Hit Points is an abstraction of many excuses why a character is not dead.
It's "I'm not dead because I blocked/parried/dodged/shoulder roll or You only scratched/bruised/nicked/shook/winded/dizzied me" with a usage limitation.
Sometimes it is a wound, sometimes a scratch, sometimes a harmless parry, sometimes a forced miss with no contact
Depends entirely on the creature hit and what attack it was that hit. On a bulette every hit is a proper wound, on a pixy, only the lone that takes it down. PC's are in the middle, but with large variance.
The halfling rogue mostly aquires fatigue, minor bruises and luck running out, the large in-your-face barbarian starts of with aquiring cuts and goes all the way to arrows and large gashes all over his body.
HP for me is a number that goes up and down. I laugh at my enemies when it goes up and I cry and hide behind the fighter when it goes down.
nothing says that narration between adventurers and monsters needs to be consistent. The ogre could be a big bag of meat while the lithe fighter deftly dodges attacks and eventually wears out leaving an opening for the ogre to smash him to pieces.
Hit Point represent ANYTHING which means that the character should not die and can continue fighting or acting; lack of Hit Point means means that the character should would fall over. It screen time is over!
A character have many hit point if the spectator believe they are important to the story and expect them not to give up easily. If a character is important to the story, it have more Hit Point then an unimportant one.
Blood or not, wound or not is not important to Script Immunity.
I wanted to XP all of these. They capture my sense of what hp are.
Like Raith5 says, they are first and foremost a number that shows who's winning and who's losing. (HeroWars, and pre-revision HeroQuest, used a somewhat, similar very abstract notion for conflict resolution called "action points".)
But when that going-up-and-down has to be translated into an ingame description, Campbell, Gold Roger and Minigiant are spot on: it is entirely contextual. When I ran a behemoth (= 4e dinosaur) with 200-odd hit points, it had gashes, and arrows sticking out of it, and the full works as the PCs fought it (a bit like the Oliphants in the LotR movies). When I ran a high-level mage NPC with a comparable number of hit points, hit point loss represented parrying with her staff, and the wearing down of her magical defences, and the like - no actual physical injury was narrated until she was down to her last handful of hp.
As Ti-bob said, it's about "script immunity" - I gave that NPC wizard had that many hit points because I wanted the confrontation with her to occupy a certain amount of dramatic space in the game.
I voted for the first option in the poll because (i) it's somewhat closer to what I think is typical, especially for a PC, and (ii) it was the only option for "not all hp loss is physical injury", but I could just as well have voted for Peanutbutter Jelly. It seems that's what most of those with whom I agree voted for.
One issue is that, per Gary's 1e definition, hit points for high level characters don't mean exactly the same thing as hit points for most monsters.
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So a hit point and a hit point aren't the same thing. It depends whose hit point it is! Stranger and stranger.
I have always taken this for granted. And Roger Musson talked about it way back when in his White Dwarf article "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". As far as I know, that was the first published wound/vitality system for D&D, and in discussing how it applied to monsters Musson distinguished between "NPCs" like bugbear chieftains, who will use PC-style wound and vitality pools, and creatures like a giant plug, where all there hit points should just be plonked down into the wounds pool, because "a giant slug never dodged or parried anything in it's life" (a rough paraphrase without the actual text in front of me).
If a PC goes down in a fight, there was probably some physical damage in there somewhere, but the physical damage doesn't have to be the first, the middle, or the last chunk of HP loss in the fight. The PC might have received a severe cut early but kept fighting through sheer adrenaline, then later collapsed due to exhaustion and fright.
This is a good point, and makes me think I should have voted for Peanutbutter Jelly.
The trick is not to narrate yourself into a corner.
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Narrate the combat to the capabilites of the group.
Very sound advice.
Until poison gets lobbed into the equation.
Because when using a poisoned weapon every hit - even if for only 1 h.p. damage - *is* a physical injury, even if only a small nick; as that's how the poison gets in. (one could easily argue that a made save means the skin didn't break, but my point remains)
Now, for consistency, extrapolate that thinking to non-poisoned weapons and bingo - every hit represents at least some sort of minor physical injury. And note the use of the word "minor" here - a tiny cut on the upper arm is still a physical injury.
Two things.
First, you don't
have to be consistent. That's the importance of the point about context: in a poison context, you have to narrate even minor hit point loss as some sort of physical injury. But nothing in the rules, or the logic of gameplay, obliges you to extend that narration to other cases.
Second, "one could easily argue that a save made means the skin didn't break":
Schroedinger's Wounds!. As I've often said, 4e didn't introduce fortune-in-the-middle mechanics into D&D. Gygax spells them out in his DMG, in his discussion of hit points and saving throws. (Though it's true that, in AD&D, the playtime elapsed between resolving the attack and resolving the poison save will often be less than that in 4e between resolving the attack and resolving the death save. But the reversal of ingame causation and at-the-table resolution is still present.)
The presence or absence of poison should not make any difference whatsoever to the narration of the actual damage
Why not? That's the whole point of "contextual" hit points. And you've already agreed that the saving throw result can modify the narration.
Physical damage is the most natural way to see it, every casual gamer spontaneously sees HP loss as wounds. It is only when a more experience gamer patronizes the casual gamers in the group about this topic, and suggests to reason more about it, that people starts complicating the interpreration.
Is this true? Especially given that you don't get debilitated by hit point loss. I came into D&D from Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. In this books you have Stamina points, that you lose in combat. And there is a strong sense in the narrative of those books that losing Stamina isn't about being wounded, but about being worn down. (Eg you can replenish Stamina by eating rations, and when the books do narrate serious injury or disablement it tends to be in the form of a penalty to your attack bonus.)
When I started playing D&D, I think I though of hp as being pretty much the same as Stamina. And in due course I read the Gygax passages that set this out in detail.
Why choose? Right now I'm playing in a 6th level AD&D game that pretty much embraces the hp as meat space narrative and its great gonzo fun.
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I've also run 4e games with all martial PCs where I completely embraced the meta aspects of hp and all the PCs were mortal. Sometimes you want something in between the extremes. Why not have a game that provides the tools for groups to decide for themselves.
Sounds reasonable. Do you envisage any problematic corner case situations where it would be hard to set up a uniform mechanical structure into which individual tables can plug their current preferences? I'm thinking maybe some forms of poison delivery, and some healing spells, might require careful design to make sure that the basic structure doesn't prejudge the issue one way or another.