Light Stabbing
Who wants to bitch and moan about abstract HP? If you’ve played any kind of D&D-style system, you’re probably familiar with the issue. Maybe you sneakily stabbed a guard only to have ’em raise the alarm anyway. Maybe you fell 50 ft. onto an iron spike only to get up and dust yourself off next round. Maybe you’ve been curious why you’re able to keep fighting at 1 hp, but suddenly get TKO’d when you stub your toe a round later. I know that I can’t be alone over here, so let’s dive in.
THE PROBLEM
Hit points nominally represent how tough your are. HP is the measure of at PC’s ability to shrug off wounds before succumbing to unconsciousness and death. As Barbarian so ably demonstrates in today’s comic, however, that mess can strain credulity. In other words, HP often struggles to reflect a believable reality.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
- Magical Resilience: I argued back in “Falling Damage” that nonsensical rules make for world-building opportunities. Anything from “heroic essence” to “destiny protects me” can help HP to make sense.
- Abstraction: If you decide that HP represents “battle fatigue” or “luck running out before a knock-out blow,” it’s suddenly easier to imagine heroic survival. This is a great strategy for long duels between evenly-matched opponents. Note however that this method works less well when the dragon’s bite hits and deals massive damage, causing you to feel 4d10 + 25 hp “less lucky.”
- Colorful Description: If you’ve ever seen one of those cool combat description tables, you know how easy it is to describe the same attack in multiple ways. The difference between a thunderwave that “pushes them back with the impact,” causes them to “bleed form the ears,” and “blows their body apart into pieces” is a pretty good indication of health.
- Vary It Up: No single excuse is going to solve the abstract HP problem. That’s because everything from swords to telepathy to starvation can affect this one overworked score. That means you’ll have to be on your toes as a GM, mixing “narrow dodges” and “great fortitude” with “the protection of the gods” and “only your rage is keeping you upright.”
Systems like Fate and Mouse Guard have true abstract health systems. The swashbuckling 7th Sea has a particularly neat “flesh wounds” vs. “dramatic wounds” system going on, neatly separating bumps and bruises from serious injury. But IMHO, even though it’s easy to look at highly mechanical systems and think that they’re trying too hard to represent health and injury “realistically,” I think that it all comes down to guidelines rather than rules. Ask a dozen gamers what HP represents and you’ll get a dozen different answers. In fact, I’m willing to bet it will vary with the same GM depending on situation.
So what do you say we put that hypothesis to the test in today’s discussion? How do you conceptualize HP? Does it represent the same narrative idea in every situation (e.g. actual bodily injury), or do you like to throw out multiple, sometimes contradictory descriptions? Do you have any favorite ways to describe HP-loss? Sound off with your best creative combat descriptions down in the comments!
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I’ve been running a lot of Dark Heresy lately, and I generally like the wounds system it has. All normal characters have about eight to twelve wounds at start. Given that a big axe wielded by a big guy will deal 1d10+7 damage at least, this can quickly lead to hitting zero. From your maximum wounds to zero, you’re fine just scraped up.
Below zero wounds, you go into critical damage, which is where extremely fun tables come into play. Depending on the type of damage and where it hits, you can get horribly maimed, scarred, lose limbs and eyes, or just die.
Relevant comic: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/permanent-injury
I’m most familiar with the d10 system doing this, giving you cumulative penalties to your dice pool as you become more and more injured. That can lead to a “suck spiral” where you just get crappier and crappier after taking an initial hit, but it is awfully satisfying to watch injuries actually injure people in a mechanically meaningful way.
I think 4E hit a nice balance with the Bloodied condition, which starts once you pass the half-way point on your HP. All sorts of powers work differently (or don’t work at all) depending on whether you’re bloodied or not, both beneficial and detrimental.
I’m a fan as well. It’s an elegant solution that preserves the feel of hp while still adding a bit of consequence to injury.
I feel like this comic makes more of a point about DR/damage resistance than HP values. Though it can be abstracted between ‘enemy’s body is too durable to pierce or damage (which natural armor already implies)’, ‘enemy wounds heal instantly unless the wound is massive or their weakness is exploited (best used for vampires, werewolves, though also implied with regeneration or fast healing)’, and ‘enemy feels no pain/injury and can shrug off mundane wounds through willpower (as this comic and most barbarians or ferocity users demonstrate)’.
Also, this comic feels awkwardly familiar…
https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/the-best-defense
Never seen that comic before. Of course, it should be noted that my original characters (do not steal) Barbarian and Babau Demon are unique individuals without precedent in this or any other world. It is purely coincidental if their antics reflect common tropes in gaming.
And your opinions on DR/mechanically negating damage values? Also spills into energy resistances or immunities (or weaknesses).
Hmm, that fiend feels markedly different art-wise than the usual style of the comic. Which devil/demon/daemon/[obscure fiendish extraplanar name] was the inspiration?
Laurel had this to say on the Patreon:
“I feel like there’s always a weird dichotomy between properly referencing the beastiary for these comics and making a recognizable enemy and then attempting to fit the cartoony style of the comic. This one was a little rough! I’m not sure it’s entirely where I would like it to be, but you learn from things like this and improve in the future!”
Oftentimes in media, an artstyle change is an indication of something truly alien or medium breaking / godlike to the setting. Photoshop Flowey in Undertale is one example. The Cthulhu mythos is another interpretation. Extraplanar creatures might all count in some fashion.
Here’s another example:
http://cucumber.gigidigi.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/591.jpg
Well sure. But that’s when you’re using the technique it for deliberate effect. Today’s demon is representative of an illustrator struggling to reconcile style with reference.
Of course, I think it’s easy to spot a slow style change over the life of the comic. Character designs continue to evolve, as you can see from Fighter’s earliest face-shape vs. his appearance in recent comics.
I borrow from RWBY for my homebrew game and say that hp up to equal to con score are meat points while everything above that is ‘aura’ aka a protective field of positive energy projected by your soul that wards off attacks and heals minor wounds taken.
What if I’m a golem?
