Why Not Just Call Them Stamina Points?

[hong]

If a giant's stone can crush a wall, it can crush a PC. The fact that it did not might mean that the high level PC took a glancing blow, but he still took damage.

And if your mojo is good enough, you can remove damage. Simple, isn't it?

 

[hong]

This is not a particularly strong position. "This is not a potato stew as you insist, but a potato and carrot stew!" Potatoes have always been part of the stew. I can't see what's gained by quibbling over portions.

Because if we didn't, we'd be forced to return to arguing over whether diagonals have breasts. Or something.

 

[D'karr]

Boxers in a ring throw a lot of punches in a single round. Some of those punches HIT. A lot of them miss the target completely.

Of all the punches some are jabs or misses that hardly even tap the other, they still make the opponent move, defend or counter and waste some energy. Some of them are more solid and really wind the opponent or make him work harder to avoid being hit forcefully. Some of them are solid enough to burst capillaries, cause contussions and abrasions, cause bleeding and concussions, break bones, bust noses and knock them out. And there have even been some deaths in boxing. But even after a knock out there are some that still get back up and go on fighting.

At the end of a round the boxers go to their corners, gather themselves, get pep-talked by their coaches, and refocus. When the bell rings they go back out and do it again. They can do this a lot but it is not indefinite. The coaches also give them directions and pep-talk them when the round is going on.

Some of those guys that are not getting "professional" pay might get back the next morning after a good nights sleep, sore as hell, and still go back and do it again.

Hit points are abstract and tend to represent this well.

You still have to HIT the opponent to cause any reduction in combat effectiveness (knocking them out), but those hits can be near misses or solid contacts. In 4e they've also introduced the "healing surge" to represent the characters catching their "second wind". The leader party role acts as a coach in the boxing ring. Some of his actions "pep talk" the others and can cause them to use healing surges to keep going. After you're out of healing surges you're done. You need rest.

So no, I think that HIT POINTS is still a good name for them. When you get HIT you lose them and when you surge you can regain them and keep fighting.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

I like stew.

 

[Kzach]

I had already assumed in my games that the only physical damage a person ever took in combat was the blow that reduced them to 0 or below. Everything else was a reduction of luck, stamina, armour protecting them, shields being hit, blows being parried or dodged but causing some sort of strain on the body, etc.

 

[MaelStorm]

Or just Stamina, I think I will use this term instead.

[You could introduce a more complicated variant, which would be a very unpopular resource management. Where WIS is used for Morale, CON is used for Fatigue and STR for Stamina]

To me the sacred cows of D&D are the 6 abilities, class, level and XP.

 

[hong]

I like stew.

 

[Sir Sebastian Hardin]

You go down with to actual damaging blows: The one that makes you bloodied, and the one that leaves you unconscious. Now that's realistic. Every human goes down with one or two hits.

(Hit point is not tied with your actual ability to resist damage. It's just a name, like AC. So no big deal)

 

[JohnSnow]

Except that every rule in the game system indicates that lethal damage = hit points. Healing = hit point recovery. The word damage is used over and over again.

The words luck and skill with regard to this are not in any of the rules. Are you making this up?

Nope. How long has it been since you read your First Edition Dungeon Master's Guide? I quote:

It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physcial ability of the character to withstand damage - as indicated by constitution bonuses - and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection.

Harkening back to the example of Rasputin, it would be safe to assume that he could withstand physical damage sufficient to have killed any four normal men, i.e. more than 14 hit points. Therefore, let us assume that a character with an 18 constitution will eventually be able to withstand no less than 15 hit points of actual physical damage before being slain and that perhaps as many as 23 hit points could constitute the physical makeup of a character. The balance of accrued hit points are those which fall into the non-physical areas already detailed. Furthermore, these actual physical hit points would be spread across a large number of levels, starting from a base score of from an average of 3 or 4, going up to 6 or 8 at 2nd level, (and so on)...Beyond the basic physical damage sustained, hits scored upon a character do not actually do such an amount of physical damage.

I bolded the part about skill and luck. I also bolded the part about hit points as physical damage. I think that about covers it.

It's life threatening if it is a significant portion of the PC's hit points or if the PC has already taken a lot of damage.

Nonsense. A PC with 1 hit point is in no life threatening danger - unless he's attacked again. He is, for all intents and purposes, unimpaired and unhurt.

How does the poison enter the PC's system if his chain mail turned the damage into a mere bruise? Well, because the PC took real damage. He took a real wound that allows the poison to enter the his system. The size and severity of that wound is relative to how many hit points he has and how much damage was done.

Poison is a corner case. If the fighter is struck by a poisoned blade, it drew blood, but that doesn't mean the injury was serious. For example, if the high level fighter with 250 hit points takes 1 hp from a poisoned knife, he still has to make a save vs. poison. What's the equivalent of 1/250th of the 1st-level fighter's 12 hp? It's so far below 1 as to not count, which means it's a bit like pricking your finger on a rose bush.

The only reason for the "turning a serious blow into a lesser one" aspect is due to the fact that low level PCs have few hit points and high level PCs have a lot of hit points and that caused some people agita.

But, hit points for years have represented damage in DND. Always has. Even with EGG's quote in the 1E DMG.

Given what I quoted from that DMG, are you still sure about that? Yes, hit points represent your "resistance to harm" and always have. But actual damage? Hardly.

If a giant's stone can crush a wall, it can crush a PC. The fact that it did not might mean that the high level PC took a glancing blow, but he still took damage.

Find a rules quote that indicate that hit point do not equate mostly to damage. That it mostly means luck and skill. The best you will find is the nebulous "the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one" which are there to rationalize the difference between low level few hit points and high level many hit points.

Well, I quoted the First Edition DMG above. Clearly, Gary felt that only the barest fraction of a character's hit points represented actual physical resistance to injury. And since the average damage of a sword hasn't changed since 1e, we must assume that characters today simply start with more "nonphysical hit points" than ever before. My Second Edition books aren't handy, but they followed 1e's lead. It seems to me that Fourth Edition is making the mechanics match the old explanation, rather than making the explanation match the mechanics, as 3e did.

I freely acknowledge that 3e tried, to an extent, to force the "actual physical resistance to injury" interpretation of hit points. The result of that change of interpretation led to silliness like the Epic Level Handbook's "swimming in Lava" scenario. So if anything, 3e is the aberration.

Or is it? How about some Third Edition quotes?

Your hit points measure how hard you are to kill.

For some characters, hit points may represent divine favor or inner power.

Damage give you scars, bangs up your armor, and gets blood on your tunic, but it doesn't slow you down

Even if you have lots of hit points, a dagger through the eye is a dagger through the eye. When a character is helpless, meaning that he can't avoid damage or deflect blows somehow, he's in trouble.

So even 3e doesn't support the interpretation that hit points represent your ability to sustain physical damage. Otherwise, they wouldn't cease to matter when you're "helpless," as the coup de grace rules would lead one to believe.

I think I've made my point as much as it's possible to make it. But hey, if you still think 4e is somehow fundamentally altering hit points, I guess I can't convince you otherwise. To me, it's finally making the rules match what the text has been saying for most of the history of the game.

 

[Sir Sebastian Hardin]

What he said. The only flaw in 3rd edition's Hit Points in the "Cure x wounds" spells. What wounds do they cure if you are just resisting actual physical damage?

But all in all, 4e makes it clearer. Regarding hit points at least.