D&D 5E The "everyone at full fighting ability at 1 hp" conundrum

[Tony Vargas]

Anyway, there are plenty of ways to model meat injury and keep HP as well if that is what your table wants.

I always liked the trope of the hero 're-opening his wounds' in some battle or rescue or other act of desperation or rage or the like.

D&D, with its plentiful, renewable, daily healing spells had basically 0 opportunity for that.

But, with all the hand-wringing at the time an idea occurred to me, that I kept in my back pocket in case any player in a 4e game I was running got squicked by overnight healing like all these on-line avatars seem to.

It never happened, of course, but still struck me as a decent, if obvious idea: adapt the disease track mechanic to lasting wounds.

You'd risk a wound when dropped, crit when bloodied, or failed a save vs a condition inflicted by a mundane attack.
Like of a monster does some grasping-rend attack that slows, and you fail X saves, then, after the encounter, roll Endurance, or it's a lasting wound...
...from there, using the track, you'd check daily and get better or worse.

Depending on how gruesome (nevermind gritty) you wanted to get, you could get into infection, permanent disability, amputation, and, of course, the ever-poppular death.

 

[3catcircus]

NPC hp = meat, but PCs its fatigue; hp represent glancing blows; hp reduction represents slight wounds that don't add up, until suddenly a single killing blow does in the character; some other hand-waving to explain away the recovery of these injuries with a bit of rest and some chicken soup.

Any way you look at it, using hp to represent your character's condition regarding wounds and injuries just doesn't really work if you want any verisimilitude.

Why should the same attacks doing the same amount of hp reduction represent physical injury to NPCs but not for PCs?

How can loss of hp represent glancing blows for both physical injuries and injuries caused by environmental damage (falling, hit by a fireball or acid, etc.)?

How can taking a series of allegedly glancing blows not result in loss of combat effectiveness at all until suddenly a single killing blow finishes the character off? If you've ever watched a boxing match or a UFC fight (or actually been in real combat), you know that a combination of fatigue, shock, blood loss, etc. slowly saps your ability to be effective in combat and at the same time a single injury can be incapacitating regardless of the condition you are in at the time of injury.

I think there needs to be a better way.

Some type of mechanic that could use hit points, not as a pool to deduct from, but as a trip point to initiate various effects that reduce combat effectiveness, while also allowing that single deadly blow to occur.

A mechanic could be used that allows you to determine how long it takes for injuries to resolve naturally (I concede that magical healing could be used to either bypass complete or speed up the natural healing process). That same mechanic could be used to determine if you suffer any permanent impairments as a result of healing naturally with no intervention (e.g. you suffer damage resulting in a critical injury and do not use the appropriate healing spell or find a chirurgeon, you should have permanent impairment)

 

[cmad1977]

In shocking news: Hps are meat when they need to be and aren’t when they don’t.

 

[darjr]

5e does offer a way to impose a sense of fatigue on hp loss. It'll be handwaving by the GM but it won't break things. As DM you can decide when a PC gets disadvantage. So you could do so if they are down what you think are a significant number of HP or after a big hit.

No book keeping really. It's maleable to fit the situations at hand or the demand of the feeling of the current game. I might try it.

I know sometimes when I'm running or lifting or doing crossfit stuff I can go a whole session and feel freaking awesome, or sometimes, seemingly out of the blue, just be "DONE".

Though that's probably because I eat like crap and warm up even worse.

It's not objective but I think a fair DM and trusted DM could pull it off. Though the players expectations should be set upfront.

 

[DND_Reborn]

In shocking news: Hps are meat when they need to be and aren’t when they don’t.

Is there a film at 11?

 

[Garthanos]

I admit to gygaxian solution but a variant a really lucky rogue is different than a tough guy and different than a skilled guy who is mostly fatigued and different than a monstrous a magical guy has some depleting shields .....My Dragon lord gets real wounds and regenerates them. Hp can be a character defining concept

 

[Kurotowa]

One of the divides I see at play in this thread is between the schools of "the rules should be an approximate simulation of real life" and "the rules should be an approximate simulation of dramatic fiction". In a simulation of real life, injuries should impair your abilities and take time to recover from. In a simulation of dramatic fiction, all injuries are purely cosmetic until the hero gets stabbed in the gut and suddenly the action pauses and the music changes so you know this one counts.

As presented in the default RAW, Hit Points are a simulation of dramatic fictional health. Does that leave things a bit abstract when healing spells can pull double duty to restore both abstract "vigor and luck" pools and actual factual lethal injuries? Absolutely. But it's an abstraction for the good of the game. When I sit down to play D&D the last thing I want to worry about is death spirals or tracking multiple types of injuries or needing three months of downtime to heal from one of those nasty strains or tears that athletes are always getting.

