Doug McCrae
Legend
What if he's magic?
Why do we really need HP to represent things other than physical injuries?
- Thread starter Li Shenron
- Start date
An alternative to Doug's take on it: what if hit points per level really represents a "damage divider". So your 98 hp fighter really only has 14 hp, but also s/he only takes 1/7th of the potential damage from any hit because s/he is a very proficient combatant. (Whereas the Dragon is big but not especially deft, and so takes full damage every time.)
This reading of hp isn't perfect: it would require healing spells to be amended in a 4e direction, and you might think it's a bit wonky for falling damage, some AoEs, etc. It also makes it a bit hard to explain what happens when a blow knocks a character unconscious or kills him/her - maybe that's the blow to which no damage modifier applied! But it does produce the result that hp only represent physical injuries (although at a ratio that is level-dependant).
With this reading of hp, you could also do minions easily enough: they would have level appropriate skills, attack bonuses etc, but only 1st level hp (ie no damage divider).
It's not my preferred take on hp - I like the 4e take - but I think it's somewhat viable.
Mercurius
Legend
[MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] - But either way, Hit Points would represent something other than simply the capacity to withstand bodily damage. That was my point bringing up the 1E red dragon: that HP, in any edition, is not just physical damage capacity - whether magic, a "damage divider," or simply an abstraction that takes into account a bunch of factors.
Fanaelialae
Legend
Basically, what [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] said.
As he mentioned, the point of those types of games is that a single attack might kill you. A dagger might have a small chance, a sword might have a middling chance, while an ancient wyrm's bite probably has a high chance of doing so.
Your defenses are there to mitigate that, but that sort of defense is swingy at best. If you can kill me with one attack, then even if you only have a 5% (or a 0.25% chance - two nat 20s) you still might roll that in the opening round, before I even have a chance to act. In fact, if combat is a regular thing, the odds are that just that will happen.
On the other hand, even if you have a 100% chance to hit me, if I have 50 hp and you can't crit for more than 48 then (assuming you only have one attack) you can't kill me outright in the first volley. You might leave me with only 2 hp, desperate for healing, but (assuming it's just you and me) I am guaranteed to be able to act.
That's what I mean when I say that systems that base character survival on defenses are swingy. Static hp systems tend to encourage CaW (since one lucky shot can mean your death). Since I prefer only small helpings of CaW with my CaS, I don't care for that. An hp system with static defenses, on the other hand, is very CaS. I mean, you could make a static defense system where damage continually outpaces hp growth, but again, what would be the point? Each type of system does something different well, and it makes sense to embrace those strengths when using them.
I don't think that DnD has ever been that kind of game. Midlevel characters never faced a real chance to be killed by a single longsword attack with the RAW, for example. Low level, maybe. But then again, that probably was the reason why some people started play with 3rd level characters. They just did not like this "grittyness".
Defining hp as something more than physical wounds gives you more room to narrate the effects of attacks anyway. I, for example, let the players narrate what the effects of, say, 20 damage to their characters by a lizardfolk tailsweep is. I do not want to have to calculate the damage/actual hp ratio for them. Too much work. And I do not need to know their hp to begin with. I never know how many hp they have. 4E is designed beautifully in that regard. But I understand that this is just me and a question of taste.
But since this is a thread in the DnDNext section, I wonder how the designers of the next edition will be able to bring the very different tastes of what hp have to represent together.
I would like to ask the question: Will they be able to pull this off?
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
i think HP are the easiest problem to solve in this respect. Provided they have the core system use the old HP mechanic and tack on an optional method to incorporate healin surges that should satifsy both 4e fans and fans of the previous editions. The only people that wont satisfy are those who wanted a change to the hp system (either more lethal or less) but who didn't like the healing surge innovation. They could always provide a third HP option to hedge their bets, but I think "classic" and "surge" will be enough,
Doug McCrae
Legend
There are various ways of looking at it. What I meant was that the fighter is pretty much the same as the dragon physically. What if the dragon's capacity to withstand damage had been condensed down into a 6ft tall, 235lb body? The explanation for this is magic. Just like the dragon, the fighter's hit points are 100% physical.
It could be argued that this is pretty similar to Gygax's idea of hit points representing many different non-physical qualities such as luck, skill, sixth sense, and magic. My idea is that instead of hit points being, say, 40% physical and 60% magic (or other non-physical property), they are 100% physical, with the explanation being magic. (By strict 3e terminology it would be called an extraordinary ability, rather than magic, like the barbarian's damage reduction, so the fighter keeps his hit points in an anti-magic field.)
There's always the issue in D&D that hit point loss doesn't incur any penalties until the total is reduced to zero. This is equally an issue whether one regards hp as physical or non-physical, and equally an issue for the big, tough dragon or little tough fighter. I would see all hit point loss prior to zero as real wounds - cuts, bruises, etc - that probably look nasty but are "just a flesh wound", though not in the Black Knight sense. As with pemerton's interpretation, the high level fighter on 50/100 hp is just as wounded as the low level fighter on 10/20 hp. They are both halfway to being incapacitated. The high level fighter probably sustained a greater number of separate blows but the cuts are less deep because he, like the dragon, is tougher.
