I provided game rules and reasoning from the book.
This is very odd.
It's no real surprise that the rulebooks will contain explanations why, in the fiction, magical items lose plusses on other planes. As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out, the explanation is relatively thin (it doesn't seem to deal very well with items that don't have pluses) but it's there.
But the point that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is addressing is this:
why write that fiction? Why write fiction that MUs can't use swords? And that fighters can't use spells? (There is another well-known fantasy RPG, Runequest, where wizards can use swords and fighters can use spells, while still maintaining a tolerable distinction between characters who are primarily sorcerers and characters who are primarily warriors.)
The fiction didn't write it itself. And it wasn't written just because someone thought it made for great literature! The reason for making travel to the planes debilitating to PCs' magic weapons and armour is obviously to maintain the mechanical challenge of higher-level play. Likewise the mass-nerfing of spells.
Other examples abound: in the D-series, for instance, teleport spells don't work. There is an in-fiction justification (magnetic fields) but that fiction has been written in order to block the option of teleporting out of the underdark to rest and recuperate between forays. Drow are loaded with magic armour and weapons (which makes them tougher against high level PCs than most monsters, both in the to hit and the AC department), but those items decay under conditions that most PC parties aren't going to be able to avoid once they finish the module. Again, the fiction is given but the metagame rationale is transparent.
This is part of the difference between being a game designer and being a novelist.
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D&D is one of the simplest process simulations out there, which is one of the reasons why so many people enjoy it. It is strictly a process simulation, though; it doesn't care about abstract goals, in the way that Apocalypse World (for example) does. Every action in the game actually does correspond to a single process within the game world.
If you undergo the mechanical operations of "The orc attacks with its sword, it hits, and you take damage"; then the in-game reality which corresponds to those mechanics is just "The orc attacks with its sword, it hits, and you take damage".
<snip>
there is no doubt anywhere that the orc actually hit you with its sword and that it caused damage.
But
damage there doesn't mean anything other than
the orc gets closer to its goal of killing you. We don't even know if you're bleeding or not! (As Gygax said, on p 61 of his DMG, when hp are lost but the character is still standing the issue of hit location is not germane, because no significant injury has been suffered.)
No process has been simulated. An intent has been declared (
the orc wants to kill the PC), a task has been declared (
the orc is going to use his/her sword to do the killin') and after the die roll is successful we know that the orc came closer to realising its intent (
knock of a damage dice worth of hp on the PC's sheet). That's indistinguishable from a 4e skill challenge or a HeroWars/Quest extended contest.
Except that a Vampire hitting one character with a wooden stake for 8 hp damage is a fatal wound while another character hit by the same attack is not even scratched.
But this is like complaining that sometimes a roll of 10 hits and sometimes it doesn't! To know whether or not a roll of 10 hits, you have to look up the to hit bonus and comare it to the AC.
To know whether 8 hp of damage is fatal or not, you need to look at the hit points remaining.
The number of hp of damage dealt,
on its own, tells you nothing about what is happening in the fiction. That's why D&D is not simulationist. (Contrast, say RQ or RM, where 8 hp of damage does have a constant in-fiction meaning.)
Gygax doesn't talk about damage. He talks about Hit Points - your capacity to withstand damage.
What he said is that your starting amount of HP (and any bonus HP gained from having a high Con score) mostly reflected your physical health, and that most of the HP gained by a high-level character represent increased skill and luck and divine favor and magical wards and so on.
That doesn't mean you can take 90 damage without it making a leaving a mark on you. That interpretation would be ridiculous, since it would require meta-gaming to address.
First,
damage is not (in general) something that is suffered by living things. Damage is something that is suffered by houses, boxes, machines etc. Animals suffer injuries. And tiredness. And other conditions which - even if we give them "folk" rather than technical/medical labels - reflect that animals are in dynamic equilibrium rather than static equilibrium like a rock or a kitchen table.
Second, here are the relevant Gygaxian passages (DMG, pp 61 and 81):
[H]it 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 domage caused are not germane to them. . . .
Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the last handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .
[D]amage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch.
Hit location is not germane, because at most there is perhaps a nick or a scratch. And there is no proportionality between "damage sustained" (ie injury) and the number of hp marked off. That is, losing 8 of your 80 hp doesn't mean that you are "10% damaged" (whatever exactly that would mean, for a person rather than a rock); and the loss of 8 hp that kills you, or that leaves you on 1 hp and hence vulnerable to any potentially killing blow, is quite different (in the fiction) to the loss of the first 8 of your 80 hp.
So yes, it's metagaming that the player of the cleric knows that the same spell can heal the 10th level fighter who has taken one "hit" from a dagger, and the 1st level MU who was reduced to 1 hp. That was a feature of AD&D. (Which 4e mostly eliminates, by adopting surge-based proportional healing.)
There is no such thing as "luck damage" or "skill damage" to eat away your "luck points" or "skill points". There is just "damage", which is physical damage. There are not two distinct sets of Hit Points, where some of them are physical and you can see them, and some are invisible and you can't see them.
It's true that D&D doesn't have two pools. (Though many variant rules which create two pools exist - the first version I know of is from the very early 80s, published in White Dwarf by Roger Musson; it uses "hp" as the luck/fatigue pool, and CON as the physical/wound pool.)
