Abstract HP

[GreatLemur]

Ultimately, it is far, far simpler to explain hit points as "your character is crazy tough" and ignore all the half-assed efforts to cram other stuff in there.

The trouble is, that solution has its own compelling counter-example: The simple fact that you gain hit points with every level. It makes a hell of a lot more sense for experience to help you avoid wounds than survive them, especially given the giant heaps of HP past versions of D&D have doled out. Then, of course, there's the whole thing about how hit point loss doesn't affect combat capability or other faculties in the way that severe wounds logically ought to. (I know people hate "death spiral" mechanics, but they do make sense.)

The unfortunate truth is that D&D's health and damage mechanics have been pretty self-contradictory in every edition I can remember any details about. There's no way to look at them that completely makes sense, and some amount of hand-waving has always been necessary. I'm hopeful that 4e will resolve some of these issues, but I doubt they'll all go away.

 

[loseth]

Y'all simply have to accept that D&D has an abstract combat system. It isn't something that's really up for debate or arguement. Yes, there are places where it doesn't work as well - falling, poison and a couple other things - but that's the price you pay when you want an abstract system and a system that is clean and simple to use. Some things get sacrificed for a fast play experience. Do y'allunderstand what that means? It means that sometimes design ideas must trump accuracy or simulation in order for the play experience to be quick and clean.

I agree with half your argument, as I think I understand it. That D&D works best if one accepts HP as an abstraction is, IMHO, absolutely true. That the system is as good as it can get and couldn't be improved by further tweaking (in terms of falling rules, etc.) is, IMHO, utterly false. Again IMHO, HP are good now, and could be even better if more design effort were put into them.

 

[apoptosis]

(I know people hate "death spiral" mechanics, but they do make sense.)

I actually dislike when games don't have some sort of death spiral mechanics. Always been a big problem for me for D&D ever since I started playing Rolemaster (which actually didnt have death spiral mechanics but the criticals basically did the same thing).

It made sense at first when D&D came out not to have them as they hadn't really been invented, but by 3E i assumed they would have had some sort of version of it.

 

[SteveC]

What is the point of this post? That d&d HPs is and will be the best rpg mechanic of what it is trying to simulate so no worth talking or thinking about anything else?

Nope. The point is that most of the time when someone spends a lot of time coming up with complex house rules for hit points, or has an entirely different wounding system altogether they can have other consequences that are just as wacky. I've played a lot of RPGs, and have dealt with the HP debates since the days of Runequest. In the end, and RPG is going to fail at simulating reality because reality is just too complicated. That's true for all types of mechanics, not just HP.

The best any RPG can do is to define the kind of world it wants to simulate, and have the rules reflect this. If you want to play in the world that a particular game is trying to simulate, then the rules will work for you. Many people want to game in a gritty "realistic" setting, and for them systems like Phoenix Command or Sword's Path Glory are going to be just the ticket. If that works for them, great!

D&D isn't that kind of a game. It's fairly abstract about a lot of things, and injury is one of those things. Is it the "best" at it? I don't know, because "best" is highly subjective. I think it's the best at simulating a heroic but not overly cinematic genre, but that's just my opinion and not a statement of fact.

In the end, I see a lot of people trying to dress up the HP system to make it "gritty" or "realistic" but that's trying to make it something it's not. To quote Rowdy Roddy Piper, it's like putting perfume on a pig.

--Steve

 

[Dausuul]

The trouble is, that solution has its own compelling counter-example: The simple fact that you gain hit points with every level. It makes a hell of a lot more sense for experience to help you avoid wounds than survive them, especially given the giant heaps of HP past versions of D&D have doled out.

That has less to do with the hit point mechanic than it does with the character level/advancement mechanics... which make hit points look like a shining beacon of clarity and simplicity. In any event, I regard the question of "how you got to be that tough" to be a much less pressing one than "how that toughness works in an actual game."

Then, of course, there's the whole thing about how hit point loss doesn't affect combat capability or other faculties in the way that severe wounds logically ought to. (I know people hate "death spiral" mechanics, but they do make sense.)

