Fully agree.
So I of course have been playing hit points absolutely by the book, because you shouldn’t break the rules until you know them backwards and forwards. But I do have a question/niggle:
Should there not be some relationship between how much damage you have received and how much you can dish out? It seems that there should be a point where a mix of blood loss, shock, concussion etc. mean you just can’t hit back properly.
E.g. in a recent session teh party met some Rheged Barbarians Free People. The Half-Orc had to prove his bona-fides by fighting and killing an actual Orc. As the fight went on, there was a definitely a conflict between the colour I was using for damage dealt “you bring your greataxe down in a mighty blow, narrowly missing his head and cutting into his shoulder” vs attacks faced “he steps back and unleashes a fierce swing of his warhammer…” Not with that shoulder he doesn’t.
I fudged it by having him drop his weapon and grapple the PC but that doesn’t get over the point that badly wounded people (e.g. under 10 HP?) shouldn’t be able to fight like they’re stepping fresh into the ring. I could avoid describing damage too much, but a) “you hit, he hits, you hit, he hits” is a dull battle and b) I’m trying to hide mechanics by e.g. not telling people what the enemy HP is and use description to indicate how close they are to bringing down their foe. So describing increased wooziness, limping etc. is really useful!
Are tehre any workarounds (subtract N from attack roles to simulate decreased health?) that people use?
In other first time DM news:
Last session we arrived in a trading town, where apparently there were three orgs workings as a cartel. The bulk of the session was meant to be an invasion of the town by the forces of evil, but I thought I’d mix things up a little by having one of the org leaders ask for a little help from the sorceror in getting an edge on antoher cartel. Just a quick bit of local colour and a chance to do some non-fighty things before we got on to the main event.
2 hours later we complete an elaborate heist, involving simultaneous break ins at two properties, drugged ale, an inside man, staged distractions, cunning illusions and all manner of shenanigans as the party take to this idea with gusto. Absolutely none of which I’d planned, but I’ve seen Ocean’s 11 and the Thomas Crown Affair so I rolled with it. It worked out OK, particularly as we did a little on the fly retconning when I ran off the cliff edge, narratively speaking.
The fact that a character or monster fights as well at 1hp as they do at 60hp is just one of those things. I’d be careful about trying to impose penalties for low health since whoever is at 5% health is obviously already struggling and giving them Disadvantage or -X to hit just guarantees their failure spiral. Even if you only impose it on enemies, it’ll still affect game balance by making everything effectively weaker.
One tweak I’ve seen regarding getting beaten up is that any character who goes unconscious and gets revived picks up a level of exhaustion. This adds incentive to not play Healing Word whack-a-mole but isn’t critically bad until you’ve gathered a couple layers. That wouldn’t have helped the verisimilitude of your orc fight though.
As I previously mentioned, I prefer using action movie logic. And in action movies, everyone fights better when they’re wounded.
Everyone always says this, but I’ve never actually seen a good argument against it. There are three angles to consider, the gamist angle, the narrativist angle, and the simulationist angle.
From the gamist angle, it doesn’t matter whether HP are meat or luck or whatever: All that matters is that it’s a number, and if the number hits 0, you pass out or die or whatever.
From the narrativist angle, it doesn’t make sense for HP to be anything other than meat. You wouldn’t say “Oh, man, that dragon came really close to hitting me. I’m going to need a bunch of those healing potions.”. And even if characters in-game aren’t supposed to know precise numbers, they should know at least roughly, things like “I don’t think I can survive three more fights like that”, which is really hard to abstract away if different kinds of “hits” hit different kinds of hit points. Most HP being luck also makes it a lot harder to explain how a badass on the brink of death needs so much more healing to get back to full health than it takes for a normal person on the brink of death.
And from the simulationist angle, well, the world we’re in really does seem to treat HP as meat. Real-world historical badasses really do take incredible amounts of actual bodily damage, more than enough to kill normal people several times over, and survive. Simo Häyhä, for instance, literally got shot in the head by a sniper, and survived. There was a guy who got so thoroughly mauled by a bear that his entire torso was in bloody shreds, and then went on to hunt down the bear that did it and kill it. News reports contain accounts of people getting shot or stabbed dozens of times, and still surviving.
The way I see it, it takes about 200 HP of damage to completely reduce a human-sized body to hamburger. For a normal person (a first-level commoner with 1d4 HP or whatever), though, it doesn’t take anywhere near that much to kill: A single dagger-shaped hole in the torso is usually enough to kill a person, even though their body is still almost entirely intact. But for a high-level barbarian, that single dagger hole won’t stop them. In fact, you’re not stopping a high-level barbarian until you do, pretty much, turn their entire body into hamburger.
While there are one-off examples of someone getting mauled by a bear and then beating the bear to death with its own arm, there’s a lot less examples of someone doing this weekly. These things make the news due to being rare and exceptional. This isn’t even counting half the things you can absorb in D&D. How many reports are there of a guy wading through waist-deep lava for 12-18 seconds? Then, of course, you have your Long Rest where your lava burns and bear maulings and traumatic brain injuries all completely resolve themselves after a good eight hours rest.
Also, while it might work for your Rungar the Barbarian types, D&D is also filled with a bajillion wizards, warlocks and skinny thieves who can casually sustain far more meat damage than the grizzled Captain-at-Arms in the local town. Saying that my weakling wizard’s ability to sustain damage far beyond the common man is due to his being a historical badass feels very limiting to the concept.
In the end though, I suppose it doesn’t matter how people want to head-canon hit points. 72hp is still 72hp no matter which way a player’s hand waves to explain it.
