Sleeping character

>Sleeping character
>Coup de Grace
>Automatic kill

Are people really ok with this?

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How would you propose surviving someone sneaking up and beheading you in your sleep?

>Evil psychotic evil character with summons bound to it's life force wrecking having with no armor and has had protective magic dispelled
>Still have to stab them 20 times missing 5 of them rolling damage dice.
>This took 2 minutes
>evil fucker is still alive didn't do enough damage
Why are people OK with this?

What painting/which artist is this?

I remember a book about games got into this a bunch. The example they used is when Hamlet stabs and kills his friend (he thought it was just an intruder) through a curtain, and how that wouldn't really work with TTRPG logic because he definitely had enough HP to survive a single sword stab.

Yup

Polonius.

If I had to guess, I would say Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio (1590-1599)

It's a bandaid to help the system handle its retarded levels of HP bloat.

because hp is an abstraction representing both the life of a character but also their will to survive, luck, etc.

Fuck this is the same reason 4e had the "bloodied" mechanic, because it tried to get people into the mindset of "two hits and they're down" rather than "I stabbed the wizard 20 times XDDD"

You know what happened in that scenario? 20 of those attacks pushed him onto his back foot, or was a near hit that drew blood but didn't wound him, or he barely dodged out of the way, but finally his luck ran out and you stabbed the fucker right in the whatever.

The root of the problem is absurd hp scaling.

In shadowrun, if you have a decent gun and shoot a guy while he's unarmored and not able to defend himself, he's fucking dead. Everyone only has like 9 to 14 of the game's version of hit points, and most of a person's survivability, much like RL, comes from not getting shot in the first place, not getting hit by bullets, and wearing copious amounts of armor just in case.

in D&D you can argue that it's a coup de grace, since the target didn't know hamlet would stab him, he was essentially helpless and failed his fortitude save vs instant death (since a dagger in D&D usually won't kill someone outright even with crit)

Coop dee grass

Yeah, what is this bullshit, he might survive all those bullets hitting his cranium from 6 inches away.

And then he fell off the tower and took 10d6 worth of "near hits" before chugging a magical elixer and asking his buddy to call upon the divine will of the gods for a miracle that mends flesh and sets bones. Because that definately makes sense. Also, lets not forget that big weapons set on fire eat up more luck and near misses for reasons unknown.

HP bloat is dumb; you can try and disguise it however you want, but HP are designed as meat points and it's retarded that the system lets them get that high in the first place. Keep HP in check and suddenly you don't have to bend over backwards to validate them.

you know people can survive falls from rather high heights right? In that case that wasn't a near miss that was a solid hit they took, and their ally healed their wounds with MAGIC

If HP HAS to mean one specific thing and you can't narratively explain what happens in a fight then you're pretty autistic

HP means multiple things at once, and you get to choose what it represents both at the moment of taking damage and also at the moment of healing.

pictured: The 1e DMG.

There's nothing wrong with doing the OP

This, however, is totally unacceptable

Or I can just play a system that doesn't have retarded HP bloat and has consistent explanations rather than requiring case-by-case justifications how *this* actually means *that*.

And he would still need MAGIC to totally-not-heal him after getting near-missed over and over.
And a near miss from a greatsword counts more than a near miss from a dagger.

>WHY IS THIS FANTASY GAME WITH MAGIC NOT REALISTIC REEE

are you the same guy who bitches about people not taking "bleed damage" after getting stabbed or bitching about why your firebolt doesn't set someone on fire for fire damage x per turn?

I'd bet you are

>There can only be one person that dislikes any aspect of D&D, and they must dislike them all to a retarded degree.

Nigga you can still be a hardcore knight pulling off badass impossible moves and slaying dragons without also being able to be dropped off three cliffs in a row before continuing on your merry way. Other systems manage to do it. If you want to argue that D&D is meant to emulate mythic fantasy where characters can literally fall from the sky to the pits of Hell and shrug it off like it ain't no thang, first I'd laugh in your face, then I'd point you to literally every other part of D&D.

>fighting dragons
>works with wizards that can fly and shoot fireballs
>dies falling off a building

okay.jpeg

>Just falling off a building
>Not letting him catch himself on an outcropping
>Not letting him j-j-j-jam his sword into the wall to slow his descent
>Not letting them bounce off an awning into a room across the alleyway, bringing the fight to a new and interesting location.

