Hit Points: Hitting the Wall

[TheFindus]

I think it is a death spiral for the guys in the front, for the reasons you mentioned.

Plus, a system like this requires more administration than it is worth in my opinion: how many times have I been healed before? How many hp do I heal less with every healing again? To me, that seems too much trouble.

I guess there are those who have to play hp in a way that every hit requires a (more or less) actual severe wound. Then there are those who use them narratively all the time. Taken to one extreme this leads to porcupine fighters, covered in arrows. Taken to another extreme there never has to be physical injury (except when poison comes into play), and hp are almost always covered by morale, stress, fatigue etc.

And this is why I kind of like hp the way they are and why I think they should not be changed in 5e: it leaves a lot of room for all different kind of games and playstyles. In that way, hp are very inclusive. And inclusiveness is good.

 

[El Mahdi]

So how do we deal with the fact that this disproportionately punishes the guys up front? I mean, they're supposed to be the guys up front, they're going to take more damage and they're going to take it more often.

IE: if a Wizard loses 10 out of 50 HP, they only "lose" 2 HP without an extended rest. However, if a Fighter loses 75 out of 100 HP, they lose out on 15 HP. Going from 50 to 48 isn't that much of a loss, but our Fighter is now at 85/100 for the next fight. After that fight, he'll be even lower, and he'll get there a lot faster.

This strikes me suspiciously as a variant death-spiral.

Yeah, it is a death spiral of a sort. But it can be adjusted to be a very, very, very slowwwwww death spiral. Depending on where you set it at (1 HP per encounter, 10%, 1 HP per encounter per character level, etc.), you should be able to set it to get a good half-dozen to dozen combat encounters per adventuring day (between extended rests).

As far as rear echelon characters (like spellcasters), I'm not sure entirely how you fix the disparity.

Perhaps have them make a Fortitude saving throw at the end of a combat encounter. If they fail, then the fight was fatiguing enough that they're Max Hit Points are reduced by 1 until they get an extended rest, etc., etc., etc. This would work, but I don't know if I like it.

But you've brought up a good point about that disparity.

 

[billd91]

A friend of mine recently pointed this out to me about 4E, but it's been true in all editions of D&D to date: Gradual hit point attrition doesn't really exist. Whatever resources you have to restore hit points--a cleric in AD&D, a cure light wand in 3E, healing surges in 4E--they put you back up to full or near-full after every battle. So as long as your healing batteries hold out, you can keep going hell for leather. As soon as the supply of heals is exhausted, however, you hit the wall. The party's fighting capacity plunges rapidly, and it's time to stop and rest for the night because you'll be slaughtered if you go on. It feels artificial, and I think it also reduces tension. Instead of gradually increasing strain, there's a sharply defined "Okay, stop here" moment.

A significant culprit here may be the ease with which targets can be hit in D&D. If AC did a better job of protecting the PC from being hit in the first place, perhaps negating a higher proportion of attacks, then this wouldn't be as noticeable an issue.

Of course, a significant element of the problem may also be the foolhardy tendency for players to throw their PCs into a fight. Though not doing so would probably be counter to heroic action gaming in the first place...

Ultimately, I think anything done to change when the wall gets hit is just that: a change in when it happens. I doubt it's ever going to not happen.

 

[KidSnide]

The idea is that combat does less damage. So a PC might have 20 HP, and he can expect to lose 5 HP in an easy fight, 10 HP in an average fight, or 15 HP in a hard fight. So you can expect to handle 3 average fights in a day, since you'll take 30 HP damage, but can heal 10 HP from resting, plus maybe a bit more through magic.

You don't hit a wall; you see the wall coming from far away.

Seeing the wall from far away is a feature of the existing systems being criticized. Most parties can tell that they are going to run out of healing surges / cleric magic / CLW wand charges well before it happens. The question isn't whether you can see it coming. The question is whether it's a wall or a slower degredation of survivability.

But I think the real question is whether, putting complexity aside for the moment, a slow degredation of survivability is actually better than hitting the well. I don't think there is one true answer. Healing is part of the greater "pacing" issue. To figure out the correct amount of healing available to the party, you first have to make some judgements about the right levels of pacing and difficulty, and preferences for both are going to vary significantly group-by-group. I bet we can come up with a bunch of wrong answers, but I'm not sure there's a right one.