The easiest solution is to say this applies to PCs (maybe humanoids in general), not to big mpnsters like golems and dragons. The Tarrasque can actually take all those hits and keep going. You are shielded; the golem doesn’t need a shield. Also gives humanoids a distinct “difference” from other creatures, whoch makes sense considering that there are already a bunch of spells and effects that only affect humanoids (e.g. Charm Person, Death Tyrant negative energy cone, etc)
But what if I’m a non-humanoid tiefling? Are my hit points preserved by the raw power of interplanar genetics?
Living creatures project an aura of positive energy
Undead project a field of negative energy
Constructs and other non-living, non-undead creatures are pretty much all structure points.
Well, I generally prefer systems that impose some penalties as your HP starts dropping – for example, World of Darkness, simple as it is in other respects of HP, does that job pretty well. (And it has 3 types of damage for healing/regeneration purposes.) On the other hand, I’m about to run a Rolemaster campaign after a loooong while. Just look at all the gory wound descriptions and complex healing methods there! 😀
Which chart am I supposed to be looking at? There are… There seem to be a lot of charts. O_O
I’m not sure HP can be conceptualised as anything other than “it’s magic”. If I ever get back to it, I was wrting a crossover fanfic which had people who explicitly have HP (Log Horizon) meeting people who . . . don’t. One thing I tried to get across was how utterly unnatural the adventurers seem to people who are stabbable flesh and blood. A (currently unwritten) scene has a guy being hit in the head with an axe, only to respond with a thumbs up and “nice blow!”
You never try to make it “make sense?” In my mind, a big hit from an axe that fails to drop a guy could be described as, “A sound like a bell shakes the battlefield as [victim’s] helmet flies from his head. Blood cakes his hair and stars dance before his eyes, but he remains stubbornly un-decapitated.”
In my mind, the trick is to invent some rational explanation like the helmet taking the brunt of the blow.
The person in question, like most high level Log Horizon adventurers, does not wear a helmet. And the effect of injuries on the Adventurers is shown in the show. It’s not much. A character gets thrown across a large room hard enough to leave a substantial dent in a solid stone wall and he gets a comical bump at worst, which he walks off in about an hour. Adventurers explicitly have HP.
In D&D and variants, hitpoints work as a mechanic and can be interpreted in the manner you describe, but it doesn’t bear up with close examination. Not how it interacts with healing and the way you have to wear people down to kill them.
I tend to think of it in the same category as a superhero movie. Some stuff would straight up kill a person, and you’ve got to explain it away with superpowers. But just because there’s some impossible stuff happening, I don’t think that means you can’t also do a little suspension of disbelief as well (e.g. folks getting blasted off their feet by explosions and being fine).
I personally prefer the “magical resilience” route, at least in the D&D style settings. When a goblin swings his sword and hits a level 1 character for 7 hp, that results in a grevious wound, possibly even death. The same strike against a level 20 barbarian will barely scratch the surface. That’s not because the strike was suddenly weaker, but because the target is not a normal person, and hasn’t been in a long time – she’s a hero of legends, a veritable demigod. And legends are bulletproof.
Treating hp as this supernatural vitality also avoids the issue with healing magic that shows up when using the “abstraction” method. A healing potion returns the same amount of positive energy to both the level 1 commoner and the level 20 barbarian. But the Barbarian has the capacity to hold far more of it, which is why the potion appears to have less effect on her.
Do you have an in-game explanation for the source of this magical resilience?
So let me get this straight. A typical D&D setting includes:
– giant, flying lizards that can breathe fire/ice/acid/lightning, cast magic spells and produce viable offspring with anything that has a pulse.
– Reality bending scholars that can blow you up by holding a piece of batshit just so and saying the right word.
– People with powers very similar to the aforementioned scholars, except that the only reason they got them is because their ancestors fucked one of the aforementioned giant flying lizards.
And „this dude is much harder to wound than an average person” is where you draw the line? :p
Joking aside, my justification is simple. The way I see it, all living creatures in those settings are powered by Positive Energy, typically in the form of a soul. It’s literally animating them and keeping them together, the same way Negative Energy does for an Undead – it’s your vitality, your life force, your life. There is no difference between the state of your body and the amount of PE you have – they’re one and the same. Damaging or restoring one will have the same result on the other. If you have more Positive Energy than a regular person would be capable of (on account of having a stronger souls – ie. higher character level), your body literally becomes „unnaturaly” tougher and more difficult to damage – it’s more „full of life” than would seem possible, and thus doesn’t part with it nearly as easily.
I like the positive energy explanation. It fits in with the existing mechanics.
It does make me wonder about simple things like stab wounds though. What’s happening medically if there’s a dagger in your heart but you’re just fine because of positive energy? Is it like supernatural life support, keeping the blood pumping? Or do concepts of mundane medicine straight up not work in the fantasy world?
The state of the body and the amount of Positive Energy are directly connected – damaging/restoring one affects the other in the same way. As such, it is not possible for someone to simultaneously suffer a life-threatening injury AND have a lot of Positive Energy in their body. Imagine a following scenario: a street thug ( https://aonprd.com/NPCDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Criminal%20(Street%20Thug) ) takes a swing at Player1 with his dagger and manages to land a critical hit. 1d4+3 X 2 = average 9 points of damage. If Player1 is a level 1 Commoner with 7hp to his name, this puts him in negatives – the blade pierced the heart and the poor sod is lying on the ground and bleeding out. If on the other hand Player1 happens to be a level 12 Barbarian with whopping 191hp (using Amiri’s statline as an example), 9hp is nothing. Apropriately, the dagger only managed to go a few centimeters in – the hit was just as strong, but the pure density of Positive Energy within Player1’s body meant that it barely did any actual damage.
average 11 points of damage, ofcourse. Now the internet will forever know my shame.
There was a funny old hungarian RPG called M.A.G.U.S., where health was divided into two parts:
– “Pain Tolerance Points” (“fájdalomtűrés pont” or FP for short) – this represented your combat fatigue, and minor disctractions like blood dripping in your face, etc; it was a high amount as you got more every level (5-15 points per level, based on class and stats); you regained them faster (even with basic psyonics that was affordably available for most classes)
– Vitality Points (“életerő pont” or ÉP for short) – this represented your physical this was a relatively low amount (average of 10-15, based on class and stats), which did not increase with levels; it had a very slow natural regeneration, and if you run out of it, you were dead
When you ran out of FP, you usually went unconscious, and every point of overflow damage went from your ÉP. There were some very nasty damages and spells that directly reduced your ÉP as well; and if I remember correctly, massive damages to FP also decreased your ÉP too (to a scale).
