HP as luck or meat?

[Barebarian]

I believe that the current canon for HP in games like D&D is that taking HP damage represents losing control of the fight, running short of luck etc. rather than actually being injured by a weapon [yet getting hit by a poisoned weapon forced you to roll against a poison save ], while other games like Exalted measure your health as actual injuries, keeping track of how high a penalty you face for how many hits you've taken. Which do you prefer, why, and which do you think D&D should use going forward?

[Kardwill]

Wasn't there the exact same topic on this board a few weeks ago?

I'm more of a "HP as luck/exhaustion/bruises/ability to mitigate damage" type of GM, especially in games like D&D where nothing happens until you're at 0 HP.
I mostly play Fate, which use a combat system where the HPs are named "stress", and I find that it fits nicely in the "TV series" kind of mood I'm looking for. "Meat" hits are represented by the fact that if you cannot soak the damages with your current stress, you have to take lasting consequences to stay in the fight. That hits a nice balance that I like to repeat in other games like D&D
Being fully functionnal after a runaway car impact, a direct hit from a rocket launcher, an axe to the shoulder or even simply a stray bullet, just because you have enough HP to soak "meat" hits, would feel silly. But saying you barely just avoided the hit or just got grazed by some flying debris (but you probably won't be as lucky next time) is nicely cinematic.

I will sometime give a "physical" impact to some of those, sure (the bruised shoulder as your armor barely stops an axe, the shockwave of the explosion, the painful fall as you avoid the car, maybe a tiny cut from the poisoned sword...), but nowadays, "real" meat hits are only for wounds that have lasting insystem consequences.

Of course, it will depend of the game. HP as mitigation works really well in games with an abstract health system and/or a big HP pool, like D&D, Mouse guard or Heroquest. In games where getting hit is serious business with consequences (albedo), a more descriptive health system (runequest), or a very shallow health pool (chtulhu), wounds will get more "meaty" descriptions.

[Anymage]

HP as momentum (as Exalted 3e does it) has cooler visuals, especially since people's first reaction is to narrate connecting hits as meat hits. You might get grazed, but nothing solid will connect until you get into serious territory.

D&D HP is an odd mishmash. You could see it as proportional meat (losing 10 or 25% of your health bar means the same thing regardless of how big that health bar is), but no one explanation fits all the cases. D&D in general tends not to faithfully match anything so much as its own tropes/continuity, though.

[NichG]

Well, D&D is one thing, but when designing from scratch I tend to make systems where there's a resource that you explicitly spend to 'deal with' potential meat hits, and different ways of spending change how e.g. poison works (basically, it's expensive to dodge but cheap to convert to a glancing blow). Meat hits are then very coarse grained things rather than ablative resources or pools - you're fine vs your leg is broken vs you're dying. This makes for different kinds of healing as well - an effect that helps you catch your breath won't heal a punctured lung no matter how many times you're subjected to it.

[Glorthindel]

In my opinion, half the problems with the game "not making sense" stems from adopting the idea that hit points equal meat points.

I lose count of the amount of times you hear the puzzled complaints of "how did the Rogue manage to avoid that fireball without moving, he was right in the middle of it?", "how can the fighter survive a fall from that height?", and "how can a Rogues dagger do more damage than a Greataxe?", "How is that creatures armour pristine, we hit him about 30 times?". The simple answer is that none of those things happened. They only seemed to happen because you crossed off (or didn't) x amounts of hit points, and somehow interpreted that as a wound. But if you read the only "wounds" as the ones that put you down, and interpret all other losses of hit points as fatigue, bruising, concussions, or lucky events which turn the attack that should have killed you into one that only staggered you, then it is much easier to understand.

Did that Rogue dodge the Fireball without moving? No, she was caught in the blast like everyone else, but was quick enough to drop, cover her eyes with her arm, and tumble with the blast wave, so she came back to her feet with a few scrapes, a few cosmetic burns, but still good to go, while everyone else has a couple of serious burns, is a bit stunned by the concussion and the hard fall to the ground, and their vision is blurred by the heat and smoke.

[Kardwill]

D&D HP is an odd mishmash. You could see it as proportional meat (losing 10 or 25% of your health bar means the same thing regardless of how big that health bar is), but no one explanation fits all the cases. D&D in general tends not to faithfully match anything so much as its own tropes/continuity, though.

If you want a mess, try D&D in French : HP has been translated to "Points de vie" (life points)...

[MrSandman]

Wasn't there the exact same topic on this board a few weeks ago?

It does seem to come around every so often.

I believe that the current canon for HP in games like D&D is that taking HP damage represents losing control of the fight, running short of luck etc. rather than actually being injured by a weapon [yet getting hit by a poisoned weapon forced you to roll against a poison save ], while other games like Exalted measure your health as actual injuries, keeping track of how high a penalty you face for how many hits you've taken. Which do you prefer, why, and which do you think D&D should use going forward?

