Crazy Jerome
First Post
Part of the purpose of the seemingly goofy numbers (and Armor as AC) in early D&D was to avoid the problem of really good armor completely cancelling out attacks, moment to moment.
That is, mathematically, consider that 10th level hero versus a bunch of 1st level guards. If you scale the 10th level guy more naturally, but keep the hit point adjustment reasonably in-line with everything else, then what you get is that a lot of the 1st level guys miss, until a couple of them finally connect (and bypass armor, if you use some other armor system). There are or course "feast or famine" issues, with going with low chance to connect, relatively low hit points, armor as damage resistance, and that is what a lot of people tend to focus upon when we have this dicussion. It just seems more "realistic" that our hero doesn't get hit at all--and then finally he does and he is quickly in trouble. Or if unlucky, he gets smacked several times right away.
What I think keeps getting missed in this respect is that Gygax and company wanted that sense of slowly being whittled down--and in order to have that, you needed a marker. Since they clearly didn't want an overt "death spiral", the scaling hit points that represented fatigue, luck, physical damage, etc. was a perfectly fine solution.
If your intention is to preserve the kind of pacing that has been like in all versions of D&D in one form or another, then you must address this issue.
That is, mathematically, consider that 10th level hero versus a bunch of 1st level guards. If you scale the 10th level guy more naturally, but keep the hit point adjustment reasonably in-line with everything else, then what you get is that a lot of the 1st level guys miss, until a couple of them finally connect (and bypass armor, if you use some other armor system). There are or course "feast or famine" issues, with going with low chance to connect, relatively low hit points, armor as damage resistance, and that is what a lot of people tend to focus upon when we have this dicussion. It just seems more "realistic" that our hero doesn't get hit at all--and then finally he does and he is quickly in trouble. Or if unlucky, he gets smacked several times right away.
What I think keeps getting missed in this respect is that Gygax and company wanted that sense of slowly being whittled down--and in order to have that, you needed a marker. Since they clearly didn't want an overt "death spiral", the scaling hit points that represented fatigue, luck, physical damage, etc. was a perfectly fine solution.
If your intention is to preserve the kind of pacing that has been like in all versions of D&D in one form or another, then you must address this issue.