D&D 5E (2014) ludonarrative dissonance of hitpoints in D&D

[Arch-Fiend]

Fair point.

my rebuttal to this 5E - ludonarrative dissonance of hitpoints in D&D

 

[Garthanos]

That'd still have Sauron ruling Middle Earth a lot more than you'd expect.

I was using the 2 out of 3 aint bad for base level resolutions of sub elements D&D has started using in at least the last 2 editions. And/But allowing individual encounters to go wrong at some level with appropriate fail conditions. Kind of like following through with having or developing skill challenges might do.

 

[Lanefan]

Realistically, the only way you can narrate damage in D&D is after combat is completed. There's no other way to do it since narrating any damage in the moment can be contradicted quite easily at a later moment. Was that wound lethal? Well, you didn't die and you dropped a second wind resulting in you gaining more than 1/2 your HP, therefore, you aren't wounded at all.

Any attempt to define HP during combat is bound to fail.

All true.

And all awful.

Combat is when you need that narrative the most, and also when you most need it to be reliable.

However, this one can't be blamed on the hit point mechanics themselves. The faults here lie with a) the existence of remote non-magical curing, and b) the whack-a-mole issue.

a) is a problem because remote non-magical curing usually relies on a narrative of inspiration and-or fatigue banishment, which doesn't play well with being pummelled into the ground and unable to move. FIX: get rid of all remote and non-magical battlefield healing.

b) is a problem because - and this has to a small extent been true since 1e - if you're at 1 h.p. you're fine but a 0 h.p. you're down and dying. FIX: a wound-vitality or body-fatigue hit point system where wound points are harder to cure, and where being in wound points hampers your ability to do various things.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So ludonarrative dissonance is when the story of a game is describing something to you the player that the narrative the gameplay would imply is contradictory to without the game's narrative presenting an explanation for this.

Here's a few definitions I found:

"Ludonarrative dissonance is the conflict between a (video) game's narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay"

"the opposition between incentives and directives and how it is handled both in the narrative and ludic structures"

"dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story"

Note "gameplay," which is an emergent quality of the system, not just a given mechanic.

Also worth noting that, outside of more linear pre-packaged adventures like APs, there may or may not be a "story" being narrated in a TTPRG that's separate from the gameplay. There can certainly be themes or genre tropes, though, and the gameplay of an RPG can stray very far from those, indeed. Likewise, while an RPG will typically have plenty of incentives - experience points, pools, resources, in-game treasures with mechanical benefits, etc - they often (again, with the exception of linear pre-packaged adventures) have no particular "directives" (beyond, perhaps, implied genre conventions) for those benefits to be in conflict with.

So, I hope this isn't offensive (clearly I understand I'm taking that risk), but, I'm going to snip out all the bits where you go on about what you or someone else said or argued or proved, and just reply to what you have to say about the above concept, or about the game in question...

I may not be using the traditional use of this term but i am trying to describe something i think is very close to it. if the narrative about what hitpoints represent is accurate when compared to what the mechanics of hitpoints.

So, there isn't one specific narrative of hit points. A point of damage is not a 'flesh wound' for instance. Instead:

"Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile."
And
"Dungeon Masters describe hit point loss in different ways. When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum, you typically show no signs of injury. When you drop below half your hit point maximum, you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious."

And, that's about it.

Really, the omission of skill is mildly appalling considering hps increase dramatically with level. I suppose you could fold it into physical & mental durability, which are both very vague - 'physical durability' could mean anything from structural resistance to damage, systemic tolerance of damage, & just plain mass to endurance and even reflexes, natural or honed by training, like rolling with a blow or fall. Likewise, the divine favor and 'sixth sense' EGG mentioned could fit under luck.

"More difficult to kill" sums it up, really. Anything that might make you harder to kill gets abstracted together into a single maximum hit point score.

