4e Hit Points and pre-4e Hit Points: A Comparison

[Hussar]

Now I'm sniping? Nice to know that impartial bystanders get the point.

Anyway, back on topic.

The whole solution to this is to simply envision hit points as representing whatever makes the most sense at the time. Hit by a sword? Ok, physical punishment. Fall 87 feet onto jagged spikes and walk away? Ok, now we're into some pretty intangible territory - luck, divine intervention, whatnot.

That some people would try to claim that this is such a huge shift from the past is ignoring a great amount of play IMO. This sort of thing went on at tables all the time. In any edition you fell into the pit trap with spikes, and survived. Are hit points simply physical punishment? Not in my opinion. There has always been some level of intangibility.

Which makes sense when you accept that hit points are simply an abstraction to ease game play. They aren't MEANT to represent anything. They're simply a short hand method for keeping score.

 

[Ydars]

HP have always represented intangibles; there was even a Dragon or White Dwarf article in the late 1980s talking about how HP should not be used if a character was immobilised or incapacitated and that CON damage was more appropriate in this situation, to reflect how lethal such a situation would be.

I have always been aware of this, and yet somehow, 4E takes this a step too far for me. I know the difference is only incremental but I feel it has gone over my "tipping point" if you like; that point where my flag of disbelief goes up and won't go down.

The real problem is healing surges; I just don't like them. From a gamist point of view, they are great. No more wands of cure X wounds meaning that PCs are always fully healed. I would just find it very disconnecting as a DM/player presented with this.

For some of us, the emotional connection with the game is similar to that with a story in a book. You have to believe in the story for it to feel real. Anything that makes this harder is bad for us. Healing surges trigger a serious disconnect for me but I would like to thank so many people on this board who have taken so much time to explain how they have gotten over this hurdle. Some of it has proved very helpful.

I am sure there is a solution for me, but maybe I will have to actually play 4e to find one that feels right. That won't happen for a while because our 3.5E game is still going strong but I am eager to try.

 

[Hussar]

I have always been aware of this, and yet somehow, 4E takes this a step too far for me. I know the difference is only incremental but I feel it has gone over my "tipping point" if you like; that point where my flag of disbelief goes up and won't go down.

Now this? This I buy. Totally behind this message. I can completely see it being too far for comfort. What I don't buy is that it's a completely new paradigm.

 

[Andor]

However, I do believe that 4e hit points and pre-4e hit points handle damage to the character in pretty much the same way. The two key changes that 4e has made to hit points are that the "intangible" aspect of hit points that allow a character to turn a serious wound into a minor injury are recovered more quickly in 4e, and that 4e characters who have not received magical healing are still able to function normally despite their wounds.

What do you think?

Jumping into the thread late...

There are a few more differences than that.

In 1e and 2e hitpoints were the same. (Barring recovery from -hp)

3e changed things up a little by moving gross damage like green slime and other body destroying effects into Con damage. 3e also had had a special status for 0hp and had a default range between 0 and dead, although lot of spells/feats/races/classes that played around with that.

4e undoes that change and restores HP as the sole 'condition track.'

4e does (as another poster mentioned) seem a bit schitzophrenic about what it intends HP to be. On the one hand they uped base HP so 1st lvl mages could no longer kill themselves by walking into a doorframe, on the other hand they also increased enviromental damage so heros couldn't ignore falls and lava. Personally I'd rather fall 10' than get whacked with an axe, but that's a different discussion.

4e also, as a result of the combat centered powers system has a lot of effects that deal HP damage that did not do so in earlier editions (like stinking cloud and illusions.) This results in the observation that HP represent the will or fighting spirit of the character in question. And that is new to 4e. Earlier editions had morale or fear effects but they were always seperate from the HP system with maybe a couple of magical fliers like Phantasmal Killer.

4e also inserts the 'bloodied' status to represent the midpoint of the fight and while it does nothing by itself it serves as a trigger for many positive and negative effects.

So one the one hand you have cinematic healing effects where a hearty "On your feet soldier!" can wake the (nearly)dead and at the same time a strangely more realistic system where your foes actually scuff the shine off your armour before killing you.

(On a side note this is the sort of thing that kills me about 4e. Hints of greatness, if only they had made up their minds what they wanted to do and then polished it. 4e so deperately needed another year of prep. )

HP in D&D have always been a brilliant and flawed mechanic. 4e abstracts it a little farther and has a perspective shift from 'wargame' to 'action film.' This changes which facets on this gem of an idea are dull or lusterous but it's still the same idea.

 

[Lanefan]

There are some grey areas, though. Nonlethal damage in 3e, while not taken off hit points per se, did reduce a creature's ability to keep fighting in the same way as lethal hit point damage. Even further back (in BECMI and 1e, IIRC), if you dealt subdual damage to a dragon equal to its full normal hit points, you could force it to surrender to you. Effectively, it seemed as if dragons had a "resolve" point total separate from but equal to their normal hit point total.

This comes from the distant past, distant enough that I don't know if it originated in a Dragon article, a rulebook, or was something we dreamed up on our own; but for as long as I can remember we've had it that you can do non-lethal damage to anything simply by stating such before you swing (and then, of course, succeeding on your hit roll) provided you're using a weapon that *can* deal non-lethal damage. Swords and daggers can if you strike with the flat of the blade, or the hilt. All bludgeoning weapons can. Arrows cannot, nor rapiers, nor any damage-causing spell. Also, if you're fighting something like an ooze or construct or undead that does not go unconscious you can't do non-lethal damage to it.

When your foe reaches 0 (or -10, depending on system) s/he is knocked unconscious rather than killed, and thus can be taken prisoner or whatever. Non-lethal damage is half temporary, half real - thus if you take 30 points non-lethal damage you automatically get back 15 of it in a relatively short time (we use about 10 minutes to half an hour but I've no idea if that's "official" or not).

As a side effect, this affords goodly-type characters a method of winning lots of battles without leaving a trail of corpses behind them...

And the best part: a system like this for non-lethal (or subdual) damage is a trivially easy thing to add to any edition, with virtually no knock-on effects.

Lanefan

 

[Delta]

This comes from the distant past, distant enough that I don't know if it originated in a Dragon article, a rulebook, or was something we dreamed up on our own...

That's in almost every rulebook pre-3E. 1E UA p. 109. 2E DMG ch. 9. An expansion on Dragon subdual from OD&D Vol. 2. 1E MM p. 30. With slight variation.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I think the reason there are arguments about HP and what it means comes from two ways of looking at things.

1) Abstraction is a switch. It's on or off.
2) Abstraction is a graph. There are different levels of abstraction.

In the case of HP, I think 4e is more abstract then previous editions. For some people, that doesn't matter - HP was already abstract, why on earth would this make a difference? For others, it does matter - it's lower (or higher, depending on your outlook on abstraction being good or bad - you may be saying "Finally, it stopped those rather feeble attempts at pretending not to be abstract!") on the graph!

 

[firesnakearies]

For me, hit points stop being a problem when I shift my perspective from what I presume to be "realistic" (as in, what I think happens in real life), to what happens in fantasy novels, movies, and comic books. The characters are heroes, it's a fantasy story, disconnect solved.

 

[Fifth Element]

Now this? This I buy. Totally behind this message. I can completely see it being too far for comfort. What I don't buy is that it's a completely new paradigm.

Agreed. I have some concern that 4E might have gone too far up the scale for comfort, but that remains to be seen.

But it is just a matter of degree.

 

[Fifth Element]

That some people would try to claim that this is such a huge shift from the past is ignoring a great amount of play IMO.

Ignoring what actually happened in the past - could that be called historical revisionism I wonder?