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

[3catcircus]

To me... if it is reasonable that hit point damage does not equate with physical injury, then it is equally reasonable that physical injury does not equate to hit point damage. Having a bleeding liver and a sliced up face won't necessarily impact your fighting ability, so there is no reason that a person at full hit points might not have some physical injuries.

Someone recovering all their hit points, particularly through something like hit dice expenditure and the natural recovery process, may not have all their physical injuries removed, they've just gotten used to them such that they no longer affect the character's ability to mitigate further damage.

But the common sense response is that a sliced up face will affect your fighting ability as you continuously need to wipe blood out of your eyes, distracting you. A bleeding liver will affect your fighting ability as your abdominal cavity fills with blood (or it all leaks onto the ground) and you slowly lose strength, become disoriented, possibly fall unconscious and die from exsanguination. Or maybe that internal bleeding throws a clot and you stroke out.

I strongly recommend obtaining a copy of "Battle Resume in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons, and Armor" for some good info on the effects of wounds, fatigue, and injury on the physical and spiritual aspects of being able to continue fighting and on recovery after the battle.

 

[DND_Reborn]

To me... if it is reasonable that hit point damage does not equate with physical injury, then it is equally reasonable that physical injury does not equate to hit point damage. Having a bleeding liver and a sliced up face won't necessarily impact your fighting ability, so there is no reason that a person at full hit points might not have some physical injuries.

Someone recovering all their hit points, particularly through something like hit dice expenditure and the natural recovery process, may not have all their physical injuries removed, they've just gotten used to them such that they no longer affect the character's ability to mitigate further damage.

Excellent points. This is why we describe hp as combat effectiveness and not necessarily physical injury. Loss of hp could be fatigue and other issues. Consider how someone can take poison damage, but not suffer from the poisoned condition (or of course they could suffer both). A character could be poisoned for 1 minute, have any hp healed during that time, but the condition remains.

But the common sense response is that a sliced up face will affect your fighting ability as you continuously need to wipe blood out of your eyes, distracting you. A bleeding liver will affect your fighting ability as your abdominal cavity fills with blood (or it all leaks onto the ground) and you slowly lose strength, become disoriented, possibly fall unconscious and die from exsanguination. Or maybe that internal bleeding throws a clot and you stroke out.

Sure, such things might affect you and they might not. Boxers fight through bloody and swollen eyes, athletes play with broken fingers, sprains, and pulls, etc. Can they no longer do such things because of their injuries? Of course they can. Are their injuries/conditions so bad as to affect their skill? That is up to the DM but often times not, or at least not appreciably. What sort of penalty, if any, depends on the situation of course.

In DND, there is no injury track. I think we are expected to understand, at least in 5E, that hp is a mechanic to simply measure overall ability to operate. Fatigue and conditions were added to help represent other levels of determent. I am not a fan of full hp recovery after a long rest, but as others have pointed out you can always make a long rest "longer" to represent more time. We switched to a 24-hour long rest for a while and it worked fine (with 4-hours short rests).

There are so many acceptable house-rules and work-arounds for more realistically monitoring actual physical damage I am wondering why people who want them simply don't use them. We do.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

To me... if it is reasonable that hit point damage does not equate with physical injury, then it is equally reasonable that physical injury does not equate to hit point damage.

From a pure logic standpoint, yes, that is perfectly consistent. From a common sense standpoint, though, it just highlights the absurdity of the argument.

We know perfectly well exactly what sorts of things cause HP damage, and by and large, they are things which would cause physical injury if they were to hit you. If someone hits you with a sword, and the game reflects that as HP damage, then the rules are telling us that HP damage is equivalent to physical damage, because physical damage is the known outcome of getting hit by a sword.

Someone recovering all their hit points, particularly through something like hit dice expenditure and the natural recovery process, may not have all their physical injuries removed, they've just gotten used to them such that they no longer affect the character's ability to mitigate further damage.

Which is just horrible from a statistical modeling perspective, because we're accounting for minor factors like "fighting spirit" without accounting for major factors like "structural integrity". It would be like trying to calculate how long it takes for a ball to hit the ground, accounting for air friction but ignoring gravity.

 

[Lanefan]

D&D needs a bloodied/staggered condition.

and probably number deflation to OD&D levels.

No argument from here! Good points.

Or go Arduin. HP=Con score + racial mod + small set # per level- Fighters 2HP, all others 1HP per level. or Maybe 3/2/1.

I'm not a fan of fixed hit point amounts, but I could get behind something like

HP=[average of starting Con and Cha scores*] + [racial mod, which could be positive, negative, or flat] + [a small randomized amount per level].

