D&D 5E Clouds, cubes, and "hitting"

[pemerton]

Several years ago now Vincent Baker wrote this description of RPG resolution systems. He was mainly wanting to work out what (in his view) had gone wrong with his design of the game In a Wicked Age. But the method of analysis can be applied to other RPGs too. (Eg it was brought into a discussion of 4e five-and-a-half years ago).

Here's the explanation for the picture, and then the picture itself:

The cloud means the game's fictional stuff; the cubes mean its real-world stuff. If you can point to it on the table, pick it up and hand it to someone, erase it from a character sheet, it goes in the cubes. If you can't, if it exists only in your imagination and conversation, it goes in the cloud.

​

I'm interested in step 4: if the to hit roll succeeds, then - in the fiction - the attacking character hit the defending character. Is that right for D&D?

In the original DMG (p 61), Gygax says that

It is not in the best interests of an adventure game . . . to delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte. The location of a hit or wound, the sort of damage done, sprains, breaks, and dislocations are not the stuff of heroic fantasy. The reasons for this are manifold.

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them. . . .

Envision, if you will, a fencing, boxing, or karate match. During the course of one minute of such competition there are numerous attacks which are unsuccessful, feints, maneuvering, and so forth. During a one minute melee round many attacks are made, but some are mere feints, while some are blocked or parried. One, or possibly several, have the chance to actually score damage. For such chances, the dice are rolled, and if the"to hit" number is equalled or exceeded, the attack was successful, but otherwise it too was avoided, blocked, parried, or whatever. Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the lost handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .

Because of the relatively long period of time represented by the round, dexterity (dexterity, agility, speed, quickness) is represented by a more favorable armor class rating rather than as a factor in which opponent strikes the first blow. . . . The system of AD&D combat maximizes the sense of hand-to-hand combat and the life-and-death character of melee without undue complication.​

This suggests that, until the last few hp are worn away, a successful hit is really "cube-to-cube", like marking down reduced hp on a character sheet (step 5 in the diagram) - a mechanical thing, but not necessarily generating any particular "cloud" - any particular thing in the fiction.

In 4e, this sense that there is no particular connection between a successful hit and some definite thing in the fiction ("Agh! I'm hit!") is reinforced by the presence of inspirational/martial healing. In 5e, it is not quite so strongly reinforced as in 4e, but there is the fighter's Second Wind, the rather rapid healing default, and the discussion of hp loss (Basic PDF, sidebar on p 75): "When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum, you typically show no signs of injury."

So how is the resolution of D&D combat linked to the fiction of the game? Or is it all just cube-to-cube - no different from boardgaming, really - until the last blow is struck and the hp reach zero and now we know what is happening in the fiction?

4e answered this by layering lots of conditions onto its attacks - so the hp loss is boxes to boxes, but the forced movement or the infliction of some condition anchors each episode of resolution to the fiction in some fashion.

What about 5e?

(Hit points as meat is one answer, but a bit at odds with the p 75 sidebar. I guess I'm more interested in other answers.)

 

[Krachek]

Nothing changed in 5 ed.
The questions: what a hit mean? what are the meaning of hit points? Are dead end.
Rules are there to help your mind immerse in a fantasy world. But if your mind start looking at the rules instead, it wont help.

 

[I'm A Banana]

A hit in 5e is more explicitly "cube-to-cloud" than in 4e. This makes sense: "the goblin hits you" or "the goblin misses you" is a description of something happening in the world. AC functions because a hit to your armor isn't a hit to you - your armor has absorbed the blow. But, a hit to you is some kind of damage. In 5e's hit-point-narration sidebar, it acknowledges that 1/2 hp and 0 hp are considered special thresholds -above 1/2 hp you show "no signs of injury" (though you were clearly "hit"). Below 1/2 hp you show cosmetic damage - cuts, bruises. When you reach 0 hp, some more critical wound is dealt.

As an improvisational DM, it's important for me to get direction from the mechanics, so I'm a big fan of that slight psychological adjustment from 4e, which better reflects how I've always narrated D&D fights.

 

[TwoSix]

Nothing like kicking off the weekend with a HP fight!

 

[guachi]

It's linked to the fiction in whatever manner the players and DM want in a manner that makes some sense to them and is hopefully fun.

if I wanted to I could have zombies start losing limbs as the players damage them. It was fun narrating the zombies getting whacked by the players and keep coming. And then when they died and got back up, because the zombie made its save, it was like the limbless black knight "I'll bite your legs off!!!"

