Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison

[Hypersmurf]

OTOH, he is not able to evade the killing stroke as he would be able to do were he fully alert and able. That is what hit points represent.

Ah! Now here, I agree.

Our 80 hit point fighter takes 75 points of damage. He is at 5 hit points, and we describe all manner of cuts and bruises appearing.

What does the 5 represent? It represents how able he is to avoid a killing stroke.

He uses a healing surge, and regains 20 hit points. What has increased? His ability to avoid a killing stroke. Does that mean his cuts and bruises all have to disappear? No, it doesn't - those are not directly affecting his ability to avoid a killing stroke, so they can remain even though his ability to avoid a killing stroke has increased from 5 to 25.

A healing surge has been used, and no cuts and bruises have magically disappeared, because hit points don't represent cuts and bruises; hit points represent ability to avoid a killing stroke.

The healing surge doesn't alter the effects of the last ten hits. It alters the effect of the next hit, which hasn't happened yet. Time's Arrow is not violated, because the event now (healing surge) has no effect on the past; it affects the future.

-Hyp.

 

[Raven Crowking]

In my opinion, it's even MORE unrealistic to say HP damage is a representation of physical wounds, as I've NEVER once seen a guy take multiple axe hits straigh to the chest/legs/arms/head/groin/etc and still be 100% able to attack back. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to say that the better you are at fighting the more axes you can take to the skull.

Good thing that is not, and is explicitly not, what hit points have ever represented, in any incarnation of the game. So, yes, I'll agree that your hypothetical system is as bad as 4e's actual system, where my apparent "mistake" is either trying to describe hit point loss in-world or trying to describe hit point recovery in-world.

(Of course, when I said that 4e hit points didn't map to in-world events, I was told I was wrong there too. Schrödinger's Arguement about Schrödinger's Wounding? Man, that cat gets around!)


RC

 

[Fenes]

The healing surge doesn't alter the effects of the last ten hits. It alters the effect of the next hit, which hasn't happened yet. Time's Arrow is not violated, because the event now (healing surge) has no effect on the past; it affects the future.

-Hyp.

Unless of course he gets dipped into negatives. If he gets tended to and brought back, and uses a healing surge, he's back in shape. If he doesn't, he dies - somehow.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I have no doubt that people have problems with the healing surge mechanic.
One "last-ditch-effort" approach might be: All healing is magic, just like martial powers are some kind of magic. In the world of 4E, the inspiring words of a leader can literally mend wounds.

Might sound bad, since it creates a very specific world, where no one is entirely mundane. Well, it worked for Earthdawn.

But the previous hit point model, is it so different? 3E basically implied a big industry around selling Wands of Cure LIght Wounds to adventurers, and made religious warriors the only source of meaningful healing. Heck, even a character superbly gifted in the Heal skill wouldn't be able to do what a simple magical spell would. Yes, true, there are non-magical heroes, but without magical aid, they are helpless. Maybe the worlds of previous editions "evolved" to the magical world of 4E?

---

Ablative Hit Points Model facilitate a high combat density. Each individual combat and strike is unlikely to kill someone, so you get a high degree of predictability and can play each combat tactically.
So, it's hard to get away from ablative hit points if you want to keep that. Do we want to keep that?
My personal answer is yes, we do. If you disagree, consider whether this is where this is the route you can see D&D going, too.

Even ablative hit points must be restored. The previous approach assumed that you could only use long rests or magic to heal. But this required you to have a magical healer in the group. The entire system rests on the availability of cleric and cleric-like characters. If you remove them, you change how the game can be played.
Do we want to change how the game is played entirely on "flavor" decisions which characters our setting or the party uses?
My answer would be know. We'd like a robust system that does support each flavor equally well and facilitates similar gameplay. If you disagree, consider whether this is a route you think D&D is safe to ignore.

There are some other contraints I can think off:
- Ease of Play
- Allowing threat of death per encounter, but still support multiple threatening encounters in a short timeframe.

I think these (among many others) where constraints the 4E designers worked on. Do you disagree with the constraints? Then I don't feel the need to discuss further with you, since we're really going far apart in what we want to play when we play D&D. There's nothing wrong with it, but whatever you come up with for hit points system breaks constraints I don't want to go without.
If you agree or can at least accept these constraints - What would you suggest, if we add the constraint: "At any point we want to be able to look a the characters statistics and determine whether he is injured, dying, bruised or fine."

Here's an idea of mine:
A Wound/Vitality System. Forget the stupid stuff from Starwars Saga where criticals went to Wound. That's not what we want. But we want to distinguish between real injuries and morale/fatigue damage.
One idea:
- Each time you're bloodied, you take a wound. This wound is superficial, if could grow worse, but if you go above bloodied before you reach 0 hit points or less, the wound is gone. (I don't want it to stay since you can go bloodied very often - you could do without this rule, or you could say that it only happens once per combat instead of the regeneration rule)
- Each time you're below 0 hit points, you take a wound. This one is real. It might stop bleeding and stuff, but it's still visibly there. if you go above 0 hit points, it stays, but you "soldier" on.
- Each time you fail your death save, you take another wound, representing the wound growing worse. If you fail 3 times in a row, you die from that wound.
- If you have taken a number of wounds equal to your constitution score, you drop dying.
- After each extended rest, you can spend two healing surges that day to recover one wound. Using the Heal skill (DC 10 + number of wounds) allows you to regain two wounds instead (still only at two surges.) Since it happens after the extended rest, you have to go with less healing surges this day.
- In addition, create a ritual that uses the Heal Skill. Make a Heal Check. DC 10 heals 1 wound, DC 20 2 wounds, and DC 30 3 wounds, at the expense of one Healing Surge each.