Nah, you're right, why let fighters live by their wits and skill and strength of their sword arm? Just give them a bigger pool of HP you can whittle away at; now when they fuck up you can just mark off the HP and get back to more important things, like what the wizard's doing.

>I'm so autistic I can't use those as explanations unless the player rolls for them

oh shit wrong thread

...

There is no right thread for that.

It's alright i got rid of it. I fucking hate you have to wait like 5 minutes to delete a post....

>A human commoner has 4 HP at most.
>A kobold can have 5.
>A basic orc has 10 average.
>A guard 11 hp.
>A leprechaun has 24.
>And a pxie described as being "physically weak by human standards" has 32.

For the commoner, one could argue that you aren't supposed to run into too many level 1 pure commoners that aren't literally children, but all the others, especially the way fey are statted (their survivabilty is supposed to come from their Sanic-level Dex and magic) make me shake my head at times.

The problem with HP is that you get too much while at the same time, giving weapons less consistent damage.

Back in OD&D, you didn't even get a bonus to something unless it was like 16 or higher, so you were generally down to whatever you rolled for your class's HD.

That, and martial classes like the Fighter got to swing multiple times per turn, which multiplied the potential damage they could do per hit, which worked since most creatures rarely had more than 100 at best.

Nowadays though, you can fall off a cliff, get stabbed, get set on fire, poisoned, shocked, frozen, fall off another cliff, and still fight just as well at almost dead as you can at full health.

That and martials can't hit multiple times for shit anymore.

Once, long ago, I was playing some AD&D, back before we had "editions".

And our lowish level adventuring group had been contracted to deal with this giant that had been extorting tribute out of several villagers. It was too tough to take on directly, but long story short, we managed to drug it and knock it out with a deer full of crap.

And then the fighter goes

>Well, he's out. I slit his throat.

And our ref is flipping through the book, and there's no rule that says you can do that. You just attack and get the +4 bonus for him being prone and no ex bonuses. Now, he houseruled it in that we just killed the guy, but it's entirely stupid to think you can't do something devastating to someone who isn't able or willing to defend themselves.

Besides, RAW, Coup de Grace isn't quit an auto-kill, although it's pretty bad.

5E makes a lot more sense where a human Thug has 32 HP, a Veteran has 58 HP, a Knight has 52 HP, and a Gladiator has 112 HP. Even Nobles have 9 HP.
Basically, the people who have 4 HP are not trained for battle whatsoever; that's like fighting a seamstress or elderly scholar.
People who actually train for battle become beefy, fast.

I kinda wish less games would lead on this excuses and just take 'meat points' to their logical conclusion.

Just stay outright a level 20 fighter really could just shrug off an antitank round to the face and everything that implies. verisimilitude be damned.

>kobold
>pixie
>leprechaun

>all have a higher HP than a human commoner

This is why I completely abandon HP based damage and use it as a guide-line in my games to try and translate it into literal damage and injury.

That makes even less sense.

Training with a sword and shield somehow makes you able to be stabbed more than the average commoner?

>that explanation

Uh-huh....And uhhh, what about this right here?
youtube.com/watch?v=VzsfyxACV7M

Aquilles is such a piece of shit. If he wasn't best buddies with the DM and he allowed called shots I bet he wouldn't be so smug.

>commoner brought back from the brink of death to full with a weak healing spell
>same spell barely affects a high level warrior

Even if you don't equate D&D-style hit points to meat points, there's a lot of shit that breaks versimilitude. It's just one of those things you can't think very hard about.

Your setting doesn't have battle seamstresses?

There's Symbaroum, in which most humanoids (PCs and NPCs) are of the same scale of toughness, roughly 11-12 toughness on average from what I can tell. Armor can do a great deal, but armor is always a roll on a single dice (unless you've got helpful armor skills) so there's the possibility of saving only 1 damage from an attack. Given that a basic sword strike from an opponent is 4 damage, an unlucky armor save can eat a quarter of your toughness in a single strike. Healing magic is limited in scope, and its overuse causes corruption on the magic user, which you usually don't want on any character.

There's also Call of Cthulhu, where the weakest enemies, cultists, are on-par with PCs and everything else is mostly too powerful to be taken out by a small squad of even the most armed combatants humanity can muster.