The players enjoyed it with a ridiculous running (well, walking...) battle versus that one zombie that just... wouldn't... die and was hit with ray of frost so its move speed was 10 feet (20 with dash!). "I hit the zombie with ray of frost and casually stroll away from it as it comes toward me)

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

I think an important distinction between 5e and AD&D is the difference in the length of a round. Because 1 round went from 1 minute to 6 seconds a single attack roll is no longer an abstraction of a series of blows and feints. Rather, one attack roll can translate to a single attempted blow. This renders the final paragraph that you quoted from Gygax moot when talking about 5e. The rest of the quoted passage still carries over to some extent. Hit points can represent luck and fatigue but there are some cases where it gets weird. How does one only lose fatigue or luck when a fireball explodes 5 feet from their face?

I think things get a little easier if you think of beings in D&D as superhumans that can take more physical punishment than people in reality. But then again I got into gaming through video games so the imagery of someone having a sword go through them and then continuing on as normal because they still have hp is something I'm just used to.

In conclusion, I treat step 4 as it is presented. The characters in fiction are getting hit by all kinds of attacks, but they continue on.

 

[Bawylie]

It doesn't suggest a cube to cube relationship at all.

Because from the beginning, it is a mistake to separate the cloud from the cube. This isn't to debate the validity of the analogy - this is to suggest the codependency between in-game circumstances, rules, and physical world tools.

It's no good to look at step 4 in a vacuum. "If I roll a 10+, I hit and do damage" and conclude that there was no meaningful in-game change. This would ignore the circumstances that lead up to the decision to attack, the reaction or shifting priority of the thing that was attacked, and the employment of the rules to facilitate the play of the game.

Truly, you may attack and kill something without ever rolling dice, but you can never just roll dice without declaring any activity, and have any in-game effect.

It is worthwhile to examine the relationship between the bits and bobs you use to play with the play of the game itself, but much less useful with regards to specific moves during play. We lose the forest for the trees doing that.


-Brad

 

[Rod Staffwand]

Yes, hit points are intentionally cloudy--except when they're intentionally cubey. They're awesome that way.

I don't understand why gamers need mechanical effects to tell them what a 'hit' means. One of the advantages of hit points is that a hit can mean whatever is convenient at the time. They are literally doing all they can to get out of the way and let you tell whatever story you want*.

*As long as that story is heroic fantasy and not some 'gritty' deathcrawl with the PCs stumbling around like Leo DiCaprio in the Revenant after one random encounter. I think that's probable more of a Rolemaster thing.

I like to think of hit points as your stack of chips in poker. The larger your stack the more you can intimidate and bludgeon opponents. You have a buffer against defeat and can trade blows with weaker opponents. If you have 100hp and your opponent 20hp and you're both dealing 10hp per round, you're in a far stronger position. The reverse is also true. Being 1 hit away from defeat is a huge psychological difference than being 2+ hits away. The risk of every action is higher so that a player might become more cautious or even more desperate in their approach. In some cases this can mirror the effects of injury. This is certainly a cloud effect and that allows it to vary from player to player, PC to PC and situation to situation in wonderful fashion.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The cloud means the game's fictional stuff; the cubes mean its real-world stuff. If you can point to it on the table, pick it up and hand it to someone, erase it from a character sheet, it goes in the cubes. If you can't, if it exists only in your imagination and conversation, it goes in the cloud.

This suggests that, until the last few hp are worn away, a successful hit is really "cube-to-cube", like marking down reduced hp on a character sheet (step 5 in the diagram) - a mechanical thing, but not necessarily generating any particular "cloud" - any particular thing in the fiction.

I'm not sure that I agree with your interpretation of the source material. Vincent Baker isn't putting forth the idea that there is or is-not a one-to-one correspondence between certain game mechanics and any given thing within the fiction (at least, not in this example). It looks like he's accepting as a given that certain game mechanics have inherent meaning within the narrative (e.g. if you mark a dagger on your character sheet, then that necessarily means your character has a dagger within the narrative; it is a cube by virtue of your ability to erase it from the sheet). The cloud is for stuff that is only narrative, that has no mechanical end to be manipulated. The cube is for stuff which, while it exists within the narrative, also has mechanical parts with which we can interact.

He's saying that the cubes are like a subset within the cloud, where math can take place. The 2d6 damage that we roll is the cube aspect of the cloud which is a greatsword. When you take 2d6 damage, your character has still changed within the narrative as a result of taking that damage, but the damage is a cube because it's quantifiable. It's also kind of a murky example, because if you consider step 3, having the high ground would be a cube-to-cube interaction if you were playing a game that used a grid with elevation markers.

Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the lost handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .

Even Gygax doesn't go so far as to posit that a hit (by the dice) is a miss (within the narrative). He's just noting that, as long as you're talking about characters or certain monsters, the hit isn't a substantially physical one unless you're down to the last handful of HP. The sword definitely hit you, but for any one of myriad reason, you weren't impaled by it; you survived the impact with merely a nick or scratch.

 

[Tony Vargas]

HPs are cube-to-cube? I don't see any HPs on the table....