While this is certainly true, the same problem applies to any of the interpretations of hit points that have been put forth. If hit points represent your fighting skills, then shouldn't your ability to inflict damage also drop as your hit points diminish? If hit points represent luck and morale, don't those affect your attacks just as much as your defense?

The problem here is that any sort of death spiral mechanic increases the likelihood of fights being decided in the first round (as one side gets knocked into a death spiral). D&D decided that avoiding that outcome was more important than strict realism.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I agree with half your argument, as I think I understand it. That D&D works best if one accepts HP as an abstraction is, IMHO, absolutely true. That the system is as good as it can get and couldn't be improved by further tweaking (in terms of falling rules, etc.) is, IMHO, utterly false. Again IMHO, HP are good now, and could be even better if more design effort were put into them.

I tend to agree.

What's funny to me is, I think this whole "goddamit, HP are abstract NOW SHUT UP!" thing WotC are doing is a bit of a huge cop-out compared to some of their earlier stuff. I mean, I'm reminded of the old VP/WP system from the earlier WotC SW editions (maaaaan, it's kind of wierd to be talking about them in the past tense, it doesn't seem so long ago, but it kind of is!), where they actually tried to make a bit more sense of HP, and divided it up into the sort of "tiring/dodging/luck" VP and the "actual injury" WP. I don't know if that system was all that great, but it actually made sense to me, on a visceral level, when HP break down the second you get outside melee combat (and can be dodgy even within it). At least 3E brought Coup De Gras rules, and I hope 4E keeps them or something similar (bet it forgets they ever existed though).

I just hope that in 4E, we get like, at least one paragraph which attempts to make sense of HP, and makes it abundantly clear that they're abstract, and I hope that it's clear that everybody who works on 4E believes HP are the same thing (something that was definately not the case in earlier editions).

I can keep on going with HP as an abstraction. Maybe though, they should just largely separate the falling and poison rules from them. I'm not sure what to do with poison right now, but making falling an attack on your Fortitude, which could potentially kill you (though if they have AP-like-things, they should allow the spending of these to prevent said death), no matter how many HP you have, would be a step forwards.

D&D decided that avoiding that outcome was more important than strict realism.

I don't believe that, really. What I would say is original D&D was so primitive as to pre-date "death spiral"-type mechanics, and by the time such mechanics became popular, they were a mark of D&D/AD&D's competitors, not of D&D, thus there was little to gain by suddenly adopting them. Later still, by the time 3E came round, maybe there was a mature decision to not adopt such mechanics, but I'm sure it was based more on preserving sacred cows than anything else. Now, by 4E, the drive is simplicity, so obviously such mechanics are out.

So I don't believe avoiding that was ever a significant issue.

 

[JDJblatherings]

Because all the luck in the world will not explain why my dwarven fighter can survive orbital re-entry.

He will not survive reentry...he'll suffocate first. ;-)

(oh crud someone else already pointed this out)

 

[Wyrmshadows]

Originally Posted by Dausuul
First of all, because it's a crappy definition. It's a vague handwavey thing. You can't sum it up in one quick sentence the way you can with virtually any other key statistic (except Armor Class, but that has its own problems); which means that when people are first learning D&D, they're apt to boil hit points down to their most obvious meaning, which is, "Hit points are how tough you are."

Second, they fluff it as representing all these abstract things, but then they go ahead and treat it like pure physical injury in the actual rules. Examples:

"Rider" effects on attacks, that only trigger if the attack inflicts damage (e.g., poison, energy drain). This implies that any attack which inflicts damage has actually connected and caused a wound--none of this "near-miss" business.

Environmental hazards which do a given amount of damage per round. This implies that damage is independent of character; that is, 10 points of damage to Joe Commoner and 10 points of damage to Thorzod Tarrasquebane means they're taking the same amount of "punishment." Thorzod may soak it better, but he's getting hit just as hard.

Healing magic which heals a given amount of damage. This implies that 10 points of damage represents the same degree of injury regardless of whether Joe or Thorzod suffered it. Plus, of course, it's called "heal," not "restore your mystical defense abstraction."