That leaves us, really, nothing solid to work with.

related concepts mechanics has in constitutions and leveling

Con increases your hps - CON, also fairly abstract, measures endurance, which contributes to your physical durability. Level represents skill, and, amusingly, increasing importance in the story, which could translate to increasing luck (author force/'plot armor').

examine damage

I think there might be a category error going on here.
Creatures are measured in hit points.
Damage is measured in hit points.
But creatures aren't damage and damage isn't a creature. So expecting what hit points represent, narratively about an attack or hazard, to be the same as what hit points represent, narratively, about a creature is not tenable.

So wheres the ludonarrative dissonance? If hitpoints are told by one gameplay element to mean one thing in narrative form and then another gameplay element contradicts that then we have conflicting narratives. through the gameplay there is a dissonance in the narrative.

That doesn't sound quite right. I mean, that'd be a contradiction, sure. If one system element said hit points were your character's resistance to damage, and another said hit points were your character's ability to score hits, that'd be a contradiction. But that's not happening. Rather, hit points are an abstraction used to denominate every possible thing that might kill a character, toted up against every possible factor that might save him, to determine whether he's defeated & dying, yet.

Your right though, abstractions themselves arnt dissonant by definition, they just are when they must relate to one another.

When you have two abstract mechanisms that can be imagined various ways, and they interact, producing an equally (more? I feel like the level of abstraction would increase when you combine abstractions? Less? Is it like a Venn Diagram, A intersect B of abstraction?) abstract result. The more abstract, the greater your freedom to visualize what has happened in the narrative rather than be told by the system what happened. So, you simply imagine something that makes sense.

Abstractions do have meaning, otherwise they would be purposeless as a conceptual tool.

Sure, that meaning just happens on one, relatively 'high' level, what happens below that level isn't a concern. Hit points tell you if your character has been defeated or can keep fighting at full power.
If there's a dissonance, it's that (and it's in a sidebar, and up to the DM, so hardly counts) idea that you show 'signs of wear' at 1/2 hps, yet that generally carries no mechanical significance.

my main question tends to be why hitpoints mean all these things other mechanics in the game that arnt hitpoints mean when we create narratives around what losing hitpoints means for a character?

When I see "my main question" I think, "wow, I should try to understand this."
I failed.

Are you saying that there are things in the potential narrative that are represented /both/ by the abstract hp mechanic, /and/ by other mechanics?

I suppose there still may be. There aren't as may or precipitous save-or-else mechanics as there used to be in 5e, for instance, but you can probably find some. Missing an attack roll by 1 and therefore, say, failing to penetrate armor (AC's own bizarre little abstractions), and succeeding on an attack roll, but not inflicting enough damage to reduce the target's current hps below half their maximum, and therefore 'showing no visible signs of wear,' could both look /very/ similar in the hypothetical narrative.
But not the same. The former didn't put you at a disadvantage going forward, the latter did.

If hitpoints are "physical durability, mental durability, will to live, and luck" (all abstractions themselves btw) and the game tells you that hitpoints are lowered via damage, then those things have to relate to damage, which itself is an abstraction that has meaning.

Though both denominated in hps, those do describe different things - how hard you are to kill (defeat, really), how good something is at killing, in general. The point of interaction is in the hit point measure, itself. Hit points of damage (measure of the attack) are deducted from the target's hit points (measure of 'durability/luck/&c). As long as creatures with higher hp totals are harder to kill, and attacks that do more hit points in damage better at killing them, that'd seem consistent.

This thread is examining how the abstraction of hitpoints can be picked appart

You can't really pick apart an abstraction, or it wouldn't be abstract anymore.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I was using the 2 out of 3 aint bad for base level resolutions of sub elements D&D has started using in at least the last 2 editions. And/But allowing individual encounters to go wrong at some level with appropriate fail conditions. Kind of like following through with having or developing skill challenges might do.

Well, yeah, but that'd be way too granular for EPIC COIN TOSS the whole point is overweening simplicity and total abstraction.

...er... that is, the two, TWO, main points are....

