Damage At Full Health Vs Damage At Low Health

[thesecret1]

In D&D, hitpoints aren't really your health, they're more like your plot armor that gets gradually whittled away. You don't really get injured whenever you lose HP, else you'd very soon be a walking bag of bleeding, abused meat and certainly wouldn't heal it by taking a short rest somewhere. Rather, whenever you lose HP, the DM should say something along the lines of "You were hit but your armor stopped the blade" or something along those lines. When your HP reaches 0, you ran out of luck and the enemy managed to land a serious blow. Serious enough to take you out of the fight (nobody's going to continue fighting with an arrow lodged in his lung, for example). Wounds like these then, with some rulesets, persist until the end of the adventure, precisely to signify that you are seriously wounded, and even though you got yourself some first aid, your combat performance is hampered by it.

If you start thinking about HP not as the amount of punishment the character is able to withstand, but as basically his "luck", a lot of shit suddenly starts making sense. Why isn't the enemy on low HP fleeing? Well, because he hasn't been injured in any way yet, he just had some close calls. Why is he fighting as if he was at peak form? Because he is. Why can you heal yourself with health potions, but cannot heal that wounded NPC? Because they're actually luck potions, and cannot help someone already wounded. And so on and so on. Everything sort of becomes really consistent once you look at it that way.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

In D&D, hitpoints aren't really your health, they're more like your plot armor that gets gradually whittled away. You don't really get injured whenever you lose HP, else you'd very soon be a walking bag of bleeding, abused meat and certainly wouldn't heal it by taking a short rest somewhere. Rather, whenever you lose HP, the DM should say something along the lines of "You were hit but your armor stopped the blade" or something along those lines. When your HP reaches 0, you ran out of luck and the enemy managed to land a serious blow. Serious enough to take you out of the fight (nobody's going to continue fighting with an arrow lodged in his lung, for example). Wounds like these then, with some rulesets, persist until the end of the adventure, precisely to signify that you are seriously wounded, and even though you got yourself some first aid, your combat performance is hampered by it.

If you start thinking about HP not as the amount of punishment the character is able to withstand, but as basically his "luck", a lot of shit suddenly starts making sense. Why isn't the enemy on low HP fleeing? Well, because he hasn't been injured in any way yet, he just had some close calls. Why is he fighting as if he was at peak form? Because he is. Why can you heal yourself with health potions, but cannot heal that wounded NPC? Because they're actually luck potions, and cannot help someone already wounded. And so on and so on. Everything sort of becomes really consistent once you look at it that way.

now explain why vampires can drain your HP to restore their HP

 

[thesecret1]

now explain why vampires can drain your HP to restore their HP

In D&D, they don't. They regenerate HP at the start of every turn. But really, even in other systems, anyone can make up any sort of bullshit for why the vampire's plot armor gets bigger. It's not like "Oh the vampire sucks your blood and heals himself!" makes any sense when a turn takes 6 seconds (in D&D, that is, but other systems will likely be along the same time frame). What, the vampire gonna rush to you, quickly take a bite, then retreat after licking a couple drops of blood? Or maybe he hit an artery and got a lot of blood, in which case... how are you even still fighting with an open artery?

The more you think about these things, the more you realize it just doesn't work. However they call HP, whatever they may pretend it is, in the end, in almost every game, it is treated as plot armor, never as your actual health.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

In D&D, they don't.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/vampire

Bite. (Bat or Vampire Form Only). Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one willing creature, or a creature that is grappled by the vampire, incapacitated, or restrained. Hit: 7 (1d6 + 4) piercing damage plus 10 (3d6) necrotic damage. The target’s hit point maximum is reduced by an amount equal to the necrotic damage taken, and the vampire regains hit points equal to that amount.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I remember a passage from a D&D text stating that a creatures tenacity and preservation instinct increase proportionately as they near death. This is why things fight equally well at 1hp as they do 100.