Cure light wounds will have the exact same effect on a heavily wounded levelled fighter as a commoner. They both have the same amount 'Metanarrative protection'. It means the difference between dying and not dying.

That's same I do agree heals should scale. Just for the sake of playing.

But it's not an automatic kill, and that's what makes it a good rule. A level 1 peasant is never going to be able to kill a level 20 barbarian with a coup de grace.

>but it's not an automatic kill

"As a full-round action, you can use a melee weapon to deliver a coup de grace to a helpless opponent. You can also use a bow or crossbow, provided you are adjacent to the target. You automatically hit and score a critical hit. If the defender survives the damage, he must make a Fortitude save (DC 10 + damage dealt) or die."

That's not an automatic kill especially with a commoner doing it to a level 20 barbarian, like that user already pointed out.

so it's not an automatic kill, cool

Depends on the level of the character. If they're level 5 or less, I'd probably allow it, assuming the character failed a perception check to awaken and avoid it. If they're above level 5, you start treating the characters as outright superhuman. If you stabbed a level 20 Barbarian in the chest with a knife while he was sleeping, I would tell the would-be assassin that his knife crumpled up like a cartoon accordion against his abs.

>That makes even less sense.
>Training with a sword and shield somehow makes you able to be stabbed more than the average commoner?

HP IS AN ABSTRACTION

IT IS NOT THE LITERAL AMOUNT OF PHYSICAL HITS YOU TAKE BEFORE DYING

HP IS, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN, THE CUMULATIVE FACTOR OF ALL TRAITS A LIVING CREATURE USES TO AVOID DEATH, DEPLETING AS THE BATTLE GOES ON TO REPRESENT NOT ONLY PHYSICAL INJURY, BUT ALSO FATIGUE AND MENTAL STRESS.

A PERSON WHO LOSES HP HAS NOT NECESSARILY BEEN STRUCK DEAD ON WITH A SWORD. THEY HAVE SPRAINED THEIR ARM BLOCKING, TAKEN A GLANCING BLOW, LOST THEIR BREATH IN THE ACT OF PARRYING, OR OTHERWISE BEEN DISADVANTAGED IN A WAY THAT THEY WOULD NOT HAVE IF THEIR AC HAD NOT BEEN MET AND THE HIT NOT LANDED.

ONLY WHEN - AND LET ME REITERATE - ONLY WHEN A CHARACTER'S HP HITS ZERO HAVE THEY SUSTAINED A FATAL WOUND. ONLY WHEN THE HP HITS ZERO DOES THE PERSON ACTUALLY GET *STABBED,* INSTEAD OF CUT, BRUISED, FATIGUED, OR SCRAPED.

TRAINING WITH A SWORD AND SHIELD DOES NOT MAKE YOU ABLE TO BE STABBED MORE THAN A COMMONER

IT MAKES YOU ABLE TO SUSTAIN YOURSELF IN COMBAT LONGER BEFORE YOUR OPPONENT IS ABLE TO LAND A FATAL BLOW

HP

IS

AN

ABSTRACTION

WE HAVE BEEN EXPLAINING THIS SHIT TO YOU AND PEOPLE LIKE YOU, OVER AND OVER, FOR LITERAL FUCKING DECADES

HP

IS

AN

A B S T R A C T I O N

He's gonna be a pretty shitty scholar if he's low enough level that he only has 4hp.

This except I would add as corollary that a portion of HP is outright meat points, so yes, training with a sword does make high level characters physically more durable than the average man.

This is especially obvious with falls from a great height, and area effects. If you stand in the middle of a fireball spell, you got hit by a fireball. Rather than autistically trying to find obscure reasons every single time this happens for a knight to survive, its much easier to simply admit the knight is superhuman, and being dowsed once in dragonfire isn't going to kill him.

>but it's not an automatic kill

It technically is, since the character is "automatically dead" if they fail the fortitude save.

Why the hell would anyone ever think that "doing a coup de grace" would be a no-strings-attached instant success auto kill, or imply that OP thought it meant that?

>never going to kill a level 20 barbarian

If a peasant rolls a 24 with a long-spear on his crit (does 1d8x3 damage), he can make it so that the 20th level barbarian would be required to roll a 20 in order to success, since his Fort bonus is on +12 at level 20.

