thesecret1
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2019
- Messages
- 5,847
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.
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.