D&D 5E Can mundane classes have a resource which powers abilities?

[chaochou]

On the second paragraph: in my 4e game, there are two ways you work out what your character is experiencing.... snip

This is somewhat tangential, but here it is.

I think one of the interesting facets of 'HP as luck / plot armour' is that given that model they ought to be situational. That is to say, a fighter standing amongst allies, alert and ready with weapons drawn might be on full HP (let's say he has 35) but that same man, totally uninjured, hanging by his fingertips over a pool of bubbling lava could be modelled as having 1 HP.

What that's telling us is that a rock or arrow or any mishap in fate sends him plunging to his death. On the other hand, if he is helped up or manages to escape his perilous situation - he has 35 HP again! Of course, if the man was, somehow fire-resistant, then his situation changes again, and so does his HP. A prone character / NPC could be modelled as having fewer HP than a standing one. This is a logical extension of the healing by inspiration idea - it's not just morale and will that can determine HP but physical situation.

Personally, I think this is an interesting design idea for a game of heroic fantasy. Not one I'd expect to see in 5e (or any future D&D edition for that matter) but the idea of HP loss as translating, not into wounds, but layers of additional and imminent danger in a scene is something I think I'd have fun with.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The worst injury John McClane actually takes in Die Hard is running over broken glass. Bullets don't bounce off him - they just get too close for comfort rather than hitting him.

My fault for a bad example, then. I could have sworn that I'd seen him take a direct hit, but he was mostly fine because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

In Gygax's DMG, in the section on NPCs (that has the tables for generating personality traits etc) there are rules for stat requirements for NPC members of character classes. And they are different from the rules that govern PCs. Generally, they are more forgiving (eg a fighter does not have a min 9 STR, but rather after rolling stats for a fighter NPC you add 2 to STR; rangers, druids and monks also have noticeably less strict minima).

I was entirely unaware of that! I wonder how much of that design was because he expected players to use a more generous stat-rolling method, while NPCs were expected to use honest rolls. There's not a ton of difference between allocating (4d6, drop lowest) to your main stat, or just rolling 3d6 and adding +2 to your prime stat.

I think it's pretty fascinating that we've moved from "I want my game rules to model the world as much as possible" to "The game rules are the physical and metaphysical rules of the world, and directly observable to imaginary inhabitants even when you get results that sound nonsensical."

It's not that the game rules are the physical laws of the world, so much as the rules describe the physical laws of the world. While there's a lot of overlap there - you can throw someone down a 10-foot cliff with reasonable certainty that they aren't going to die from it, but that they will sustain some degree of injury, and you could easily kill someone if you do it too many times in a row - there are also differences.

The major thing is that the game rules are all written with certain assumptions, which allow them to simplify complex physics into something that works well enough for most situations. The falling rules, for example, assume a man-sized object. (All of the rules, really, are written for a human scale.) Blind adherence to RAW would say that you can kill virtually anything short of an elephant by throwing it from a 900-foot cliff for ~70 damage. The DM acts as a kind of oversight, though. If you throw a house cat from that cliff, it will probably not die (though it will certainly be worse for wear); if you throw an elephant off that cliff, it probably will die, in spite of what the rules say about terminal velocity. The simplifying assumption of a man-sized falling body no longer applies.

In a similar case, you may wish to alter the rules for stabbing people who aren't wearing any armor, in the rare situation when that assumption doesn't hold.

That isn't to say that the actual, modified rules for throwing an elephant off of a cliff represent something unknowable to anyone within the game world, of course. Merely that, whatever those rules actually are need not conform to what is written in the book. There is nothing in the game rules, RAW or RAI, published or house-ruled, that is unknowable to science.

 

[Neonchameleon]

My fault for a bad example, then. I could have sworn that I'd seen him take a direct hit, but he was mostly fine because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

I'd call cutting your feet open on broken glass worse than what was ultimately a nasty bruise.

