Schrodinger's HP and Combat

[Celebrim]

To a degree, this is a straw man with D&D of any flavor, simply because the nature of hit points is nebulous in pretty much every edition.

Gygax explains hit points very thoroughly and clearly in the 1e DMG. I have no idea where this myth that hit points don't have an explanation comes from. There are some important realistic features of injury that D&D pretty much doesn't model - shock, trauma and blood loss being some of the most relevant - but hit points themselves to the extent that they are intended to be realistic are given a very explicit definition. A portion of that long and worthwhile description reads:

"Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of 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 six sense ability which caused 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 reset and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points." - Gygax

In brief Gygax says that:

a) All hit point loss represent some physical damage.
b) As characters increase in level, they gain only a tiny additional ability to sustain wounds.
c) However, as characters increase in level, they gain greater skill (of some sort, depending on the class or flavor of the character) to advert serious wounds and take only minor injuries instead. Thus, the more hit points that a character has the smaller a wound is represented by a given number of hit points. For a low level character, a 6 hit point loss could be a serious or even fatal wound, but for a healthy high level character the same serious blow deals only a minor wound.
d) As a high level character suffers wounds, his ability to avoid wounds begins to increase due to injury, with the result that blows become relatively more and more serious.

So the nature of hit points is quite explicit and clear. What tends to confuse people is that damage is graded on a curve as it were, so that 6 hit points of damage is scaled to the particular target. We can say what 6 hit points of damage means relative to the target, but having said it means a particular thing for a particular target doesn't mean that it means the same thing for a different target. However, being a measurement on a relative scale doesn't make the definition nebulous.

 

[SteveC]

In a word: no.
Okay, not too helpful, so more words. I'd say that this issue comes to the forefront largely from the "HP as meat" crowd, which I've never been a member of.

I watch a lot of action movies, and as such I think that the 4E HP model is the best implementation of the HP model I've ever seen, including the "get up and shake it off" from the Warlord, if what you're looking to do is run like an action movie. Since that's the goal for my games, no issue.

I've never had a player with issues with this, and I'd say it's purely an online thing. Nothing to see here, move along.

And the people who argue this online got HP as meat (mostly) in 5E, so they should enjoy that and play on.

 

[Bluenose]

2) Narrative malleability

Depending on whatever other abstractions (eg armor class mesh of avoidance and mitigation, action economy in n seconds) that are layered upon and interface directly with the nebulous ablation system of HP, you are going to have a system that renders incoherent any arbitrarily chosen instance of HP loss as consequentially meat.

Conversely, impose a death spiral/injury mechanic (*) upon the system and remove those abstractions (eg break out AC into mitigation and avoidance), and you're approaching territory where "any arbitrarily chosen instance of HP loss as consequentially meat" becomes more tenable.

Fate manages to combine an absence of hit points and narrative malleability and potentially a death spiral too.

In brief Gygax says that:

a) All hit point loss represent some physical damage.
b) As characters increase in level, they gain only a tiny additional ability to sustain wounds.
c) However, as characters increase in level, they gain greater skill (of some sort, depending on the class or flavor of the character) to advert serious wounds and take only minor injuries instead. Thus, the more hit points that a character has the smaller a wound is represented by a given number of hit points. For a low level character, a 6 hit point loss could be a serious or even fatal wound, but for a healthy high level character the same serious blow deals only a minor wound.
d) As a high level character suffers wounds, his ability to avoid wounds begins to increase due to injury, with the result that blows become relatively more and more serious.

While I agree, that is what Gygax describes, this does of course run into an entirely separate problem, which is that then the spells that restore hit points are curing smaller and smaller injuries depending on the character that they're cast on. When you cast Cure Light Wounds on a 2nd level Mage and restore 7 of their 8 hit points, you're bringing them back from very serious injuries; while the same spell won't be nearly as effective at healing the injuries on a 10th level Fighter, whose minor injuries require much more magic/time to heal. 4e's proportional healing was a much better model of what you're describing, and hence has been discarded.

 

[Celebrim]

While I agree, that is what Gygax describes, this does of course run into an entirely separate problem, which is that then the spells that restore hit points are curing smaller and smaller injuries depending on the character that they're cast on.

