D&D 5E Hp as meat and abstraction

[Jeff Carlsen]

Double post. See following.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Huh? Sorry if I missed it, but are you talking about a specific edition of D&D? I don't recall any of them using this assumption, even AD&D with it's one minute rounds.

It's implied in all editions by the description of combat turns, which while adjudicated in sequence, supposedly happen simultaneously. Each attack action is a series of jabs, feints, blocks, parries, and riposts. Because the attacks of both the fighter and the goblin are described as such, and they're described as happening roughly simultaneously, in most case we have to conclude that both attack rolls represent the combined combat.

 

[Neonchameleon]

For me, HP is my injury mechanic.

A guy who hits you with a sword isn't hurting your feelings, he's hurting your body. But I can't be arsed to try and figure out exactly how and why he's hurting your body, so I figure this works okay: I reduce a pool of points you have. These can be thought of as your "reasons I don't die from getting hit with a sword" points. What, exactly, that means, is kind of up to you and me in the moment, but the salient fact of the fiction is that you've been hit with a sword, so it is going to cause some bodily harm. Someone with fewer of these points WOULD die from getting hit with the sword.

So if you take damage, you take some bodily injury. How severe that injury is depends on how much HP you've got left after the fact. Is it NONE? The injury is life-threatening. Is it SOME? The injury is not life-threatening. But the precise nature of the injury doesn't matter to me. Say it's a broken leg. Say your arm's off. Say it's some bruises. Say it's some internal hemorrhaging. Whatever makes sense to you and me and everyone else works. The more badass your idea of your character is, the more he's going to be able to continue fighting with his guts as an ascot.

Now to me this makes no sense at all. "Your arm is off". There is not only no allowance for this in the mechanics, there is a distinct absence of allowance for this. You have two functional arms.

Under a hit point model unless you drop below zero you can never be significantly more beaten up than Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or John McClane in Die Hard (not counting the broken glass on the floor). The mechanics are clear that you are not functionally impeded and you never need the Regeneration spell to recover hit points. Indeed the Regeneration spell, by its presence in the core rules, defines most wounds as not needing such healing. As for recovery times? The very longest recoveries in hit points in any edition of D&D (4 weeks) is about as long as it takes a marathon runner to return to race fitness.

Which is the takeaway, here: HP is the only mechanic I need to model bodily injury. Having a broken leg or a sucking chest wound or a cosmetic slice or a meaty chunk taken out of your leg isn't something I need a lot of detailed rules about. You're down HP.

But you're still just peachy. You can run as fast as you could. You can hit as hard as you could. You're in no practical pain and able to dive out of the way of spells as well as you could. On 1hp you are every bit as capable as you were at full hp other than at taking direct damage. As such I find hit points an epic fail for modelling injury - if they were tied to injury levels and a death spiral as in GURPS or WoD things would be different. But we know one thing to be true. As long as you have at least one hit point you have not taken and wounds that slow you down - in other words you have taken no serious wounds.

Damage on a miss doesn't bug me in that context, because a miss is just an attack that doesn't do physical damage. Maybe Barry's attacks ALWAYS do physical damage, no matter how agile or well-armored the target is.

For me strength damage on a miss when armour is deflection is simple. The blow that hit the armour and didn't penetrate, but still was hard enough to bruise you underneath. Or the blow you parried - but was hard enough to leave your sword arm ringing. It's a beatdown rather than finesse approach.

 

[sheadunne]

Non-magical DoaM mechanics have existed in D&D since at least 2007 and in Pathfinder since at least 2011 (it's entirely possible it existed before and I'm just not familiar with it). If one includes mechanics that allow a miss to be treated as a hit, it's been around longer (if a dice roll indicates a miss and an ability makes it a hit, is that different than an ability that makes a miss have the same effects as a hit, just without calling it a hit?). I'd be a bit surprised if 5e doesn't follow the trend. The language of hit and miss are just as abstract as HP and damage are and there's no reason not to exploit that abstraction to make interesting and fun mechanics for people to play with.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

First off, no it isn't. Surviving fifteen marginal sword blows is pretty ridiculous, but it's not the same thing as causing harm to a person, by making an attack with your weapon, without actually touching them.

"Without actually touching them" is the point I don't buy. If this is really the case, if the sword is cutting through the air, then please explain the function of armour. The same blow, which goes harmlessly by the target without touching it, would have hit the same target if it hadn't don his armour? So wearing armor makes you somehow ... smaller?

So could you live with DoaM, if the blow would have been successful without the target's armour?

Appaently, our understanding of the term "miss" as used in the context of the D&D combat rules differs somewhat.

The problem with D&D's very abstract system is that no explanation whatsoever will give satisfying answers to all players and all possible questions and corner cases. Of course each of us has situations we can live with, situationas where we grind our teeth, and situations where we house rule our way out of the mess. And this is roleplaying.

