D&D 5E Q&A 10/17/13 - Crits, Damage on Miss, Wildshape

[Savage Wombat]

I submit that most chocolate ice creams contain some amount of vanilla flavoring. But no vanilla ice cream contains chocolate. If you put chocolate in, it's no longer vanilla.

/nothing to do with the discussion, but important for the metaphor

 

[urLordy]

Well, it's your analogy!

My analogy, before being re-purposed, is that in a vanilla and chocolate ice cream, it is useless to expect and tell a vanilla lover to like more chocolate simply because there already is some proportion of chocolate in the ice cream. My reading of your version of the analogy is that you've simply belittled the amount of vanilla that you think people taste in the ice cream by changing the proportions to vanilla swirls.

Look, I understand not wanting to play 4e because they took out the vanilla swirl and made it impossible to treat HP as meat.

The vanilla/chocolate doesn't refer to hp-as-meat specificially; that was a separate tangent. Vanilla/chocolate refers to ways of designing and reading the rules (outcome-based or process sim/worldbuilding to use my ad hoc labels).

It's not about denying anyone's playstyle. It's just one mechanic that fits in with the abstract nature of D&D combat. As Ratskinner has eloquently noted throughout the thread, there have always problems when trying to narrate HP damage as injury.

Which you know I agreed with. Ratskinner also eloquently expressed that he respected that, for some people, damage-on-a-miss is the last straw. Think back several years to when 4E was in development and the edition wars. A lot of that edition warring (going both ways) was telling other people that they were being unreasonable about like or not liking a certain mechanic. Now D&D Next came out so soon on the heels of 4E because those that didn't embrace 4E still didn't like what they didn't like, right?

 

[pemerton]

All damage in D&D, in every edition, is narrative-independent. There are no called shots, no hit locations. It falls to the DM to narrate the effect of any HP loss in the game, to the degree that they want to. There's nothing that makes this mechanic any different in that regard. How do you narrate a "critical hit" that only takes away a third of the opponent's remaining HP? How do you narrate a damage roll of 1 that kills an opponent?

I hope it's obvious that I agree with this!

Every edition prior to fourth edition explicitly treated damage as always being connected to at least some sort of tissue damage.

What about damage to a wraith or spectre?

What about damage caused by psionic attacks against psionics with no points left to deplete? (Is the tissue in their brains being damaged?! And then heaing via a few days rest?!)

I'm not even sure that damage to a skeleton or zombie is aptly characterised as tissue damage, any more than damage dealt to a door by an axe or to paper by fire is tissue damage.

everyone here AFAICT admits that D&D's core has incohesion like that. The ONLY question is to add more of the same, or quarantine what's there as a sacred cow and stop adding to it.

I don't admit that D&D is incoherent in its attack and damage mechanics - at least, 4e isn't.

So I don't see the great weapon fighter mechanic as breaching a quarantine. I see it as taking advantage of the potential of the system.

Think back several years to when 4E was in development and the edition wars. A lot of that edition warring (going both ways) was telling other people that they were being unreasonable about like or not liking a certain mechanic. Now D&D Next came out so soon on the heels of 4E because those that didn't embrace 4E still didn't like what they didn't like, right?

I don't think you're being unreasonable, and frankly how you want to play D&D is no business of mine.

My issue in this thread is that [MENTION=95493]Tovec[/MENTION], Celebrim (and perhaps you - I honestly can't remember) have asserted that the reason I don't object to the mechanic is that I don't care whether or not my game makes sense. It's that attack upon me and my game that I am interested in arguing against - nothing else.

 

[Ratskinner]

A very good question, I had to think about this a while before I even responded.

(emphases mine) So what do you guys think encourages and discourages narration avoidance or inconsistency across the different editions? And are there lessons to apply in D&D Next?

My feeling is that outcome-based mechanics (which are readily embraced in 4E) either induce more narration avoidance or not any less so than in previous editions.

I don't think particular mechanics on one side or the other are the problem. Its the muddle of the two that creates the worst tensions. If healing spells cause this problem...is it that the HP are abstract ("meta") or that the healing spell titles aren't? I've seen plenty of other systems that handle things either very abstractly or very fiction-oriented, and either can work.

So..
As you note..HP, damage, and the general combat engine for just about all editions. Missile combat stands out to me as a place where its just better not to look.

The healing spells for the older editions in particular. 4e and healing surges made that a little more sensible. However, non-magical healing adding another discouragement to narrating an attack too specifically so you don't find yourself "shouting wounds shut".

