Disappointed in 4e

[Rel]

Many games make do with a sort of HP that only represents physical injury.

Agreed. But it looks to me like D&D isn't one of them.

I just checked through 5 editions of D&D (Basic, 1e, 3e, 3.5 and 4e. I don't own 2e.) and only Basic referenced Hit Points as purely physical damage. All other editions indicated that there are other components including some combination of "combat skill, luck, magical forces, the ability to turn a deadly blow into a lesser one, divine favor and resolve".

When I think of D&D combat, I think abstraction. We know that you don't have to envision a PC only swinging his weapon one time in a 6 second round. We know that you don't have to envision a PC taking 6 direct hits from a greatsword before falling. If I'm abstracting anyway, I don't have a problem folding confidence and morale into what Hit Points are supposed to represent.

 

[mmadsen]

Not entirely clear what you mean here, but;
Splitting AC in to 'hard to hit' and 'withstanding hits' is pretty much what WHFRP does, There is no AC as such but each character has a percentile chance to hit and then if successful toughness + armour is subtracted from damage.

On the spend hit points to evade damage, well is that not what we are currently doing?

What I was recommending was this:

Split Armor Class into one value for avoiding hits (Defense) and one for withstanding hits (Toughness). When you attack, you roll a d20, plus any accuracy bonuses, against your opponent's Defense to hit, like Touch AC in 3E. If you hit, you roll another d20, plus any damage bonuses, against your opponent's Toughness, which includes any armor bonuses, to score a telling blow, which disables him, a bit like the Damage Save in True20.

But important heroes and villains have Hit Points, which they can use to modify those rolls, after the fact. A giant swings at you and hits by one? Spend one hit point to dodge it! Or take the hit and let him roll the d20 plus his massive damage bonus against your Toughness. Probably better to use your Hit Points to avoid the hit entirely.

Hit Points still play a crucial role, and very little has changed mechanically, but they're not physical toughness. You have an actual Toughness score for that. Hit Points become just the intangible part -- luck, magic, divine favor, etc. -- not a mix of tangible and intangible.

 

[Arnwyn]

I see 4E stepping back to the days of 1E when the DM was in control of the game. In 3E, as a DM, I felt less in control of the game from a there is a rule for everything syndrome. I feel like 4E encourages the DM to "take back the game".

Why must we argue about this stupid term "RAW"

Because there is some number of people who don't like to play "Mother May I?". And that's legitimate for those people. (Not making any edition distinction here, so take a hike, evangelists.)

 

[mmadsen]

Yes, it often bothers me in not just D&D, but many games in general, that characters/units do not become weakened and less dangerous as they become wounded.

The question is, to what degree is a D&D character getting meaningfully wounded as he loses hit points? Hit points aren't consistent, so we can't really say.

Let me repeat that: hit points aren't consistent.

Gygax himself admits that it's preposterous to assume that a high-level fighter is, say, nine times as resilient as a lower-level fighter. He's only negligibly tougher; those extra hit points come from skill, luck, divine favor, magic, etc.

So almost 90 percent of his hit points are intangible, and just over 10 percent are tangible toughness.

When he gets hit by a dozen goblin arrows, does he really have a dozen arrows sticking out of him? If he's wearing armor, that's not unimaginable, but if he's not?

The only thing we really know is that bad things happen, in a hurry, when he loses all his hit points.

But wait; hit points aren't consistent. He requires more healing to recover from those dozen grazes than his squire requires to recover from a life-threatening (4-hp) wound.

We can go back and forth all day, but no explanation stands up to much scrutiny. The real point is that hit points work out mathematically in play -- there are few gotchas! where someone turns out to be much tougher or more fragile than they looked -- and they're simple.

Moving forward, should something that's 90 percent intangible be so closely tied to physical wounds? Or should we simply accept that they're primarily intangible? And maybe even introduce another mechanic for physical wounds?

 

[Mallus]

Because there is some number of people who don't like to play "Mother May I?".

As an aside, I've always wondered why those people played traditional RPGs (like D&D). At their core, these games are a series of negotiations being the players and DM/GM, a series of "Mother May I's" in which the players states desired actions and the DM/GM describes the results. Sometimes these negotiations are mediated --to varying degrees-- by explicit, stated rules. Other times they aren't.

I think it's probably more accurate to say that people don't like it when Mother says 'no' (because if you're not playing 'Mother May I?', you're playing something more akin to a wargame/boardgame than an RPG).

</aside>

 

[mmadsen]

The main component of hp has always been and always should be physical damage.

The main component of Hit Points has most certainly not always been physical damage. In fact, for any character past first-level, physical damage has always been a small fraction of Hit Points.

Do you have a reason why the main component of Hit Points should be physical damage?

4E can't really decide what hp are.

Agreed.

 

[mmadsen]

A realistic injury system would require more than a little more simple math. If competing RPG systems offer any guide, such a system would involve a lot of charts.

A realistic system would not require any more math or charts than the current system. A detailed system would.

Doing more bookkeeping for an equally unrealistic injury modeling system doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Well said.

You won't get a real physical comparison to HP unless you only have about 5-10 HP to take into account what really kills people.

Hit points don't model real-life injuries well at all, because one good blow can kill anyone, but people also survive dozens of stab wounds or gun shots. Wounds don't accumulate, and people don't ablate. Two flesh wounds don't add up to a decapitation.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I was responding to a claim that this is revisionist history: "Hit points in 4e are the same as hit points in every other edition of D&D; a measure of a character's ability to keep fighting. When a character's hit point value is greater than zero, they can."

If you can show me a passage that specifies this is incorrect, I'd like to see it.

It is revisionist history to claim that hit points do not now, and have not always, meant, at least in part, "the number of pink elephants owned by the character". This is true in 1e, 2e, 3e, and 4e.

If you can show me a passage that specifies this is incorrect, I'd like to see it.


RC

 

[Mallus]

A realistic system would not require any more math or charts than the current system. A detailed system would.

Right (don't mind me, I was just taking a shot a Rolemaster...).

Hit points don't model real-life injuries well at all, because one good blow can kill anyone, but people also survive dozens of stab wounds or gun shots. Wounds don't accumulate, and people don't ablate. Two flesh wounds don't add up to a decapitation.

In an odd way, the Damage Save mechanic in M&M --which is meant to model 4-color superheroes-- is more realistic than the ablative HP mechanic found in D&D. Without Impervious defenses, that almost any PC can dropped with a single, lucky shot while a lucky PC can shrug off damage from impressively lethal sources.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Once more, Gygaxian hit points -- the hit points of all previous editions -- allow a hit to always represent damage. Hit point loss is always damage. However, the amount of damage 1 hit point represents is not on an absolute scale, but corresponds instead to the hit point total of the being hit. Thus, 8 hp of damage might be a 1st level character run through with a sword, but is only a nick to a 10th level character.

The 10th level character might have intangible qualities that allow him to take less physical damage in the game world than the 1st level character, but those 10 goblin arrows have all been in contact with him, and they have all done him some amount of physical damage. If they had not, he wouldn't have to make 10 saving throws vs. the poison that was on those arrows.

This is a simple, elegant system that has served the game well until we were given Schroedinger's Wounding in 4e.

RC