Dumbass.

Cool.

Capslock is cruise control for cool.

>are you the same guy who bitches about people not taking "bleed damage" after getting stabbed or bitching about why your firebolt doesn't set someone on fire for fire damage x per turn?
But some games do have exactly these rules, those aren't unreasonable requests at all. Jesus christ stop playing so much fucking D&D, there are other systems out there.

>stop playing so much D&D

But why? A good DM would understand that the rules are meant to be bent, broken, abstracted, or enhanced based on the basic DM Guide teachings, and add such things in the first place.

If they manage to sneak up to the sleeping person, weapon ready - then yeah, of course.

What a crazy guess, I wonder how you figured it out. If only people used clear file names.

You are a retard, as expected of a tripfag

You don't know what 'technically' means.

A level 20 Barbarian is not going to have Con 10, and I guarantee you he's going to be wearing magical gear that improves his save (which he would wear to bed, don't pretend to be even more retarded than you are). A +24 total Fort save is far more likely.

A smart man would have used a scythe in their example. 32 damage for a DC of 42 would be a lot more likely to kill him.

But it still isn't an automatic kill.

Coc is probably the only game where your hit points pretty much translate one to one to meat points.

Unless you have some sort of mystic protection, you're about as likely to survive as real life, and don't even bother to ask about getting those points back in this session.

Hmm, I totally forgot the damage is this added to the difficulty check.

Hell I forgot about the fort save to be honest.

Personally speaking I'm dead against save or dies. You shouldn't be able to just 'skip' the payer's hit points. There needs to be some sort of damage roll even if there's no way they can survive it.

Even if you don't care about trying to seem fair any time you introduce an instant death situation in the game some crafty player is going to find a way to use it against you. Just look at the magic crown in tomb of horrors.

That guy is right.

>IT MAKES YOU ABLE TO SUSTAIN YOURSELF IN COMBAT LONGER BEFORE YOUR OPPONENT IS ABLE TO LAND A FATAL BLOW
Isn't that what your weapon skills and traits and every aspect of the character are supposed to represent?

Could most of this be solved by giving HP a subcategory like "Mortality Points", which counts toward HP total and decreases at a ratio of "(level-1)dmg:1MHP", but can be GM specified damage taken that would affect anyone pretty equally such as falling from a great height, getting Nearly-Headless Nick'd, or having a god damn meteor fall on you? Could we just use the Constitution or other equivalent stat as this HP?
You conveniently left out the Barbarian's Con modifier, the peasant's relevant attacking stat mod which could easily be either a positive, negative, or neither, and the fact that the peasant conveniently rolls max damage. If he gets a piddly 2x3 that's a mere 16 DC to someone with a base +12 to save, not counting relevant mods. If the bastard is optimized to even 16 Con then he's golden, not even considering whatever magic items a level 20 Barbarian would have.

Naw, it's literal.
>but the fighter is more skilled at dodging blows
Characters take the same amount of damage from a hit that lands whether they were defending against an attack or even unconscious. In 3.5 a 20th level fighter WITH NO MAGIC who rolled at least average on all his HD and has a 14 CON can survive a fall from any height (if you include massive damage rules he live 19/20 times). The max damage isn't enough to kill him. He can fall from the upper atmosphere and walk it off. How does that mesh with your worldview that characters aren't getting more physically resilient as they level up?

>Could most of this be solved by giving HP a subcategory like "Mortality Points",
swd20 does this
you get two types of health - 'vitality points' and 'wound points'
your vitality points are rolled with hitdice like normal character health, and are more or less your character's plot armour
wound points start out directly equal to your CON score and can only be improved by improving your CON or through special means

it's pretty interesting, and there's some neat interactions with the system in stuff like force powers - which require you to use up vitality points to cast spells, making you weaker - and crits letting you bypass vitality entirely and strike directly at somebody's wounds.

>every aspect
yes
which conveniently includes HP, user

unfortunately D&D doesn't seem to let you represent this very well, although i expect there's feats similar to combat expertise in some editions of D&D (a swd20 feat that lets you take a penalty to your attack up to your BAB and add that directly to your DC until your next turn, representing more careful, defensive fighting)

systems like GURPS handle character skill in combat better, with stuff like defenses based directly on your weapon skill

I can't believe I'm letting myself get pulled in...

