Hit points as luck

[Celebrim]

I don't think it's horribly unbalance good. You balance by the spell (and the level it's being cast at), rather than by the character level of the healer.

Suppose a balanced 1st level spell did 1d8 damage. Would the same spell be balanced at 1d8/character level? Well, this is doubly better than that spell, in that healing is more powerful in D&D than damage (unlike say MtG) and the spell is scalling by the level of a the target. So imagine a damaging spell that allows a 1st level caster to do 20d8 damage to a 20th level character. Do you see the problem now?

 

[jian]

Suppose a balanced 1st level spell did 1d8 damage. Would the same spell be balanced at 1d8/character level? Well, this is doubly better than that spell, in that healing is more powerful in D&D than damage (unlike say MtG) and the spell is scalling by the level of a the target. So imagine a damaging spell that allows a 1st level caster to do 20d8 damage to a 20th level character. Do you see the problem now?

I think the question as originally posed is more along the lines of “if the original spell heals 1d8 + caster’s level in HP, is it more powerful or unbalanced if the house rule is that it now heals 1d8 + recipient’s level in HP?”

That is a slightly more difficult question. It makes a 1st level cleric’s healing effect on high level characters much more useful - so if your high level party has a low level cleric hireling or ally, then they’re much more useful to you than under the original rule. On the other hand, it makes the high level PC’s healing of their lower level allies less powerful. It makes no difference to PCs healing each other if they’re at the same level, of course.

 

[Celebrim]

I think the question as originally posed is more along the lines of “if the original spell heals 1d8 + caster’s level in HP, is it more powerful or unbalanced if the house rule is that it now heals 1d8 + recipient’s level in HP?”

I made the example a bit extreme in order to make it clear, but the answer when you tone down the scaling is still the same and for the same reasons.

That is a slightly more difficult question.

Only because by making the advantage smaller you make the problem smaller.

It makes a 1st level cleric’s healing effect on high level characters much more useful - so if your high level party has a low level cleric hireling or ally, then they’re much more useful to you than under the original rule. On the other hand, it makes the high level PC’s healing of their lower level allies less powerful. It makes no difference to PCs healing each other if they’re at the same level, of course.

Probably not. You see most low-level healing is level capped anyway. So for example in 1e it was just flat 1d8 with no bonus for being high level. In 3e it was 1d+8 + 1/class level but that was capped at 1d8+5 to avoid a first level spell being too good. And in 5e it is 18d+casting bonus but again not scaled. If you have it with something like 1d8 + 1/target character level but cap it at +5 than you are really minimizing the change in such a way that all your analysis above just sort of falls apart. The range of caster to target interaction changes gets really small and it "makes no difference" generally at all, but then if it makes no difference then are you in any real sense scaling the healing with the recipient's character level? More to the point, are you really embracing the reality that under the Gygaxian model if a given would represent X damage at 1st level then the same wound at 10th level represents nearly 10 times as much damage? If you were really trying to model that reality in any fashion and make a meaningful change to how healing worked, then surely you would do something like "heals 1d2 hit points per character level of the recipient".

But even that seemingly innocuous level of scaling shows how bad that sort of scaling would be for the game's playability. Now the healing is too trivial at low level and yet too extreme and easy and resource efficient at high level. Making it 1d8 + target's character level makes the imbalance a little less noticeable, but it's still there. The game has moved to cap really efficient scaling for good reasons. There is a reason for example 3e capped the scaling on fireball at 10d6.

And this isn't even getting into issues like how would be price magical healing when the amount of healing doesn't scale with the power of the effect but the power of the recipient. Imagine if fireball worked this way: 1d6 damage per character level of the target. It would be obvious why that was busted, right?

 

[jian]

I made the example a bit extreme in order to make it clear, but the answer when you tone down the scaling is still the same and for the same reasons.



Only because by making the advantage smaller you make the problem smaller.



Probably not. You see most low-level healing is level capped anyway. So for example in 1e it was just flat 1d8 with no bonus for being high level. In 3e it was 1d+8 + 1/class level but that was capped at 1d8+5 to avoid a first level spell being too good. And in 5e it is 4+1d4 presumably to avoid 'whiffing' but again not scaled. If you have it with something like 1d8 + 1/target character level but cap it at +5 than you are really minimizing the change in such a way that all your analysis above just sort of falls apart. The range of caster to target interaction changes gets really small and it "makes no difference" generally at all, but then if it makes no difference then are you in any real sense scaling the healing with the recipient's character level? More to the point, are you really embracing the reality that under the Gygaxian model if a given would represent X damage at 1st level then the same wound at 10th level represents nearly 10 times as much damage? If you were really trying to model that reality in any fashion and make a meaningful change to how healing worked, then surely you would do something like "heals 1d2 hit points per character level of the recipient".