Death spiral in PnP RPGs is real and often not fun unless you have a gritty setting and plot. The whole game has to be designed around it. Combat heavy games don't work well because eveeything becomes a slog.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I remember a passage from a D&D text stating that a creatures tenacity and preservation instinct increase proportionately as they near death. This is why things fight equally well at 1hp as they do 100.

Death spiral in PnP RPGs is real and often not fun unless you have a gritty setting and plot. The whole game has to be designed around it. Combat heavy games don't work well because eveeything becomes a slog.

death spiral is avoided in pnp RPGs because you typically control 1 character
when you control multiple units, it becomes another tactical layer you have to manage

Spoiler

which is another reason why games where you control more than 1 character are in fact not RPGs but tactical games with RPG elements

 

[OSK]

I've been playing Hard West which directly uses the luck idea. It's like an HP bar that depletes as you get shot at. When your luck runs out, you'll get hit and take actual HP damage. If the character isn't in cover, they'll usually die in one or two hits. It also functions as a resource allowing you to spend it to perform special abilities.

I think it fits perfectly in a Wild West setting where no one wears armor and the weapons are super deadly. Without it, combat would either be over too quickly or you'd have characters tanking dozen of bullets without being hampered in any way. It gives the combat a cinematic feel.

 

[Funposter]

Personal opinion, but I feel like if combat degrades a unit to being practically worthless, it should try to flee the field of battle.

Fleeing mechanics are pretty rare in RPGs, was never sure why. Probably because players want to hunt down every last bodybag of exp.

Bandits in Skyrim will cower/retreat when they get down to like 5% HP, but then it regenerates and they just start attacking you again.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

A person on death's door can be just as deadly if he's spiteful enough and his adrenaline is jacked. Plenty of accounts of people continuing to fight on after receiving fatal wounds sometimes even taking their opponent with them. Armor may save you in that case.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I prefer my combats to be like Mortal Kombat. What's wrong with grisly wounds and blood like Brutal Doom? I don't play games for fucking realism. Fuck that! I play for epic unreal fantastic bullshit that epic books, songs, movies, poems and stories are written about. The god damn impossible. Yeah, he had his arms ripped off and was impaled yet still scissor kicked the fucking dragon's head off doing a double backflip twist and landing in an epic pose. Then the rips the horn out with his teeth and spits it right through the giants heart and laughs.

 

[Dhaze]

Personal opinion, but I feel like if combat degrades a unit to being practically worthless, it should try to flee the field of battle.

Fleeing mechanics are pretty rare in RPGs, was never sure why. Probably because players want to hunt down every last bodybag of exp.

The concept is great, and I fully agree that we should see more of it, more often. Not only in RPGs even; I think such an idea could well find its place in many types of games wherein combat in involved. But most of the time, it's badly implemented, and fundamentally suffers from the same problem as those caused by such spells as Fright or Waves Of Fear.

Under a Real Time With Pause system, it's not too bad. Let's say a kobold flees; well you just let it flee. It probably won't drop meaningful loot, and will only offer a pitance of experience points. If some players want to bother hunting down every last possible xp point or gold piece, I say let them waste their time however they may like.

But under a system that sees you remaining in a combat state as long as an enemy you've engaged is still alive? It's a pain in the ass, because now the enemy is fleeing, but you're still in combat—with all the slowness that implies—and have to kill that fleeing guy.

For it to work, the enemy would have to;

1) Flee, obviously
2) Not come back twenty seconds later, having somehow discovered within themselves an unsuspected fount of courage
3) Be considered not anymore engaged in a fight with you
4) Perhaps disappear entirely once out of sight, provided the environments allows that to be remotely credible (a gnoll merging into a shadowy thicket in a forest for example; not a guard just vanishing impossibly into the ether whilst trapped with you between four walls)

A person on death's door can be just as deadly if he's spiteful enough and his adrenaline is jacked. Plenty of accounts of people continuing to fight on after receiving fatal wounds sometimes even taking their opponent with them. Armor may save you in that case.

