D&D 5E The "everyone at full fighting ability at 1 hp" conundrum

Garthanos · Oct 14, 2019

Ratskinner said:
My biggest gripe about HP is related to Healing. Heroes getting battered about for little impact is fine...just watch a marvel movie. My problem is when somebody casts a "healing" spell on a guy who...well, isn't wounded.

The Dragon Masters of my game world tend to have somewhat poor self defense because they are regenerators with a berserkergang issue (they have monster like hit pts)... when they get hit it very often not skill induced fatigue/luck turning the blow or similar but that internalized healing turns the wound into fatigue and most healing is about refreshing that fatigue and other nebulous resource expenditure that heroes have ie divine favor / luck etc etc.

One way of seeing it is that a healer can see you are spent and that includes those nebulous resources that are hit points even if others cannot. It's part of both the magical healing gift and the knack for leadership. So that Poets Priests and Politicians all do their thing (Bards, Clerics and Warlords)

Wound removal is (in 4e) in a remove affliction ritual (and the surgery practice can do it to) But its usually only valuable for NPCs. Actually I think afflictions would be one of those areas I would have like to seen better developed for 4e. For instance perhaps if death saves are failed a wound/affliction is incurred.

Coroc · Oct 14, 2019

Sacrosanct said:
Some of the discussion from other threads, and my gaming session last Sunday, has had me thinking about this a little more, and why it's problematic.

We all know HP are abstract. And we know that a certain suspense of disbelief has to happen. And when we ask, "Why are you at full fighting power from 100 hp down to 1 hp, but then suddenly lose everything, and if you lose 99% of your hp, it make no sense to heal all of it after 8 hours?" the common response is "because HP aren't meat, and all those hits you took aren't real hits, they are just grazing attacks that might not have hit you directly."

Well, there's another big problem with that. One that I as a player encountered last Sunday, and the sleep thread reminded me of just now. I.e., unless loss of hp actually does have a narrative effect (the DM describing the wounds from each attack), and there is no difference from the PC's perspective to guess how close they are to beating the creature, it has a significant detrimental effect to the players. In the sleep thread, it impacts whether or not the wizard will use that spell slot to end a battle. if they have no idea roughly how worn down the target is, they are more hesitant to use it. In my example last Sunday, I had first used magic missile. The DM pretty much narrated nothing with each attack people did, and when I asked, it was "it hits the creature." I was sure the creature had a resistance to something (it did, it was a gray ooze), but my magic missile, firebolt, and other PCs' attacks were all narrated the same so I had no idea what worked better than another.

So it seems like a paradox of sorts. HP are not just meat or fighting capability, but if you don't act like they are meat in the game, it has a negative affect to game play.

There is a case where you do not have to be so abstract with HP:

For mobs. Because they normally won't retreat make a short rest and come back as fresh as new.
So narrate the bloody combat in all detail when it comes to the wounds the players dish out

For the players everything serious should only be the last hit that gets them in the negatives. Everything else is loss of morale, motivation stamina or maybe damaging the equipment a bit or some minor scratches. For the last hit feel free to narrate some ramped up stuff.

Lateron, when they survive rest, it simply turns out that the last stroke was not that severe like it first looked .

It is an improvement because, hey it is better than A-Team, spitting 2000 rounds out of heavy automatic weapons and no one gets a scratch, you have to admit that.

3catcircus · Oct 14, 2019

Coroc said:
There is a case where you do not have to be so abstract with HP:

For mobs. Because they normally won't retreat make a short rest and come back as fresh as new.
So narrate the bloody combat in all detail when it comes to the wounds the players dish out

For the players everything serious should only be the last hit that gets them in the negatives. Everything else is loss of morale, motivation stamina or maybe damaging the equipment a bit or some minor scratches. For the last hit feel free to narrate some ramped up stuff.

Lateron, when they survive rest, it simply turns out that the last stroke was not that severe like it first looked .

It is an improvement because, hey it is better than A-Team, spitting 2000 rounds out of heavy automatic weapons and no one gets a scratch, you have to admit that.

Again, I ask why do the same hp represent different things for NPCs vs PCs? "Because they are heroic" just doesn't hold any water unless you also make the conceit that everyone other than the PCs are just window dressing in world that is static until the PCs are on stage.

For those of us who have played and DMed for decades, hit points didn't just get restored so easily. Without magical healing, when you hit exactly 0 hp, you were lights out and bleeding out until you hit -10 hp and death. If you got treatment before getting to -10 you still required a week's rest. Get knocked from 1 hp down to -1 hp (or any attack taking you from +hp into -hp)? Death, no save. The rest of the session was spent finding someone to raise dead or resurrect you or the reserve characters got broken out.

That older way of handling hp is actually a better model of reality than how it is done in 4e or 5e.

Mecheon · Oct 14, 2019

3catcircus said:
For those of us who have played and DMed for decades, hit points didn't just get restored so easily. Without magical healing, when you hit exactly 0 hp, you were lights out and bleeding out until you hit -10 hp and death. If you got treatment before getting to -10 you still required a week's rest.

Hate to say it, but that don't match up with what I remember. Heck, just gave 2E's rules a runover and can't find anything similar there

DND_Reborn · Oct 14, 2019

Mecheon said:
Hate to say it, but that don't match up with what I remember. Heck, just gave 2E's rules a runover and can't find anything similar there

Actually, in 1E and 2E, 0 hp = death. It was optional, but normally highly recommended, to allow PCs to go to -10 before they died, losing 1 hp / round IIRC.

