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Well we have anime. We also have dnd lore If you notices, mistra decided to make the weave into a system that was basically an operating system and esceintially gamified their reality. You have slots, calculated by the computer, or weave. SO when you gain levels in a class... well, that class is real thing made in the weave or with other supporting features. once upon a time, no one else had access to paladin class but helm, and only humans could be paladins. This means that helm had a mod and that class is now part of the system. How do you explain the fact that everyone else made the class and eveyon'es class is the same and got updated? well you know mistra loves developement of magic and stuff. You honsestly think someone like her wouldn't just modify anny attempts to make a super special classs or modification? She absolutely would be like no, you succesfully gained access to the normal like eveyone else class but accessed by your upgrade. There is only one person who does osmehting like let clerics cast wizard spells, and that is the dude who mounted her and he became a paradox... something that doesn't exist but does, or sommething that rather than not existing but does, just exists as something because it just does. So like, yeah, it makes sense how the smartes wizard who wrecked everything can still grant wizardry to clerics he's like thae ultimate form of irony. He tries to become a false god b posessing a god, everything fllls appart and he dies not becoming a god, then he becomes a not god, but congradulations you are a god, but you aren't. Chances are he's one of the few things that don't get altered when he becomes a god, or in other words his paradox fomr stays, if he becomes a god, some of the issues that come with it might not matter too much.
Flavour is totally free and I always use the context of the situation to inform my descriptions of what happens during combat. What I mean is, if a character of low HP misses an attack, it is easy to describe the pain overtaking them and the arms feeling heavy as they lose blood. If a character on low hit points scores a critical hit, it is easy to describe the surge of adrenaline and battling against burning limbs to deliver a singular strike! There doesn't need to be rules to make you weaker when you're on low HP or anything like that, just use the dice rolls as added context based on how things are going.
I also think saying that you can fight just as well at one hit point undervalues the psychological and strategic impact that being at low health has on a player. Even if mechanically you can do all the same things you could at full health, what you're more likely to actually do is take cover, drink a healing potion, or take some other defensive move. Combine that, plus the fact that you've probably burned some limited resources by that point, plus the flavor element, and you see why "You can fight just as well at one hit point" is an idea that only comes up in the abstract: It hardly ever feels that way in actual gameplay.
1HD is a normal person. That’s 1d6. Weapons deal 1d6 damage. Every extra hit die is super human. 6 damage is enough to kill a normal person. In the abstraction formula the hit comes at the last 6.
If I ever dm I would also try to describe enemy attacks as well based on the context of the attack the enemy uses and the kind of protection the target player has. For example a bandit shoots an arrow at the player and misses if it was a heavily armored character, I'd have the arrow bounce off them harmlessly but if it's someone with light or no armor I'd describe the player dodging the arrow as it whizzes past them. If some big monster was swinging something heavy a missed attack could be really close but make in impact crater against the floor or wall, and so on. even if it miss you can flavour it so that even if your enemy misses, you can still showcase things like how close it was to hitting or how strong the attack could have been if it had landed.
@@ehisey i do tell them they are súper human, but still mortal and more than able to die I know that a lot of people like their games to be "realistic" (whatever that means in a game with dragons and dungeons) or for the story to be gritty and hey for each their own, but DnD as a system is designed to be a power fantasy of sorts, there are better systems out there for that kind of storytelling like warhammer (fantasy) that has stuff like injuries codified, in DnD a normal person has like 5 hp and your characters can end up with 200, they aint normal humans
I think Starfinder by Paizo have a good system for tracking hit points; you have two separate 'health bars', one for HP (which does increase as you level, but increases at a fairly slow rate), and another for Stamina (which increases each time you level, but at a higher rate than HP), that represents the character avoiding/blocking or letting their armor's shields 'soak-up' the damage. Stamina is deducted first, and is a lot easier to recover, only needing a 10-minute rest to recuperate and catch a breather, whereas HP lost recovers wayyy slower and usually requires medical treatment or mystical healing to recover. Feels like a good way to split the difference narratively and mechanically :)
One of the few things I like about White Wolf games is HP and subdual HP. Most damage is subdual, ie it won't kill you, but it makes it difficult to keep fighting as they drop. It also makes it easier to lose actual HP from otherwise subdual hits. Only issue is that it really only works if your total HP pool stays in the lower double digits
The 3.5 mechanics based "Star Wars The Roleplaying" game from the late 90's early aughts used the same system. It's my personal favorite hybrid rule that could be adopted into 5e as a representation of something similar. Your health started out as a base, based off your class/race. And only went up by however much your con style bonus was. (avg. 2 points per level.) But our stamina/vitality increased at a much higher rate. Your stamina would be able to be replenished very quickly, after a rest, but your health, would take much longer to regain if lost. And usually required something extra like a bacta tank. Given that Paizo called in StarFinder instead of Pathfinder, I can tell where they got the inspiration for it. Still my favorite way to handle hit points in a table top game though.
Similarly, I think one of the things that I'd say GURPS does well is splitting the various wishy washy abstractions that make up D&D hp. HP, there, is strictly your meat. Everything else that seems to be bundled together into D&D hp is various other things - Your three forms of active defence, luck as a mechanic if you take whatever advantage that is, even stuff like armor reducing damage rather than your AC partly being representative of your armor's ability to soak damage, and so forth. If you get hit, you get hit. IF you would get hit but your active defence prevented you from getting hit, we all know exactly what happened - you doded it, you parried it, or you blocked it depending on which you did. If you got hit but then take 0 damage from the blow because the damage dice rolled below your armor, your armor got in the way. (I swear my teeth would be less on edge with D&D hp if different parts of the system, at least in 5e, didn't seem to be approaching it from different assumptions about what it represented. I don't mind an abstracted conception of health, which ultimately HP is always going to be, and I play a ton of rules light games which take the opposite approach to GURPS, but I kind of need the abstraction to be consistent across the system rather than... Fuzzy... And changing depending on if we're taking the damage or healing it and how we're healing it, exactly)
@@robertdavis5693 I love this system as well. I think it started with some older house-rule systems back in the 2E era, and was also formalized in Unearth Arcana in 3E. Note also 1) crits, rather than being doubled, simply bypass stamina and get right to the meat, giving a much increased level of danger, 2) used an "armor as DR" system to buff low-level minions, 3) actually had minions (in a way) before 4E, and 4) effectively used stamina as a mana pool for force users (i.e. spellcasting). This is the one basket of features I'd love to see formalized as a modern system, preferably with a grim, OSR-like feel. I've tried using both "vitality & wounds" and "armor as DR" in several campaigns, usually with good and heroic results. I've also tried dropping wounds and just saying that crits and damage after stamina is Con damage.
Didn't really get into the origin of armor class, but that also comes from naval wargaming. The best protected ships had "first class armor", the next best "second class armor", and so on. That's why in early editions, low AC was better.
@@FrostSpike Speffically for D&D the chanmail rules one hit would drop a normal man, but the fantastic creatures rules had creatures that "Fought as X men" the hero(lvl4 fighter) and super hero(lvl8 fighter) fighting as well 4 and 8 men respectively.
@@woomod2445 Yes, I was talking specifically about naval wargaming specs. If an 14" explosive shell lands next to an 8th level fighter they might still have some trouble staying on their feet. 🙂
Thank you for referencing Daredevil. That is generally how I approach the concept of damage and player characters, but didn't have a strong or concrete approach to explaining it or communicating it effectively in game. I think this is going to help a lot with my game going forward. Another good touchstone for this would be the Dresden Files, I think.
In a lot of ways you're filling a niche Matt has sort of abdicated. Your vids remind me of his RTG vids, which he makes less of now as he evolves into his final form of RPG publisher. Not a dig against him, but I miss his content like this. Thanks for bringing it back in a thoughtful way!
First, I love you mentioned Brian David Gilbert, man I miss his Unraveled videos a lot. Second, the idea of hit points makes a lot more sense when you've seen so many shonen animes haha.
Hackmaster has a Threshold of Pain rule. You ToP is 30% of your total hp +1% per level (+2% for martial classes). Converting it to 5E, If a hit exceeds your ToP, you make a d20 save vs 1/2 Con score. If you roll is equal or less that half your Con, you shrug off the pain. If you fail, you drop in pain for a number of rounds equal to how much you missed the roll by. If you roll a 20, you fall unconscious for 5d6 minutes. This state can only be distinguished from death by a successful medicine roll (DM determined). While it might seem harsh, their system also has opposed roll combat (defenders roll their defense, it isn't static.) Also the armor absorbs damage rather than just prevents hits.
So there actually is a Game of Thrones TTRPG, and its damage rules are pretty brutal. One good hit can kill most characters and likely permanently cripple or disfigure anyone who survives, but those good hits are against a different, small pool of... health points, I think? There's also a version of hit points that represents stamina, willpower, resilience, etc.
I know different games are different but I love the way Pathfinder 2e does it. In PF, HP is pretty straightforward representative of how much damage a person can take and AC is whatever skills or armor are keeping them from being hit. However, with PF, its a mechanic that characters absolutely get scarred and wounded. It takes *days* to heal back to full from 2 or 3 hp, even at level 1. If you go down, you take the wounded condition, which makes it easier for you to die if you go down again, but also GMs are encouraged to give that character a permanent reminder of that fall.
The shift from Chainmail to D&D (3LBBs) was from 'hit to kill' to 'hit points'. As you said, they are an abstraction and it follows they are ambiguous, i.e. could be physical or metaphysical as Gygax describes in the 1e DMG. To your point about your heroes feeling like normal people or superheroes, one need only look to the DMG 1e, as Gygax states in the first edition DMG a "telling blow" addresses the "last handful of hit points" for normal men. Further, weapons are scaled to hit points for normal men rather than higher level characters like such level titles suggest, e.g. heroes (4th level) and superheroes (8th level). The "to hit" die and the damage die are lesser abstractions which are part of the concept of melee. An armored character may absorb the impact of a strike, while an unarmored character may avoid the same strike regardless of whether or not damage dice were involved or not. The abstraction serves the referee's narrative. Extraneous die rolls, like death saves, etc. merely interfere with the abstraction, interrupt immersion and further drive players into obsessing over the numbers rather than continuing to roleplay.
Holy shit, you just inspired how my game does death saves. HP is light damage... but each damage after you're at 0 hits your speed or con score, and once they're both at 0, you die outright. Recovering 2 con or 5ft of movement takes a week... so if you're missing all 30ft (6 weeks) and 4 con, it'll take you 2 months to recover. This covers stuff like sprained ankles and messed up shoulders REALLY well. And crits might just auto deal 1 damage to the enemy's scores.
I imagine hit points as being capacity for focus in spite of distraction. Loosing hit points does mean taking damage, just not in a way that's life-threatening: weapon damage causes painful or inhibiting wounds, acid damage causes ongoing burning and itchiness where you got hit, cold and poison causes numbness, fire and lightning burns you, thunder and psychic disorients and may cause lack of balance or alertness, and necrotic, radiant, and force damage can be characterized any number of ways. As you loose hit points and accumulate these injuries, you get more shaken and slow to react until you make the critical mistake that allows an enemy to strike true and take you down. This makes sense of both magical healing in that all HP recovery is literally healing damaged tissue, and of temporary HP: Having a detailed strategy in mind (Inspiring Leader), getting a calorie boost before combat (Gourmand/Chef), and having a magical field absorb energy from attacks (spells, artillerist cannon, etc.) all make it easier to keep focus on what you need to do even when dealing with pain and other distracting factors. This works for some enemies as well (especially humanoids), though I think the traditional concept of HP loss works better for large monsters.
Two points I wish to make (great video, by the way): 1) GURPS did this very well because it was a point-based system instead of a level system. You can become very skilled and very powerful, and yet 1-2 lucky hits can still bring you down. 2) In a book series I recently read called The Man Who Battled Monsters, the heroes were described as changing physically as they became more powerful. Eventually, they were barely Human (or whatever race they were), and more physical manifestations of the raw magic present in the world. Thinking about it this way is easier for me to justify the idea that a person can go to sleep one night and wake the next morning with more HP or fully heal after being near death.
In Critical Role, especially the early episodes of season one, it seems like Matt describes damage to the mouth a lot. It made me wonder if that was an area of focus because they’re voice actors.
i explained hit points to someone in terms of boxing. The average person likely won't handle being punched more than once. additionally a boxer hitting the average person would likely knock the unconcous. alternatively a compentent and practiced boxer can withstand multiple hits and multiple hits from a compitant combattant. AC aditionally counters and increases the durbaility of adventures. and example of this is football where the increased ac reduces the injury and longeveity of these people. additionally the class mechanics add to this fighers increased resiliance indicate their expernce with being hit, barbarians use addrenaline to increase their willingness to take abuse. long story short the more exprenced people become with violcnce and injury the better they handle these situations literlally leveling up.
this was always my thought process. a pit fighter swinging a sword would kill a commoner, hurt a lvl 2 fighter and scratch a 18th lvl fighter (if it even hits at all). thats why HP scales on levels the more experience your adventures get the better the are at taking hits or minimizing the wounds you'd get.
In a narrative game like Cypher, it's quite possible to describe the damage taken as something caused by an apparent miss from the opponent. For example, "You shoot your pistol at the foul creature. Your shots narrowly miss but, alarmed, it jumps backwards into the cabinet of wine bottles which shatter and rain shards of razor sharp glass onto it. It takes 2 points of damage."
I feel death saving throws are an important part of views on hit points. 7th sea has a system of dramatic wounds in their health system that death saving throws could be like somewhat. If an assassin is targeting them while they sleep or a big villain is holding a knife against their throat or something else suitable you could say "This isn't about your hit points. This is directly against your death saving throws even though you're not at zero". If it is something like the slit throat they might have to roll death saving throws on their turn for the remaining point while alive and active unless they get magical healing immediately.
I completely agree that 4E had some really great things it brought to the table. As to describing hits/misses, I do similar to you: if the attack would have landed without the target's armor, then the attack strikes, but ineffectively.
It's why I liked the separation between Touch AC and Flat Footed AC. It allowed you to have a really easy to look at idea whether an attack missed completely or hit you but just didn't do damage.
I think it's also important to include effects on the battle, whether they factor into attack or AC or not, as well as the battlefield itself. Maybe a miss is a miss, maybe a miss is a swing catching the nearby wall by mistake, or maybe a miss is the monster shielding its eyes from the flash of the fireball that just impacted over there.
My thoughts on Hit points are that they could be a good abstraction on how physically and mentally demanding fights are, more like stress points. Each hit takes something out of you, and you start to get weaker as your points go down. How hard the hit is also matters, like a death of 1000 cuts compared to one huge hit.
What you described is very close to how I run D&D combat/injuries. I tend to lean on any result on an attack that's less ten 10 is the character swinging wildly and missing, anything miss over that (being blocked by AC) is some sort of block or dodge by character with how close the roll was determining how cool/desperate the defense was. IE. 11 = "Your blade strikes him, but barely scratches his armor." vs 19 vs 20ac, "A split second before your strike would have hit its mark, his own blade flashes to meet it! He grits his teeth and with an effort pushes you back!" Then for injuries its the same sort of deal, if you hit, but the damage is not high (in preposition to the enemies or even players health total) I'll describe it as a scratch or that the hit barely made it through the armor or that they mostly dodged, but got clipped. And if its a solid hit, I'll give it a little bloody detail and make it clear that hurt allot! I also use my own version of the bloody system where enemies take penalties to fighting when at low hit points and will obviously be looking to retreat, surrender or go all out, dropping the penalties, but making it clear they are ready to die in this battle. Light hit: "Your blade cuts through her armor and draws a line of red across her chest, but does not go deep enough to seriously hurt her. Her smug smile turns to a scowl as she focuses on you." Heavy hit: "Your ax hits squarely into her side, driving the breath from her as she staggers, eyes widening as she suddenly realizes just how badly she is losing." Then when low health something like: "She's slowing down as she loses blood and so can't quiet evade the mace which clips the side of her head, knocking her helmet lose and causing her to stumble. She is visibly frightened and stares at you, clearly trying to gauge if you'll have mercy if she throws down her arms." or "The mace cracks the side of her head and sends her reeling, but when she regains her footing, you can see her eyes blaze with new found hatred! She knows she is dying, she knows she can't win... But she also knows she's taking one of you with her!" Important Note: I have enemies retreat or surrender semi frequently (as in the last few badly injured enemies in a fight will more often then not stick around to fit it out to the bitter end if they are not mindless or ideologically motivated), but that's because my players are heroic, they don't like killing unnecessarily, they have sympathy for monsters defending there homes or poor people turning to banditry out of out of desperation and its only the truly evil antagonists (in a world where no monster races have 'always evil' next to their names) get the whole, "If you surrender, its just going to mean we get to execute you dramatically!" Treatment. That would not work with every group and has been a bad fit in the past for groups I've run for that used surrendering enemies to be truly sadistic and edgy so like... Not something that works for everyone.
