D&D 5E (Fun) - Gravity Proves Standard Human has 9 HP

[Stalker0]

Disclaimer: This topic is completely silly and for fun. Lets keep it light, I know how serious some people like to take this stuff. Also, for my 4d6 statistics, I ran 4 million random number simulations to get the numbers. So the % should be very close, certainly close enough for this, but they are not statistically perfect.

Its the eternal question. Sure PCs get big hitpoints and levels and XYZ, but how about your normal, stock human. How many hitpoints do they really have? Its the eternal question, and through the power of physics, it can finally be settled, once and for all!

So lets start with a fun fact: A human that falls from a height of 48 feet (4 stories) has a 50% chance to die. Yes its really that high, apparently we humans are more durable than you might think. Now doesn't mean your not heinously injured, but you can survive a very high fall a decent amount of the time.

5e teaches us that falling deals 1d6 damage per 10 feet, or 4d6 damage. Some of you may want to round up to 50 feet or 5d6....but this is dnd damn it, and we round down!

Now in 5e, there are two ways that a fall could kill us:

• Deals damage = double our hitpoints = instant death
• Deals damage above hitpoints -> die by death saves

We are going to assume that the person has full hp when they make the fall, and that they do not receive any assistance or further damage afterward, aka they are at the whims of the death saves if they fall unconscious.

So our second fun fact: An unconscious 5e character has a 57.6% chance to survive without assistance. If nothing else in this post interests you, enjoy that statistic. That includes rolling 20s and nat 1, its the whole show, and took me some effort to calculate!

So now we crunch the numbers. What hitpoint number gives us the appropriate life and death numbers to get us our 50% survive rate?

The answer: 9 hp.

At 9 hp:
% Live Straight up (aka take 9 or less damage on 4d6): 9.75%
% Die Straight up (aka take 18 or more damage on 4d6): 15.90%
% Fall Unconscious (10-17 damage): 74.35%

• Unconscious but Stable: .7435 * .576 = .428 = 42.8%
• Unconscious and bleed out: .7435 * .424 = .315 = 31.5%

Total % Live Chance: %Live + %Unconscious but Stable = 52.6%
Total % Death Chance: %Death + %Unconscious and Bleed out = 47.4%

That is the closest to the 50% number we can get. At 8 hp, the death chance is way too high (59.4%).


So I expect everyone to take this number as gospel and now go update all of your adventures so that all normal humans have 9 hp. The math has spoken!

 

[Charlaquin]

That’s awesome! Though now I’m curious of that 50% real life survival rate accounts for medical care though.

 

[overgeeked]

And in D&D5E the normal human who survives that fall will be perfectly fine after an 8 hour nap.

 

[jgsugden]

You're not factoring in that people in the real world, as opposed to D&D people, have resistance to falling damage 5.

 

[Vaalingrade]

This is certainly better methodology than I had allowing a cat to scratch a person (1 damage ala 3.5) until they died.

 

[Raith5]

What happens if you wear Padded Armour?

 

[Horwath]

And in D&D5E the normal human who survives that fall will be perfectly fine after an 8 hour nap.

HPs are abstraction

you either fell on your head, dying almost instantly or you landed on your feet on a grass field that has a decline and went into a perfect roll to absorb falling energy.

in D&D those are only 2 options.

 

[Umbran]

That’s awesome! Though now I’m curious of that 50% real life survival rate accounts for medical care though.

It almost certainly does. Where does the number come from if not from medical reporting?

 

[NotAYakk]

You don't have to simulate 4d6; there are only 1296 possible die rolls. Just check them all.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

HPs are abstraction

you either fell on your head, dying almost instantly or you landed on your feet on a grass field that has a decline and went into a perfect roll to absorb falling energy.

in D&D those are only 2 options.

This is hysterical but also really makes me feel we need a simple, preferably WotC-approved (so 6E, likely) system which applies injuries when someone recovers from being at 0 HP (if they don't recover, who cares!), much like Pillars of Eternity has. I kind of wonder if someone has some nice house-rules or a 3PP on the subject. Ideally you'd want them to reflect whatever caused you to hit 0 HP (i.e. non-lethal damage, no injury, falling, roll on a chart for anything from bruising to broken bones - I mean, you did recover, probably via magic, so we don't need to go too far, fire damage, burns of some kind, etc. etc. but the list should be short).