There are few examples of people doing it weekly because, first, adventurers are insane, and second, the world we live in just isn’t as hazardous as a typical D&D world, so there just isn’t as much opportunity to do this sort of thing on the regular.
A sane person, if you tell them that they have a 99% chance of surviving some particular activity, is going to nope right out of there, unless the activity is really, really important, while the adventurer is likely to say “Sure, count me in”, even for a 90% chance. Plus, even if you can survive getting stabbed a dozen times, getting stabbed eleven times still hurts.
I really appreciate you bringing up this angle! I like those concepts and use them still. IIRC, a few sites don’t like them as they aren’t “real” theories but probably just me taking them poorly a long time ago.
I try and describe combat if my players don’t and usually do a combination of actual cuts or stabs, bruising, and twisting to minimize it. Fortunately, my players are mixed between having played for decades and go with it or new enough that they accept it.
I do agree people surviving those things, or the stories of people who survived a long fall without a parachute, are the exceptions and not the rule for the real world. In my head, the PCs are also that exception.
@Stanislaus if everyone, yourself included, is having fun, you are doing it right! Including the retcon.
I like to do critiques at the end to learn from the players what they thought worked and didn’t work. Especially in the past few campaigns I ran, where I tried new things to me to do. It gives me insite to the player and the group overall.
@Acsenray Great clip! I like most of his stuff as well.
@Miller yes to that clip as well.
In the end, it’s what we like.
For me, I like Alternity’s system, as their damage system, while complex, covers this. Stun damage is bruising and small cuts. Wounds represent non lethal but bigger damage. Broken bones or deep lacerations. Mortal damage is truly that. It’s eventually fatal unless it gets treated. That system allowed me to run a Firefly Out of Gas type scene where the person need to get something completed before they pass out or die. Having said that, I don’t use Alternity as much because being twenty years old, I want more to it but am not great at writing that stuff up.
As a gamer having played for over four decades, I flip flop on hit points. In the end, hit points work great for heroic games. They can keep going until they can’t. It’s fun. I think DND/PF and the like work great for those types of games. If I want gritty modern, again, Alternity or Shadowrun work well.
Thanks for the discussion!
The other thing to keep in mind with hit points is that the only way to know for sure how many someone has is when they run out. Folks sometimes criticize the idea that Einstein, say, was a 20th-level physicist, because even if we assume that physicists have a d4 hit die and that he had no Con modifier, that would mean that he’d have 50ish HP, enough to survive being hit by a strong guy with a sword five times. But the thing is, maybe Einstein would survive five strong sword blows-- We can’t tell, because Einstein, being a sensible person, avoided the sort of situations where people would be hitting him with swords. Even the sort of situations where they’d only be hitting him with a sword once.
I’d say that just shows the gamist nature of hit points. There’s no reason for Einstein to have 50hp – all he needs to be “Einstein” would be a high Intelligence with a big bonus to some version of Knowledge: Physics. The rest of his stats can be base commoner material. But, in game, the main way to get those skill points or proficiency bonuses or whatever is by gaining levels. In the real world, the idea that the only way to get really smart is to also get physically better at surviving a boulder falling on you (or getting poisoned or being on fire or…) is just silly.
In SCA heavy weapons combat, becoming tired is how many tournaments were lost.
That armor is kinda heavy (not as bad as people think, but still) and it is hot and sweaty.
Not to mention using the shield constantly to block, and swing your sword.
So, yeah, I can see how that equates to “damage”.
If you’re trying to sell me on a system where Einstein would have three HP, sure, I can buy that. But if someone tries to sell me on a system where Einstein would have 50 HP, I can buy that, too. In the absence of any empirical data on what sorts of trauma Einstein did or didn’t survive, I have no basis on which to chose between those models.
I can as well – because I don’t see hit points as being anything other than “hit points” so I don’t need to say “well… maaaayybeeee real Einstein could have been thrown into lava for twelve seconds and survived, we dunno…” 
Only for player characters. NPCs have whatever stats they need to reflect who they are.
Technically true. But the example given was based on the idea that Einstein would be statted as a player character. Otherwise there’s no basis for criticism about his “20th level Physicist” stats. [X] Level [Class] only really applies to PCs.
And that basic concept, “Why does Einstein have so many HP?”, is one that’s been around for a while. NPCs having whatever stats they need is a fairly new concept in 5th edition-- In 3rd edition, while a DM could of course do that (because the DM can do whatever they want), the standard way to make more-competent NPCs was to give them class levels.
Yeah, but that’s just a function of the human body being a weird combination of super fragile and incredible resilient. Simo Hayha didn’t survive that sniper shot because he was high level, he survived because he was freakishly lucky that the bullet didn’t destroy anything in his head that he needed to survive. Change the angle of entry by a fraction of a degree, and he drops like a sack of potatoes.
In 5E certainly. In 3.X/PF1, they did have classes for it. I have read good reasons why the Expert class worked for people like Einstein and it didn’t need to be higher than fourth or fifth level to work. This is one of those good things about 5E RAW, imo, that the DM can just give the NPC what they need to be that NPC.
There was a Dragon article back in the 80s about Tolerance of Pain and coming up with a character’s threshold for pain, based on race, class and level. If the character takes more than that threshold, they have penalties. IIRC, SAGA system also had a special damage track that could do this, mainly for Star Wars. I think the Vitality Point/Wound Point system even had some penalties when you take Wound Point damage. I have used that and many other options. Again, it’s all what a group wants. For myself, if I use DND or the like, I don’t have penalties. They aren’t fun, it is a game, and not sure it adds that much.
@Miller I agree with you that Simo Hayha was lucky. If a game designer wanted to show that in a game, they might use hit points. 