Why Not Just Call Them Stamina Points?

[Mallus]

I'm sure you will find "character's luck, or mojo, or dude-factor" written all over the place in the rules.

Once the rules make it into my brain, yes.

On a more serious note... the good thing about D&D's damage system is that provides a usable framework for adjudicating violence while freeing the DM/player to narrate the effects of the violence in the manner of their own choosing.

Want "Fist of the Northstar" D&D? Describe high-damage wounds using splatterpunk language.

Want "Die Hard" D&D? Describe a thousand minor wounds. Toss in the requisite "Yippy Ky Ay".

Want "A Team" D&D? Damage is only the loss of dude-ness. Blood is never spilled.

It's a terrifically flexible system, so long as you don't saddle it with need to make logical sense.

 

[WayneLigon]

The entire 3E game system, from combat to spells, discusses lethal damage and wounds with regard to hit points. It never discusses luck, or skill, or defense with regard to hit points outside of the single phrase that it allows a character to turn a serious blow into a less serious one (and note: the phrase "less serious" does not mean "not serious", a wound can be less serious and still be serious).

John's argument is a philosophical one which does not match what is written in the system, nor as how many players have historically viewed the system.

Possibly because they didn't feel the need to, since the assumption has been there since the beginning?

This probably describes their feelings best, as it's the discussion of the different between 'vitality/wounds' and 'hit points'. It most certainly does describe skill and luck. Anything they say there can be applied to 3E; it's the same system, after all.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Second Wind and 6 hour healing support a non-physical interpretation of hit points but Bloodied supports a physical interpretation. What does the 4e flavor text say? Do we know yet? I suspect that it will describe HP as having both a physical and non-physical component just like the flavor text in 1e and 3e.

After all there always had to be a physical component to allow poison to work and for Cure X Wounds to make sense. But equally there always had to be a non-physical element as wounds don't impair functioning and a 10th level fighter's body isn't made out of iron.

I ain't seeing much change here.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I call the Total BS card on this one. It's not metagaming when at one hit point to choose actions that lead to survival. It's "Crap! I'm seriously wounded and cannot take another blow like that last one" in character decision making.

The way I see it is the player knows the next blow will be fatal but the PC doesn't. The character has suffered many wounds, sure, but they are all shallow cuts, bruises, flesh wounds and so forth. They must be because they don't impair functioning.

For me the term 'metagaming' is value neutral, by the way.

 

[KarinsDad]

Possibly because they didn't feel the need to, since the assumption has been there since the beginning?

This probably describes their feelings best, as it's the discussion of the different between 'vitality/wounds' and 'hit points'. It most certainly does describe skill and luck. Anything they say there can be applied to 3E; it's the same system, after all.

It's an interesting theory.

It has weaknesses though.

1) SWSE still has a condition track and a damage threshold to handle certain aspects of combat. It is not just hit points. They can take a more abstract view of hit points because they resolved the "I'm not impaired at 1 hit point" problem with additional mechanics. So, comparing SWSE hit points to DND hit points is not apples and apples.

2) This is a description by recent game designers. It says nothing about how the game has historically been played. The concept that someone "dodges" the first 9 attacks and then gets hit with the 10th presents real descriptive and NPC decision issues for DMs.

If one considers hit points a measurement of damage (not one to one, but a percentage), then the DM can have the NPCs see that an opponent has been actually hit with at least glancing blows multiple times and the NPCs have a concept that they are wearing down the PC.

If one considers hit points a measurement of dodging/parrying (as per the article), then the NPCs do not know if this PC is just good at Dodging (high Dex) which he can keep up all day or just good at Dodging (high hit points) which is limited. The NPCs have no knowledge that the PC is actually wearing down (shy of DM metagaming). Ditto for PCs versus NPCs. The metagaming concept of "I hit him 5 times now, why won't he fall?" doesn't work in a hit point dodging concept of "I missed him 5 times now, why won't he fall?". Sure, one could rationalize that they are actually near hits or glancing blows every single time (no exceptions), but then if one does that, they are not following what the article states that they are also parrying and dodging as well. They are following what I wrote here in the previous paragraph (i.e. how I view hit points).

 

[Imp]

As I mentioned in the other thread about this. It is an abstraction that is a COMBINATION of damage, stamina, luck, and the like. Are you hurt when you are at 1 hp? Maybe...probably even. Are you so hurt you can barely stand and you have to limp everywhere you go? Nope.

No, you completely can be, it's just that the effects aren't modeled in the game – it's possible, under the longtime D&D hit point model, to take a thrown knife to the belly at 1/2 your total hitpoints, stagger along for the rest of the fight or fights and what is presumably protecting you and enabling you to perform is your heroic will, luck, etc. and very few "meat points" – but you'll need to get treated or at least lay down for a good while after that, and barring that, it's going to hurt in the morning, which is the sort of narrative element that the pre-4e model allows if you want to use it. In 4e, you heal up overnight, or you use your healing surges in the morning (unless I've got the surge mechanics wrong) to do the same thing if the healing-up-overnight is houseruled to something less... which winds up being weird and I don't know how that would shake out in play.

