Let's Talk About Metacurrency

[Bill Zebub]

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).

In support of that viewpoint: I was just reading the quickstart for Nimble, which is 5e derived/adjacent, and in their model once you reach zero HP you start taking wounds. At six wounds you are dead. HP can be healed quickly, but wounds can take much longer.

In that model it seems that HP represent some kind of luck or skill or hero points or whatever, and you don't actually take physical damage until they are exhausted.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, its pretty much "Let's look at all the D&D tropes and say "Okay, all these things have to at least some degree an in-world explanation and aren't just naked fictional and mechanical tropes. So what would do that?"

Of course the price is you can't tell yourself its a low-key fantasy world anymore. It blatantly isn't.

That of course is the issue. I want a low-key fantasy world to be an option.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That of course is the issue. I want a low-key fantasy world to be an option.

Well, you know my usual response to that: "You're using D&D why then?" Its been a poor choice for that from the day it came in three little beige books.

(Yes, I know, because its easier to find players. Its still pounding nails with a wrench to me).

 

[mamba]

Except in Star Wars games there clearly is something measurable about the Force. It's used for a bunch of things, and the description of it works just fine for it's unconscious use by non Force-sensitives.

I don’t know, at a minimum the unconscious use is a problem for me. That is no better than an actual luck mechanic, in neither case is it anything the character intentionally influences

 

[mamba]

That of course is the issue. I want a low-key fantasy world to be an option.

is it though, or do you need to handwave a lot away because there simply is no good in-world explanation. Not sure what the game you play looks like, but I don’t see how 5e mechanics can reasonably arrive at a low fantasy setting when you actually think things through

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well, you know my usual response to that: "You're using D&D why then?" Its been a poor choice for that from the day it came in three little beige books.

(Yes, I know, because its easier to find players. Its still pounding nails with a wrench to me).

True, but it also is true that the D&D has over the years gotten less gritty and more high fantasy. It was never particularly gritty or low fantasy, but there still has been quite a significant change.

 

[Umbran]

Of course the price is you can't tell yourself its a low-key fantasy world anymore. It blatantly isn't.

Earthdawn, of course, has never been low key about its fantasy.

 

[pemerton]

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

As I posted:

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).

In my experience, players use the numerical/mathematical information that their PCs' remaining hp give them all the time: in deciding whether to rest, whether to fight, who to heal, etc.

But as per my example, the characters can't have the sort of information about the likelihood of dying from a given roll of the attack deice that the players rely on. Hence my assertion that all this player thinking is "meta".

 

[pemerton]

But is that desirable in a game where combat is the main mode of play? I'd argue not, based on experience with lots of different systems. Death spirals by way wound penalties and similar almost never improve the experience or create the kind of play folks imagine they will, in my experience.

I play mostly "death spiral" games, and will not try and conjecture about preferred experiences.

But the fact that some (many) people don't want a death spiral, and hence use D&D hit points, isn't an argument that D&D hit points aren't meta. If anything, it seems to me to push the other way: because people don't want in-fiction injury, exhaustion etc they use a meta system to track progress and set-back in combat.

 

[pemerton]

It's the intersection between combat being able to kill a character through hit point loss, and what happens when a character is actually unable to continue a fight (which suggests some kind of major injury) where I find some narrative muddle.

Basically, how do you narrate a character getting taken out of a fight (brought down to 0 HP and below) in any edition of D&D (plus other D&D-adjacent medieval fantasy games) using action movie narration, such that the other characters in the party should be acting like the character is at grave risk of dying in the next few moments (as the death and dying rules require)?

Robin Laws gives good advice on this in one of the original HeroWars rulebooks (it might be in the Narrator Book, but maybe it's in the main book - I can't remember): use ambiguous narration, similar to what LotR uses when Frodo is struck/stabbed by the Orc captain's spear.