HP in Lore

Does your setting's lore and mechanics intertwine Veeky Forums ? Can a legendary hero take getting blasted several times with fireballs and bullets? Can they survive having their throat slit in game and lore?

Should gameplay and background mix? Or should they be distinctly separate?

I feel a story where an obviously high level warrior gets killed from being shot in the chest once in the midst of battle breaks the illusion, especially if it can't happen in the game.

Sort of? Hit points are abstract in my games. They are "meat points" when convenient for them to be so, and "luck/near miss points" when convenient for them to be otherwise. Generally I just let the players decide what they are, or personally decide what they are for my character.

I operate under the strict rule that no human being has ever ascended past level 5 in the real world, no matter how accomplished they seem to be to us. Alexander the Great, Einstein, Napoleon, Charles Atlas, Mike from Accounting, all of them were no higher than 5th level at most. The vast majority of people in the real world never even make it to 2nd level, in fact.

Everything past that enters the domain of superheroes and legends. It wouldn't be hard for me to find stories about heroes who survived unlikely wounds relatively easily.

What it ultimately boils down to is that, yes, my 20th level character really can survive a 10,000-foot fall onto hard concrete with nothing to block or slow down his fall. It'll hurt like a motherfucker, but as long as he has 1 hit point, he'll be able to stand. He's that badass, and it's that kind of game, all the time, every time.

I like to think of HP as a very very abstract thing. It makes sense so that when fighting an archer, a warrior doesn't end with like, 14 arrows sticking from his back (if that's your thing is fine, i don't like it personally).

I usually think of Samurai Jack. Whenever a fight was tough, his hair would end up breaking free and getting loose. When it was really tough, he'd end up shirtless. Not necessarily wounded, shot, with arrows hanging out of him. When I think of it, i think that loosening his hair is what happens when he's down a two two thirds of his HP. Losing shirt is maybe half?

I use HP like that. It 'includes' wounds but isn't limited to it.

A knight with 60 HP takes a 10 damage hit? I say the sword/mace/bolt struck armor and the impact knocks him off his stance. it really hurts, maybe a bruise underneath, maybe he just lose airs for a moment, but he is still standing.

Same guy takes 50 damage a single hit? Yeah, okay, now it seems like he has an ugly gash across his arm, or an arrow sticking to his back. Maybe his helmet flew off for dramatic effect, or his armor is partially broken and pieces have fallen off.

If we talking about unarmored character, it's mostly torn clothing, grazing hits and close dodges that slowly wears them down.

The killing blow is always killing though. So if you had 1 HP, and someone did a mere 1 damage, they struck a vital.

HP has no 'in lore' justification. It's just a measure that an outside entity has of how close of losing the fight someone is.

Playing GURPS fantasy, even experienced or highly competent/legendary warriors can have bad moments on a failed defense (though at the 'legendary' level they will usually have some level of Luck, possibly with some other risk-mitigation methods). An arrow in the eye is an arrow in the eye at the end of the day, so the lore and mechanics match pretty exactly most of the time. Lends some weight to run-ins with dragons, that's for sure.

seconding this; GURPS is great for verisimilitude

I'm DMing a campaign with extremely high lethality for my friends. In TDE, our system, there's rules for when a character is 'wounded', which translates to taking a long lasting, possibly infectious and maybe even crippling injury which takes at least two in-game weeks to heal.

The first character of one of my players onĀ“ce got a dagger through his dwarven face, in one cheek and out the other. Rendered him unable to talk for the rest of that chars life IC and just last session that player's new char got a deep gash cut horizontally right across his face once more. Similar fate, we'll see how they hanlde it next session.

In summary, HP is enormously important in our group, as characters can - theoretically - die every fight.

I wouldn't want it any other way

We've got a homebrew system that uses RP (Restoration Potential) instead of HP. In the setting everyone uses magic, warriors just usually use it in more brute force ways. Essentially it represents how much damage can be rapidly or instantly healed (depending on level) before beginning to take permanent damage to your fleshy bits. Once you burn through your RP you'll die about as fast as you would in real life, and will receive wound penalties assuming a blow doesn't down you instantly.

Post rule pdf plz

It occurred to me that I didn't really answer all of your questions OP.

Yes, my setting's lore and mechanics are very closely related. The mechanics of our system was based on the lore.

Powerful heroes can take a tremendous amount of damage before falling, at high enough levels they could even come back from total bodily annihilation once or twice.

Gameplay and setting can mix if you want, and I could argue that at least a little mixing is almost required. However I believe that the mechanics of the system are important, and ensuring that they work well should take precedence over being totally lore-friendly.

We settled on RP because our group disliked how ethereal HP was. It can be interpreted so many ways, but ultimately is just a gauge that exists to determine the victor of battle. RP is lore-friendly and firmly grounded in the setting, which makes it play a role in the world. - Something you never see HP do.

Seconding this. I'd love to see your system, regardless of level of polish.

