Narrating Hit Points - no actual "damage"

[The Human Target]

That pretty much has to be the default, with how HP work in all editions.

It's just kind of hand wavey.

If every bit of damage was real injury, PCs would all be horribly scarred cripples by the end of the first dungeon.

If every bit of damage was realistic injury, why is there absolutely no difference between being at 100 hit points or 1 hit point?

But really, hit points are whatever you need them to be in the moment.

Hit points are an intentionally vague game mechanic.

Hit points are hit points.

 

[Celebrim]

A hit and a hit point aren't the same...and that still doesn't answer why a fighter covered in small nick's and scratches needs a "Cure Serious" or week upon week of healing if he isn't seriously wounded.

I know it seems pedantic, but if we're talking about the narration of damage...well, it can matter.

And look there goes Ratskinner with the goal posts running at full speed.

I never tried to claim that the hit point was realistic. In fact, I explicitly said it was not elsewhere in the thread. For that matter, neither did Gygax try to claim the hit point was realistic. I was only addressing a very narrow question pertinent to the OP's questions that started the thread. I think that the quote in question shows that the intention of the hit point system is that each hit is intended to have some physical component to it, that a certain portion of hit points represent 'meat', and that those 'meat' hit points are not deducted last after the non-physical hit points are removed but are continuously eroded by hits, and that this erosion is narratively represented by a large number of nicks, scratches and bruises, and further that Gygax on the whole was very clear about that.

I in no way attempted to show that this was 'realistic' or any other crap like that, but only that this was the intended meaning of the hit point and that it was largely internally consistent. Moreover, to the extent that it is not internally consistent, as I warned the OP, any other narrative interpretation would be less internally consistent. For example, while you think you are being 'pedantic', in fact you are actually supporting my position with your goal post moving. If in fact that it is narratively inconsistent for a fighter that has been covered with nicks, scratches and bruises to require 'Cure Serious Wounds' or weeks of healing to fully recover, how much more narratively inconsistent would it have been for the fighter to require 'Cure Serious Wounds' or weeks of healing to fully recover when he had no physical injuries at all?

Yes, I do know that 4e in particular moved the definition of the hit point around, but I'd argue that 4e never gave much thought to narrative consistency anyway. Likewise 5e by default also has a slightly different definition of the hit point, though I'm not convinced 5e is as narratively consistent or interested in being narratively consistent either. Likewise, people are free to change the definition of the hit point and house rule around that change, and if it makes them happy then by all means let them do so. My only position in the thread has been that the original definition was provided and the game's logic was subtly built around that definition, so that if you change it you'll find yourself needing to change narration in a lot of other subtle ways.

 

[Celebrim]

To fix this, absolutely nothing needs to change about hit points.

A lot needs to change about the resting and recovery rules.

Well, I think that depends on what your goals of play actually are. D&D historically has attempted to be a compromise between playability and verisimilitude to being inside a beloved fantasy story. That is to say, people wanted to play a game, but that game was one they wanted to remind them of the fantasy adventure fiction of Fritz Leiber, JRR Tolkien, Robert Howard, Michael Morcock and so forth. Over time, D&D has become increasingly self-referential and less connected to anything external to it. It's become a genera of its own, and one that a person that has never played D&D can nonetheless be familiar with owing to the large degree of penetration of D&D tropes into the wider gaming community. People now 'know' what a 'Ranger' is, even if that ranger looks nothing at all like Tolkien's Rangers that inspired the D&D ranger. Likewise people have expectations about what a 'Druid' does that have no real relation to having read any historical speculation about druids. Likewise with 'levels' and 'experience' and 'hit points' and a great many other D&Disms.

And people don't have to care about the narrative creating verisimilitude to anything, most especially to reality. That's an aesthetic choice. Arguably D&D's latest edition is mostly about having verisimilitude to itself.

Now I agree that many of 5e's aesthetic choices don't fully appeal to me since I cut my teeth on this game like 35 years ago, but I do understand why they were done and what the default game was trying to create.

 

[Celebrim]

For 5e there is no more week upon week of healing needed. It's 1 nights rest and your hp is back to max.

5e, the only edition of D&D that you can be beaten so badly you are nearly dead and then recover from that like real people recover from scratches and bruises, in 8 hours of rest overnight.

One solution to this, no matter how badly it plays is to have hp recovery be slow so that being beaten nearly to death takes the proper amount of recovery time. I really dislike this as I dislike how slow recovery times play.

Another solution is to add an injury table that occurs when you are knocked unconscious. A roll to see if you take an injury and roll to see what injury it is and what it does and how long it takes to recover from it. This allows being nearly killed in combat to actually feel like you were nearly killed in combat, but allows hp to handle all the fatigure and luck and minor cuts and bruises etc.