In DND you don't get harder to hit as you level: I'm sure you'd agree a matter swordsman is harder to hit than a novice.

This is part of the HP abstraction. Those extra HP represent that extra level of defense. The longer you dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge the harder it becomes.

Is it a perfect abstraction? No. There are plenty of cromulent complaints about the system. This isn't one of them.

Because a level 20 fighter is supposed to represent a superhuman demigod ala Hercules, not your average joe. HP is still an abstraction, but you have to take into account how mythically powerful your PCs are going to become over the course of the campaign.

There is such a thing as terminal velocity. Height doesn't matter once you reach that, and such falls are survivable even to people in real life.

I've run swashbuckling style games using wounds and vitality. It's awesome for low magic settings, making out of combat healing a breeze so the adventure doesn't drag.

The problem you start running into is when everyone starts going full crit boat and combat turns into whomever rolls a 12 first wins

Because others systems can be good too. Even better.
A good driver can use a shitty car with no problem and adapt, but he would be even better with a good car.

Except that his HP pool doesn't get smaller when he's unconscious or not actively defending himself so that doesn't make sense. It's just physical toughness. There's literally no reason in the rules to think otherwise. The spell that restores HP is called "cure light wounds". There's no reason to argue otherwise than
>muh realism
>it wouldn't make sense

>add that directly to your DC until your next turn
fug, meant AC
DC is a different thing entirely, and speaking of;

>DND you don't get harder to hit as you level:
i was about to contradict that, but it seems like you're largely right
while in swd20 each class gets a 'defense bonus' that adds to their AC, this doesn't seem to be the case in 3.pf
not sure about further editions of D&D

yeah that's the big problem with that crit rule
personally i'd see if i could tweak it a little, if not change it entirely

[citation needed]

Not 19/20 times. He's just plain tougher than normal humans. Or are you suggesting that a master swordsman is many multiple of degrees better at surviving falls at terminal velocity than the average soldier? He's just more skilled? Does he tuck an roll when he creates a crater in the ground?

And when you're struck with a poisoned weapon, you're poisoned. But it's an abstraction alright, you dodged the blow or some shit and the poison spilled into your mouth.

I prefer system with less abstraction and more lethal blows myself, but I can get that some people don't like that

>And when you're struck with a poisoned weapon, you're poisoned. But it's an abstraction alright, you dodged the blow or some shit and the poison spilled into your mouth.

You're making ridiculous allowances for their viewpoint to work. It's literal. Everything in the rules supports this. It's just headcanon to think otherwise.

I'm glad someone remembered. It's also hugely depended on size, weight and wind factors despite what primary school taught you.

When you're poisoned or bleeding, you take HP damage. It screams meat point for me.
When you're in fire because of some spell, or you take continuous damage because of some spell, it screams meat point aswell. Especially when the definition is "your target is on fire"

You can say it's an abstraction, the system can say it's an abstraction, but it sure doesn't seems like one, that's why so many people complains about "meat point"

Maybe you got a shallow cut from the blade. That happens a lot in fights.

Wasn't it like that in 2nd edition AD&D? Been a while but pretty sure it was.

I'm fine with it.

>And he would still need MAGIC to totally-not-heal him after getting near-missed over and over.

Actually, the Warlord was a corebook class that defied that. He got people fired up and inspired to get them back and fighting.

Nothing in the rules supports it being anything other than meat points. You can make half-baked justifications for your headcanon all day long but it won't change facts.

4e did a good job of fixing that with Surges. So a healing ability almost always restores 1/4 of your max HP (Plus a little bit depending on the exact healer)

Well, we're on the same point
My ridiculous allowances was ironic, hard to convey on text

So, as long as you have a weapon who can do damage over time, you make shallow cut every fucking time
But if you don't, then opponent dodge the blow and it's really tiring

Come on

Gotcha. My apologies, I'm drunkposting.

There's also Burning Wheel, when when you take damage you take a wound, and depending of the damage you did, it can just a graze or a brutal disembowelment.
If you want to survive, you have to get some armour or a shield to deflect blows

where when*

Have you ever watched or participated in a swordfight? The vast majority of sword swings made aren't serious, commited deathblows. Most swings are made to keep your opponent at bay, provide security while moving between guards, or to take a quick cut at an exposed limb or other target of opportunity.