I found the referense in the 1E DMG, pg. 82:

The section on hp recovery (same page):

Coroc · Oct 14, 2019

3catcircus said:
Again, I ask why do the same hp represent different things for NPCs vs PCs? "Because they are heroic" just doesn't hold any water unless you also make the conceit that everyone other than the PCs are just window dressing in world that is static until the PCs are on stage.

For those of us who have played and DMed for decades, hit points didn't just get restored so easily. Without magical healing, when you hit exactly 0 hp, you were lights out and bleeding out until you hit -10 hp and death. If you got treatment before getting to -10 you still required a week's rest. Get knocked from 1 hp down to -1 hp (or any attack taking you from +hp into -hp)? Death, no save. The rest of the session was spent finding someone to raise dead or resurrect you or the reserve characters got broken out.

That older way of handling hp is actually a better model of reality than how it is done in 4e or 5e.

Sure with the older editions system the regaining hp or experiencing a knockout or death were more like hp=flesh. But 5e design is different. And also in older systems you had different mechanics for mobs than for players e.g. hd. for mobs.

My suggestion on how to handle it differently RP wise is just to help people to differ between HP=flesh but still make colorful descriptions of a combat. I mean it never gets very realistic anyway doesn't it? IRL if you get a deep bleeder you might be unconscious within seconds. If your entrails are slashed open you might pike it in a very painful way, if you somehow get medical attention you still might get an infection. Often one hit is deadly, how do you get your HP realism into this? Is your 800 HP barbarian immune to death from an assassins dagger even if he hits critically with 10d6 sneak attack damage? That's not very realistic if you are honest.

So better reserve the ultra dramatics for the real thing, and for the mobs (occasionally).

DND_Reborn · Oct 14, 2019

As an aside, in 1E, hp that represented "meat" were roughly 4 points (for a typical person) + con modifier for each level (maximum 9 for most classes). Gygax acknowledges it is ridiculous to assuming the accumulation of hp beyond this represents ability to take physical harm. The remainder of hp were skill, sixth-sense, luck, favor of the gods, etc.

Oofta · Oct 14, 2019

3catcircus said:
Again, I ask why do the same hp represent different things for NPCs vs PCs? "Because they are heroic" just doesn't hold any water unless you also make the conceit that everyone other than the PCs are just window dressing in world that is static until the PCs are on stage.

For those of us who have played and DMed for decades, hit points didn't just get restored so easily. Without magical healing, when you hit exactly 0 hp, you were lights out and bleeding out until you hit -10 hp and death. If you got treatment before getting to -10 you still required a week's rest. Get knocked from 1 hp down to -1 hp (or any attack taking you from +hp into -hp)? Death, no save. The rest of the session was spent finding someone to raise dead or resurrect you or the reserve characters got broken out.

That older way of handling hp is actually a better model of reality than how it is done in 4e or 5e.

I really disliked older editions that had death at -10 and house-ruled it when I ran my own games. Dying at a flat -10 was so arbitrary. What was so magical about that number? If I had two PCs, one with 5 HP and one with 100, the former pc for all intents and purposes had double their HP as a "buffer" before dying. A low level PC will be fighting monsters that will rarely kill them outright in one blow, even if they were already wounded. High level PCs? Get low on HP and any single attack could take you from perfectly fine to flat out dead.

There is no perfect system. Any system you come up with will probably be one person's "better" will be anothers annoying. Same way with HP. IMHO the system we have now is simple and it's good enough for what it does. I don't want a death spiral, it's easy to use the alternate rules to have longer (but still relatively fast) healing periods.

DND_Reborn · Oct 14, 2019

We used your HP at first level was your negative limit in 1E/2E. At one point we also used -10 modified by your CON bonus with +hp increasing the negative (so, CON 16 would result in -12 limit).

Oofta · Oct 14, 2019

If I were going to attempt to do something more realistic, I'd probably do something based on going below 0 that mimiced something similar to exhaustion. So hit 0 and you are dying, only able to take limited actions at less efficiency. Get lower? You're taking wounds that will continue to disable you and leave more permanent damage without magical healing. I might want to tie it into total HP somehow as well, probably a percentage.

So at 10% increments of total HP:

First increment: You can still take an action with disadvantage and move at half speed. Attacks against you have advantage.
Second Increment: Action or move.
Third Increment: Attacking or strenuous activity drops you an increment, move at one quarter speed (crawling).
Fourth Increment: Con save or die. Anything you do will kill you unless you make a con save with disadvantage. You can't effectively attack anymore (possible exceptions for things like an already loaded crossbow, etc).

Or something along those lines. You automatically drop an increment at the end of your turn and if you're attacked it can drop you appropriate increments.

But would it be more fun? It could mimic the whole "the hero is dying but crawling to trying to X" where X is something heroic. I do know it would be more finicky. I'd have to do some real world play testing, and my current group isn't that much into combat.

D&D 5E The "everyone at full fighting ability at 1 hp" conundrum

Garthanos

Arcadian Knight

Coroc

Hero

3catcircus

Adventurer

Mecheon

Sacabambaspis

DND_Reborn

The High Aldwin

Coroc

Hero

DND_Reborn

The High Aldwin

Oofta

Legend

DND_Reborn

The High Aldwin

Oofta

Legend

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