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

[Allister]

*Shrug*

We learned not to look too closely at hitpoints all the way back in our 1e/2e mix and match game when we tried to rationalize natural healing, Cure light wounds and the different effects on high and low HP characters.

 

[mmadsen]

Go back and reread The Hobbit or LotR, and you will find that Smaug was engaged in a combat in which hundreds of arrows were fired at him without doing significant damage, and likewise the Witch King of Angmar was involved in the Battle of Pellinore Field. We don't actually know that Legolas killed the fell beast with a single arrow, nor do we know how many "hit points" such a creature has in Tolkein's world.

This is ludicrous. You simultaneously believe that hit points represent physical injuries, and that Smaug, the fell beast in the night, and the Witch King of Angmar, none of whom had any visible injuries, all died on the first or second shot because their hit points were low.

Again, that is totally inconsistent. If you want to argue that hit points are intangible luck points, and they were low on those intangible luck points, you'd at least make some sense.

 

[Raven Crowking]

This is ludicrous. You simultaneously believe that hit points represent physical injuries, and that Smaug, the fell beast in the night, and the Witch King of Angmar, none of whom had any visible injuries, all died on the first or second shot because their hit points were low.

Um.....No, though I could see why you would think (if I thought as you think I do) that it is ludicrous.

We are told that arrows hit Smaug, but that they are ineffective.....this is very much in keeping with hit point loss in 1e, and the scene could easily play out in a 1e game as described in the book. OTOH, the Arrow of Dragon Slaying was designed after the Black Arrow that actually killed Smaug, so if you prefer 1e has you covered that way as well.

The fell beast.......We are not certain that it died. We are not certain whether or not it had any visible injuries. We are not certain of anything in this particular case. For all we are told, the beast failed a morale check.

The Witch King of Angmar? Again, he may have had no visible injuries, but he had no visible either. In D&D, undead do not heal with the passage of time, and he's potentially wounded when the flood destroys the black horses, as well as at other times. His is currently in the midst of combat. He has recently striven at the Gates of Gondor....and while Gandalf does him no damage, we cannot be certain what his status is at this time. He is struck with a weapon devised with a special purpose of fighting the men of Angmar (the barrow blade), which might have properties that do more damage than one would otherwise expect. Certainly Tolkein describes it as a significant blow. Finally, while no man can harm the Witch King, non-men are clearly his prophesied bane.

I would have no difficulty whatsoever rendering any of these scenes in 1e D&D terms. Again, without any inconsistency.


RC

 

[Mallus]

Because the "damage" can be "talked away" from any attack, any attack can be retroactively discovered to have "targeted luck, resolve or some other intangible aspect of hit points that did not also have some potentially lethal component."

... or injuries that looked pretty severe at first can turn out to be not so bad after all.

Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before (or I'll keep posting it!).

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I wanted to check my books before replying to this. Page 293 of the 4e PH states:

"Hit points (hp) measure your ability to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on your feet throughout a battle. Hit points represent more than physical endurance. They represent your character's skill, luck, and resolve - all the factors that combine to help you stay alive in a combat situation.​

So, a high-level 4e character who is low on hit points because he has turned deadly strikes into glancing blows (and is thus covered in nicks and scratches), out of breath from exhausting his physical endurance, and dangerously close to running out of luck is consistent with the 4e definition of hit points.

I like to think of it this way:

Normally, I think I'd do pretty well if I suddenly got into a random fistfight on the street. However, if I go to the gym and lift weights for an hour until my legs and arms feel like jelly, I do not think I would last for more than a few seconds. My reactions are slow, my limbs are weak, and a fresh combatant would probably wipe the floor with me. I figure that that's the point at which I am low on HP. After a short rest I feel much more capable.

Of course, a 4e character is Better Than I Am. He can bend bars/lift gates for hours without tiring. What knocks him out is deflecting the stone-cracking blows of an ogre's hammer or gritting his teeth and covering his face as a ball cube of white-hot flame licks across his body. At the end of that, he's still standing, but less able to turn away a devastating blow when it comes.

On top of that, for the sake of narrative sense, the devastating blow is almost never automatically lethal. It's a smash to the head that he survives, but perhaps with a severe concussion. A stab to the shoulder that he may or may not bleed to death from. The death save mechanic tells us what sort of wound it is. Die in 3 rounds? You had an artery punctured when you hit 0 HP. Pop back up in 3 rounds after a natural 20? An action-hero style blow to the head that knocked you out, but you shook it off in time to save the day.

Add healing surges to the mix, and it's even better. HP represent the ability to keep fighting. Healing surges represent reserves of will and strength that are depleted over the course of a day. When you wake up, rested and refreshed, you have a full complement of surges. When you take a sharp blow to the head, you might need to take a moment to shake it off (second wind). When your enemy seems to be overwhelming you with a series of almost-lethal blows that you barely manage to deflect, your allies can help you pull yourself together and fight on (e.g. warlord abilities). When you take a splash of acid in the face, it might not do any real damage, but the pain can undermine your ability to fight, something that can be overcome through magically patching up the wound (cleric abilities), distracting you from the pain (warlord abilities), or simply being a badass (second wind).

