WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Lanefan]

Until critical hits bypass vitality and the game becomes Russian Roulette on who can roll the first crit and win.

If too many things can go straight to Wounds the system just doesn't work.

It works best if pretty much the only time Vitality and Wounds matter is when you're trying to recover them or get them cured, with Wounds simply taking longer to recover naturally and being harder to cure magically.

I use a Body-Fatigue system (very similar idea, different names) and the only damage I can think of that ever goes straight to Body Points is a failed insta-kill assassination attempt on a helpless target; in other words, something not that commonly seen. Otherwise, you don't get into Bodies until you run out of Fatigues.

 

[AnotherGuy]

And that is your right. But I want a system that makes more sense to me, so I'm going to keep fiddling around until I find something I like.

Did you ever fiddle along the lines of capping HD based on a creature's size? I saw an idea for that during my 2e days (Str + Size affected Hit Points). During the playtest period of 5e I incorporated the below table for HD. It worked fine - reminded me of E6. Once the offical 5e rules came out we switched back. But I'm thinking once my current campaign is done we will amalgamate some homebrew rules with Level Up.

Less than 1HD Diminutive
1HD Tiny
4HD Small
6HD Medium
10HD Large
18HD Huge
34HD Gargantuan

You could use DR for armour (adjusted for armour quality) while monsters would have DR based on the hardness of their hide/scales.
Armour Class would drop, since the main benefit of armour would be DR. Shields would become better for AC.

Incorporeal undead would ignore DR for their touch attacks, but the Dex ability could be rejiggered to include an Evasion stat which allows one to reduce those type of touch attacks by 1-5 based on their Dex score. We use odd numbers for that starting at 11. All our ability scores have benefits for odd numbers.

 

[Maxperson]

If someone actually gets thrown through a wall and lands on a bunch of jagged rocks, they're dead.

Or by RAW at 0.

"An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious."

It's not all being winded or scratched.

 

[Zardnaar]

Hey guys, has anyone figured out if hit points are meat points or not? We should try to figure out if hit points are meat points or not. That will be constructive

I thought that counted as no religion/politics rule.

As always ban Kender, blame the French.

 

[Maxperson]

The whole point is that any hits against your hit points ARE NOT deadly blows.

If that were true, going to 0 would not cause death saves and could not kill you. You would have to already be at 0 and be attacked again for a deadly blow to happen(massive damage deaths are for the first couple levels).

 

[Staffan]

Wait, wait, was that a call to the past about D&D a long time ago!?! Does that mean it's time to bring out quotes from the OG sources?

View attachment 269782

No? Darn it. Too late.

;-)

Meh. The only explanation that makes sense is that hit points (for humanoids, at least) is Aura.

 

[Maxperson]

I on the other hand refuse to believe that any hit points are meat. Just as a point of information.

That's fine as a house rule, but the rules do not support that. The very fact that weapons deal types of damage, slashing, puncture or bludgeoning proves that. If there were no meat hit points, the type of damage would be utterly irrelevant. No amount of resistance would protect you from any damage at all, since none of it affects you physically.

We know from the description of hit points in the PHB that hit points start being meat when you drop under half hit points and you suffer a serious wound when you drop to 0 in order to create a situation where death saves happen. No physical hit points = no death saves when you hit 0 since nothing actually happened to kill you.

 

[glass]

Then how can you have read it to say if it were good or bad?

Nobody is required to buy every product WotC puts out just so they can talk about it.

Why, when the hit-point mechanic is already there to do the job?

They do not, and never have, done the job of being meat points. Nor should they.

Anything's possible, I suppose. I guess 2009 was just the watershed moment when they finally got it right huh?

Assuming you mean 2008: Not quite, but closer than any edition before (or since). For one thing, they still referred to regaining hit points as "healing" (and compounded that error by having "healing surges" which had nothing to do with "healing" or "surging" - brilliant mechanic, terrible name).

No edition of D&D, not even 4e, is completely consistent with non-meat point hp. Every edition of D&D is massively more consistant with non-meat than with meat.

We talked about this earlier. If you have a different system for dealing with actual physical damage, this goes away. But yes, if you only have hit points, that becomes a problem.

I mostly agree with Ulorian, but I have to disagree on this. If you are more vulnerable to a particular kind of damage, then you have to work harder and/or be luckier to avoid that kind of damage. Still perfectly consistant with hp as stamina, skill, and luck.

Don't spend your time tearing down WotC

As market leader by a large margin, WotC's actions have an impact on all of us whether or not we play the game/edition they are currently selling. That alone makes them worthy of criticism, and criticising them is not "tearing them down".

It works best if pretty much the only time Vitality and Wounds matter is when you're trying to recover them or get them cured, with Wounds simply taking longer to recover naturally and being harder to cure magically.

IIRC Starfinder has it that its vitality equivalent is easier to recover by resting but harder to recover with magic. I am not sure how I feel about it (I have only played a couple of sessions of Starfinder so far), but it is at least interesting. And it doesn't do the instant-death-on-a-20 that VP/WP in Star Wars did.

 

[Cadence]

I'm obviously in the "hp are a big bundle of things for game purposes, and the lens you see them through is cloudy" camp. If I threw the meat out of them though I'd really wonder why we'd need separate exhaustion tracks and luck mechanics and things like those since we'd already have a big pool that measures those already.

(Something about the thread title makes me feel not bad about continuing against my better instincts... but not quite unbad enough to completely wax poetic on falling damage, and being hit when unawares and not dodging, and going back to damage types mentioned above, and...)

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

If that were true, going to 0 would not cause death saves and could not kill you. You would have to already be at 0 and be attacked again for a deadly blow to happen(massive damage deaths are for the first couple levels).

I guess you could establish that going to 0 is that magical point where a blow does connect physically. But as others have pointed out, this is a well-trodden road.