If we're talking about D&D and its clones, I just think and talk about hp loss as hp loss, just like a videogame. I do that because I find any other option utterly incoherent and nonsensical, so I treat hp as what it is: the amount of punishment a character can take before getting taken out.

If we're talking about other games, I prefer systems like Fate and Fudge, or anything that has some sort of wound system, preferably with a mechanic to alleviate or ignore certain wounds.

[Mechalich]

HP is a bizarre amalgamated mechanical abstraction that is terrible at properly representing anything reasonable in the fiction but at the same time immensely useful in actual gameplay - which is why so many video games use a version of it.

At the end of the day, playing a high-combat game where characters take realistic amounts of damage from hits in terms of what a human body can actually survive just does not work, you simply cannot have high-lethality high-combat in a game setting without a cheat like HP. As a result it's pointless to debate what HP is meant to represent at the fiction level because HP is designed primarily to bypass the reality of the fiction where 'you got stabbed and are now dead' is not viable for play.

Ultimately, high combat games in a low-tech setting (in a high tech setting you can use something like 'shields' as an alternative to HP) involve characters getting into far more fights than they could plausibly survive, especially without accruing permanent disabilities of some kind in the process and HP is part of the suspension of disbelief that you have to buy into to play the game. If that buy in doesn't work for you, so be it, play something else, but trying to massage HP into something reasonable is really beside the point.

[Mastikator]

Except HP is obviously meat points since you take HP damage from things that can only be injury like environmental damage. HP represents two mutually exclusive systems simultaneously, that is why I prefer Exalted's take.

[Anonymouswizard]

To me, hit points ate meat, end of, and when I'm running D&D the full consequences of this are played straight (with the addition that wounds which treated cause you to lose additional hp at a rate between 1/minute and 1/round).

Also, we have to remember that 1st level D&D isn't overly realistic if we go by meat.

Then again, I tend to run systems where your hp begins relatively higher (you can absorb two to four average attacks), but where scaling is lessand there's probably a death spiral in play. When combat is nasty brutish and short players tend to avoid it and achieve their goals through other means.

[Morty]

D&D hit points have straddled the fence between "meat" an "luck" for a while. Sometimes they're one, sometimes the other, without much rhyme or reason. The only way to make it work is just not think about it too hard. Some people are more comfortable with it than others. It's more pronounced in recent editions, which make healing without magic easier.

I likewise prefer other methods of ensuring characters can get into fights and not die, for combat-heavy systems. Exalted 3E's initiative system is quite elegant. Some other systems just have two damage pools, one for "light" damage and one for "heavy" damage when things get serious.

[aaron819]

The rules treat it as meat in some ways and as abstract "bad things don't happen yet" points in ither ways. Just don't think about it and the game works perfectly fine.

[Conradine]

What puzzled me is that undeads , oozes and constructs should get much more hp than living creatures. These things can really get a spear that stakes them side-to-side and keep going without problems.

Anyhow, good examples of hp as meat ( very high Constitution ) could be Theokoles and the Egyptian ( from Spartacus BaS ) and the chained monster of Xerxe's Immortals ( 300 ).

[Zhorn]

HP is HP.
It can be luck. It can be meat. It can be anything the DM of your table deems it to be.

This is one of those topics that there will not be a united consensus on.
It won't matter how long a thread goes on a topic, there's always going to be a group on either side saying the book(s) agree with their particular interpretations, and the other side is wrong.

Personally I prefer HP as being meat-like: a successful roll to hit is a contact-making-hit that takes a toll on the recipient. Beyond that I leave it up to the context of the game at the moment. Maybe it drew blood, maybe the character rolled with the hit.

[Max_Killjoy]

Are we talking about D&D-style hyper-scaling HP in particular?

If HP = meat, then it's goofy because it means characters end up able to take more and more of the same wound as they level... the same wound that would have reduced them to dying in a single hit can eventually be absorbed over and over again with no ill effect.

If HP = meat+luck+etc, then it's just as goofy because it means that the same exact roll that hits by exactly the same margin and the rolls exactly the same damage... is either a miss, a graze, or a solid hit, depending on how many HP the target has... and it's bad design because it both blurs up several unrelated fiction-level elements, and fights with other mechanics for the same fiction-level elements.

If you're telling me that HP = luck... then when a character is "lucky", do I represent that with more HP or with free rerolls? If you're telling me that HP = evasiveness... then when a character is "evasive", do I represent that with more HP or with a better AC? Etc.

[False God]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, we all got it wrong, HP stands for cHutzPah.

[jjordan]

If we're talking about D&D and its clones, I just think and talk about hp loss as hp loss, just like a videogame.