I suggest using the average of two largely unrelated stats mostly to avoid making Con the most important stat in the game, which it would otherwise become if it solely determined hit points. The 'small randomized amount per level' could be the dice used now but divided by two (so, Fighters get d5 per level instead of d10).

* - locked in at roll-up and unaffected by future changes to these stats, these could be a character's 'body' or 'wound' points if one wanted to implement such a system

 

[Garthanos]

Honestly, not nonsensical enough to raise it's head above the general clouds of nonsense engulfing D&D.

Bothered me in AD&D still does nowest.

True, it's a whole dramatic arc waved away. OTOH, every time - and it hasn't been a /lot/ of times, just a few - that I have made a big deal and a whole adventure out of getting someone brought back to life (or have seen another DM do it), the result has been that the dramatically-raised character has either died again right away, or had to be written out of the plot because the player moved away or something. And that's just a profound antic-climax to what should be a powerful little story arc.

4e is where character death finally seems to mean something ... and where raise the dead felt like less of a patch for a system whose balance or ability to predict Adversary Difficulty/Combat Ratings was totally wacked

 

[Lanefan]

SMDH yeh so not interested in playing with you

You really don't like bad things happening to your characters, do you?

Also not consistent with any adventures or tables I ever saw. Or even from what I can tell the random encounter tables. But someone else will have to figure that insanity out. It sounds like someone making huge justifications for something silly stupid with a hypothetical extreme rarity.

I've never seen a character suffer all four of level drain, amputation, feeblemind and death in the same combat. (and don't forget there's also petrification and aging to help spoil your day)

Many times I've seen two of those happen to the same PC in the same combat, most commonly through someone dying via being level-drained all the way to and below 0th (to then rise as an undead a moment later!). The only time I've seen a character level drained, aged, and feebleminded all at once was through a series of horrible pulls from an expanded Deck of Many Things.

Amputation in 1e is extremely rare - I've maybe seen it happen 10 times to PCs in 35 years of DMing and playing. Feeblemind is also extremely rare, and more often caused by curses, traps, or Decks than by opposing spell*.

On the flip side, 1e also had mostly-unrestricted wish powers and so forth to help counter some of this.

* - the only time I can recall a PC being feebleminded via the spell happened fairly recently; and the spell wasn't cast by the opposition! It came as a result of some in-party pranks that escalated into PvP...and guess whose PC was the spell's target... (the feeblemind was healed later)

 

[Tony Vargas]

4e is where character death finally seems to mean something ... and where raise the dead felt like less of a patch

Raise Dead was a ritual gained at 8th - and got extra-expensive in paragon & epic, because wealth/level, I guess, or because of some sort of mystic exceptionalism, maybe - instead of a spell gained at 9th.
That doesn't seem a huge difference.

I've never seen a character suffer all four of level drain, amputation, feeblemind and death in the same combat. (and don't forget there's also petrification and aging to help spoil your day)

...wait, so you've seen 'em all happen to the same character over some longer time-frame?

 

[Lanefan]

True, it's a whole dramatic arc waved away. OTOH, every time - and it hasn't been a /lot/ of times, just a few - that I have made a big deal and a whole adventure out of getting someone brought back to life (or have seen another DM do it), the result has been that the dramatically-raised character has either died again right away, or had to be written out of the plot because the player moved away or something.

Tell me about it.

My PC had rather heroically died and failed his raise roll. Years later, a party goes into Niflheim (not-so-pleasant Norse land of the dead) to fish him out the hard way. They find him and get him out, but less than 200' back into the prime material he gets attacked by a monster and killed.

And he failed his raise roll again.

 

[Lanefan]

There are so many acceptable house-rules and work-arounds for more realistically monitoring actual physical damage I am wondering why people who want them simply don't use them. We do.

So do we, but it's not something one can dream up on the back of a napkin and not every DM is willing (or able) to do the designing required to make up such a system that works well enough to play.

That, and as the RAW say it's supposed to work in a particular way that's what players come to expect. Much better if the RAW included a physical damage component to set expectations, and leave it to individual DMs to strip it out if they want a simpler version at their tables.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Much better if the RAW included a physical damage component to set expectations, and leave it to individual DMs to strip it out if they want a simpler version at their tables.

Generally speaking, I'd rather see a clearly delineated, modular option than a blank space awaiting a house rule, though either is better than some byzantine maze of over-detailed sub-systems. So, yeah, if there's a sensible module that can be popped in or out for that purpose, without collapsing or contradicting whole swaths of the system, or requiring fundamental re-balancing to keep it's functional, that'd be great, and it wouldn't matter if it was opt-out or opt-in, really.
If.