I mentionned Dragon's Dogma in an earlier post, and one of the enemies in that game did just that.

A golem is a huge, humanoid-looking creature of stone, but it cannot be hurt by simply striking at it haphazardly. Instead you imperatively must target little discs of an undescript matter embeded at various places in its body. Once a few disks have been destroyed, the golem will briefly shut down, allowing you to wail freely on the discs (though one is under its foot, so depending on the precise moment of its shutdown, on the animation it was in at that time, it might be entirely impossible to damage that disc). However the golem will soon awaken, and enter a raging state during which it is much, much faster and more aggressive; but simultaneously its remaining discs take more damage from your attacks.

I think this one in particular is one of the finest example and implementation of that whole concept.

 

[Conan]

In D&D, hitpoints aren't really your health, they're more like your plot armor that gets gradually whittled away. You don't really get injured whenever you lose HP, else you'd very soon be a walking bag of bleeding, abused meat and certainly wouldn't heal it by taking a short rest somewhere. Rather, whenever you lose HP, the DM should say something along the lines of "You were hit but your armor stopped the blade" or something along those lines. When your HP reaches 0, you ran out of luck and the enemy managed to land a serious blow. Serious enough to take you out of the fight (nobody's going to continue fighting with an arrow lodged in his lung, for example). Wounds like these then, with some rulesets, persist until the end of the adventure, precisely to signify that you are seriously wounded, and even though you got yourself some first aid, your combat performance is hampered by it.

If you start thinking about HP not as the amount of punishment the character is able to withstand, but as basically his "luck", a lot of shit suddenly starts making sense. Why isn't the enemy on low HP fleeing? Well, because he hasn't been injured in any way yet, he just had some close calls. Why is he fighting as if he was at peak form? Because he is. Why can you heal yourself with health potions, but cannot heal that wounded NPC? Because they're actually luck potions, and cannot help someone already wounded. And so on and so on. Everything sort of becomes really consistent once you look at it that way.

Good question.

The answer why it's like this in dnd is to facilitate a simple gameplay. Instead of thinking of HPs as health you should think of them as a fake counter of combat worthiness. Once it drops to zero, you are out and if it gets below a target number, you are done for.

It is not a perfect simulation of a real combat but it has its merits, namely it works for the purpose of knowing when to fight, when to quit.

I have experimented with other systems where you have the concept of wounds and those incorporate the solution to your concern, that the more wounds the characters accumulate the more ineffective they become at combat.

While such a syatem simulates reality better, it can become very unfun due to reduced options for the players as the combat evolves. Reality is not always fun.

Even many systems with wounds in the end use an associated HP system, which is in fact the ideal solution. You can keep the effect of wounds mitigated by desginating them as outcomes of failed tests after taking large HP damage.

 

[Piotrovitz]

Wounds system can solve this pretty well, if it's implemented properly and balances reality vs fun.

E.g in Blackguards, the more beating you take and accumulate more wounds, the worse you perform in combat. You can have 10% of your max hp, still be able to stand and hold your weapon, but you cannot hit shit, and if you do, it's for minimal dmg.

Pretty sure there are plenty of other cRGPs that are handling this problem well.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Apeiron's games (762 High Calibre, Man of Prey etc.) have this system where everything can die with one well placed shot or get hurts and lie in pain.
Protective gear does not give you some +2 armor like in Diablo or D&D, it protects you from the bullets (different tier protects from different calibre) at the cost of stamina loss or stuns in various degrees. Enemies also are affected, which comes with an issue when they drop unconcious, your team loose sight with them and might give them opportunity for a sneak attack if their AI isn't brain dead.

I've been playing Hard West which directly uses the luck idea. It's like an HP bar that depletes as you get shot at. When your luck runs out, you'll get hit and take actual HP damage.

