D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?

[Hussar]

My point is the post how narration in no way is related to what the game is telling you. Which rolls right back to the heart of all the hp = meat discussions.

 

[Cadence]

Let me spin it around.

I declare that the 5 HP of damage I took missed me but caused me some concern.

Prove me wrong. After all, if the system has meaning in universe, then you should easily be able to tell me that I'm wrong.

But, you can't. Heck, I declare that I lose 5 HP because I stepped back and turned my ankle. You still can't prove me wrong.

If there is a successful attack roll for 5hp (colloquially known as a successful to hit roll for 5hp, or "hit for 5"), then it seems pretty cool to me for whoever is narrating it to do so in a whole bunch of ways. "Dodging the blow causes me to step back out of the way and sprain my ankle for 5 hp", or "the constant parrying has started to wear me down and worry me for 5hp". HP mean those things just as much as they mean cuts and bruises. I'd also take no narration and leaving it ambiguous until needed too.

Heck, I declare that glint of your sword reflected sunlight in my eyes, causing my 5 HP of damage.

Nothing I'm saying here can be gainsayed by the mechanics of the game.

There are lots of things the mechanics don't stop one from doing. "As the mage casts fireball at me I hold up the roll of tissue paper and say, brrr, that's cold, what kind of fake fire was that. It didn't even burn the tissue paper or hurt me."

Similarly, one presumably wouldn't take the first six "hits for 5" by saying they sprained both ankles and both wrists and twisted their neck and got really, really tired out, but never got a scratch.

Or, if told "the orc hits for five" I can't picture someone repeatedly snarkily beginning their narration with, "the orc didn't 'hit' he missed", acting like they don't understand how the term is used colloquially, or trying to make the DM say "succeeded on their attack roll" instead of "hit".

I think anyone I've ever played with would quickly find a person who did those things to be an unbearable donkey <to quote Gordon Ramsay> and stop playing with them.

 

[Cadence]

Very good narration.

Now, connect any of that to the actual mechanics. How do you know your blade slipped past and didn't bang off his knee?

In that post I didn't. I was narrating it there as all of them with the or in. I know something from the big list of possibilities happened and caused 5 hp. But unless it was relevant to describe it isn't needed.

You even flat out admit that you don't actually know - "the lens is cloudy, who can say?"

If I wanted to know I'd go play Phoenix command. Every game discretizes and combines concepts at some point. Damage into HP is one of those things in D&D.

All very pretty, but, completely divorced from what the game is telling you. IOW, 100% your own fabrication to justify things after the fact but not supported in any way by the actual mechanics.

The game explicitly says hit points combine a bunch of things (doesn't it?). I said when someone takes damage some unspecified combination of stuff related to those things must have happened to them but we don't focus on it. How is that not supported by the rules?

 

[Guest 7034872]

If there is a successful attack roll for 5hp (colloquially known as a successful to hit roll for 5hp, or "hit for 5"), then it seems pretty cool to me for whoever is narrating it to do so in a whole bunch of ways. "Dodging the blow causes me to step back out of the way and sprain my ankle for 5 hp", or "the constant parrying has started to wear me down and worry me for 5hp". HP mean those things just as much as they mean cuts and bruises. I'd also take no narration and leaving it ambiguous until needed too.

I agree, and there's a corollary to this when it comes to "misses": unless the player rolls a nat 1, I prefer never to say "You whiffed it, dude." Instead, I'll narrate it as "Your crossbow bolt streaks through the morning fog to hit the orc squarely in her stomach, but she raises her shield upon seeing you aim at her and the bolt just lodges into it." Technically, it's still a miss, but to the player it isn't at all the same thing as "You whiffed it, dude. Okay, it's Chuck's go now."

There are lots of things the mechanics don't stop one from doing. "As the mage casts fireball at me I hold up the roll of tissue paper and say, brrr, that's cold, what kind of fake fire was that. It didn't even burn the tissue paper or hurt me."

Right. One thing I really like doing is letting players narrate how some of these things go: putting them in charge of the story elements surrounding their immediate actions yields a lot of buy-in. I'll specify success or failure, but I like leaving a good chunk of description up to them.

Or, if told "the orc hits for five" I can't picture someone repeatedly snarkily beginning their narration with, "the orc didn't 'hit' he missed", acting like they don't understand how the term is used colloquially, or trying to make the DM say "succeeded on their attack roll" instead of "hit".

That is someone who would never, ever get invited back to my table.

My point is the post how narration in no way is related to what the game is telling you. Which rolls right back to the heart of all the hp = meat discussions.

I dig that: HP isn't purely meat, sure. It does involve meat, but at the end of the day the way both HP and meat get depicted in the game don't really fit each other or the worlds of anatomy and biology. Making things seem to fit nonetheless is the work I'm most interested in, because that's what successfully suspends disbelief.

 

[Cadence]

My point is the post how narration in no way is related to what the game is telling you. Which rolls right back to the heart of all the hp = meat discussions.

Has anyone said HP are entirely meat as opposed to HP are meat and a bunch of other stuff?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Now the players do not need to stop for any narratively meaningful period of time and don't face any meaningful risk stopping wherever they happen to be. Magic items were expected and required. By the system. That was critical for why influence over monitary rewards was a way to project soft power in the past. Now in modern d&d gold has no value and there is no need for players to buy anything but basic armor & a magic weapon if they do not find one. Your attempts at vilification fall flat by missing the actual application & targeting random windmills as giants .. I have no idea what you think eminent domain spies to but certainly not anything we've been discussing.

Gold didn't have any particular meaning in half the lifespan of the game; in OD&D I saw tons of characters buying random things with it because they had nothing to do with it that was actually relevant to the game in-play. It wasn't like in the early days most GMs would let you buy magic items beyond the occasional potion or scroll anyway.

My point about eminent domain was that if you essentially had to use magic item availability to steer people, there was nothing "soft" about that; it was flat out saying "the only thing besides levels that matter to you in this game are entirely in my control and you'll either do what I want or not get them." That's not "soft".

 

[Thomas Shey]

All very pretty, but, completely divorced from what the game is telling you. IOW, 100% your own fabrication to justify things after the fact but not supported in any way by the actual mechanics.

Yeah, there's no actual connection with what the narration is and what the mechanical result is; you could narrate it in likely a half dozen different ways.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Let me spin it around.

I declare that the 5 HP of damage I took missed me but caused me some concern. Prove me wrong. After all, if the system has meaning in universe, then you should easily be able to tell me that I'm wrong.

At least in some incarnation, that 5 points could have delivered poison. That's why I maintain all hit point damage must involve some injury, even if its minuscule.

 

[Thomas Shey]

He'll correct me, but I think Cadence's point is that half of the game is narration. The narration and the mechanics only rarely really line up neatly, but suspension of disbelief requires a lot more good narration than it ever does clever mechanics.

That doesn't make the mechanics pretty heavily disconnected from the narrative here, and that absolutely doesn't have to be true; I can probably reference a dozen games that give you more to work with than D&D in that regard.

 

[Guest 7034872]

That doesn't make the mechanics pretty heavily disconnected from the narrative here, and that absolutely doesn't have to be true; I can probably reference a dozen games that give you more to work with than D&D in that regard.

I don't think I understand your complaint yet. What now?