It's not that the game rules are the physical laws of the world, so much as the rules describe the physical laws of the world.

Except that as I have already quoted Gygax to demonstrate, Hit Points are an abstract that contain a mix of skill, luck, and divine protection. That's not a physical law, that's a fudge factor.

The major thing is that the game rules are all written with certain assumptions, which allow them to simplify complex physics into something that works well enough for most situations.

Yes. Yes they are. And one simplification made is that in combat people will be defending themselves. If they aren't defending themselves you use the Coup De Grace rules. This is why you can not have your experiment of hitting someone twenty times with a sword. A "hit" is being effective in six seconds worth of combat, not whacking someone once.

In a similar case, you may wish to alter the rules for stabbing people who aren't wearing any armor, in the rare situation when that assumption doesn't hold.

No. Or you'd need to change wizard hit points. But you do need to change the rules for people who aren't defending themselves. And that's a good reason why your hit point experiment fails.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Yes. Yes they are. And one simplification made is that in combat people will be defending themselves. If they aren't defending themselves you use the Coup De Grace rules. This is why you can not have your experiment of hitting someone twenty times with a sword. A "hit" is being effective in six seconds worth of combat, not whacking someone once.

And that's a perfectly fair call, (with which I just happen to disagree). You could say that hit points mean something different than I do, so there are different assumptions in place, and you would need to actually throw those people into real combat and measure their effectiveness against a real ogre (or whatever) in order to get them to the point where one is statistically likely to "fall" from the next "hit".

It doesn't mean that hit points are not scientific, or that they don't have an objective and knowable definition. It just means that we disagree on the specifics of what goes into that definition.

 

[Hussar]

This is somewhat tangential, but here it is.

I think one of the interesting facets of 'HP as luck / plot armour' is that given that model they ought to be situational. That is to say, a fighter standing amongst allies, alert and ready with weapons drawn might be on full HP (let's say he has 35) but that same man, totally uninjured, hanging by his fingertips over a pool of bubbling lava could be modelled as having 1 HP.

What that's telling us is that a rock or arrow or any mishap in fate sends him plunging to his death. On the other hand, if he is helped up or manages to escape his perilous situation - he has 35 HP again! Of course, if the man was, somehow fire-resistant, then his situation changes again, and so does his HP. A prone character / NPC could be modelled as having fewer HP than a standing one. This is a logical extension of the healing by inspiration idea - it's not just morale and will that can determine HP but physical situation.

Personally, I think this is an interesting design idea for a game of heroic fantasy. Not one I'd expect to see in 5e (or any future D&D edition for that matter) but the idea of HP loss as translating, not into wounds, but layers of additional and imminent danger in a scene is something I think I'd have fun with.

Isn't this how it's done though? But from the other end? The fall from the cliff and the bubbling lava simply does enough damage that it will kill the PC, regardless of HP. The prone PC is easier to hit, thus, easier to kill.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
It's not that the game rules are the physical laws of the world, so much as the rules describe the physical laws of the world. While there's a lot of overlap there - you can throw someone down a 10-foot cliff with reasonable certainty that they aren't going to die from it, but that they will sustain some degree of injury, and you could easily kill someone if you do it too many times in a row - there are also differences.

But this isn't actually true. The vast majority of people falling down ten feet in a D&D world are 1st level commoners with 2-4 HP. The average damage from a 10 foot fall is potentially lethal (as in knocked below zero and bleeding to death). Which is pretty ludicrous when you think about it.

Then again, this apparently is a world where average house cats are deadly threats.

The major thing is that the game rules are all written with certain assumptions, which allow them to simplify complex physics into something that works well enough for most situations. The falling rules, for example, assume a man-sized object. (All of the rules, really, are written for a human scale.) Blind adherence to RAW would say that you can kill virtually anything short of an elephant by throwing it from a 900-foot cliff for ~70 damage. The DM acts as a kind of oversight, though. If you throw a house cat from that cliff, it will probably not die (though it will certainly be worse for wear); if you throw an elephant off that cliff, it probably will die, in spite of what the rules say about terminal velocity. The simplifying assumption of a man-sized falling body no longer applies.