 

[Mallus]

Of course in real life injuries can really suck.

Speaking of... there was a thread around here -- I think-- about using/modifying the 4e disease progression track to represent serious injury (for use when a character goes below zero HP).

I'll probably use something like that if my group wants a grittier/more sim-like treatment of damage in our new campaign.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Our 80 hit point fighter takes 75 points of damage. He is at 5 hit points, and we describe all manner of cuts and bruises appearing.

What does the 5 represent? It represents how able he is to avoid a killing stroke.

He uses a healing surge, and regains 20 hit points. What has increased? His ability to avoid a killing stroke. Does that mean his cuts and bruises all have to disappear? No, it doesn't - those are not directly affecting his ability to avoid a killing stroke, so they can remain even though his ability to avoid a killing stroke has increased from 5 to 25.

(1) I beg to differ about whether those cuts and bruises directly affect his ability to avoid a killing stroke. I assume that you have never been seriously injured, or in a fight. I spent 4 years in the US Army, and I can say with some degree of certainty that your injuries do directly affect your combat readiness.

(2) If those cuts and bruises don't directly affect his ability to avoid a killing stroke, why does healing those cuts and bruises (by magic, for example) raise his hit points? Shouldn't cure spells be merely descriptive?

(3) What if the healing surge healed all damage he had taken? What happend to those cuts and bruises then? Or do the all manner of cuts and bruises we described earlier not map to hit points at all in this edition? And if they do not, why did we describe them earlier? Again, Schrödinger's Arguement to explain Schrödinger's Wounding.

The healing surge doesn't alter the effects of the last ten hits. It alters the effect of the next hit, which hasn't happened yet. Time's Arrow is not violated, because the event now (healing surge) has no effect on the past; it affects the future.

Within the context of the game itself, yes. Within the context of narrating in-world events, no.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

I have no doubt that people have problems with the healing surge mechanic.
One "last-ditch-effort" approach might be: All healing is magic, just like martial powers are some kind of magic. In the world of 4E, the inspiring words of a leader can literally mend wounds.

To quote the 6th Doctor: "In a word, yuck."



And it goes to show you how little thought was put into this subsystem (like the falling subsystem of earlier editions) that we already have several (IMHO) better methods of dealing with decoupling encounter hp from total hp and/or describing wounds in this thread. I prefer the system I forked, as I have no desire for the extra bookkeeping that a "wound track" would have.

RC

 

[Mallus]

In pre-4E paradigm even if some of the HP damage a fighter takes is luck, skill etc. at some base level some of it is real injuries which is why it takes days to weeks to heal.

I think a better way to put it is that pre-4e, HP damage one characteristic of real, physical injury, namely, "requiring weeks to heal", but at the same time lacked most the other important characteristics, like "impairment", "loss of physical capability" and "susceptibility to further injury via complication and infection".

In my view that single shared characteristic doesn't make the prior edition's take on HP markedly more realistic.

 

[Fenes]

I think a better way to put it is that pre-4e, HP damage one characteristic of real, physical injury, namely, "requiring weeks to heal", but at the same time lacked most the other important characteristics, like "impairment", "loss of physical capability" and "susceptibility to further injury via complication and infection".

In my view that single shared characteristic doesn't make the prior edition's take on HP markedly more realistic.

Works for me and others though.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I think a better way to put it is that pre-4e, HP damage one characteristic of real, physical injury, namely, "requiring weeks to heal", but at the same time lacked most the other important characteristics, like "impairment", "loss of physical capability" and "susceptibility to further injury via complication and infection".

In my view that single shared characteristic doesn't make the prior edition's take on HP markedly more realistic.

My nine-year-old daughter has no problem understanding hit points, and has no problem understanding how hit points work in terms of both game mechanics and the win conditions of the game. Yes, the hit point mechanic is not as detailed as some, and some claim that it is unrealistic because of that lack of detail. Yes, it is important to consider before adding subsystems (which, unfortunately, hasn't always been the case). But please note that it it the subsystem (falling damage; healing surge) that causes the problem, not the hit point mechanic itself.

If the failing of the hit point mechanic is that it is not detailed enough for some tastes, the failing of problematic subsystems is that they add absurd elements into the game. When characters can routinely fall 200 feet without injury, or get up from deadly injuries as routinely as Captain Jack Harkness, credulity is stretched to the breaking point. There is a very large qualitative difference between "undetailed" and "results in absurd occurances in the game world", IMHO.

Of course, if you really think that the hit point mechanic is so terrible, you must find it annoying to have it continued, and made more terrible yet, in 4e, right?