 

[clearstream]

How does the model argue that its certainly true that these doors and npc's are differentiated? Is the 10% of doors or 10% of npcs where the result is different ment to represent determinant differentilization or is it meant to represent temporary differentalization? Is the module there to predict that 10% of doors will open easier? No because the chance hasent changed, is it to predict that 10% of npc's are different? No because the npcs arnt different. This means that the module is representing something that isint a permanent difference between entities in the universe but instead one that is temporary bound up into the abstraction of the action being used to open the door, that action can mean anything that the dm permits to being attempted as breaking the door open. though that could be your point and i just havent reached it yet.

Indeed it might, at which point anything we want to say about what the model represents is down to our choice of fable.

The issue of bringing a different skill into the equation of breaking a door is not that it brings an outside element to breaking the door when the original equation was strength vs door. The issue is how it is used, in your example you break a fundamental concept to the argument that i dont think you intended which is noticing a fault in the door, to notice such a thing means that you've now changed the context of the experiment by introducing an element that changes what the doors are from their pre existing state without that change being from "closed without opening" to "open". you also have to describe how noticing this fault allows the door to be opened, the door is still not opening just because you find a fault in it, does that give you a bonus to your strength check to open the door? Do you automatically succeed a strength check to open that door? Either case you've changed the door, but perhaps your argument is that through other means we can still achieve the 10% probability of opening a door without relying on strength, if we use a different skill that the dm's reaction to changes the circumstances of the encounter, but a dm doesent have to do that, you could roll any number on your check to fail to succeed in the answer isint there for you to succeed with.

Seeing as the model does not accommodate such changes without on the fly extensions, again we come back to applying whatever fable we like. In 5th edition, and indeed via Disable Device in 3rd, Intelligence can be applied to opening a door. The ability to tailor the model on the fly drives us ever further into the realm of fabulism.

However, in this specific case we the dm are changing the fabric of the universe to reinforce the idea that these checks can possibility give a result, specifically in this case trying to adhere to the idea that there should be a 10% chance, but that 10% chance doesn't mean there's a 10% chance that ANYTHING can work, including up to a performance check or diplomacy check.

Anything can work that a group finds plausible: that's the only requirement. The universe of the game has no ineluctable fabric: it only has such fabric - as much and as malleable - as the group have played out.

Doing so changes the qualities of the door, remember its not 10% against any door, its a 10% against a door whos properties are clearly defined.

Am I right in feeling that here you decide to agree with my point that so far as the model is concerned, the door is clearly defined? I think the line you are taking is that there is a transitory instance of the door/open-event and that so long as this transitory instance is connected to plausible fluff we are hunky-dory. Yet the model works the same way even if the transitory instance (if we decide that's how it operates) is connected to implausible fluff.

Perhaps the most robust claim we could make is a normative one: normally, our fables share features... they might not - nothing forces them to - but they often do. What about when they don't? You and I might rail at the perversity of that group who allows a hard stare to merit an open check, but we can hardly stop them playing how they like, can we? The model lacks the detail necessary to prevent a hard stare from working: it relies on fabulous norms to keep everyone in line.

 

[Garthanos]

Well, yeah, but that'd be way too granular for EPIC COIN TOSS the whole point is overweening simplicity and total abstraction.

...er... that is, the two, TWO, main points are....

Doing a king arthur (graham chapman flavored) impression again?

Well I didnt even suggest that the rock paper scissors could actually represent an abstracted methodological approach to the problem (direct, responsive, or deceptive)?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Doing a king arthur (graham chapman flavored) impression again?

Close, but, what I'm referencing nobody expects.

Well I didnt even suggest that the rock paper scissors could actually represent an abstracted methodological approach to the problem (direct, responsive, or deceptive)?

Even better! (worse?)

 

[Garthanos]

Even better! (worse?)

So presentation matters....

 

[Tony Vargas]

So presentation matters....

(on advice of counsel) no comment