Hit points as luck

[MGibster]

I really don't like the fantasy of you getting hit and that means you "have less luck than before" and when you get to 0HP, you are "out of luck" and suddenly you drop unconscious after one real hit. Thats not how luck works. There is no measure and reserve for luck. You can't heal or refill your luck. This feels non sensical and absurd to me.

Hit points are abstract representations of how much damage a character can suffer and just about any such a system is bound to be absurd when examined too closely or taken too literally. Of course in the narrative, getting hit doesn't really mean you have less luck than you did before. It means when the axe wielding orc hits your character it wasn't a blow that cleaved his head in twain, instead it was a glancing blow or perhaps a solid hit with the flat. Remember, the rules of the game are not the physics of the world.

If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts (la la la)
Then repeat to yourself, "It's just a show
I should really just relax
For Mystery Science Theater 3000!"

 

[James Gasik]

In retrospect, my headcanon is that Gary was tired of people asking how 1 sword strike can take down a 1st-level Fighter but it takes 5 to take down a 5th level one, which also makes zero sense if hit points are "meat".

A comic book, of all things, I read back in the 90's explained this as high level warriors learning how to minimize the damage they take in combat instinctively, so that the ability to withstand more damage is actually the ability to take less damage in the first place (this was before "damage reduction" was more widely used in the game, of course).

Basically, Gary should have stuck to his guns when he was talking about D&D not being a simulation game- first he says it's absurd to think of it as one, but then he went out of his way to put rules in to make it more "realistic", lol. If we'd had a variation of the MST3K mantra, maybe things would have been different...ah, who am I kidding. Nerds can fight about things like whether or not the sun is shining, lol.

 

[jian]

HP are only luck in the sense that "you are lucky that (arrow) didn't kill you". Which is why experience allows you to create more "luck" - you get better at knowing how to turn at the last moment to take the arrow on your shoulder, where your armor is thickest, and it cracks off only leaving a bruise instead of collapsing a lung.

It IS luck, but it is (IMO) better described as effort. Things are just happening so fast, that you are lucky that your efforts pay off and you don't get yourself killed. Some of that is also "grit", in that a lesser person might give up and die, while you suck it up and carry on.

I (respectfully) don't like the OP's suggestion regarding spending it to avoid dying from poison, because that is already what is happening when you take 12 poison damage but have 14 HP. If the poison is enough to kill (drop) you, it should do that. You shouldn't be able to pay some lesser amount of HP to avoid it. (Unless, you know, you have poison resistance, but again, that is already accounted for).

I think I’d only recommend it for things where you don’t take damage - so the poison inflicts Disadvantage to all checks (5E) or kills you (1E), that sort of thing. I agree it’s not a great fit for saving for half damage from a fireball.

If one was going to use HP as luck to affect rolls, I probably would recommend separating a small portion (probably your 1st level HP) as Health and the rest as Fortune, and only allowing you to add Fortune to checks which didn’t involve taking damage. So yes to attack rolls, skill checks, and most saving throws; no to saving throws against damage.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Hit points are hit points. A game construct used to play the board game part of D&D. But the story and narrative of what happens in D&D does not equate one-to-one with the board game events. So jumping through hoops trying to make them do so is always a fool's errand.

Once the board game combat is done you can select a couple of events in it to be the important narrative points that occurred... treat those couple of things as what "actually" happened during the fight... but anything past that will make no logical nor narrative sense because the combat rules of D&D are designed purely for fun gameplay with a hint of narrative and NOT for generating an actual logical story.

There is a reason why fights in D&D books and movies do not equate to the round by round action of the RPG. Because they are two completely different things.

 

[Celebrim]

I think there's an essay by Gygax somewhere on this topic where he basically says most of your HP in D&D (especially at high level) is luck..

That's not exactly what he says. He instead says at higher levels hit points increases mostly not through greater durability but rather to other seemingly supernatural or metaphysical characteristics which will differ depending on the type of character - fighters get better at evading wounds, clerics get more divine provenance, wizards get sort of innate force fields or instinctive magical protection, thieves get luckier, etc. He doesn't really specify what this supernatural fortitude has to be, just leaves it up to the group to specify how it is acting to mitigate wounds. And mitigate is the key word here, because...

using the example of the last duel in The Adventures of Robin Hood (IIRC) as an example - every time Robin and Guy of Gisbourne swing and narrowly miss, they're taking off each other's HP, until Gisbourne finally runs out first and loses. And that seems a perfectly valid interpretation, I don't know if Gary stuck with it.

Pretty sure that isn't exactly what he says either. Rather the most common Gygaxian explanation is that like a 2nd level character was like 50% durability and 50% this supernatural other stuff, and that when they were "hit" they were actually hit as the language implied but they were hit significantly less seriously than they would have been from the same blow at first level. Likewise, a 10th level character would be like 10% durability and 90% this supernatural other stuff. In any event, each hit depleted both durability and this other supernatural quality proportionately, until you were out of supernatural quality covered in minor bruises and scrapes and wounds and then just as vulnerable as you would have been at first level, unable to avoid the killing blow.

So, if your HP are mostly luck, could you spend them in other ways? Could you spend your HP to improve your rolls, especially for saving throws? Which leads to some interesting conversations at the table:

So you could, but you'd have to be really careful about both the flavor and the mechanics of the rule. And in particular:

Player: Damn, I rolled a 3. My save vs poison is 10, so I failed.
GM: Then you die.
Player: Well, that sucks. Can I spend HP to improve my saving throw result?
GM: Sure, go ahead. That'll cost you 7 HP.
Player: Better than being dead!

