D&D General D&D isn't a simulation game, so what is???

[pemerton]

He's partly responding to me, probably; I've indicated even though I'm far less simulationist, I still don't think D&D style hit points are a good model; I don't think they serve a gamist or even dramatist set of desires that intrinsically well either. The fact they're ultra-minimalist when it comes to simulation is just the cherry on the sundae.

I think that the 4e implementation - in which they ebb and flow, like Robin Laws's action points in Hero Wars; and in which the quirk of Cure Light Wounds being able to heal a good number of mortal wounds is resolved - is very effective for creating dramatic fantasy combat in a RPG context.

I'm not a very big fan of the AD&D version, in which there is more flowing than ebbing within combat, and they serve as an attrition device more than anything else.

The currently active 5e Healing thread isn't selling me on the 5e approach, but that's pretty moot as the issues with hit points is only one of many reasons why I'm not likely to be playing 5e D&D any time soon.

EDIT: Saw this in your next post:

you'd need to revisit both mundane and magical healing, so the lesser wounds are easy to treat and recover from, and the more severe ones less so.

For me, a significant strength of 4e is that it tackles this head-on. And uses the disease/curse track, and the Remove Affliction ritual, to model lingering injuries or other debilitating conditions. The upshot is obviously rather gonzo, but that's a virtue rather than a flaw in the context of D&D!

 

[pemerton]

But the wound/vitality split is equally arbitrary. I tried to explain my thoughts in my example, but the percentage of that split could well vary wildly between two individuals.

RM and RQ both handle the difference between being tough and being quick. There are various ways a wound/vitality system could do that too, if it was desired.

It's just as arbitrary as HP.

No one is discussing arbitrariness, as far as I can tell. The discussion is about simulation.

As far as narration, I use a little chart for my PCs:

Category	% of HP
Bruised	75-99
Wounded	50-75
Bloodied	25-50
Critical	1-25

Not sure how much more you would want, or what other information would matter.

How can a PC who is at 25% or less of their hit points be critically injured, given that they can still act without any penalty, they are perhaps able to be healed to full health by the simplest of healing magic (eg a first level PC can normally be healed from 2 hp to 8 hp by a Cure Wounds spell), and even if they do fall unconscious, they have a real chance of being up and about again under their own steam, and can be restored to consciousness within a few seconds by an untrained person using 100-odd grams of healing supplies?

You can tell roughly how beat up someone is. People keep talking about how you can't tell someone was killed by an ant bite just because they died after being bitten by an ant is silly.

No one is disputing that you can tell the person was bitten to death by an ant. But not until the end of the combat. As your own table shows: if a character drops from 20 to 4 hit points in a fight, but walks away and then heals up by spending (let's say) their Second Wind plus a couple of hit dice, it's obvious that they were not critically injured, whether by ant bites or sword blows or anything else. They were just tired and sore!

 

[Oofta]

And this statement makes a bunch of assumptions out the gate, including "most people" and "well enough" meaning what you seem to think it means here.

Then let me rephrase. No one I have ever played with had much of an issue. That's ... hundreds of people over the years. Occasionally it comes up, people shrug or mention something about "action movie logic" and we move on. There have been other threads on this forum that confirm the attitude with surveys.

I'm not going to say the only reason to do so is. But I think the implication that nothing else can be done that isn't overcomplicated or brings nothing useful to the table is one that isn't well supported, and just because the first-entry system in the hobby doesn't do it doesn't say there's any great virtue to how it does things either. If that's insulting to you, then I reserve the right to suggest you're oversensitive here.

You may not think "its got more to people being overly attached to tradition than any real grounding in argument." is insulting. I do. It comes off as "I'm the enlightened one here, not you unwashed masses who should listen to my words of wisdom." On the other hand I'm not particularly offended because you're just some rando internet guy.

What is D&D trying to simulate? Certainly not the real world, that's far too messy. D&D does a decent job of simulating action movie logic where the protagonist gets beat to a bloody pulp but other than occasionally getting a second wind and maybe, just maybe looking a bit tired at a long drawn out slug-fest or muttering "I'm getting too old for this", is doing just fine. The bad guy's minions on the other hand die instantly with a single bullet. Our guy? Slap a band-aid on it, wince every once in a while to remind the audience you're hurt and continue mowing down the bad guys firing at you with assault rifles with your 9mm pistol. Or your fists, because instead of just killing you from 50 feet away they always run up and try to club the protagonists with the but of their rifle for some reason. With very few exceptions and some theatrical groans no one is actually hurt, they're doing fine until they're dead.

The PCs are Rambo, one of the normal people on CW's superhero shows, MCU's Hawkeye or Black Widow. Not real world soldiers.

