D&D 5E The "everyone at full fighting ability at 1 hp" conundrum

[pemerton]

unless loss of hp actually does have a narrative effect (the DM describing the wounds from each attack), and there is no difference from the PC's perspective to guess how close they are to beating the creature, it has a significant detrimental effect to the players.

<snip>

So it seems like a paradox of sorts. HP are not just meat or fighting capability, but if you don't act like they are meat in the game, it has a negative affect to game play.

There seem to be a couple of possibilities here.

One is to follow Gygax's advice in his DMG, and narrate hp loss to non-PCs differently.

Another is this:

You don't have to have HP act like meat in order to narrate a decreasing amount of HP.

EDIT: I see I was ninja'd by @Shiroiken on the Gygaxian solution.

Also, when it comes to healing I'm with @Tony Vargas et al - the wound is still there, but it's bandaged, not bleeding etc and so doesn't impede performance.

 

[Eric V]

IRL, people pay good money for ineffectual treatments all the time.

OK, that's one rationalization.
You could also say that, when making that one significant attack, the creature is able to overcome or work around his 'wounds' (exhaustion, demoralization, luck running out, whatever) in that moment, but is decreasingly able to defend the rest of the time - that tracks fairly well.
Or, that reduced hps, however non-physical, /do/ represent degraded fighting ability, /and that's evident to the opponent/.

So instead of "you stab him below the floating ribs, perforating his sigmoid colon" you'd say "you have him on the ropes, his parries are getting desperate, his attacks, sloppy..."

Yeah. When narrating combats, there are basically only two occasions that a PC is hit "for realz": the hit that makes them bloodied (half hp) and the hit that knocks them out. The rest are "stamina injuries."

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah. When narrating combats, there are basically only two occasions that a PC is hit "for realz": the hit that makes them bloodied (half hp) and the hit that knocks them out. The rest are "stamina injuries."

You can sometimes even "follow along" an action movie fight scene that way. And, I mean, like, one with Erol Flynn, even, up to one with, say Gerard Butler.

Oh, the sheriff gave Robin a cut on his arm and is backing him towards the balcony... Robin's bloodied...

...Ok, Friar Tuck never casts Cure Light Wounds on him, but aside from that, pretty decent.

One is to follow Gygax's advice in his DMG.

This is, afterall, a controversy that reached a satisfactory conclusion 40 years ago.

The anti-D&D position - that gaining HD means your character necessarily grows physically larger or phases from flesh to wood to stone to adamantium or whatever other lunacy that requires, and, thus, D&D is a stupid and we should all go back to playing real wargames - was put to rest.

 

[Oofta]

Or as pedestrian as "most halflings don't like to adventure among the "big'n's" - only the strongest even consider it..."

Or even just larger Monsters and things like Golems, zombies, and whatnot, that need to be destroyed, not just stabbed in a vital spot...

Those rules do work fine as long as you're OK with pacing your game that way, all the time. (I like to claim more flexibility and make timing/length of rests more situational. Yeah, it's a little "DM may we rest now?" but it lets me have /both/ frenetic days and longer adventures.)

True, the pacing also works better for my style. So it's a win-win for me. I tend to run urban/mystery/social heavy campaigns with occasional long treks and investigations.

So between episodes instead of between scenes?

Exactly.

 

[aco175]

When I narrate combat, I mostly tell the players when a monster is about half and then I tend to place a red circle on the mini when they have only 1 hit left. In 4e, the red circle was when the monster went to bloodied, but 5e I tend to assume the PCs can do a certain amount of damage per hit and just go with it.

Lately with the PCs being 8th level I tell them the goon bandits have 12 HP and let the players know what they need to do to kill them. This is mostly since 8th level PCs can kill the 12 hp bandits and when the PCs were low level I just put a red circle on the bandit if they hit it for 5 or more damage.

 

[3catcircus]

I find the hp model to be entirely unsatisfying. Being engulfed in a fireball, taking full damage, and not dying outright shouldn't allow you to be 100% combat effective. You should either roll around in agony trying to put yourself out or push through it on adrenaline to later collapse after the fight is over, to later die of 3rd/4th degree burns over your entire body.

Real life soldiers have been at times known to suffer multiple wounds and keep on fighting, only to later collapse once the danger had passed - or Shane like a leaf afterwards if not wounded. They've also been known to fall over and die from a single lucky wound. Damage from environmentals is especially not represented well in D&D.

That first wound is a shock to the system moreso than actual damage. You could continue fighting, cower, run away, etc. Some wounds will make you less effective, and some are the incapacitating ones (even if not deadly).

I'm not suggesting being ultra realistic, but trying to emulate reality to some extent is worth any additional book keeping. When someone is hit with a bottle of flaming oil in D&D, it burns for a few rounds and that's it; it should start slowly, continue burning, spread, set clothes and hair on fire, and continue getting worse unless you actively put it out. It ought to be a terrifying experience for PCs of all levels.