So from a narrative level, you had a measurement of your battle tiredness, amount of scratches and “flesh wounds”, being out of breath and everything else that doesn’t really leave a scar but indicates how close you are getting to get knocked out and suffer some serious injuries; and a separate (smaller) scale of how dead you are. You got attacks that “tire you out” and some attacks that really makes you injured.
There is a similar optional rule in the 5e DMG if I remember correctly, but this system works best when it’s the default so really dangerous attacks can be defined by dealing direct vital points.
Pillars of Eternity 1 had a somewhat similar system. You had two health bars – one for health (a total amount of damage you can take before you find yourself at death’s door) and one for endurance (the amount of damage you can take before losing consciousness. For obvious reasons it was never higher than your health). Every time you took a hit you would lose both. Endurance could be regenerated in combat using spells, and you would get it all back after a fight. On the other hand, there was no way to heal the damage to your health except by sleeping it off.
Starfinder (the space variant of Pathfinder 1e) has a system like this, with Hit Points (the “are you dead?” points) being relatively low and Stamina Points (the “’tis a flesh wound” points) being both more common and easier to recover (you could get some back automatically by resting). So the idea is not so much that you were shot a bunch of times by lasers and sat down for an hour to heal your burns as it is you barely dodged a bunch of lasers, and sat down for an hour to get your blood sugar back up so that you can barely dodge more lasers.
This is my point of comparison:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/vitalityAndWoundPoints.htm
It always struck me as a neat bit of simulation, but what’s the cost in playability? It seems to me that this level of grit can risk getting a bit mathy.
In the system I mentioned it worked well, because you practically used FP as you’d use HP in 5e (or PF1e), and the ÉP decrease would come in in dire situations (like when you are bleeding out in earlier D&D editions, or to add seriousness to massive damage). But if you try to add this kind of layers to a system that was designed with single value HP, it will usually become clunky, as now you’ll have to check one more source for figuring out damage; and you need to revisit every class feature, spell and monster ability to check how do they fall in line with the new system, and then you can be sure that there will be some subclass or spell in a later sourcebook that totally breaks it cause the designer never meant to make it work with it…
But a simple system that doesn’t need ttoo much math could work for 5e like this:
– At first level, you don’t get max HP, you get the same amount as you’d get any other level.
– You get a Vitality or Wound (let’s call LP as life points) equal to your CON score and the average HP for your class (so 5 for d8 HD, 7 for d12HD, etc). This value changes when your base CON changes permanently, but not by temporary effects (magic items like Amulet of Health counts as temporary cause you lose it when you remove the item; Tome of Health is permanent).
– If you take more damage than your current health, the rest of the damage is deducted from your LP.
– Whenever you fail a Death Saving throw, you lose one LP.
– Whenever you take massive damage*, you lose LP.
– If you’re down to 0 LP, you are dead.
– You can regain Long Rest by sacrificing HD restoration. For each HD you would regain during a long rest, you can opt to regain 1LP instead.
– Healing magic can also restore LP.
The only math and balancing factor would be calculating massive damage.
Sounds close to the Starfinder version:
https://starfinder.dragonlash.com/character-creation/health-and-resolve/
For Dnd I have a strong preference for the “Magical Resilience” explanation.
Pretending that your high level fighter is just the tough guy at your local gym, or perhaps a special forces soldier at level 20 instead of a superhuman badass like the the rules imply just causes too many problems.
(through I generally think of it less like a force field and more like the kind of superhuman toughness that say The Hulk has. Someone stabs him and he deflects the spear with his muscles leaving only a swallow wound).
That makes sense for D&D monks, but the existing fiction seems to imply that “tough guy at the gym” is accurate for fighters and similar.
Do you have a go-to explanation for the source of the magical resilience? Or is it sort of a handwave?
Well, no tough guy at the gym is rougly level 1-2 fighter/rouge at the very most, with special force soldier at level 3-4 and action hero special force soldier at 5-6. Above that it’s superhuman badass.
Tough guys at the gym don’t win wrestling matches with gorillas one armed, survive falls from orbit, swim long distances in full plate, survive months without eating or any of the other stuff that high level dnd fighters can just do.
As for explanation, an assumed good old Charles Atlas Superpowers as a thing that just happens in the setting. That is if I bother even giving one. Beowulf didn’t need an explanation nor did the various other super-powered heroes of myth that weren’t the child of one god or another, and if that’s good enough for that esteemed pedigree why wouldn’t it be good enough for my humble elf-games?
I think I used a bit too much local jargon there.
By Charles Atlas Superpowers, I just mean “people can get super-humanly powerful/skilled through intensive training”.
That’s a really interesting question, and I think the answer has to do with something called the “geek mindset.” I’m riffing off of this book…
https://www.amazon.com/Find-Your-Lack-Faith-Disturbing/dp/0374537364
…But the basic idea is that part of the appeal of a simulated world lies in in-depth explanation. There’s a mindset that wants to inhabit the fiction, and nonsensical explanations inhibit that drive.
So when Beowulf works well in the literary tradition, it works less well in a geek tradition that wants to thoroughly explore a secondary world.
From a practical standpoint, you can gloss over miraculous dragon bites in Beowulf. When you’re playing a cleric and your job is healing though, you’ll likely have to improvise some kind of explanation for miraculous survival. In that sense, I think that Charles Atlas powers are a great explanation…
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/naruto/images/9/97/Rock_Lee_Part_I.png/revision/latest?cb=20181229065526
…But they aren’t codified in the system. You’ve got to rely on homebrew and headcanon, and that’s not something that everyone at the table is going to automatically share.
I’ve messed around with wound systems to solve the problem of characters being completely fine at 1 hp. Typically they’ll involve something like “You are absolutely not fine at 1 hp. You’re struggling to keep contributing, and taking a minus 8 on all your rolls”, or somesuch.
