Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is LIVE! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Narrating Hit Points - no actual "damage"
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7353152" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I think there are a bundle of problems. Not having monsters fight to the death is harder than you might think. In real ancient warfare, the majority of fatalities were inflicted usually during the 'rout' portion of the fight. That is, the two sides would engage until one side's morale would fail, and then the side with the failing morale would rout and during the rout phase they'd be overrun by cavalry and run down and basically mass stabbed in the back by the winning side. Part of what made the Greek Phalanx so devastating wasn't just superior weaponry, but superior military discipline - the Greeks didn't rout. And there are plenty of examples in the real world of individuals and units not routing and fighting to the death, either from fanaticism or discipline or sheer personal tenacity. Indeed, most military traditions are about instilling this willingness to fight to the death into its elite soldiery through some sort of process, precisely because if your unit doesn't rout the enemy will tend to do so. I could go through a lot of real world examples, but it would invariably get political. Suffice to say, I think the truth of that statement will be born out in the investigations of the interested student, and as a hopefully non-political example consider how the "beserker" concept reoccurs through almost all tribal and animistic cultures.</p><p></p><p>A morale check system or any other system that makes this random suffers the same problems with respect to fulfilling gamist goals as random wound systems. The game becomes too unpredictable to design challenges well. If you design the encounter with orcs on the assumption that they'll rout at some point, then it takes a larger number of orcs to challenge a given party than normal. But, if this group doesn't rout at the expected point, then the PC party will have to, with the attendant risk of being the one that will suffer disproportionately large casualties during the rout phase. To avoid this, you'd need basically 'hit points for morale' so that groups would rout at a somewhat predictable point. I've never seen a system implement this.</p><p></p><p>The reason you rarely see PC's fleeing is mostly because fleeing rarely helps. Fleeing is complex and usually involves giving your opponent multiple unanswered attacks. In most cases, the PC's are more likely to survive by standing their ground and hoping the dice break their way than they are by fleeing. In many cases, the PC's are facing beasts that are much faster than they are and so fleeing isn't really even an option. Even if they theoretically could retreat, in many cases an organized retreat involves sacrificing part of the force to let the rest get away and that's just not a very attractive option. In order to retreat successfully, a PC party has to be tactically prepared for a retreat and that requires a level of skill and system mastery that is late in coming. Finally, from a metagame perspective, PC's rarely retreat because they have an assumption that most encounters are 'fair' and the odds are in their favor. In order for a retreat to be successful, you have to begin the process several rounds before it becomes necessary. But D&D combats are usually really short in terms of the number of rounds involved, and so typically you only see retreat either at first contact - "There is no way we can take on that!" - or when it is already too late.</p><p></p><p>I think you are right that as long as most of the PC's hit points remain at the end of the night, you can plausibly suspend disbelief that all those minor cuts and scrapes and bruises, even if they aren't healed per se are at healed up enough that with a night's rest they are no longer really issues. It wouldn't be perfect, because it still doesn't exactly simulate our own experiences with injury, but it would lessen the problem. However, changing the way we narrate combat would not solve the whole of the problem, because you'd still have problems with character's dropped to death's door by injuries right as rain the next morning. Fundamentally, while our experience with injury and pain allows us to suspend disbelief regarding the idea that most injuries and pain can be ignored rather quickly, nonetheless our experience remains that quite often they cannot and our injuries continue to be a source of pain and debilitation for a long time. We've all had experiences of going to bed and waking up to find the injury more severe, tender, sore and debilitating in the morning. We've all experienced loss of functionality of some sort because of injuries we've received, so if you don't model that at all then it becomes very obvious that 'it's just a game' pretty much all the time.</p><p></p><p>That said, I've never really seen a game willing to model injury realistically, and most attempts I've seen at realism (Role Master and Dwarf Fortress come to mind) in fact produce non-realistic narratives that are arguably no more realistic in the narrative than what a good DM would produce with narration taking cues from D&D's hit point system and quite possibly a lot less. For all the fact that Dwarf Fortress models the body down to the level of thickness of tissue, in point of fact the narratives produced by Dwarf Fortress combats hew closer to the ridiculously comic end of the spectrum than they do to gritty realism. They are filled with implausible absurdities and repetitive silliness. Realistic injuries don't just involve tangible locations and lingering effects, but the really critical effects of injury are always shock, blood loss and organ damage. Plus, realistic injuries would spend a lot of time with infection and septic shock and all the stuff that kills you hours or days after the fight is over. Dwarf fortress does do this, but not in any way that ultimately feels realistic. Nor does realism really support the trope, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" that most adventure gaming wants to support by way of mechanical character development and advancement. </p><p></p><p>In short, I don't think there is a system for recording injury that happily supports more different aesthetics of play than some sort of hit point system. While hit points are never going to be "realistic", you can make nods toward realism by various tweaks of the system and I think no one has ever produced a realistic system that is fun in tabletop play anyway for the reasons I outlined in the my prior post.