Why do we really need HP to represent things other than physical injuries?

[steeldragons]

My customary way of narrating combat is that every attack which inflicts hit point damage causes physical injury, but how serious the injury depends on the ratio of damage dealt to target's hit points. If a monster claws you for 10 points of damage, and your normal max is 15 hit points, you got torn up pretty bad. If your max is 100, you took a grazing cut but nothing serious. If your max is 5, your guts are in a pile on the floor and you're bleeding to death. Sure, natural healing is unrealistically fast, but the difference is of a magnitude I can live with--a week or two instead of a month or six. It still has the effect of causing problems that persist beyond a single night's rest.

Precisely. Explained it better than I ever would have thought of doing...or ever really thought about it, period. Just kinda intuitively interpreted/thought of things that way...but never really thought about the "why" or verbalized it.

It's not about how much damage the attack does, or what abstract thing(s) that attack means it takes away...but how much "damage" it does with what your PC has to work with!

Maybe this is why I've never had any issues with describing HP as physical injury.

Yes.

Also, I've said it in other 5e threads, but it's great that this system has "Injury" categories/placements/tables and that system has "Luck" points or "Fate" points, this other system uses "Fatigue scores in a way I really appreciate" or what have you. They work? You like them? Great. Enjoy.
Play those games.

This is D&D. D&D has Hit Points. That's what there is, whatever it means to you or in the books.

I don't need or want something else to bother with tracking. All it will do is slow the game down...and I like my combats as fluid as possible.

"You take X damage to your Y and Z damage to your W, but your QRS is fine. Unless you take damage to your V, then you're screwed." I do not need.

Yes, sure. I have noooo arguments with "Optional add-ons"/"Alternative modules for xyz style of play". That's great. We want everyone to be happy.

However...

"Handwaving" is not a bad word.

There is a certain (some might argue a LOT) of suspension of disbelief necessary to play D&D. Most of the game details on your character sheet are dealing in "abstracts" to define a "concrete" character. Ya gotta be willing to glaze over stuff...or why are you choosing to play D&D?

And that, imho, is as it should be. It is an game of pretend in an unbelievable world. The fact you can't pinpoint what every "Point of Hit" is going to or what percentage is "abstract" and what percentage is "real"? Geddoverit! Or go play some kind of "concrete" game, that details out every possible thing in quantitative terms.

D&D is not this. Nor should it attempt to become.

You got hit. You take X damage. Your turn. You hit, roll damage. Their turn...

The fun (for me and mine)...the fantastic heroic scenes and the continuing story...are in the narration/description. Not in the numbers on the page or dice or what "definitively" HPs mean so we should add in a sub-system to track what kind of HPs your PC just lost.

You got hit. You're hurt! Moving on.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

If you can take 20d6 damage, you should be able to beat a 15 Fort DC.

If not, the character deserves to die.

That's still a 5% chance of failure at best.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Sounds like the fighters in your game break a lot of bones in their chests. Lucky that those ribs never puncture their lungs, and that hp loss never results in them breaking anything "mechanically important" (like an arm or a leg).

For me, this sort of thing is acceptable is small doses. It's certainly heroic for a fighter to still be fighting when lesser men couldn't. However, if it happens constantly (as is likely in high level D&D game) it stretches my sense of versimilitude to the point of incredulity.

Why? I know of several incidents of such heroics. Kirk Gibson's homerun on 2 crippled legs. Chris Mohr punted for an entire season with a broken leg and even made a hell of a hit on a returner to save a touchdown. There was a woman wrestler who broke her back, yet still finished - and won - the match. I can't recall her name. A friend of my father's chute failed and he plummeted 5,000 feet and walked away.

Gary had this to say:

"Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm—the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter’s exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points."

You'll notice the bold part. Every hit deals some damage. Yes, luck, divine providence, skill, etc is a part of it. But every hit deals damage. It's never just damage. It's never NOT damage. It's both. 4e changed that, and ended up with pretty speeches closing sucking chest wounds.

 

[JohnSnow]

Just a random thought here...

Is it possible that in an effort to provide "balanced" encounters where death was a real risk, the designers changed the parameters of the system? In other words, each encounter was assumed to use such and such a percentage of your resources (including hit points). What that means is that there is no real risk of death until you get to that last encounter. That's consistent - old D&D was a little swingy at the low levels, but after you got past those, you were't really at risk until you'd gotten through a few combats.

