D&D 5E I just don't buy the reasoning behind "damage on a miss".

[Herschel]

I don't believe I stated what my understanding of hit points was. My point was that you're not going to get everyone to agree on what they are.

Pages and pages of arguing with no side being convinced by the other has demonstrated that well enough I think.

Yet all the evidence written in books by the designers says you're misinterpreting them. That's not to say you can't houserule/mod the game for HP to be "meat", far from it, but claiming they are "meat" by default is rather silly when everything written says they're not "meat points".

Expecting the game mechanics to directly account for all the different houserules/mods isn't realistic. Adding modules and sidebars for some may be.

 

[Wicht]

One thing I have never quite figured out about the whole hp thing...

If hp's don't primarily represent physical damage then why does it take a more powerful cleric to heal the wounds of the higher level injuries. If its mainly being "winded" then does a 3rd level healing spell represent that the higher level fighter with more hp loss needs greater divine "juice" to get his breath back than the young, inexperienced fighter? And why doesn't running reduce your hp? Or if it represents luck, then why is "regeneration" useful? Should it be "get your luck back" instead of regeneration. It seems to me that while hp can partially model luck, and "wind," the spells demonstrate that the default assumption has always been that hps mostly model health and physical wholeness and that higher level types are just able to press through more pain than lower level types.

This may not be representative of 4e but it seems pretty much true for every edition before.

 

[Halivar]

One thing I have never quite figured out about the whole hp thing...

If hp's don't primarily represent physical damage then why does it take a more powerful cleric to heal the wounds of the higher level injuries.

...

This may not be representative of 4e but it seems pretty much true for every edition before.

The HP convention is a poor model for any of the narrative paradigms being advanced in this thread. When invented, it was a simple abstract concept, easy to pick up, that falls apart under thorough simulation or logical narrative.

But, it's D&D, and we are making the best of what we've inherited.

 

[Herschel]

The HP convention is a poor model for any of the narrative paradigms being advanced in this thread. When invented, it was a simple abstract concept, easy to pick up, that falls apart under thorough simulation or logical narrative.

But, it's D&D, and we are making the best of what we've inherited.

Yep, and after everything written about it how anybody fails to understand this defies logic.

 

[bogmad]

Again, I'm not arguing that hit points equal meat. I know they don't. I'm well aware hit points can represent a whole number of different things.

A "hit" is a little more concrete of a term I think.

I'm coming to see that my biggest problem with "damage on a miss" is that it muddies the whole issue of what we agree a "hit" is. Nearly every defense of GWF has fallen back to a fighter being unable to NOT CONNECT (i.e. miss) with at least a small glancing blow. That's about as much arguing for HP as meat as I am, (which, again, I'm not). Is it a damage on a miss mechanic, or an auto-hit mechanic?

The few explanations of GWF actually doing damage on a total whiff of a miss have been unsatisfactory to me from a narrative standpoint.

 

[Halivar]

The few explanations of GWF actually doing damage on a total whiff of a miss have been unsatisfactory to me from a narrative standpoint.

Part of where the disconnect for us is the word "whiff", and I blame DM's for narrating misses this way (including me). The dude had a 12 AC until he put on fullplate. My 15 attack did not whiff. It went *KLUNK*. In my mental schema, this opens up a realm of possible narrative outcomes.

 

[Manbearcat]

Part of where the disconnect for us is the word "whiff", and I blame DM's for narrating misses this way (including me). The dude had a 12 AC until he put on fullplate. My 15 attack did not whiff. It went *KLUNK*. In my mental schema, this opens up a realm of possible narrative outcomes.

I've attempted to convey this multiple times with the Elder Air Elemental vs the Tarrasque. The Tarrasque is "whiffing" on a miss (not colliding with any object) while the Elder Air Elemental is "making contact" on a miss ("hitting" or "colliding with an object"), its just that the force of the impact is dissipated entirely. Damage on a miss is nothing more than partial dissipation of that force.

 

[Halivar]

And that's fine for an air elemental. I don't know that the RAW needs to deal with very possible special condition a monster might have. If we go down that road, we wind up with a rule system that reads like stereo instructions*. And, as much as I loved the system, the 4E books were written just so.

*with apologies to Beetlejuice.

 

[Wicht]

The HP convention is a poor model for any of the narrative paradigms being advanced in this thread.

Its always worked pretty well for me in modeling small or large wounds, depending. Not in a strictly medical sense, but in the narrative sense of glancing blows, stabs, claws and teeth ripping into flesh, and there being bleeding. Which then makes things like regeneration and cure moderate wounds make sense. I'm not sure how you can argue it does a poor job modeling this, when in fact, it has done pretty serviceable for me for years.

 

[Halivar]

For full transparency: I am okay with this rule, but I think it could have been written better. They erred on the side of brevity and simplicity, to a degree I would not have. I would have done something like this:

If you hit, you get a bonus 50% STR bonus to damage.
If you miss, but WOULD have hit touch AC, you deal STR bonus to damage.
If you would have missed touch AC, you get nothing.

This is far less useful against Dex-high targets, but it solves a lot of issues, IMHO.