Narrating Hit Points - no actual "damage"

[Jester David]

I've commented before that hit points are a variable abstraction that represent both physical health and energy/ luck/ skill in a Heisenberg/ Schrödinger state.
They work really well in the game as a form of plot armour, allowing higher level characters to survive longer and making them less fragile with levels. But they make zero sense. The more you think about hit points, the less sense they make and the more weird nonsensical situations you can consider.

I recommend not thinking too hard about hp or drawing attention to them.

 

[cmad1977]

Sometimes it’s damage. Sometimes it’s not.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What I don't understand is, if hit points represent some sort of nebulous "energy" then why are there specific damage types? A long sword does slashing damage, so it seems safe to assume that when it does damage it is actually a slash, not just a hard blow against armor.

As I see it, damage types are still important before they hit you. You need some way of saying that you can't cut a rope by hitting it with a hammer, after all.

One of the things that they don't get into in D&D, because it's not very important to the mechanics and would be difficult to make sense of under the rules, is that body armor converts slashing damage into bludgeoning damage. (Other games do a better job of explaining it.) Arrows should be more effective against a skeleton if it was wearing a breastplate, for example.

But yeah, if you're wearing armor of fire resistance rather than armor of cold resistance, then obviously the dragon's breath weapon has to hit you in order for that to matter.

 

[Azzy]

they make zero sense. The more you think about hit points, the less sense they make and the more weird nonsensical situations you can consider.

I recommend not thinking too hard about hp or drawing attention to them.

This, a thousand times over.

 

[Dausuul]

Has anyone experienced treating HP in this way?

I have not personally, but I had a friend who tried this way back in 2E. He soon gave up. His players found it massively confusing and unintuitive.

If your players are on board, I think this can work fine. If they're not, it'll be a constant headache.

But they make zero sense. The more you think about hit points, the less sense they make and the more weird nonsensical situations you can consider.


I recommend not thinking too hard about hp or drawing attention to them.

Yeah, that's been my attitude for a while now.

Hit points are a "stage dressing" mechanic. They look good at a glance, they support the DM's efforts to create an exciting battle scene, and they don't distract from the action. If you get up close and examine them carefully, they are an obvious fake; but if my audience is paying that kind of attention to the stage dressing, I've already failed.

 

[Hriston]

This is something I would like to try when I start up my next game: All hit point "damage" is simply small, accumulated weariness.

This is still too representational for me. I like to keep hit points an abstract counter of how much "damage" you can take until you are down, with what the damage consists of left largely undefined, whether it's fatigue, luck, divine favor, destiny, or something else that protects you from "hits". It's an abstract resource.

Damage is not broken arms, sliced open bowels, or arrows to the back. It's the blow to the shield that takes a little more out of you, it's the sore muscle from stepping out of the way, it's the stitch in your side. Nothing physical, nothing that could be permanent, even without magic, and that can easily be visualized to recover after a long rest.

I think the hit point recovery portion of the rest mechanics makes it difficult to narrate damage as anything you can't just shrug or sleep off, unless magical healing is involved, of course.

When one is reduced to zero hit points and needs to make death saving throws... There, that's when there is actual damage from that last blow. That time the arrow hit you, the sword cut you open. That's what requires magical healing or multiple long rests to recover.

Well, something knocked you out, but we still don't know whether you've been wounded significantly. There's a 15% chance you could bounce back up within the next 18 seconds and be fully healed after 8 hours of sleep. Or you could become stable, regain consciousness in a few hours, and be able to fully recover overnight. I think it boils down to this quote from the Damage and Healing rules: "Unless it results in death, damage isn’t permanent." That leaves us not knowing whether any grievous damage was done until after the death saving throws have been resolved.

 

[hbarsquared]

Hmmm.

I get that HP are completely representational, and represent that combination of everything: luck, weariness, and actual physical damage. I'm not really interested in developing a Narration Algorithm or introducing a more complex Wound/Vitality system.

More of a "how can I best describe the action in a way that makes the most sense?"

The short answer seems to be: "You can't." What with healing, long rests, successful death saves... not to mention typed damage and rider effects... No single method, including "all damage is just your energy level" sounds like it's going to cut it.

I admit I kinda like the extreme-abstract of simply saying, "you take damage" and letting the PC decide how it affects them. Simple, yet also empowering.

Although I'd like to play a game where all damage is is just tiredness, and where enemies are worn down instead of outright slaughtered, perhaps D&D isn't straight up the game for that.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Hmmm.

I get that HP are completely representational, and represent that combination of everything: luck, weariness, and actual physical damage. I'm not really interested in developing a Narration Algorithm or introducing a more complex Wound/Vitality system.

More of a "how can I best describe the action in a way that makes the most sense?"

The short answer seems to be: "You can't." What with healing, long rests, successful death saves... not to mention typed damage and rider effects... No single method, including "all damage is just your energy level" sounds like it's going to cut it.

I admit I kinda like the extreme-abstract of simply saying, "you take damage" and letting the PC decide how it affects them. Simple, yet also empowering.

Although I'd like to play a game where all damage is is just tiredness, and where enemies are worn down instead of outright slaughtered, perhaps D&D isn't straight up the game for that.

