D&D General D&D memes thread discussion…

[Wofano Wotanto]

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Learn to aim. Avatar only needed one bullet, you amateur.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Not to open that old can of worms but: hp are meat points and luck and skill at avoiding blows and just plain plot armor.

 

[CleverNickName]

Oh, memories.

I posted my opinions on this in another thread a while ago:

There was a discussion* not very long ago** about the nature of damage and hit points. Folks seem to be divided*** into three**** groups on the matter.​

​

The first group insists that hit points represent the amount of physical damage a body or object can take before falling unconscious or breaking apart. That fireball burns you a lot, or it burns you only a little, or it barely burns you at all, but the point is that fireballs burn you. They don't scare you or exhaust you or bum you out, because that's not how fire works. So now everyone in the world has super healing powers and can bounce back from nearly being burned to death in just 8 hours, and a fighter can just decide to not be burned anymore as a Bonus action. Uh huh. Sure, whatever keeps the game moving.​

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The second group insists that hit points are more abstract, that they represent an aggregation of physical, psychological, and physiological effects that can vary depending on the situation, and requires you to play fast and loose with what "reality" looks like. Did you take full damage? It probably burned you. Did you take only a little damage? Probably just stressed you out. Unless the cleric healed you with magic, which means you were actually were burned after all. Unless the cleric ran out of spells and needed to rest to get those spells back: when you wake up it turns out those burns are gone, so they must have just been exhaustion. UNLESS you slept in your armor; you wake up exhausted at full HP so it must have been, I dunno, depression or something? Schrödinger's Burns: they're both present and absent and you never know which until you heal them.​

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The third group mostly just shakes their heads, crosses off one number and writes down a new number, and tries not to think about it. Damage and hit points and ability scores and stuff are all just numbers that move around behind the scenes anyway, and all of them are nonsense from a narrative perspective. The City Guards don't brag about who has the highest Strength score, and wanted posters don't have Challenge Ratings of the various villains printed on them, after all. So they try to stay immersed in the story and not let annoying little things like math district them. Did that fireball burn you or not? Who cares, just cross off 22 points from a box and move on.​

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I'm usually in the third camp as a player, and the first camp when I'm a DM (I'm fickle). But really, all three are perfectly acceptable if you want my honest opinion. Is fire a chemical reaction or a philosophical quandary? Both hurt my head.​

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-----​

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*argument​

**every three months​

***willing to die on this hill​

****at least​

​

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Oh, memories.

The real question is whether fire in D&D is an element or a damage type, isn't it?

 

[schneeland]

The design of hit points in D&D is a clear indication that Gary Gygax was indeed a Great Old One - thus the constant sanity loss when you think about them too hard

 

[Vaalingrade]

HP are plot armor. You are alive as long as you have them or can get more soon.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

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Yep, there's all sorts of names you could use, like Jean, Juan, Johannes, etc. Even John Johnson would be more creative.

Major Major Major Major sees nothing wrong here.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, that's far enough back that the changes weren't really taking off yet. Speaking anecdotally, I'd say B&N has become noticeably less of an actual book store in the last ten years. Not entirely a bad thing unless you were looking to browse books, and they've certainly grown in some ways. The local one now stocks more graphic novels and manga than even the largest of the dedicated comic shops in the area, for ex. But the old days of being able to reliably find something new to read with every visit seem to have passed, and it's particularly difficult to start a new series on impulse due to their refusal to make any effort to stock the first book or two in what series they do carry. And the publishing industry is pushing hard toward everything being a series these days, at least in fiction - the number of standalone novels these days feels like it's half what it was 30-40 years ago.

Yes, you can still order books through B&N easily enough and their warehouse stock seems decent enough - but if you have to special order a book rather than grab it from the shelf, why do I want to do that instead of buying online, saving taxes, gas, time and frustration? The managers didn't have an answer for that question even twenty years ago, and they don't now.

I sincerely hope things are better elsewhere, but I'm afraid that may not be the case.

Perhaps the ones here in Los Angeles are different, but here we have several of them that are large, generally two story stores that are filled with books. They do have sections for graphic novels/manga and for board games, but books are by far the majority of the space taken up.

The fantasy/sci-fi section takes up an entire aisle or else two entire aisle halves, depending on the store. Some stores have separated sci-fi and fantasy into separate sections for ease of genre browsing.

 

[Maxperson]

D&D General - The D&D Memes Thread

www.enworld.org

I have literally put my D&D and other RPG stuff into my will to be given to my kids after I pass. At which point they'll be their problem

Did you see the updated Gygax will? Gary's will literally had his kids rolling percentile dice to determine choosing order for some of his stuff.

 

[Maxperson]

D&D General - The D&D Memes Thread

www.enworld.org

Happened to me last D&D session. It was a D4 - AND the host asks us to not wear shoes in the house - so the Red Alert was flagged for the entire table. We found it way across on the other side - but phew crisis (and dice caltrop foot sole puncture) averted

I did that once! Once! I woke up in the middle of the night and had to use the bathroom. Apparently I forgot to pick up some dice and stepped on a 1980s(not rounded or flat on top) d4. Pain is a good teacher and I have not forgotten a d4 on the floor since.