I have been running a Dresden Files RPG lately. The equivalent of hp goes away at the end of a fight and is essentially inconsequential but physical damage. However, a player can opt for more lasting injuries, which can allow you to stay on your feet but impair your abilities. In 5e, I like the idea that any damage that doesn’t drop you is actually a graze or similar.
I think it needs to be mixed and matched depending on context and damage type. A monster will just take every hit you give it until it dies, but a villain fencing you would be more stamina based with misses being nonchalant dodges and hits being scratches or desperate blocks.
Mostly joking...but I do kinda like the Hit Point = Farmer theory: A hero's hit points represent their ability to put up with the bullshit and danger that comes along with being an adventurer. Once a character rolls and fails their death saves, they retire from the adventuring lifestyle and leave to go be a farmer and have a peaceful life.
I do enjoy the videos that you have been releasing. Having discovered your channel recently, it's been quite fun to watch for certain. This topic is a fun one for certain as depending on the narrative style or setting HP can be described in numerous ways, and it can be fun to justify it from game to game. This is a good video and it's fun to see how damage is justified in games like this. Starfinder is a fun one with a pool of stamina points for hero's that acts as a shield for proper hit points, that stamina is much easier to recover than hit points, with hit points taking longer to heal naturally, or requiring spells to fix, with Mutants and Masterminds taking another approach with toughness checks where eventually you may accumulate enough penalties to fail and take real damage. Anyway, good and solid video overall, and I look forward to the next one
In a campaign I love to run in my homebrew setting (I love reusing it and seeing what insanity people do) there's always an optional side boss hidden away in a yuan-ti temple the players have to sneak out of. Many groups just miss it, because they never bother to explore the parts of the temple that give them the clues he's there, but one group found him and decided since they out numbered him greatly, to try and quickly take him down. This is a low level encounter, I expect the players to be about level 2, maybe 3 when we get there so the 'boss' is really just, a level 2 sorcerer with some of my NPC class shenangians piled on, and a reduced number of spell slots. This was in PF1, and at the time I heavily limited the number of spells the boy could use (he had an item that made his DC's -slightly- harder that the wizard took after the encounter, and actually went out of his way to study spells that it would work with that was cool) and one thing I didn't plan for was the monk running in and getting immediately crit with the boss's one decent damaging spell, Acid Touch (or something like that) for like 8d4 damage. Taking the monk from full health to almost actually instant death. The paladin managed to get in and lay on hands, but the wound of the Acid burned handprint on the Oread's ebony chest would become a key defining feature of his character over the campaign and something I've always loved. A lot of my players (especially in 5e) have had a 'magical healing leaves no scars' mentality but I always felt that sometimes, some damage, some experiences, they leave a mark. Thankfully this player was totally into that.
I like the idea that hitting a "bloodied" threshold leads to taking a point of exhaustion until healed back past that threshold. Exhaustion is a really good model for losing mental focus AND getting physically rattled mid battle. My preferred threshold is "below 20HP, or half your Max, whichever is lower". This means that low level players start to feel the impact of hits very quickly during battle, while high level characters can shrug off most damage unaffected until the last one or two impacts before death. When they're on death's door, they will hurt in the same way they used to hurt after a single strike as a younger adventurer.
Constitution works for dodging a blow because it factors into endurance. A character with high Con will have a higher HP and will be able to dodge or pull off a last minute party. It indicates how long an enemy can keep you on the ropes before you make a mistake. Personally I use a combo of descriptions. Early HP loss is often getting winded from a weapon making contact with armor but not directly breaching the armor. Critical hits or damage after you drop below 50% is where damage becomes more serious.
This is why I love Rolemaster’s attack system where it isn’t the hits that matter, it’s the special critical hits that do the big damage. In it you roll an attack subtract the defense, then the higher you roll it could just do hit point damage or it can cause leveled Crits based on how high that total is
I like to think of HP/leveling up like shares in a company. A punch to a low-level character, who has little experience in how to take or avoid or lessen a hit, will take a large chunk of what's available. But someone like Bruce Lee knows how to take a punch by twisting just right or flexing/relaxing certain muscles can minimize how much of themselves that punch affects. So it's like higher characters have had their overall health broken into smaller chunks that get taken, like a company splitting their stocks. A lvl 1 wizard represents a company with 6 shares of stock available, whereas a lvl 20 barbarian may represent a company with 300 shares of stock.
Firefly ref! I actually like the scarring at 0 HP, I think I may look at that or the bloodied condition. It would definitely also work in terms of group cohesion. If you see the scars of your party members, where you had to heal them, you would be much more protective.
Star Wars based on 3rd edition DnD used vitality and wounds. Vitality was the “luck” based hp while wounds was you con score and could be hit via critical hits or with a lack of vitality. Game got hard when you had to survive a 6d6 lightsaber strike in your wounds lol. I enjoy your channel, can’t wait to see more.
Armor class is tricky. What if you are pounding on a stone golem? The creature isn’t “blocking” your blows …it acts is absorbing the damage. I remember one role playing system that denoted the legendary aspects of Dragons armor and the thicket it got as the beast aged,So for every age the dragon reduced 1 point of damage. Thus a lvl 8 aged dragon would absorb the first 8 points of every hit(like in the movies)
If one goes with this then you see knights in armor getting hit all through the battle but the armor absorbs the blows(like in real history) A true hit/miss in this case would be anything that either hit/miss the most basic armor class
Your description of the Masks health system reminded me of the way the Avatar Legends RPG does so I looked it up and sure enough, same publishers lol I really appreciate that they go for something different than a standard "this is how many hits you can take before you are unconscious" style in a lot of other RPGs
Great vid! Made me think way more on this. I want to allow hitpoint representation depending on character to character. Meaning when hit they describe the dmg they took. So as a dm I would say: "he lifts his axe and drives it down for 30 dmg." They would say how they hit or of they narrowly dodge (cut clothes or cut cheek, arm ect.) Meaning it's more of a back and forth of descriptions. Also would mean players can describe their intention on an attack and I can react description wise as the enemy.
I do wish that they'd change fall damage though, it goes from being heroic to silly when a level 5 player can fall off a 100 foot wall, get up, brush themselves off and walk away.
That has been fixed. And it gets pretty lethal with scaling. Every 10ft becomes non linear, so 10ft us 1d, 20 ft is 3d, 40 ft is 7d. That makes 100ft falls basicly lethal.
@@ehisey so where has this been fixed? I did a quick check of the One D&D playtests and didn't see any changes, and there's nothing on D&D beyond in any 5e book that changes the d6 per 10ft with 20d6 max. That being said, this does sound a bit familiar, so maybe I've seen it before.
@Andrew i came to this video out of a 1e forum. Forgot this was multi edition. It was correct in a Dragon or Outdoor adventures. Not surprised one is not doing it, 5e and One are super player protective.
An interesting angle on the concept of only a "killing blow" being a severe injury also matches up well with the concept of resting one long rest and being at max HP.
Still not sure where the confusion is coming from. You can't have it both ways: If you want hit points, you have to accept a level of abstraction; if you want accuracy, then you don't get to have hit points. Seriously, have two players sword fight. Does the attacking player, if armed with a longsword, say that she wants to perform a _Zwerchhau_ or a fendente? If the other player is armed with an arming sword & buckler, do they announce they're attacking with a stab-knock? As the fight draws on, does that player announce that he's switching to a Walpurgis stance and thereby gain a stamina buff for using that guard? Do players who want accuracy in damage roll a series of hundreds of d20s to get the steel to spark the flint just right, followed by a dexterity roll for getting the tinder to glow when trying to light a candle in a dungeon? Charles Dickens, a person who grew up using flint & tinder to light candles, said it takes a half hour to succeed at that. If they roll a natural 1, do they cut half the meat off a finger with the flint and find said finger unusable for 4d12 days? When someone starts getting fussy about hit points, the appropriate response is to say, "Chill, or we'll start asking you how you go to the bathroom with your armor on. I'll be rolling saving throws for _that_ behind my DM screen, and chafing and infection damage will affect _all_ of your abilities and rolls."
I take a combination of all those things, in a way. With 2 new players (out of 4 in my game), when they asked about how HP actually works I ended up giving an answer (without ever actually reading it from the book) quite similar to the one DnD gives us, which for the most part manifests itself as a combo of all the stuff you said. Something akin to "the amount of hits you and your armour, or you ducking and dodging out of the way, your character can take before they take that 'brutal hit'" - most of the time they don't question the similarity of AC and the "not getting hit" part of HP, and the best way I've found to not over-explain when and where hits land, is that *you don't always need to describe it* especially when it's a relatively low number of damage.
The Adventure Game Engine (AGE) uses this very much like your luck description. You choose to spend points to not get wounds (you can choose to if you want) wounds actually harm you, debilitate you and can kill you.. spending points is you heroically not getting hit or just grazed. This is effectively luck, hero armor, fate, etc characters and named important NPCs and big villains have more of this resource to spend.. eventually it runs out and they take real and descriptive damage..(ie not abstract points) and suffer the consequences with debuffs, like bleeding, unusable body parts, immobilization, unconsciousness, etc and your body stat gives you an idea how much brute damage you can take.. so you can have the big guy take a few real hits before going down, being a bad ass. or not spend points to take a hit and possibly even reserve that for a surprise second wind. etc Your video really did a good job highlighting the different concepts. DnD is what it is and is fun to play and very popular but has always had design and rule issues.. some are fundamental others are addition-based. and other game engines have solved some of these problems and are worth taking a look at more and you touch on some. great video.
I can't stop thinking about the "Scar when you go unconscious" system as an inverted "How do you want to do this?" DM: The Orc Warchief hits you for... * rolls dice * 16 slashing damage. Player: I'm unconscious. DM: Okay. Assuming you get healing, you're going to have a scar. Tell us about it.
The only reason we have to have this conversation at all is that the game mechanics don’t support any given hit point interpretation very well. You can spend all day at 1 hit point or ten and mechanically there is no difference. Below 1, you are injured badly enough that you may die in less then a minute without help. but then returning only a single hit point means you are fully functional. Heroic characters don’t pass out any time they get seriously injured. Gritty survivalists try desperately to avoid being injured, because injury often mean real problems for them. 5e really wants this to be our problem when it really didn’t have to be.
I’ve always thought of hit points as magically being more durable than normal. Even though it makes no sense in physics, it is, to me, the only explanation for why one can tank an axe to the face while sleeping.
“Because there’s no way an adventurer could actually survive a 600 foot fall onto rocks…” Not even if she turns into a goldfish at the last minute?!? :) Great video! Congrats on the shoutout; you deserve it!”
@@johnathanrhoades7751 It wouldn't kill a person... but it would kill a goldfish. Just like the amount of kinetic energy that would kill you wouldn't kill an elephant. Arguably, if the goldfish slowed down like a paratrooper who's T-10d just opened, it could have taken 1 point of damage at that point (opening shock is a jolt) and changed back to Keyleth at that point. Or it would have taken a while to "slow down" from the momentum Keyleth had, and fallen at above a goldfish's terminal velocity.
@@bludfyre yup. Definitely would kill the goldfish, I would have just done the carry-over damage differently, but it’s not my table, he telegraphed the danger, and it was incredibly memorable! The lovely things you get to think about in D&D😁
I tend to use the Bloodied threshold - sub 50% hp - as a loose guideline for describing hits. At least with martial weapons and the like. Above that, you're trading on stamina. A miss my be parried or deflected off a shield. A hit may also hit the shield, but it'll connect with force and freakin sting. Or someone with a greatsword beating down over and over against someone's guard. They're not getting hit, but they wont be able to keep that sword arm up forever. Against someone with less armour, the enemy may land a shallow cut above their eye. It won't hurt much, but the blood is going to obscure their vision. That sort of thing. Sub 50%, thats when things start getting nastier. That shield hit isn't just going to rattled you, it's going to badly bruise your arm if not fracture something. Now we're looking at the knife in Mal's shoulder, or Charlie Cox getting hooked. These injuries are showing now; you're not just being worn down you're being hurt. And if it brings you below zero, yeah, that one is going to be particularly nasty. A crit, or a particularly vicious hit (mechanically, but also narratively) may override this. - We're mostly talking PCs and other humanoids here of course. If you're fighting a dragon, a hit that gets through it's scales probably is going to cause some kind of injury from the get go. It's just not that damaging compared to the size of it. You're not wearing someone down in a duel at that point, you're tearing down a giant with death fo 100 cuts (or stabs, or bashes)
Great episode on a topic of discussion the wider community needs to keep having. Great shout outs to the pulp adventure genre which is where D&D has its roots. The one thing I'd like to expand upon is the idea of where AC stops and HP begins. For me, this has to do with narrating the amount of control a PC has over a given attack. Did you easily brush that sword blow aside, or can you feel the reverberation of the impact numbing your hand? Did you deftly roll out of the way, or did the blow push you forward and you broke a more serious fall by rolling into it? Bloodied was an excellent condition and I think is still the gold standard of when you should start incorporating small cuts, scratches, and bruises to your narration of the fight. Finally come the killing blows, which I feel people are much to tame with and often lean on non-vital areas like arms, legs, and sides to make "convincing" hits. Humans can be both incredibly fragile and amazingly resilient given the circumstances. Boromir from the LotR movies is the quintessential example of fighting on your last HP and continuing to roll critical successes on your death saving rolls to keep protecting your allies. Is it really that unrealistic for a sudden adrenaline surge to snap someone back from the brink of death to push for survival? I think we're often times simplifying HP too much to the ability to take physical punishment and not considering its narrative implications as an abstracted mix of stamina to push forward, luck to attain the improbable, and the training to find the impossibly thin line of action to survive. Mix them in whatever amounts you want, but do understand that D&D characters are pulp adventure heroes that _will_ find the most improbable ways to live another day in the relentlessly harsh world of adventuring.
As a life long martial artist and fencer, I like to use a little bit of everything. Sometimes a hit hurts by bruising through your armour, or a blocked hit powers through and hits at reduced power, or you dodged, but the awkward position of the dodge strained a muscle, or lightly sprained an ankle. The enemy landed a glancing blow, or a pommel strike, etc. Crits landed by the enemy are hits proper. The knife in Mal's shoulder, for example. A proper hit, but one that the character could power through. Bloodying is also a proper hit. Crits, or bloodying may, or may not leave scars. The final strike is a serious wound. Broken arms, crushed ribs, chopped off hands and neck slices. Still kept ambiguous enough you could believe with immediate emergency medical aid they might survive with some gnarly wounds. Anything that does double your HP is unambiguous death. Flattened splatters, decapitation, cut in half, etc.
I would tell my players of high level if they take hit that should realistically kill them like your Wizard did when the ship crashed into him, that they narrate me how they managed to survive that, even if it’s just barely. Your Wizard for example could have cast a protective spell just in the last moment that managed to shield them from most of the impact, even though it was still massively painful.
I've said for years that the fundamental problem of RPG system design is finding the balance of simulation to abstraction that works best for your particular preferences. The more simulationism you introduce into a game, the more "realistic" it becomes, but this inevitably comes at the cost of complexity. There is a point at which one can be "overthinking" game design. The problem with Hit Points in D&D isn't limited to 5E; it's a problem that has existed from the very beginnings of the game, because D&D ties hit points to class level, and the real problem here is the class and level based character development system. As characters gain levels, they gain power. And so, if the antagonists also gain power proportionally, then the game should have a relatively static difficulty, adjusted for level, but the numbers involved just get bigger. Hit Points are an abstraction that can't be adequately explained by any kind of attempt at introducing more realism into a justification. Just accept the abstraction for what it is. This is why my Tapestry RPG System gets rid of classes, entirely, and features a skills-based character development system. Life Points in Tapestry are based on the PC's ability scores, and base LP doesn't increase or decrease unless the PC's ability scores change for some reason. Since they are derived by formula from three of the PC's nine ability scores ((Constitution/1 + Strength/2 + Willpower/3) *2), and each ability score has a median about about 15 (range 6d4, or 6-24), the median PC will have only about 55 LP ((15 + 7.5 + 5)*2), no matter if they are a novice or a veteran.
My main problem is the ballooning HP pools. My fix for a system project was Str + Con = HP for most creatures. Also fixes the weird "commoners have d4 HP" idea that gets thrown around.
THAT's interesting. So 20 hp for most people, but potentially up around 30ish for heroes and less for old ladies? That's definitely actual physical meat hp. Maybe add +1 per level? And then the die of your weapon would actually matter!
@John Pettus thanks, I thought it was pretty clever. Average 20. I have characters starting with 60 ATT points to distribute between the 6 with a starting cap of 15. Instead of leveling, when they get 10 or so XP they get another ATT point. It's a roll under ATT system.