But there's only so much of this you can pull out of your butt in a day. Eventually, the cleric's magic can't keep up with the latticework of cuts and bruises that covers your body, and the warlord's pep talks start to sound hollow, and you're so tired...so tired...just want to lie down here for a minute until you can feel your hands again...

Healing surges represent real damage accumulating over time. As you become more and more beat up, it eventually becomes impossible to lift your arm to ward off that last blow that takes you down.

Perhaps a character who is out of luck loses his balance and happens to hit his head on a rock, and a character who is out of resolve is simply frightened to death.

I like the 4e system on death and dying for things like psychic damage. What is psychic damage, anyway? Well, in an abstract HP system, it could represent despair, lethargy, involuntary movements and twitches, tunnel vision, or any number of effects that are not physical injury but reduce your ability to keep fighting. If a psychic damage effect puts you below 0 HP, we look to the death save to see what actually happened to you. Did you just faint from the overload (i.e. make your death save), or did you have a stroke and die (i.e fail 3 saves)? It works similarly in 3e, but I enjoy the wildcard that death saves add to the mix.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

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.

In accordance with what you say below, I disagree that being hit by a sword and surviving is an indication of your physical resilience. There's something else going on there. Find me a human that can take a good hit with a sword and not simply die. In this case HP represents your ability to turn major damage into minor damage. The sword found the hole in your armour, but you managed to twist away so that it left a deep nick rather than an opened artery.

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.

Which has always been true. D&D has always been a game, and has always required some level of simplification in order to prevent us from becoming bogged down in the depths of overwrought simulation.

 

[Raven Crowking]

In accordance with what you say below, I disagree that being hit by a sword and surviving is an indication of your physical resilience. There's something else going on there. Find me a human that can take a good hit with a sword and not simply die.

There are actually quite clear historical records of folks run through with swords who continued to fight and then went on to live long and happy lives. May I recommend this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/242110-history-mythology-art-rpgs.html ?



If I learned one thing from my Sense of Wonder threads re: 3e, it is that the same folks who said "No way, no how does what you're saying make sense" are the biggest proponents of "We needed 4e to fix the problems that didn't exist no way, no how when 3e was the big thing" now. Of course, those people are also the first to deny that they shifted their perspective.

And, who knows, maybe this time it'll be me who changes his perspective about 4e.

So, I'm going to drop this until 5e comes along, unless someone has something new to add to the discussion.


RC

 

[thecasualoblivion]

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.

I think this is the key undercurrent of things. Wargame vs. Action Film. 4E has certainly embraced the 'action film' interpretation of HP fully, there is no doubt about that. The thing is, I would argue that 3E used the traditional 'wargame framework' from earlier D&D, but thanks to the economics of the good old Curestick(Wand of CLW/Lesser Vigor), ended up being more 'action film' in practice. I would guess that most 3E games utilized the curesticks to play like an 'action film' in terms of HP, even if the actual mechanics said otherwise. This created an awkward situation where the mechanics of HP thematically were contrary to how most people played the game.

The whole resting to regain HP was good in theory, but in practice how much did it really happen? Curative magic, either from items or from characters, is fairly constant in D&D. It bogged down the game(1e-3e) to lack magical healing, and this being a social game in most cases somebody either chose to play or was pressured into playing a class that could heal. Again, while pretty to read and hold in your head for 'immersion' purposes, these were primarily rules that most people bypassed(either via healers or curesticks) to play the game they wanted to play.

The mechanics should represent how the game is being played, and that was not the case during 3E. The treatment of HP you describe may have existed in AD&D, but 3E killed it in practice, if not in theory. What 4E has done is simply to give mechanics to represent how the majority of people actually play D&D, and not some treasured ideal.

If nothing else, if 4E actually has damaged the "feel" of D&D in terms of HP in the majority of the community(and IMO this is not true), the fact that the game is playable without a character devoted to healing combined with classes like the Warlord who let you fully fulfill that role without being forced to play a Cleric more than makes up for it.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

There are actually quite clear historical records of folks run through with swords who continued to fight and then went on to live long and happy lives. May I recommend this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/242110-history-mythology-art-rpgs.html ?



RC

People have survived all sorts of things but most people that suffered deep wounds in ages past died of tetanus, scepticmia and/or a dozen other infectous agents. Gut wounds of any seriousness were almost invariably fatal and extensive burns likewise.
We hear about the guys that survived because it was so unusual, nobody talked about the guy that died of blood poisioning after 3 weeks.

 

[mmadsen]

There are actually quite clear historical records of folks run through with swords who continued to fight and then went on to live long and happy lives. May I recommend this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/242110-history-mythology-art-rpgs.html ?

The point I have emphasized when discussing realistic combat is that it is not unrealistic that a great warrior can survive multiple wounds; it's unrealistic that he cannot die from one.

That's just how hit points work. Either they're "unrealistically" high, and no one sword blow can kill a great warrior, or they're "grim and gritty" and low, and any one sword blow will kill that great warrior. Neither extreme is realistic, because wounds aren't cumulative, and vertebrates aren't ablative.

If I learned one thing from my Sense of Wonder threads re: 3e, it is that the same folks who said "No way, no how does what you're saying make sense" are the biggest proponents of "We needed 4e to fix the problems that didn't exist no way, no how when 3e was the big thing" now. Of course, those people are also the first to deny that they shifted their perspective.

To whom are you referring?