That really does seem to be the design intent of the creators. I know the whole short rest/long rest dynamic was the biggest mental adjustment I had to make when I came back to D&D after last having played AD&D in the early '90s. As a DM I've wrapped my brain around this by considering player characters to be the equivalent of Navy SEALs. They are, in general, healthier and, more importantly, they have the do or die and never quit mindset. So I've split the HP into meat points and motivation/endurance points and adjusted my narration accordingly.

[Segev]

If HP = meat+luck+etc, then it's just as goofy because it means that the same exact roll that hits by exactly the same margin and the rolls exactly the same damage... is either a miss, a graze, or a solid hit, depending on how many HP the target has... and it's bad design because it both blurs up several unrelated fiction-level elements, and fights with other mechanics for the same fiction-level elements.

I disagree that it's goofy or bad design. I acknowledge that you find it unsatisfying, but you do have a consistent refusal to accept that the two blows did not "hit by the exact same margin" in the narrative layer, precisely because the higher hp total of the higher-hp target (presuming that the higher hp are from something like class levels rather than a very obvious presence of "more meat") represented a (non-infinite) portion of his ability to avoid taking that hit to a vital area. I know you dislike that AC and high hp both contribute to a narrative "miss" (or "cosmetic damage"), while hp represents some amount of luck or energy expenditure that can't be kept up forever but AC represents something he can do all day, but that doesn't make it bad design. Just unsatisfying to you.

[Max_Killjoy]

I disagree that it's goofy or bad design. I acknowledge that you find it unsatisfying, but you do have a consistent refusal to accept that the two blows did not "hit by the exact same margin" in the narrative layer, precisely because the higher hp total of the higher-hp target (presuming that the higher hp are from something like class levels rather than a very obvious presence of "more meat") represented a (non-infinite) portion of his ability to avoid taking that hit to a vital area. I know you dislike that AC and high hp both contribute to a narrative "miss" (or "cosmetic damage"), while hp represents some amount of luck or energy expenditure that can't be kept up forever but AC represents something he can do all day, but that doesn't make it bad design. Just unsatisfying to you.

If "endurance" is included in D&D's HP, then why don't heavy exertion or exhaustion expend significant HP?

If "luck" is included in D&D's HP, then why isn't the Lucky feat set up as more HP or an extra Hit Die or something related?

[HouseRules]

Add to Max_Killjoy

What does luck circumstantial bonus not counting all of your hit points as bonus to hit, or bonus to damage?

[PeteNutButter]

I always thought of HP as meat.

The other way seems more like an excuse than explanation. If we are in business of excuses (which D&D forces with its ridiculous hp inflation) than we might as well just use a hp as meat excuse. Whatever amount of physical damage 10% of your max hit points is is how much damage 10% of your max hit point is, regardless of what that number actually is. The inflation of actual damage numbers vs your hit points is purely a game mechanic.

[Arbane]

If "endurance" is included in D&D's HP, then why don't heavy exertion or exhaustion expend significant HP?

If "luck" is included in D&D's HP, then why isn't the Lucky feat set up as more HP or an extra Hit Die or something related?

Because D&D was first designed in the 1970s by wargamers who had only the vaguest idea what they were going, and has since become a sacred cow of the system as a useful abstractions of 'harm surviving ability' even as other systems have come up with more-coherent alternatives.

[Âmesang]

I've always seen HP as being more "meat" like, considering a high-HP character can be submerged in a pool of lava, climb out, pick up their sword, and keep fighting…

…of course there's also the issue of low-level — and especially NPCs — having two few HP, leading to the "Cat VS Commoner" situation.

[Jay R]

In my graduate Mathematical Simulation class, the professor said, "You can only get out of a simulation what the designers put into it." His example was that you can't separate simulated shoppers into different categories if the simulation model treats them all identically.

HP is a simplistic simulation of the ability to continue to act, deliberately over-simplified for game purposes because the workings of a human body are far too complex to simulate quickly and easily.

Therefore the question is meaningless. The HP simulation is not complex enough to represent either luck or meat, or anything other than how long the character can continue to act..

If you think about a simulation too much you start asking questions like, "Why is a Danish Prince speaking English in iambic pentameter?, or "How can we see into this private bedroom?"

Or even, "Why don't they all run away when the monster's theme music starts playing?"

These questions pull you away from the entertainment.

Stop thinking about the HP model. Use it to think about the ogres who are attacking your wizard.

[Segev]

If "endurance" is included in D&D's HP, then why don't heavy exertion or exhaustion expend significant HP?

If "luck" is included in D&D's HP, then why isn't the Lucky feat set up as more HP or an extra Hit Die or something related?

