"Stumbling Around in My Head" - The Feeling of Dissociation as a Player

[Bluenose]

If I remember correctly (I may not - it's been a while*) hits to arms and legs don't also count against that "body pool". It also depends whether and how much healing you apply to yourself.

*: plus, we used to play several systems that were somewhat similar, and the main one of these definitely had this sort of rule.

Damage to legs and arms certainly counted against the main pool, but I think only until the limb was reduced to zero (maybe depending on edition). So eight damage to a five point leg would do five to the main pool, but eight damage to the abdomen would all count.

Exceed the hit points of the limb by six, and it's severed/mangled beyond repair. Exceed that on head/chest/abdomen, and it's a dead character. I saw more characters die that way than to overall damage, I suspect. You could re-attach a limb with Healing 6, but not bring someone back to life without very high-powered magic that most religions didn't have access to. Shamans could self-raise, of course.


Also, if hit points are proprtional meat, Cure X Wounds spells should presumably have healed more damage on characters with more hit points. Otherwise, relatively minor wounds (20 damage on a 100hp character) require more magical healing than serious ones (20 damage on a 25 hp character). 4e at least gets that bit right.

 

[pemerton]

Why can't PCs know that? That's your own interpretation of D&D worlds. Mine is that they do know that the risk of a non-magical arrow alone killing them, unless it's a powerful bow wield by a powerful person, is nigh zero.

<snip>

I'm willing to resolve that problem here by making the game world a closer match to the rules of D&D.

I can't say there's anything wrong with that per se.

But personally, I think it makes the world of D&D something different from how it is generally presented and played.

What does that mean inside the game world that someone can ensure that they won't take a good hit?

Good question. If hit points are luck and divine favour, how do you know that you are going to be lucky? And what does it mean for luck to be "run down" over the course of the adventuring day?

Uhm, don't all RQ PCs have a single hp pool, typically around 10-18 hp, as well as location hp? And realistically, when you play RQ, no one without damage reduction will ever take more than about 4 hits overall, using the listed damage expressions, without going down

Well, you might get lucky and get a serious of minimum damage rolls (a fortnight ago, rolling 2d20 for the ongoing damage from a beholder's disintegrate ray, I got snakes eyes!).

But I think that we can infer from this that, in RQ, the sort of rapier slash that produces a streak of blood but no other impairment is not a hit: it's just colour, probably suitable for the narration of a narrowly successful parry against a solidly successful hit.

If I remember correctly (I may not - it's been a while*) hits to arms and legs don't also count against that "body pool".

Sorry, on this occasion I think your memory is letting you down.

An aside on D&D combat as process-sim, flashing blades vs sloggers

I enjoyed this post, and would have XPed it if I could have.

 

[mmadsen]

So in terms of the appropriate feel to combat, 0e-3e D&D seems to get it exactly backwards. It seems that heavy armour should be giving the slogger characters 'hit points' to hack through, while unarmoured swashbucklers should have a higher 'defense' score, but far fewer hp.

Absolutely. If everyone's wearing heavy armor and using mundane weapons, then combat feels more or less right, like an Arthurian tale -- only no one ever gets unhorsed and knocked out early.

If performing division wasn't such a pain, then having armor divide damage by a factor of two, three, or four might work better than increasing AC to get hit half, one-third, or one-fourth as often.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

In 3E, all damage taken was physical damage. Period. No exceptions.

The most common way that your character gets hurt is to take lethal damage and lose hit points, whether from an orc's falchion, a wizard's lightning bolt spell, or a fall into molten lava. You record your character's hit point total on your character sheet. As your character takes damage, you subtract that damage from your hit points, leaving you with your current hit points. Current hit points go down when you take damage and go back up when you recover.

What Hit Points Represent: Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one. For some characters, hit points may represent divine favor or inner power. When a paladin survives a fireball, you will be hard pressed to convince bystanders that she doesn't have the favor of some higher power.

...You might want to do some reading before you start making absolute statements.

Personally, I'm all about 'all wounds all the time,'* official explanations be damed! But every single edition has treated hit points with the same sort of abstract hand-wavey explanation. Let's not pretend otherwise.

*Barring, of course, psychic damage situations such as pemerton pointed out.

 

[S'mon]

What does that mean inside the game world that someone can ensure that they won't take a good hit?

It means they're just that good.

 

[S'mon]

No. No it doesn't - it only comes close to doing that if you declare hit points to be proportional meat. I've already quoted the 1e approach to hit points earlier in this thread and I'm going to do so again.

Originally Posted by AD&D 1e DMG, page 61
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.​

Gygax's description of what two high level swashbucklers hacking away at each other's hp pool actually represents, is different from how it actually feels in play. Gygax says I'm supposed to think "Errol Flynn battling the Sheriff of Nottingham", but in play it actually feels more like "Boorman's Death of Uther".
I just raise this point because the lameness of that 3e duel has stuck with me for 9 years, whereas in my Friday AD&D game I just had the exact opposite experience, but it was only possible in AD&D because both duelists were in platemail. And this difference in impression... impressed me. ​

 

[mmadsen]

It means they're just that good.

I'm totally on board with high-level fighters being just that good -- but just that good at what exactly? Because they're not especially good at avoiding getting hit, yet they can ensure that they won't get hit well -- at first, and right after getting healed.

 

[S'mon]

I'm totally on board with high-level fighters being just that good -- but just that good at what exactly? Because they're not especially good at avoiding getting hit, yet they can ensure that they won't get hit well -- at first, and right after getting healed.

Like I said, I don't think it's realistic, or particularly good design.

Edit: Although attritive hp that increase with level to huge numbers is a way of giving some plot protection, I'm not sure they really do that very well in practice; post 3e the equal-CR monsters are designed to take PCs from full to 0 hp pretty fast. I tend to think that increasing defence plus a small increase in durability is probably best. On the other hand, D&D levels are a very powerful carrot, and hp increase seems to be part of that.

 

[rounser]

Me: A surfeit of unevisionable mechanics that don't map to the fantasy world are, for D&D, obviously bad game design.

Disassociation enthusiasts: Ah, but hit points, plus these quotes from Gygax taken 20 to 30 years out of context mean that not only are you wrong, but the creator of the game condones our healing surges and marking and CAGI as D&D done right!

Me: No, I'm aware of hit points and their wargaming origin. They are a single instance, their existence doesn't give you carte blanche to introduce a tidal wave of stuff that maps even less to fantasy reality than they do. And we all know that if Col Pladoh were still here, you wouldn't quote him to his face because he doesn't condone these 4Eisms, and you're quoting him decades out of context, and you're well aware of that.

And if anything, the failure of 4E seals the argument on whether 4E was a legitimate D&D with this kind off design in it. To enough of it's audience, the answer was a resounding "no" to such a degree that it relinquished market lead to a game that didn't include such bad game design elements. Am I stretching by making this link? Not as much as you quoting Gygax so far out of context.

Mod Note: see my post below ~Umbran

 

[JustinAlexander]

...You might want to do some reading before you start making absolute statements.

Take your own advice.

I've tried to be very patient and very explicit in stating that "only the last few hit points count" was a workable explanation of the rules (albeit not the explanation supported by most editions of the game). It makes me a little sad that the people subscribing to that position in this thread are apparently incapable of extending the same live-and-let-live courtesy, apparently out of their desire to fight an edition war by proxy.