That just sounds awful. That's doing nothing interesting to improve the game at all IMO. That's not a conversation that enhances the game and makes the player more feel like he's Dirk the Daring or whatever in a fantasy world doing great heroic deeds. That sounds and feels like a game of spreadsheets.

Worse, that's highly highly unbalanced as it turns healing spells into literally every other resource in the game the way you imagine it, which makes clerics even more "godly" than ever and healers just get absolutely overpowered.

 

[Bae'zel]

No matter how much I explained to my players that HP was abstract and basically "luck", they always vividly explained how much their character was bleeding, stumbling, gasping in pain etc...

Players made me convert them all into "meat" points instead. I'm okay with this, I like it when heroes get beat up like in Die Hard.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hit points are hit points. A game construct used to play the board game part of D&D. But the story and narrative of what happens in D&D does not equate one-to-one with the board game events. So jumping through hoops trying to make them do so is always a fool's errand.

Once the board game combat is done you can select a couple of events in it to be the important narrative points that occurred... treat those couple of things as what "actually" happened during the fight... but anything past that will make no logical nor narrative sense because the combat rules of D&D are designed purely for fun gameplay with a hint of narrative and NOT for generating an actual logical story.

There is a reason why fights in D&D books and movies do not equate to the round by round action of the RPG. Because they are two completely different things.

IMO examples of those "narrative points" determined after the fact would include any situation in which the damage type is relevant via the rules (poison is the most famous case), and anytime a creature reaches 0 hit points.

 

[GMMichael]

I think there's an essay by Gygax somewhere on this topic where he basically says most of your HP in D&D (especially at high level) is luck, using the example of the last duel in The Adventures of Robin Hood (IIRC) as an example - every time Robin and Guy of Gisbourne swing and narrowly miss, they're taking off each other's HP, until Gisbourne finally runs out first and loses.

This is a great interpretation of hit points until you find out about the armor class mechanism. Then one must ask, "why does wearing heavier armor prevent one from losing luck?"

So, if your HP are mostly luck, could you spend them in other ways? Could you spend your HP to improve your rolls, especially for saving throws? Which leads to some interesting conversations at the table:

Player: Damn, I rolled a 3. My save vs poison is 10, so I failed.
GM: Then you die.
Player: Well, that sucks. Can I spend HP to improve my saving throw result?
GM: Sure, go ahead. That'll cost you 7 HP.
Player: Better than being dead!

As you mentioned, Cypher. Also, Dark Souls RPG, if I'm not mistaken.

No matter how much I explained to my players that HP was abstract and basically "luck", they always vividly explained how much their character was bleeding, stumbling, gasping in pain etc...

As it should be. Let the players decide what their hit points are; let the rules decide how many HP the PCs have.

 

[jian]

That's not exactly what he says. He instead says at higher levels hit points increases mostly not through greater durability but rather to other seemingly supernatural or metaphysical characteristics which will differ depending on the type of character - fighters get better at evading wounds, clerics get more divine provenance, wizards get sort of innate force fields or instinctive magical protection, thieves get luckier, etc. He doesn't really specify what this supernatural fortitude has to be, just leaves it up to the group to specify how it is acting to mitigate wounds. And mitigate is the key word here, because...



Pretty sure that isn't exactly what he says either. Rather the most common Gygaxian explanation is that like a 2nd level character was like 50% durability and 50% this supernatural other stuff, and that when they were "hit" they were actually hit as the language implied but they were hit significantly less seriously than they would have been from the same blow at first level. Likewise, a 10th level character would be like 10% durability and 90% this supernatural other stuff. In any event, each hit depleted both durability and this other supernatural quality proportionately, until you were out of supernatural quality covered in minor bruises and scrapes and wounds and then just as vulnerable as you would have been at first level, unable to avoid the killing blow.

Sure, by “luck” I would be happy to mean “any version of luck, experience, magical blessing, and other form of plot protection you think works for the character and the game.”

As for the Gary quote I suspect I’m actually remembering Old Geezer’s quotes on the subject here on ENWorld:

Post in thread 'I don't get the dislike of healing surges'

Oct 5, 2011

I don't visit that other board anymore, so I can't provide that link. But a poster that goes by "Old Geezer" mentioned it more than once.

Old Geezer is Mike Mornard; he was a player in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, Gary Gygax's Greyhawk campaign, and Professor Barker's Tékumel campaign - some impressive gaming bona fides.

Here's one of Mr Morland Mornard's posts on rpg.net.

Robin Hood (the 1939 version with Errol Flynn). Gary always said that the final fight between Robin and the Sherrif was what he had in mind when he designed the D&D...

• The Shaman

• 

 

[Bae'zel]

As you mentioned, Cypher. Also, Dark Souls RPG, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah the Dark Souls 5e RPG has some real neat ideas, I think. There's a whole lot of different types of equipment too, most of which have unique ways to spend your HP to trigger extra effects.

Also, you roll your HP before every fight, so nothing is predictable.

Then again, if you die in that game, you get reborn at a bonfire, with a roll on a table that show how much you've lost of your humanity.

Overall tons of interesting ideas. I recommend perusing it.