D&D General 4e Healing was the best D&D healing

[Crimson Longinus]

Minions having 1 hp is an abstract simplification designed to make running them at the table easier for the DM. Noting something as either just alive or dead is easier then keeping track of HP; especially when there is a large number of creatures to keep track of.

If managing the HP totals of a dozen different monsters at the same time doesn't annoy you, then the minion "module" will hold less appeal to you.

My middle-ground hack for such a a situation is this is: (Only use if the monsters have HP no higher than the roughly twice the averageish damage of the party's basic attacks. One weapon strike, cantrip etc.) Any damage makes a creature wounded and drops them to half HP. Any further damage drops a wounded creature to 0 HP and kills them. And of course you can still kill a healthy creature in one strike if you deal their full HP of damage.

This is basically a hack for speeding up things, not making monsters weaker. And as this is just a maths hack, you can start or stop using it any moment as the actual stats of the creature are not altered. For example perhaps there are ten orc bandits and and you use this rule but once only four are left you could drop it and use normal rules. Or same thing in reverse if the party is first fighting couple of enemies but then a horde of reinforcements arrive. Or if the characters do something that would intentionally do pitiful amount of damage you can just use the normal rules.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

However, on average, if 10 first level fighters level fighters have an athletic competition, odds are that one of those fighters will have 1 HP. You're suggesting that having death be a likely outcome for that fighter is a reasonable outcome? I don't think so.

I'm suggesting that a fighter having 1hp is a bad premise. If the intersection of two rules will give an unreasonable result, then the blame should go to the bad rule, rather than the reasonable one.

What about the fighter who is reduced to 1 HP in combat? Does he drop dead from cardiac arrest if he tries to flee from the creatures attacking him?

If he runs for a couple of minutes, to escape the monsters, then he'll probably be fine. If he keeps running for 26 miles, then it's likely something might happen to him along the way.

What about commoners, who have very few HP and for whom each day may bring rigors equal to an athletic competition. Shouldn't they be dropping dead left and right as well?

Even if we don't assume the existence of any specialized rules to govern common labor, they should be fine as long as they stop working when they suffer injury. If they take 1 damage, and then rest until it's healed, they'll be fine. If they're old and frail, and that 1 damage causes them to break a hip, then maybe they die as they would in the real world. The objective force of the impact (as measured in damage) is less important than the capacity to withstand that force (max HP).

All of this effort to avoid the far more straightforward idea that a point of damage to someone with 1 hit point remaining should be different within the fiction of the game from a point of damage to someone with 2 or more hit points remaining.

There is nothing remotely straightforward about such an assertion. That's like saying an arrow in flight has different characteristics, depending on what it will later hit. It's a fundamental failure to separate cause from effect.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I'm suggesting that a fighter having 1hp is a bad premise. If the intersection of two rules will give an unreasonable result, then the blame should go to the bad rule, rather than the reasonable one.

If he runs for a couple of minutes, to escape the monsters, then he'll probably be fine. If he keeps running for 26 miles, then it's likely something might happen to him along the way.

Even if we don't assume the existence of any specialized rules to govern common labor, they should be fine as long as they stop working when they suffer injury. If they take 1 damage, and then rest until it's healed, they'll be fine. If they're old and frail, and that 1 damage causes them to break a hip, then maybe they die as they would in the real world. The objective force of the impact (as measured in damage) is less important than the capacity to withstand that force (max HP).

There is nothing remotely straightforward about such an assertion. That's like saying an arrow in flight has different characteristics, depending on what it will later hit. It's a fundamental failure to separate cause from effect.

It's not all that unusual for characters to find themselves at or near 1 HP, whether they start that way (in older editions) or are whittled down over the course of an adventure. Nonetheless, they are able to function the same as when they are at full HP.

Even you just stated that a character who has been reduced to 1 HP can compete in (and potentially win) a race, provided it takes no more than a few minutes. It certainly doesn't sound like they're so bad off to me.

Although, frankly, the idea of suffering damage for exertion seems like a strange contortion of logic to me. We already have exhaustion for modeling exertion. Do you regularly force characters who exert themselves to suffer damage? Or only characters who are low on hit points (and how is that threshold defined)? Or only characters at 1 hit point? Just how many hit points should my fighter have to lift a porticullis, assuming I don't want him to die from a sudden heart attack?