That reminds me about that overrated popamole cover shooter called Uncharted (some people said it was modern version of Tomb Raiders but they're stoopid), where you soak bullets and hide behind cover to swipe strawberry jam from your googles (like in CoD) but rely on luck. When it runs out - you catch the bullet and die.

 

[Brancaleone]

I'm considering adding this to my games, but it does lead to some problems such as long battles taking even longer because units become less and less effective.

Basically Rashomon's duel from the woodcutter's tale.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

In D&D, hitpoints aren't really your health, they're more like your plot armor that gets gradually whittled away. You don't really get injured whenever you lose HP, else you'd very soon be a walking bag of bleeding, abused meat and certainly wouldn't heal it by taking a short rest somewhere. Rather, whenever you lose HP, the DM should say something along the lines of "You were hit but your armor stopped the blade" or something along those lines. When your HP reaches 0, you ran out of luck and the enemy managed to land a serious blow.

Dungeons & Dragons, from the beginning, has allowed player-characters to replenish their hit points both through magical means and through resting. When a cleric casts cure light wounds on a party member, or a PC chugs a potion of healing, those are not boosting a character's luck but are actually providing magical healing of wounds received. Similarly, bed rest slowly restores a character's hit points, representing normal non-magical healing of wounds, not a bizarre mechanic wherein indolence increases plot armor. This remained true for all later versions of D&D published by TSR. If a DM stated "You were hit but your armor stopped the blade" that would indicate a "miss" in terms of D&D's combat, not a hit that would deduct at least 1 hit point, which would then require more healing.

Granted, Gary Gygax seems to have been challenged by the realism, or lack thereof, involved with a player-character gaining hit points per level and therefore being able to sustain more physical damage. In the 1978 AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax included an aside about hit points asserting they not only reflected ability to withstand damage but also "skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness)." However, this is another example of Gary venting an opinion without considering the totality of the mechanics in the game he co-created, since D&D's mechanics did exactly mean that leveling up increased a PC's ability to sustain more physical damage, which in turn would require more healing, whether magical or normal. A fighter reduced to 10 hit points from 30 would require twice as much rest to fully heal non-magically than a fighter reduced to 10 hit points from 20, or on average twice as many healing spells.

 

[Chippy]

Gamers asking for this level of complexity when the latest RPGs can't even be bothered to implement hotkeys for player convenience.

 

[Tyranicon]

Gamers asking for this level of complexity when the latest RPGs can't even be bothered to implement hotkeys for player convenience.

The basement coders of old are like primordial chads compared to the limpdick game designers of the modern era.

 

[Dorateen]

The Gold Box games have flee mechanics, coupled with a morale system that enemies could surrender as well.

 

[thesecret1]

Dungeons & Dragons, from the beginning, has allowed player-characters to replenish their hit points both through magical means and through resting. When a cleric casts cure light wounds on a party member, or a PC chugs a potion of healing, those are not boosting a character's luck but are actually providing magical healing of wounds received. Similarly, bed rest slowly restores a character's hit points, representing normal non-magical healing of wounds, not a bizarre mechanic wherein indolence increases plot armor. This remained true for all later versions of D&D published by TSR. If a DM stated "You were hit but your armor stopped the blade" that would indicate a "miss" in terms of D&D's combat, not a hit that would deduct at least 1 hit point, which would then require more healing.

Except that bed rest here (ie. long rest) is often more effective than healing potions and magic, which flat out makes no sense. "The orc's sword cut a large strip of meat from your shoulder" – good thing it's gonna be all good one nap later. It also doesn't address how a person at 1HP (meaning thoroughly massacred and barely conscious) manages to keep fighting at full capacity. And before you start talking about adrenaline, take into account that any amount of time could have passed between the loss of HP and the combat itself – if you're out of hit dice and have no good place to rest, it can easily happen that you're spending prolonged amount of time in the dungeon while on low HP (presumably trying to get out and survive), supposedly wounded and battered, yet somehow performing without any issues all that time.