In the past, I've played with a few ideas for 5e overhauls, one of which is a modification to how damage and healing works. You'd actually have two HP bars: one called Valor which is explicitly _not_ meat, and one called Vigor which is explicitly meat. You take damage to valor first, and once your valor is depleted further damage is applied to vigor. Valor is much easier to heal, and you're expected to go into every fight with full valor, whereas vigor is much harder to heal and might require multiple days to top yourself off. Vigor also acts as a cap on valor; your current vigor is also your max valor. Losing vigor thus gimps your character in future fights because you now have less valor as well. I actually developed this idea out of an article from the Angry GM about Fighting Spirit. The idea was similar in that you have two health pools, but you'd get an offensive debuff once the first health pool was depleted. The idea was that instead of just knocking your character out and removing your agency, you'd still be able to act defensively or run away. A lot of players keep fighting until they hit 0, so this would help to signal to such players when it's probably a good idea to run away. The valor/vigor concept I came up with based on this should work similarly, not that it hinders your offense when you run out of valor, but the long-term penalties for losing vigor should encourage players to consider retreating or fighting more defensively.
2 ways of approaching yhis I have really liked: 1. In the West End Games D6 system, everyone has the same number of "hit points" (6) and what varies is the ability dodge attacks and absorb damage. When you get hit you roll to see if your armor absorbs the blow and, if not, the amount that the damage roll exceeds the armor roll determines the damage (1 point for 1-6, 2 points for 7-12, etc) 2. In Lord of the Rings Online you don't have hit points you have "morale points". As you take hits you're demoralized, and when your morale hits 0 you're "defeated" and have to retreat rather than killed.
In relation to the ad: my campaign setting is heavily inspired by Greece, so it felt wrong to call that iron bull a gorgon and ALL gorgons medusas. We do refer to that creature as a lybian beast. My table also self-polices the "Heracles not Hercules because that's Roman" policy. We're super fun at parties.
I think you can combine "luck," damage types, 5e's "you heal up after a long rest" and your approach to characters dropping to 0 hit points. That combination is glancing blows, which leave superficial wounds around the level of a papercut. So for the crossbowman firing at one of the players, you could describe it as "you hear the twang of the crossbow, try to dodge out of the way, and the bolt goes right past your left leg, so close the quills nick you. You lose 7 hit points." Or for fire damage, you could describe "the Scorching Ray went right past the goblin, and he jumped back away from it like he'd been burned. He has beads of sweat running down his side. Roll damage."
I had two systems that did HP differently. The old, Marvel Super Heroes HP was accumulated by adding up your Strength, Agility, Fighting Skill, and Endurance. A little-known game, the Riddle of Steel, didn't deal much in HP, instead focusing on what kind of wound you got in different body parts. If you got hit in your sword hand, you had decreased fighting ability. Get hit too hard in the head, and you lose intelligence. It was a complicated system, but really interesting. As you leveled up, you got better at avoiding getting hit, not got more HP.
I've been thinking recently that for Death Saving Throws, practically a topic in itself, maybe the character doesn't suffer a lethal blow to hit 0HP but just takes a nasty hit that causes them to go into shock. That way if they stabilise, they remain calm enough to endure the shock and/or get lucky and just pass out. If they don't stabilise, they die of that shock. And of course, if an enemy strikes them during this process, _that's_ when the character suffers the lethal hit that could and likely will cause them to die.
I kind of like to think of HP as a mix of all of these things. It's your ability to avoid lethal damage. An attacker might be aiming for your heart with their dagger but you manage to dodge enough that they stab into your side instead.
For AD&D we use the PC's last 3HPs as their health, everything down to that point is getting buffeted, banged, fatigue from dodging, etc. But at 3HPs the PC sustains "damage", cuts, abrasions, etc. At 0, uncon. If in a single attack round the PC is reduced below -3HPs, the character is dead. HPs increase with level, therefore HPs aren't a reflection of how many cuts you can take, rather, it's how much you can avoid due to experience before getting hurt. For us, we still use the -10HPs for death (unless, per above, if during a single attack the PC is reduced past -3HPs), and will gradually bleed. If stabilizedthey will still be uncon for another 1d6 turns (up to 1 hour) during which the party needs to keep them safe. Even after that, they'll be weak as a kitten for a week, even if they've been healed (pg. 82 AD&D 1e DMG).
For me, It comes down to normal attacks are light scratches and bruises, where as crits or masive attacks that make the player go oh shit might be the ones that give scars to a character. Alot of it will come down to the group and how they play.
The abstraction that hp also represents an ability to dodge tied to stamina can be kinda used to help describe low damage rolls, its why I just say "it connects, roll for damage" then do a full description. "The bugbear swings at you with its morningstar, you attempt to leap out of the way but the momentum and follow through of the swing cause the handle to still make contact with you, you take 3 damage" as an example.
I usually describe the first half or so of HP loss, or exceptionally minor damage as close scrapes, dings to armor, or some other emergency action that would suit the character. The Abjurer gets a last second energy shield up, the Fighter takes the blow on the armor, denting the plate, the Halfling suddenly stoops down to grab a coin they dropped, the Warlock's pact item moves by itself to intercept to blow, ect. I find it help a lot to make actually being injured feel impactful, when the players haven't been "slightly wounded" by a goblin poking them for 2 damage for the twelfth time today. That Orc sticking his axe in someone hits a lot harder if players aren't being torn to shreds daily, and the incidental damage to stuff can occasionally lead to better after combat interactions, I find. A short break restoring health also makes more sense, if the time spent is spent fixing or restoring those emergency measures, then if it's spent chugging coffee to fix that quard of blood lost, or foot that was stabbed by a dozen gobbos.
Something that I always keep in mind when I'm describing damage as both a player and a GM. The characters are martially competent (at least a very large majority of them are) and know their way around a fight. They know how to block, parry, dodge and all of that and anyone who has actually been in a fight knows that there are times when you don't fully block, dodge, or parry something coming at you. There are many instances where it kinda sorta works but not completely. I often describe our parties fighter bringing up their sword to parry the enemies greatsword and even though the power of the strike cut through the fighters guard and into their collarbone, the fact that the fighter managed to get their blade up is what saved them a fatal blow. I'll describe glancing blows for rogues, shielding runes flaring to life for casters or armor taking the brunt of the actual damage. Leaving the character wounded, but still very much alive. Just because someone beat your AC does not mean that all of the defenses you have in place suddenly disappeared or stopped working. It makes more sense to me that they are in fact the reason that the enemies greatsword DIDN'T just cleave you in two.
Something my group has done for the past 4 months has been leveling up but only gaining hit points at level 4, 8, 12, 16, 20. All the stakes are always super high, each monster is super threatening, and healing is paramount to surviving. We pretty quickly found out it makes us feel like super natural people, level 1-3 is kind of commoner hp for most classes, and at all levels using strategy over brute force is super important if we want to kill anything, like traps, lures, using dodge actions to be harder to hit etc. Very fun varient and I recommend anyone who wants a more gritty DND without butchering the rest system.
I loved the way the Conan RPG games handled hitpoints. Where hitpoints is called Vigour. Where every strike lowers vigour when it connects. But then it also has a secondary system with vigour, where based on various feats, if you take more then a certain number of vigour points in a single hit, you would also take a wound. With each wound making it harder to do fight and do skill checks, till five wounds kills the character. So to me, making it seem like while every strike may have hit, it never actually got past armour or clothing due to dodging or blocking, only a wound actually being a hit that drew blood.
Great video, thanks for the work. I started tabletop roleplaying games in the 70's and broke my teeth on tabletop war games and tabletop miniature games. So I played Chainmail and things like it before I ever found D & D. In the 70's a man by the name of David Hargrave came out with rules for tabletop roleplaying that were a horrible system by themselves, but amazing as a supplement for D & D. I think it was the first use of critical hit charts, fumble charts, magic fumble charts. It had new spells, classes, monsters, etc. But chief among all the supplements was the HP system from book 3 of the Arduin Grimoire. I have always felt D & D HP system breaks the game at almost every level and actually forces players to only have one off game sessions. Because the entire session has to be geared to the level of the players. This is immersion breaking for me. In fantasy and epic stories about heroes. You can have the young hero as a recruit join the old hero in defense of the gate against the horde or BEM's. You cannot do this in D & D without some serious cheating and story telling. How did Arduin HP system fix this? Example: 1st Level Human Ftr with an 18 constitution score would start with 45 HP and gain 1 hp a level not counting special abilities, feats, skills, etc. So at First level that Fighter would have an unbelievable amount of HP's with 45, but at 20th level he would only have 64 HP. This means he has more chance of living from overall damage, while gaining levels that would also gain him skills and items that would make him more survivable but a Dragon would still kill him in one breath, save or not unless the hero had magical protection spells, items or abilities. In other words, players survive longer at low levels but are still crunchy and unbroken at high levels. This means in my example. The 20th level Human Fighter and the 1st Level Human Fighter can stand side by side at the gate and defend it against the Goblins. One has 45 HP the other 64 HP. One is very low skilled and probably has poor gear and will take more hits and give less hits. The other will be deadly, dishing out multiple hits and kills and being near unhittable for the goblins because of their armor, class, skills and gear. But they can stand together. Unlike in D & D where that could never happen realistically. This allows roleplaying, instead of roll playing. With the Arduin crit and fumble systems, its usually not the hp loss that kills you, its the crits and fumbles or just plain stupid decisions. I talked to Dave Hargrave as to why he did this and his off the cuff comment at Pacificon that day was 'So low levels will have enough hp's to choose whether or not to stay in a combat or run'. After running with this system for more than 30+ years as a DM it allowed my campaign world to be open. No leveled dungeons, no leveled parties, etc. Meaning just because you encounter that Dragon, doesn't mean you should fight it. It also allowed me to have other results than just party wipes. I could rob the players of gear and then leave them on the side of the road. I could offer them trade or even enslavement or work release instead of death. So many more roleplaying encounters happened because sometimes the players just have to poke the dragon. Dave also said another thing 'Power attracts Power' meaning if you display power, it will be noticed and could threaten someone else in power and they will react. :) So the math for Human (15 HP), Fighter (5 HP), 18 Constitution ( 24 HP, 1 per con point plus 1 per con point over 12) and Level 1 (1 per level). Other races get a different bonus, Dwarves start in the mid 20's, Hobbits less, etc. Barbarian gets 7 HP for class and 3 per level. Rogue gets 3 for class and 1 per every 3 levels. Mages get no class bonus and only 1 hp per 5 levels. So a Human mage with a 12 Constitution score at 1st level would have 15 + 12 + 1 or 28 HP and at 20th level they would have 31 HP. So as you can see, a mage no longer falls 10 feet and dies or gets hit by an arrow and dies, or coughed on and dies. But they are still crunchy. Because of this system I changed the healing system to a percentage base. Cure Light is 20% healed, Cure Serious is 40%, etc upto 100% for a Heal spell. Now for monsters I changed HP's in this way. This is my own home brew. Every monster gets 10 HP per hd then when they take damage that puts them below 0, roll another D10 and if that number is above the amount they took they survive the death blow and keep fighting, but must make a morale check to either bargain or flee depending on circumstances. If they can flee without immediately dying, they run, if they are cornered or gonna get hit as they run, they may throw down their weapons and beg for mercy, etc. This is a role playing chance so no hard rules here, just go with it as you see fit as the Story Teller. So Goblin has 10 hp, takes 14 damage, I roll a d10 and get a 3 and the goblin dies. Had I rolled anything above 4 the goblin lives but must make a morale check to see his reaction to near death. Fun times when the weak goblin survives certain death, then makes his willpower and then turns around and fights to the end. Only has to make morale once in a battle unless its an ability or spell. Now having starting HP this high may seem like its hard to threaten or kill the players. But the Crit and Fumble tables make up for it. Plus magic fumble tables. All spells require a d20 roll so can crit or fumble. Any spell that needs concentration, if you are damaged while casting and fail a concentration check that is an automatic spell fumble. Now with a lethal system like this in play, it is the duty of the DM to remember that he is not against the players, but in reality working with them in the crafting of an experience and story. My job every time I DM is to get the players as close to disaster and death as I can such that each player has the opportunity to use their class, skills, background, gear, etc to help each other to get past what is happening. Nothing pleases me more than at the start of a night of playing, I hear the players talking about how close to death they were last game session and if it wasn't for player x we would have died. I get no satisfaction out of wiping a party. That is bad story telling. Do I cheat, no, its not cheating when your goal is for everyone to have fun and feel useful. So know your party you are DMing for, understand their skills, class, abilities, feats, gear and even their interactions and use that in your planning during encounters and combat. Note those are not the same. Is the system I adapted better? Not really, but it works for me and has still to this day. Emperor's Choice was selling copies of the original Arduin Grimoires for awhile and you may still be able to find them and a hardback as well. But other than that good luck finding them. Only a few of us old crusty grognard's still keep small A4 style hand printed stapled together paperback books like that around. Chris
I've always liked the system used in one of WOTCs old D20 Star Wars RPGS. Characters had HP, like we are all used to, but they also had vitality points that equaled their Con score (IIRC),and they never changed. You could have a 5th level charter with 50 HP, but only 10 Vitality points. Regular hits were applied to HP, Crits to VP. So, a Crit could always outright kill a character no matter what level they were.
MrRhexx did a video about half a year ago about a different approach to armor which this video reminds me off. He stated getting hit should be DEX-modifier only, and armor giving a reduction on the amouth of damage. I've used it in my own game, both for players and enemies, and it makes the fights a lot more intense. Enemies with heavier armor getting hit easily, but taking only a fraction of the damage, while the more nimble players dodge most attacks, but get damaged relatively hard when they do get hit. I also warned my players that different armor would be vulnerable/resistant to different types of damage, though up to now this has not really mattered much (lightning attacks are going to go far against metal encased enemies, for instance). The idea of scarring after going unconsious is great, I'll very likely use that in the future.
Yeah, I agree and even commented about that. Speaking of which, I think the video's title has some slight clickbait considering how AC isn't mentioned at all.
I think the trouble with the "Daredevil approach " is that it's one thing to get beat up and punched with fists, but even a minor wound with a slashing weapon is dangerous and deadly. That Firefly example of a little old knife to the shouilder would not be something to just shrug off in a few days. That little poke could mean sliced pectoral or deltoid muscles that could literally prevent you from using that arm again for the rest of your life. (in a world without magical healing of course) . I think the abstract is the most important thing. A hit for 10hp could be either "with what feels like your last gasp of energy to duck under the axe blow. Can you dodge the next one ?" or " The axe thuds into your shield shaking your whole body". I mean it's all abstract. In AD&D 1e , a round was 1 minute long and a fighter made 1 attack per round which represented "a minute of sparring and looking for an opening to hit. That one attack roll represented the 1 meaningful chance to make a blow that counts" Even Hollywood realism can falter. It's one thing for the hero to get shot once and struggle on (eg John Mclane in Die Hard 1 or Martin Riggs in LW 1) but if every hit in an RPG was a bullet, sword or arrow impact that would destroy my verisimilitude. In my games i use a combo of hit points = stamina/ ability to dodge or luck ; and pure punishment but the real hits don't start landing until the PC is down to their last 25% of hp My favourite example of hit points = stamina is in Game of Thrones S1 where Bronn is fighting the Knight of the Vale at Tirion's trial at the Moon Door. Bronn dances around the armoured knight until he tires out, and Bronn takes his chance finishing the knight off when he's too knackered to defend himself. Each swing and a miss by the knight is Bronn rolling a hit and chipping away at the knight's hit points (stamina). Maybe that one is a bit too abstract to pull off at the table for an RPG !! But might be worth a try!!
I really love your 'describe your scar' concept for going below 0hp - very cool! If I'm being honest, I actually prefer RPGs were damage has actual rules effects. Ars Magica, Legend of the Five Rings and Savage Worlds all have great damage systems, but fewer people want to play them ☹️
My favorite RPG *by far* is Mythras and it's partially because it's the sanest take on damage I've ever seen. Armor functions as armor (platemail is strong AF), everyone gets locational HP, and avoiding hits is mostly achieved by actively parrying attacks. Shields let you passively protect yourself which is *also* strong AF. You get some Luck points for re-rolls. It strikes a perfect balance where getting stabbed sucks about as much as you'd expect it to, but you'll hardly ever just insta-die and you've got enough mitigation for cool heroic fights to happen. Not to mention the "special effects" system means most fights end with someone on the floor surrendering, because they *would* die if they didn't. Despite all that, somehow it's not too overbearing the way some games are. In practice it runs quick once you know what you're doing.
I think the best method (which is one I used in a custom made TTRPG) is using ability scores as HP. When you take damage you lower them, and in my system when any reaches 0, you die. This also opens up thematics! A character can describe how a arrow lowers their dexterity, maybe hitting them in the lower leg and slowing their movement. It also makes armor and constitution-like scores important. In the system I made, grit (constitution) does nothing. Its fodder you can lower your grit and be fine. It gives you more time to take damage without making you worse at fighting, like a barbarian shrugging off an knife in the shoulder with a grin and having no trouble clobbering its thrower.