The nature of both hit points and damage are intentionally vague. However, interpreting them in a minimally injurious way (prior to 0) largely avoids any dissonance between described results and logical outcomes. In other words, if you describe the arrow impaling my character's leg, I expect him to move more slowly, and if he doesn't then there's a serious disconnect. Similarly, if you describe my high level rogue as getting a superficial scratch every time he's hit with a greataxe, it gets a bit silly since that's not how greataxes work (they're not exactly subtle weapons). Hence, my advice would be to not describe it that way.

YMMV

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Although, frankly, the idea of suffering damage for exertion seems like a strange contortion of logic to me. We already have exhaustion for modeling exertion. Do you regularly force characters who exert themselves to suffer damage? Or only characters who are low on hit points (and how is that threshold defined)? Or only characters at 1 hit point?

Not from exertion; from injury. Injury is a possibility, whenever we stop and actually look at an activity in detail. You aren't particularly likely to injure yourself during any given minute of running, but if we're paying sufficient attention, then something might come up eventually.

It's no different than exploring a dungeon, really. There is no such thing as a room in which someone is incapable of being injured. The potential for injury is everywhere, but the only question is whether it's worth modeling. Most of the time, any incidental injury you might suffer during a race (or while farming) is simply irrelevant, or can be modeled sufficiently by abstracting it into the basic check result. All of that goes out the window if someone is so incredibly frail that any amount of injury would result in sudden death; in such a scenario, it is extremely important that it not be abstracted away.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Not from exertion; from injury. Injury is a possibility, whenever we stop and actually look at an activity in detail. You aren't particularly likely to injure yourself during any given minute of running, but if we're paying sufficient attention, then something might come up eventually.

It's no different than exploring a dungeon, really. There is no such thing as a room in which someone is incapable of being injured. The potential for injury is everywhere, but the only question is whether it's worth modeling. Most of the time, any incidental injury you might suffer during a race (or while farming) is simply irrelevant, or can be modeled sufficiently by abstracting it into the basic check result. All of that goes out the window if someone is so incredibly frail that any amount of injury would result in sudden death; in such a scenario, it is extremely important that it not be abstracted away.

So you make your players roll checks while dungeon delving if they're low on hit points, to see if they take damage? If Bob's fighter is down to 3 HP, he might trip over his own feet while looking for secret doors in an empty room and break his neck? Whereas Chuck's wizard who has been hanging in the backline and is near full HP can search the room with no risk of damage?

Seems pretty inconsistent to me. If my 100 HP character takes 3 points of damage during combat, do I get to ignore it under the premise that it's not likely to matter and therefore not worth modeling? I'm especially surprised you would make that claim since you claim to be a proponent of the slow natural healing of early editions, where the slow recovery did make each hit point matter more (assuming you lacked access to a cleric).

I hope you let your players know that there's a threshold below which arbitrary instant death/dying during exploration is possible.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So you make your players roll checks while dungeon delving if they're low on hit points, to see if they take damage? If Bob's fighter is down to 3 HP, he might trip over his own feet while looking for secret doors in an empty room and break his neck? Whereas Chuck's wizard who has been hanging in the backline and is near full HP can search the room with no risk of damage?

I don't know where you're getting this from, but it's way out of line. Nobody makes any additional check, just because they're low on HP. They make checks for all of the normal things, and sometimes, a failed check will result in damage (regardless of how many HP they have remaining). If you fail to climb, then you fall, and may take damage. If you're running down a hill, and something distracts you at the wrong time, you might wipe out and take damage. If someone shoots into an unstable pile of rocks, it may collapse, dealing damage to everyone in an area. The potential for damage is everywhere. The world is an inherently dangerous place, and the only reason anyone can ever get anything done is that the vast majority of those hazards are not instantly fatal to the sort of people who would encounter them. A world with minions in it is not a world that makes sense; it's a shallow parody of a world, where the tiniest amount of examination would reveal that civilization should have died out before it began.

I hope you let your players know that there's a threshold below which arbitrary instant death/dying during exploration is possible.