Actual balance of such a system is tricky, and barbarians still stretch credibility, but it is a somewhat viable method.
I thought that 4e and its “bloodied” mechanic was a nice middle ground here. Not to granular, but still a simple “this stuff happens” when you’re below half health.
I’d take it a step further and make the cutoffs at 2/3rds and 1/3rd health, but yes I really like the idea. Among other benefits it is an indirect buff to in-combat healing, which I think is an under-appreciated potential game aspect.
I personally like to use the magical resilience method, as i like it when a character can still disembowel someone on a good hit, without it neccesarily being the finishing blow. The magical resilience method feels like it really frees up people’s ability to colorfully describe the insane amount of damage they just did, without it having to be the finishing blow. I also just like the idea of how starting around level 3 or 4, characters start breaking reality and how they react to it just by existing with their sheer durability. I love the idea of a guy get stabbed through the guy, or having their neck slashed, and then barely reacting to it because they are just so used to it by now, and are so beyond such minor injuries. Really adds a bit of heroic flair to things.
Relevant gif: https://giphy.com/gifs/emile-hirsch-QMpmt7bvdHmjS
Exactly:). Also i realized i wrote a guy get stabbed through the guy. I meant a guy getting stabbed through the gut.
I dunno. I think there’s a certain charm to the phrase, “You stabbed my entire guy!”
See, my mind went more to a “partial cover” mental image! You stabbed my guy by going THROUGH ANOTHER GUY!
2:25 is where I’m coming from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKizlJ7jbFA
Honestly, we don’t devote much time thinking about it. One takes various blows through the course of the fight, some leaving marks, some not… and if you fall over at some point, it’s because collectively it’s all proven too much.
As to Barbarian here though… she’s the one class that cares least about such things, the one running on adrenalin and rage, to the point where a few swords sticking out of vital organs is a problem that can be deferred a while.
Of course, that’s how we end up with party members trying to keep her anger going long enough that someone can patch up the injuries before she notices she should be dead.
…of course, one other little quirk of such things is that clothing and armor never seem to need repairs. Someone may have just stabbed you in the guts with a longsword before someone else just about cut you in half with a greataxe, but your armor is still as good as new. Only the occupant needs repairs…
Oh man… Edged weapons in space combat. This mess comes up all the time in Starfinder, and it drive me nuts. I’ll be sitting there like, “You’re bleeding! How are you not also explosively decompressing!?”
Rapid sealant technology. Space suits are all designed to patch themselves in the event of a sudden breach. (Using nanomachines or smart metal or something, I dunno. Space wizards did it.) Shame the technology doesn’t work on living tissue, but at least it keeps people from decompressing every time they get shanked in hard vacuum.
Of course, that sets up the potential for attacks specifically targeted at spacesuit repair modules and maybe an antagonist with unnatural regenerative abilities somewhere down the line…
Another option is that if the suits are magical, they’re using the necklace of adaptation effect, which is effectively a shell of fresh air around them, that even functions in vacuum. The suit probably encompasses this shell to make it more feasible or affordable for the average user by mixing technology instead of pure high level magic.
Who said it doesn’t work on tissue? How else are you not bleeding out inside your space suit after being cut, where you can’t quickly bandage yourself?
I think there might be force fields involved too. Some kinds of armour mention having low-grade force fields that assist with maintaining environmental integrity.
Goblin helmets are patched up with tape, so presumably free action space tape.
I’m guessing the borrowed spellotape from the Potterverse.
I handle hit points as a combination of all those factors and more. But I also don’t shy away from the idea that high level characters are just that tough. There are some things that “training” and “luck” can’t explain away, most notably things like lava and acid. Legendary heroes can just tough that stuff out, for a little while, at least.
And that’s okay! It doesn’t bother me from a realism perspective, because D&D and related systems are perfectly realistic. They are a realistic simulation of a world governed by D&D rules. Yes, that’s a tautology, but that’s okay too. The fact that legendary warriors can routinely survive falls from cliffs and brief immersion in lava is simply a fact of worlds like Golarion and the Forgotten Realms, as much as the existence of orcs and magic. It’s internally consistent and it’s awesome, and that’s all I want out of a system.
Likewise, to use the 7th Sea example, drama is a reality of that setting. It is “realistic” that skilled swordsmen can shake off gunshot wounds and rapier impalement, and take on dozens of brutes without breaking a sweat, because that’s the sort of world Theah is. The system delivers the intended setting.
The bigger problem comes from systems that claim to simulate realistic human beings (as in, human beings that resemble the ones in real life), but fail to do so. Certain editions of the World of Darkness games have failed in this regard, for example, with a surprising number of gunshot wounds required to incapacitate or kill a normal human being.
I’ve always liked the idea that biology works differently in magical settings. Like, maybe the humors are a real thing. Or acid takes a while to eat through positive energy rather than just dissolving flesh.
Of course, as I go through this thread, I’m becoming increasingly aware that this is just background headcanon stuff for me. I’ve never made the attempt to actually reason out a justification.
The humors do exist in Pathfinder, if you don’t mind a little bloodletting between friends or foes.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/e-g/extraction-scarificator/
Well, in KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) we have HPs which are the combined worth of SIZ and CON, so a large Saxon has quite a lot of points more than the small Pict. However, All players have this Unconcious stat, which is 1/4th of your hitpoints. If you have less HP than that (and more than 0) you become unconsious, and are at the mercy of your attackers. This also means that this Saxon can take more damage, but that he will be out of it earlier, with more HP remaining than the Pict. And it prevents some Fight to the Death shenanigans which are ussually not in keeping with the lore. Also HP heal very sloww, just 2 to 3 HP a week, so getting wounded in a fight is a big deal, also because there is next to no “magical/miracle” healing.
MEanwhile the only way to raise your HPs in KAP is by becoming more famous! This works lile this: You get Glory after each adventure (Glory is a combination XP and Renown) and when you pass a 1000 theshold, like going from 5890 to 6120 (thought the 6000 treshold) you get a Glory point. And you can use it to rais any one thing on your character sheet. And you can use this to raise CON and SIZ to get more HP.