Regarding the different way to describe an attack roll is lower than the AC (dodging out of the way, hitting the armor, blocking with a shield, etc.) I think we can borrow from earlier editions’ flat-footed AC and touch AC. Flat-footed AC is basically your AC when you can’t react to an attack, either due to being surprised or you haven’t acted in combat yet. To put it simply, you can’t use your dexterity bonus, but you still have your AC from your armor and shield. Touch AC is basically your AC to avoid contact either from magical projectile or someone’s touch. To put it simply, you don’t add your armor or shield bonus, since if someone could touch your armor/shield, they still made contact with you. Typically a creature’s AC is higher than its flat-footed AC which in turn is higher than its touch AC. So what I would probably say is if an attack roll is lower than the touch AC, it can be described as the target completely dodging out of the way; if it’s higher than touch AC but lower than flat-footed AC, the attack connects but is blocked by armor/shield; if it’s higher than flat-footed AC but lower than AC, the target dodged at the last moment and the weapon scraped by the armor/shield. Of course, we don’t need to reintroduce the mechanics of flat-footed and touch AC to 5e, but it’s a way to quantify what exactly a “miss” does for the math heads out there.
I do something similar to you. Especially in previous editions where things like touch AC and flat footed AC were actually written on your character sheet. If an attack misses by 1 or 2 I would describe that as a block with your shield. If you have a +3 to AC from Dex the next three points would be described as a dodge, and if wearing leather the next two points might have glanced off their armor. I mean, I'm not doing the math every time, but just to give an idea on how to describe things. For hits it kind of works the same way. If they hit them by two I'd say something like, "You manage to get your shield up but the force of the blow jams your shoulder painfully and you take 6 damage." The next two might be, "The goblin's sword slips up under your shield and slices painfully up your armor. Your armor absorbs most of the blow but it leaves a slice in the leather and you feel a trickle of blood leaking down into your pant leg. You take four damage." Magical healing is healing the actual cuts, bruises, cracked and broken bones, but natural healing from a long rest would be stuff like taking an hour to patch up the damage to your armor, bandaging and stitching minor cuts, stretching and massaging out the pulled muscles and bruises, meditating to rebuild the mental fortitude and reduce fatigue, that sort of thing. So getting hit is actually hitting g you, but it's not leaving grevious wounds. Otherwise how would they heal overnight? So the barbarian taking arrows to the chest wouldn't happen, but them slapping them out of the air, or catching them on their bracers or twisting so they glance off their heavy muscles leaving a superficial slice across their skin, might be something I'd describe. When they get knocked to zero, that's when they take the big wounds, and if they manage to survive but don't get magically healed, them being able to recover to full health is where 5e HP really breaks down. In that case I'd say something like, "The severity of the wound wasn't as bad as the initial shock made it seem. You stitch it up and, while painful, it isn't debilitating after a good night's rest." So the barbarian marching forward blocking, slapping down, head butting 10, 15 arrows might take him from 100 HP to 8, then that 16th arrow that hits for 10 was the one that glanced off his bracer, and he didn't manage to twist enough in time, so it hits him square in the left side of the abdomen, piercing flesh and muscle, bri ginger him to his knees before he falls unconscious onto his face, snapping the arrow off as he twists to his side." Then later, after a rest, it's revealed the arrow only penetrated an inch and left a nasty gash, before striking a rib and skirting off the side without penetrating any vital organs or doing more than superficial damage to the muscle. For a nimble character, it's the same sort of thing. They parry or dodge a blow and deflect most of it, but the flat of the enemy's blade still slams into your arm leaving a nasty welt and thin line of blood. You take 10 damage. You don't have to describe every hit and miss in such detail, but if you do enough of them for each character, so they start to get a feel for how their character handles getting damaged, then when you just say, "The orc swings his axe. It hits and does 8 damage," they see it in their own head and imagine maybe the axe strikes their armor but the head turns so it leaves a shiny scratch, but the blunt force rattles their teeth in their skull and forces them back a step, momentarily.
I've actually taken an approach to HP where I mix both aspects of the luck, stamina, and hardiness into account when describing damage. The way I get both myself and my players accustomed to the idea that different attacks will be described differently depending on the situation is to call HP- Health & Posture. If the attack that hit was one of many that will happen in combat, I usually describe it by saying the characters had to physically exert themselves to dodge or parry the incoming blow and not something that took little effort on their part, in essence the attack damaged their Posture; however when it comes to big hits like different damage types or big numbers, I take the approach of describing the attack as one that is physically hurting them, doing damage to their Health Also, crits in my game don't do double damage to players, but instead deal a long-term injury. I found a nice pdf where there's 3d6 tables for every damage type causing different unique injuries, it's pretty cool. More often than not, it lands on scars for my players but the two most impactful ones where when they dropped a symbolic dagger to the depths of Sharn and an internal injury that they must take medicine for or be unable to use all 3 action types in one turn (action, bonus action, movement)
I do the same regarding crits (though they do both, double damage and a long term injury), with mine I use a table from another game, and the injuries scale with a severity roll. They're capped at 60% when you're above 0 hp, and can't go below 60% when you're at 0 (I didn't want people dropping dead at full hp, and when they're dying I didn't want it to be from a broken toe) I'm curious about that table though, as I've never got around to actually writing down the difference between damage types, and just kind of do it ad hoc.
@@Lurklen look up Maxwell's Malicious Maladies, that's the name of the pdf. Maybe not every damage type will make perfect sense at your table, but if the situation arises, you can always continue to improvise lol
In my current game, we started off as level 0 villagers, and we decided what kind of fitting styles we prefer by what we picked up to defend ourselves with. I had a pitchfork and a barrel top, and later on i would swap to a shield and sword. One of the defining moments from the early sessions, even just before we gained our first level, we had undead chasing us through some catacombs, and for multiple turns I was consistently rolling terrible for attacks, and to justify that, this skeleton had actively targeted my shoulder multiple times over 3 rounds. My character lost use in that arm and had to swap hands for his weapon. Multiple sessions go by without me addressing that wound, and without us fully healing, and when we do take a look, I've lost full use in that arm, and its gone very bad (avoiding description). We had to do multiple medicine checks to avoid me losing my whole arm to infection, and because i didn't feel like going to the soon to be artificer for a robot arm. We saved the rest of my arm, and through paladin healing (dumping my lay on hands into my shoulder every long rest) and meeting my patron, it was restored fully so that i could get back to my usual sword and board.
I use a modified Exhaustion table in my games to account for long-term injuries like gaping wounds, broken bones, concussions, etc. In addition to "on drop to 0" or "on bloodied", characters in my games suffer a long-term injury (or scar) after suffering a critical hit, or any attack that deals max damage. But I also allow my players more agency to mitigate serious incoming hits outside of the HP system: As a Reaction, any worn, held, or wielded item may be sacrificed to negate an incoming hit (breaking or destroying the item in the process). They go through a lot of shields. But this also gives players with professional skills more incentive to use them, as they have to fix up their broken items during downtimes. The smith is constantly unbending and re-honing swords, and the carpenter is busy fixing up all those shields. I've also created houserules around rest and healing to slow things down a bit more and make them less action-hero movie than 5e tends to run when compared to 2e, etc. 8 hours = short rest ; 9 to 24 hours = long rest ; 12 to 24 hours in a safe, dry, warm, place with access to resources and fascilities = comfortable long rest. Both kinds of long rest restore all class features, but only a comfortable long rest fully restores HP, or heals 1 level of exhaustion (an "uncomfortable" long rest simply gives each player 1 free Hit Die to roll for healing, in addition to any Hit Dice they want to burn to heal, as if it were a short rest).
In my Pathfinder games I usually described damage like a boxing or MMA match, where a lot of strikes "hit", but knockout blows had to be pretty special, but each knock to your hit points kinda wore you down. After a 10 round slugfest, it might not be surprising for a loose jab that got through clean to put you down, even if you could've taken it easily at the start of the fight. In my more recent campaign I've also used the narrative of spiritual power growing as characters level up to explain just how ridiculously tough they get. Yeah, it gets kinda narmy and Dragon Ball Z-like when you can put your arms in a cross block and just tank a gout of dragonfire, but...by that point, you've kinda earned feeling like a superhero, so even if it's not the most convincing explanation, my table seems to like it.
I like the "stress" (damage) rules in spire. When you take stress, it applies to one of your attributes, which can have "armour". Then you roll a D10 and if it is less than your total stress you're fine, for now. However, if you roll over then you take fallout i.e. something bad happens to you. Maybe you break an arm, or psychologically scar yourself. The higher your stress when the fallout occurs the worse your outcome. Fallout resolves stress, because it becomes real rather than potential. It also means that luck is a double edged sword. If you get in a fight and take stress but not fallout when the shoe finally drops you'll suffer more
I have a system that I got from a video somewhere, specifically referring to barbarians. All the hits they take are superficial, except for 2. The one that bloodies them, and the one that brings them to zero. Getting bloodied adds one level of exhaustion, from an exhaustion table that I home-brewed. As well as the damage. And the final blow brings them to death saves, but barbarians and possibly fighters (not decided) can choose to be brought to 5 hp and take another level of exhaustion instead. (Up to level 3 exhaustion) It’s call the “Refuse to Die” rule. It is basically Boromir getting hit with 3 arrows before going down, as his fight went on he was visibly weaker. Then the first arrow hits, that was him reaching death saves but choosing to go on. Then as more and more hit he was less and less effective but since he had a duty to protect the hobbits he refused to die. If a character survives something like this they must describe a visible scar for each time they refused death saves. Alternatively all classes can have this but with altered rules and probably some classes getting to use it more times than others.
The best way to handle HP using the 5e definition is to replace the term HP with "stamina". A "hit" just means that the attack is on target enough that the opponent had to exert a lot of energy to avoid it, thus the damage is affecting their stamina and that in turn affects how much longer they can stay on their feet. This means that the opponent either had to dodge, parry or deflect an attack, or was possibly hit in an armored area hard enough to maybe cause some bruising. Basically, every fight turns into a minute-long boxing match, but with swords instead of gloves. Once the opponent is KO'd, the player characters can finish them off. When a character reaches 0 HP, their body has endured enough stress that they pass out due to some condition that can onset from overexertion. Different damage types can induce different conditions, such as heat stroke from fire or hypothermia from cold, if a good portion of the damage came from that damage type. The severity of the condition is retroactively determined by the result of their death saves - 3 failures and it was lethal, while 3 successes means they just passed out from shock and need some rest to recuperate. This also makes more sense for the various healing effects and temporary HP. Healing functions like a shot of adrenaline, which can help a person get back on their feet from many conditions that could cause them to pass out. The temp HP are more like a morale boost, so they don't really help if you are passed out and dying. Treating HP and healing this way also means that people dying from physical injuries can't be helped with normal healing - you need stronger magic that can repair the physical damage to the body and those spells often have costly material components, so that offers narrative opportunities that otherwise make no sense in a world where every major city has at least a half dozen temples full of people with healing magic. All that said, I use this style of describing things only for hits against the player characters. I almost always treat the enemies' HP as "meat points" unless the enemies have healers in their midst.
One of the best examples IMO of seeing what Hit Points look like in action is...the movie Snatch. Bullet Tooth Tony takes 6 shots and still keeps on fighting, yet gets killed by one lucky shot later. Boris the Bullet Dodger has a high Natural AC, hence he takes the car hit, and a ton of HP evidenced when Bullet Tooth Tony has to unload an entire clip into him. Yet the Fat Man (an NPC) got killed from on stab of a sword.
This entire video sent me on a bit of a mental trip in considering how the different game systems I have played in handle hit points. Some of the TTRPG's I've played use a physical/mental health system like in the FFG Star Wars system (Called Wounds and Strain respectively). In the Dragon Age RPG damage is not differentiated between a type unless a specific ability will defend against damage from a specific source (using fire on a Rage demon is beyond useless), or if armor is designed to mitigate it (like an enchanted suit of armor that can resist spell damage) And in another RPG I have called Tales of Xadia, hit points are not even a thing, instead it relies on tracking a growing penalty dice that represents a negative condition, like Fear or Wounded. And depending on what fits for the narrative the Narrator (DM) can use these penalty dice against the players when determining the difficulty of a scenario. After all, you would think climbing a rock cliff with a bleeding wound might be less than pleasant. Kind of facinating to consider the other ways that TTRPG's consider the survival of the player characters.
I was watching an older video from the Dungeon Dudes that sort of references this topic in terms of thinking about character power. To paraphrase: A gritty fantasy like Game of Thrones (early seasons at least), is essentially a Tier 1 game, where most of the characters are probably at level 1 (or not even that), with a smattering of level 2-4s among the more elite, and only a tiny fraction breaking the level 5 barrier, who warriors of incredible power or terrifying sorcery. They argue that basically no person in the real world would ever reach level 3-4. Tier 2 characters are more like your standard heroic fantasy characters that you'd see in Lord of the Rings or whatnot, who have superhuman ability both to take and dish out damage. Tier 3 are Avengers class heroes, essentially so far above the power level of everyday people that they are practically gods, the types who are called in to deal with existential threats to the entire planet, or even beyond. Tier 4 are top-of-the-class superheroes, or, probably better yet, the top tier of anime heroes, the Gokus and Saitamas and the like, for whom accidentally destroying the planet with their powers is a potential concern. Put in that context, I think it's fine to just accept that characters, especially above Tier 1, aren't just regular people, and being able to take multiple wounds that would be lethal to a lesser person and just shrug them off kind of goes with the territory. And if you want a game where players' injuries and damage are realistic, it's much easier to pull off at low level.
I like the Indiana Jones analogy because that's exactly the type of narrative the 5e system encourages. Your character is literally defined by how they operate in combat. Other systems have more abstract rules for taking hits because combat has less focus, and some other systems track where the damage hit and how hard it hit. Very different mechanical focus and narrative feelings depending on the system.
Thanks for this video it is actually incredibly helpful to me. I am trying to get a D&D group going at a school and one of the concerns of the principle is combat. I have been thinking about how to rationalize damage, and this video really helped coalesce into an actual idea. Also, agreed about the Hobbit movies....now I'm sad.
My preferred approach is games that use a "flesh & grit" type of system. For the uninitiated, most hits reduce a grit point pool, and are absorbed by your armour and cause bruises & reduced stamina. Grit is fully restored on a long rest, and also your grit pool increases on a level up to reflect your increased experience and endurance. Should you run out of grit points, or suffer a crit, or something such as fall into a spike trap, damage hits your flesh pool, which take much longer to recover. Suffer a serious injury to flesh and you can die without ever losing grit (fall a long way into a spike trap for example). I think it strikes a balance between the abstraction that is hit points, and being able to have narrative fights
As someone who practices martial arts sword fighting, I would like to add something to the "bruises" point of few. Although it is only a sport for me and I am only in friendly sparring competitions, most of the time I get bruised I don't notice it, yes I will feel that I am hit, but that is all. After the sparring session, I will start feeling them, but at that point, I don't even remember when I got those bruises. Now some strong blows, especially on the fingers with the small change the sword will hit underneath my armour, I do feel immediately and will stop the fight. Now our adventurers do fight in life-or-death scenarios, at that point adrenalin will be ruching through their vanes. Although that wasn't life or death, I have been in situations where adrenalin kicks in and I felt nothing until after it went away, hits I would normally stop for and start cooling. So in my mind, it seems perfectly logical that you actually get hit, but just get bruised or a small flesh wound, all in all, we should just be able to say in the heat of the fight "It's just a scratch!.
There are a couple things I think you missed. Which is the fact that magical healing exists in the DND. Also, most people are wearing armor so they still take a hit, but the armor protects them a bit, it's like if someone clubs you while your are wearing a helmet, the temporary damage is slight only. Maybe a Bruse. Then when you've take a number of those beatings, blood is finally drawn. Down hill from there. BUT DND I think does suppose that ALL of the creatures are more sturdy then our world. By a bit that is.
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Well we have anime.
We also have dnd lore
If you notices, mistra decided to make the weave into a system that was basically an operating system and esceintially gamified their reality.
You have slots, calculated by the computer, or weave.
SO when you gain levels in a class... well, that class is real thing made in the weave or with other supporting features.
once upon a time, no one else had access to paladin class but helm, and only humans could be paladins. This means that helm had a mod and that class is now part of the system.
How do you explain the fact that everyone else made the class and eveyon'es class is the same and got updated? well you know mistra loves developement of magic and stuff. You honsestly think someone like her wouldn't just modify anny attempts to make a super special classs or modification? She absolutely would be like no, you succesfully gained access to the normal like eveyone else class but accessed by your upgrade.
There is only one person who does osmehting like let clerics cast wizard spells, and that is the dude who mounted her and he became a paradox... something that doesn't exist but does, or sommething that rather than not existing but does, just exists as something because it just does. So like, yeah, it makes sense how the smartes wizard who wrecked everything can still grant wizardry to clerics
he's like thae ultimate form of irony. He tries to become a false god b posessing a god, everything fllls appart and he dies not becoming a god, then he becomes a not god, but congradulations you are a god, but you aren't. Chances are he's one of the few things that don't get altered when he becomes a god, or in other words his paradox fomr stays, if he becomes a god, some of the issues that come with it might not matter too much.