 

[Oofta]

RM and RQ both handle the difference between being tough and being quick. There are various ways a wound/vitality system could do that too, if it was desired.

No one is discussing arbitrariness, as far as I can tell. The discussion is about simulation.

How can a PC who is at 25% or less of their hit points be critically injured, given that they can still act without any penalty, they are perhaps able to be healed to full health by the simplest of healing magic (eg a first level PC can normally be healed from 2 hp to 8 hp by a Cure Wounds spell), and even if they do fall unconscious, they have a real chance of being up and about again under their own steam, and can be restored to consciousness within a few seconds by an untrained person using 100-odd grams of healing supplies?

No one is disputing that you can tell the person was bitten to death by an ant.

Umm ... do you want me to hunt down the actual posts? How the person may have died from the ant bite or perhaps from a heart attack?

But not until the end of the combat. As your own table shows: if a character drops from 20 to 4 hit points in a fight, but walks away and then heals up by spending (let's say) their Second Wind plus a couple of hit dice, it's obvious that they were not critically injured, whether by ant bites or sword blows or anything else. They were just tired and sore!

Like I said. D&D doesn't try to simulate reality. It simulates action movies. I do use the alternate long rest rules because in part because it makes more sense to me, but even then I just accept that in a world with magic people could have easily evolved to heal more quickly. But again, action movie logic. Arm in a cast? No big deal, just rip that bad boy off, wince a few times, maybe pop have a bottle of tylenol and off you go.

EDIT: not to mention many people don't realize they're even hurt until they're no longer in the middle of the fight. There are numerous stories of people thinking they were stung by a wasp only to find they'd been shot 5 minutes later. Apparently winning a sword duel and then falling over dead from your wounds a few minutes after the fight was over was also a thing.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Honestly, I think the best way to define simulation is to compare how you would resolve an event in all three of the main approaches - gamist, sim and narrativist.

So, let's have a thought experiment. A character finding and removing a trap. Pretty straightforward, bog standard action.

1. Gamist approach:

Player declares he's looking for traps, rolls dice to succeed or fail. If he succeeds, he finds the trap, then rolls dice to remove it. The nature of the trap, the details of the trap, what he's doing to find the trap or remove it don't really matter. They can be completely ignored. Traps are essentially like you find in something like the old Baldur's Gate game where you click the find traps button and a red outline appears where the trap is, then you try to remove it. There's no narrative here, particularly. You certainly can narrate the event, but, again, it doesn't really change anything.

2. Narrative approach:

Player declares he's searching. That indicates that the player is now interested in finding something here. A success might mean he finds something without any complications. A failure might find something or might result in the DM adding something to find that just blew up in the character's face. A lot of this is going to depend on the system, table, players and GM. Of the three, I think that nar games create the most idiosyncratic games because there are just so many different inputs to cover.

3. Sim approach:

Player declares he's looking for traps. Now, in earlier D&D, before you had thieves abilities, the player would actually have to declare what he was doing, how he was looking, where he was looking, etc. So, there's a strong element of sim here. There's a pretty direct correlation between the player's declarations and the narrative of the game. Later RPG's tended to gamify this a bit more because the whole Mother May I nature of declarations was typically deemed as too much of a PITA. So, again, you might get a system where the hidden trap has Hiding HP (I'm making this up as I go, please be kind ) and the character has Searching HP. A contest ensues as to whether the player can find the trap and disarm it. If the trap wins, the trap is set off. Again, there's a pretty clear line of progression here where the actions by the player can be directly narrated and won't be countered by future events. The whole Process Sim approach. Note, there are other approaches here that might work as well.

In any case, the three approaches (and of course you can certainly hybridize these as well) have advantages and disadvantages. The Gamist approach is fast. You get results very quickly. At the cost of not really generating any sort of narrative other than whatever the group decides to plaster on after the fact. The Sim approach has the advantage of generating a narrative. We know (within certain limits) what's going on. We can make narrations that are tied directly to the game and know that these narrations very likely can't be retroactively rewritten. The Nar approach has the advantage of being very creative and engaging. It has the disadvantage of being very creative and engaging. Sometimes I just want to roll dice and get on with it. Futzing about watching Dave and the GM waffle back and forth about some quantum trap can be fun, but, can also be well, a whole barrel of not-fun.

But, when all's said and done, none of the different approaches are superior. They're just tools.

You missed the Roleplaying(tm) approach: "I step in the trap, because that's what my character would do."

 

[DND_Reborn]

People keep talking about how you can't tell someone was killed by an ant bite just because they died after being bitten by an ant is silly.