In a similar case, you may wish to alter the rules for stabbing people who aren't wearing any armor, in the rare situation when that assumption doesn't hold.

That isn't to say that the actual, modified rules for throwing an elephant off of a cliff represent something unknowable to anyone within the game world, of course. Merely that, whatever those rules actually are need not conform to what is written in the book. There is nothing in the game rules, RAW or RAI, published or house-ruled, that is unknowable to science.

Whereas to me, I have zero interest in playing in an OOTS strip world. Breaking the fourth wall like that is not something I'm interested in at all.

To me, the rules are a spotlight, of varying diameters with the PC's in the centre. Everything the PC's do in the game world is governed by the mechanics of the game (at least those things that the mechanics covers). Outside of that spotlight, the game world functions as a pretty normal world where house cats don't regularly claw people to death and falling off a ladder results in a sprain or rarely a break, and is not lethal most of the time.

The mechanics are there for one purpose and one purpose only - to allow the players to interact with the game world through the medium of their character. They are not meant for world building.

 

[Hussar]

And that's a perfectly fair call, (with which I just happen to disagree). You could say that hit points mean something different than I do, so there are different assumptions in place, and you would need to actually throw those people into real combat and measure their effectiveness against a real ogre (or whatever) in order to get them to the point where one is statistically likely to "fall" from the next "hit".

It doesn't mean that hit points are not scientific, or that they don't have an objective and knowable definition. It just means that we disagree on the specifics of what goes into that definition.

I'm still waiting for your example of the fire giant hit for 109 points of damage. It should be easy. Why isn't it? If HP are objective and knowable, then you should be able to rattle off an iron clad example of HP loss without any difficulty.

The problem is, HP are an abstraction. Which means they are not objective or knowable. They are taking something that IS objective and knowable, as simplifying it down to the point where it's useful in the game. But you are mistaking the abstraction for the reality.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

House cats don't really just attack for no reason, though, but I grant that it is a poor rule to state that "every successful attack does a minimum of 1 damage".

Damage from falling hasn't been able to kill anyone outright since 2E, though. Ever since the -10 rule become the default, the worst a short fall could take you is down to -5, if you happened to be so frail as to only have 1hp and took maximum damage from the fall. (Which seems reasonable, based on infomercials - old people are totally at risk of dying from a fall if they don't have someone to help them up.)

 

[Grydan]

House cats don't really just attack for no reason, though

I've clearly spent too much time in the company of the wrong sort of house cat, because my immediate reaction was "Yes they do, all the time."

 

[LostSoul]

A little late to the game...

That's what I said. It's not the same level of information. What the player does represents what the character does. It is on a much more abstract level.

<snip> My problem is with characters operating on information that they cannot possibly have, or with players acting in any capacity beyond what their characters can control. What do you want to call that? Is it just meta-gaming?

Represents what the character does - I like that. That phrasing makes things a little clearer to me.

I have trouble getting the idea of dissociated mechanics, though I could probably recognize which ones are which. I think it's because I don't approach the game in the way some do; I tend to see it as more of a game than some kind of... I don't know, simulation? where the rules are representative of the physics. I tend to focus on the decisions the players are making. I enjoy it when those decisions are based in the current game-world situation, but I don't find that dissociated mechanics are worse than something like, I don't know, WotC-D&D's skill mechanics. (Or WotC-D&D initiative, my personal pet peeve.)

Anyway, enough about me. I'd call making decisions beyond your PC's capability playing the game, assuming the system has mechanics that allow such actions; but then again I allow players to make decisions based on the information they have, not just the information that the PCs have. Meta-gaming? I guess to me that would be playing mind-games with the other players, especially the DM. e.g. "I want a vorpal sword so I'm going to harass the DM night and day until I get one."