Don't forget stuff like 'The swing misses you, but you rolled your ankle trying to dodge it. 8 Hit points'
Flavour is totally free and I always use the context of the situation to inform my descriptions of what happens during combat. What I mean is, if a character of low HP misses an attack, it is easy to describe the pain overtaking them and the arms feeling heavy as they lose blood. If a character on low hit points scores a critical hit, it is easy to describe the surge of adrenaline and battling against burning limbs to deliver a singular strike! There doesn't need to be rules to make you weaker when you're on low HP or anything like that, just use the dice rolls as added context based on how things are going.
I also think saying that you can fight just as well at one hit point undervalues the psychological and strategic impact that being at low health has on a player. Even if mechanically you can do all the same things you could at full health, what you're more likely to actually do is take cover, drink a healing potion, or take some other defensive move. Combine that, plus the fact that you've probably burned some limited resources by that point, plus the flavor element, and you see why "You can fight just as well at one hit point" is an idea that only comes up in the abstract: It hardly ever feels that way in actual gameplay.
1HD is a normal person. That’s 1d6. Weapons deal 1d6 damage. Every extra hit die is super human. 6 damage is enough to kill a normal person.
In the abstraction formula the hit comes at the last 6.
I like telling the players they are not "super human". What makes them a hero is fighting despite the fact it is probably going to kill them.
If I ever dm I would also try to describe enemy attacks as well based on the context of the attack the enemy uses and the kind of protection the target player has. For example a bandit shoots an arrow at the player and misses if it was a heavily armored character, I'd have the arrow bounce off them harmlessly but if it's someone with light or no armor I'd describe the player dodging the arrow as it whizzes past them. If some big monster was swinging something heavy a missed attack could be really close but make in impact crater against the floor or wall, and so on. even if it miss you can flavour it so that even if your enemy misses, you can still showcase things like how close it was to hitting or how strong the attack could have been if it had landed.
@@ehisey i do tell them they are súper human, but still mortal and more than able to die
I know that a lot of people like their games to be "realistic" (whatever that means in a game with dragons and dungeons) or for the story to be gritty and hey for each their own, but DnD as a system is designed to be a power fantasy of sorts, there are better systems out there for that kind of storytelling like warhammer (fantasy) that has stuff like injuries codified, in DnD a normal person has like 5 hp and your characters can end up with 200, they aint normal humans
I think Starfinder by Paizo have a good system for tracking hit points; you have two separate 'health bars', one for HP (which does increase as you level, but increases at a fairly slow rate), and another for Stamina (which increases each time you level, but at a higher rate than HP), that represents the character avoiding/blocking or letting their armor's shields 'soak-up' the damage.
Stamina is deducted first, and is a lot easier to recover, only needing a 10-minute rest to recuperate and catch a breather, whereas HP lost recovers wayyy slower and usually requires medical treatment or mystical healing to recover.
Feels like a good way to split the difference narratively and mechanically :)
One of the few things I like about White Wolf games is HP and subdual HP. Most damage is subdual, ie it won't kill you, but it makes it difficult to keep fighting as they drop. It also makes it easier to lose actual HP from otherwise subdual hits.
Only issue is that it really only works if your total HP pool stays in the lower double digits
The 3.5 mechanics based "Star Wars The Roleplaying" game from the late 90's early aughts used the same system. It's my personal favorite hybrid rule that could be adopted into 5e as a representation of something similar. Your health started out as a base, based off your class/race. And only went up by however much your con style bonus was. (avg. 2 points per level.) But our stamina/vitality increased at a much higher rate. Your stamina would be able to be replenished very quickly, after a rest, but your health, would take much longer to regain if lost. And usually required something extra like a bacta tank.
Given that Paizo called in StarFinder instead of Pathfinder, I can tell where they got the inspiration for it. Still my favorite way to handle hit points in a table top game though.
Similarly, I think one of the things that I'd say GURPS does well is splitting the various wishy washy abstractions that make up D&D hp. HP, there, is strictly your meat. Everything else that seems to be bundled together into D&D hp is various other things - Your three forms of active defence, luck as a mechanic if you take whatever advantage that is, even stuff like armor reducing damage rather than your AC partly being representative of your armor's ability to soak damage, and so forth. If you get hit, you get hit. IF you would get hit but your active defence prevented you from getting hit, we all know exactly what happened - you doded it, you parried it, or you blocked it depending on which you did. If you got hit but then take 0 damage from the blow because the damage dice rolled below your armor, your armor got in the way.
(I swear my teeth would be less on edge with D&D hp if different parts of the system, at least in 5e, didn't seem to be approaching it from different assumptions about what it represented. I don't mind an abstracted conception of health, which ultimately HP is always going to be, and I play a ton of rules light games which take the opposite approach to GURPS, but I kind of need the abstraction to be consistent across the system rather than... Fuzzy... And changing depending on if we're taking the damage or healing it and how we're healing it, exactly)
@@robertdavis5693 I love this system as well. I think it started with some older house-rule systems back in the 2E era, and was also formalized in Unearth Arcana in 3E. Note also 1) crits, rather than being doubled, simply bypass stamina and get right to the meat, giving a much increased level of danger, 2) used an "armor as DR" system to buff low-level minions, 3) actually had minions (in a way) before 4E, and 4) effectively used stamina as a mana pool for force users (i.e. spellcasting). This is the one basket of features I'd love to see formalized as a modern system, preferably with a grim, OSR-like feel. I've tried using both "vitality & wounds" and "armor as DR" in several campaigns, usually with good and heroic results. I've also tried dropping wounds and just saying that crits and damage after stamina is Con damage.
Didn't really get into the origin of armor class, but that also comes from naval wargaming. The best protected ships had "first class armor", the next best "second class armor", and so on. That's why in early editions, low AC was better.
That's cool, I hadn't seen that before.
And, apparently, Hit Points were the number of 14" shell hits it would take to sink the vessel!
That is wild. Pretty cool
@@FrostSpike Speffically for D&D the chanmail rules one hit would drop a normal man, but the fantastic creatures rules had creatures that "Fought as X men" the hero(lvl4 fighter) and super hero(lvl8 fighter) fighting as well 4 and 8 men respectively.
@@woomod2445 Yes, I was talking specifically about naval wargaming specs. If an 14" explosive shell lands next to an 8th level fighter they might still have some trouble staying on their feet. 🙂
Thank you for referencing Daredevil. That is generally how I approach the concept of damage and player characters, but didn't have a strong or concrete approach to explaining it or communicating it effectively in game. I think this is going to help a lot with my game going forward. Another good touchstone for this would be the Dresden Files, I think.
Congrats on getting mentioned by Matt Colville on his most recent video!
Thank you!! It’s so wild 😁
Praised actually.
In a lot of ways you're filling a niche Matt has sort of abdicated. Your vids remind me of his RTG vids, which he makes less of now as he evolves into his final form of RPG publisher. Not a dig against him, but I miss his content like this. Thanks for bringing it back in a thoughtful way!
@@BryanCmpbll Aww thank you, that's so kind!
It has to be the beards.
First, I love you mentioned Brian David Gilbert, man I miss his Unraveled videos a lot. Second, the idea of hit points makes a lot more sense when you've seen so many shonen animes haha.
Hackmaster has a Threshold of Pain rule. You ToP is 30% of your total hp +1% per level (+2% for martial classes). Converting it to 5E, If a hit exceeds your ToP, you make a d20 save vs 1/2 Con score. If you roll is equal or less that half your Con, you shrug off the pain. If you fail, you drop in pain for a number of rounds equal to how much you missed the roll by. If you roll a 20, you fall unconscious for 5d6 minutes. This state can only be distinguished from death by a successful medicine roll (DM determined).
While it might seem harsh, their system also has opposed roll combat (defenders roll their defense, it isn't static.) Also the armor absorbs damage rather than just prevents hits.
So there actually is a Game of Thrones TTRPG, and its damage rules are pretty brutal. One good hit can kill most characters and likely permanently cripple or disfigure anyone who survives, but those good hits are against a different, small pool of... health points, I think? There's also a version of hit points that represents stamina, willpower, resilience, etc.
I know different games are different but I love the way Pathfinder 2e does it. In PF, HP is pretty straightforward representative of how much damage a person can take and AC is whatever skills or armor are keeping them from being hit. However, with PF, its a mechanic that characters absolutely get scarred and wounded. It takes *days* to heal back to full from 2 or 3 hp, even at level 1. If you go down, you take the wounded condition, which makes it easier for you to die if you go down again, but also GMs are encouraged to give that character a permanent reminder of that fall.
The shift from Chainmail to D&D (3LBBs) was from 'hit to kill' to 'hit points'. As you said, they are an abstraction and it follows they are ambiguous, i.e. could be physical or metaphysical as Gygax describes in the 1e DMG. To your point about your heroes feeling like normal people or superheroes, one need only look to the DMG 1e, as Gygax states in the first edition DMG a "telling blow" addresses the "last handful of hit points" for normal men. Further, weapons are scaled to hit points for normal men rather than higher level characters like such level titles suggest, e.g. heroes (4th level) and superheroes (8th level). The "to hit" die and the damage die are lesser abstractions which are part of the concept of melee. An armored character may absorb the impact of a strike, while an unarmored character may avoid the same strike regardless of whether or not damage dice were involved or not. The abstraction serves the referee's narrative. Extraneous die rolls, like death saves, etc. merely interfere with the abstraction, interrupt immersion and further drive players into obsessing over the numbers rather than continuing to roleplay.
Holy shit, you just inspired how my game does death saves.
HP is light damage... but each damage after you're at 0 hits your speed or con score, and once they're both at 0, you die outright.
Recovering 2 con or 5ft of movement takes a week... so if you're missing all 30ft (6 weeks) and 4 con, it'll take you 2 months to recover.
This covers stuff like sprained ankles and messed up shoulders REALLY well.
And crits might just auto deal 1 damage to the enemy's scores.
I imagine hit points as being capacity for focus in spite of distraction. Loosing hit points does mean taking damage, just not in a way that's life-threatening: weapon damage causes painful or inhibiting wounds, acid damage causes ongoing burning and itchiness where you got hit, cold and poison causes numbness, fire and lightning burns you, thunder and psychic disorients and may cause lack of balance or alertness, and necrotic, radiant, and force damage can be characterized any number of ways. As you loose hit points and accumulate these injuries, you get more shaken and slow to react until you make the critical mistake that allows an enemy to strike true and take you down.
This makes sense of both magical healing in that all HP recovery is literally healing damaged tissue, and of temporary HP: Having a detailed strategy in mind (Inspiring Leader), getting a calorie boost before combat (Gourmand/Chef), and having a magical field absorb energy from attacks (spells, artillerist cannon, etc.) all make it easier to keep focus on what you need to do even when dealing with pain and other distracting factors.
This works for some enemies as well (especially humanoids), though I think the traditional concept of HP loss works better for large monsters.
Two points I wish to make (great video, by the way):
1) GURPS did this very well because it was a point-based system instead of a level system. You can become very skilled and very powerful, and yet 1-2 lucky hits can still bring you down.
2) In a book series I recently read called The Man Who Battled Monsters, the heroes were described as changing physically as they became more powerful. Eventually, they were barely Human (or whatever race they were), and more physical manifestations of the raw magic present in the world. Thinking about it this way is easier for me to justify the idea that a person can go to sleep one night and wake the next morning with more HP or fully heal after being near death.
In Critical Role, especially the early episodes of season one, it seems like Matt describes damage to the mouth a lot. It made me wonder if that was an area of focus because they’re voice actors.
Also might explain why he loves a good toothy maw.
i explained hit points to someone in terms of boxing. The average person likely won't handle being punched more than once. additionally a boxer hitting the average person would likely knock the unconcous. alternatively a compentent and practiced boxer can withstand multiple hits and multiple hits from a compitant combattant. AC aditionally counters and increases the durbaility of adventures. and example of this is football where the increased ac reduces the injury and longeveity of these people. additionally the class mechanics add to this fighers increased resiliance indicate their expernce with being hit, barbarians use addrenaline to increase their willingness to take abuse. long story short the more exprenced people become with violcnce and injury the better they handle these situations literlally leveling up.
this was always my thought process. a pit fighter swinging a sword would kill a commoner, hurt a lvl 2 fighter and scratch a 18th lvl fighter (if it even hits at all). thats why HP scales on levels the more experience your adventures get the better the are at taking hits or minimizing the wounds you'd get.
A character taking damage in 5E is like shooting John Wick
You've made it Mike! Once you're mentioned by Colville, you're officially a big time D&D RUclipsr!
😁😁😁🤯
In a narrative game like Cypher, it's quite possible to describe the damage taken as something caused by an apparent miss from the opponent. For example, "You shoot your pistol at the foul creature. Your shots narrowly miss but, alarmed, it jumps backwards into the cabinet of wine bottles which shatter and rain shards of razor sharp glass onto it. It takes 2 points of damage."
I feel death saving throws are an important part of views on hit points. 7th sea has a system of dramatic wounds in their health system that death saving throws could be like somewhat. If an assassin is targeting them while they sleep or a big villain is holding a knife against their throat or something else suitable you could say "This isn't about your hit points. This is directly against your death saving throws even though you're not at zero". If it is something like the slit throat they might have to roll death saving throws on their turn for the remaining point while alive and active unless they get magical healing immediately.
I really, really like this idea. I might have to "borrow" this.....
I completely agree that 4E had some really great things it brought to the table.
As to describing hits/misses, I do similar to you: if the attack would have landed without the target's armor, then the attack strikes, but ineffectively.
It's why I liked the separation between Touch AC and Flat Footed AC. It allowed you to have a really easy to look at idea whether an attack missed completely or hit you but just didn't do damage.
I think it's also important to include effects on the battle, whether they factor into attack or AC or not, as well as the battlefield itself.
Maybe a miss is a miss, maybe a miss is a swing catching the nearby wall by mistake, or maybe a miss is the monster shielding its eyes from the flash of the fireball that just impacted over there.
My thoughts on Hit points are that they could be a good abstraction on how physically and mentally demanding fights are, more like stress points. Each hit takes something out of you, and you start to get weaker as your points go down. How hard the hit is also matters, like a death of 1000 cuts compared to one huge hit.
What you described is very close to how I run D&D combat/injuries. I tend to lean on any result on an attack that's less ten 10 is the character swinging wildly and missing, anything miss over that (being blocked by AC) is some sort of block or dodge by character with how close the roll was determining how cool/desperate the defense was. IE. 11 = "Your blade strikes him, but barely scratches his armor." vs 19 vs 20ac, "A split second before your strike would have hit its mark, his own blade flashes to meet it! He grits his teeth and with an effort pushes you back!"
Then for injuries its the same sort of deal, if you hit, but the damage is not high (in preposition to the enemies or even players health total) I'll describe it as a scratch or that the hit barely made it through the armor or that they mostly dodged, but got clipped. And if its a solid hit, I'll give it a little bloody detail and make it clear that hurt allot! I also use my own version of the bloody system where enemies take penalties to fighting when at low hit points and will obviously be looking to retreat, surrender or go all out, dropping the penalties, but making it clear they are ready to die in this battle.
Light hit: "Your blade cuts through her armor and draws a line of red across her chest, but does not go deep enough to seriously hurt her. Her smug smile turns to a scowl as she focuses on you."
Heavy hit: "Your ax hits squarely into her side, driving the breath from her as she staggers, eyes widening as she suddenly realizes just how badly she is losing."
Then when low health something like: "She's slowing down as she loses blood and so can't quiet evade the mace which clips the side of her head, knocking her helmet lose and causing her to stumble. She is visibly frightened and stares at you, clearly trying to gauge if you'll have mercy if she throws down her arms."
or "The mace cracks the side of her head and sends her reeling, but when she regains her footing, you can see her eyes blaze with new found hatred! She knows she is dying, she knows she can't win... But she also knows she's taking one of you with her!"
Important Note: I have enemies retreat or surrender semi frequently (as in the last few badly injured enemies in a fight will more often then not stick around to fit it out to the bitter end if they are not mindless or ideologically motivated), but that's because my players are heroic, they don't like killing unnecessarily, they have sympathy for monsters defending there homes or poor people turning to banditry out of out of desperation and its only the truly evil antagonists (in a world where no monster races have 'always evil' next to their names) get the whole, "If you surrender, its just going to mean we get to execute you dramatically!" Treatment.
That would not work with every group and has been a bad fit in the past for groups I've run for that used surrendering enemies to be truly sadistic and edgy so like... Not something that works for everyone.
I have been running a Dresden Files RPG lately. The equivalent of hp goes away at the end of a fight and is essentially inconsequential but physical damage. However, a player can opt for more lasting injuries, which can allow you to stay on your feet but impair your abilities.
In 5e, I like the idea that any damage that doesn’t drop you is actually a graze or similar.
I think it needs to be mixed and matched depending on context and damage type. A monster will just take every hit you give it until it dies, but a villain fencing you would be more stamina based with misses being nonchalant dodges and hits being scratches or desperate blocks.
