What exactly is "hit points"?

It's an abstraction representing combination of stamina, superficial and flesh wounds and luck.

>b-but
When clerics heal HP they restore stamina and close wounds and cuts.
When warlord (shut up) heals HP he restores your heroic willpower
When you heal HP by weird and mystical means it's luck.

>taking an hour break heaps open wounds

In GURPS they are literally meat points. You have HP equal to your Strength. In certain situations, you use your HP to figure how much damage you do (as for a slam) or take (as for a fall).

There's a second "HP" that you can purchase in the form of Ablative Damage Resistance, where 1 damage taken is 1 Ablative DR gone, which will "heal" at the rate of normal HP. One could use this to justify a huge HP pool that doesn't come from mass, but from external sources (magic, superpowers, heroic prowess, etc.)

The abstraction in d&d, specifically d&d and it's tripe. There are good hp systems out there. REQUIRE the gm to properly complete the fucked and inconsistent abstraction.

Lvl 10 swats arrow away/barely gets grazed (regardless of the roll to hit him) or otherwise get's plot armor to make the arrow not actually do what the dice and combat system says that it absolutely does.

But then why do healing spells heal hit points?

Because, as you note from the description, the high level fighter still takes Some damage- But they're just nicks and scratches. The healing spell heals those, as its most obvious effect, while also restoring stamina and vigor, undoing the attrition of the battle and letting you fight at full strength for longer.

I agree that healing spells are badly named, though.

Have you heard of a concept called "effective hit points"? It's a concept used in video games with same reduction mechanics: if you have 50 hp but only take half damage, you could say you have 100 ehp.

Less and more skilled characters both have the same amount of physical resistance, and it is those wounds that are healed through magic; the inflated numbers of a higher level character is just a measure of how much further that same amount of health gets them when they're significantly better at dodging blows and mitigating damage. Hp is always a measure of health, but it is a measure that is multiplied by ability to reduce damage.

If only the game had several other mechanics within it that fit what you've described much better without nearly as much ass pulling.
If only.

Honestly dnd just works better is you just say meat points. Stop beating around the bush. Ya the lvl 1 gets fucked because he is a scrub but the lvl 10 has 7 arrows in him and keeps going. Healing flesh wounds over night? Your magicly powerfull and heal faster then most. Get hit with a greatsword? Srug it off and laugh then punch that faggot to death.

Are you too retarded to get it or something?

Except that contradicts what the system tells you?

One is stronger.

Only the description the entier game plays like that.

It's a fucking metacurrency, spent for combat purposes. It's always been a metacurrency.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

What an insight. I now see that no amount of forensic search will find even 1 hp in a human body.

Thank you again, master.

The immense amount of autism involved into justifying increasing HP with level by any means necessary
BRP > D&D every edition and every derived game

Only if you make it do so? Sure, some specific rules in places are inconsistent, but abstract HP is just as consistent, and a lot more reasonable, than meat points.

>A simple, clearly laid out and easy to understand abstraction
>autism

>A game in a different genre is arbitrarily better.

Didn't your media studies degree prepare you better?

Yes autism. Non-autism would be the entire wall of text in just reading something on the lines of
>we stack up HP with level so that you can face more bigger monsters at higher levels, and that's all there's to it, it's just a points system in a game"

> game in different genre
Both D&D and BRP are simulationist RPGs from the late 70s/early 80s (before you were born) set in a fantasy world. What different genres are you talking about?

>Barbarians ist the luckiest class.
>Costitution is actually luck
>bandages keep holes in your body from luck pouring out.

user, it is none of those things. If it was we wouldn't have this thread every other week, and even if we did it wouldn't be so vitriolic. I get it, it's easier to just say everyone else is retarded, d&d is perfect just the way it is, they just don't get it. But that's a really weird focus of pretension user, you really should get other hobbies.

>user, it is none of those thing
It is autism though
Reading is like reading something CRC wrote

I meant CWC.

>DnD
>simulationist
user, I...

Its like you take a hit and how much you feel it, was my opinion.

Am I the only person that doesn't mind D&D hit point mechanics and has always just taken them at face value. It's a fantasy game, meat points are fine.

>What exactly is "hit points"?

Plot armor. Some characters last longer when exposed to life threatening situations than others.

usually, the characters that hew closer to "big tough guy" are less threatened than those who more closely resemble "little weakling" but you also have to factor in the popularity/longevity/role of the character.

