In the heat of battle, is hit point loss a wound?
Neonchameleon
Legend
Not true. Anyone can be brought back to their feet non-magically from negative HP. But this is not the same as actually being healed. The damage is still there and will still be there until the healing surges are recovered. This is a cinematic trope (as illustrated by the Terminator example).
No. It is missing the point. Gygax said that only the last few hit points represent real damage and one of the purposes of the hit point system is to model Eroll Flynn style swashbuckling. As for AD&D vs OD&D, AD&D was pure Gygax and has much more information. And I believe Arneson's approach was different to Gygax's. Gygax was absolutely clear when he addressed the issue directly. Only the last few hit points represent anything other than trivial physical damage.
Once more you are distorting. Any hit in 4e can, with the right non-magical encouragement be shrugged off or worked through. There is a vast difference between that and healed.
Those, Terminator, The A Team, Princess Bride, Indiana Jones, Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Erroll Flynn style swashbuckling, and just about every action movie ever. FFS you can even see spending healing surges in combat in Leverage on occasion when Eliott's having a big showdown. You even have healing surges being spent between rounds in mundane boxing matches.
You know the list of things I can think of where you have routine magical healing but people not pulling themselves back in through grit and determination? I can get as far as D&D, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, Everquest, and knockoffs. I can't even go for anything gritty with the ubiquity of magical healing.
And I know which my preferred playstyle is.
No. The problem is that they changed what hit points were in 4e without really going into detail about how. The damage is in surges, the hit points measure shock.
Well I guess you can spend the next three weeks laid up in bed. And utterly prohibit any cinematic games without magic. Me, I'm going to point out that D&D in no way models the ankle that won't support your weight. If you're above 0hp then it can and if you're below it's not your ankle that's the problem. So stop malingering.
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Herremann the Wise
First Post
A much needed and significant change in my opinion, but I would like to contend not that risky.
I disagree and would suggest the following:
***The highest privilege given to a character is the capacity to use their hit points rather than suffer wound damage. Now this is a privilege that will sometimes be denied the character but more of that later. The main thing is that a character takes wound damage unless they are allowed to use and can use their hit points. I suppose the typical two caveats are:
- When a character runs out of hit points, they cannot use hit points and thus take wound damage.
- Certain attacks are so skillful that they may deny the character the privilege of using their hit points to avoid it {the classic critical hit}.
Wuxia Style; Arrow-Cutting
I think this comes down to how you describe things as much as other factors. The bottom line is that if a character is allowed to use their hit points, the attack on them has been mostly ineffective; how that is described is really a style preference for the group. Avoiding wuxia style stuff should not be that difficult. Arrows are ineffective (do not deal wound damage) because the character uses their skill to avoid what would have been a certain shot (by expending hit points). Or by getting lucky, or the arrow glances off armor, or the arrow gets caught in their hat, or bounces painfully off of the toe of their boot, or is seemingly diverted as if Pelor himself had bent the arrows path. [Effectively this is a case of describing it in accordance with what the hit points are being attributed to: luck, skill, divine providence, morale, will to go on, capacity to turn a serious blow into a less serious one, mental and physical toughness etc. The halfling rogue is a lot of luck while the half-orc barbarian is a patchwork of scars, cuts and bruises.]
The Single Successful Arrow Shot
There are times where this should be able to happen. However, for the sake of the game, there also needs to be a concession that most of the time, the character gets to use hit points to maximize death avoidance. Where you draw the line would be a classic case for a dial.
Does the character get to use hit points if they are surprised or flat-footed? Do they get to use hit points if they are unaware of the attack? What if they are incapacitated? These are all reasonable situations where hit point use could be denied the character. However in these cases, perhaps the priest can react immediately to the attack with a blessing that allows the character to use their hit points when they otherwise would not be able to. Perhaps a halfling's luck allows them to use hit points when they otherwise would not be able to. Perhaps an allied fighter can get their shield in the way so that the ranged attack is possibly nullified (or not). Perhaps a rogue with "uncanny dodge" can never be denied their use of hit points due to surprise? Perhaps a character's armor can offer damage resistance to lessen the resulting wound?
In other words, there is a heap of ways how you can stop that single shot killing the character from avoiding it completely to copping a non-mortal wound. BUT, if a 20th level character is asleep and cops a dagger directly through their braincase, they are copping one hell of a wound that they are almost certainly not telling their friends about. I think it important that this threat should always be there (even if such things are in the control of the DM). By having a relatively small amount of wound points, even a high level character can be killed in a single shot; they just have a whole heap more resources at their disposal to not find themselves in such a vulnerable position.
