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

[pemerton]

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!

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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.

Interesting idea.

In 4e, the closest I have got to this for NPCs is "minionisation" based on context/successful player skill roll. And also hit point loss from Intimidate checks.

For PCs I haven't really explored it very much. I don't think the game would support "minionising" a PC - instead you would vary the damage, eg by allowing a successful check from a friend/ally to reduce the damage that would otherwise be threatened by the bubbling lava.

 

[Hussar]

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.)

You're missing the point though. Normal commoner 1 only has 2 hp. 99% of the humans in your game world have 2 HP.

An average 10 foot fall will be lethal the majority of the time without outside assistance to stabilize the guy who is bleeding to death.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

An average 10 foot fall will be lethal the majority of the time without outside assistance to stabilize the guy who is bleeding to death.

Average hit points for a commoner are one of those things which varies between editions. In ye olde D&D, they had a meager handful of hit points (1d4), while in 4E they generally had exactly 1, and in 3E they had between 1 and 200. Throwing out the outliers, I would put the average commoner at something much closer to 4 hit points than 2, which means 1d6 falling damage has around a 50% chance to knock someone out, at which point they might die depending on that edition's rules for stabilization.

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.

That's really the point of contention right now, isn't it? Because I have no desire to break the fourth wall either. We just disagree about where the wall is placed.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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.

I gave an example, with the massive bruising and cracked ribs, identical to what a level 1 character would have taken from max damage on a battleaxe (11 damage against 10 hit points). Was that in a different thread? Sorry, I'm still kind of new around this forum, so I might have put it in the wrong place.

But abstraction does most certainly not equate to unknowable. Abstraction means that what we see is directly related to what's going on within the game, but we lose some of the information in the translation. It's like asking what color the sky is, compared to actually seeing it; there are many colors that the sky can actually be, and many of those answers would be abstracted out to blue (or red!), but the sky is clearly visible to anyone in-game even though we don't have enough information (at our abstract level) to perfectly recreate it.

When our fighter gets hit really hard, we may only know in the abstract that it's ~110% of how much she can take and remain conscious, but the character can be perfectly aware of the true extent of that injury (cracked ribs, etc). Usually, the DM is at liberty to fill in some of the details that were lost due to abstraction.

 

[Hussar]

Cracked ribs and bruising is hardly six seconds from death. Which is what our giant did to our fighter.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

People can die from a lot of things. I'm not prepared to say that massive blunt trauma can't lead to death in that sort of situation. I mean, you could have two identical people with identical wounds, and it could be fatal to one person but not the other.

I don't know that the exact mechanism by which one person remains alive when another would die is really all that well-understood. It's not a perfect model, but nothing is.

What's your alternative for hit point damage, as caused by a giant's great axe, potentially causing instant death (if you fail your save against massive damage), which both leaves you potentially ~six seconds from death and​ takes ~six days to heal if you survive it.

 

[pemerton]

Average hit points for a commoner are one of those things which varies between editions. In ye olde D&D, they had a meager handful of hit points (1d4), while in 4E they generally had exactly 1

I have just written up notes for running G2 (Glacial Caverns of the Frost Giant Jarl) for a 26th level 4e party. Many of the frost giants will be minions with 1 hp. That doesn't mean that they fall unconscious if they suffer a 10' fall while replacing the torches in their sconces!

Being a minion is a status for action resolution purposes; it is not a statement about, nor a model of, the character's physical resilience as she goes about his/her life in the gameworld.

In my game, from time-to-time the players have made skill checks in non-combat situations to "minionise" NPCs - and thereby enable them to be dropped in one blow without a chance to fight back, raise the alarm etc. This change in mechanical status does not mean that the NPC is undergoing any physical transformation in the gameworld. It's analogous to giving the player a "fortune" token permitting a one-shot kill.

 

[pemerton]

What's your alternative for hit point damage, as caused by a giant's great axe, potentially causing instant death (if you fail your save against massive damage), which both leaves you potentially ~six seconds from death and​ takes ~six days to heal if you survive it.

Of course [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] can speak for himself. In my own case, the alternative is fortune-in-the-middle: you roll the dice before you fully narrate the situation, and you only complete the narration once all the relevant action resolution has been resolved.

Robin Laws gives good advice on the technique in the original HeroWars rulebook (pp 150-151): "avoid describing the results of sucessful blows with the accuracy of a trauma-unit physician until the final consequences are determined". And he gives some examples, such as instead of "she grabs the spear and twists, dislocating your shoulder" going instead with "she grabs the spear and twists - the pain is incredible; it feels like she's dislocating your shoulder".

In 4e, for instance, you don't know whether or not a blow that knocks someone unconscious is fatal until that 3rd failed death save. So up until that point, you narrate in the experiential but non-definitive way (emphasising the shock/pain rather than the physical injury itself) that Laws describes.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Being a minion is a status for action resolution purposes; it is not a statement about, nor a model of, the character's physical resilience as she goes about his/her life in the gameworld.

Yes. Among the editions, 4E was unique in that it didn't attempt to model any sort of objective reality.

It's why everyone complaining about a level 1 fighter killing a level 23 minion has it wrong - because that level 23 minion would be modeled as a level 4 solo monster if it came up against a level 1 party.

 

[pemerton]

Yes. Among the editions, 4E was unique in that it didn't attempt to model any sort of objective reality.

That works as long as the emphasis is on the word "model". Of course the ingame reality is as objective as any such thing can be. But the mechanics aren't generally a model of it (though some are: eg a PC's theme, paragon path and epic destiny all tell us something about the ingame reality; so does a PC's equipment inventory or position on a battlemap).

I'm with some other posters, however, in taking the view that 4e is not as unique in this respect as you believe. If you look at Gygax's descriptions of hit points and of saving throws in his DMG, I think they're both closer to the 4e style than the 3E style. And the AD&D action economy is as abstract as the 4e one also, in my view - in some ways probably moreso, because of the very long (1 minute) rounds.

Even if you look at Lolth's -10 AC, what does this tell us about the gameworld, other than that she has so much Demon Queen mojo that only high level character's have any real chance of hurting her?

(For that matter, in my view some features of 3E, such as its natural armour bonuses, are in the same category. What does a +30 natural armour bonus - a bonus far larger than the most magical of plate armour can grant - actually model in the gameworld. It's just a label given to a number that has been worked out using the same metagame rationale as underpins 4e's monster buildig rules.)