I used to spend time worrying about what HPs "meant"

It's just easier to keep HP as numbers that get scratched off of paper as they go down.

Now I save my narrative descriptions for describing the scene for my players so they can make decisions, and narrating the consequences of their decisions.

No one cares that I take time to describe them getting fatigued. Especially as it slows down combat.

 

[pemerton]

"how can I best describe the action in a way that makes the most sense?"

<snip>

What with healing, long rests, successful death saves... not to mention typed damage and rider effects... No single method, including "all damage is just your energy level" sounds like it's going to cut it.

I think a degree of light touch is helpful, and being flexible from context to context, as the logic of each situation demands.

If I were going to designate an exact amount of hit points that represent the ability to take physical damage, I'd probably just say that the hit points from first level ar physical, and the rest skill, luck, etc.

I think this sort of rigidity in interpretation undoes some of the benefits of the fact that a given episode of hp loss can be whatever you need it to be at the moment of narration.

I think Rod Staffwand articulated this really clearly:

Hit points are the easiest mechanic in the world. They are whatever you need them to be.

You can narrate them as nicks and scratches or luck running out or entrails spewing forth to be put right with a mere cure light wounds. Whatever makes sense in the context of the attack and its results.

I'd like to play a game where all damage is is just tiredness, and where enemies are worn down instead of outright slaughtered, perhaps D&D isn't straight up the game for that.

Cortex+ Heroic mostly works like this.

What I don't understand is, if hit points represent some sort of nebulous "energy" then why are there specific damage types? A long sword does slashing damage, so it seems safe to assume that when it does damage it is actually a slash, not just a hard blow against armor.

If you have armor that gives you resistance against one type of damage, it seems like the damage type suddenly becomes very important and can't be chalked up as "energy loss" or what have you.

I get that thinking of hit point damage as "energy loss" enables the eight hour heal, but it still seems at odds with all the different damage types in the game and how important they are.

Well, if you're immune to fire or whatever, then being bathed it in probably doesn't tire you as much, run down as much luck, etc, as if you're flammable in the normal way.

But ultimately I think damage types are best looked at through an aesthetic lens - we call these things out because we like the colour it adds to our games - rather than through any sort of "causal" logic.

 

[Celebrim]

I know, I know, the verisimilitude of hit points has been an ongoing argument for decades...

This is something I would like to try when I start up my next game: All hit point "damage" is simply small, accumulated weariness.

Damage is not broken arms, sliced open bowels, or arrows to the back. It's the blow to the shield that takes a little more out of you, it's the sore muscle from stepping out of the way, it's the stitch in your side. Nothing physical, nothing that could be permanent, even without magic, and that can easily be visualized to recover after a long rest.

When one is reduced to zero hit points and needs to make death saving throws... There, that's when there is actual damage from that last blow. That time the arrow hit you, the sword cut you open. That's what requires magical healing or multiple long rests to recover.

Has anyone experienced treating HP in this way?

No, I haven't.

It's a long ongoing debate that dates back to the 1970's. I personally believe that Gygax gave a fairly definitive treatment of the topic in the 1e AD&D DMG, but even there I have to concede that after appearing to answer the question he left the door open to other interpretations with a conflicting paragraph elsewhere.

There are several problems you are going to run into going with the "all hit points are not meat" definition. The most glaring of which is all the "on hit" triggers there are in D&D. For example, on hit you might suffer being poisoned. How did that happen if all hits involve no actual damage to the flesh? Likewise, on hit you might suffer energy drain or any number of other ill and potentially lethal effects. How does that work if you are just being fatigued?

When you say something like, "Damage is not broken arms, sliced open bowels, or arrows to the back.", you make it sound like there are only the two extremes here - "All damage is not meat" and "All damage is meat". I've never played D&D where the damage was broken arms, sliced open bowels or arrows in the back either. You've introduced a false dichotomy, and most interestingly, it's exactly these two extremes that Gygax definitively discarded in his treatment of what a hit point is. In Gygaxian D&D, hit points are some combination of meat and not meat, and the usual practice is that all hits (on PC's at least) do some combination of a wounds and depletion of whatever the not physical portion of the hit points as. The only real question is whether those things are strictly proportional. That is to say, the only real argument in my opinion is over whether a wound always has some physical component however minor, or whether the definition of "hit" allows for hits that are at least on some occasions entirely without corresponding wounds inflicted.

When on the other hand you write something like, "When one is reduced to zero hit points and needs to make death saving throws... There, that's when there is actual damage from that last blow. That time the arrow hit you, the sword cut you open.", that's per Gygax again entirely the way the game has always been intended to play. Even among the groups I've played with where every hit had some physical component, the grievous and potentially mortal wounds only occurred when you were reduced to less than zero hit points. Before that, you might have been nicked, cut, bruised, scraped, contused, pierced, strained and so forth, but none of those minor injuries were of the life threating sort. A particularly powerful hit might 'connect' harder than others and be described as a bad wound - an arrow sticks in your thigh for example - but it wouldn't be described as connecting with anything vital unless it dropped you below zero hit points.

Anyway, you wouldn't be running a game in a way that it hasn't been run before, but I don't think it is the way hit points have traditionally been described.