If we're in a situation where a professional warrior that is a douchebag with no name that nobody likes comes up against the plucky little kid whose story we've been following for weeks, and both of them get shot at with a hundred crossbow bolts, the latter is more likely to survive than the former.

HP allow characters that normally wouldn't be able to survive the improbably high number of lethal situations fantasy stories put upon people to actually survive. It's plot armor.

Ah no, not in that way.

Its funny how people always tend to think of HP as your literal health points, forgetting how the system actually works. has the gist of how the system effectively works. The true measure of a character's health however is commonly overlooked due to sometimes poor implementation of damage rules, but more often due to DMs not feeling like throwing monsters that can actually damage a character's true health: their Constitution score.

The Con score contributes HP (with the rest coming from combat ability via level mechanics), is used when dealing with fatigue and stamina, adds to Fortitude rolls to resist poisons and diseases, and a few other things I don't feel like looking up. Guess what the point range is for both PCs and NPCs Con scores? About 8 to 18, unless barbarian. Guess how much a vampire deals to Con damage when it drinks blood? 1d4 per round, that's death for PCs in just under a minute (10 rounds) on average. Less than 30 seconds (4 rounds) in universe if they get unlucky.

There are also plenty of other monsters and diseases and poisons that attack your ability scores outright, some even magical and hard to resist.
And there are very few spells that restore ability damage, with them only coming into play when characters get near 10th level, and pretty much all of them being divine.

I always considered HP something like a character's tolerance to pain and their stamina. So a medic kit would have drugs to let off pain, and bandages to suture wounds. Or a healer just brings a second wind to a character, reducing their exhaustion or reduce how much pain they are in.

Person A has 5 HP, they get hit with an arrow for 7 damage. They are past their pain threshold and faint, and they are dying because their body is damaged and bleeding out.

Person B is hit with the same arrow, but they have 10 HP. They are still standing because their higher threshold to pain and their body being more resilient to shutting down in this situation.

Just like most things in D&D, it works well if you don't think much about it. D&D/PF is the capeshit of roleplaying, which means
>plot armor (HP) and retarded imbalance are just accepted as part of the status quo
>everyone uses the popular versions no matter what quality it's written at
>the movies generally suck
>there are a group of 'true fans' who hate everyone else and act as gatekeepers
>a few of the vidya are actually pretty damn good
>people rip each other and pop culture off like they're at a convention
>two main rival companies that have superficial design differences, but their fans are constantly at each other's throats
>since they're the main publishers most people with different ideas are prevented from major entry
>fanboyism and nostalgiafaggotry prevents certain major improvements from taking effect
>current changes are specifically appealing to possible new audiences, causing a break between oldfags and newfags
>nobody pumps the goddamn tires, so shut the fuck up about it or go elsewhere

Oh, right, and
>certain writers abuse their position to turn published material into a sociopolitical soapbox

I get it, but that WAS his answer and it WAS ex post facto.

Here's my take: HP represents ability to not get hit, general endurance, and luck. The way I run my 5e games, everyone fights as normal until reduced to 0HP and then bad things start happening. For your example

>Level 1 takes an arrow

An arrow takes you in the gut, and you fall down, gasping. You now have a high chance of fainting and bleeding out.

>Level 10 takes an arrow

Any number of things. Twitching aside at the last second. Taking the hit on the armor. Desperately throwing a shield up and catching it. Basically anything that would make an action hero go, "That was too close, man."

Eventually, however, the level 10 gets worn down. Their reflexes numb, their breath is short, and their weapons feel like lead. At some point, they will hit 6 HP, take that arrow for 8, and fall.

4e heals are actually (almost all, there are a few minor heals that aren't) proportional to your HP, so they always heal you about the same amount (1/4th your HP or so). Which means you never get to the point where a cure wounds at level 1 gets you back from the brink of death into top fighting shape, while at level 20 it barely heals a scratch.

It goes all the way through the LV1 character but only penetrates about half an inch into the LV10 character's muscles.

>4e

kys dumb grognard

Isn't it wonderful that any time anyone has a problem with D&D, there's an about 80% chance you can point to 4e and say "hey, they actually fixed this!".

Low level types succumb to the pain earlier on. High level types are the sort who die standing up.
They have the same amoumt of meat, but at higher levels you're likely to lose more. Hence slower full healing.

Level 10 PC is a demigod and not a normal human. If you don't want to play as demigods then don't play level 10.

>So a medic kit would have drugs to let off pain, and bandages to suture wounds. Or a healer just brings a second wind to a character, reducing their exhaustion or reduce how much pain they are in.
Kind of like adrenaline syringes in modern shooters, huh?