 

[Alzrius]

Or you know... the combat takes such a toll on an individual that the fatigue eventually takes over and the person falls unconscious due to the fatigue. And when that person falls, his head hits a rock and begins bleeding. Or do you not believe people can die from fatigue? Or that people don't hurt themselves (and possibly die) when they faint or fall unconscious?

No, I just don't believe that that fatigue is caused by somebody hitting them - or not-hitting them - in a fight, and nothing else (like, say, when they swing their own sword).

Are the odds of that happening any better or worse that getting hit with a battleaxe 15 times and not dying? To me, they are both so implausible that picking nits is a waste of my time.

The odds of somebody falling unconscious from how many times they aren't hit in battle is far and away less plausible than them dodging and twisting enough that most of the wounds are comparatively minor (certainly, this is an idea that's more palatable thanks to a lot of action movies, which seem to have the hero absorbing a ridiculously large amount of damage without it seriously impacting his combat abilities - as compared to the number of movies which have the hero falling unconscious in battle because he's so tired from the bad guy's missed punches).

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, as far as "all playing under one roof" goes, I think HP needs to always be at least a little meat -- under typical D&D conditions, that last hit will always risk your death, so something that causes damage *has* to be at least potentially deadly. That last 1 hp? Definitely meat. If someone insults your morale or steals your luck and you wind up at risk of death, it's clear that there was some physical injury going on. However much of the rest of the HP needs to be meat is probably up to different tables, and in order to support the two "extremes" of the continuum, the game need only avoid explicit morale-based healing and explicit injury-based damage (except as optional modules). The healing rate can be defined as flexible: a "short rest" might mean 5 minutes, 8 hours, one week, a month....and those are different places on the contiuum of "realistic injury" --> "who cares?"

"Your arm is off". There is not only no allowance for this in the mechanics, there is a distinct absence of allowance for this. You have two functional arms.

I don't require a mechanical representation of this beyond "you are not at full HP." In fact, I'm actively against such a mechanical representation in most of my games because uuuuuuuuugh, fiddly little injury mechanical modifier blah.

Because if you are a big damn hero and we are playing a game of absurd cartoonish hyper-violence where the narration of "your arm just came off" is something that would happen, the fact that your arm just got ripped off means doodley-squat to how adequately you perform all your other actions. Guess your two-weapon wielding ranger puts his sword hilt in his teeth and continues to rock hard. That missing arm just makes you less able to defend yourself against the next attack (which is why you're closer to 0 hp).

No mechanical representation necessary or desired. Quite the opposite, mechanical representation of that missing arm would injure the cartoonish hyper-violence wahoo awesomeness.

Of course, if that's not the tone I want, that's not the narration I use. 8 points of damage could be "your arm's off" or it could be "scratched up" or it could be "bleeding a little" or it could be "a slow, seeping wound" or it could be whatever injury makes sense in the moment for me and the people I'm playing with. If HP model injury, those injuries need not necessarily be severe. It can be all nicks and scratches and bruises and mild concussions until you hit 0 hp (or even then, sometimes!).

And in no case do I need or want any rules beyond HP for any of that.

But you're still just peachy. You can run as fast as you could. You can hit as hard as you could. You're in no practical pain and able to dive out of the way of spells as well as you could. On 1hp you are every bit as capable as you were at full hp other than at taking direct damage

You're a badass fantasy hero. If the only weakness you suffer after taking some injury is a susceptibility to more serious future injuries...sounds good to me.

For me strength damage on a miss when armour is deflection is simple. The blow that hit the armour and didn't penetrate, but still was hard enough to bruise you underneath. Or the blow you parried - but was hard enough to leave your sword arm ringing. It's a beatdown rather than finesse approach.

Totally. Damage on a miss doesn't destroy HP as injury for me.

 

[DEFCON 1]

(certainly, this is an idea that's more palatable thanks to a lot of action movies, which seem to have the hero absorbing a ridiculously large amount of damage without it seriously impacting his combat abilities - as compared to the number of movies which have the hero falling unconscious in battle because he's so tired from the bad guy's missed punches).

Yeah... if you have to look to "action movies" to illustrate your fight plausibility... I think you're proving my point about absurdity.

 

[Alzrius]

Yeah... if you have to look to "action movies" to illustrate your fight plausibility... I think you're proving my point about absurdity.

If I can point to illustrations of my fight plausibility as being well-represented in mass media, whereas yours is too out there even for said media, I'm definitely proving a point about your stance and absurdity...but not the one you seem to think.

 

[darjr]

Fred Hicks posted a neat summary about DoaM from Rob Donaghue that I think bears consideration in all this discussion.