In RuneQuest you have hit locations, which have HitPoints, which is dependend on your CON score, modified by SIZ and POW (this can be seen as the magical part of HP). So you can loose an arm in combat. And even a lowly trollkin can land a blow on a Sword of Humakt. But as this plays in Glorantha, everybody is a magic user, so protective, and healing, magic is fairly common.
Sounds to me like the “slow healing HP” of KAP makes for a very different play experience than the familiar D&D “adventuring day.” How does that slow healing tend to affect gameplay? Is combat fairly rare?
Well, yes and no. As armour is a big thing here, and you play knights, which usually have the best armour, in a fight with bandits, most of the times you don’t even get hit, because both the armour, and the shield, will stop the damage, and you can kill bandits with abondon, as they don’t have, or have very little, armour. However, in a fight with another knight, who is also armoured up, you deal very little damage to each other, until one of you scores a “critical hit”, which doubles the damage that you do, and, if your opponent fails, or fumbles his weapon roll, it even passes armour, and might kill you in one blow. This is referred to in the KAP world as the “tink-tink-BOOM” phenomena.
But because a fight might kill you, fighting is far less common than in D&D. And if you do have to fight, it usually is for something meaningful, because otherwise your sacrifice would be in vain.
What helps, with the slow healing stuff, is that the conceit of the setting is, that you only have time for one adventure every year. So 60 days to go questing. And after that adventure you go home again, to rest en heal, and do the proper knightly stuff, like taking care of your manor, and fathering children, who can take over the manor, and as a PC, once you’re dead.
Also there are monsters, and ennemies, that can kill you easily, because you were not meant to win that fight. Several of Lancelots opponents are like that, in which you can come across them, before Lancelot does, and you’ll just become one of the killed, or captured, knights, before the final end of the enemy, by the hand of Lancelot.
The one exeption of course is Tourney! There you will fight “For Love (of combat)” and to show your mettle to your peers. However, this is done with “rebated” weapons, which basically means that all damage is halved, so less change of an accidental kill. But they do occur, just like in history.
My favorite explicit abstraction is LOTRO of all things where your health bar is more a measure of your remaining willingness to keep fighting. So you could be stabbed and Inigo Montoya it.
Well then. I love it a lot. And I especially love that Inigo Montoya is a verb now.
I’d actually prefer a system that uses some sort of “Bloodied” or injured mechanic where people (and monsters) become less effective as they loose health. I think this was tried in 4th edition, but since the whole game was… not well received in some quarters, the idea was kind of tainted by association.
Making that work, though, requires your characters to actually be able to tank more than one hit. I’m noticing that in 5thE, there seem to be a lot of enemies who can regularly deal 50%+ of a character’s HP in damage every round, and that’s against the melee types. Our casters are constantly in danger of being one-shot.
Are you familiar with the term “rocket tag?”
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RocketTagGameplay
Yes, and it’s not a playstyle that I like for tabletop games, at least not in D&D nor as frequently as it seems to show up in 5thE. Instead of careful planning and resource-management, it seems like nearly every fight just instantly becomes a race of who can nova harder and faster.
Pathfinder 2e seems to have done a good job of keeping the higher levels from becoming pure rocket tag, as the enemy attacks/defenses pretty much scale with the players’ defenses/attacks, and crippling spells are not as game-ending as they used to be while still being significant debuffs. In 2e it is very difficult to buff yourself more than a +1 or +2, so tactics, resource expenditures and even seemingly minor debuffs are a big deal.
Yeah, my ideal game-system would probably work out to be something like 2/3rds Pathfinder 2.0, 1/3rd 5thE, with just a dash of 3.5 and 4E for seasoning.
“Hah! I’ve taken more damage from my sister’s three-year-old kid biting me than that!”
You sister wouldn’t happen to be named Rosemary, would she?
Earthdawn and 3.X DnD both had similar mechanics where nonlethal damage would count up, while lethal damage would count down, and if the nonlethal total exceeded your total remaining HP, you’d fall unconscious. The difference, however, was that most of your HP in Earthdawn were explicitly from a magical talent.
I liked the systems from, say, Rifts and Big Eyes Small Mouse. Rifts had megadamage caused by super powerful attacks which could affect ships and dragons and so on, while regular mundane attacks couldn’t even touch them. Big Eyes Small Mouse had scratch points and regular points, so a human could squish a mouse no problem, but two mice fighting could interact more normally.
For me and DnD though? My thoughts solidified way back when I watched an anime called Ushio to Tora, where a kid (Spoilers?) picks up a magic spear and gets super tough and fighty. In one episode, there were these three demon heads that were flying around super fast, lopping off heads, and the kid fought with them. They zipped up to him and each of them bit him… and they were shocked that his body was so tough that they couldn’t bite through! To me, that’s hit points in a nutshell, just not magical.
Speaking of which, I never liked the flat 50hp it took to trigger a ‘Massive Damage’ roll. It always seemed to me that at higher levels it should have been moved up by a lot. A percentage maybe? Then again, I always ignore it, and I’ve never played with anyone who didn’t as well.
More problematic to me is the wishy-washy description of Damage Reduction in 3.5, described as ‘eh, you don’t take that much damage, but maybe it’s because it didn’t hit you as hard, maybe it’s because it healed real fast’. Poisons (of a certain kind) only work on you if damage is dealt, but it strains things a bit when you think that a poisoned blade could have just been inside the flesh of your opponent and nothing happened.
I have trouble with saves vs. poison in general. What do you mean I resist the poison? I’ve just been stabbed over here! Do I strain real hard and push the poison out of my veins?
To me save versus poison means that your body is capable of either muting the reaction to the poison, or has such good CON that the poison does not affect or cripple it. It is not a concious process, more a game mechanical solution to the problem of poison in a wound
Well sure. But narrating that action is all manner of awkward. A reflex save is a heroic dodge. A will save is a mighty mental battle. A fortitude save is a just, “You’re OK I guess.”
I find myself wanting to describe heroic resistance, but a non-conscious biological process doesn’t really support the style.