-KS

 

[am181d]

No matter what system you have in place, players will always have the option (events allowing) to finish one combat and then wait until they regain hit points -- whether that's through magical healing or going back to the nearest village and resting for 6 months.

I don't see much point in a fiddly system that caps the number of hit points you can heal at any given time, but I have been tinkering with a Wounds/Vitality system, where you heal 50% of you total Vitality after a short (5 minute) rest and the rest after a longer (1 hour) rest. Without magic, Wounds would restore overnight (either 1 per day or 1/level day).

This presents the players with options. If they're in a hurry, waiting an hour between encounters may not be practical, but they're not hosed too badly by the shorter rest.

All of the above could work for a straight HP system as well, but I figure most gamers would still want to identify some percentage of hit points as "real damage" that can't be healed so quickly through non-magical means.

 

[howandwhy99]

HPs are D&D's iconic pool resource which can be whittled down and brought back up again, where having more is simply better in any given case.

What HPs don't do is work as a classic attrition mechanic. When your HPs are low you are not weaker in effect nor do you lose any options to act. That's a good thing IMO.

Battle attrition games are typically seen as drudgery because the end results are often determined early on, but the final outcome takes several rounds to complete. Lots of rounds can be good. They typically mean more action and diversity and chances to change one's position, but in pure attrition games your odds of hitting and damage dealt would go down along with your HP.

HPs are actually a meter that had no impact (before second wind) on PCs. They fought at full capacity the whole fight until they hit zero. That's been contested many times as unrealistic, but it has stayed in place because pretty much every other option makes the combat subsystem largely chance.

Before the millennium HPs could be low during the exploration phase of the game. Full HP wasn't guaranteed and consequences of encounters weren't shunted off from each other. Bringing exploration back might mean HP totals are again as much a result of adventuring as battles.

 

[Minigiant]

Let's look at it from another way.

4E tried to keep players from hitting the "offense wall" be doing 2 two things:

• Giving all characters at-will and encounter attacks that are "mostly" always available to them during every fight.
• As daily powers are expended, characters receive action points and additional usages of magic items that replaced them.

The problem was that action points and magic items did not replace dailies. The point was that fresh adventurer were Daily users and tired adventurers could use magic items. It was a good idea but poorly implemented.

But what characters transform defensively as the day goes on and the resources run low. Something like the 4E Battle Mage's Closing spell.

A fighter could have a revenge attack that deals bonus damage equal to his Max HP- his Current HP.

A warlock could call up all the dead cursed for the day and swing them at the BBEG.

A cleric could pray for some sort of theurgy which is more powerful the more desperate the cleric is.


Or you could do something silly and say raise dead has a 20% success rate and you get a 10% bonus for every encounter you attempt because the world rewards the daring. Doesn't stop the wall but it might keep them going.

 

[fuindordm]

I don't see the proposed solution as a death spiral, because it doesn't affect the PC's performance. A fighter at 50% max hits just as often and just as hard as a fresh fighter. But the former has less endurance.

The imbalance between front and back rank doesn't bother me either. The back rank may not be running low on HP but they are running low on spells.

 

[erleni]

If you want to avoid hiting the wall abruptly you may look into the 4e mechanics (i.e. healing surges) and implement a variant where you start with less healing surges than usual and regain an healing surge per fight (or every two fights, you have to find a balancing point).
In this way "easy" fights will never make you hit the wall, but a very difficult fight will make you think twice before entering another one. In this way you change the triggering factor from the number of encounter to the difficulty of them.

Honestly all the HP issues I see debated in this forum come really down to a matter of taste and HP will always be open to a lot of house-ruling.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Before the millennium HPs could be low during the exploration phase of the game. Full HP wasn't guaranteed and consequences of encounters weren't shunted off from each other. Bringing exploration back might mean HP totals are again as much a result of adventuring as battles.

This. Also prior to 3E it was not always a given that all damage would be cured after a battle before continuing on. Wands,potions, and scrolls were not commonly available for sale per the rules and clerical healing until around 7th level was limited to just cure light wounds plus whatever potions, or scrolls with healing spells the party happened to have.

So based on a 5th-6th level party with a cleric having several cure light wounds prepared and perhaps an odd potion or two, the notion of healing up the whole party to full health after every battle just doesn't hold up.