Granted, Gary Gygax seems to have been challenged by the realism, or lack thereof, involved with a player-character gaining hit points per level and therefore being able to sustain more physical damage. In the 1978 AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax included an aside about hit points asserting they not only reflected ability to withstand damage but also "skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness)." However, this is another example of Gary venting an opinion without considering the totality of the mechanics in the game he co-created, since D&D's mechanics did exactly mean that leveling up increased a PC's ability to sustain more physical damage, which in turn would require more healing, whether magical or normal. A fighter reduced to 10 hit points from 30 would require twice as much rest to fully heal non-magically than a fighter reduced to 10 hit points from 20, or on average twice as many healing spells.

Gary saw this exact dissonance that I'm describing and reached more or less the same conclusion – HP is your bullshit meter, your plot armor, your combat luck, however you want to call it. That higher levels need more rest to recharge HP is rather irrelevant, as there's no reason why your plot armor couldn't recharge the same way.

The fact of the matter is, there is no mechanic in the game that actually treats HP as health. Sure, they brand it that way... but they don't act the part. If HP was instead called something like, idk, "physical energy", nobody would even make the connection that it is somehow representing your health. You'd drink energy potions, recover with energy spells, or recover with rest, low PE meaning you're tired, your muscles are sore, etc. with enemy attacks that "hit" meaning you had to take a particularly strenuous action to avoid getting impaled any dying. And while rather silly sounding, it would make a lot more sense than current explanations with "health", as they never really stand up to scrutiny. The mechanics just don't treat HP as health.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I liked how 'health' is represented in Lord of the Rings Online -- it's called 'morale' and the main healer is the bard-like class(minstrel) but there's also classes like the captain that can heal through inspiring allies in combat etc.,

 

[plem]

implementing this kind of idea never works because it leads to a death spiral, where you already know whether you'll win or lose based on the first round of combat. got fireballed? might as well reload. fireballed the whole group of enemies? might as well fast-foward to victory. if this was implemented in D&D, winning initiative order would basically settle all encounters. doing as much damaged with 1 HP as with 40 might not be realistic, but the alternative is just bad game design.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

implementing this kind of idea never works because it leads to a death spiral, where you already know whether you'll win or lose based on the first round of combat. got fireballed? might as well reload. fireballed the whole group of enemies? might as well fast-foward to victory. if this was implemented in D&D, winning initiative order would basically settle all encounters. doing as much damaged with 1 HP as with 40 might not be realistic, but the alternative is just bad game design.

Sounds like a problem with reloading being able to solve all your problems to me.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

In some way Battle Brother also do this through the wound system where you can get wounded in battle which impact your performance. Even then the effect of the wound debuff are often not as crippling as a real simulationist wound would do.

The only video game genre where a heavily simulated wound - combat performance would be sandbox game with almost no failstate, something like BB I guess could be tweaked with you just keep replacing cheap meatbag over and over again and only develop the lucky 10%. In normal RPG video game death spiral is just a waste of time because you either reload or it is ironman and you waste even more time, a bad design.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Except that bed rest here (ie. long rest) is often more effective than healing potions and magic, which flat out makes no sense. "The orc's sword cut a large strip of meat from your shoulder" – good thing it's gonna be all good one nap later.

There ought to be negative consequences for over-consumption of healing potions. Addiction should be the place to start, negative modifiers from withdrawal and a drain on gold. In regard to tabletop, too often DMs don't seem to consider time to be a valuable resource. "Long rests" therefore do explain how a character can recover from dire wounds (when coupled with non-magical, non-divine medical treatment) but thought is rarely given to what the villains are accomplishing in the background while the players are taking that time off. Long rests should be something the players want to avoid, both in and out of character. Perhaps games should look to the brackets of "woundedness" to dictate what if any treatment is required and how well a character could continue to fight on past the fight where they took the wounds once the adrenaline rush is gone. Lightly wounded, moderately wounded, heavily wounded, gravely wounded and so on.