The Arrow Pincushion
I think this is actually where the split model I'm promoting is at it's strongest. The only time an arrow is going to be stuck in a character's body is when it is causing obvious physical damage or wounding. Losing hit points means that the character has not been stuck bad enough to be wounded. Describe it how you want but there's your line. If the attack wounded the character, then make sure it sounds like it hurts. If the character has only lost hit points, make sure that you don't describe something that sounds like a significant wound. This provides clear directions for the DM in terms of description (or for the players if that is your style). What the pincushion thing is saying is "don't describe something that sounds completely ridiculous". Having wounds clearly separated allows you to do this.
I think the above split system does too with the added bonus of not getting caught out when you attempt to restore hit points and heal wounds. Hit points are quickly restored and hyper-importantly can continue to act as a buffer, vastly reducing the slope of the potential death spiral. In addition, there is now a plethora of viable ways that hit points can be restored in combat. Morale based increases, second winds, leader encouragement and so on are believably applied. A fighter can believably menace multiple opponents, stripping them of hit points through demoralizing them without having to occasionally explain how such things kill such opponents. It just leaves such demoralized opponents incredibly vulnerable.
Wounds however can take longer to heal as suits the group. Mundane healers can alleviate wounds well enough that it is a viable and dare I say become the standard way of dealing with such things. Divine healing becomes a gravy or perhaps a resource that is carefully metered out. Funnily enough, cure light wounds, cure critical wounds etc. actually make sense now. You don't have that weird circumstance where a cure critical wounds does almost nothing for a high level character. I would prefer such things in fact to be rituals that take time and are not spammed out like so many wands of cure light wounds.
Perhaps the hardest thing is connecting hit points to wounds in terms of measurement. I think the most obvious unit of measurement is in fact the hit point. A 1 hit point wound takes 1 day for the average humanoid character to be not affected by. [It is not completely healed, it just at that point no longer affects the character any more.] A 9hp wound takes 9 days to heal. Wounds are treated individually (and are rare enough that this takes only minor accounting work). I have a set of rules in this regard that I designed a while ago but that might be best left for another time.
So yeah, I still think this would be a pretty cool way to go for an advanced rule module and that it can be trimmed up for the core.
Best Regards
Herremann the Wise
Mercutio01
First Post
Can't XP you, but good points. For your first example, I would have narrated it as a glancing blow, something that maybe knocked the wind out of the wizard, but nothing more serious than that. But it would still have been a hit.
Mercutio01
First Post
That's not how I've ever played 3E, 2E, or 1E. Indeed, high level fighters take barely a scratch from the shotgun aimed at their faces because they duck away at the last second and get a grazing wound---but they still get hit.
In 4E, characters cannot take a hit, or else the entire healing system retcons everything that happened before the heal.
And that is a playstyle preference that is not my own. I don't want to play cinematic D&D and have never really done so. This is why I say 4E specifically ushered in a playstyle that is not to my tastes at all.
Worship at the altar of Gygax all you want. He was an interesting guy who was part of making a great game, but he wasn't the only one. It's like lauding George Lucas for the original Star Wars trilogy, when it was actually a combination of a lot of people's work. I think Gygax's ex post facto explanation for hit points was wrong. Gygax is Stan Lee to Arneson's Jack Kirby. Furthermore, Basic D&D came out before AD&D, and it's practically identical to OD&D, in that hits were obviously meant to be hits (d6 HP and d6 damage). It wasn't until Gygax did AD&D later that HP took on the nebulous explanation that they did. And, if thinking about where hit points actually came from initially (the number of hits ships could take in old wargames), it becomes obvious that Gygax's interpretation took a turn away from what they initially meant. OD&D and Basic had them as real damage. 1E doesn't. 2E does. 3E is a weird in between case in that they are both, but not at the same time. 4E appears to go back to 1E, but adds the healing surge mechanic, which creates (as I realized below) a de facto wounds/vigor system.
Which is a change from previous editions.
Terminator, sure. A-Team (no one ever gets hit in the A-Team, unless we're talking punches, and that's something D&D has never modeled well). Princess Bride simply doesn't belong on this list. It literally has magical healing and resurrection. Conan doesn't belong, and neither do Leiber's works. In the Errol Flynn swashbuckling movies like "The Sea Hawk" people who get stabbed, get stabbed. And die. I have played versions of Flynn type swashbuckling in 3E without changing anything and it worked perfectly well. Tell me again how I must be doing it wrong.
