D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[James Gasik]

I would be worried that this sort of design would potentially be more hassle than it's worth and possible a case of over-engineering. I think that there is a reason that HP tends to endure across a lot of tabletop and video games. It's easy and straightforward to understand as a game mechanic. It's really only edge cases that rub a small subset of people the wrong way, though I think that is due to their own preferences.

Certainly what you could do, and has been done in other systems, is split hit points into WOUNDS and VITALITY. Wounds are equal to half your hit point total (rounded up). You only take Wound damage from critical hits or when your Vitality hits zero (and certain special attacks the DM decides are particularly deadly, like Swords of Sharpness).

Magical healing, potions, and the Healer Feat, can recover Wounds first, then Vitality. Things like Second Wind can only recover Vitality. Hit Dice can only restore Wounds during a long rest, otherwise, they restore Vitality.

If your Wounds hit zero, you die. No death saves, no nothing, you're dead, Jim. Better hope someone has Revivify!

Now you know when an attack is "just a flesh wound" and when you should describe people as being bruised, bloodied, and seriously hurt.

It's a grittier system than 5e core, especially in light of how terrifying monster crits are, and you'd probably have to ban Adamantine armor, but it makes the distinction more clear.

 

[cavalier973]

…looks more like THREE hit points to me.

You just did another two points of ego damage

 

[cavalier973]

…but probably close enough for jazz.

Are you talking smooth jazz, fusion jazz, classical jazz, or “jazz” that is really just R&B?

 

[cavalier973]

In my game, all PCs have a single hit point each, and if a monster even touches them, they die. Fortunately, they each start out with three lives, and have the opportunity to gain a fourth life if they can reach a certain score during play.

 

[Mannahnin]

Interestingly, Fantasy Craft has d

Certainly what you could do, and has been done in other systems, is split hit points into WOUNDS and VITALITY. Wounds are equal to half your hit point total (rounded up). You only take Wound damage from critical hits or when your Vitality hits zero (and certain special attacks the DM decides are particularly deadly, like Swords of Sharpness).

Magical healing, potions, and the Healer Feat, can recover Wounds first, then Vitality. Things like Second Wind can only recover Vitality. Hit Dice can only restore Wounds during a long rest, otherwise, they restore Vitality.

If your Wounds hit zero, you die. No death saves, no nothing, you're dead, Jim. Better hope someone has Revivify!

Now you know when an attack is "just a flesh wound" and when you should describe people as being bruised, bloodied, and seriously hurt.

It's a grittier system than 5e core, especially in light of how terrifying monster crits are, and you'd probably have to ban Adamantine armor, but it makes the distinction more clear.

Or slightly simpler, do what The Nightmares Underneath does, which I talked about in a prior post (in spoiler tags).

Hit Points (Disposition) are your ability to defend yourself/resist defeat, and damage past them goes to Constitution (Health). Once you suffer Con (Health) damage you have a chance of being knocked unconscious, may be bleeding, suffer lingering injuries, etc. You die when your Health is reduced to zero or if a fatal injury is sustained based on location.

And the spells and mundane means which heal one or the other are different.
(Note: apparently this was tweaked with a Wounds score in 2nd ed)

 

[AnotherGuy]

Re cures applying only to specific types of damage e.g. burns or actual wounds or fatigue or sonic, etc.:

In all three of those systems - 1e, 4e, and 5e - I could kitbash this in with only the following changes:

--- (in 1e only) add and codify a bunch of damage types that are currently only informal at best
--- players would have to track the type of damage (radiant, sonic, burn, electric, etc.; or generic (e.g. what most normal weapons do)) along with the amount of damage taken
--- add in various items, spells, and other things that cure specific damage types only e.g. a Potion of Blessing that cures only necrotic damage; an Aloe Herb that cures only burn damage; a Neutralize Charge spell that only cures electric damage, and so forth.

To make the physical/fatigue side work one could either add a wounds-vitality hit point system or just use a variant of the Bloodied mechanic that 4e already has. So, with this you'd have [spell-potion-etc.] of Cure Fatigue for when the recipient is at or above the Bloodied threshold and [spell-potion-etc.] of Cure Wounds for when the recipient is below it.

To really get complicated these could be combined e.g. there could be something that only works on burn wounds (i.e. the damage has to be burn damage and you have to be Bloodied).

All in all this is a very easy kitbash (as such things go) and - somewhat amazingly for 4e and 5e - has no obvious knock-on effects. The most time-consuming bit would be coming up with all the new items and spells, but that's not difficult.

This idea does add some player-side recordkeeping complexity, however, which I quickly admit is a strike against it.

In a makeshift game I'm running this 15th, I've converted all the hit points to "stamina" and have a separate block like in VtM for wounds. Its 4 PCs at levels 4-6. It is a mix of 3.x, 5e and VtM. I haven't figured it all out but hope to by the time the game starts

 

[Voadam]

Re cures applying only to specific types of damage e.g. burns or actual wounds or fatigue or sonic, etc.:

In all three of those systems - 1e, 4e, and 5e - I could kitbash this in with only the following changes:

--- (in 1e only) add and codify a bunch of damage types that are currently only informal at best
--- players would have to track the type of damage (radiant, sonic, burn, electric, etc.; or generic (e.g. what most normal weapons do)) along with the amount of damage taken
--- add in various items, spells, and other things that cure specific damage types only e.g. a Potion of Blessing that cures only necrotic damage; an Aloe Herb that cures only burn damage; a Neutralize Charge spell that only cures electric damage, and so forth.