But clearly the game contemplates hp loss equating to what you call "luck damage" or "skill damage": I just quoted Gygax to that effect ("The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch").
If you're saying that each HP can have both a physical and non-physical portion, then you're making a lot more sense than if you suggest that some HP are entirely physical and others are entirely non-physical.
Hit points, at least as described by Gygax, are neither physical nor non-physical. They're not a measure of
any ingame quantity, because - as Gygax makes clear - they're not part of a process simulation (the "not proportional" comment is enough to show that; the "hit location is not germane" reinforces the point).
Hit points are a measure of a game-state - how close is the character to suffering a fatal blow, to losing the conflict? What, in the fiction, has brought that about - fatigue, bad luck, resignation - is left as an exercise for the game participants. How any event of hit point loss is to be narrated - a scratch, a narrow escape that leaves the character wrong-footed, a jarring parry, etc - is likewise left as an exercise for the game participants.
That's not to say that one mightn't treat hp otherwise (eg as meat, with all hp loss being proportional to the total hp in physical consequence, as you are suggesting). But the game provides no support for this - eg it won't tell you what the injury is, what part of the body it happens to etc. Which is to say the game won't simulate any process for you.
Yeah, hit points in DnD really don't make too much sense when you really start thinking about them
<sip>
I'm fairly certain that other games have had more "realistic" hit point systems where the PCs size and constitution created a hit point score that didn't really change unless one of the two base characteristics did. Others had hit points as essentially toughness which was layered on top of wounds which didn't change.
RM is like your second example; RQ is like your first.
But I don't agree that hp in D&D don't make sense. I think they make perfect sense - as long as you recognise what they are (a metagame device for tracking how close the character is to being worn down and defeated). In AD&D the lack of proportional healing does somewhat undermine this, which is why I regard 4e as a superior implementation of Gygax's hp model (because it eliminates the problem that the more your hp loss is due to loss of luck, the more likely you are to need a "cure critical wounds" spell).
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If you move 30' feet in six seconds, and then cast a spell 25' feet away, then that's what actually happened - you moved at an average rate of five feet per second, for six seconds, and then finished casting a spell which takes effect more-or-less instantaneously. It may not be as detailed as you could get with GURPS, because it sacrifices a little of its granularity in favor of playability, but it's not abstract by any stretch.
And what about all the other participants in the fight? Were they frozen in time? And then, when they take their turns, what about my PC who acted before them?
In this respect 3E and later are actually
less simulationist than AD&D and other earlier editions, which tended to use far more continuous resolution with their "side initiative" rules.
Games like RQ, RM and other simulationist systems go to great efforts to achieve something close to simultaneous action; and/or to have losing initiative actually correspond to actually standing there unmoving for a moment or two as the other character gets the drop on you.
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Meta-gaming is always an evil, even if it is sometimes the lesser of two evils. When your assassin agrees to not backstab the paladin, because it's a PC, then that is one of those rare cases where meta-gaming might be justified. It's still jarring to the players at the table.
Which players? Not me, when I'm playing. And not my players, as far as I can tell.
When my players make choices that are fun, or dramatic, the other players don't find that jarring - they often laugh or cheer, sometimes they groan or say "not again . . . ". It's a game. One reason for playing games is to get involved, and enjoy them or roll your eyes at the other players or to make the other players roll their eyes at you!
some players don't understand what role-playing is, or don't actually care about role-playing, but insist on playing an RPG anyway.
I don't think this is true of my players. All but one has been playing since the early 80s, as have I. (Which I think is longer than you?)
Role-playing is making decisions as your character would.
<snip>
If you make decisions beyond the scope of character agency, then you're not role-playing
This can't be
literally true - after all, choosing to pick up a die is not making a decision as one's PC would. So the question is, how is the metaphor to be cashed out?
If my PC
really wants something, and is putting all her effort and all her hope into it, and at the table I spend all my fate points and cash in all my inspiration chips, to me that looks like I'm making decisions as my character would and exercising my character's agency.
You might think that effort and hope aren't part of a character's agency, but that's not a definitional feature of RPG design or play. It's a difference in aesthetics and the philosophy of (fictional) action.
Where I must object is at the idea of an attack dealing damage only to your luck, since that sort of damage would not be observable to the characters, and they would not be able to address it. The absolute minimum viable explanation must still allow the game to be played, without meta-gaming.
Again, what you are presenting here as a principle of design is actually an aesthetic view about fantasy fiction.
If players don't have luck-type mechanics (be they hp, fate points, re-rolls, whatever) then the metaphysics of the fiction are the same as the physics of dice - cold, uncaring randomisation. But that is not a neutral or natural fictional state of affairs: it is a definite stand against whole swathes of fantasy fiction (especially providential romance like Arthurian legends, Tolkien, the film Hero, etc).
You're entitled to your preferences. But when I play a game in which PCs' convictions, and hope, and effort,
matters, I don't cease to be roleplaying. I'm just playing with a different sort of fiction. (And that's before we even get to view about the role of
protagonism in fiction, which is also an issue of aesthetics, not minimum design specifications.)
The better solution is to simply not play a character who would be put into such a situation.
This, plus your earlier comments about the GM not actually making any decisions, suggest that you want the game to unfold more or less mechanically from a set of starting conditions. I personally don't find that a very appealing pastime, and I don't see what in particular it has to do with RPGing.
