How do you reconcile hit points?

[Libramarian]

Nope. Co-opting some words and phrases more commonly used by those attacking 4E, but I do truly believe that bad mechanics are detrimental to roleplaying, that 4E has much better mechanics than any other edition (including its healing mechanics), and thus is more amenable to roleplaying.

Fair enough.

I have a different interpretation, high level adventurers actually do take more physical damage before they are incapacitated.
Lets take a simple example, blocking a hook to the head. (for this example disregarding all other different and improvable ways such as evading, slipping in, using a shield, back flips etc)
An inexperienced combatant will block with his face, the fight netting him a broken nose and a concision.
An (more) experienced will be using his hands, forearms, shoulders (may be even finding away to use his feet if skilled enough) by the time he is finally defeated he will have several of the following: jammed fingers, broken and dislocated bones, torn ligaments and will look like he had been falling on his face down a ravine (lots of bruises and cuts) since it would likely take several hits thanks to a combination of rolling with the punches and thicker neck muscles. It would take significantly more time to recover.
In other words the difference between 1st round K.O. in an armature and 12th round K.O. in a title match.

Edit: Forgot to add, some of the damage may be psychological (such as developing punch shyness) Once the fighter is a bad ass and he knows it, it may take time to recover after having his stuffing beat out of him)

Yup, this.

 

[Orius]

I reconcile it by telling myself it's a game abstration and then I stop worrying about it.

As for the scaling issue, was that really a big problem pre-3e? In AD&D, characters stopped adding Hit Dice around name level and only gained a small number of fixed hp/level afterwards. Plus PCs and enemies had smaller hp totals in earlier editions too, 3e hp totals are pretty big in comparison. And 3e has spell caps which didn't always exist in the past; I don't remember if the Cure X Wounds spells had caps (and that's just 2e, not 1e), but Heal didn't. In 3e Heal capped at 150 hp, when a fighter or barbarian could have a great deal more than that.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

THIS. It's an abstract game mechanic to avoid other, more complex systems or make hitting feel pointless though high damage reduction.

Agree with this bit ...

It's no different than "spell slots" or any other game mechanic, I mean what is really stopping the wizard from casting high level spells all the time other than the game says "NO"?

Really disagree with this. It's very different. I want a game to be as close to the real world as possible, except for the specific things the game is about that we require a difference. Every difference from the real world requires effort to take into consideration onto the game, so I don't want to do it without a compelling reason. (Sidenote: this is why I think statements like "If you can accept dragons why can't you accept hit point?" are really dumb)

So D&D is about fighting fantastic monsters, and I'm okay with unrealistic monsters. D&D is about magic, so I'm okay with magic. And we don't have any real-world magic to model game effects on, so we're free to make it work however we want.

But we do have a fair understanding of how real world injuries happen. Unless D&D is intentionally about people with wacky magic health (which I don't think it is) I'd like health and injuries to be realistic. As a result, I strongly dislike the hit point mechanic.

However ... hit points are such a fundamental part of D&D that it's impossible to take them out and still have the game feel like D&D. When I want a D&D experience, I grit my teeth and put up with them. Generally though I prefer to play a game with a less wacky approach to injuries.

 

[delericho]

A Fighter's body isn't really 2.5 times harder to hurt than a Wizard's, according to most theories of the game. And a 10th level Fighter's body isn't really 25 times harder to hurt than a 1st level Wizards either. He's just learned to roll with the punches, to tough it out.

A sword blow that cuts the commoner nearly in half becomes a minor bruise or shallow gash on the hardened veteran because he knows how to move, how to turn the edge or give with the blow, how to minimize damage. The sword blow was just as good in either case, but the fighter managed to turn what should have been a disemboweling strike into a mere flesh wound.

This is largely how I view it. When a character takes damage, even if it is only a single hit point, that character has suffered some amount of 'real' damage - even if it's only a scratch. However...

A deep cut on the Wizard represents two, maybe three hit points of damage. A cut of equal severity on the fighter represents somewhere between fifty and seventy five hit points.

This isn't how I view it.

IMC, losing a greater number of hit points does not imply that you're more seriously wounded, whether that's in absolute terms or as a percentage of the whole.

(The exception to this is if an attack kills a character outright, in which case you can go to town on the graphic descriptions - since only very powerful magic can bring them back, it doesn't matter if they were impaled, beheaded, pulped, or whatever.)

So those 2-3 hit points on the Wizard probably is not a deep cut, and nor is the 50-75 hit points on the Fighter. In both cases, it's just some measure of damage - and at worst, a wound that will heal by itself if left untended.

The paradox is that the 10th level fighter is also 25 times harder to heal than the 1st level Wizard.

One is healed casually with Cure Light, while the other will take several castings of Cure Critical.

Yes, there is a problem with the healing rules in pre-4e versions of the game. Ideally, each character should have a calculated "healing value" that stands at some percentage of their total hit points, and whenever they receive healing they then gain a number of hit points calculated from that "healing value". Thus, if the Fighter has 100 hit points and the Wizard 20, a cure light wounds might restore 25 points of damage to the Fighter and 5 to the Wizard.

Basically, that's part of the "Healing Surge" notion from 4e. And not one I really have a problem with - I didn't like the Surges themselves, but the notion of a "Surge Value" wasn't a bad one.

(There is, however, a problem with this at low levels - suddenly the 1st level Cleric can no longer provide the 1st level Fighter with an almost-complete heal with a single CLW. That has a significant impact on how many encounters the party can get through in a day, which may well be undesirable.)

