kermit4karate
A strong opinion is still only an opinion.
I did not say you did.
D&D General Hit Points are a great mechanic
- Thread starter loverdrive
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kermit4karate
A strong opinion is still only an opinion.
1 in 216 to get to the fourth d6, BTW.
Oops! Yes you're right, it really does come up more often than I think
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
I don't know if "incompatible" is the right term. Plenty of fictional fantasy heroes shrug off massive damage. Look how many arrows it took to kill Boromir, and he was able to linger long enough to deliver his last words to Aragorn! And let's not get started on pulp fantasy icons like a certain Cimmerian...
It's better to say that in your preferred narrative, nobody has "plot armor" and anyone can die. Like, say, The Black Company novels.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser have metric tons of plot armor! Hit points would be the best system for them. And see my comment about Boromir in LotR.
It's only some fantasy where "anyone can die". Which is fine, but there's lots of fantasy stories where characters are able to overcome impossible odds in a fairly routine manner.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
RE: the narrative.
In any fiction, death doesn't occur because the author throws dice or darts at a dartboard (well, I'm not so sure about George R. R. Martin...). Death occurs because the author decides "this is the time a character dies" which happens when they feel it is appropriate.
In simplest terms, when a D&D (or any ttrpg) character avoids death, narratively, it wasn't their time yet. They got lucky, they pulled through, adrenaline allowed them to narrowly avert death- you see this stuff all the time in novels. What some people are having a problem with is that the game itself doesn't tell you what the reason is. Gary Gygax infamously muttered some stuff about divine protection, luck, and morale, and while all of those could be factors, the game engine doesn't tell us why the gods care, what makes the characters so lucky, etc. etc., or when an attack fails to kill a character due to good fortune, skill, or just plain guts. It's left up to the players and the DM to figure it out.
Again, Micah Sweet often points to the example of being poisoned by a knife blade or a snake. This is a scenario where you definitely were struck, did take at least some damage, otherwise you wouldn't be making saving throws. Now, it's entirely possible that a mere nick or graze is enough to be exposed to the poison, but hit point systems don't really define what a hit point of damage means- there's no system for fractions of hit points. You nick yourself shaving and bleed a bit. That's a wound, right? Does that mean you took a hit point of damage? Probably not, but you certainly took some amount of damage!
People talk about hit point bloat all the time, how ttrpg heroes become far too tough and resilient to be afraid of most forms of injury. Most of this has less to do with hit points, and more to do with damage scaling. If a game designer decides a dagger inflicts 1d4 damage, and that the goblin stabbing you has a +2 damage modifier, then at most you can take 6 damage from a normal attack.
Now if the game designer also says a normal person has 4.5 hit points on average, that means on average, a goblin stabbing you with a dagger is instantly fatal to normal people! Who needs swords or greataxes in such a world, when the vast majority of people (including goblins!) die from a dagger wound!
Quickly, however, the game realizes that a system where everyone goes down from a single hit isn't particularly viable, so some form of damage mitigation system is put into place. HIt points being among the simplest versions of this. So suddenly character A can survive two dagger hits, and monster B can survive 4. But quickly, this gets out of hand due to the needs of the game- if a party of four heroes can kill a monster in four attacks, that's entirely too quick, it doesn't feel challenging at all!
So the monsters get more hit points to survive longer. But that allows them to deliver more damage in return, so we have to give the heroes more hit points to make up for this, and this quickly gets out of hand. And then the designers, realizing how silly all this looks, try to get cute and dream up other forms of damage mitigation to stack on top of hit points, be it damage reduction, "phantom" hit points, or regeneration.
I've heard DM's complain about falling damage, that characters should die from falling off cliffs. However, people have fallen from ridiculous heights in the real world and not died, there's nothing magical about that, it's physics in action- what did you land on, how did you fall, and so on. Vesna Vulovic was just a stewardess, not an action superhero, and she fell 33,000 feet and survived with less than 20 hit points to her name (the minimum D&D would inflict to you)!
Of course, it's not the hit points that's the problem, I think. It's that the character doesn't suffer the massive, painful injuries afterwards. As long as they have 1 hit point to their name, they can stand up and walk away. "Surely," some say, "they should suffer permanent injuries, levels of fatigue, and other horrible consequences for daring to survive!". But why though?
Because it "doesn't make sense"? I mean, how much fun is it, really, as a game, if you tell the player "congratulations, you didn't die. Btw, you're going to suffer life-altering injuries that will take months of recovery and you might have to retire from adventuring."
How is that different from death? Your character can no longer play, and you'll likely have to make a new one to keep playing the game!
As to players who act like they are invincible, there's a very simple solution. Their characters should have no idea what hit points are, or how many they have- it's a game mechanic, after all.
So don't let players know how many hit points they have! Roll hit points at level up in secret, keep the totals to yourself, and if needed, houserule any mechanics that would give someone information about how many hit points someone has (like the Battle Master's level 7 feature).
I guarantee they'll become much less likely to engage in reckless actions of any kind pretty quickly!
In any fiction, death doesn't occur because the author throws dice or darts at a dartboard (well, I'm not so sure about George R. R. Martin...). Death occurs because the author decides "this is the time a character dies" which happens when they feel it is appropriate.
