Let's Talk About Metacurrency

[Reynard]

I don't think they represent injury, and I'm not being disingenuous.

Generally I think the loss of hit points consists in being set back in the current fight, but what that being set back looks like I think is very contextual. Some instances of hit point loss correspond to the suffering of an injury. Some don't.

Suppose a PC starts the day with 20 hp, and then in a fight with Orcs is hit 4 times, taking average damage from their swords, and thus loses 18 hp. The PC now has 2 hp left, and is likely to be felled by any Orc blow that they cannot dodge or parry. The player knows this. I don't see how the PC knows it - especially if the combat in which they lost 18 hp is over, and they've caught their breath and bandaged any nicks and scratches. They might know that they're not at their peak; but I don't think they can know that the next Orc blow will probably be fatal (or near-fatal, depending on edition).

Right but every time the previous blows landed, there is a very high probability that the fiction was about getting hit: bruises, blood and the whole bit. I have never seen in 40 years, running for literally hundreds of people,a table that did not describe hit point damage as, well, damage 95% of the time.

 

[mamba]

In the fiction the character does not know it has an out-of-fiction metacurrency token to spend, but the player does. The character's thought process and the player's are thus not the same.

but the character does know that sometimes things just work out for them against the odds, so maybe all they do is confidently walk forward with a ‘the gods helped me in the past, may they do so now’ on their lips

 

[mamba]

I don't see how hard lines help the GM do their job.

that is not what @Umbran wrote. The question was ‘Do you understand the reasons folks want GMs to follow some rules, generally?’

 

[mamba]

When a D&D player looks at their PC's hp, sees that they are getting low, and so has their PC drink a potion of healing, that's pretty meta! I mean, the PC can hardly know that their luck is running out. . .

but they can feel exhausted and sore, maybe even bruised, and know that drinking that potion helps with that

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Right but every time the previous blows landed, there is a very high probability that the fiction was about getting hit: bruises, blood and the whole bit. I have never seen in 40 years, running for literally hundreds of people,a table that did not describe hit point damage as, well, damage 95% of the time.

Though to be fair, with the current natural healing rates this is absurd too. How can you have suffered real injuries if you're absolutely fine next day?

Personally I use gritty rests, which still far from realistic, at least make this somewhat more verisimilitudious.

 

[Reynard]

Though to be fair, with the current natural healing rates this is absurd too. How can you have suffered real injuries if you're absolutely fine next day?

Personally I use gritty rests, which still far from realistic, at least make this somewhat more verisimilitudious.

We aren't talking about realism. That's not necessary for something to be in the fiction. Hit Points are damage, but they are action movie damage.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

We aren't talking about realism. That's not necessary for something to be in the fiction. Hit Points are damage, but they are action movie damage.

Sure, but to me the standard healing rules feel like an absurd action movie parody.

 

[Artamo]

My personal take: some people want to play D&D as an action movie, and some people want to play it as a medieval war movie, but both are trying to use the same bucket of hit points. There may be better systems for both: maybe Feng Shui for the action movie folks and Harnmaster for the medieval war folks but ultimately, they want to do it in D&D.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

Though to be fair, with the current natural healing rates this is absurd too. How can you have suffered real injuries if you're absolutely fine next day?

Personally I use gritty rests, which still far from realistic, at least make this somewhat more verisimilitudious.

The hack I use is that even "natural" healing is frankly supernatural, because it is a magical world.

Characters in an area where the normal background world-magic is suppressed would perceive that area as horribly cursed. Healing would be dreadfully slow and often incomplete, crop yields would be low, livestock would be sickly and scrawny, craftwork would be difficult, time-consuming, and give poor results - all because things would work in "our-world realistic" ways instead of in "pastoral fantastic" ways normal to the setting.

 

[TwoSix]

We aren't talking about realism. That's not necessary for something to be in the fiction. Hit Points are damage, but they are action movie damage.

I do agree with @Crimson Longinus (!) that it’s difficult to reconcile “this trauma will cause you to bleed out and die in the next 18-30 seconds”, which is what the death save system basically requires you to narrate, with “the damage you took will not inconvenience you in any way after a 6 hour break”, which is basically how I narrate full hit points plus full Hit Dice.

Combine that with the oddities of the intersection of healing effects, and characters with differing levels and widely disparate amounts of hit points, and that’s why I arrived at the point where the only narrative I could justify for D&D hit points was a fully supernatural one.

That’s the narration that allows me to keep the system fully intact, and still have credible rationales within the fiction for how all those disparities intersect.