You must have missed what I said. But in any case, if someone with 1hp behaves as though they were just fine, then they're too dumb to live. Fortunately, my players have more common sense than that.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I don't know where you're getting this from, but it's way out of line. Nobody makes any additional check, just because they're low on HP. They make checks for all of the normal things, and sometimes, a failed check will result in damage (regardless of how many HP they have remaining). If you fail to climb, then you fall, and may take damage. If you're running down a hill, and something distracts you at the wrong time, you might wipe out and take damage. If someone shoots into an unstable pile of rocks, it may collapse, dealing damage to everyone in an area. The potential for damage is everywhere. The world is an inherently dangerous place, and the only reason anyone can ever get anything done is that the vast majority of those hazards are not instantly fatal to the sort of people who would encounter them. A world with minions in it is not a world that makes sense; it's a shallow parody of a world, where the tiniest amount of examination would reveal that civilization should have died out before it began.

You must have missed what I said. But in any case, if someone with 1hp behaves as though they were just fine, then they're too dumb to live. Fortunately, my players have more common sense than that.

Running along a flat path for an extended period of time doesn't normally result in damage, so then why did you say that a character who runs for miles with only 1 HP is in danger of death? Are characters regularly distracted while running down hill in your games, or does this only happen to characters with low HP? The character might be a rogue with expertise in athletics and acrobatics, in which case they're not likely to be particularly worried about the likelihood of tripping over their feet.

I mean sure, if you're climbing and you fall, you're in trouble if you are at 1 hp. However, climbing wasn't one of the examples I used. I used lifting weights and running, but of which are quite safe sports overall.

Dangerous circumstances are reasonably unlikely to happen when competing at a faire. Therefore, it sounds like what you're saying is that it IS reasonably safe for someone at 1 HP to participate in athletic competition. It's only if something out of the ordinary occurs that they could be in trouble.

Hence, someone at 1 HP is able to operate at full capacity, assuming reasonably safe circumstances under which the chances of them sustaining damage are minimal. Is that fair?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Running along a flat path for an extended period of time doesn't normally result in damage, so then why did you say that a character who runs for miles with only 1 HP is in danger of death?

Even if you're running on a treadmill under laboratory conditions, if you do it for long enough, there's a chance of falling and getting hurt. If you lift weights, there's a chance that something could go wrong; doubly so when you're testing your own limits. People often get hurt while performing exercises that would normally be considered fairly safe. The only reason we consider them to be safe is because humans have a remarkable ability to recover from injury, and the chance of an uninjured person dying outright is extremely remote.

The only way a healthy person could die while running a marathon, aside from outside hazards, is if they kept running even while suffering multiple injuries during the process. And since only a moron would possibly do such a thing, it's not something that we need explicit rules for.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Even if you're running on a treadmill under laboratory conditions, if you do it for long enough, there's a chance of falling and getting hurt. If you lift weights, there's a chance that something could go wrong; doubly so when you're testing your own limits. People often get hurt while performing exercises that would normally be considered fairly safe. The only reason we consider them to be safe is because humans have a remarkable ability to recover from injury, and the chance of an uninjured person dying outright is extremely remote.

The only way a healthy person could die while running a marathon, aside from outside hazards, is if they kept running even while suffering multiple injuries during the process. And since only a moron would possibly do such a thing, it's not something that we need explicit rules for.

I've got news for you. Injured people who run or lift weights don't drop dead from it.

If the injury was a hindrance (a pulled muscle) they might exacerbate that injury, but we know that hit point damage isn't that type of injury because otherwise they ought to be hindering. You might say it isn't modeled because it doesn't matter, but I would say that a pulled muscle in your leg (which hinders your ability to move and dodge) or in your arm (hindering your ability to swing your sword) is extremely pertinent to a game of action adventure, like D&D, where those activities are routine.

Having a black eye has no impact whatsoever on a person's ability to run a race or lift weights, much less to survive doing so.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Having a black eye has no impact whatsoever on a person's ability to run a race or lift weights, much less to survive doing so.

Whatever it was that caused the black eye, did not necessarily inflict HP damage. Or if it did, because it was forceful enough that a reasonable number of repetitions would result in death, then the black eye is not the extent of the injury.

I'm getting sick of all these strawmen. If you can't stand the idea that the game mechanics might actually represent anything, then fine. Just stop trying to pretend that minions are remotely like the same level of abstraction as anything that came before or after. That's not an argument that anyone could ever win.