Mostly joking...but I do kinda like the Hit Point = Farmer theory:
A hero's hit points represent their ability to put up with the bullshit and danger that comes along with being an adventurer. Once a character rolls and fails their death saves, they retire from the adventuring lifestyle and leave to go be a farmer and have a peaceful life.
I do enjoy the videos that you have been releasing. Having discovered your channel recently, it's been quite fun to watch for certain. This topic is a fun one for certain as depending on the narrative style or setting HP can be described in numerous ways, and it can be fun to justify it from game to game.
This is a good video and it's fun to see how damage is justified in games like this. Starfinder is a fun one with a pool of stamina points for hero's that acts as a shield for proper hit points, that stamina is much easier to recover than hit points, with hit points taking longer to heal naturally, or requiring spells to fix, with Mutants and Masterminds taking another approach with toughness checks where eventually you may accumulate enough penalties to fail and take real damage.
Anyway, good and solid video overall, and I look forward to the next one
In a campaign I love to run in my homebrew setting (I love reusing it and seeing what insanity people do) there's always an optional side boss hidden away in a yuan-ti temple the players have to sneak out of. Many groups just miss it, because they never bother to explore the parts of the temple that give them the clues he's there, but one group found him and decided since they out numbered him greatly, to try and quickly take him down. This is a low level encounter, I expect the players to be about level 2, maybe 3 when we get there so the 'boss' is really just, a level 2 sorcerer with some of my NPC class shenangians piled on, and a reduced number of spell slots.
This was in PF1, and at the time I heavily limited the number of spells the boy could use (he had an item that made his DC's -slightly- harder that the wizard took after the encounter, and actually went out of his way to study spells that it would work with that was cool) and one thing I didn't plan for was the monk running in and getting immediately crit with the boss's one decent damaging spell, Acid Touch (or something like that) for like 8d4 damage.
Taking the monk from full health to almost actually instant death. The paladin managed to get in and lay on hands, but the wound of the Acid burned handprint on the Oread's ebony chest would become a key defining feature of his character over the campaign and something I've always loved. A lot of my players (especially in 5e) have had a 'magical healing leaves no scars' mentality but I always felt that sometimes, some damage, some experiences, they leave a mark. Thankfully this player was totally into that.
I like the idea that hitting a "bloodied" threshold leads to taking a point of exhaustion until healed back past that threshold. Exhaustion is a really good model for losing mental focus AND getting physically rattled mid battle. My preferred threshold is "below 20HP, or half your Max, whichever is lower". This means that low level players start to feel the impact of hits very quickly during battle, while high level characters can shrug off most damage unaffected until the last one or two impacts before death. When they're on death's door, they will hurt in the same way they used to hurt after a single strike as a younger adventurer.
From one overthinking gamer to another, I must say this video warmed my heart. Not literally, with fire damage, of course - just figuratively.
Constitution works for dodging a blow because it factors into endurance. A character with high Con will have a higher HP and will be able to dodge or pull off a last minute party. It indicates how long an enemy can keep you on the ropes before you make a mistake.
Personally I use a combo of descriptions. Early HP loss is often getting winded from a weapon making contact with armor but not directly breaching the armor. Critical hits or damage after you drop below 50% is where damage becomes more serious.
*parry
This is why I love Rolemaster’s attack system where it isn’t the hits that matter, it’s the special critical hits that do the big damage.
In it you roll an attack subtract the defense, then the higher you roll it could just do hit point damage or it can cause leveled Crits based on how high that total is
YES! THIS! ROLEMASTER ❤️ Since 1987.
That’s part of why I GM’d Rolemaster for my AD&D 2e group back in the day. They all ended up preferring it too.
We used to play Rolemaster rules in a Greyhawk campaign.
I like to think of HP/leveling up like shares in a company. A punch to a low-level character, who has little experience in how to take or avoid or lessen a hit, will take a large chunk of what's available. But someone like Bruce Lee knows how to take a punch by twisting just right or flexing/relaxing certain muscles can minimize how much of themselves that punch affects. So it's like higher characters have had their overall health broken into smaller chunks that get taken, like a company splitting their stocks. A lvl 1 wizard represents a company with 6 shares of stock available, whereas a lvl 20 barbarian may represent a company with 300 shares of stock.
Firefly ref! I actually like the scarring at 0 HP, I think I may look at that or the bloodied condition. It would definitely also work in terms of group cohesion. If you see the scars of your party members, where you had to heal them, you would be much more protective.
Star Wars based on 3rd edition DnD used vitality and wounds. Vitality was the “luck” based hp while wounds was you con score and could be hit via critical hits or with a lack of vitality. Game got hard when you had to survive a 6d6 lightsaber strike in your wounds lol.
I enjoy your channel, can’t wait to see more.
Armor class is tricky.
What if you are pounding on a stone golem? The creature isn’t “blocking” your blows …it acts is absorbing the damage.
I remember one role playing system that denoted the legendary aspects of Dragons armor and the thicket it got as the beast aged,So for every age the dragon reduced 1 point of damage. Thus a lvl 8 aged dragon would absorb the first 8 points of every hit(like in the movies)
If one goes with this then you see knights in armor getting hit all through the battle but the armor absorbs the blows(like in real history)
A true hit/miss in this case would be anything that either hit/miss the most basic armor class
Your description of the Masks health system reminded me of the way the Avatar Legends RPG does so I looked it up and sure enough, same publishers lol I really appreciate that they go for something different than a standard "this is how many hits you can take before you are unconscious" style in a lot of other RPGs
Great vid! Made me think way more on this. I want to allow hitpoint representation depending on character to character. Meaning when hit they describe the dmg they took. So as a dm I would say: "he lifts his axe and drives it down for 30 dmg." They would say how they hit or of they narrowly dodge (cut clothes or cut cheek, arm ect.) Meaning it's more of a back and forth of descriptions. Also would mean players can describe their intention on an attack and I can react description wise as the enemy.
I do wish that they'd change fall damage though, it goes from being heroic to silly when a level 5 player can fall off a 100 foot wall, get up, brush themselves off and walk away.
That has been fixed. And it gets pretty lethal with scaling. Every 10ft becomes non linear, so 10ft us 1d, 20 ft is 3d, 40 ft is 7d. That makes 100ft falls basicly lethal.
@@ehisey so where has this been fixed? I did a quick check of the One D&D playtests and didn't see any changes, and there's nothing on D&D beyond in any 5e book that changes the d6 per 10ft with 20d6 max.
That being said, this does sound a bit familiar, so maybe I've seen it before.
@Andrew i came to this video out of a 1e forum. Forgot this was multi edition. It was correct in a Dragon or Outdoor adventures. Not surprised one is not doing it, 5e and One are super player protective.
An interesting angle on the concept of only a "killing blow" being a severe injury also matches up well with the concept of resting one long rest and being at max HP.
Still not sure where the confusion is coming from. You can't have it both ways: If you want hit points, you have to accept a level of abstraction; if you want accuracy, then you don't get to have hit points. Seriously, have two players sword fight. Does the attacking player, if armed with a longsword, say that she wants to perform a _Zwerchhau_ or a fendente? If the other player is armed with an arming sword & buckler, do they announce they're attacking with a stab-knock? As the fight draws on, does that player announce that he's switching to a Walpurgis stance and thereby gain a stamina buff for using that guard?
Do players who want accuracy in damage roll a series of hundreds of d20s to get the steel to spark the flint just right, followed by a dexterity roll for getting the tinder to glow when trying to light a candle in a dungeon? Charles Dickens, a person who grew up using flint & tinder to light candles, said it takes a half hour to succeed at that. If they roll a natural 1, do they cut half the meat off a finger with the flint and find said finger unusable for 4d12 days?
When someone starts getting fussy about hit points, the appropriate response is to say, "Chill, or we'll start asking you how you go to the bathroom with your armor on. I'll be rolling saving throws for _that_ behind my DM screen, and chafing and infection damage will affect _all_ of your abilities and rolls."
18:02 I love that this one guy has just rewired everyone’s brains with a single phrase
I take a combination of all those things, in a way. With 2 new players (out of 4 in my game), when they asked about how HP actually works I ended up giving an answer (without ever actually reading it from the book) quite similar to the one DnD gives us, which for the most part manifests itself as a combo of all the stuff you said. Something akin to "the amount of hits you and your armour, or you ducking and dodging out of the way, your character can take before they take that 'brutal hit'" - most of the time they don't question the similarity of AC and the "not getting hit" part of HP, and the best way I've found to not over-explain when and where hits land, is that *you don't always need to describe it* especially when it's a relatively low number of damage.
The Adventure Game Engine (AGE) uses this very much like your luck description.
You choose to spend points to not get wounds (you can choose to if you want)
wounds actually harm you, debilitate you and can kill you.. spending points is you heroically not getting hit or just grazed.
This is effectively luck, hero armor, fate, etc characters and named important NPCs and big villains have more of this resource to spend..
eventually it runs out and they take real and descriptive damage..(ie not abstract points) and suffer the consequences with debuffs, like bleeding, unusable body parts, immobilization, unconsciousness, etc
and your body stat gives you an idea how much brute damage you can take.. so you can have the big guy take a few real hits before going down, being a bad ass. or not spend points to take a hit and possibly even reserve that for a surprise second wind. etc
Your video really did a good job highlighting the different concepts. DnD is what it is and is fun to play and very popular but has always had design and rule issues.. some are fundamental others are addition-based. and other game engines have solved some of these problems and are worth taking a look at more and you touch on some.
great video.
I can't stop thinking about the "Scar when you go unconscious" system as an inverted "How do you want to do this?"
DM: The Orc Warchief hits you for... * rolls dice * 16 slashing damage.
Player: I'm unconscious.
DM: Okay. Assuming you get healing, you're going to have a scar. Tell us about it.
That is indeed a good idea. I'm going to use that in my next session!
The only reason we have to have this conversation at all is that the game mechanics don’t support any given hit point interpretation very well.
You can spend all day at 1 hit point or ten and mechanically there is no difference. Below 1, you are injured badly enough that you may die in less then a minute without help. but then returning only a single hit point means you are fully functional.
Heroic characters don’t pass out any time they get seriously injured. Gritty survivalists try desperately to avoid being injured, because injury often mean real problems for them.
5e really wants this to be our problem when it really didn’t have to be.
I’ve always thought of hit points as magically being more durable than normal. Even though it makes no sense in physics, it is, to me, the only explanation for why one can tank an axe to the face while sleeping.
“Because there’s no way an adventurer could actually survive a 600 foot fall onto rocks…”
Not even if she turns into a goldfish at the last minute?!?
:)
Great video! Congrats on the shoutout; you deserve it!”
I still think that the kinetic energy of a goldfish hitting at terminal velocity wouldn’t kill you, but i respect the ruling 😂
Thank you!!
@@johnathanrhoades7751 It wouldn't kill a person... but it would kill a goldfish. Just like the amount of kinetic energy that would kill you wouldn't kill an elephant.
Arguably, if the goldfish slowed down like a paratrooper who's T-10d just opened, it could have taken 1 point of damage at that point (opening shock is a jolt) and changed back to Keyleth at that point. Or it would have taken a while to "slow down" from the momentum Keyleth had, and fallen at above a goldfish's terminal velocity.
@@bludfyre yup. Definitely would kill the goldfish, I would have just done the carry-over damage differently, but it’s not my table, he telegraphed the danger, and it was incredibly memorable! The lovely things you get to think about in D&D😁
I mean if you can turn into a goldfish you're basically a god right ?😜❤
I was happy to see your vid shouted(?) out during Matt Colville’s video.
[When worlds collide…]
Thank you!
I tend to use the Bloodied threshold - sub 50% hp - as a loose guideline for describing hits. At least with martial weapons and the like.
Above that, you're trading on stamina. A miss my be parried or deflected off a shield. A hit may also hit the shield, but it'll connect with force and freakin sting. Or someone with a greatsword beating down over and over against someone's guard. They're not getting hit, but they wont be able to keep that sword arm up forever. Against someone with less armour, the enemy may land a shallow cut above their eye. It won't hurt much, but the blood is going to obscure their vision. That sort of thing.
Sub 50%, thats when things start getting nastier. That shield hit isn't just going to rattled you, it's going to badly bruise your arm if not fracture something. Now we're looking at the knife in Mal's shoulder, or Charlie Cox getting hooked. These injuries are showing now; you're not just being worn down you're being hurt.
And if it brings you below zero, yeah, that one is going to be particularly nasty.
A crit, or a particularly vicious hit (mechanically, but also narratively) may override this.
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We're mostly talking PCs and other humanoids here of course. If you're fighting a dragon, a hit that gets through it's scales probably is going to cause some kind of injury from the get go. It's just not that damaging compared to the size of it. You're not wearing someone down in a duel at that point, you're tearing down a giant with death fo 100 cuts (or stabs, or bashes)
Yeah that's kinda how I describe it too :)
I'd be interested to see how Matt Colville mentioning you, in his Castle Amber video, affects your views.
Great episode on a topic of discussion the wider community needs to keep having. Great shout outs to the pulp adventure genre which is where D&D has its roots.
The one thing I'd like to expand upon is the idea of where AC stops and HP begins. For me, this has to do with narrating the amount of control a PC has over a given attack. Did you easily brush that sword blow aside, or can you feel the reverberation of the impact numbing your hand? Did you deftly roll out of the way, or did the blow push you forward and you broke a more serious fall by rolling into it? Bloodied was an excellent condition and I think is still the gold standard of when you should start incorporating small cuts, scratches, and bruises to your narration of the fight. Finally come the killing blows, which I feel people are much to tame with and often lean on non-vital areas like arms, legs, and sides to make "convincing" hits. Humans can be both incredibly fragile and amazingly resilient given the circumstances. Boromir from the LotR movies is the quintessential example of fighting on your last HP and continuing to roll critical successes on your death saving rolls to keep protecting your allies. Is it really that unrealistic for a sudden adrenaline surge to snap someone back from the brink of death to push for survival?
I think we're often times simplifying HP too much to the ability to take physical punishment and not considering its narrative implications as an abstracted mix of stamina to push forward, luck to attain the improbable, and the training to find the impossibly thin line of action to survive. Mix them in whatever amounts you want, but do understand that D&D characters are pulp adventure heroes that _will_ find the most improbable ways to live another day in the relentlessly harsh world of adventuring.
Mr. Artivus Gleem, you cracked me up. If Gygax is a time traveler, the Sandal of Gygax just got a big buff lol
As a life long martial artist and fencer, I like to use a little bit of everything. Sometimes a hit hurts by bruising through your armour, or a blocked hit powers through and hits at reduced power, or you dodged, but the awkward position of the dodge strained a muscle, or lightly sprained an ankle. The enemy landed a glancing blow, or a pommel strike, etc. Crits landed by the enemy are hits proper. The knife in Mal's shoulder, for example. A proper hit, but one that the character could power through. Bloodying is also a proper hit. Crits, or bloodying may, or may not leave scars. The final strike is a serious wound. Broken arms, crushed ribs, chopped off hands and neck slices. Still kept ambiguous enough you could believe with immediate emergency medical aid they might survive with some gnarly wounds. Anything that does double your HP is unambiguous death. Flattened splatters, decapitation, cut in half, etc.
I would tell my players of high level if they take hit that should realistically kill them like your Wizard did when the ship crashed into him, that they narrate me how they managed to survive that, even if it’s just barely. Your Wizard for example could have cast a protective spell just in the last moment that managed to shield them from most of the impact, even though it was still massively painful.
I've said for years that the fundamental problem of RPG system design is finding the balance of simulation to abstraction that works best for your particular preferences. The more simulationism you introduce into a game, the more "realistic" it becomes, but this inevitably comes at the cost of complexity. There is a point at which one can be "overthinking" game design. The problem with Hit Points in D&D isn't limited to 5E; it's a problem that has existed from the very beginnings of the game, because D&D ties hit points to class level, and the real problem here is the class and level based character development system. As characters gain levels, they gain power. And so, if the antagonists also gain power proportionally, then the game should have a relatively static difficulty, adjusted for level, but the numbers involved just get bigger. Hit Points are an abstraction that can't be adequately explained by any kind of attempt at introducing more realism into a justification. Just accept the abstraction for what it is.
This is why my Tapestry RPG System gets rid of classes, entirely, and features a skills-based character development system. Life Points in Tapestry are based on the PC's ability scores, and base LP doesn't increase or decrease unless the PC's ability scores change for some reason. Since they are derived by formula from three of the PC's nine ability scores ((Constitution/1 + Strength/2 + Willpower/3) *2), and each ability score has a median about about 15 (range 6d4, or 6-24), the median PC will have only about 55 LP ((15 + 7.5 + 5)*2), no matter if they are a novice or a veteran.
My main problem is the ballooning HP pools.
My fix for a system project was Str + Con = HP for most creatures.
Also fixes the weird "commoners have d4 HP" idea that gets thrown around.
THAT's interesting. So 20 hp for most people, but potentially up around 30ish for heroes and less for old ladies? That's definitely actual physical meat hp. Maybe add +1 per level? And then the die of your weapon would actually matter!