Only in theoretical handwavey land

>Ultimate demon was defeated by making an item that deals 1 radiant damage to everything within 500 feet, and grants resistance to radiant damage
>They made 10,000 of these
>10,000 procs of 1 damage reduced to 0
>Demon army died real fast
>Only 11 knights survived the battle

inb4 min damage of 1

Playing Only War.
I consider every hit a critic.
My players even stopped caring about wounds in battle. If they're hit, they die.

People die fast and die hard. I like to go for >MUH REALISM in a lot of my games, so when someone gets whacked in the face with a mace, it's usually followed by lots of stumbling and lots of searching for their missing eye and ear.

You can kill a big guy for you by simply sliding your knife across his throat, but even a level 1 peasant can fuck you up by just jabbing at you with his pitchfork while you're unarmored or distracted.

Characters used to look at me in disbelief when they'd try to "tank" a punch to the face and end up knocked out on the ground. Now they know not to play stupid games, or they'll win stupid prizes.

>Characters used to look at me in disbelief when they'd try to "tank" a punch to the face and end up knocked out on the ground. Now they know not to play stupid games, or they'll win stupid prizes.
Giving everyone a glass jaw is NOT the same thing as realism, user. If you want to play the "you're always in danger of dying" game throw in some exploding crits or some shit, don't replace everyone's meat with paper mache.

HP only really make sense as meat points. It's literally in the name.
HIT points. How many POINTS of being HIT you can take. If you don't want ridiculous bullshit, play a system that doesn't cater to it.

>Characters used to look at me in disbelief when they'd try to "tank" a punch to the face and end up knocked out on the ground. Now they know not to play stupid games, or they'll win stupid prizes.
But people can do that. I assume they were big badass adventures and not a bunch of high schoolers? Seriously I'm with There's a big difference between "realistic threat of death" and "you are a group of small children" .

Remember, it's not simulation, it's >MUH REELISM.

In-universe HP is a rough estimation of an individuals magic-based healing factor/regenerative capabilities.

Why not just play 40k tabletop?

For my game, there's more descriptor than concrete unit of health at work.

It's more like you're sucking on a bunch of status effects until you're just too shit to do combat. In general, it works. You're out when it makes sense narratively.

>HP only really make sense as meat points

But if the item granted resistance to radiant damage, how did 9989 of the knights die? Getting within 500ft of the army should've obliterated any demon.

plot armor, you get to 0 you're wounded.

this is about the only way to really describe the effects of getting shot by, well anything. anything from an arrow to a spear to a bolter round will fuck you up a hell of a lot worse than losing 7 hp.

i should add, don't try to rp the hp. just tell em to write down x dmg because they narrowly missed chewing on an arrow.

Guy you replied to.

I'm decently Veeky Forums. I can bench about 180% my bodyweight for reps, and I may not be a Big Guy for You as far as looking like Arnold goes, but trust me when I say this, but even Big Guys for You can get knocked out easily with just a solid punch to the jaw.

I've, first hand, been knocked out by a little shit when I wasn't expecting it, and according to witness testimony, he only did it with one sucker punch. And "getting knocked the fuck out" doesn't literally mean blacking out for several hours until you wake up, strapped to a chair in a dirty basement. Usually, getting knocked out just means you writhe around on the ground for a few seconds and get back on your feet holding your head in pain.

You're envisioning getting "knocked out" like how they "black out" in the movies. But in my world, and in my games, getting knocked out is just...getting knocked out.

So "yes". Getting suckerpunched in the jaw and getting a mild concussion IS >muh realism.

depends on the little shit, I've seen an old lady knock out a grown man in his prime (she's a hard ass) and I've been hit by some loser kid (grade 12) who thinks he knows martial arts, where the only remarkable thing about the punch was how much it didn't hurt, though I doubt I could take a single full on punch from a real boxer. I've seen drunks get knocked flat on the ground from a single punch and another drunk tank punches to the head and retaliated with a powerful headbutt

If the toughest guy in the party can't take a punch then it's not realistic... unless the puncher is actually good at punching, of course.

I'm sorry, but I only have the german version for it, since it's a german game. It'll come out (maybe it already is out?) soon in english though.

But just to warn you, the combat isn't particularly good or exciting, it's just that our group is playing with the premise of their Characters being just some guys in that setting. Which means no plot armor or dice fudging. The players should(deliberately saying 'should', since up until now it was basically just "I move in for the attack" without much tactics or whatever) act intelligently and be smart about when and who to fight.

If they decide to bite off more that they can chew, they'll suffocate.

Oh, and I just noticed that you probably misunderstood me when I said

>In TDE, our system, there's rules for when a character is 'wounded'

That literally just means that you have a CON stat and depending on the hit point damage a Char takes and that CON stat the character receives a wound. Wherever the wounding blow landed, I as the DM describe what happens to their characters and what kind of injury they take(torso -> broken ribs, head(no killing blow) -> fucked up face etc.).

It's a good amount of house-ruling built upon a relatively solid foundation.