Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

[ACOS]

Since nothing besides hitting zero has any effect on you, it's reasonable to claim there's no actual injury until that happens. Just fatigue or combat weariness or whatever.

No it is not.

• If hit point loss isn't wounds, why are the spells that restore them explicitly curing wounds?
• If hit point loss isn't wounds, how do they deliver poison, disease, and other rider effects?

Also, apparently being really tired turns paper cuts (or roses, or whatever) from an annoyance to being super deadly.
Funny how that works.

[Deathfork]

Since nothing besides hitting zero has any effect on you, it's reasonable to claim there's no actual injury until that happens. Just fatigue or combat weariness or whatever.

No it is not.

• If hit point loss isn't wounds, why are the spells that restore them explicitly curing wounds?
• If hit point loss isn't wounds, how do they deliver poison, disease, and other rider effects?

The simple fact remains that damage doesn't do anything to you until you fall unconscious.
I'm reiterating what the game is telling me about how the reality of the game world works. The only opinion I offered is that it's a reasonable to take the position that hit points are tracking something other than just physical injury. And I stand by that opinion.
Either you deny how the game works, or you have to accept that hit point damage is tracking an abstraction and not just (I would argue barely) physical injury. Or you have to do all kinds of fundamentalist (or 4e) style mental gymnastics to reconcile the book fluff with the book crunch and with reality.

If hit point loss is wounds, how do you get more when you gain a level? Are you gaining more muscle mass and stronger bones that prevents you from taking more damage when hit with a longsword? Or is it an abstraction?

If hit point loss is wounds, how does one go from nearly dead to fine in the space of roughly a week, no matter the extent of the injuries? How does a wizard heal faster than a barbarian in this case?

[DSMatticus]

If hit point loss is wounds, how do you get more when you gain a level? Are you gaining more muscle mass and stronger bones that prevents you from taking more damage when hit with a longsword? Or is it an abstraction?

If hit point loss is wounds, how does one go from nearly dead to fine in the space of roughly a week, no matter the extent of the injuries? How does a wizard heal faster than a barbarian in this case?

Please don't make raelizarm arguments and confuse them for verisimilitude arguments. A world in which awesome people can take a ballista shot to the face and shrug because that is just a thing you can do once you are sufficiently awesome is not at all irrational or inconsistent. It is not our world, but it is not a divide by zero error for fiction. I will literally fucking pile examples on you until you drown in them of fictional stories from the beginning of recorded history to modern day in which badass people survive things no ordinary person could because they are a badass person in a fantasy story.

And if you are saying that the hitpoints of badasses in fantasy stories cannot represent actual physical injury because normal people in the actual world could not withstand those physical injuries, you are being an idiot. That doesn't even remotely connect. It's a complete non-sequitur.

Hitpoints as plot armor has always been fucking stupid, because sources of hitpoint damage come from things like falling from orbit and bathing in lava, and attacks that deal hitpoint damage also have riders which conceptually depend on physical injury like poison. What, are you going to declare high level characters unrealistically gravity/lava/acid repellent in order to avoid admitting that they are unrealistically durable? You're not patching any holes in the logic of the fictional universe: you're poking holes into it.

[Voss]

No. Don't even fucking START that shit with me. It is never, EVER reasonable to claim that "no actual injury occurs" if you are taking hit point damage.

Fuck you and your healing surge fapfest.

I'm not telling you anything the game isn't telling you. Either you accept no injury occurs, or that any injury that occurs is so insignificant that it has no negative effect on the injured, or that PCs simply don't feel pain.

The game isn't telling you that. At least, it isn't just telling you that. Every edition of D&D has been wildly inconstant about it (internally). 5e explicitly calls them a mix of physical/mental durability, will to live and luck. 3e is vague in its definition (how hard you are to kill), but sometimes it is a lucky dodge and other times you're being stabbed, burnt or whatever, but cure moderate wounds really isn't restoring your 'luck'

Mostly though, they're consistently an abstract game concept that takes whatever flavor text people want to coat them with. But you can take some comfort that (as usual) ISP's insane extreme position isn't coherent either.

[DSMatticus]

But you can take some comfort that (as usual) ISP's insane extreme position isn't coherent either.

ISP's "insane extreme position" is about the only position that has ever been even remotely coherent. Hitpoints do not reflect some quantum ability to have both fallen and not fallen off a cliff. You fall, you lose hitpoints, and a spell literally called "cure ____ wounds" gives them back. This shit is not ambiguous.