I generally agree with this. I think that 5e removed long recovery times because any nod toward realistic injuries more or less requires the party to have a dedicated healer in order to prevent characters from being removed from play for inconveniently long periods. Full recovery of hit points also meets a gameplay goal of making encounter design easier because the status of the characters is much more predictable.

But I personally think too much is lost by handwaving away injury like that. I don't know of anything outside of a game that works that way.

And my personal solution to it would be to add a wounds as condition system to the game so that severely wounded characters had lingering conditions that required time or powerful magic to remove. Your character could keep going, but only with niggling problems that reminded the player that there character had just had the crap beaten out of them.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

For 5e there is no more week upon week of healing needed. It's 1 nights rest and your hp is back to max.

5e, the only edition of D&D that you can be beaten so badly you are nearly dead and then recover from that like real people recover from scratches and bruises, in 8 hours of rest overnight.

One solution to this, no matter how badly it plays is to have hp recovery be slow so that being beaten nearly to death takes the proper amount of recovery time. I really dislike this as I dislike how slow recovery times play.

Another solution is to add an injury table that occurs when you are knocked unconscious. A roll to see if you take an injury and roll to see what injury it is and what it does and how long it takes to recover from it. This allows being nearly killed in combat to actually feel like you were nearly killed in combat, but allows hp to handle all the fatigure and luck and minor cuts and bruises etc.

It's a design choice, driven in part by player input. For example, looking over 2nd Edition (it's been a while!) you naturally healed 1-3hp per day of rest with a bump for every week spent resting. Healing was assumed to be achieved magically, either via spells or items. Clerics had a lot of spell slots, with bonuses for high Wisdom, and had to pre-select them by praying for each spell slot. What usually happened was the cleric would expend all their healing spells for the day on wounded party members before resting for the day, then pray for spells after a rest, regaining a full allotment the next day. So in 2e characters typically had more spells, which were fixed, and party healing was associated with expending these spells exclusively for most in-dungeon healing.

In 5e we have fewer, more flexible spells and the design is lent more to actively using them in encounters over saving them for healing nightcaps. For those who want more of that style of play, alternate natural healing methods are available.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The easiest way to make hits actual hits and damage actual damage (and take "energy" out of the equation) is for you to just never have any character gain more hit points than what they get at 1st level. If you do that... then a single successful and strong hit with a greataxe might very well drop you to 0 hit points as it well should.

Does this mean PCs can't stand up as a group one-on-one against a dragon? Yup. A single breath weapon attack will mostly likely set every PC on fire and potentially kill them outright (with the "go to negative HP and you're immediately dead" rule.) But if you want to be concerned about representing a physical reality of combat and that hit points are meant to represent that reality... no one should have 20s, 50s, 100s of hit points. Because when you do, it suggests that someone can stand there completely unarmored in front of someone with a greataxe and take three, five, ten blows from that greataxe and still not reach 0 HP and fall unconscious. Which we all know is stupid.

Why are our hit points so high? Because it's the way the game emulates "heroic fantasy" and not "the physical realities of combat". And it's the same reason why Hollywood fight scenes can go on for more than five minutes with people taking massive punches and blows to the face and head, whereas a UFC fighter can knock someone senseless in three seconds with a single punch or kick. "The physical realities of combat" are less interesting to experience and less fun to play as a game in the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

D&D is a game first and foremost that is trying to represent a hyper-reality, not true-to-life. And the game presents game rules and game mechanics trying to make the game itself fun while presenting that hyper-reality. And thus the game sometimes has to supersede the "realities" of the narrative because it's not trying to "be real". It's trying to be "fun" and "cool".

 

[Celebrim]

Does this mean PCs can't stand up as a group one-on-one against a dragon? Yup. A single breath weapon attack will mostly likely set every PC on fire and potentially kill them outright (with the "go to negative HP and you're immediately dead" rule.) But if you want to be concerned about representing a physical reality of combat and that hit points are meant to represent that reality... no one should have 20s, 50s, 100s of hit points. Because when you do, it suggests that someone can stand there completely unarmored in front of someone with a greataxe and take three, five, ten blows from that greataxe and still not reach 0 HP and fall unconscious. Which we all know is stupid.

Yes, and so did Gygax. Which is why he took great pains to make sure no one understood hit points in that manner. Gygax would argue that if you stood there unarmored and made no attempt to defend yourself, that even if you were a 10th level fighter with 95 hit points, the blow would pretty much be automatically lethal. If you let someone slit your throat or if you let someone hit you with a well swung great ax, you were just dead. All of a huge warhorse's hit points might reflect its ability to absorb damage, but only fraction of the 10th level fighter's hit points represented the ability to absorb damage. The rest were an abstraction of that fighters ability to avoid damage. So, a fighter that chooses to stand there and take it would effectively be the same as a fighter that was tied up and unable to avoid the blow. And in 1e AD&D, a character that was completely helpless to avoid an attack automatically died. You didn't need to roll hit point damage for attacks of that nature.

