D&D General What “hit points” is?

[robus]

Further, once you hit 0, not only is it a serious physical injury, sufficient to not only cause unconsciousness, but also sufficient to cause you to have at least the potential to die. No potential to die, no death saves. THAT'S the really major disconnect. You've gone from wounded to the point of being able to die, to running marathons no problem with 8 hours of sleep

Agreed. The whole thing doesn’t really add up to an easily narratable situation. Definitely an area where some more refinement could be made.

I’m pondering making failed death saves be lingering wounds that can only be healed by magic or proper medical care and rest. Sure you can keep adventuring with an unhealed wound, but you’re pushing your luck.

 

[Maxperson]

Agreed. The whole thing doesn’t really add up to an easily narratable situation. Definitely an area where some more refinement could be made.

I’m pondering making failed death saves be lingering wounds that can only be healed by magic or proper medical care and rest. Sure you can keep adventuring with an unhealed wound, but you’re pushing your luck.

Oh, I like that idea. Perhaps a wound track similar to exhaustion.

 

[robus]

Oh, I like that idea. Perhaps a wound track similar to exhaustion.

Yeah I like the wounds PDF I’ve linked to a few times, but people have commented on it leading to a death spiral. This might be a decent alternative giving the player the choice to push on despite the risk that more wounds might lead to death, but without the hobbling that an exhaustion-like track can bring.

And not treating failed death saves like they’re no big deal once a healing potion has been quaffed.

 

[Celebrim]

Further, once you hit 0, not only is it a serious physical injury, sufficient to not only cause unconsciousness, but also sufficient to cause you to have at least the potential to die. No potential to die, no death saves. THAT'S the really major disconnect. You've gone from wounded to the point of being able to die, to running marathons no problem with 8 hours of sleep.

This is a newly introduced problem though. The problem is that we've kept the mechanical structure of the hit point and the attack action that has been core to D&D since the beginning, and we've radically changed the definition of healing. As a practical matter in D&D most healing has been magical, which allows us to handwave away the problem of how someone got better. But until recently, natural healing at least had some sort of verisimilitude to realism in that a person who had taken nearly lethal wounds needed (depending on the system) days or weeks of rest to recover up to the peak of their vitality.

So the important point to make here is that the disconnect is not with the hit points, but rather there is a disconnect with the idea of natural healing. And the idea that everything is better in the new scene is not verisimilitude to realism, but verisimilitude to cartoon violence or its close cousin action movie violence where the Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis in one scene takes wounds which should have put anyone in the hospital for an extended stay, but they grit it out and 10 or 15 minutes later in the movie you can't really tell that 10 or 15 minutes earlier they had taken traumatic damage.

If you are trying to reconcile that mechanic in terms of realism, you are automatically going to fail. There will be no realistic and coherent explanation for the whole of the system. No redefinition of the hit point is going to account for everything that is going on mechanically in the system. You've changed genre from fantasy casual realism of the old pulp fiction titles that inspired the game, over to video game, cartoon, or action movie violence. And you'll never get that to line up. If you want to go back to fantasy casual realism, then you have to adjust the concept of the short or long rest.

And I think the system is built to let you decide what sort of plausible duration of rest you need for the genre you are going for and the level of suspension of disbelief you feel comfortable with.

 

[5ekyu]

Hitpoints are what I lose when I see another thread about hitpoints.

Nope, at least for me, it's a loss of sanity points.

Hit points is a part of a workable system for dudhing out a combat resolution that produces a certain cinematic style.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Almost. The fortune mechanic does care about the narrative a little. At under 50%, the fortune mechanic(because the side bar mechanic on describing hit points are part of it) requires the narrative to include visible signs of damage, such as bruising, minor cuts, etc. It's not a large connection, but it's not completely divorced, either.

That is true only in 5th edition (as far as I know), which for my purposes here I am not concerned with. I am certain nothing along these lines existed in 1E/2E, but I didn't play 3E long and never played 4E. My comments were meant to be restricted to the origins of hp as in the OP, so my apologies for the overlap.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Agreed. The whole thing doesn’t really add up to an easily narratable situation. Definitely an area where some more refinement could be made.

I’m pondering making failed death saves be lingering wounds that can only be healed by magic or proper medical care and rest. Sure you can keep adventuring with an unhealed wound, but you’re pushing your luck.

Oh, I like that idea. Perhaps a wound track similar to exhaustion.

Yeah, there are several house-ruled/ homebrew ideas on this. @robus has a very nice pdf for wounds. We don't use it, but something similar.

That said, there are already variant lingering injury rules in the DMG (p. 272), one of which revolves around failing a death save by 5 or more.

 

[Salthorae]

Agreed. The whole thing doesn’t really add up to an easily narratable situation. Definitely an area where some more refinement could be made.

I’m pondering making failed death saves be lingering wounds that can only be healed by magic or proper medical care and rest. Sure you can keep adventuring with an unhealed wound, but you’re pushing your luck.

I've trialed this in my games to mixed success. Some players loved it others decidedly did not. It definitely makes a more "gritty" gameplay and much more cautious players, so that is helpful if you're interested in that concept.

 

[Hriston]

Excelling post!

I will expand on this, if I may, to say that this is why the narrative of the resolution becomes so important. The fortune mechanic doesn't care how the combat happens, only the result at the end: life or death.

Thanks!

I’m not sure what you mean by “how the combat happens”. Certainly, mechanical resolution is being used because the fiction is that someone/thing is attempting to do lethal harm to another person/creature. The relative strengths/defensive capabilities of the combatants seems to be another input that isn’t entirely divorced from the fiction. I think there’s a tendency for hit points to get lumped in with those, which then leads to the question of what exactly they represent, but I don’t think they should be. They don’t affect how well you hit or how hard it is to hit you, for example, as long as you have some. One non-zero value is as good as any other in this respect. So sure, the resolution mechanic cares about whether you have hit points or not because if not, there’s no fight, which brings us back to the one question hit points were designed to answer, are you combat-ready or out of the fight?

 

[DND_Reborn]

Thanks!

I’m not sure what you mean by “how the combat happens”. Certainly, mechanical resolution is being used because the fiction is that someone/thing is attempting to do lethal harm to another person/creature. The relative strengths/defensive capabilities of the combatants seems to be another input that isn’t entirely divorced from the fiction. I think there’s a tendency for hit points to get lumped in with those, which then leads to the question of what exactly they represent, but I don’t think they should be. They don’t affect how well you hit or how hard it is to hit you, for example, as long as you have some. One non-zero value is as good as any other in this respect. So sure, the resolution mechanic cares about whether you have hit points or not because if not, there’s no fight, which brings us back to the one question hit points were designed to answer, are you combat-ready or out of the fight?

My comment about "how the combat happens" was in reference to the idea that the fortune mechanic works no matter how the narrative is played out. Obviously other factors (resistance to fire) for instance can have a narrative effect when the character takes fire damage. But the actual attack roll and damage roll is independent.

Maybe I didn't say that well? I don't know, I have to run to work LOL!