Pre-4e saving throws are another area that can often cause us to just not look too closely. I mean, you're in an open space, no cover, and an AoE goes off covering two identical rogues, they are engulfed in <something>. Yet one dies and the other doesn't...they both stood their ground, not moving...so its not like the one who made his save actually leapt out of the blast zone...what exactly did the survivor do that the other didn't?

The notorious 4e Prone Ooze. I imagine there are probably other less-common circumstantial cases that come up during 4e play. I know I also have seen the circumstance of dealing both frost and fire damage with the same weapon...which seems....counter-intuitive.

Stealth in general seems to be poorly modeled, and that's compounded by the way sneak attacks/backstabs have worked. (Which, I think has always cheated the sneak-assassin types on the attack, but benefitted them on the sneaking part...maybe just to encourage them to go on ahead and get in trouble?)

I've presided as DM over several instances (particularly 2e) where the result of overlapping effects of spells was not immediately evident. I've been in situations where it was obvious what should happen as per the "crunchy" bits of the spell descriptions, but I couldn't figure out exactly what should actually be visible to someone watching the scene.

Hit rolls, damage and hit points are common to all editions -- so I don't know that any one edition can discourage narration inconsistency in that respect. Cure spells, of course, too, which we all admit. There was always some narration avoidance in corner cases of sneak attack, evasion, fireballs that may or may not set things on fire -- and I would truly enjoy if the D&D Next continued to encourage the gaming table to consider fictional positioning in such cases.

No one edition...all of them. I think D&D would have to give up to fairly fundamental sacred cows in order to avoid these.

But in a standard combat with outcome-based powers, where players are in zoomed out 3rd person perspective, and a player uses a fiat ability, and it's not explicit why/what process occured, isn't that easily narration avoidance or inconsistency? Bob hits on a miss and imagines the greatsword clipping the pixie, but John imagines the pixie's exhaustion flitting aside, and Betty and Sally and Ebert don't imagine anything at all. But they can't come to a shared hallucination, because Bob and John have different visions, and Betty considers both ideas to be ludicrous so she ignores it, and Sally and Ebert simply don't care as it's not their roleplaying stance and why should they care because nothing in gameplay induces them to care otherwise.

This could be said for every single time anything or anyone takes HP damage during a D&D combat: "Bob deals damage and imagines the greatsword clipping the pixie..." Worse, what happens if the table agrees on the "exhaustion" narration for a hit but then somebody hits it with a healing spell?

I don't have a real conclusion to any of this. If D&D is a confused animal that isn't quite self-aware of what its design goals are, then I'm equally confused if -- objectively, outside of my personal preferences -- designing mechanics like hit-on-miss is supposed to further those undeclared design goals or not, other than just some WoTC designer thinking that's a cool mechanic.

I think early D&D was a confused animal. Especially if the stories of its "organic" growth and development are correct, then it actually didn't start out with any design goals.

 

[Celebrim]

What about damage to a wraith or spectre?

Well, at least you've given up on attempting to prove that damage to a person from a weapon doesn't involve tissue damage since the TEXT PRETTY EXPLICITLY SAYS IT DOES.

It's not clear from the text what wraiths and specters are made out of, but since at least magical weapons can cut it, it's got at least some physical substance. Ectoplasm maybe. Whatever ethereal things are made of - ether presumably. Or at worst, an energy field, which while intangible is nonetheless physical. Regardless, whatever the substance, from the general explanation of hit points, it's clear that if the sword whiffs and doesn't touch the substance of the wraith, it doesn't do damage and if it did do damage we know that it is because it can cut whatever wraiths are made of.

What about damage caused by psionic attacks against psionics with no points left to deplete? (Is the tissue in their brains being damaged?! And then heaing via a few days rest?!)

I'm not hugely familiar with the psionic rules in 3rd edition, and I'm not familiar at all with the 2nd edition rules. However, if you look at the 1e table one thing that stands out quite glaringly - psionic attacks by and large don't do hit point damage. You can be dazed, confused, rendered an idiot, turned insane, paniced, enraged, stunned, killed (your mind physically crushed), temporarily or permanently lose psionic power, put into a coma, or rendered a will-less robot but normal psionic attacks don't do hit point damage.

So far as I know (and I admit my knowledge of 3rd psionic is quite limited, since I never embraced them, seeing as they were offered only as an alternative magic system) psionic combat was removed from the game by 3.5, but in general psionic attacks in 3rd edition for the most part did ability damage or put debuff conditions on the target very much like 1e. Those that do hit point damage, say psychic crush, presumably do physical damage to the brain - they explicitly did so in 1e. In fact, because by the definition and explanation provided for hit points, which I've already provided, we pretty much know that if some hit point damage has occurred, at least some physical wounds have also been sustained. The target may or may not have also lost some amount of metaphysical resources as part of evading the brunt of the attack, but if damage occurred the attack was by definition not completely evaded and some damage occurred. This is not only logical from the words 'hit' and 'damage' - to say nothing of the logic of the phrase 'hit point' itself - but explicitly stated by the text.