Agreed. I've been wrestling with that problem with my own 3.X rules branch. At one point, I rewrote the cure spells to depend on the HD of the target rather than the level of the caster. However, I quickly gave up on that for balance reasons - at low levels, the spells were too weak to allow for the sort of sustained play healing promotes, whereas at high levels the application of a low level spell cured too much. I'm still a bit bothered by it, and would love to have a good solution, but things like spell abundance depend on assumptions of spell utility and there are lots of things that can unravel if you aren't careful where you pull out threads and replace them. Balance on the cure spells is just a lot easier if you stick with the present scale, and since I have many bigger worries, fixing healing has been pushed to the back burner.

While I believe firmly that 4e was a mistake, and made several questionable design decisions, I don't blindly believe everything 4e did was bad nor do I disagree with most of 4e's (IMO largely unrealized) goals. Several aspects of 4e have already influenced my own D&D heartbreaker, and its likely that at some point I'll visit the concept of surges in some form to regulate and balance how healing works.

And all that said, it doesn't change the fact that hit points were given a concrete and reasonable definition and color right from the start. Hit points are abstract and obviously never intended to be perfectly realistic in all details, but exactly what they abstract is not nebulously defined in early editions of the game. Gygax clearly specifies that every damaging wound always does at least some meat damage as well as possibly some metaphysical damage. I don't think we need to revisit how 4e screws this up in a few edge cases, or makes other changes to the assumptions that had prevailed from OD&D to 3e, much less reach some agreement over whether we should even care or whether these changes marked an improvement, but I prefer everyone choose to believe what they believe on the basis of facts. It is not the case that 1e hit points were defined a truly nebulous way.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Further, (2) narrative malleability is anathema to your play agenda because you want "I attack with my sword, hit, and cause damage" to always and only mean "dude 1 strikes 1 time with weapon and cleaves/smashes/stabs musculoskeletal system (and possibly organs) of dude 2 and causes physical harm to dude 2."

I feel like this is very close to my position on the subject. Narrative malleability is something that I want to minimize as much as possible in a system, at least to the extent that it doesn't significantly increase the workload required to model anything. To me, the whole point of having a system is that it converts the objective reality of any action into a mathematical language that we can process and then spits back the objective reality of the outcome of that action.

Although, in my case, my agenda is that "I attack with my sword, hit, and cause damage" should always mean "dude 1 successfully strikes 1 time with weapon and causes a lot of battering and bruising to dude 2 because thankfully dude 2 was wearing armor." As long as it always means something consistent and objective, then that's the important part.

And fortunately for me, 5E lets me do that fairly easily (thanks to default fast healing, lingering wounds triggered by critical hits, and the optional rule that any hit against an unarmored target is automatically a critical).

 

[cavalier973]

While running 4E I always treat all damage before "bloodied" as superficial blows, exhaustion, demoralization and overall battle fatigue. Only after "bloodied" hit's become wounds, hence the name.
This way "second winds" before B are exactly, what it says on the label - catching a breath, trying to concentrate on battle at shake away any distractions. Second Wind after B - you are trying to close your wounds by crude, but fast and effective ways, like binding them with a piece of your clothes, removing foreign objects from them or forcing your joints back in place.
Healing potions before B? No problem - healing magic clears your mind and bolsters your spirit. Same with other methods of healing.

Excellent.
I was going to suggest something similar.

For a game that relies on mathematics for conflict adjudication, hit points are a mathematical representation of a character's health, morale, and endurance, all wrapped up into an easy-to-understand statistic.

For an alternative method, one could look to "Torchbearer"; those rules have a list of conditions that characters suffer whenever they incur a failure (things like "Hungry and Thirsty", "Exhausted", "Sick", etc.). Once a character has acquired every condition, he dies.


Also, this:
From the 4th Edition Rules Compendium:

“Hit points measure the ability of a creature to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on its feet throughout the battle. Hit points represent more than physical endurance. They also represent skill, luck, and resolve–all the factors that combine to help a creature stay alive in combat.” (p. 256)

 

[cavalier973]

* Amusingly enough, 4e is the first D&D system to come stock with a perfectly synthesized mechanic that makes handling of lasting, consequential injury a seamless thing - the Disease Track.

