Not sure if this has been mentioned, but everything changes when regeneratiom and fast healing are involved. Suddenly, every attack is then doing meat damage.
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D&D 5E Hp as meat and abstraction
- Thread starter Lokiare
- Start date
jodyjohnson
Adventurer
Some thought regarding Genre sim from movies:
In a fist fight almost every blow hits.
In a sword fight almost every blow gets blocked or parried.
Like Hong Kong cinema where punches and kicks land with regularity but when they grab weapons it's all block, parry, parry, block, evade.
Or Storm Troopers vs. Rebel soldiers - deadly accurate, as opposed to Storm Troopers versus Named characters - no hits, all errs.
I like to add Red Shirts to the party as genre enforcement. 1e and the band of men-at-arms, retainers, and mercenaries has its value.
In a fist fight almost every blow hits.
In a sword fight almost every blow gets blocked or parried.
Like Hong Kong cinema where punches and kicks land with regularity but when they grab weapons it's all block, parry, parry, block, evade.
Or Storm Troopers vs. Rebel soldiers - deadly accurate, as opposed to Storm Troopers versus Named characters - no hits, all errs.
I like to add Red Shirts to the party as genre enforcement. 1e and the band of men-at-arms, retainers, and mercenaries has its value.
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
Is it? I agree it implies some portion is meat damage, but is it all meat damage or even most?
This implies you "get more meat" as you gain levels, and you're able to survive wading through lava because you "have more meat".
Regeneration and fast healing can be just as easily you re-gaining all those non-meat parts that make up hit points.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
The idea of "hit points as meat" has never been the position of anyone who doesn't like the "hit points as an abstraction for combat-worthiness" idea, at least that I've heard - the only people postulating that "hit points equal meat" are the ones using it as a (misrepresentative) way of saying why it's a bad idea.
To be more accurate, the idea about hit points as being tied to physicality is that "hit point loss equals physical damage" (and, conversely, that hit point restoration is physical healing). The fact that you gain more hit points over time has nothing to do with the idea that you've gained greater physical mass - it's that now the damage scaling involved with measuring how serious X hit points' worth of damage is is on a larger scale now. A wound that would have been a large portion of your hit points would have been a serious injury, whereas now it's considered to be a comparatively smaller injury.
For those who remember back a few editions ago, the idea that greater hit points meant that you could make the same X points of damage be a smaller overall wound than it would have been a few levels back used to be called "rolling with the blows."
Obviously, there are places where the idea doesn't work - hence the "swimming in lava" example - but these were corner-cases that didn't subtract very much from the overall viability of the idea. It wasn't a perfect idea, but it was good enough to be serviceable.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Yes. The 3e terminology "touch AC" makes perfect sense. If you roll less than the touch AC, you fail to touch the target. If you roll higher than the touch AC but lower than the full AC, your blow makes some contact but is ineffectual due to the target's armor or other defenses. Enabling damage on an attack that hits the touch AC is simply introducing the variable degrees of success commonly found with skills.
We've never been given that example by WotC. It's not a blanket yes that I'm giving; such a mechanic could certainly be implemented poorly, but I think it could also be done well. "Damage on a ricochet" has the virtue of still allowing for the possibility of the attacker failing completely, which avoids most of the plausibility and gameplay issues associated with true DoaM.
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
Were they corner cases? You can jump off the cliff and survive just fine. A dragon can bite you, critically even so that there is not question it's teeth are chomping on your head, and you can be relatively fine from it. You can be cut a hundred times by a sword and still be OK. You can simply wade into an army of orcs, and they can all hit you, and you can still be fine from it. You can trigger an acid trap and be fine (though it would have instantly killed you at lower levels). Poison? Disease? The same ones that would have killed you at first level are meaningless at high levels.
It wasn't corner cases, it was almost anything at high levels that brought this issue up. The "hit points as purely meat" simply didn't make sense as you got to high levels. And it was (and remains) a common complaint of high level play in prior editions. Believability suffers as hit points get to extremes.
And I don't mean to imply the opposite was acceptable either. Obviously, if you die from a dragon biting your head, it's not simply because the dragon made you fatigued and unlucky and less divinely inspired or whatever. Obviously, you took real physical damage. A lot of it.
But, it's got to be some combination if you're going to persuade a majority of people to buy the concept. It's got to be some level of abstraction.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Yes, they were.
The only times the idea didn't work was when it was completely implausible that there was no way that you could move (or otherwise react) in a way that would dampen the amount of damage you'd hit. You can spread out to try and catch more air to slow your fall and/or land on your feet as opposed to your head. You can twist so that the dragon bites your arm rather than your neck. You can take a hundred flesh wounds from a sword before the combined tissue damage is enough to fell you, etc.
You didn't fall off hundred-foot high cliffs or take a dip in lava in every combat. In fact, you almost certainly only had that come up a handful of times over the course of a campaign. These gaps were simply not put front and center enough to ruin suspension of disbelief.
This paragraph has a number of problems. It presumes that this was "almost anything" at high levels, without citing examples. It keeps on using the "hit points as pure meat" option when I just laid out why that was a mistaken way to look at it. It says that this was a "common complaint" without citing any sources - I can hold that it was a rare complaint from a vocal minority and be just as right if we're going to just presume that we're each speaking for the crowd as a whole.
Finally, the issue of "hit point extremes" is, to me, only a problem when you demand that simulationism be taken as far as can possibly be imagined. At some point you have to say that there are places where the idea doesn't work (e.g. the swimming in lava thing) but they're rare enough that it's not a big deal. The problem with things like "missed sword swings killing you" doesn't meet that level of rarity, meaning that they come up again and again, and so disbelief can no longer be suspended under a repeated assault.
Except that's clearly not true, since someone can yell at you and suddenly those hit points are back.
I don't disagree that it's an abstraction, just with the characterization of the abstraction. I think that the best way to go about that is to assign your fantasy character action hero-levels of personal physical resiliance, rather than saying that there's an unspecified mixture of non-physical erosion of combat effectiveness and physical damage being represented by the same pool of hit points.
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Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
I cited examples. You then cut most of those examples out, and responded that I didn't cite examples.
I am going to assume you didn't do that in bad faith and just accidentally cut the part and didn't read it. So, is that what happened?
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I admit that I truncated your first paragraph in my reply; that said, I still responded to most of your first paragraph's examples in the first paragraph of my reply. My statement about you not providing examples was specifically referring to your second paragraph's saying how the issue came up a lot at higher levels without mentioning specifically (or uniquely) high-level examples (hence why I said "this paragraph"). That said, I'll address the ones from your first paragraph that I did overlook.
Mistwell said:
The acid trap thing isn't an issue - before it would have gotten you in the face, now it's just grazing you on the arm since you moved quickly enough. Likewise, poison and disease dealt ability damage, not hit point damage, and so had the potential to be just as deadly across all levels (though your saving throws - that is, your ability to resist them, did go up), and hence wasn't a hit point issue.
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