But even that seemingly innocuous level of scaling shows how bad that sort of scaling would be for the game's playability. Now the healing is too trivial at low level and yet too extreme and easy and resource efficient at high level. Making it 1d8 + target's character level makes the imbalance a little less noticeable, but it's still there. The game has moved to cap really efficient scaling for good reasons. There is a reason for example 3e capped the scaling on fireball at 10d6.

And this isn't even getting into issues like how would be price magical healing when the amount of healing doesn't scale with the power of the effect but the power of the recipient. Imagine if fireball worked this way: 1d6 damage per character level of the target. It would be obvious why that was busted, right?

I think it’d be quite interesting to have a spell that inflicted damage based on the target’s HD or level, but I agree it’d be interesting to balance. I don’t think it’s obviously busted, as you put it.

If you had a 3rd level wizard spell called lifeblast that did indeed inflict d6 damage per target’s level (highest level of enemy caught in blast, capped at 10d6 if you like) then it’s very useful* for a 5th level caster when facing a 9 HD boss enemy but less so for blowing up a platoon of 1 HD mooks. It’s pretty much the same as fireball for a 10th level caster much of the time. You’d use it differently from fireball, of course, always trying to catch a high level enemy in the blast when possible and so on. Is it more useful or less balanced than fireball? Who knows. You’d want to playtest it a bit and see, same as anything else.

*Useful for the wizard, rather less so for the fighter in melee with the boss who’s just found out how friendly fire isn’t.

(This reminds me of how dragon breath used to work, which was interesting - it inflicted as much damage as the dragon’s remaining HP rather than 7d10 or whatever. So it was very much in the party’s interests to get first stab on the dragon; if the dragon acted first then it’s possible you were all taking 45 fire damage to the face (back in the days when that was a lot of effing damage), which could TPK pretty quick if your DM was being cruel about it. Dragonlances worked the same way (I think it was the total of the rider and the dragon’s remaining HP if you were on a dragon at the time?) which was a nice mirroring.)

If healing was based on the recipient’s level then it would simply be used or valued differently - it would simply be more efficient to heal a higher level ally. If it’s capped as you describe it doesn’t make much difference at all. I’d be fine with it either way.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Suppose a balanced 1st level spell did 1d8 damage. Would the same spell be balanced at 1d8/character level? Well, this is doubly better than that spell, in that healing is more powerful in D&D than damage (unlike say MtG) and the spell is scalling by the level of a the target. So imagine a damaging spell that allows a 1st level caster to do 20d8 damage to a 20th level character. Do you see the problem now?

I'm not talking about damage. I'm talking about healing. You create a Basic Healing Rate (an baseline amount a spell will heal you based on your hit die type), and different spells (or the same spell cast at different levels) heal multiples of that amount. So a 1st level Cure Wounds might heal a wizard 1d6, but heal a berserker 1d12. A higher level cast might heal 2d6 or 2d12, and do on. I would use the 1d8s listed for most healing spells as the amount to be converted to BHR. If a spell uses a smaller die, you drop the amount healed by one step (1d8 to 1d6, for example).

 

[Fanaelialae]

HP are an abstraction, so interpret them however you like.

I've toyed with the idea of allowing players to spend HP to negate conditions. It would need to have a high enough cost to avoid being the default option (fighter gets hit with slow and pops a trivial number of HP to ignore it) while being low enough that players will use it when needed (because, otherwise, it's just a useless bit of clutter in your house rules). I would probably go with a percentage of HP to avoid it being spammable at high levels. Maybe a percentage of current HP to incentivize it being used when danger is high, rather than anytime. For example, the fighter is facing off against the BBEG and is down to 10 HP. The BBEG nails him with a stun, so the fighter burns 50% of his current HP, dropping him to 5, but allowing him to act next turn. This dials up the tension of the fight, and gives the fighter one last chance to pull a Hail Mary. But if the BBEG stunned the fighter at the start of the battle, when the fighter still has 100 HP, it's less likely the fighter would burn 50 HP to get back in the fight.