In Farcry 2 you could pull bits of landmine out of your stomach and so long as you had morphine you were fine. It's dumb but I like that kind of thing.

My own issues with say D&D (well 3.5/Shitfinder more specifically) was the need to give 'background' characters like peasants and experts scaling hit points. Like abstractions of heroic deflections or turning deep wounds into scratches work okay if normal people don't get this power from tilling a lot of land or weaving a fuck ton of baskets.

>But then why do healing spells heal hit points?

Because they restore plot armor, which in most stories usually involves some explanation as to why the hero hasn't just keeled over yet/suffered a grievous injury despite all the shit they're going through.

A comedic interlude, a character exploring downtime, being revitalized by magic, getting a heroic speech, etc. All of them make let us accept why someone who just went through enough shit to make any decent person say "fuck it" keep on going.

A unified measure of ability not to die when being hit, be it via toughness, luck or sheer willpower If you read into games besides DnD then it's also ability not to receive impeding injuries.

>hey, they actually fixed this!
You mean cut it out or replaced it with a diffrent system. 4e didnt tank because it was a "fixed" 2e or 3e

>comparing 4e to D&D of any edition
Sorry, you're confused. 4e was it's own game entirely and has no relation to any D&D game.

>i-it doesn't feel like d&d!!
Typical grognard non-arguments.

4e absolutely was an attempt at a fixed 3e. Read the design interviews if you feel like it, they break down identifying and fixing a bunch of specific problems.

It had nothing to do with 2nd edition stuff, mostly because WotC D&D has nothing to do with that in general short of inheriting the name and a few sacred cows.

IMO, it still does have a little to do with OD&D/BECMI stuff beyond the superficials in design philosophy at least.

Not saying you are not allowed to dislike it or anything, but please don't spread lies about it.

For this I point to the old ‘Calibrate your expectations’ essay for 3.5. Anyone past 5th level is effectively a superhero with abilities well beyond a common man. 10h level is on the road to 20th level demigodhood, the stuff of legend.

So yes, you’re better than a 1st level scrub who dies from an arrow.

this is how I run D&D:

replace HP with Vitality & Wounds (or just call it HP & WP)
one is stamina, near-misses, pain, fatigue, stress and goes up as you level
the other is meat points and doesn't change very much after character creation.
crits and certain special effects go straight to meat points.

HP is a form of armor, not health.

>HP is a form of armor, not health.

I always thought Armor should add some HP too. Something like X per level depending on the type/quality of the armor.

I prefer Armor not giving a bonus against being hit (evasion), but as Damage Conversion. Armor converts Lethal Damage to Nonlethal, and Nonlethal is ignored.
this works with

YOU LOT 'RE ALL JUST A BUNCH A SQUEELIN' GROTS.

AIN'T NUFFIN' WRONG WIT 'AVING DA KILLIEST BOYZ BE BIGGER AND 'ARDER DEN DA NEW GITZ

If HP is luck, fatigue, "close call" points, or whatever, then why the fuck do fighters not deal more damage at higher levels automatically? Why do I need more STR or a bigger more flaming sword to deal more close calls? Shouldn't my fighter's skill and experience let them deal more telling blows a.k.a. drain HP faster?

Maybe all of those are merely abstractions too.

Strength? Simply an abstraction of how well you've learned to apply natural body mechanics.

A combination of stamina, luck, and wound recieving ability. Typically damage is dealt to those things in order, with lines blurring as you get closer to certain intervals.

bad game design

/thread

So the high level fighter has a less-serious wound than the low level fighter, but a healing spell which restores exactly enough HP to fix one will also fix the other. So if a pair of fighters, one high and one low, had the same wound, we'd assume that that they'd lost the same % of their health. However, the same healing spell would fix more for the low level fighter than the high level fighter.

Are healing spells apparently less effective on higher level characters? Cure Light Wounds can heal a potentially fatal wound for a 1st level character, but will do bupkis to a higher level one.

If you're a priest and are rushed to the side of an injured man, how do you know what Cure spell to cast, without using an effect that tells you an exact HP number (which is a bit immersion-breaking)? How do you know if that cut is them being down one Cure Light Wounds or being down one Cure Critical Wounds?

Fluff them as meat points. Your character are growing to become demigods, allow them to be supernaturally tough. It helps with the feeling of the setting and allows a natural kind of feats to be born. Your level 18 character doesn't need a rule to say how he can survive falling damage or not drown even when being trapped underwater, he just has so much hit points that he can survive it.