There are effects which ping away at endurance/exhaustion and do hp damage to represent it. Environmental damage from extreme heat or cold, for example, which are oft scoffed at by the "but that just means it's meat, and you're lying when you say it's more than that" crowd, are exactly hp representing a part of your endurance. Why aren't you collapsing from cold? Because you've more (but finite) endurance to go.

As for the "lucky" feat, why isn't it represented by doubling your bonus to the roll, or a flat bonus to the roll?

I forget if you can use Lucky to force others to re-roll and take the worse value; if not, then why can't "lucky" factor into AC to keep you from being hit? If so, then your answer is already present, because instead of bonus hp, it's its own expendible resource that operates on the AC end of not-taking-a-lethal-blow. In a sense, forcing a re-roll which makes a hit into a miss IS bonus hp by virtue of not taking damage from the hit. But I know that's not what you mean, so I'm mostly just making a point that AC and hp both represent not taking more than cosmetic damage a lot of the time, so anything that operates on the AC end of that still can represent roughly the same thing.

"Luck" is such an intangible, anyway, that questioning why it's represented one way or another is guaranteed to allow somebody who wants to find fault with it a case where they can scream about it making no sense.

[Max_Killjoy]

If you think about a simulation too much you start asking questions like, "Why is a Danish Prince speaking English in iambic pentameter?, or "How can we see into this private bedroom?"

Or even, "Why don't they all run away when the monster's theme music starts playing?"

Because the audience the play was written for was English-speaking, and it's hard to tell people things, story or otherwise, in a language they don't speak. If you want a really strange one, a friend of mine was telling me about a German movie she saw about Conquistadors, in which the "Spanish" Conquistadors spoke German, and the Aztecs spoke English with German subtitles, then there were English subtitles added under all of it in the version she saw.

Because it's hard to tell a story when you can't see or hear the characters -- we're not seeing through the walls, we're being shown what's going on with these characters in this place.

Because the characters can't hear the music, it's there to "enhance" the audience's "experience". Now, that said, the use of music in TV and movies is often horrible, telegraphing events or distracting entirely.

These questions pull you away from the entertainment.

Welcome to my experience of "entertainment".

[jjordan]

Use it to think about the ogres who are attacking your wizard.

The ogres shoot an arrow at my wizard and make a successful attack role. Does my wizard have an arrow sticking out of him or did he expend some of his energy dodging the arrow?

From the standpoint of game mechanics the answer to this question doesn't make any real difference. From the standpoint of narrative and player choices and consequences it makes a difference. I think that's why people keep asking about this.

[Segev]

The ogres shoot an arrow at my wizard and make a successful attack role. Does my wizard have an arrow sticking out of him or did he expend some of his energy dodging the arrow?

From the standpoint of game mechanics the answer to this question doesn't make any real difference. From the standpoint of narrative and player choices and consequences it makes a difference. I think that's why people keep asking about this.

The answer from narrative and player choices standpoint is: "What makes more sense to you right now?" The goal is to improve your verisimilitude. Choose accordingly.

[Morty]

Because D&D was first designed in the 1970s by wargamers who had only the vaguest idea what they were going, and has since become a sacred cow of the system as a useful abstractions of 'harm surviving ability' even as other systems have come up with more-coherent alternatives.

As usual, probably the best and most concise explanation of the problem.

[NichG]

The most cosmologically grounded way I can think to do it if we're talking about D&D is to say that HP is literally excess positive energy stored in the reservoir that exists where body and soul are connected (or negative energy for undead). If someone sticks a sword through your heart, you should die, but that positive energy keeps your body working and forces it to repair itself to a stable state rapidly, as long as enough energy exists to do so. As a result, as long as you have even 1 hitpoint left, that means you are presently uninjured, but at the same time you very well may have withstood injuries along the way (they were just very short-lived).

Once that last hitpoint is gone, weapons become legitimately dangerous and the only thing keeping you alive is your biology. So things like bleeding out become possible. The bleeding/stabilization/-10/etc rules are all just complex ways of saying 'things are different when you don't have your buffer'. Stuff that causes bleeding effects at >1hp has some special counteragent that reduces the effectiveness of a person's innate pool of positive energy. Fast Healing means that you have a biology that actively generates positive energy and refills its own buffers; Regeneration is Fast Healing plus the fact that your biology can heal itself even without help from positive energy (so you can recover from arbitrary negative hp as long as the method doesn't shut down your biological healing).

With undead, negative energy is animating their body in a state that would manifestly not work biologically, so at 0 they just stop.

If you take HP damage you can be poisoned, because the weapon actually went through you - it just happens that you got better from the over damage, but the foreign substances in your body don't get ejected by positive energy's sudden healing effects.

Higher level characters have bigger reservoirs, and spells that heal hitpoints are just topping up the gas tank - that's why you need a different spell to restore a lost limb and the like.