Silly or not, it is true technically as I have already pointed out. Although going to 0 hit points we know the ant did, in fact, "hit" with a bite, all we know is the bite caused hit point loss.

The PC goes unconscious at 0 hit points. Why? Shock? Blood loss? A bit nerve cord or something? You can narrate it a dozen different ways--the game tells you nothing about how it happened--all you know is the PC is unconscious.

Now, if the PC goes next and rolls a nat 20 death save, they are conscious again with 1 hit point. So, maybe that "unconscious" moment was like nodding off at the wheel while driving? You might be asleep or out of it for just a split second or less, but it happens.

And that brings up yet another issue with combat/damage in 5E from a simulation stand point. The cursed "whack-a-mole" effect. You suffered some form of trauma or injury, yet because of a nat 20 death save you are up at 1 hit point and functioning completely normally. Talk about something being "silly"!

In a fashion, if that PC with 1 hit point goes the rest of the battle without ever taking damage, the effect is identical to that PC being at full HP and never taking any damage.

This is why our group (and many others IME) impose a level of exhaustion for going to 0 hp. Until you get a chance to actually rest, there is now a lingering effect. Using the Lingering Injuries table is also fairly common practice, and some groups use both or have other house-rules to simulate the effect of injury after going to 0 hit points. FWIW, I liked the concept of lingering injuries, but the table in the DMG is pretty meh and has way too much which is easily remove by a fricken goodberry for crying out loud...

Also, there are all the hit points a creature has before they reach 0. Every successful attack "endangers" the PC, and hit points are the mechanic spent to avoid that danger--but it is entirely narrative.

Finally, the Vitality/Wounds system is IMO hands-down the best WotC has done to date. I was SO disappointed when I looked into 5E and it had been abandoned. It had critical hits going directly to your wounds--i.e. YOU GOT HIT! No spending vitality to parry or turn it aside or whatever. You couldn't avoid it and you are solidly hit. Once your vitality is gone, you are fatigued. The very word implying you are tired from avoiding the danger so far but at this point you just can't do it anymore. So, it isn't quite as arbitrary as you seem to think, especially when you look deeply into the rules for recovery, etc.

Anyway, I know you are handling different conversations concerning these topics. I am not expecting anything I say to convince you otherwise and vice versa is true. But, I am still waiting for you to comment on the STR/longbow issue.

 

[Bill Zebub]

As @Hussar and I have both pointed out, a 5e D&D character who is on zero hp may die in less than a minute, or may recover consciousness within a few seconds, and within a day be right as rain, simply under their own steam. It's not plausible that, in the fiction, the character is in a state that admits of both those possibilities. (I don't even know what such a state would be, in physiological terms.)

It's called a wave function that hasn't yet collapsed through observation. Schrödinger's PC. God doesn't play dice, but we do.

 

[Campbell]

This is getting inordinately silly. Hit points are a natural outgrowth of war game mechanics meant to model the gradual attrition of military units as they lose men. This slow attrition over the course of multiple combat encounters in no way is reflective of the fiction or any work of genre fiction / action movies. John McClane is never running low on hit points.

What it does is create a compelling gameplay experience that encourages players to make decisions about how to properly utilize their resources. There is a really good reason the vast majority of video games use similar systems - they are easy to understand and provide a good framework for gameplay decisions. There's no shame in the game.

 

[pemerton]

the protagonist gets beat to a bloody pulp but other than occasionally getting a second wind and maybe, just maybe looking a bit tired at a long drawn out slug-fest or muttering "I'm getting too old for this", is doing just fine.

That is, never suffers any critical wounds!

not to mention many people don't realize they're even hurt until they're no longer in the middle of the fight. There are numerous stories of people thinking they were stung by a wasp only to find they'd been shot 5 minutes later. Apparently winning a sword duel and then falling over dead from your wounds a few minutes after the fight was over was also a thing.

This never happens in 5e D&D. It's the reverse - as per your chart, a person is critically injured, yet five seconds later is back on their feet swinging away.

The obvious solution is to abandon your chart - they never were critically injured.

This slow attrition over the course of multiple combat encounters in no way is reflective of the fiction or any work of genre fiction / action movies.

That's why I think the 4e version is the best implementation. It's no surprise that it is also the closest to how action points work in Robin Laws HeroWars.

 

[pemerton]

It's called a wave function that hasn't yet collapsed through observation. Schrödinger's PC. God doesn't play dice, but we do.

We don't need to invoke Schroedinger here. It's enough to say that the fiction hasn't been established yet. That's something that non-simulationist mechanics allow for - the deferral of authorship until we get more information out of the resolution process.