Certainly there is still a physical component to 4e hp as Doug McCrae says but it seems to allow less feedom in describing what happens during a fight. I've always tended to narrate the blows reducing a player to 1/4 hp or less as moderately serious, so contra what he says later, a PC in my campaigns in the past that was at 3/30 hp knew he was pretty hurt.

So what happens to a wounded horse in a PC party, then? They heal up too?

 

[JohnSnow]

2) This is a description by recent game designers. It says nothing about how the game has historically been played. The concept that someone "dodges" the first 9 attacks and then gets hit with the 10th presents real descriptive and NPC decision issues for DMs.

I posted this earlier in the thread. As I said, it's from the First Edition DMG (p. 82, if you want to read it). You can call it a "philosophical argument" all you want, but it says a great deal about how the game has historically been played. AND, moreover, it's wholly consistent with the Saga description of hit points.

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.

You do a fair amount of dismissing of this argument because it's, in your view, "the only way the designers could think of to account for level-based increases to hit points."

But the simple fact is that, once you get beyond 1st-level (and even at 1st level in 4e), those "level-based increases" (or points beyond what a normal human has) are responsible for the VAST bulk of the character's hit points. Moreover, when you consider that a character historically had a negative reserve down to -10 (also in that 1st Edition DMG, btw), we can reasonably assume that most "normal humans" have about 4 hit points (or less!). They can be easily killed (or dropped to "dying") by a single sword blow, a single arrow, or even a good stab with a dagger.

This is entirely consistent with what we know about people in the real-world. Gary's example of Rasputin just reinforces the point that even someone who was thought to be nearly superhuman "in the real world" could be described as having "about 14" hit points.

So, allow me to state, for the record, that if you want to decide that some fraction of a character's hit points represent "actual meat", I have no problem with that. Whether it's worth tracking the distinction is a whole other matter. However, that's the ONLY way to read what Gary wrote, game mechanics wonkiness of magical healing notwithstanding.

If one considers hit points a measurement of damage (not one to one, but a percentage), then the DM can have the NPCs see that an opponent has been actually hit with at least glancing blows multiple times and the NPCs have a concept that they are wearing down the PC.

If one considers hit points a measurement of dodging/parrying (as per the article), then the NPCs do not know if this PC is just good at Dodging (high Dex) which he can keep up all day or just good at Dodging (high hit points) which is limited. The NPCs have no knowledge that the PC is actually wearing down (shy of DM metagaming). Ditto for PCs versus NPCs.

Nonsense. The PCs and the NPCs are perfectly able to tell when their opponents are laboring, fatigued, and might even be able to be taken down. I can tell in a real fight when a guy's about to go down - not with absolute certainty, but I can certainly have the impression that I'm wearing down his defenses.

And that's what hit points represent - wearing down your opponents defenses. Yes, partially they represent the actual physical damage you're doing, and a tiny fraction might be considered to be related to serious injury. But when the average human can be killed by a single sword blow (and not a crit...just a good, solid, hit), the "meat total" of a "normal human" is about 5 hit points. Gary's allowance of 23 was absurdly generous, but is still well below even 20% of a high-level character's hit point total. In Fourth Edition, it probably should amount to about 4 points at level 1 and 1 per level thereafter. Hardly a significant fraction.

Which basically means that the average PC is always getting the bulk of his "hit points" from things other than his body's ability to absorb damage (by getting "wounded"). It is, in fact, such a small fraction that I don't think it's really worth tracking.

Although, as I've also said before, I could see a system being put into place for PCs getting "wounded" when they drop to negative hit points, to represent losing those actual "meat points." However, I think for most people, it adds too much complexity for too little reward.

But perhaps you're one of the 5% for whom the extra bookkeeping would be worth it. On the other hand, I don't think most people care that much.

 

[Plane Sailing]

You do not take any physical damage of note till you hit zero. Zero is not dead, never was.

I mean this in a spirit of humour and pickyness, but originally in D&D zero was "he's dead, Jim!"

I don't remember when -ve hp first appeared formally (was it 1e?) but in OD&D it was dead when they ran out

Cheers

 

[hong]

I call the Total BS card on this one. It's not metagaming when at one hit point to choose actions that lead to survival. It's "Crap! I'm seriously wounded and cannot take another blow like that last one" in character decision making.

To be precise, it's "crap! If I take another blow, I will die". Explicating that further is unnecessary.

 

[Plane Sailing]

PCs at one hit point tend to run away like little girls. If there were nothing wrong with them, why would they do that?

My first ever PC was a 1st level thief (In OD&D+greyhawk rules). I had 1hp and was part of a party of 14 adventurers - and one of the three survivors. Along the way I fired a slingshot stone at an iron golem (*I* didn't know what it was), stole some big rubies, helped fight a 4th level fighter (and managed to end up with his dancing sword because nobody else remembered it) and slew a large earth elemental through sheer geekiness (aka strong familiarity with Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

By 'eck we were tough in those days