Armor should absolutely be HP and they should remove saves in favor for skill DCs so that you are always rolling to a target number and then your armor helps for the HP damage.

A lvl 1 PC has 6HP and a Lvl 10 has 100HP. Both PCs get hit with a arrow for 8. How do you explain this?
They both got hit by the arrow. The 1st level guy got hit through the chest and is now on the ground, bleeding out. The 2nd got got skewered through the side of his arm or leg, and while painful and bleeding, it's just a flesh wound. Why? Because the higher level guy is better trained, physically tougher, less hesitant, has better muscle memory, luck/divine protection/magic protection/what have you.

This is exactly how it works. HP is not "fighting spirit" where you haven't even got hit yet, and neither is it pure meat points where the lvl 10 guy gets hit in the same spot but the arrow barely penetrates.

>then why the fuck do fighters not deal more damage at higher levels automatically?

They do in 4th edition.

>>Why do I need more STR or a bigger more flaming sword to deal more close calls? Shouldn't my fighter's skill and experience let them deal more telling blows a.k.a. drain HP faster?

In other editions, most of a Fighter's increased damage comes from the feats/weapon focus options they take and extra attacks. You need to be higher level to get more and more of those.

So in the end, Fighters do deal more damage/.

>The 2nd got got skewered through the side of his arm or leg, and while painful and bleeding, it's just a flesh wound.

So eventually he becomes a pin cushion?

>Having hit points
>Not just doing it the dorf fort way where you roll for damage to bones, nerves and ligaments

if my character is a superhuman or supernatural somehow (ex: fighter with supernatural ancestry) HP is meat points because I think that's cool.

If my character is more grounded in realism, HP represents skill at arms or some other ability to resist harm, because I think its cool.

HP is vague for a reason. Anything else is autism

Why do you all insist on playing games with "levels" and "hitpoints"? Play something superior, games that track how serious a wound on your body is. It is way better narratively and actually makes sense. We have grown beyond the 70s, but you all still hold onto the past.

he chose to fight in the shade

but yeah, basically
a better archer could land better hits

See? Autism.

>non-autism would be ignoring actual roleplaying and just playing hack&slash video games

Please leave.

Have fun still trying to rationalize hit points after 40 years.

I've been thinking of a way to incorporate hit points into a fantasy setting that makes sense. Keep in mind that this solution makes even normal people pretty fantastical, but I figure that's alright.
It goes as follows:
Souls are real, and in fact conduits to the elemental plane of positive energy. Your soul holds your meat body together, either regenerating your wounds or just preventing you from dying. But it has a limit to how much it can do, hence hit points. The more powerful the soul, the better it is at holding your body together, and the more hit points you have. As you face tougher challenges and gain experience, your soul grows more powerful.
Having a tougher body (more constitution) also helps.
When you rest, your soul regains energy from the plane of positive energy and regenerates your body (hit die on short rest and full hit points on long rest)
Healing magic strengthens the conduit to the plane of positive energy for a short time, regenerating your wounds.

Undead meanwhile have a sort of anti-soul, a conduit to the elemental plane of negative energy that keeps the body moving in a mockery of life. Hence normal healing magic does not work on undead.

If you don't want resurrection magic to ruin a lot of plots, but still want it for players, you could work it in by suggesting that some individuals have special souls marked for greatness by the Gods or Fate. These souls may come back from the dead via magic rituals. Those special individuals end up as adventurers, great heroes or villains, either because Fate drives them towards greatness or just because it is relatively less risky for them.

If feel like this method helps explain a lot of d&d-isms into a cohesive whole. Plus there is already some precedent for souls being powerful (hence demons and devils want them) or used for healing (the Steal Life option in the Soul Cage spell from Xanathar's).

Anyone got any thoughts on this or advice on making it better?

HP is how much punishment you can take before dying and functions as meat points where you're able to absorb more damage by attaining more meat to cushion the blow.

It's not meant to be realistic or anything, but that's how D&D treats it and that's the easiest way to explain how it works without going into a soliloquy that ends up causing more questions that answers (see: )

>Damage is your opponent making you slightly less lucky than you were before.
>Sleeping restores luck, with some classes restoring more luck than others.
>Wizard is the unluckiest class in the game while also being one of the strongest classes as well.

>Implying D&D hasn't been a hack&slash video game since its inception.

It's an abstraction.