Again:

"Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which cause movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts, and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points." - Gary Gygax

If 'hit points' were meant to express something that could be lost without hitting the target, why in the heck did they decide to call them 'hit points'? I mean sheesh, the mental back flips that some people are going through in this thread to not see things by there most obvious interpretation astounds me.

I'm not even sure that damage to a skeleton or zombie is aptly characterised as tissue damage, any more than damage dealt to a door by an axe or to paper by fire is tissue damage.

They may be things, but they definitely have tissue. Bone is a tissue. 'Tissue' in a medical sense just means the structural material something is made of. And in the sense I'm using it, by tissue I mean 'the thing that the creature is actually made of' as opposed to 'any and all other metaphysical things that hit points abstract to not limited to skill, luck, destiny'. So in the sense I mean it, the 'tissue' or 'meat' of an iron golem is 'animated iron'. This would I think be pretty darn obvious, and in any event even if my words 'tissue' and 'meat' are unclear and insufficiently generic, none of that would disrupt understanding of the very clear meaning of hit points.

I mean basically we are given a very clear and exacting explanation of what hit points are meant to represent in the text by the author of the system, and this interpretation has been in throughout all the other systems that have readily adopted the concept of the hit point from pnp RPGs to side scrolling fighter video games, and so what you probably should be doing is trying to understand how the ill defined wraith must fit into this clearly defined system, rather than using the using the gaps in the explanation of 'Wraith' to argue that the system is other than how it is has been explicitly defined.

 

[Ratskinner]

I'm not sure I understand this. Damage is not narrative-independant to everyone, as long as they idealize a correlation.

huh? A correlation is not nearly the same thing as a narrative. When an arrow hits and does "8 damage" the DM (usually) has freedom to narrate this however they might wish to. However, at least IME, most DMs don't actually narrate hits because doing so highlights the fact that HP are entirely meta/abstract. Especially since the narration has exactly zero impact on the mechanical operation of the game. I don't count "Oh, he got you good that time!" as a narration, because it tells you nothing relevant about the fiction and I most usually see it uttered in a rather loose gamist fashion.

I'm sure a good system might encourage everyone to view hit points as 100% meta, but D&D Next is not that system, giving so many conflicting signals and incohesion.
IOW, D&D doesn't objectively state that damage is "narrative-independant", nor does it state it's not, because the system doesn't even know it itself. All conclusions are therefore subjective AFAICT.

FWIW, I don't know of a single edition of the game where HP actually end up functioning as they are defined in the "what HP represent" section. While I agree that the game never tries to come out and declare it, HP are pretty obviously nothing but a fiat "I'm still alive" token mechanic. (With pacing thrown in sometimes.) Narrative for hits is totally irrelevant to their functioning, and their functioning is totally irrelevant to the narrative for the hits. That's about as "narrative-independent" as you could hope for.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not hugely familiar with the psionic rules in 3rd edition, and I'm not familiar at all with the 2nd edition rules. However, if you look at the 1e table one thing that stands out quite glaringly - psionic attacks by and large don't do hit point damage. You can be dazed, confused, rendered an idiot, turned insane, paniced, enraged, stunned, killed (your mind physically crushed), temporarily or permanently lose psionic power, put into a coma, or rendered a will-less robot but normal psionic attacks don't do hit point damage.

I'm talking about 1st ed AD&D, not 3E. A 1st ed psionic with no psionic defence points left to lose takes hp damage in lieu. What tissue is being damaged? The brain? Which then heals without treatment over the next X days?

 

[Celebrim]

huh? A correlation is not nearly the same thing as a narrative. When an arrow hits and does "8 damage" the DM (usually) has freedom to narrate this however they might wish to. However, at least IME, most DMs don't actually narrate hits...

I narrate the hits. It's the inability to provide consistent narration to the mechanic that is my principle reason for hating 'damage on a miss'. My dislike of it when wearing my gamist hat - that it ignores the fortune mechanic save to tell us degree of success - is only secondary. In both cases, I wouldn't mind the mechanic if it was 'damage on a glancing blow' or something of the sort.

Missile weapons aren't problematic to narrate. They are narrated in the same manner as sword blows. The only problematic aspect of narrating missile weapons in a hit point system is the degree of improbability you can assign to such narration. Why can the hero dodge the arrow almost perfectly every time, but not so perfectly he doesn't take some sort of glancing blow or superficial wound? Oh well, movies work the same way - it's hero magic.

because doing so highlights the fact that HP are entirely meta/abstract.