This still leaves the problem of healing. The high level fighter on half hit points ought to recover just as fast as the low level fighter, if they are both equaly wounded. In 1e the recovery rate is 7 hp per week, plus Con bonus (until four weeks pass, at which point one fully heals). In 3e the rate is 1 hp per level per day - more proportionate to total hit points, but still not completely proportionate. For the proposed interpretation to make sense, hit points would have to be restored as a percentage of the total, which is how it works in 4e. This is all equally true for healing magic, which works at a flat rate pre-4e.
The biggest problem for the above interpretation is the warlord, as an important part of the class is that its abilities are martial, not magical. Hit points became less physical in 4e and this approach goes in the opposite direction.
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wedgeski
Adventurer
Couldn't agree more. I don't like the film in general but that's one of the great movie sword-fights: the sheer weight of the weapons, the gradual fatigue that overcomes Hector. Truly excellent.
Fanaelialae
Legend
Considering the modular approach, it should be pretty easy to keep everyone happy as you say. I agree that classic and surge are probably a must-have, but I do think we'll see more and less lethal modules at some point. Maybe not in the "core" three, but somewhere.
If the basic hp formula is Con + X, as it seems may be the case, it'd be pretty easy to create a vitality/wounds system for a higher lethality game. Then you just define what type of attack can circumvent vitality (nat 20, or perhaps an attack that exceeds your defense by X) and you suddenly have a significantly more lethal system.
Less lethal is even easier. Just grant +X hp.
This approach is internally consistent, however, it will strike some people (myself, included) as too anime-like for a typical game. This sort of thing is very characteristic of shonen manga/anime (Bleach, Naruto, Yuyu Hakusho) where protagonists are capable of absorbing unrealistic amounts of harm due to their magical natures or powers. It's far less common in fantasy outside of anime.
I prefer that hp be defined as it has always been defined. That way you can describe your fighters as walking away from having swords thrust through their guts, while I can describe the skillful way in which my fighters parried or dodged that sword thrust at the last second, earning themselves a scratch at best.
As for recovery time, I have no issue with metaphysical protection taking time to recover. There's no realistic metric for that sort of thing. I mean, we might be able to find statistics to measure the recovery rate of morale, but I expect we'd find that it varies drastically between individuals. Some people bounce back overnight from psychological events that scar others for the rest of their lives. Luck is even less measurable from a real world perspective. As such, I think that the metaphysical side of recovery can be justified regardless of what recovery rate you choose. The overnight 4e approach makes just as much sense as the weeks long recovery of 1e, in this respect.
I like HP as damage and never had any problem describing them as such except with falling. Which I use a houserule where falling does 1d10 CON damage per 10ft fallen with a max of 10d10 CON. Keeps it scary but does model the possibility, however remote of dying from a 10ft fall or surviving terminal velocity impacts.
As for descriptions of things people have mentioned as hard? Red dragon bite?
"the dragon lunges downward and snatches you by your shoulder, you feel your armor pop and squeze, it dents inward and you feel yourself sliced open by your own armor all along the bite. However it holds and the dragon shakes you then tosses you back down. You hit hard but quickly roll to your feet. Your turn"
15 kobold attacks?
"You feel many impacts on your armor, some points slide in and find weak spots, you partially deflect some into cuts and slices, your bleeding all over but the cowardly creatures weak attacks were not able to find a vital point thanks to your armor. Your turn. "
NP.
However the other side. The HP represent luck and fatigue thing is ludicrous.
Imagine if you will.....
"you duck the dragons bite at the last minute, again, but your so tired from your constant ducking that you faint and fall over. "
Followed by
"thank the gods your warlord buddy noticed your dizzy spell from all the quick dodging and told you to get your
together and get back in the fight allowing you to get back up and dodge at least one more attack"
Theoretically both might work, but one sounds really frickin LAME compared to the other. So i know what I pick.
As for descriptions of things people have mentioned as hard? Red dragon bite?
"the dragon lunges downward and snatches you by your shoulder, you feel your armor pop and squeze, it dents inward and you feel yourself sliced open by your own armor all along the bite. However it holds and the dragon shakes you then tosses you back down. You hit hard but quickly roll to your feet. Your turn"
15 kobold attacks?
"You feel many impacts on your armor, some points slide in and find weak spots, you partially deflect some into cuts and slices, your bleeding all over but the cowardly creatures weak attacks were not able to find a vital point thanks to your armor. Your turn. "
NP.
However the other side. The HP represent luck and fatigue thing is ludicrous.
Imagine if you will.....
"you duck the dragons bite at the last minute, again, but your so tired from your constant ducking that you faint and fall over. "
Followed by
"thank the gods your warlord buddy noticed your dizzy spell from all the quick dodging and told you to get your
together and get back in the fight allowing you to get back up and dodge at least one more attack"Theoretically both might work, but one sounds really frickin LAME compared to the other. So i know what I pick.