Do you use that to represent injuries other than disease in your games?

 

[pemerton]

In brief Gygax says that:

a) All hit point loss represent some physical damage. .

Not exactly.

Gygax's DMG, pp 61, 81:

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them . . .

Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the last handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .

[R]ecall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch . . . [T]hus the saving throw [versus poison]. If that mere scrach managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

What is clear from this is that up until the last handful of hit points, hit point loss does not correspond to physical damage, except perhaps a nick or scratch. Any such nick or scratch is not physically damaging in any meaningful way, and hence questions of hit location and damage type are not germane.

The hit point essay on p 82 also indicates that when a high level fighter is healing for a month to regain all his/her hit points, the bulk of that recovery must be of "metaphysical" hit points - because assuming that s/he had not been reduced to 0 or fewer hit points (which introduces its own, condition-based, rules and healing requirements), s/he can't have suffered a wound that cannot be physically healed in a few days. (Because a 0-level character with just a handful of hit points could also suffer, and then recover, from such a wound.)

The main differences between Gygaxian hit points and 4e hit points are:

(i) dropping to zero hp is treated differently - in 4e it is more Schroedinger-y than in Gygax's AD&D;

(ii) whatever physical damage that is suffered that is not potentially fatal (ie that does not drop to zero or fewer hp) in core 4e debilitates for only the time it takes to have a long rest, whereas in AD&D it can debilitate for at least a couple of days;

(iii) metaphysical hit points take a long time to recover in AD&D, whereas in 4e metaphysical hit points can be very quickly recovered by inspiration, whether from the words of an allied battle captain, a benediction spoken by a cleric, getting one's second wind, or some other form of surge-dependent healing.​

To reply to [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] on the issue of verisimilitude, 4e is no different from AD&D as far as point (ii) is concerned - in both systems, the combat system has no capacity to deliver injury results that are not potentially fatal, but that take extended periods of rest to recover (eg no broken limbs).

In my view it is no different as far as (iii) is concerned either. There is nothing inherently versimilitudinous about "metaphysical" hit points (luck, grit etc) taking minutes or days to recover. Personally I find that pacing of 4e corresponds better to action fiction of the superheroic or Conan-esque variety.

The biggest pressure on verisimilitude in 4e, in my view, arises at point (i). In AD&D this is not particularly realistic either - any injury that is potentially fatal, but that does not kill, can be recovered from in a week or so, which is much quicker than real life. In 4e many occasions of being dropped to zero hit points are more like a swoon or a temporary dizziness, rather than a potentially fatal wound (analogues are found in boxing, when a fighter falls to the canvass and then gets up; and in LotR, when Frodo faints after being "stabbed" by the troll) but the game system doesn't tell us which is which until after the death saving throw/recovery process has been resolved.

5e is more like 4e than AD&D in this respect: being dropped to zero hit points doesn't in and of itself impose any significant debilitation, and hence you can't tell whether or not a blow that dropped someone to zero hit points was a serious, potentially fatal, injury until they have failed three death saves (at which point, as in 4e, you know that it was potentially fatal, and that that potentiality was realised).

 

[pemerton]

I always described hit point loss as physical injury, up until 4E. You could be impaled for 47 damage on a critical hit, and power through it if you were heroic enough.

I don't understand how inspirational healing or second wind would get in the way of this: second wind equates to using your action to summon up your heroic fortitude, and inspiration equate to someone else brining out your inner heroism via encouragement, benediction etc.

 

[pemerton]

On a slightly related point, the quote from Gygax on poison saves shows how different AD&D saving throws are from 3E and 5e saving throws. In AD&D, the poison save is essentially a luck roll, perhaps with a hint of skill thrown in: it determines whether or not the hit point loss corresponded to a scratch or wound through which poison entered, or the mere lose of "metaphysical" hit points. A successful saving throw means that the character wasn't poisoned.

This is completely different from the Fortitude save in 3E, which is all about the ability to withstand being poisoned, not to avoid being poisoned. The only rules elements in AD&D that resemble that are the bonus to poison saves from CON (which dwarves and halflings get automatically, and which all characters gets at CON 19+).