In simplest terms, when a D&D (or any ttrpg) character avoids death, narratively, it wasn't their time yet. They got lucky, they pulled through, adrenaline allowed them to narrowly avert death- you see this stuff all the time in novels. What some people are having a problem with is that the game itself doesn't tell you what the reason is. Gary Gygax infamously muttered some stuff about divine protection, luck, and morale, and while all of those could be factors, the game engine doesn't tell us why the gods care, what makes the characters so lucky, etc. etc., or when an attack fails to kill a character due to good fortune, skill, or just plain guts. It's left up to the players and the DM to figure it out.
Again, Micah Sweet often points to the example of being poisoned by a knife blade or a snake. This is a scenario where you definitely were struck, did take at least some damage, otherwise you wouldn't be making saving throws. Now, it's entirely possible that a mere nick or graze is enough to be exposed to the poison, but hit point systems don't really define what a hit point of damage means- there's no system for fractions of hit points. You nick yourself shaving and bleed a bit. That's a wound, right? Does that mean you took a hit point of damage? Probably not, but you certainly took some amount of damage!
People talk about hit point bloat all the time, how ttrpg heroes become far too tough and resilient to be afraid of most forms of injury. Most of this has less to do with hit points, and more to do with damage scaling. If a game designer decides a dagger inflicts 1d4 damage, and that the goblin stabbing you has a +2 damage modifier, then at most you can take 6 damage from a normal attack.
Now if the game designer also says a normal person has 4.5 hit points on average, that means on average, a goblin stabbing you with a dagger is instantly fatal to normal people! Who needs swords or greataxes in such a world, when the vast majority of people (including goblins!) die from a dagger wound!
Quickly, however, the game realizes that a system where everyone goes down from a single hit isn't particularly viable, so some form of damage mitigation system is put into place. HIt points being among the simplest versions of this. So suddenly character A can survive two dagger hits, and monster B can survive 4. But quickly, this gets out of hand due to the needs of the game- if a party of four heroes can kill a monster in four attacks, that's entirely too quick, it doesn't feel challenging at all!
So the monsters get more hit points to survive longer. But that allows them to deliver more damage in return, so we have to give the heroes more hit points to make up for this, and this quickly gets out of hand. And then the designers, realizing how silly all this looks, try to get cute and dream up other forms of damage mitigation to stack on top of hit points, be it damage reduction, "phantom" hit points, or regeneration.
I've heard DM's complain about falling damage, that characters should die from falling off cliffs. However, people have fallen from ridiculous heights in the real world and not died, there's nothing magical about that, it's physics in action- what did you land on, how did you fall, and so on. Vesna Vulovic was just a stewardess, not an action superhero, and she fell 33,000 feet and survived with less than 20 hit points to her name (the minimum D&D would inflict to you)!
Of course, it's not the hit points that's the problem, I think. It's that the character doesn't suffer the massive, painful injuries afterwards. As long as they have 1 hit point to their name, they can stand up and walk away. "Surely," some say, "they should suffer permanent injuries, levels of fatigue, and other horrible consequences for daring to survive!". But why though?
Because it "doesn't make sense"? I mean, how much fun is it, really, as a game, if you tell the player "congratulations, you didn't die. Btw, you're going to suffer life-altering injuries that will take months of recovery and you might have to retire from adventuring."
How is that different from death? Your character can no longer play, and you'll likely have to make a new one to keep playing the game!
As to players who act like they are invincible, there's a very simple solution. Their characters should have no idea what hit points are, or how many they have- it's a game mechanic, after all.
So don't let players know how many hit points they have! Roll hit points at level up in secret, keep the totals to yourself, and if needed, houserule any mechanics that would give someone information about how many hit points someone has (like the Battle Master's level 7 feature).
I guarantee they'll become much less likely to engage in reckless actions of any kind pretty quickly!
loverdrive
your favorite gm's favorite gm (She/Her)
Is shrugging off hits really that incompatible with fantasy fiction?
Say, Moorcock's Corum Jhaelen Irsei defeated mooks left and right, constantly suffering flesh wounds that didn't inhibit his fighting abilities in any way, with grittiness being employed only in fights with truly great foes.
I've recently re-read H.L. Oldie's Way of the Sword, which was my main influence growing up, everyone (and I mean everyone, any incidental character) is a great warrior-poet. Fighting itself is an art form, often practiced among peers with no intent to kill -- and when the main characters encounter people waging wars for real (and thus having way less time and opportunity to figure out techniques), the only way they can lose is by attrition. They'll fight off armies, but eventually, after hours and hours of fighting, they'll get exhausted, miss a strike, get wounded and die shortly after. Sounds suspiciously like HP to me.
Voranzovin
Explorer
Accidental post, please ignore.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Of course, all of this assumes that purpose of play is to create a narrative, with the PCs as main characters, which naturally means following narrative tropes and customs (or deliberately subverting them, another kind of trope). This may be a currently popular assumption, and there's nothing bad about it, but it isn't the only reason to play RPGs. It just isn't.
So the above doesn't cover every viable way to play, just the most popular one. Some of us want injuries that last longer than a day to be a thing. Some of us are good with longer recovery, either by skipping ahead in the timeline or playing another character for a time. To my mind, the hit point system is fine for most things, great in fact, provided that a mechanism for longer-term injury exists. I prefer a determination of real injury be made after the character reaches zero hp and someone can check on them. Regular hit point recovery healing won't fix real injury in this system once its been determined, but higher level effects could. Other than that, rest and active care.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
True, but fantasy fiction is only one source of inspiration for RPGs.
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