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

[pemerton]

Nothing like kicking off the weekend with a HP fight!

At your service!

 

[pemerton]

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

Notations on a character sheet.

 

[Tony Vargas]

(OK, since you brought it up in another thread, I guess you deserve more than a drive-by.)

Several years ago now Vincent Baker wrote this description of RPG resolution systems.

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?

Meh. The thing is that the die is on the table, and the fight is in the cloud.

Imagine the fight how you like.

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.

A hit for some damage means the character that hit is closer to winning the fight. That could (in 5e, if it reduces the target below half hps, according to the side bar, for instance) mean that moment in the cinematic duel when one character takes a little cut to his arm or it could just mean that one of the characters is looking 'pressed' and worried for the moment.
But /something/ happened in the cloud, maybe not a wound or even a touche, but not nothing.

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.

Six seconds is a long, long time to spend swinging a weapon, once.

In contrast, tracking ammunition in AD&D made the 1-minute round nonsensical, because archers could fire a lot more than 2 arrows per minute, while, in 5e, the 6-second round makes Extra Attacks with a crossbow nonsensical.

Something's always going to be a little whacked.

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 guess the flip side of that question is how does avoid being killed/disabled/horribly-disfigured when that happens. Luck, perhaps? Superhuman effort in diving out of the way in a split second? Plot Armor? ;P

 

[pemerton]

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.

I agree with this. It's a more elaborate explanation to [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] as to why hp are cubes.

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

Maybe? Play can become more cautious in a board game, too - or in poker for that matter - if the stack of chips gets low. It produces changes in the fiction as a result - but is it, itself, a leftward arrow?

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.

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

In discussing his dissatisfaction with the design of In a Wicked Age, Baker says:

There are a couple of places in the game where there are supposed to be rightward-pointing arrows, but they're functionally optional. I assert them, but then the game's architecture doesn't make them real. So it takes an act of unrewarded, unrequired discipline to use them. I suspect that the people who have the most fun with the Wicked Age have that discipline as a practice or a habit, having learned it from other games.​

In the case of being hit, it seems that maybe there are similarly optional leftward pointing arrows?

EDIT:

The thing is that the die is on the table, and the fight is in the cloud.

Imagine the fight how you like.

A hit for some damage means the character that hit is closer to winning the fight. That could (in 5e, if it reduces the target below half hps, according to the side bar) mean that moment in the cinematic duel when one character takes a little cut to his arm or it could just mean that one of the characters is looking 'pressed' and worried for the moment.

But /something/ happened in the cloud, maybe not a wound or even a touche, but not nothing.

This also looks like optional leftward pointing arrows.

 

[pemerton]

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.

When I used to GM RM, one player would keep a track of the most penalties his PC had ever been under. I think at one time he was at -275 from some combination of injuries and still rolling attacks with his bow, hoping for double or triple open-ended!

 

[Tony Vargas]

This also looks like optional leftward pointing arrows.

IDK about 'optional.' The two loopbacks in the illo look suspicious, to me.

A Cloud loopback would be a sort of failure of system scope, you do something in the fiction, the game abstains from modeling it in any way, you might as well not be using the game, at all. The less important the thing in question is, the less it matters, I suppose, and no game can cover everything.
A cube loopback would be a failure of imagination, something happened, but you abstained from visualizing it. Again, the less important the thing is, the less it matters if you bother or not, but human imagination prettymuch /can/ cover everything.
Well, everything imaginable, he said, tautologically. ;P

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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.

Actually, I'll take it further. This example is Vincent Baker explaining a traditional RPG, such as AD&D circa 1990, which he then goes on to contrast with less-traditional games.

The entire point of the system being described here is that you start with narrative cloud-stuff, and the game mechanics convert that into quantifiable cube-stuff for the purposes of determining resolution, which is then translated back into cloud-stuff so we can continue on with the narrative. It's exactly like doing a word problem in math class, or running a simulation in your CAD program of choice, except that the math is simple enough for us to calculate by hand and we're actually invested in the outcome.

It's important that we start with a right arrow between the cloud and the cube, and close the loop with a left arrow between the cube and the cloud. If we only had right arrows, then we wouldn't care about the outcome of any of the mechanics because it wouldn't impact the narrative at all. If we only had left arrows, then nothing we did in the narrative would really matter since it doesn't contribute toward determining the outcome in any way. You need both of them if you're going to have a significant game, of the type which this model represents.

 

[pemerton]

A Cloud loopback would be a sort of failure of system scope, you do something in the fiction, the game abstains from modeling it in any way, you might as well not be using the game, at all.

Remember when The Alexandrian said that 4e is "skirmish linked by free-form improv"? The free-form improv is cloud-to-cloud.

Everytime you see someone post about "not rolling dice all session", that was probably cloud-to-cloud too. Whether you like a lot of this or only a bit of this seems to be a major point of difference among RPGers (and feeds into "roll vs role" debates).

A cube loopback would be a failure of imagination, something happened, but you abstained from visualizing it.

Baker's threshold is not "you abstained" but "the game made it possible to abstain".

An example that illustrates this - think of debates about "old school" vs "Perception DCs" for finding stuff in rooms (and put aside the ranty tone of these discussions, and the fact that Gygax in his DMG says either approach is reasonable). In an "old school" game, where to open the secret door you have to declare you're moving the sconce, you can't play the game without going from cloud to cube.

(This is part of why the indie people are all over the OSR.)

 

[Jester David]

I respect Gygax for his contributions to gaming, but let's not pretend his rant in the DMG is anything more than it is: a game designer defending their game design from detractors and critics. It's no different that Keven Siembieda defending SDC/HP in every Palladium rule book published since the late '80s.
Hit points are funky. But they work. But they work best when you don't think about them or look too hard at the details.

Gygax wrote his rant to end the discussion on hp back in 1979. If it didn't end then, I don't foresee it ending now...

 

[Tony Vargas]

Remember when The Alexandrian said ...

No. Just no.

Everytime you see someone post about "not rolling dice all session", that was probably cloud-to-cloud too. Whether you like a lot of this or only a bit of this seems to be a major point of difference among RPGers (and feeds into "roll vs role" debates).

Sure. Freestyle RP would be another example, the logical conclusion of enjoying play beyond the scope of a system - don't use a system at all.

Baker's threshold is not "you abstained" but "the game made it possible to abstain".

It's usually possible, unless the game resorts to using the player as resolution system...

An example that illustrates this - think of debates about "old school" vs "Perception DCs" for finding stuff in rooms (and put aside the ranty tone of these discussions, and the fact that Gygax in his DMG says either approach is reasonable). In an "old school" game, where to open the secret door you have to declare you're moving the sconce.

That's an example of player-as-resolution system, yes. Though it seems awfully close to cloud-to-cloud (lack of system scope), too. I mean, the sconce and the opening of the secret door aren't happening on the table in any sense, right?