As such, your argument has a big flaw in it. The justification for large numbers of hit points is not increased ability to absorb damage, but increased ability to evade it. High level fighters have enough hit points to survive a dragon's breath attack, not because they are much more durable than they were at 1st level, but because they have acquired through experience an uncanny ability to mostly evade attacks and take proportionately less damage - but not no damage - when faced with deadly threats. What before would have burned them to a crisp, instead only delivers first degree burns, because they took some action that evaded the attack that they would not have taken when they were less experienced.

 

[DEFCON 1]

As such, your argument has a big flaw in it. The justification for large numbers of hit points is not increased ability to absorb damage, but increased ability to evade it. High level fighters have enough hit points to survive a dragon's breath attack, not because they are much more durable than they were at 1st level, but because they have acquired through experience an uncanny ability to mostly evade attacks and take proportionately less damage - but not no damage - when faced with deadly threats. What before would have burned them to a crisp, instead only delivers first degree burns, because they took some action that evaded the attack that they would not have taken when they were less experienced.

I would disagree that it's a flaw... in fact I'd suggest that even your explanation does not present "a reality", but rather is also a representation of "heroic fantasy narrative".

You are in the exact center of a 40' diameter ball of fire from a spell. There's no "hiding" or "dodging" from a ball of fire. You are engulfed. So there's no explanation of any type that explains how this ball of fire is hot enough to hit a regular person and immediately kill them, burning them to a crisp, but a "fighter" stands there, "dodges" the ball without actually moving anywhere, and then remains standing with barely a burn on him. All because he had 95 plotarmor points.

And that's entirely my point. Anyone who is looking to emulate any semblance of a "reality" in terms of combat should never give any PC any more than like a dozen HP. Because almost all attacks that can cause actual physical damage to someone should not and do not need to strike a person more than once or twice before that person is knocked down on the verge of death, if not outright killed.

Anything past that is putting you in "heroic fantasy narrative" and a "game" for which dodging fireballs and being hit by 25 foot tall giants with greatclubs just barely causing "bruises" is a part of the fun. And at that point, there's no reason to worry about "reality" whatsoever.

 

[Celebrim]

I would disagree that it's a flaw...

You just described the mechanics is a way that contradicts the description of them.

...in fact I'd suggest that even your explanation does not present "a reality", but rather is also a representation of "heroic fantasy narrative".

I don't think I ever said any other thing. Nonetheless, this assertion doesn't mean your description is correct.

You are in the exact center of a 40' diameter ball of fire from a spell. There's no "hiding" or "dodging" from a ball of fire.

That's not in fact an element of the rules. You are imposing a narrative on the mechanic not supported by the mechanic and then, with your fiction that you imposed that you didn't draw from the rules, you are asserting that because the game doesn't support your fiction that the mechanics are wrong. It seems more likely that your fiction is wrong. We know that the rules support evading the blast of a fireball. It's up to the DM to support that narrative through the fiction he creates. Ergo, the statement "there is no "hiding" or "dodging" from a ball of fire is false, and it must be that your understanding of the fiction is flawed. Maybe fire balls are not uniform. Maybe turning your back to the blast or putting your shield up or any other numbers of actions can provide shelter from the blast. Maybe fire doesn't even behave exactly like it does in the reality you are familiar with (certainly the rules suggest that in various ways). The rules suggest that is the case, therefore the fictional positioning must provide for it. Just as your description of what happens when a great axe blow is swung at a fighter is flawed, so your narrative of the fictional positioning of a fireball is flawed.

Anything past that is putting you in "heroic fantasy narrative" and a "game" for which dodging fireballs and being hit by 25 foot tall giants with greatclubs just barely causing "bruises" is a part of the fun. And at that point, there's no reason to worry about "reality" whatsoever.

Again, D&D places the fictional positioning after the fortune roll. You can't put the result of the fictional positioning in front of the fortune roll and say that the outcome you are assuming isn't supported by the fiction roll. And moreover, the whole thing about "reality" is your introduction. The fact that it is not realistic - whatever that would mean - isn't really a part of the discussion I'm having. I happily concede a lack of realism. That doesn't make you right.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I happily concede a lack of realism. That doesn't make you right.

If you are agreeing with me, then why are you arguing with me? Because I'm not making my point of "D&D combat is not meant to be realistic" the same way you would make your point of "D&D combat is not meant to be realistic"? If we're both saying the same thing, what difference does it make which explanation is better or "more right" at expressing it?

I mean if you want to tell the people in the thread who've been trying to explain how the combat and hit point system could represent "reality" why it's pretty much pointless (as I've been doing)... go right ahead. But I don't see the point in you wasting your efforts arguing with me about how I chose to explain myself instead? You like my conclusion but don't like the route I took to get there. Okay. Fine. But it seems like I can easily ignore your comments because you essentially agree with me, and thus I count that as win.