3e started down the path to 4th by making wands of cure light wounds an available option. Suddenly, we could have people dropping to 0 hp in each and every encounter. Of course, you had to have serious magical healing available in order to play that way, but whatever. Thus originated the notion of someone who HAD to play the cleric (or the need to have "healing sticks").

Then Fourth Edition came along and "hit points" became entirely a per encounter resource. Which meant that you can now offer a real risk of dropping to 0 hp (and possible death!) in every single encounter. In other words, you've ratcheted up the tension of the game by raising the risk factor. The downside is that "hit points" have to come back much more quickly or you can't keep this high tension factor. Which means you have to either rely on magical healing, or make hit points even more "fatigue, luck and combat skill" than they have ever been before. And of course, coming back from 0 is even more problematic with that sort of system.

However, to keep some aspect of the traditional attrition-based side of adventuring alive, WotC came up with the concept of each character having a limited number of daily "healing surges."

Basically, I'm suggesting that the treatment of hit points has changed over the last two editions in order to raise the tension factor of the game. But the designers never actually decided what "dropping to 0" really means in the context of the new system that has evolved.

Thoughts?

 

[JonWake]

Honestly, the more I hear from people talking about how absurd HPs are (they are), or how they want a skill system in place of classes, the more I realize that there's a generation of players undergoing the same thing that previous generations have: you're learning that you might not like D&D.

D&D is ridiculous. It's based on a 40 year old war game, there are plenty if times where it's totally counter intuitive, and if you try to apply the rules as physics of the world, you'll find a world filled with absurdity. But it's fast and easy to teach, the system usually stays out of the way and any 12 year-old can pick it up and play with a 60 year-old.

If you want more realism, try Runequest.

 

[malkav666]

Seems to me that this is a great list of unnecessary sub-systems, many of which can be folded into Hit Points making for a far more efficient game.

I love you too.

Unnecessary is matter of taste really when you really get down to it. The more of those items you blanket up into the term "HP", the less variety you get in the terms of what types of challenges you can put in front of a party. I like the idea of challenging a party with other types of threats than just "take x hp damage". While Im not a great fan of everything I presented, that really wasn't the point of the post. But rather I just wanted to display that a lot of the things being talked about that HP could be defined as do in fact have systems to represent them already. To me : Variety > Efficiency. But everyone has different tastes on that front.

Personally I would rather have those systems in place (or some form of them) as they are exception oriented (meaning they apply to specific, abilities,spells,traps,monsters,etc) than to not have them. Its easier for me not to use certain threats or say "I don't like x I won't use it" than it is to update and codify an alternate threat condition from scratch and incorporate it into a ruleset. So even though I am not a big cheerleader for all of the things on my list I wish for them to remain in form.

As for everyones definition of HP, I don't really care. When you have them you can attempt to take any action you'd like to, when you don't you have the choice of three actions: Try and stabilize, bleed more, or die. I don't care if one of my players thinks that the number of HP they have relates to how hungry they are or not, when they run out, the toon begins the process of bleeding and dying. This process is the same for a player who thinks HP represents a myriad of physical and mental conditions, luck, armor and whatever, as it is for the player who thinks HP represents only physical wounds. It is all the same after 0 is approached and attained.

Thanks for the discussion.

love,

malkav

 

[Naszir]

Why is this true?

"4e changed that, and ended up with pretty speeches closing sucking chest wounds."

If hit points are considered abstract in 4e as they have been considered abstract in all editions then why all this flailing about pretty speeches closing sucking chest wounds? 4e at times has its issues in trying to accurately describe how hit points, damage and healing interact with each other. All of the other editions had the same issues.

I think the interesting thing here will be if 5e can come up with a system that will be more consistent than the previous editions.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Then Fourth Edition came along and "hit points" became entirely a per encounter resource. Which meant that you can now offer a real risk of dropping to 0 hp (and possible death!) in every single encounter. In other words, you've ratcheted up the tension of the game by raising the risk factor. The downside is that "hit points" have to come back much more quickly or you can't keep this high tension factor. Which means you have to either rely on magical healing, or make hit points even more "fatigue, luck and combat skill" than they have ever been before. And of course, coming back from 0 is even more problematic with that sort of system.

However, to keep some aspect of the traditional attrition-based side of adventuring alive, WotC came up with the concept of each character having a limited number of daily "healing surges."