To make the physical/fatigue side work one could either add a wounds-vitality hit point system or just use a variant of the Bloodied mechanic that 4e already has. So, with this you'd have [spell-potion-etc.] of Cure Fatigue for when the recipient is at or above the Bloodied threshold and [spell-potion-etc.] of Cure Wounds for when the recipient is below it.

To really get complicated these could be combined e.g. there could be something that only works on burn wounds (i.e. the damage has to be burn damage and you have to be Bloodied).

All in all this is a very easy kitbash (as such things go) and - somewhat amazingly for 4e and 5e - has no obvious knock-on effects. The most time-consuming bit would be coming up with all the new items and spells, but that's not difficult.

This idea does add some player-side recordkeeping complexity, however, which I quickly admit is a strike against it.

I did this with a one off curing thing in an AD&D game that I think would only heal one type of damage, probably a burn salve of some type.

Tracking that kind of specificity was a pain that potentially adds a minor speed bump to every instance of damage in combat which I prefer to be faster paced in execution and I quickly dropped the idea and did not follow up on it further.

 

[Voadam]

1d3 hp per day (page B25). So about a week.

You are correct, thanks for the page cite.

 

[AnotherGuy]

My experience of the mechanics points the other way - for the reasons give in my example and @soviet's example from upthread:

A 7 hp, or 16 hp deduction against one character may correlate to a 1 hp loss by another (eg losing 7 hp from your 100 hp total is clearly no more serious than, and perhaps less serious than, losing 1 hp from a 4 hp total).

And correlations can go the other way: a 1 hp loss suffered by a character who is unconscious and has bled to -3 or worse will, in AD&D, kill them (bringing them below -3 in a single blow), as will a 16 hp loss suffered by a character who is at full strength and has 12 hp (say, a pretty tough 1st level fighter).

So to me, it seems clear that hp deductions are prompts to narration, where what is narrated is dependent on the current hp of the target of the attack, and what that running total will become once the deduction is applied. Whether this is physical injury will depend on these circumstances; and I don't see how we can quantify hp loss as "mostly" physical injury in any robust fashion.

If one were being fair, would one not also look at how one recovers hit points, no?
Given that recovery was slow, and that there were no short rests, 2nd winds, healing surges, HD spend or other ambiguous powers on how one healed hit points, it is fair to say that recovery affected in the main physical damage.
Furthermore hit points capped in a sense by 9th level.

Later editions did not cap. They introduced a whole swathe of narrative powers and ways to recover hit points. 4e's Cairn of the Winter King allowed one to Skill Challenge the opponent with words in order to wear down their resolve.
To say that hit points from edition 3.x onwards were the same narratively for prior editions, I feel, is quite the misstatement.

PCs don't take short rests to knit their broken bones, close their gaping wounds or regrow their severed limbs!

Yes, and that is why I said from 3.x onwards hit points are primarily (but not exclusively) vitality with 4e taking that step even further and 5e finding a middle ground to extend short rests to an hour and removing some powers which were considered controversial by some. The short rest being extended to an hour is enough to bind a wound, cauterize a bleed, apply a bandage, stitch a cut...etc

 

[pemerton]

Certainly what you could do, and has been done in other systems, is split hit points into WOUNDS and VITALITY. Wounds are equal to half your hit point total (rounded up). You only take Wound damage from critical hits or when your Vitality hits zero (and certain special attacks the DM decides are particularly deadly, like Swords of Sharpness).

Magical healing, potions, and the Healer Feat, can recover Wounds first, then Vitality. Things like Second Wind can only recover Vitality. Hit Dice can only restore Wounds during a long rest, otherwise, they restore Vitality.

If your Wounds hit zero, you die. No death saves, no nothing, you're dead, Jim. Better hope someone has Revivify!

Now you know when an attack is "just a flesh wound" and when you should describe people as being bruised, bloodied, and seriously hurt.

It's a grittier system than 5e core, especially in light of how terrifying monster crits are, and you'd probably have to ban Adamantine armor, but it makes the distinction more clear.

The earliest version of this that I know is "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive" by Roger Musson, in White Dwarf 15 (1979).

It uses CON as the wound points. By default, damage is to hp. If the roll to hit is N greater than required (where N is an amount that grows with character level, so higher level characters are harder to wound) then the damage goes to wound points. Likewise certain failed saves or surprise attacks etc cause wound points. Loss of wound points causes penalties to hit (-1, -2, -3 at 75%, 50%, 25% wound points) or death (at zero wound points). There is also a chance of a mortal wound (from memory 5, 10 or 15% at 75%, 50%, 25% wound points); and at each of the break points of 75%, 50%, 25% wound points, hp are reduced to that proportion of the total, if not that low yet.

Zero hp, with wound points remaining, means the PC can't act but isn't dead, dying or even necessarily wounded.

Hit point recovery is very quick (something like 1 per hour or even per turn - I can't recall exactly, and haven't gone back to check the article). Wound point recovery is based on days of rest, similar to hp recovery in the AD&D DMG.

I've never used this system. It's a bit fiddly, but more significantly it seems likely to change play quite a bit, making killing PCs easier although also making it more likely that PCs will be at full hp at the start of most encounters. 4e D&D delivers the latter without the fiddliness or deadliness of this system.