Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5806916" data-attributes="member: 92305">Hit Points are not incoherent.  They are abstract.  They're an abstract measure of the damage done to a character or creature. D&D, and therefore roleplaying, has it roots in wargaming.  What happened in wargaming?  A figure would represent a unit or many units.  A figure could represent, say, a squadron of tanks, or a maybe a platoon of foot soldiers. Many of the wargaming rules worked like this:  A figure can take two hits.  The first hit means that the figure is wounded and at half strength.  The second hit destroys the unit completely--it is taken off the battlefield. Turns may be 8 hours long--or even some other unit of time, including multiple days (one month turns on very large scale combat maps are not uncommong).   So....  you can see how this idea was easily translated to characters in the RPG.  A unit (which is a character or creature) can take a number of points of damage until it is destroyed. In the wargame, maybe foot soldiers could take up to two hits, as I described above.  And, maybe tanks could take up to eight hits. Translate that to the RPG:  Instead of a 37mm main gun on a Panzer III tank rolling damage up up to 8 hits on its target, this translated over to a longsword doing 1d8 damage on an enemy character or creature. Instead of the combat round being 8 hours or even a month long, it became 1 minute long (and, later, 6 seconds long). And, just like two figures of tanks coming to face-to-face contact on the battlefield, with dice thrown to represent what happened in that massive tank battle where two squadrons of tanks went after each other, the D&D combat round is also abstract, not representing specific melee hits. The attack/defense/damage system in D&D is very much akin to two figures on the Axis & Allies gameboard coming together with dice thrown to represent the overall outcome. When a tank squadron is hit, and 6 of the units 8 "health" points are destroyed, we don't define excactly what each hit measures.  All that is important is that, during that 4 hour combat round, the tank squadron was nearly destroyed and is now operating at about one third of is normal peak performance. Many times, in a wargame, there were no negative effects to losing health points of a unit.  The points only measured how much total damage the unit could take. In the case of the tank squadron, the unit would operate the same as the units with 8 health points--it's just that THIS tank squadron can only take two more points of damage before being destroyed. Abstract. That's exactly the case with a D&D character.  There are no ill effects to taking HP damage other than it gets the character close to zero and unconsciousness/death.   So, really, hit points aren't really that hard to understand.  They're an abstract measurement of how hard it is to kill a character or creature. Remember, each attack doesn't represent an actual blow or swing, either.  The attack throw is an abstract method, like hit points, for showing how likely a unit (character) is of placing damage on its foes. In D&D, when a single attack throw is made in a one minute combat round (or even a six second combat round), the dice throw doesn't measure a single attack.  It doesn't measure any attacks.  It just represents how likely that character is of placing damage on his foes--a character with a high attack modifier is highly likely to damage his foes.     So, if an attack in D&D is successful, this could really mean that a single blow found a spot on a foe.  Or, it could mean that a few, even several, seperate blows found home and damaged the foe. It's abstract measurement. Let's say a fighter has 25 HP.  If attacked and 6 hit points are removed, all this means is that something happened that made the target less capable of withstanding damage. Maybe the enemy landed a small cut.  Maybe the enemy landed zero attacks, but the fighter is starting to get winded.  Maybe the enemy landed a 11 hits during the combat round, but none of them were lethal. There's a lot of permutations. And, we really don't care.  All we need to know is when the character drops--and that will be when the character reaches 0 HP.</blockquote>

Verification