That's not to say that D&D is realistic by any stretch, but still.

Have you ever watched or participated in a real swordfight with actual swords?
If you're unarmored, the shallow cut won't be so shallow.

And you're not even arguing with my points.
Why when you have a poisoned weapon you can make a shallow cut everytime and that's not the case when you don't?
Because they are meat points.

>Why when you have a poisoned weapon you can make a shallow cut everytime and that's not the case when you don't?

What's saying the unpoisoned weapon isn't making shallow cuts also? The poison does not affect the amount of slashing damage the sword does.

So that's meat points.
You're making shallow cuts until your opponnent has just the right amount of HP so you can hit him with a real blow.

This is fucking stupid

Oddly enough, LOTW covers this exact situation with it's system.

If you have a poisoned weapon you make an attack with the weapon and an attack with the poison separately.

If you get the weapon through but not the poison? You likely didn't get enough poison in the wound or you gave him a nasty impact, not a cut.

If the poison gets through but not the weapon? The actual cut itself was negligible or you flicked poison from the blade into an existing wound or such.

But then, all hits in LOTW are negligible stress and tiny wounds until you get hard enough to make injury rolls.

I'm just here for the sake of arguing, to be honest.

But consider: A commoner and a soldier have roughly the same amount of meat, but different HP.
The soldier is better at rolling with blows and fighting through the pain of shallow cuts. Both can and will still die to a good hit, but the soldier tends to take a bit of effort to wear out or set off balance.

depends on the character. Magicguy or carpet wearing floozie? Instakill.

High level martial character or monstroes PC, heavily injured but allowed to survive the initial blow.

>A commoner and a soldier have roughly the same amount of meat, but different HP.

In the D&D universe the more experienced you are the tougher your meat is. It's a little bit silly but that's how all the rules portray it. The abstraction argument is just people trying to fit a square peg in a round hole because they don't like how the round peg looks.

Call it half and half. While it's entirely thematically appropriate for the party barbarian to walk out of a fight with two dozen arrows and three spears stuck in them, the fighter probably took the same amount of damage in the form of bruises, pinpricks from stabs that almost got their joints, and pommels to the helmet.

Dnd characters past like level 5 perform feats way beyond any real human, level 20s are literal demigods hence their ability to perform superhuman feats like I don't know, surviving a terminal velocity fall.

"Hit points are a combination of actual physical constitution, skill at the avoidance of taking real physical damage, luck and/or magical or divine factors. Ten points of damage dealt to a rhino indicates a considerable wound, while the same damage sustained by the 8th-level fighter indicates a near-miss, a slight wound, and a bit of luck used up, a bit of fatigue piling up against his or her skill at avoiding the fatal cut or thrust. So even when a hit is scored in melee combat, it is more often than not a grazing blow, a mere light wound which would have been fatal (or nearly so) to a lesser mortal. If sufficient numbers of such wounds accrue to the character, however, stamina, skill, and luck will eventually run out, and an attack will strike home..."

-Gygax

>Gygax
>relevant
But fine, if I must address it... so what? The books say similar things. The point is that everything in the rules blatantly contradict that. That's what we've been talking about. There may be a paragraph describing it as metanarrative plot armour but the rules always portray it as meat points.

>If they manage to sneak up to the sleeping person
This. If they are stealthy enough and the character is unaware enough, and no one is on guard, or whoever is on guard missed the assailant, then its perfectly realistic to kill someone in their sleep.

Yes, the barbarian's meat will be, on average, 1 point tougher per level than the fighter's.

How about you actually read the rules? It's fort save vs death, with the damage inflicted by the coup de grace added directly to the DC.

>Damn, I have almost been hit by that giant thrice. Time to drink that LUCK potion again to replenish my hit points.

All of this is just blatant rationalization of a blatant gamist device: hit point bloat. It's a mechanic that makes you feel strong and powerful. Large hit points, such as in D&D, are about gamism, nothing more. Anybody who claims otherwise is not being honest with himself.

>the metaphysical peak of 95 hit points
>le cringe

Almost all systems do it this way.

D&D is just retarded with it's HP system.