What constitutes a "hit" in your mind?

[Gorgon Zee]

Is every "to hit" roll actually physically contacting a character in the game? Or are they whittling down their opponent's energy and luck and only the last few "hits" are actually drawing blood?

Star Wars Saga: If it does hit point damage, it's energy and luck. If it does wounds, it;'s blood.
D&D: It depends on the source of the damage.
Alien RPG: When the Alien stabs you either it's tail, or a grenade goes off beside you it's only luck until you have to roll on the random death table. I so hate this.
Rolemaster: The critical table will tell you in detail exactly what it was.
Pendragon: Blood, always.
Call of Cthulhu: I tend to play it as blood always. YMMV
Fate: Stress is ... just stress. It takes a consequence to be blood
Pirate Borg: Everything is blood, guts, vomit, and bits of flesh flying. Even paper cuts
Numenéra: Just luck until you run out.

Two rants.

• The Star Wars Saga system fixed the issue with D&D not being possible to treat hits as representing anything consistently. Why oh why did they not go with something like this for 4e or 5e? Now we have to narrate fall damage and poison as physical, and combat damage as mostly luck -- a decade later and no better off. Sigh.
• So, I was playing an aliens game and we'd nearly all been slashed and damaged by aliens, knives and other stuff. People had around 5 hits, and when you hit zero, you roll on a table to see if you were dead or exactly how mangled your are. So we assumed that if zero was "seriously damaged for dead", then 1 must be at least scratched a little. Oh no. Because the game does not want you to be able to spot synthetics so easily, so it is literally not possible to have a scratch or minor injury in the game. No bleeding that isn't fatal or near fatal. So despite the movies making it very clear that slight scratches make it easy to spot a synthetic, we could not do so after several knock-down fights. I so hate this.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

A hit as the term suggests hits the target, doing some amount of physical damage.

But in real life, a hit doesn't require damage be done. In fencing and many martial arts, you just have to contact a person and it's a hit. In football people hit each other and they do not do damage.

I'm fine with a hit doing no damage (like in fencing) or some stress or temp damage (as in football) if the game system wants to model things that way. I prefer systems that track stress/temp damage separately from real damage (so Rolemaster, Fate, Star Wars Saga) but if you want to go simpler and have a very narrative "hit point total" like D&D that could pretty much mean anything, sure.

I quite like "damage on a miss" rules as it speeds up combat and helps with mook clean-up, but when I narrate it, it's not really a "miss", it's an attack that forced the enemy to spend effort to avoid.

 

[guachi]

The players always describe a hit as physical contact. Always.

True at my table when I can get the players to describe a hit. As a DM I'll go out of my way to describe hits on PCs as not physical contact just to add flavor and difference to the game.

 

[pemerton]

I quite like "damage on a miss" rules as it speeds up combat and helps with mook clean-up, but when I narrate it, it's not really a "miss", it's an attack that forced the enemy to spend effort to avoid.

My way of thinking about damage on a miss is that the character is so relentless and implacable that they always set back any foe they choose to attack. The roll to hit is just to determine how much they set back this foe on this occasion.

 

[GobHag]

Depends. Is it modern D&D with massive piles of HP? Then it's luck and energy. Is it old-school D&D or a D&D-like? Then it's actual blood drawing contact. Otherwise it depends on the genre and the system. Toon? You're squashing and stretching the toon until they fall down, but they get back up after a few minutes. Paranoia? All meat, all the time. Discworld? It's all contextual traits, so we're back to depends.

I personally think it's a massive shame if in modern DnD it isn't meat. I got all this HP for a reason and it's for taking a warhammer to the face and shrugging it off.

 

[MGibster]

Is every "to hit" roll actually physically contacting a character in the game? Or are they whittling down their opponent's energy and luck and only the last few "hits" are actually drawing blood?

It really depends on the game. In Cyberpunk 2020, when your character loses 5 hit points in their left leg due to a gunshot it's because a bullet has physically hit their left leg. Maybe your character takes low damage because of amor or the shot just grazed them, but they've definitely been hit.

Even in more more abstract games like D&D I tend to see a physical connection having been made. Maybe that orc hit you awkwardly with the flat of his axe, maybe he hit you with the axe handle, or maybe he kicked you in the crotch that combat round. It's not until you you receive a blow taking you to zero or fewer hit points that you've finally been hit by something life threatening.

 

[pemerton]

Even in more more abstract games like D&D I tend to see a physical connection having been made. Maybe that orc hit you awkwardly with the flat of his axe, maybe he hit you with the axe handle, or maybe he kicked you in the crotch that combat round. It's not until you you receive a blow taking you to zero or fewer hit points that you've finally been hit by something life threatening.

The issue for me is not just about it being life-threatening. It's (i) that it is typically not debilitating, and (ii) even if you drop to zero or fewer hp, it's often likely that you'll recover to full hit points just by resting.

I think (i) and (ii) put pretty significant constraints around how hp loss is narrated. My own preferred approach is the Gygaxian one (ie most of it is near-misses, grazes, nicks, etc) and the one set out in two non-D&D books - Robins Laws HeroWars and the Burning Wheel-derived Torchbearer 2e - which encourage keeping the narration of defeat loose and a bit ambiguous until it is reasonable to drive home some final consequences. (JRRT also uses this sort of approach in LotR, when Frodo is stabbed by the Orc captain.)

Once a Raise Dead or similar spell is going to be needed, then a degree of finality is a reasonable thing to narrate.

Also, I should be clear that I'm talking here about PCs. As Gygax recognised, narrating consequences for NPCs is a different matter. Nothing will go wrong if a GM narrates a player's roll reducing a cultist to zero hp as decapitation or whatever: that just establishes that this person is not going to be able to be revived after the fight by binding their wounds and administering a draught of spirits!

 

[MGibster]

The issue for me is not just about it being life-threatening. It's (i) that it is typically not debilitating, and (ii) even if you drop to zero or fewer hp, it's often likely that you'll recover to full hit points just by resting.

It's not an issue for me because I don't take D&D seriously. I don't say this to disparage D&D, I'm running a 5.5 campaign right now, but I simply accept D&D on its own terms silly as they might be. I simply don't narrate a final, gruesome death for a PC because they might be healed later that same round. One way or the other, it's just not an issue that hinders my ability to enjoy the game as there's about as much tension in a D&D game as there is in a Fast & Furious movie.

 

[GobHag]

I'm of the opinion that there's nothing wrong describing a dragon's fang piercing through my full-plated chest, through my heart and even skewering mys pine.... and then having me all fine and dandy the next day.

I'm Just That Tough is my motto.