Basically, I'm suggesting that the treatment of hit points has changed over the last two editions in order to raise the tension factor of the game. But the designers never actually decided what "dropping to 0" really means in the context of the new system that has evolved.

Thoughts?

I think that is correct. I even have a separate experience to support it.

I ran a Forgotten Realms campaign using Fantasy Hero (4th ed.), where the intent was to get something a lot like D&D play in some ways but not others. One of the specific things we wanted was that each fight would be tense--which you can get easily in Fantasy Hero. However, we also wanted a lot of healing options--it just wasn't a Realms game if you couldn't "cure light wounds" or find healing potions. And in Hero, once you add such things to the base system, because of how healing typically works, fights either kill you or do no appreciable damage. You can fudge around with "charges" and other limitations on healing, but ultimately if true to the source material, this leads to the same problem that 3E CLW wands produces--though more on the healer characters than the item economy.

Our solution was to put the limit on healing on the target instead of the source. We house ruled that healing did not stack on damage from a single hit. Each wound benefits only from the best healing result applied to it. Since Hero damage amounts are much more coarse than D&D, this was not too onerous to track. Light wounds you can erase entirely, moderate ones you can mostly mitigate, and heavy ones wear you down.

If it had occurred to us to go all the way to something like surges per day, we could have streamlined that whole process and rolled even that modest tracking into a single number. But then, we aren't professionals, and our little tweak worked well enough at the power level we were playing. When 4E came out, I looked at the surge mechanics and instantly thought, "same problem, cleaner solution."

The big difference there, of course, is that in Hero, we already knew what dropping to zero "Body" meant, and we weren't changing it with our tweak, since "Body" and "Stun" already fit that model.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Why? I know of several incidents of such heroics. Kirk Gibson's homerun on 2 crippled legs. Chris Mohr punted for an entire season with a broken leg and even made a hell of a hit on a returner to save a touchdown. There was a woman wrestler who broke her back, yet still finished - and won - the match. I can't recall her name. A friend of my father's chute failed and he plummeted 5,000 feet and walked away.

Because the idea that someone breaks their ribs and sternum once a week, every week, for an extended period of time strikes me as absurd. Note that I did say that I had no issue with this sort of thing provided it was the exception rather than the rule. And while heroes, such as fighters, are certainly exceptional, it nonetheless strains my sense of versimilitude to imagine that they are constantly fighting with multiple broken bones with no penalty whatsoever.

Not that I want a penalty. I'm not a fan of death spirals. It's just that I find the idea of fighters who take life threatening injuries on a daily basis to be a bit beyond belief.

Gary had this to say:

"Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm—the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter’s exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points."

You'll notice the bold part. Every hit deals some damage. Yes, luck, divine providence, skill, etc is a part of it. But every hit deals damage. It's never just damage. It's never NOT damage. It's both.

Notice that the part in bold lists only minor injuries. Broken bones and sucking chest wounds are notably not on that list at all.

As I've stated earlier in this thread, I take no issue with minor injuries of that nature. I even describe plenty of attacks just so. However, because I don't think a giant's club is likely to cause such injuries, I prefer to narrate those types of attacks generally as near misses. Please note, this is not something I started with 4e, but dates all the way back to my 2e days. I liken being hit by a giant's club to being hit by a car. While I suppose you could be hit by a car and suffer nothing but scrapes and bruises, if you're hit by several cars that description begins to strain credulity.

4e changed that, and ended up with pretty speeches closing sucking chest wounds.

Sigh... really, this fallacy again? You think that it's perfectly reasonable for a fighter to fight with no penalty when he has 3 broken ribs and a cracked sternum, but the idea that the equivalent of a medieval drill sergeant inspiring (or shaming) him to his feet after he falls down is suddenly unreasonable?

To each their own I suppose...

 

[JonWake]

Here, want to see what HPs look like in action? Check out this video of the fight between Hector and Achilles. Its a fight between a 7th level fighter (Hector) and a 14th level fighter (Achilles). In D&D terms, they're both doing pretty consistent damage to each other, with Hector even scoring a critical hit against Achilles. He then blows it with a fumble, tripping on a rock. It's not until Hector is down to his last couple hit points that Achilles makes the killing blow.

This is what a D&D fight looks like: lots of shield bashes, dinged armor, sudden knees and surface cuts until one finally gets the better of the other.