@John Pettus thanks, I thought it was pretty clever. Average 20. I have characters starting with 60 ATT points to distribute between the 6 with a starting cap of 15. Instead of leveling, when they get 10 or so XP they get another ATT point. It's a roll under ATT system.
In the past, I've played with a few ideas for 5e overhauls, one of which is a modification to how damage and healing works. You'd actually have two HP bars: one called Valor which is explicitly _not_ meat, and one called Vigor which is explicitly meat. You take damage to valor first, and once your valor is depleted further damage is applied to vigor. Valor is much easier to heal, and you're expected to go into every fight with full valor, whereas vigor is much harder to heal and might require multiple days to top yourself off. Vigor also acts as a cap on valor; your current vigor is also your max valor. Losing vigor thus gimps your character in future fights because you now have less valor as well.
I actually developed this idea out of an article from the Angry GM about Fighting Spirit. The idea was similar in that you have two health pools, but you'd get an offensive debuff once the first health pool was depleted. The idea was that instead of just knocking your character out and removing your agency, you'd still be able to act defensively or run away. A lot of players keep fighting until they hit 0, so this would help to signal to such players when it's probably a good idea to run away. The valor/vigor concept I came up with based on this should work similarly, not that it hinders your offense when you run out of valor, but the long-term penalties for losing vigor should encourage players to consider retreating or fighting more defensively.
2 ways of approaching yhis I have really liked:
1. In the West End Games D6 system, everyone has the same number of "hit points" (6) and what varies is the ability dodge attacks and absorb damage. When you get hit you roll to see if your armor absorbs the blow and, if not, the amount that the damage roll exceeds the armor roll determines the damage (1 point for 1-6, 2 points for 7-12, etc)
2. In Lord of the Rings Online you don't have hit points you have "morale points". As you take hits you're demoralized, and when your morale hits 0 you're "defeated" and have to retreat rather than killed.
In relation to the ad: my campaign setting is heavily inspired by Greece, so it felt wrong to call that iron bull a gorgon and ALL gorgons medusas. We do refer to that creature as a lybian beast.
My table also self-polices the "Heracles not Hercules because that's Roman" policy. We're super fun at parties.
Do you have a Roman npc that regularly messes up the pc's names?
I think you can combine "luck," damage types, 5e's "you heal up after a long rest" and your approach to characters dropping to 0 hit points. That combination is glancing blows, which leave superficial wounds around the level of a papercut.
So for the crossbowman firing at one of the players, you could describe it as "you hear the twang of the crossbow, try to dodge out of the way, and the bolt goes right past your left leg, so close the quills nick you. You lose 7 hit points." Or for fire damage, you could describe "the Scorching Ray went right past the goblin, and he jumped back away from it like he'd been burned. He has beads of sweat running down his side. Roll damage."
I had two systems that did HP differently. The old, Marvel Super Heroes HP was accumulated by adding up your Strength, Agility, Fighting Skill, and Endurance. A little-known game, the Riddle of Steel, didn't deal much in HP, instead focusing on what kind of wound you got in different body parts. If you got hit in your sword hand, you had decreased fighting ability. Get hit too hard in the head, and you lose intelligence. It was a complicated system, but really interesting. As you leveled up, you got better at avoiding getting hit, not got more HP.
I've been thinking recently that for Death Saving Throws, practically a topic in itself, maybe the character doesn't suffer a lethal blow to hit 0HP but just takes a nasty hit that causes them to go into shock. That way if they stabilise, they remain calm enough to endure the shock and/or get lucky and just pass out. If they don't stabilise, they die of that shock. And of course, if an enemy strikes them during this process, _that's_ when the character suffers the lethal hit that could and likely will cause them to die.
I kind of like to think of HP as a mix of all of these things. It's your ability to avoid lethal damage. An attacker might be aiming for your heart with their dagger but you manage to dodge enough that they stab into your side instead.
For AD&D we use the PC's last 3HPs as their health, everything down to that point is getting buffeted, banged, fatigue from dodging, etc. But at 3HPs the PC sustains "damage", cuts, abrasions, etc. At 0, uncon. If in a single attack round the PC is reduced below -3HPs, the character is dead. HPs increase with level, therefore HPs aren't a reflection of how many cuts you can take, rather, it's how much you can avoid due to experience before getting hurt. For us, we still use the -10HPs for death (unless, per above, if during a single attack the PC is reduced past -3HPs), and will gradually bleed. If stabilizedthey will still be uncon for another 1d6 turns (up to 1 hour) during which the party needs to keep them safe. Even after that, they'll be weak as a kitten for a week, even if they've been healed (pg. 82 AD&D 1e DMG).
For me, It comes down to normal attacks are light scratches and bruises, where as crits or masive attacks that make the player go oh shit might be the ones that give scars to a character.
Alot of it will come down to the group and how they play.
The abstraction that hp also represents an ability to dodge tied to stamina can be kinda used to help describe low damage rolls, its why I just say "it connects, roll for damage" then do a full description. "The bugbear swings at you with its morningstar, you attempt to leap out of the way but the momentum and follow through of the swing cause the handle to still make contact with you, you take 3 damage" as an example.
I usually describe the first half or so of HP loss, or exceptionally minor damage as close scrapes, dings to armor, or some other emergency action that would suit the character.
The Abjurer gets a last second energy shield up, the Fighter takes the blow on the armor, denting the plate, the Halfling suddenly stoops down to grab a coin they dropped, the Warlock's pact item moves by itself to intercept to blow, ect.
I find it help a lot to make actually being injured feel impactful, when the players haven't been "slightly wounded" by a goblin poking them for 2 damage for the twelfth time today. That Orc sticking his axe in someone hits a lot harder if players aren't being torn to shreds daily, and the incidental damage to stuff can occasionally lead to better after combat interactions, I find.
A short break restoring health also makes more sense, if the time spent is spent fixing or restoring those emergency measures, then if it's spent chugging coffee to fix that quard of blood lost, or foot that was stabbed by a dozen gobbos.
Something that I always keep in mind when I'm describing damage as both a player and a GM. The characters are martially competent (at least a very large majority of them are) and know their way around a fight. They know how to block, parry, dodge and all of that and anyone who has actually been in a fight knows that there are times when you don't fully block, dodge, or parry something coming at you. There are many instances where it kinda sorta works but not completely. I often describe our parties fighter bringing up their sword to parry the enemies greatsword and even though the power of the strike cut through the fighters guard and into their collarbone, the fact that the fighter managed to get their blade up is what saved them a fatal blow. I'll describe glancing blows for rogues, shielding runes flaring to life for casters or armor taking the brunt of the actual damage. Leaving the character wounded, but still very much alive.
Just because someone beat your AC does not mean that all of the defenses you have in place suddenly disappeared or stopped working. It makes more sense to me that they are in fact the reason that the enemies greatsword DIDN'T just cleave you in two.
Something my group has done for the past 4 months has been leveling up but only gaining hit points at level 4, 8, 12, 16, 20. All the stakes are always super high, each monster is super threatening, and healing is paramount to surviving. We pretty quickly found out it makes us feel like super natural people, level 1-3 is kind of commoner hp for most classes, and at all levels using strategy over brute force is super important if we want to kill anything, like traps, lures, using dodge actions to be harder to hit etc. Very fun varient and I recommend anyone who wants a more gritty DND without butchering the rest system.
i have never thought about changing how hp works this is so cool :0
I loved the way the Conan RPG games handled hitpoints. Where hitpoints is called Vigour. Where every strike lowers vigour when it connects. But then it also has a secondary system with vigour, where based on various feats, if you take more then a certain number of vigour points in a single hit, you would also take a wound. With each wound making it harder to do fight and do skill checks, till five wounds kills the character. So to me, making it seem like while every strike may have hit, it never actually got past armour or clothing due to dodging or blocking, only a wound actually being a hit that drew blood.
The Hobbit movies (and partially the Lord of the Rings movies), also known as "Why doesn't Legolas just win the entire war by himself?"
Great video, thanks for the work. I started tabletop roleplaying games in the 70's and broke my teeth on tabletop war games and tabletop miniature games. So I played Chainmail and things like it before I ever found D & D. In the 70's a man by the name of David Hargrave came out with rules for tabletop roleplaying that were a horrible system by themselves, but amazing as a supplement for D & D. I think it was the first use of critical hit charts, fumble charts, magic fumble charts. It had new spells, classes, monsters, etc. But chief among all the supplements was the HP system from book 3 of the Arduin Grimoire.
I have always felt D & D HP system breaks the game at almost every level and actually forces players to only have one off game sessions. Because the entire session has to be geared to the level of the players. This is immersion breaking for me. In fantasy and epic stories about heroes. You can have the young hero as a recruit join the old hero in defense of the gate against the horde or BEM's. You cannot do this in D & D without some serious cheating and story telling.
How did Arduin HP system fix this? Example: 1st Level Human Ftr with an 18 constitution score would start with 45 HP and gain 1 hp a level not counting special abilities, feats, skills, etc. So at First level that Fighter would have an unbelievable amount of HP's with 45, but at 20th level he would only have 64 HP. This means he has more chance of living from overall damage, while gaining levels that would also gain him skills and items that would make him more survivable but a Dragon would still kill him in one breath, save or not unless the hero had magical protection spells, items or abilities. In other words, players survive longer at low levels but are still crunchy and unbroken at high levels.
This means in my example. The 20th level Human Fighter and the 1st Level Human Fighter can stand side by side at the gate and defend it against the Goblins. One has 45 HP the other 64 HP. One is very low skilled and probably has poor gear and will take more hits and give less hits. The other will be deadly, dishing out multiple hits and kills and being near unhittable for the goblins because of their armor, class, skills and gear. But they can stand together. Unlike in D & D where that could never happen realistically.
This allows roleplaying, instead of roll playing. With the Arduin crit and fumble systems, its usually not the hp loss that kills you, its the crits and fumbles or just plain stupid decisions. I talked to Dave Hargrave as to why he did this and his off the cuff comment at Pacificon that day was 'So low levels will have enough hp's to choose whether or not to stay in a combat or run'. After running with this system for more than 30+ years as a DM it allowed my campaign world to be open. No leveled dungeons, no leveled parties, etc. Meaning just because you encounter that Dragon, doesn't mean you should fight it. It also allowed me to have other results than just party wipes. I could rob the players of gear and then leave them on the side of the road. I could offer them trade or even enslavement or work release instead of death. So many more roleplaying encounters happened because sometimes the players just have to poke the dragon. Dave also said another thing 'Power attracts Power' meaning if you display power, it will be noticed and could threaten someone else in power and they will react. :)
So the math for Human (15 HP), Fighter (5 HP), 18 Constitution ( 24 HP, 1 per con point plus 1 per con point over 12) and Level 1 (1 per level). Other races get a different bonus, Dwarves start in the mid 20's, Hobbits less, etc. Barbarian gets 7 HP for class and 3 per level. Rogue gets 3 for class and 1 per every 3 levels. Mages get no class bonus and only 1 hp per 5 levels. So a Human mage with a 12 Constitution score at 1st level would have 15 + 12 + 1 or 28 HP and at 20th level they would have 31 HP.
So as you can see, a mage no longer falls 10 feet and dies or gets hit by an arrow and dies, or coughed on and dies. But they are still crunchy. Because of this system I changed the healing system to a percentage base. Cure Light is 20% healed, Cure Serious is 40%, etc upto 100% for a Heal spell.
Now for monsters I changed HP's in this way. This is my own home brew. Every monster gets 10 HP per hd then when they take damage that puts them below 0, roll another D10 and if that number is above the amount they took they survive the death blow and keep fighting, but must make a morale check to either bargain or flee depending on circumstances. If they can flee without immediately dying, they run, if they are cornered or gonna get hit as they run, they may throw down their weapons and beg for mercy, etc. This is a role playing chance so no hard rules here, just go with it as you see fit as the Story Teller. So Goblin has 10 hp, takes 14 damage, I roll a d10 and get a 3 and the goblin dies. Had I rolled anything above 4 the goblin lives but must make a morale check to see his reaction to near death. Fun times when the weak goblin survives certain death, then makes his willpower and then turns around and fights to the end. Only has to make morale once in a battle unless its an ability or spell.
Now having starting HP this high may seem like its hard to threaten or kill the players. But the Crit and Fumble tables make up for it. Plus magic fumble tables. All spells require a d20 roll so can crit or fumble. Any spell that needs concentration, if you are damaged while casting and fail a concentration check that is an automatic spell fumble.
Now with a lethal system like this in play, it is the duty of the DM to remember that he is not against the players, but in reality working with them in the crafting of an experience and story. My job every time I DM is to get the players as close to disaster and death as I can such that each player has the opportunity to use their class, skills, background, gear, etc to help each other to get past what is happening. Nothing pleases me more than at the start of a night of playing, I hear the players talking about how close to death they were last game session and if it wasn't for player x we would have died. I get no satisfaction out of wiping a party. That is bad story telling. Do I cheat, no, its not cheating when your goal is for everyone to have fun and feel useful.
So know your party you are DMing for, understand their skills, class, abilities, feats, gear and even their interactions and use that in your planning during encounters and combat. Note those are not the same.
Is the system I adapted better? Not really, but it works for me and has still to this day. Emperor's Choice was selling copies of the original Arduin Grimoires for awhile and you may still be able to find them and a hardback as well. But other than that good luck finding them. Only a few of us old crusty grognard's still keep small A4 style hand printed stapled together paperback books like that around.
Chris
I've always liked the system used in one of WOTCs old D20 Star Wars RPGS. Characters had HP, like we are all used to, but they also had vitality points that equaled their Con score (IIRC),and they never changed. You could have a 5th level charter with 50 HP, but only 10 Vitality points. Regular hits were applied to HP, Crits to VP. So, a Crit could always outright kill a character no matter what level they were.
MrRhexx did a video about half a year ago about a different approach to armor which this video reminds me off. He stated getting hit should be DEX-modifier only, and armor giving a reduction on the amouth of damage. I've used it in my own game, both for players and enemies, and it makes the fights a lot more intense. Enemies with heavier armor getting hit easily, but taking only a fraction of the damage, while the more nimble players dodge most attacks, but get damaged relatively hard when they do get hit. I also warned my players that different armor would be vulnerable/resistant to different types of damage, though up to now this has not really mattered much (lightning attacks are going to go far against metal encased enemies, for instance). The idea of scarring after going unconsious is great, I'll very likely use that in the future.
Yeah, I agree and even commented about that. Speaking of which, I think the video's title has some slight clickbait considering how AC isn't mentioned at all.
I think the trouble with the "Daredevil approach " is that it's one thing to get beat up and punched with fists, but even a minor wound with a slashing weapon is dangerous and deadly. That Firefly example of a little old knife to the shouilder would not be something to just shrug off in a few days. That little poke could mean sliced pectoral or deltoid muscles that could literally prevent you from using that arm again for the rest of your life. (in a world without magical healing of course) .
I think the abstract is the most important thing. A hit for 10hp could be either "with what feels like your last gasp of energy to duck under the axe blow. Can you dodge the next one ?" or " The axe thuds into your shield shaking your whole body".
I mean it's all abstract. In AD&D 1e , a round was 1 minute long and a fighter made 1 attack per round which represented "a minute of sparring and looking for an opening to hit. That one attack roll represented the 1 meaningful chance to make a blow that counts"
Even Hollywood realism can falter. It's one thing for the hero to get shot once and struggle on (eg John Mclane in Die Hard 1 or Martin Riggs in LW 1) but if every hit in an RPG was a bullet, sword or arrow impact that would destroy my verisimilitude.
In my games i use a combo of hit points = stamina/ ability to dodge or luck ; and pure punishment but the real hits don't start landing until the PC is down to their last 25% of hp
My favourite example of hit points = stamina is in Game of Thrones S1 where Bronn is fighting the Knight of the Vale at Tirion's trial at the Moon Door. Bronn dances around the armoured knight until he tires out, and Bronn takes his chance finishing the knight off when he's too knackered to defend himself.
Each swing and a miss by the knight is Bronn rolling a hit and chipping away at the knight's hit points (stamina). Maybe that one is a bit too abstract to pull off at the table for an RPG !! But might be worth a try!!
I really love your 'describe your scar' concept for going below 0hp - very cool!
If I'm being honest, I actually prefer RPGs were damage has actual rules effects. Ars Magica, Legend of the Five Rings and Savage Worlds all have great damage systems, but fewer people want to play them ☹️
My favorite RPG *by far* is Mythras and it's partially because it's the sanest take on damage I've ever seen. Armor functions as armor (platemail is strong AF), everyone gets locational HP, and avoiding hits is mostly achieved by actively parrying attacks. Shields let you passively protect yourself which is *also* strong AF. You get some Luck points for re-rolls. It strikes a perfect balance where getting stabbed sucks about as much as you'd expect it to, but you'll hardly ever just insta-die and you've got enough mitigation for cool heroic fights to happen.
Not to mention the "special effects" system means most fights end with someone on the floor surrendering, because they *would* die if they didn't.