“Your body is in excruciating pain, and you have trouble in keeping consience, not to mention focussed on the task at hand. However, as you will your body to obey, you feel your muscles slowly react to your mental commands, and, through a haze that slowly clears, you are able to keep standing, and finish the task at hand.” That suitably heroic for you? You can add some Wisdom checks if you want, just to spice it up.
I conceptualize it like a fight in any movie: Lots of glancing blows, with maybe one or two hits that actually land. When someone is at half HP they are actually injured.
This is one of the few instances where I’ll defend 3X. The “Coup de grace” rule, while badly implemented is a good idea in theory. (The other instance is “Flatfoot AC”, albeit it needs a better name.) You wanna execute the sleeping foe? In 5E you get a critical and unless you one-shot them, they’re fine.
I know there’s a called shots rule to deal with the guardsman problem:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/called-shots/
But it’s very much in the same boat as “wounds and vigor” for me. Just that little bit too far down the granular hole.
This reminds me of a classic gripe I have with many video game RPGs. The player’s party reaches an area and finds a dying NPC, struck down by a villain or monster. The party listens to the NPC’s dying worlds, often tearfully as their friend/mentor/that cool guy they met a bit ago dies. And, at no point during all of this, do they have the healer character with a near-infinite supply of healing spells use any of that sweet, sweet healing magic on this critically injured person.
I know WHY that’s a thing (gameplay/story segregation), but I really want a game where that’s actually a thing, and people actually use heals in-story.
“My heals aren’t working!”
“What? Why not?”
“He was stabbed with a plot dagger!”
Anime too. Spoiler alert… This happens so hard in Magic Knight Rayearth that the healer in question even brings it up again – “After she died I tried and tried to heal her and it just didn’t work!” or something like that, and neither of her friends rolled their eyes or offered a snide comment or anything. Harsh!
I once designed a system that dealt with health via Wounds and Scratches. You could sustain very limited Wounds, but a lot of Scratches… but once enough Scratches accumulated, they would turn into a Wound. It was a bad system with too much math, but I like to think it had a couple of good ideas buried in it somewhere.
It’s a solid concept:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/vitalityAndWoundPoints.htm
But like you said, the implementation can get a bit on the mathy side.
This is why I like systems that separate the “Non life threatening* damage from the “life threatening” damage. FFG Star Wars does this with the critical effects that happen if you run out of hp or get crit. Fragged Empire (and it’s spin offs) have endurance which works as the abstract death defying hp pool, but if you get crit or run out of endurance, you start taking damage to your stats. Star finder is somewhere between just HP like DnD and separate abstract health and real damage, not sure how different it feels though.
But in DnD i tend to describe it based on the scene… most attacks are going to be minor scrapes, cuts, and bruises, but the big hits will look like actual hits. “The dragon chomps down on you and thrashes about, but you are able to pry its mouth open before it bites you in half” RPing your wounds after a fight to hint at the healers that you could use some healing magic is also fun.
I can’t find the meme, but I always liked the one about RPing heals.
“Hey guys, I’m down to 15 out of 71 hp. Could I get some heals?”
“Whoa whoa. Your characters don’t know about hp. I expect you to RP this interaction.”
“OK then. On a scale of 0 to 71, I’d say I’m feeling about a 15. Could I get some heals now?”
I have these guidelines for actual combat (we don’t use traps very often):
The first half of your HP is your combat skill and ability to defend yourself.
The second half of your HP starts incorporating your armor and pure stubbornness into the equation as your fighting stamina is drained.
Your last few (a number equal to roughly your level) is meat points.
However, when we’re to the point of something like being crushed by a boulder large enough to have Harrison Ford running from it… then we operate on chunky salsa rules.
A common sense approach? How dare you! It’s only Tuesday, and I’m spending spring break practicing social distancing. I need to make this argument stretch until at least Friday.
My take on the issue is that creatures from D&D/Pathfinder (systems I usually run) is that, being a different world, those are different creatures. Even though humans and some other animals look similar, they exist in a world where physical/mental capability and experience translates directly into vitality (more specifically, Hit Points), among other things. Whenever a character gains a level, they actually go through a type of metamorphosis.
Lit! How do you describe the level-up metamorphosis?
It’s not that physically visible, so something along the lines of: “The rest has left you invigorated and inspired. Taking time to reflect on your hardships, you better adapted to face them in the future.” If I ever feel particularly dramatic, I’ll add: “Your nerves rewire, treating yesterday’s terror as today’s caution. Fragile scars become hardened hide, and a desperate survival instinct is slowly replaced by unyielding determination.”
Now see, I was hoping for an overt Beauty and Beast style metamorphosis:
https://i.makeagif.com/media/3-31-2016/q7_3MW.gif
I‘m happy with the completely abstract.
thinking about adding penalties at 25% thresholds when I GM and expanding the current „staggered“ at 0 HP to start at HP = HD
What system are you running in? And what kind of penalties are you imagining?
Whenever I DM/GM for a while, and once the players are happy with the idea, I keep track of, but never tell them, exactly how many hit points they have, but rather refer to the idea of three-quarters, half, and one-quarter levels, using good old magnetic discs to indicate this as events progress. Obviously the players their maximums, so they can make decisions as they see fit. It seems to work for me, as it gives the sense of “how healthy” they are at the same time as maintaining the “will a stubbed toe fell me?” mystery you mention. As it happens, post-dragon bite, replacing the 3/4-to-full HP magnetic disc with the 1/4-to-unconscious disc ALWAYS gets a response…
Heh. I always liked the idea of letting some of that stuff sit on the other side of the screen. I never pulled the trigger on the style though.
Do you ever have people resist the idea? Like, “No! My autonomy as a player demands I have access to this information!”
I think it’s hard for me to look at HP loss as anything other than loosing health from injuries (see Bleed damage), but the setting would determine the narrative the most. Are you Jack Rakan from Negima!? Able to take several blows head-on because HP is basically toughness(he might be my spirit animal)? Or are you the martial artist able to avoid a more serious slashing wound because your level 12 self is not packing more blood, but instead more skill?
That said, we did just adopt the Wound Vitality system in our games. Now half total HP is recovered after 10 minutes of rest, or at twice normal rate when healed magically. But the other half can ONLY be regained by a full-day’s rest.
