How do you handle hit points?

[billd91]

I run hit points as a combination of meat, skill, luck, etc. When describing hit point loss, I roughly follow the 5e outline. About the only difference is that if I need to know how many hit points are meat, I use con score. If a PC has a 14 Con and 58 hit points, 14 of those are meat.

I also run hit points as a combination of meat, skill, luck, vigor, etc. Each hit point of damage incorporates a bit of each of those components. I just don't care exactly how much of it is any one component because it has never been relevant in over 30 years of gaming.

 

[Hussar]

The biggest issue here is that folks insist there can only ever be one narration.

So damage must include a bit of meat damage, in order to follow healing rules and that sort of thing.

Fortunately for me, I don’t see that need. Sometimes a hit is a hit and sometimes it’s not. Whatever I feel like at the time. Since from 3e onward, even natural healing only take a couple of days at the longest, this makes most sense to me.

IOW don’t feel like you have to be constrained to only use one method. Mix it up. Have fun with it.

 

[Li Shenron]

I describe the final blow only, unless a hit has additional or special effects. I don't even describe criticals.

I can leave the details for the players to imagine by themselves.

 

[S'mon]

Against a PC at positive hp I typically say stuff like "the dagger finds a chink in your armour and nicks you" - minor scratches and bumps that wear down the PC.

 

[ccs]

Most times I just mark off however much damage the players told me.
Sometimes I'll describe a blow.
A lot of the time (unless I forget) I'll let players know if the targets been reduced to 10 or less HP.
I don't bother debating wether a HP represents "meat point/not-meat point" - it'll represent whichever fits the story best art the moment.

This approach seems to have been working fine for the past few decades, so I'm not inclined to change now.

 

[jasper]

https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.LS4G4lYg2oD0ED2iUeA86QHaFM&w=189&h=132&c=7&o=5&pid=1.7

This commoner took 16 points of damage to his face when he was kid. He became a fighter swashbuckler.

 

[Maxperson]

https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.LS4G4lYg2oD0ED2iUeA86QHaFM&w=189&h=132&c=7&o=5&pid=1.7

This commoner took 16 points of damage to his face when he was kid. He became a fighter swashbuckler.

Yeah, but it was all emotional damage so he survived it.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

For me, the details depend on many, many things: the situation, the method of damage delivery, the creature type and my mood. Sometimes a do lots of description and sometimes I do very little. Regardless of my description, I try to make sure the players know if they actual delivered damage or just missed outright.

I've never had anyone at my table complain, so I must be doing something right.

 

[Celebrim]

The biggest issue here is that folks insist there can only ever be one narration.

So damage must include a bit of meat damage, in order to follow healing rules and that sort of thing.

Fortunately for me, I don’t see that need.

I feel, for the reasons that I outlined, that there is only one consistent narration with respect to hit points - although I also concede that if your throw 4e in the mix with its very different game system from the rest of D&D, that contention gets harder to justify.

But - and this is the important point - consistency is an aesthetic choice, and whether or not your game should be consistent is entirely subjective.

So if you want to forgo certain aesthetics, you are perfectly free to use inconsistent narration or even no narration at all. I'm sure most tables skip narration as pointless some or much of the time, simply to speed play and avoid turning narration into a chore where you have to think something up even though this is, for example, the 18th time someone has hacked into a juju zombie with an edged weapon so far in this combat, or the 16th time a juju zombie has landed a hit on a PC in response.

In the past, when this topic has come up, people with disagreeing opinions have I think spent too much time trying to convince each other that their way was more consistent than another way, resulting in a lot of exaggeration by both sides, since to be frank while I think you can have consistent narration with hit points, if consistency was among your highest aesthetic goals you probably would use a more realistic wound system. The real argument in my opinion isn't over which side is most consistent. The real argument in my opinion is over how much you should care. And if you phrase the argument in this latter manner rather than the former, you no longer have to be judging the other side, or contorting your own logic to try to pretend to vastly more consistency than you actually have because you are afraid that if it turns out your are less consistent than the other guy, that you are somehow wrong. It's perfectly fine to say, "You know, my table just doesn't care that much. It's a game."

 

[DEFCON 1]

"Hit points" are the number of hits of a joint you need to take because you finally realize while playing that "None of this stuff really matters, man! At zero bad guy fall down go boom!"