No, hit points are partially meta/abstract. No, they don't define the wounds that occur. It is abstraction rather than process simulation. But they aren't 'entirely' abstract. They can be visualized as something.

But that's not something particular to the hit point system. A wound track relies on the same abstraction, and the narration of the hit and resulting wound also doesn't define the mechanical outcome. Likewise, GURPS is more heavily into process simulation than D&D, but largely uses hit points in an abstract manner as well. Relatively few systems take the time to mark and define every wound that occurs to a character simply because this quickly becomes tedious, and highly realistic wounds tend to make for relatively un-fun games. Because in a social game, what you don't want is to put a player out of the game for an extended period.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm talking about 1st ed AD&D, not 3E. A 1st ed psionic with no psionic defence points left to lose takes hp damage in lieu. What tissue is being damaged? The brain? Which then heals without treatment over the next X days?

You mean with no psionic points left. If no psionic defense points are left, the psionic begins losing attack points instead (or at least, they can).

But sure, as to your question, why not? See, now you are reduced from arguing that the interpretation is not consistent, to arguing that it isn't 'realistic' for a brain to be able to recover from injury.

But for this use of 'realistic', now it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether you find magic, dragons, and so forth realistic. Because of the fact that D&D exists in an alternate universe from this one, there is no reason to suppose that the biology, chemistry, and physics of that universe are perfectly congruent with our own in every detail. Ok, so we've just learned that damage to the brain can often be healed in this universe. So what? We also accept say in 3rd edition, that actual intelligence damage will usually heal on its own. I've got no problem with that because heroes in fiction that suffer concussions and blows that cause even traumatic injuries to the brain, usually just get better as well. So we are living in a story book universe. So what? The explanation for hit points remains consistent and remains EXACTLY WHAT WE'VE BEEN EXPLICTLY TOLD IT IS.

Again, why the mental back flips? Does the text need to tell us, "Oh yeah, for the purposes of the game many physical injuries that would be crippling and permanently debilitating in the real world just get better." Would that make you feel better about the fiction?

 

[pemerton]

When an arrow hits and does "8 damage" the DM (usually) has freedom to narrate this however they might wish to. However, at least IME, most DMs don't actually narrate hits because doing so highlights the fact that HP are entirely meta/abstract. Especially since the narration has exactly zero impact on the mechanical operation of the game. I don't count "Oh, he got you good that time!" as a narration, because it tells you nothing relevant about the fiction

<snip>

HP are pretty obviously nothing but a fiat "I'm still alive" token mechanic. (With pacing thrown in sometimes.) Narrative for hits is totally irrelevant to their functioning, and their functioning is totally irrelevant to the narrative for the hits. That's about as "narrative-independent" as you could hope for.

Under the definition of "narrative" that you are working with, I agree. But that is not the only sense of narrative that can be in play, I think. (And this relates to your observation about pacing.)

I don't know if you're familiar with HeroWars/Quest, but prior to HQ revised, extended contests in that system were resolved via an "action point" mechanic: action resolution involves bidding AP from a pool, and successes cost the enemy their bid action points (and sometimes could result in transfers of APs to the winner of that exchange), until eventually someone drops to 0 AP and loses the contest.

Robin Laws says this about narrating AP bids and AP loss (HeroWars: Roleplayiing in Glorantha, pp 130, 150):

Players and narrators [=GMs] are encouraged to describe the action as an onlooker would see it . . . Try to match the bid to the action described. If you describe an all-out offensive . . . you should be bidding high, while if you say that your character is circling his opponent cautiously then a low bid is in order.

AP reflect much more than the combatant's physical condition. . . AP also measure a character's emotional state. . . Until the character drops to 0 or fewer AP, any injuries he suffers will be superficial. . . [A]void describing the results of successful blows with the accuracy of a trauma-unit physician until the final consequences are determined.​

Does this remind you of any other system and it's implications for narration? Of course D&D doesn't have the bidding aspect, though in 4e their are resource-deployment choices that have some resemblance. But the idea of all wounds being superficial, and of description of injuries being treated in a loose and generic way until final consequences are determined, both fit the hp model.

Does this undermine narration? It undermines knowledge of the details that would interest a trauma-unit physician! But I think it can support a sense of the emotional and dramatic state of the situation: who is pushing hard, who is being pushed hard, who is on the ropes, who is surging back, etc. That can be an important aspect of narrative, at least for some RPGers (eg me!).

EDIT: In case it wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with you that hit points are primarily "I'm still alive" tokens, but that this isn't an independent to a certain approach to narration.