An 8 HP arrow on someone with 6 HP is a gutshot through their middle. An 8 HP arrow on someone with 100 HP is a mildly distracting graze of the torso with some light bleeding.

That doesn't explain healing spells, which is kinda fucky. Which is why I prefered d20 Modern's Vitalty Points/Wounds Points, which abstracted them into "I'm dodging well, aha!" with Vitality and "Fuck, that hit me in the chest" with Wound.

At the end of the day, unless you use Meat Points, HP (Heaps of Plotarmor) is the only explanation you can use. Stamina/Luck is completely out of the question

>lvl 20 wizard with negative DEX and +0 Constitution
>lvl 1 Fighter high physical stats
>Both jump out of an airplane
>Wizard doesn't have his spellbook and the fighter isn't some weird subclass where he can parry the ground or whatever
>Wizard has a decent chance of surviving max fall damage
>Fighter dies every time

Fluff it as partially being an innate magical resistance. Cure Light Wounds can bring a weak man back from the dead because he's a little weakling scrublord with no great deeds to his name and no innate magical resistance. That's also why a Fireball which does 30 HP damage would insta-gib him.

Meanwhile Macho Flexo the Barbarian has great deeds to his name and both his fame and his skill at arms have conveyed an innate magical resistance. For good or ill, it takes more magic to effect him. Cure light wounds only heals scratches, but he can laugh his way through a Fireball.

This also explains why spellcasters have low HP: Fucking with magic lessens their innate resistance in proportion to the power of their magic. Druids and Clerics get a small pass becauise their powers are Divine, not Arcane.

Boom. Fluff reason.

Doesn't work.

For one thing, magical resistance is already a separate mechanic that operates much differently than HP does.

Secondly, mages have several spells that either disrupt active spells, shut down active spell effects, or grants them some form of magic resistance for a time, so it wouldn't make sense for them to have so many anti-magic spells while still (somehow) having the weakest "magical resistance" in the game.

Yeah, but if that were true, then some level 3 scrub wouldn't be able to charm Macho Flexo, since he's probably got shit mental scores

Well put.

It pretty much works this way in anime, sometimes explicitly.

"There is only so much you can train your body. But your spirit energy can be increased with enough hard work"- Genkai, not verbatim. You can basically be the toughest guy in the world but if yo can't use your spirit energy to fortify yourself, and /or use it as a weapon, you can't compete at the top level. This was before they introduced like 3 more types of energy. (Poor Demon World Tournament).

Still, there's no reason to believe that the mind doesn't influence the body when that happens all the time anyways without spells. Not every bit of fantasy needs an incantation. Look at the origin of fantasy tropes The Lord of the Rings. Think about how Fingolfin fought Morgoth, Glorfindel fought Gothmog, hell how Eowyn beat the Witch King. Soul points were there from the beginning.

Yeah, monks in d&d use ki points, sometimes explicitly to heal themselves. It could be said that everyone has ki, it's just that monks can use it in unique ways.

It's an abstract mix of energy, toughness, luck etc.

A seasoned veteran knows how to avoid serious hits or not get hit at all.

Old school rpg's had reasonable caps on hp.

Unfortunately video games like final fantasy/wow have thousands of hit ponts which means nothing.

In the modern era, I blame computer and video games for perpetuating this problem.

Even in the current eraof high fidelity visuals, video RPG characters struck in combat are shown to react in the same way as characters of lower and higher level. They reel back. They go 'argh!'. Oftentimes a spray or splash of blood gouts out of them. The only difference between a beginning character and a veteran is that one deducts a different number from a higher total of health.

It's very annoying that fancy parries and displays of skin-of-teeth survival skill implied by are not used in the context of a general hit and loss of HP. The technology is certainly there.

Since a lot of RPG players today come from playing computer games and the like they carry this problem with them and assume it applies in D&D and the like too.

I think there is some irony that older games with lo-fi graphics of icons swinging vaguely at each other arguably reflect HP better becasue your imagination takes over. At least mine does.

One guy gets hit by an arrow and dies, the other, stronger guy gets hit by the arrow and is not hindered at all. What explanation do you need?

>Since a lot of RPG players today come from playing computer games and the like they carry this problem with them and assume it applies in D&D and the like too.
Newsflash, it does.

The only reason why you don't see this in early editions of D&D was because the amount you earned per level up was miniscule compared to later editions, to the point where earning over 100 HP was the equivalent of being motherfucking superman.

Shh. Next they'll learn that dragons rarely had three digit health.