Lastly, I've seen some arguments in this thread that because randomness already exists in the game, luck shouldn't be a mechanic. I think this is a false dichotomy. This is conflating player luck with character luck. Just like someone could be a physically weak player but play a fighter with 20 strength, or be of average intelligence but play a wizard with 20 intelligence, I see no reason why a character's exceptional luck shouldn't be represented mechanically. Whether that be HP as luck, something like the Lucky feat, or this proposal.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

@jian

The issue with your suggestion isn’t that it couldn’t work, but that it assumes hit points have a fixed meaning that can be cleanly extended. The truth is, HP in D&D (and most systems that borrowed them) are deliberately undefined beyond “are you still alive?”. That abstraction only holds together because their single function is binary: above zero, you keep playing; at zero, you don’t.

Once you say, “Well, they mostly represent luck, so why not spend them?” you’re no longer dealing with the same concept of HP. You’ve redefined them, and that redefinition has ripple effects through everything else in the rules:

• If HP are luck, then what are healing spells restoring—luck? stamina? divine favor?
• What about poison, starvation, or suffocation damage? Are those really luck depleting, or something else?
• If HP are spendable, should we also separate out “meat damage” to track real injury, like Star Wars d20 did with wounds?

What you’re really describing isn’t “hit points with extra options,” but a new resource system that replaces the old abstraction. And that’s the catch: the more you try to stretch HP into other roles, the less they remain the common shorthand that makes them easy to understand in the first place.

 

[jian]

@jian

The issue with your suggestion isn’t that it couldn’t work, but that it assumes hit points have a fixed meaning that can be cleanly extended. The truth is, HP in D&D (and most systems that borrowed them) are deliberately undefined beyond “are you still alive?”. That abstraction only holds together because their single function is binary: above zero, you keep playing; at zero, you don’t.

Once you say, “Well, they mostly represent luck, so why not spend them?” you’re no longer dealing with the same concept of HP. You’ve redefined them, and that redefinition has ripple effects through everything else in the rules:

• If HP are luck, then what are healing spells restoring—luck? stamina? divine favor?
• What about poison, starvation, or suffocation damage? Are those really luck depleting, or something else?
• If HP are spendable, should we also separate out “meat damage” to track real injury, like Star Wars d20 did with wounds?

What you’re really describing isn’t “hit points with extra options,” but a new resource system that replaces the old abstraction. And that’s the catch: the more you try to stretch HP into other roles, the less they remain the common shorthand that makes them easy to understand in the first place.

Yes, that’s quite right and all covered in my initial post. If you use HP as metacurrency you’d have to rename them. It’s the idea of having HP (or health or whatever) as the same pool as metacurrency which I found interesting to discuss.

 

[Retros_x]

Remember, the rules of the game are not the physics of the world.

Why would you need to remember me of something I never claimed otherwise?

It means when the axe wielding orc hits your character it wasn't a blow that cleaved his head in twain, instead it was a glancing blow or perhaps a solid hit with the flat.

Exactly what I described and what I want, physical hits that cause physical damage. So thanks for agreeing with me I guess? An Axe hit should be some sort of physical hit and not "you need to dodge so close that you are out of breath and your luck is going away". If your character dodges in the narrative, the enemy did roll lower than your AC (in D&D at least).

I never had a player describe their PC with 5 out of 75 HP left as "out of luck, (only) out of breath, homesick, depressed, hurt in the soul" or whatever non-physical harm I've read in this thread already. They all describe damage mostly as flesh with out of breath and tired being on top of it, as it would come naturally when being severly wounded. But never only that without blood. It doesn't make sense and its not the fantasy most players have.

I want to emphasize that I am mainly talking about D&D and D&D likes. If you have a way more narrative game that is in itself more abstract and doesnt have a tactical combat system, this whole HP as non flesh-and blood energy can work much better IMO.

 

[SteveC]

I think that hit points (and by this I mean escalating hit points, not static ones like in BRP) are like a good soup or stew: they are made up of a lot of different ingredients.

You have your physical durability, your luck, your fate, your plot armor, your endurance, your fate of the gods ... and lots of other things.

And like a good soup or stew, it's probably best not to look at the ingredients too closely or you might not want to try it.