 

[Sunseeker]

Really disagree with this. It's very different. I want a game to be as close to the real world as possible, except for the specific things the game is about that we require a difference. Every difference from the real world requires effort to take into consideration onto the game, so I don't want to do it without a compelling reason. (Sidenote: this is why I think statements like "If you can accept dragons why can't you accept hit point?" are really dumb)

If I want the real world, I'll go to work.

So D&D is about fighting fantastic monsters, and I'm okay with unrealistic monsters. D&D is about magic, so I'm okay with magic. And we don't have any real-world magic to model game effects on, so we're free to make it work however we want.

But we do have a fair understanding of how real world injuries happen. Unless D&D is intentionally about people with wacky magic health (which I don't think it is) I'd like health and injuries to be realistic. As a result, I strongly dislike the hit point mechanic.

However ... hit points are such a fundamental part of D&D that it's impossible to take them out and still have the game feel like D&D. When I want a D&D experience, I grit my teeth and put up with them. Generally though I prefer to play a game with a less wacky approach to injuries.

D&D nas never ever(bear with me) ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER modeled in-game injury as real-world injuries. The fact that some 6 editions and innumerable clones later this is still being a sticking point is just asinine. The simple fact is that even those systems which attempt to model real injuries(and I've played some) stop at the point where it becomes unreasonably burdensome on the play experience. The number of sub-systems you would actually require in order to model real-world effects on the body of continuous strain and harm is HUGE and is no more accurately represented by taking on a wounds system, a body-parts system, a fatigue system and half a dozen other things.

 

[Kannik]

I "reconciled" it by sticking to this quote from the 1e PHB:

Each character has a varying number of hit points, just as monsters do. These hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors. A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being killed. let us suppose that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This is the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The same holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.

... and then by taking in stride the weird effect that a tough fighter took longer to "recover to full" than the spindly mage. (Really, though, it just showed that fighters were all poets on the inside, delicate personages who were troubled by the violent path they took, and so it took a while for them to be able to be as strong of resolve as the mage, who was really must have sold their soul for all that arcane power, and so while they were believed to be the softer type they really were vacuous shells of arrogance )

Humour aside, as a game mechanic I just took what it did for the reason it did. As was also said in the 1e DMG:

It is important to keep in mind that, after all is said and done, ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a game. Because it is a game, certain things which seem "unrealistic" or simply unnecessary are integral to the system.

(all that said I much prefer % based healing as a way to bridge that oddity gap)

peace,

Kannik

 

[N'raac]

While percentage based healing sounds great in theory, it has practical issues. For Cure Light Wounds to be useful at low levels, it becomes a pretty awesome spell at high levels. 20% of max hit points has been thrown around a lot for CLW. So it will take 5 CLW's to heal a 10 hp L1 character fully from 0 hp? That seems like a lot of resources.

It won't seem like very much at 15th level, though. 5 first level spells (or 5 shots off the CLW wand - cost of 75 gp) to heal the downed 18 CON barbarian back to full health? Cheap.

And now we need to go through all the other spells. If CLW cures 20%, then Moderate must be 40%, Serious 60%, Critical 80% and Heal goes back to 100%, I assume. Pretty powerful healing at those higher levels, compared to the old model where the healing spells didn't really keep up with the hp growth.

 

[dkyle]

While percentage based healing sounds great in theory, it has practical issues. For Cure Light Wounds to be useful at low levels, it becomes a pretty awesome spell at high levels. 20% of max hit points has been thrown around a lot for CLW. So it will take 5 CLW's to heal a 10 hp L1 character fully from 0 hp? That seems like a lot of resources.

It won't seem like very much at 15th level, though. 5 first level spells (or 5 shots off the CLW wand - cost of 75 gp) to heal the downed 18 CON barbarian back to full health? Cheap.

And now we need to go through all the other spells. If CLW cures 20%, then Moderate must be 40%, Serious 60%, Critical 80% and Heal goes back to 100%, I assume. Pretty powerful healing at those higher levels, compared to the old model where the healing spells didn't really keep up with the hp growth.

You could scale spell healing by number of the target's hit dice. That at least fixes Fighters being harder to heal than Wizards. It makes some sense that CLW isn't so good at healing high level characters.

Or you could just do it like 4E does it, which works quite well.


Also, CLW wands were a complete and utter failure of design. They don't belong anywhere near Next.

 

[Orius]

While percentage based healing sounds great in theory, it has practical issues. For Cure Light Wounds to be useful at low levels, it becomes a pretty awesome spell at high levels. 20% of max hit points has been thrown around a lot for CLW. So it will take 5 CLW's to heal a 10 hp L1 character fully from 0 hp? That seems like a lot of resources.

It won't seem like very much at 15th level, though. 5 first level spells (or 5 shots off the CLW wand - cost of 75 gp) to heal the downed 18 CON barbarian back to full health? Cheap.

You could do both. CLW could go back to the old standard of 1d8+1/level capped at 1d8+5 which is sufficient for low level adventuring. Cure Serious and Cure Critical could do percentages, and Heal is full curing.

 

[winemaker81]

IMC hit points have absolutely nothing to do with how much damage you can take, they represent your ability to avoid damage. You don't take 12 points of damage from an ax blow, you expend 12 hit points to avoid the ax. With that concept, increasing hit points as you go up in level makes complete sense.

In general I don't over think hit points. As someone stated, it's just an abstract game mechanic. That said, this idea is a good one.