Despite all that, somehow it's not too overbearing the way some games are. In practice it runs quick once you know what you're doing.
I think the best method (which is one I used in a custom made TTRPG) is using ability scores as HP. When you take damage you lower them, and in my system when any reaches 0, you die. This also opens up thematics! A character can describe how a arrow lowers their dexterity, maybe hitting them in the lower leg and slowing their movement. It also makes armor and constitution-like scores important. In the system I made, grit (constitution) does nothing. Its fodder you can lower your grit and be fine. It gives you more time to take damage without making you worse at fighting, like a barbarian shrugging off an knife in the shoulder with a grin and having no trouble clobbering its thrower.
Regarding the different way to describe an attack roll is lower than the AC (dodging out of the way, hitting the armor, blocking with a shield, etc.) I think we can borrow from earlier editions’ flat-footed AC and touch AC.
Flat-footed AC is basically your AC when you can’t react to an attack, either due to being surprised or you haven’t acted in combat yet. To put it simply, you can’t use your dexterity bonus, but you still have your AC from your armor and shield.
Touch AC is basically your AC to avoid contact either from magical projectile or someone’s touch. To put it simply, you don’t add your armor or shield bonus, since if someone could touch your armor/shield, they still made contact with you.
Typically a creature’s AC is higher than its flat-footed AC which in turn is higher than its touch AC. So what I would probably say is if an attack roll is lower than the touch AC, it can be described as the target completely dodging out of the way; if it’s higher than touch AC but lower than flat-footed AC, the attack connects but is blocked by armor/shield; if it’s higher than flat-footed AC but lower than AC, the target dodged at the last moment and the weapon scraped by the armor/shield.
Of course, we don’t need to reintroduce the mechanics of flat-footed and touch AC to 5e, but it’s a way to quantify what exactly a “miss” does for the math heads out there.
I do something similar to you. Especially in previous editions where things like touch AC and flat footed AC were actually written on your character sheet. If an attack misses by 1 or 2 I would describe that as a block with your shield. If you have a +3 to AC from Dex the next three points would be described as a dodge, and if wearing leather the next two points might have glanced off their armor. I mean, I'm not doing the math every time, but just to give an idea on how to describe things.
For hits it kind of works the same way. If they hit them by two I'd say something like, "You manage to get your shield up but the force of the blow jams your shoulder painfully and you take 6 damage." The next two might be, "The goblin's sword slips up under your shield and slices painfully up your armor. Your armor absorbs most of the blow but it leaves a slice in the leather and you feel a trickle of blood leaking down into your pant leg. You take four damage."
Magical healing is healing the actual cuts, bruises, cracked and broken bones, but natural healing from a long rest would be stuff like taking an hour to patch up the damage to your armor, bandaging and stitching minor cuts, stretching and massaging out the pulled muscles and bruises, meditating to rebuild the mental fortitude and reduce fatigue, that sort of thing.
So getting hit is actually hitting g you, but it's not leaving grevious wounds. Otherwise how would they heal overnight?
So the barbarian taking arrows to the chest wouldn't happen, but them slapping them out of the air, or catching them on their bracers or twisting so they glance off their heavy muscles leaving a superficial slice across their skin, might be something I'd describe.
When they get knocked to zero, that's when they take the big wounds, and if they manage to survive but don't get magically healed, them being able to recover to full health is where 5e HP really breaks down.
In that case I'd say something like, "The severity of the wound wasn't as bad as the initial shock made it seem. You stitch it up and, while painful, it isn't debilitating after a good night's rest."
So the barbarian marching forward blocking, slapping down, head butting 10, 15 arrows might take him from 100 HP to 8, then that 16th arrow that hits for 10 was the one that glanced off his bracer, and he didn't manage to twist enough in time, so it hits him square in the left side of the abdomen, piercing flesh and muscle, bri ginger him to his knees before he falls unconscious onto his face, snapping the arrow off as he twists to his side."
Then later, after a rest, it's revealed the arrow only penetrated an inch and left a nasty gash, before striking a rib and skirting off the side without penetrating any vital organs or doing more than superficial damage to the muscle.
For a nimble character, it's the same sort of thing. They parry or dodge a blow and deflect most of it, but the flat of the enemy's blade still slams into your arm leaving a nasty welt and thin line of blood. You take 10 damage.
You don't have to describe every hit and miss in such detail, but if you do enough of them for each character, so they start to get a feel for how their character handles getting damaged, then when you just say, "The orc swings his axe. It hits and does 8 damage," they see it in their own head and imagine maybe the axe strikes their armor but the head turns so it leaves a shiny scratch, but the blunt force rattles their teeth in their skull and forces them back a step, momentarily.
I've actually taken an approach to HP where I mix both aspects of the luck, stamina, and hardiness into account when describing damage. The way I get both myself and my players accustomed to the idea that different attacks will be described differently depending on the situation is to call HP- Health & Posture. If the attack that hit was one of many that will happen in combat, I usually describe it by saying the characters had to physically exert themselves to dodge or parry the incoming blow and not something that took little effort on their part, in essence the attack damaged their Posture; however when it comes to big hits like different damage types or big numbers, I take the approach of describing the attack as one that is physically hurting them, doing damage to their Health
Also, crits in my game don't do double damage to players, but instead deal a long-term injury. I found a nice pdf where there's 3d6 tables for every damage type causing different unique injuries, it's pretty cool. More often than not, it lands on scars for my players but the two most impactful ones where when they dropped a symbolic dagger to the depths of Sharn and an internal injury that they must take medicine for or be unable to use all 3 action types in one turn (action, bonus action, movement)
I do the same regarding crits (though they do both, double damage and a long term injury), with mine I use a table from another game, and the injuries scale with a severity roll. They're capped at 60% when you're above 0 hp, and can't go below 60% when you're at 0 (I didn't want people dropping dead at full hp, and when they're dying I didn't want it to be from a broken toe) I'm curious about that table though, as I've never got around to actually writing down the difference between damage types, and just kind of do it ad hoc.
@@Lurklen look up Maxwell's Malicious Maladies, that's the name of the pdf. Maybe not every damage type will make perfect sense at your table, but if the situation arises, you can always continue to improvise lol
@@dragonkamehameha Cool, thanks!
In my current game, we started off as level 0 villagers, and we decided what kind of fitting styles we prefer by what we picked up to defend ourselves with. I had a pitchfork and a barrel top, and later on i would swap to a shield and sword.
One of the defining moments from the early sessions, even just before we gained our first level, we had undead chasing us through some catacombs, and for multiple turns I was consistently rolling terrible for attacks, and to justify that, this skeleton had actively targeted my shoulder multiple times over 3 rounds. My character lost use in that arm and had to swap hands for his weapon. Multiple sessions go by without me addressing that wound, and without us fully healing, and when we do take a look, I've lost full use in that arm, and its gone very bad (avoiding description). We had to do multiple medicine checks to avoid me losing my whole arm to infection, and because i didn't feel like going to the soon to be artificer for a robot arm. We saved the rest of my arm, and through paladin healing (dumping my lay on hands into my shoulder every long rest) and meeting my patron, it was restored fully so that i could get back to my usual sword and board.
I use a modified Exhaustion table in my games to account for long-term injuries like gaping wounds, broken bones, concussions, etc.
In addition to "on drop to 0" or "on bloodied", characters in my games suffer a long-term injury (or scar) after suffering a critical hit, or any attack that deals max damage. But I also allow my players more agency to mitigate serious incoming hits outside of the HP system: As a Reaction, any worn, held, or wielded item may be sacrificed to negate an incoming hit (breaking or destroying the item in the process). They go through a lot of shields. But this also gives players with professional skills more incentive to use them, as they have to fix up their broken items during downtimes. The smith is constantly unbending and re-honing swords, and the carpenter is busy fixing up all those shields.
I've also created houserules around rest and healing to slow things down a bit more and make them less action-hero movie than 5e tends to run when compared to 2e, etc. 8 hours = short rest ; 9 to 24 hours = long rest ; 12 to 24 hours in a safe, dry, warm, place with access to resources and fascilities = comfortable long rest.
Both kinds of long rest restore all class features, but only a comfortable long rest fully restores HP, or heals 1 level of exhaustion (an "uncomfortable" long rest simply gives each player 1 free Hit Die to roll for healing, in addition to any Hit Dice they want to burn to heal, as if it were a short rest).
I love how you frequently post midday so I can watch your new videos during my lunch break
I’m glad!
In my Pathfinder games I usually described damage like a boxing or MMA match, where a lot of strikes "hit", but knockout blows had to be pretty special, but each knock to your hit points kinda wore you down. After a 10 round slugfest, it might not be surprising for a loose jab that got through clean to put you down, even if you could've taken it easily at the start of the fight.
In my more recent campaign I've also used the narrative of spiritual power growing as characters level up to explain just how ridiculously tough they get.
Yeah, it gets kinda narmy and Dragon Ball Z-like when you can put your arms in a cross block and just tank a gout of dragonfire, but...by that point, you've kinda earned feeling like a superhero, so even if it's not the most convincing explanation, my table seems to like it.
“My new best friend” I was so excited for you when I saw he mentioned you in a video!
I like the "stress" (damage) rules in spire. When you take stress, it applies to one of your attributes, which can have "armour". Then you roll a D10 and if it is less than your total stress you're fine, for now. However, if you roll over then you take fallout i.e. something bad happens to you. Maybe you break an arm, or psychologically scar yourself. The higher your stress when the fallout occurs the worse your outcome.
Fallout resolves stress, because it becomes real rather than potential. It also means that luck is a double edged sword. If you get in a fight and take stress but not fallout when the shoe finally drops you'll suffer more
I have a system that I got from a video somewhere, specifically referring to barbarians. All the hits they take are superficial, except for 2. The one that bloodies them, and the one that brings them to zero.
Getting bloodied adds one level of exhaustion, from an exhaustion table that I home-brewed. As well as the damage. And the final blow brings them to death saves, but barbarians and possibly fighters (not decided) can choose to be brought to 5 hp and take another level of exhaustion instead. (Up to level 3 exhaustion)
It’s call the “Refuse to Die” rule.
It is basically Boromir getting hit with 3 arrows before going down, as his fight went on he was visibly weaker. Then the first arrow hits, that was him reaching death saves but choosing to go on. Then as more and more hit he was less and less effective but since he had a duty to protect the hobbits he refused to die.
If a character survives something like this they must describe a visible scar for each time they refused death saves.
Alternatively all classes can have this but with altered rules and probably some classes getting to use it more times than others.
The best way to handle HP using the 5e definition is to replace the term HP with "stamina". A "hit" just means that the attack is on target enough that the opponent had to exert a lot of energy to avoid it, thus the damage is affecting their stamina and that in turn affects how much longer they can stay on their feet. This means that the opponent either had to dodge, parry or deflect an attack, or was possibly hit in an armored area hard enough to maybe cause some bruising. Basically, every fight turns into a minute-long boxing match, but with swords instead of gloves. Once the opponent is KO'd, the player characters can finish them off.
When a character reaches 0 HP, their body has endured enough stress that they pass out due to some condition that can onset from overexertion. Different damage types can induce different conditions, such as heat stroke from fire or hypothermia from cold, if a good portion of the damage came from that damage type. The severity of the condition is retroactively determined by the result of their death saves - 3 failures and it was lethal, while 3 successes means they just passed out from shock and need some rest to recuperate.
This also makes more sense for the various healing effects and temporary HP. Healing functions like a shot of adrenaline, which can help a person get back on their feet from many conditions that could cause them to pass out. The temp HP are more like a morale boost, so they don't really help if you are passed out and dying. Treating HP and healing this way also means that people dying from physical injuries can't be helped with normal healing - you need stronger magic that can repair the physical damage to the body and those spells often have costly material components, so that offers narrative opportunities that otherwise make no sense in a world where every major city has at least a half dozen temples full of people with healing magic.
All that said, I use this style of describing things only for hits against the player characters. I almost always treat the enemies' HP as "meat points" unless the enemies have healers in their midst.
One of the best examples IMO of seeing what Hit Points look like in action is...the movie Snatch. Bullet Tooth Tony takes 6 shots and still keeps on fighting, yet gets killed by one lucky shot later. Boris the Bullet Dodger has a high Natural AC, hence he takes the car hit, and a ton of HP evidenced when Bullet Tooth Tony has to unload an entire clip into him. Yet the Fat Man (an NPC) got killed from on stab of a sword.
This entire video sent me on a bit of a mental trip in considering how the different game systems I have played in handle hit points.
Some of the TTRPG's I've played use a physical/mental health system like in the FFG Star Wars system (Called Wounds and Strain respectively). In the Dragon Age RPG damage is not differentiated between a type unless a specific ability will defend against damage from a specific source (using fire on a Rage demon is beyond useless), or if armor is designed to mitigate it (like an enchanted suit of armor that can resist spell damage)
And in another RPG I have called Tales of Xadia, hit points are not even a thing, instead it relies on tracking a growing penalty dice that represents a negative condition, like Fear or Wounded. And depending on what fits for the narrative the Narrator (DM) can use these penalty dice against the players when determining the difficulty of a scenario. After all, you would think climbing a rock cliff with a bleeding wound might be less than pleasant.
Kind of facinating to consider the other ways that TTRPG's consider the survival of the player characters.
I was watching an older video from the Dungeon Dudes that sort of references this topic in terms of thinking about character power. To paraphrase: A gritty fantasy like Game of Thrones (early seasons at least), is essentially a Tier 1 game, where most of the characters are probably at level 1 (or not even that), with a smattering of level 2-4s among the more elite, and only a tiny fraction breaking the level 5 barrier, who warriors of incredible power or terrifying sorcery. They argue that basically no person in the real world would ever reach level 3-4. Tier 2 characters are more like your standard heroic fantasy characters that you'd see in Lord of the Rings or whatnot, who have superhuman ability both to take and dish out damage. Tier 3 are Avengers class heroes, essentially so far above the power level of everyday people that they are practically gods, the types who are called in to deal with existential threats to the entire planet, or even beyond. Tier 4 are top-of-the-class superheroes, or, probably better yet, the top tier of anime heroes, the Gokus and Saitamas and the like, for whom accidentally destroying the planet with their powers is a potential concern.
Put in that context, I think it's fine to just accept that characters, especially above Tier 1, aren't just regular people, and being able to take multiple wounds that would be lethal to a lesser person and just shrug them off kind of goes with the territory. And if you want a game where players' injuries and damage are realistic, it's much easier to pull off at low level.
I like the Indiana Jones analogy because that's exactly the type of narrative the 5e system encourages. Your character is literally defined by how they operate in combat. Other systems have more abstract rules for taking hits because combat has less focus, and some other systems track where the damage hit and how hard it hit. Very different mechanical focus and narrative feelings depending on the system.
Sweeney was such a baller character and your use of wish immediately before that was iconic
Thank you!! ☺️
Thanks for this video it is actually incredibly helpful to me. I am trying to get a D&D group going at a school and one of the concerns of the principle is combat. I have been thinking about how to rationalize damage, and this video really helped coalesce into an actual idea.
Also, agreed about the Hobbit movies....now I'm sad.
I’m so glad this video helped!
My preferred approach is games that use a "flesh & grit" type of system.
For the uninitiated, most hits reduce a grit point pool, and are absorbed by your armour and cause bruises & reduced stamina. Grit is fully restored on a long rest, and also your grit pool increases on a level up to reflect your increased experience and endurance.
Should you run out of grit points, or suffer a crit, or something such as fall into a spike trap, damage hits your flesh pool, which take much longer to recover. Suffer a serious injury to flesh and you can die without ever losing grit (fall a long way into a spike trap for example).
I think it strikes a balance between the abstraction that is hit points, and being able to have narrative fights
As someone who practices martial arts sword fighting, I would like to add something to the "bruises" point of few. Although it is only a sport for me and I am only in friendly sparring competitions, most of the time I get bruised I don't notice it, yes I will feel that I am hit, but that is all. After the sparring session, I will start feeling them, but at that point, I don't even remember when I got those bruises. Now some strong blows, especially on the fingers with the small change the sword will hit underneath my armour, I do feel immediately and will stop the fight.
Now our adventurers do fight in life-or-death scenarios, at that point adrenalin will be ruching through their vanes. Although that wasn't life or death, I have been in situations where adrenalin kicks in and I felt nothing until after it went away, hits I would normally stop for and start cooling.
So in my mind, it seems perfectly logical that you actually get hit, but just get bruised or a small flesh wound, all in all, we should just be able to say in the heat of the fight "It's just a scratch!.
There are a couple things I think you missed. Which is the fact that magical healing exists in the DND. Also, most people are wearing armor so they still take a hit, but the armor protects them a bit, it's like if someone clubs you while your are wearing a helmet, the temporary damage is slight only. Maybe a Bruse. Then when you've take a number of those beatings, blood is finally drawn. Down hill from there. BUT DND I think does suppose that ALL of the creatures are more sturdy then our world. By a bit that is.