 

[jsaving]

If we assume the following:

• HP loss does not reflect wounds (because you heal completely after only 8 hours rest, so they couldn't be wounds, but near misses as people have described)
• You can lose 99% of your hit points and not suffer any effects to any of your abilities, combat or otherwise (which rules out fatigue and wear and tear)

then the DM narrated correctly as the above would advise. Not the DM's fault.

I would not agree with this at all. Understanding that one physically solid hit is enough to end nearly anyone (see coup de grace rules for more on this), a hit point system has to be about the gradual wearing-down of a foe to the point where that solid hit occurs. This is why you can heal after a rest and why your abilities function normally until suddenly, precipitously, the hit occurs and they don't.

 

[robus]

The solution is that NPCs & Monsters use Meat Points, because they're not expected to matter much after a combat. PC's HP are more like stamina, with all wounds but those that take them to 0 HP as superficial.

That’s pretty much the approach I use. The PCs are fighting fit until they leave themselves exposed to a potentially lethal attack. The NPCs and monsters are fighting for their lives from the first blow.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Right. But if you describe all attacks at less than half hit points as actual wounds, then the other side of the paradox gets exposed: it makes no sense to heal completely back to full after 8 hour with not so much as a limp.

I think that's why I have such a hard time with the recover to full rule. I've always narrated attacks like wounds that nick away at the opponent. I think most people do. And that rule just throws that logic out of the window.

It sounds more like the gritty variant or something similar would work better for you then. I'll admit from playing in B/X and 1E on, the idea of full hp recovery in 8 hours can be a bit of a stretch...

We house-ruled a new feature: BODY (BOD). It does represent your meat body. Medium creatures have 5 + CON modifier, small have 4, large have 6, etc. IIRC gargantuan have 11+CON mod... It is really just the average baseline HD-type for size rounded up.

When your HP reaches zero, damage goes to your body. It takes a number of long rests equal to the BOD level you are trying to get back to when you heal. Ex. you are injured and have BOD 3 left, you would need 4 long rests to get to BOD 4. This means it takes a couple weeks for someone with BOD 0 to fully recover.

You can have maximum HP and reduced BOD if you have lingering wounds.

It goes on... and is pretty realistic in a lot of ways if I explained all of it, but frankly you should be getting the idea it was just too cumbersome and we dropped it for simplicity's sake.

Anyway, there are plenty of ways to model meat injury and keep HP as well if that is what your table wants.

Finally, as others have probably suggested (I didn't read all the replies... sorry, folks but I am tired...) you can always allocate some portion of HP to be meat body. IMO the portion should be small. Like half your HP at level 1, then 1 additional hp (plus CON mod?) per level after that. Ex. a Fighter level 5 with CON 14 would start with 8 MP (meat points?) and gain 3 MP per level after that, for a total of 20 MP out of 44 HP.

I don't know, there are so many ways to accomplish whatever you want to.

 

[FrogReaver]

Some of the discussion from other threads, and my gaming session last Sunday, has had me thinking about this a little more, and why it's problematic.

We all know HP are abstract. And we know that a certain suspense of disbelief has to happen. And when we ask, "Why are you at full fighting power from 100 hp down to 1 hp, but then suddenly lose everything, and if you lose 99% of your hp, it make no sense to heal all of it after 8 hours?" the common response is "because HP aren't meat, and all those hits you took aren't real hits, they are just grazing attacks that might not have hit you directly."

Well, there's another big problem with that. One that I as a player encountered last Sunday, and the sleep thread reminded me of just now. I.e., unless loss of hp actually does have a narrative effect (the DM describing the wounds from each attack), and there is no difference from the PC's perspective to guess how close they are to beating the creature, it has a significant detrimental effect to the players. In the sleep thread, it impacts whether or not the wizard will use that spell slot to end a battle. if they have no idea roughly how worn down the target is, they are more hesitant to use it. In my example last Sunday, I had first used magic missile. The DM pretty much narrated nothing with each attack people did, and when I asked, it was "it hits the creature." I was sure the creature had a resistance to something (it did, it was a gray ooze), but my magic missile, firebolt, and other PCs' attacks were all narrated the same so I had no idea what worked better than another.


So it seems like a paradox of sorts. HP are not just meat or fighting capability, but if you don't act like they are meat in the game, it has a negative affect to game play.

It seems me like the premise of this post is that the only possible narration for hp loss is to narrate them as "meat".

I can think of many additional ways that hp loss can be narrated - or not narrated depending on what you want them to be at the moment.

My take is that enemies typically will face actual wounds. PC's will typically be fatigued, less lucky etc etc.