This has significantly up’d the ante on taking damage. It can be quite scary when you get down to 1/4th max health, but you can only recover up to 3/4th before the next day…
Gritty gameplay!
Does the wound/vitality thing work well with the standard adventuring day? Or do you guys find yourselves doing more of a “one big fight per day” style given the more serious repercussions of combat?
It’s less scary with multiple small encounters, since you recover up to half your health in only 10 minutes. It makes the bigger fight at the end far scarier. I lost maybe a pint or two leading up to the goblin chieftain. I got crit by him and almost bled out. Had to recover over night to get that back.
And yeah, we did get a smaller encounter after that which was scary for me.
HP isn’t an abstraction, is just a number. Anyone who has watch any shonen anime and try to abstract HP will hit his head with a wall and take 8d6 mental damage. A old person doesn’t have that much HP as a young one, still old people continue their life until they die. Once i got my wrists full of shards of glass when one of my friends closed a door, i lost lots of blood, got my pants and t-shirt made a mess, the floor made a mess and needed to take out the shard one at a time while trying to not bleeding. Bu it wasn’t that terrible and except for some scars in my wrists and arms i got no problem at all afterward. So it may have looked horrible but it was a minor problem. In real life there is lots of things that can kill you in many ways, long ago there was a tv show “A Thousand Way to Die” i think it was called, the title was pretty accurate. The human body has lots of systems, too many and each working and needing the others to work too. You can’t then abstract such complexity so easily without losing accuracy. HP is just the game way to protect our sanity score from thing man was not meant to know 🙂
It’s all well and good to say that HP doesn’t represent any one thing. But then you get shot by three goblins arrows. How do you describe the loss of hp when the game gives you particular situations to deal with?
You loose HP and that is all. Any answer is good. As i said you can’t make a “realistic” system in game. What could, and normally should, be a mortal wound in a person can be a mere flesh wound in another. Say in a modern warfare game:
DM: A grenade lands just mere centimeters of your head and explotes.
Player: I stand up and throw my last grenade in that direction.
This exchange in a game don’t sound that much strange, but in a more realistic system it would be quite rare. You can’t take a grenade on the face and survive. Except it can happen in real life. And that would be in a modern realistic game, use “Wounds Mean Nothing” in exalted and you can take a Solar Circle Sorcery to the face without problems. A perfect system doesn’t exist, or more correctly the closest thing we got is HP. So how would i handle the three goblin arrows? The pc loose as much HP as he should loose in that case. How the damage is represented is up for the player. He may choose to have arrows on his brains and survive, or they are mere scratches, or the arrows stuck on his armor. What happens is up to the player. Except if he got an arrow to the knee, in that case he must retire from adventure and become a guard 😛
Also have you read this:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NormallyIWouldBeDeadNow
There is a quite interesting real life examples 🙂
You’re suggesting that the player describes what happens when struck in combat instead of the GM? That’s… Not a setup I’ve seen in practice.
I think that “it’s all down to player choice” is a bit of a copout. That’s because these are multiplayer games, and the group has to decide on a mutual version of hp rather than “everyone has their own headcanon.” Sure the headcanon thing works for the individual, but the second you share that mess aloud you have to make a decision
But Colin how are we gonna play of we don’t have things to complain/fight among us? How can anyone play in a group on the verge of a violent imploding, already preparing the knives and guns? o_O
Just kidding, we are not that violent… usually 🙁
And with the plague we are in fact not playing at all for a while 🙁
Oof. I feel ya there, bro. My IRL games are thoroughly cancelled.
Do you guys not do Roll20 though?
We don’t play online 🙁
At least we didn’t leave a campaign at half. But with this problem we can’t continue a campaign we have leave a time ago and we wanted to restart 🙁
At least you can play online. So you and Laurel take care of your health and be safe 😀
I prefer the RAW from prior editions of D&D myself:
AD&D PHB 6th printing page 34: “Each character has a varying number of hit points…these hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors… Thus the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.”
This is reinforced in later editions, but in general the idea of “hit points = bodily durability” is either from other game systems or people’s own misunderstandings of D&D.
In my own games, I use that logic. A 6th level character isn’t merely tougher but has a level of pain tolerance gained through personal hardship.
This explanation is the least satisfying in terms of coherent world-building, but it’s also the most useful. HP represents:
— Actual damage
— Potential damage (whatever that means)
— Skill
— Luck
— Magical bullshit
Choosing when and how to invoke these various explanations is part of the skill of GMing. That’s not going to make the obsessed world-builder very happy (e.g. How can my high-level barbarian survive falling at terminal velocity once per day? There must be some logical explanation!), but it does make the game playable. It also happens to be the method I employ. 🙂
In 3.5, one of the core rules for damage includes the “Massive Damage” rule, but it’s rarely implemented. “If you ever sustain a single attack deals (sic) 50 points of damage or more and it doesn’t kill you outright, you must make a DC 15 Fortitude save. If this saving throw fails, you die regardless of your current hit points. If you take 50 points of damage or more from multiple attacks, no one of which dealt 50 or more points of damage itself, the massive damage rule does not apply.”
Using that edition as an example, a barbarian without the feat “Steadfast Determination” will survive any fall because they’re not necessarily an attack. But that same Barbarian will likely be having to make this roll on a “per encounter” basis. A 1 in 20 chance means they will likely just die outright (eventually).
My big issue is just that specific bodily injuries are the world of homebrew. A 200 foot fall doesn’t break any bones or inhibit movement in any way from a RAW sense. A good fall on one’s chest would break arms and ribs. A bad fall on one’s feet would break bones, perhaps even the femur, in addition to causing massive spinal damage that could more easily leave someone paralyzed. But with abstracted damage, you’re a dick when you implement that, because “show me where in the book I’d get crippled for landing on my feet!”
And just because they can survive something doesn’t mean they will encounter it on a regular basis. It’s pretty hard to find 200 foot drops in nature (at least ones you’d fight near) and far harder to find such drops in medieval architecture.