Now who's making crap up and putting words in people's mouths? You want to know how I model people pulling themselves back in to a fight with grit and determination? By continuing to fight when they are missing hit points. There's no need at all to restore hit points in a mundane fashion to simulate fighting through the pain. Characters are already doing that when they are fighting despite missing hit points.
Which is fine, but that's an Oberoni fallacy. It requires a house rule to fix something that is broken out of the gate. Let me ask this question then: If damage is in surges left, doesn't 4E then already have wound and vigor points if not expressly called that? Where HP are vigor and HS are wounds? If that's the case, why in the hell didn't that become the actual stated purpose? If healing was my only real gripe with 4E, maybe you could have made a convert out of me based on that.
You could houserule a lot of stuff to make 3E play cinematically. It would probably take just as much work as it would to make 4E not play cinematically.
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Steely_Dan
First Post
Ever since back in the day I never describe HP loss as actual wounds until the character is getting low on HP.
If a character with 100 HP gets smacked for 9 HP, that would represent no actual injury, but a 10 Hp character getting smacked for 9 HP would be bad news.
If a character with 100 HP gets smacked for 9 HP, that would represent no actual injury, but a 10 Hp character getting smacked for 9 HP would be bad news.
An interesting thing that cropped up recently is that AD&D actually has rules for inflicting long term damage.
'If any creature reaches a state of -6 or greater negative points before being revived, this could indicate scarring or the loss of some member, if you so choose. For example, a character struck by a fireball and then treated when at -9 might have horrible scar tissue on exposed areas of flesh -- hands, arms, neck, face.' -AD&D, DMG, p. 82.
There is also some stuff about if you go under 0 Hit Points you are wounded and require medical attention to move again, even *if* your hit points are brought back up magically.
'If any creature reaches a state of -6 or greater negative points before being revived, this could indicate scarring or the loss of some member, if you so choose. For example, a character struck by a fireball and then treated when at -9 might have horrible scar tissue on exposed areas of flesh -- hands, arms, neck, face.' -AD&D, DMG, p. 82.
There is also some stuff about if you go under 0 Hit Points you are wounded and require medical attention to move again, even *if* your hit points are brought back up magically.
Herremann the Wise
First Post
I agree that the pressure is there. I also believe it a pressure that can be successfully alleviated.
I agree with this, although a giant slug is going to have some pretty handy DR but still not be much of an opponent for most PCs. In the main, I can imagine most animals not being graced with hit points. In fact, this would seem the ideal definition of a minion (from my perspective
).I think it makes sense that using the split system, the chained high level fighter loses his or her privilege of using hit points. Thus both characters (the high level fighter and low level wizard from the article) are going to be taking wound damage, and as their capacity for wounds would be somewhat similar, both are going to be fried, badly fried or dead depending. However as an aside, while the fighter might have a capacity to take 26hps worth of wounds, and a low level wizard might be able to take 19hps worth of wounds before dying, I think it is worth noting that both characters would be quite different in terms of how much damage they could take before being incapacitated. The fighter might be able to take 18hps worth of wounds before being incapacitated while the wizard takes a punch to the gut and he goes down like a sack of spuds with his incapacitated limit being perhaps only 9hps.
The thing is, how many situations are there going to be where the character is denied their use of hit points? These attacks like any attacks are going to be particularly vicious when hit points are restricted from being expended. The challenge is to make sure these situations are well moderated. I think the big change with this split system is keeping damage output well controlled. You don't want damage to escalate significantly as they are planning in 5e. You instead want this burden taken up by skill instead.
The pressure is there and the trick as I say is controlling damage and the options you allow to deny a character their use of hit points. With this a 5d6 fireball is going to be pretty effective if it works, but in the end be fairly easy to avoid it's full effect. I could see a fireball doing 0 wound damage if it misses the target, light wound damage if it is "saved against" and significant wound damage if the character gets caught flat-footed. While it's a "thing", I believe it easily dealt with so long as it is considered.
Best Regards
Herremann the Wise
Not in the face, I'm assuming!
Of course they can be hit. It's just that, like your shotgun guy, it's generally not serious enough to impede them, or stop the refocusing and pushing on.
Sometimes they get hit and dropped. As per the advice in HeroWars, you narrate these ones at a sufficient level of generality that either death or recovery is feasible (like Aragorn's fall over the cliff in the 2nd LotR movie - the filmmakers show us he's hurt, but leave it unspecified exacty how badly).
Well likewise, a 4e PC who gets badly stabbed will die. But most hit point loss to a rapier attack does not represent being badly stabbed. It's a bit like your shotgun guy you mentioned.