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7353152, member: 4937"] I think there are a bundle of problems. Not having monsters fight to the death is harder than you might think. In real ancient warfare, the majority of fatalities were inflicted usually during the 'rout' portion of the fight. That is, the two sides would engage until one side's morale would fail, and then the side with the failing morale would rout and during the rout phase they'd be overrun by cavalry and run down and basically mass stabbed in the back by the winning side. Part of what made the Greek Phalanx so devastating wasn't just superior weaponry, but superior military discipline - the Greeks didn't rout. And there are plenty of examples in the real world of individuals and units not routing and fighting to the death, either from fanaticism or discipline or sheer personal tenacity. Indeed, most military traditions are about instilling this willingness to fight to the death into its elite soldiery through some sort of process, precisely because if your unit doesn't rout the enemy will tend to do so. I could go through a lot of real world examples, but it would invariably get political. Suffice to say, I think the truth of that statement will be born out in the investigations of the interested student, and as a hopefully non-political example consider how the "beserker" concept reoccurs through almost all tribal and animistic cultures. A morale check system or any other system that makes this random suffers the same problems with respect to fulfilling gamist goals as random wound systems. The game becomes too unpredictable to design challenges well. If you design the encounter with orcs on the assumption that they'll rout at some point, then it takes a larger number of orcs to challenge a given party than normal. But, if this group doesn't rout at the expected point, then the PC party will have to, with the attendant risk of being the one that will suffer disproportionately large casualties during the rout phase. To avoid this, you'd need basically 'hit points for morale' so that groups would rout at a somewhat predictable point. I've never seen a system implement this. The reason you rarely see PC's fleeing is mostly because fleeing rarely helps. Fleeing is complex and usually involves giving your opponent multiple unanswered attacks. In most cases, the PC's are more likely to survive by standing their ground and hoping the dice break their way than they are by fleeing. In many cases, the PC's are facing beasts that are much faster than they are and so fleeing isn't really even an option. Even if they theoretically could retreat, in many cases an organized retreat involves sacrificing part of the force to let the rest get away and that's just not a very attractive option. In order to retreat successfully, a PC party has to be tactically prepared for a retreat and that requires a level of skill and system mastery that is late in coming. Finally, from a metagame perspective, PC's rarely retreat because they have an assumption that most encounters are 'fair' and the odds are in their favor. In order for a retreat to be successful, you have to begin the process several rounds before it becomes necessary. But D&D combats are usually really short in terms of the number of rounds involved, and so typically you only see retreat either at first contact - "There is no way we can take on that!" - or when it is already too late. I think you are right that as long as most of the PC's hit points remain at the end of the night, you can plausibly suspend disbelief that all those minor cuts and scrapes and bruises, even if they aren't healed per se are at healed up enough that with a night's rest they are no longer really issues. It wouldn't be perfect, because it still doesn't exactly simulate our own experiences with injury, but it would lessen the problem. However, changing the way we narrate combat would not solve the whole of the problem, because you'd still have problems with character's dropped to death's door by injuries right as rain the next morning. Fundamentally, while our experience with injury and pain allows us to suspend disbelief regarding the idea that most injuries and pain can be ignored rather quickly, nonetheless our experience remains that quite often they cannot and our injuries continue to be a source of pain and debilitation for a long time. We've all had experiences of going to bed and waking up to find the injury more severe, tender, sore and debilitating in the morning. We've all experienced loss of functionality of some sort because of injuries we've received, so if you don't model that at all then it becomes very obvious that 'it's just a game' pretty much all the time. That said, I've never really seen a game willing to model injury realistically, and most attempts I've seen at realism (Role Master and Dwarf Fortress come to mind) in fact produce non-realistic narratives that are arguably no more realistic in the narrative than what a good DM would produce with narration taking cues from D&D's hit point system and quite possibly a lot less. For all the fact that Dwarf Fortress models the body down to the level of thickness of tissue, in point of fact the narratives produced by Dwarf Fortress combats hew closer to the ridiculously comic end of the spectrum than they do to gritty realism. They are filled with implausible absurdities and repetitive silliness. Realistic injuries don't just involve tangible locations and lingering effects, but the really critical effects of injury are always shock, blood loss and organ damage. Plus, realistic injuries would spend a lot of time with infection and septic shock and all the stuff that kills you hours or days after the fight is over. Dwarf fortress does do this, but not in any way that ultimately feels realistic. Nor does realism really support the trope, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" that most adventure gaming wants to support by way of mechanical character development and advancement. In short, I don't think there is a system for recording injury that happily supports more different aesthetics of play than some sort of hit point system. While hit points are never going to be "realistic", you can make nods toward realism by various tweaks of the system and I think no one has ever produced a realistic system that is fun in tabletop play anyway for the reasons I outlined in the my prior post. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Narrating Hit Points - no actual "damage"
Top