That’s why I’m building a troop of interplanar daredevils that jump off the tallest mountains in the multiverse: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/falling-damage
Honestly I just mentally treat D&D characters (beyond maybe 1st and 2nd level where they’re very squishy) as action movie protagonists. Some of HP is avoiding hits or fatigue or getting punched and slammed about but still being able to function just fine, some is glazes and flesh wounds, and others are just straight up improbable things to survive…. that they just do several times because… it’s part of the genre.
Wait a minute… You mean you just suspend your disbelief and get on with life? Impossible!
Incidentally, D&D4e had the idea of “bloodied” — once you dipped below half hit points, you were noticeably beaten up a bit… nothing serious, but you’d be breathing heavily, cuts and bruise and scorch marks. It had no direct mechanical effect, no penalties or anything, but it hooked into a variety of powers… e.g. it often meant you were vulnerable to effects that a non-bloodied character could ignore, and most regeneration effects could raise you only to bloodied, not to full health.
I do like the bloodied mechanic as a neat middle ground. It adds a little more narrative explanation to what’s going on with hp (i.e. “OK, now you’re getting seriously beat up.”) But it doesn’t go so far as to add a crazy-complex system…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/wounds-and-vigor/
…To an otherwise elegant rule like hp.
HP is the quantum-wave-functions of the cells extending over increasingly large volumes of the body. Damage disrupts this superposition until the effect becomes as negligible as it is to classical physics, but while it is there, the body of whatever adventurer isn’t fully physically existent, but rather as a wave entity or living pattern. Each level roughly describes how many cells are at best present overlapping any single given cell.
The size of the hit die represents actual physical tankyness, barb’s with their d12.s are huge and meaty, where wizards with d4.s are skinny and feeble. The HP-effect doesn’t add anything, it effectively multiplies what is already there, which is why wizards don’t automatically become fitness gods at high levels, and barb’s aren’t Hulks at the same.
Anyone can aim for the neck, the left side of ribcage, eyes, or what have you; but the rogue(-class-group) are the only ones who learn how to collapse wave-functions when targeting these, causing massive disruption with a successful strike. And even if the target survives, the damage can remain on the body and cause flaws in the pattern.
What manner of magic causes this phenomenon is up to the setting.
Where did you get your medical degree, and what was the game design minor like?
I usually describe damage as painful, but mostly non-lethal injuries. It’s only when a lot of them stack up or someone lands the finishing blow that things actually go down. I also try to make previous wounds matter in relation to prior ones – for example, in my short-lived Pathfinder 2E campaign “Threads of the Stitcher-King,” my PCs were fighting zombies and the party Alchemist hit one with an acid vial that dealt persistent damage for a few rounds and then fizzled out after the zombie made its save. I described the way the acid ate into the center of the creature and softened it up before it ran out. When the Barbarian later dealt the finishing blow to the zombie, I described the way the sword went into the area softened by the acid with extra ease, allowing him to bisect the zombie with little effort. (I also conceptualize the way zombies work as only being able to take so much damage before the negative energy animating them is spread too thin trying to hold the pieces together and eventually seeps out and dissipates.)
How would you have described the same avid attack against a human opponent?
Probably more or less the same, although slightly relocated. Surprisingly, the abdominal area can take a lot of punishment. Injuries to the abdomen are rarely instantly fatal and you can continue to function for a long time before you bleed out. The pain might be debilitating, but I assume everyone in an RPG fight is running on adrenaline and at least somewhat accustomed to injury. Injuries to the face (if shallow) and extremities are also good ways to describe wounds that aren’t instantly fatal. The human body can take a surprisingly big beating before shutting down.
I find it best to just think of everyone as being Rasputin (according to legend the assassins who killed Rasputin had extreme difficulty killing him and he only died after being poisoned, shot and stabbed multiple times, beaten with chains, and finally tied up and thrown in a river to drown)
“You are one of Rasputin’s many clones. One of you must survive the night. Try not to be brutally murdered.”
Sounds like a fun one-shot.
This was something that I thought was incredibly cool about RWBY, that they actually came up with an IC explanation for this phenomenon by giving the heroes a protective Aura that could absorb blows, letting them tank should-be-lethal attacks. That was a brilliant idea, and one that really should be used more often.
Makes sense to me. Of course, as a storyteller there’s a real tradeoff here: You have have to take time to explain how cool your world is rather than showing it in the next set piece.
I think that’s why most action adventures tend to gloss heroes’ insane durability, relying on suspension of disbelief to do the heavy lifting. That in turn makes me wonder when it’s more appropriate to give narrative attention to this sort of stuff and when it’s best left as an assumed thing in the background.
Part of the issue is the leveling system/escalation, if one accepts that a level 20 Hero fighter (who is on par level wise with a archmage who knows wish and time stop) they are a mythic hero like Hercules, Beowulf, or anime hero than them surviving a lava bath would be simply they pulling off heroic stuff, meanwhile if you play epic six (maybe quarter Xp gain) only the tankiest walk of insane assaults, to the point one can say, it missed the vital organs.
Weirdly, of the three you mentioned I think that only Hercules has “in-game justification” for being so tough. Beowulf and anime heroes only have genre conventions to shield them.
I cordially dislike tying HP to anything that doesn’t involve wounds (e.g. “luck running out before a knock-out blow”). First off, why do healing spells affect battle-luck? Second, why does physical hardiness influence it? It feels like battle-luck and similar explanations come out when systems clearly designed with some form of “HP=hardiness” intent starts producing absurd results. I’ve seen it everywhere from D&D to Mecha video games. It’s annoying.
There’s nothing wrong with hit points representing how often you can avoid being seriously hit, but they need to be designed differently.
Repeat after me: 5E Hit Points are not Meat Points.
5 HP of damage does not make a 5mm deep cut, while 50HP of damage makes a 5cm deep cut. HP is a purely ABSTRACT method of calculating how well you are able to weather the damage you have taken.
Heck, dropping to 0 is listed as dying BUT it takes your max HP past 0 to instakill a PC. Functionally 0HP is actually 50% HP, but death saving throws means you’re at the point where the damage you’ve taken could start a cascade failure leading to your demise. Or maybe you save and pull yourself back together.