Hit Points are very good at being Hit Points. For me, they fall into what I like to call the least worst solution. It's a solution that has clear flaws, but all the alternatives are worse so you go with it because a perfect solution doesn't exist.

 

[Lanefan]

One of the divides I see at play in this thread is between the schools of "the rules should be an approximate simulation of real life" and "the rules should be an approximate simulation of dramatic fiction". In a simulation of real life, injuries should impair your abilities and take time to recover from. In a simulation of dramatic fiction, all injuries are purely cosmetic until the hero gets stabbed in the gut and suddenly the action pauses and the music changes so you know this one counts.

Excellent point.

As presented in the default RAW, Hit Points are a simulation of dramatic fictional health. Does that leave things a bit abstract when healing spells can pull double duty to restore both abstract "vigor and luck" pools and actual factual lethal injuries? Absolutely. But it's an abstraction for the good of the game. When I sit down to play D&D the last thing I want to worry about is death spirals or tracking multiple types of injuries or needing three months of downtime to heal from one of those nasty strains or tears that athletes are always getting.

Well, first off, if your game has magical healing the three-months-downtime issue largely goes away: even if you don't have a healer in the party you can always pay someone to patch you up with a spell or two.

As for the tracking issues, there's a relatively simple way to add to the realism yet not add too much to the bookkeeping that already exists in some other games: some sort of a body-fatigue or wound-vitality points system.

Here, fatigue or vitality points are 90% non-meat, represented physically by maybe a few nicks and scratches (this is necessary if poison and other such effects are to work as intended) but otherwise covering the whole luck-stamina-etc. side of things. These are the hit points you gain with level.

Body or wound points, on the other hand, are mostly meat; represented by actual injury of some sort and harder to recover or cure back. There's a wide range of detail you can get into regarding how specific injuries affect a character; but that's all optional. These are a fixed (as in, they never change once they're determined in the first place) amount of hit points that everyone has.

Hit Points are very good at being Hit Points. For me, they fall into what I like to call the least worst solution. It's a solution that has clear flaws, but all the alternatives are worse so you go with it because a perfect solution doesn't exist.

Agreed, though as I note there's ways of getting (relatively!) closer to perfect that don't cause too many headaches.

 

[Bawylie]

I think you can a) change what hit points are in the rules, b) change what you think hit points are, or c) some combo of both.

When you watch boxing or MMA, a KO occurs when a fighter can no longer effectively defend themselves from an opponent’s attacks. The refs (and the supports on the sides) watch closely to ensure the fights stop the instant one combatant can’t stay upright, block, dodge, or otherwise defend themselves. Those fights stop right then because to continue would/could cause substantial harm or permanent injury. So we fight until the fighting part is over, but we don’t deliberately injure someone who can’t defend themselves - that wouldn’t be sport.

If we keep that sort of threshold in mind, the idea that a combatant is “KO-ed” once they can’t effectively defend themselves, then we can understand that even 1 hit point is enough to be on your feet and defending yourself. 1 hit point is also a dramatic reduction in combat effectiveness - you won’t be defending yourself effectively for very long.

Zero HP would represent a state at which you can’t defend yourself. Hand in hand with that, you’re making death saves, and automatically fail death saves when you take damage. It’s like those failed death saves could be fatal damage. We could think of them that way.

The only real issues we run into are speed of recovery. We might think an overnight sleep isn’t good enough to heal all our wounds. But it could be enough to restore our ability to defend ourselves. Certainly boxers and MMA fighters can go back to training or even another fight shortly after a match. Maybe it’s not the next morning, maybe it’s a couple days. Fortunately a “long rest” can mean longer than 1-sleep.

So I think if I were to modify the rules at all, I’d have the failed death saves linger for longer because they seem to represent substantial damage, something more than mere fatigue. So maybe just erase 1 failed death save after a week “extended” rest with regular treatment (or perhaps remove one failed death save once per day with use of a Cure Wounds spell). And I’d let a long rest continue to restore full HP with the understanding that HP measures only your ability to effectively defend yourself from lethal attacks.

Those slight changes in our thinking and the rules might be enough to remove some of the roadblocks to suspending disbelief. It works for me. But if it’s not 100% there for you, maybe it’s at least on the right track.

 

[Garthanos]

In real life people get this ... adrenal surge that supresses pain and impairment massively till they have time to cool down and feel safe (this has been documented not as nor really a rarity but more of a normality). And so realistic might actually mean. No impairment till after the immediate danger is perceived as gone.