Natural healing is on a daily basis. This implies that hit points represent real injury, since you don't recover any hit points by taking a five-minute rest break.
Hit points do not change regardless of character status. If you're paralyzed or unconscious, you keep all your hit points. This implies that the ability to consciously dodge and defend is not a factor in your hit point total.

Constitution affects your hit points, but Wisdom and Dexterity do not. This implies that being physically durable is important to determining your hit point total, but willpower, perception, and quick reflexes are irrelevant.

Some of these are "corner cases," but many of them are not. True, you don't encounter poison in every fight, or even in most fights. How many fights do you encounter healing magic in or after? Oh, yes--all of them (at least for a typical 3E game). How often do you apply your Constitution modifier when calculating hit points? Every time you calculate your hit points. If you don't want to think about what hit points mean, that's fine, but as soon as you start taking a serious look at them, you'll run into huge problems.

QFT QFT QFT

There are too many exceptions to the hand wavey "Oh, HPs are just abstract" excusemaking for what is fundamentally a system tracking a character's mortality that is very, very flawed. I have encountered lots of situations over the years like these above and these kinds of situations have brought raised eyebrows from certain of my players as I attempted to justify some sort of silliness.

Consider this, if HP are some abstract primarily non-physical attribute, then why wouldn't a paralyzed opponant be considered to have maybe no more than 6hp. The character can't dodge, is unable to move so she can't get lucky over and over and over and over again as her 130hp body is criss crossed over and over again with the enemy mage's dagger, she isn't getting a second wind as there is no exertion, etc.

It is silly, silly, silly.

Before moving to True20 and Runquest I instituted a WP/VP system and that made for a much more believable system. And yes, believable and fun, for many players and DMs, are on good terms with one another.



Wyrmshadows

 

[JDJblatherings]

"Rider" effects on attacks, that only trigger if the attack inflicts damage (e.g., poison, energy drain). This implies that any attack which inflicts damage has actually connected and caused a wound--none of this "near-miss" business.

Once in a LARP tossed a javelin at someone, they dodged and bashed their head into a cabin wall, my attack was a success but my javelin didn't inflict any damage.

Environmental hazards which do a given amount of damage per round. This implies that damage is independent of character; that is, 10 points of damage to Joe Commoner and 10 points of damage to Thorzod Tarrasquebane means they're taking the same amount of "punishment." Thorzod may soak it better, but he's getting hit just as hard.

Somone with 9 hp is a goner where as somone with 100 hp is going to survive, this means tough guys can take the punishment because of grit and determination.

Healing magic which heals a given amount of damage. This implies that 10 points of damage represents the same degree of injury regardless of whether Joe or Thorzod suffered it. Plus, of course, it's called "heal," not "restore your mystical defense abstraction."

It is healing, the gods are stingy with high HP people that shouldn't be getting themselves hurt . It's more healing for the low HP fellows and less for the high HP fellows not the same healing. Cure Light wounds can be a 100% of a 1st level charcters hp but is easily less then 10% for a 7th or 8th level character. Surley these aren't all the same points.

Natural healing is on a daily basis. This implies that hit points represent real injury, since you don't recover any hit points by taking a five-minute rest break.
Hit points do not change regardless of character status. If you're paralyzed or unconscious, you keep all your hit points. This implies that the ability to consciously dodge and defend is not a factor in your hit point total.

Hp are recovered by character level something is going on here besides the same physical damage regardless of HP total.
If you are paralyzed or unconscious you are a dead duck if someone wants you dead...coup de grace anyone?


[qoute]
Constitution affects your hit points, but Wisdom and Dexterity do not. This implies that being physically durable is important to determining your hit point total, but willpower, perc
eption, and quick reflexes are irrelevant.
[/quote]
Concentration is tied to CON also. CON is a measure of "toughness" not simply health and endurance.

 

[Delta]

Any guesses where thats from?
1st ed AD&D players handbook, page 34.

You'll notice that what very specifically isn't there is "will to live", which is a very new evolution to 4E. In 1E every hit was some kind physical injury, whether a scratch or a sucking chest wound -- so there was a reason why spells were called "cure wounds". But that's been expanded recently to a whole bunch of other stuff, practically anything anyone wants it to be.