It is true that you can slap any fluff on anything, but it is not true that you can slap any fluff on anything and have it make sense. 4e declared that martial powers were a matter of skill and opportunity and that this would be represented with daily limits. That is the particular flavor coat they chose to apply onto their mechanics, and it very specifically was not the least bit coherent, and that incoherence pissed a lot of people off. But the fundamental incoherence of what they were doing didn't stop them from putting those words on paper; it just meant a bunch of people got to go on the internet and correctly identify that two plus two does not equal five. Exactly like when you try to tell people that D&D hitpoints are plot armor and not actual injuries, a bunch of people get to respond to you that two plus two does not equal five. Because fall damage. Because lava. Because poison. Because the cure spells. Because everything.

Nothing physically stops you from shitting on the verisimilitude of a fictional universe. You could make a game in which hitpoints were plot armor, and adjust your fluff or mechanics to fit, but D&D is not such a game. D&D is a game in which the only coherent answer is that hitpoints represent injuries and powerful people either turn big wounds into little wounds or eat big wounds like they don't give a fuck. Anything else involves addressing a bajillion and one edge cases and creates the honest to god problem that healing is a metagame concept your characters can't properly understand, which is stupid.

[Voss]

ISP's "insane extreme position" is about the only position that has ever been even remotely coherent. Hitpoints do not reflect some quantum ability to have both fallen and not fallen off a cliff. You fall, you lose hitpoints, and a spell literally called "cure ____ wounds" gives them back. This shit is not ambiguous.

No, the cliff situation is not particularly ambiguous (but also you've just taken hit point damage and not splattered or broken bones, which is what you'd actually expect, and monks magically take less damage from splatting on the pavement simply by falling next to a wall, so sometimes it isn't even that unambiguous). But other situations _are_, especially when saving throws are involved. Superficial, meaningless or even nonexistent damage happens all the time as well. And the game has repeatedly defined hit point damage as both physical and superficial luck based plot armor nonsense. Simultaneously. It is literally what the actual rules actually say. And strangely enough that doesn't stop anyone from pretending that they're Bruce Willis crawling across broken glass like a dumbass.

[PhoneLobster]

ISP's "insane extreme position" is about the only position that has ever been even remotely coherent.

No.

Everything Voss said plus fuck you even if you sat down and redefined hit points from their vague and variable official definitions to "fuck you its physical injuries only final destination" it's STILL a ludicrously vague abstracted version of that "flavor" of resource you realizmz dolt.

And as an abstracted resource a very heavily abstracted resource, even an abstracted injury flavored resource they just plain are not realizmz you realizmz idiot.

There have been discussions here before of what actual realizmz physical damage tracking mechanics would look like. And the answer is "stupidly elaborate and impractical", the answer is NOT "HP with final destination blood special effects only".

And you know, I like that it's an abstracted resource, I like abstraction, I like the flexibility it gives so we can use HP to describe marginally different fluff while providing a unified practical and simple mechanic that meets important game play goals.

But I'm not stupid enough to imagine that abstraction doesn't have limitations and one of those limitations is that it CAN'T provide the realizmz interpretation you are pretending it must have.

[Insomniac]

Fighters can't do anything. He's not even expected to have a reasonable opportunity of victory against similar bruiser types like ogres, trolls and giants. In their first adventure, some mook gets thrown against a "CR 4" guy with 60 HP, 20 strength and a 4d10 breath weapon at first level and is expected to die and suffer a "death level" (whatever the fuck those are, I can't find rules for that in the adventure or DMG).

After the mook PC gets thrown into the literally impossible scenario to get killed, the villagers heal him back up and you're supposed to do 6 more levels of this bullshit. In the preposterously unlikely scenario that the PC wins, the victory is counterfeited by this guy coming back all throughout the adventure, repeatedly "challenging" the 1st and 3rd level PCs to unwinnable 1 on 1 combats.

The stupidity of this Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure just floors me.

[Dogbert]

In the preposterously unlikely scenario that the PC wins, the victory is counterfeited by this guy coming back all throughout the adventure, repeatedly "challenging" the 1st and 3rd level PCs to unwinnable 1 on 1 combats.

The amount of DM fappery just in this paragraph is staggering...

[Voss]

Fighters can't do anything. He's not even expected to have a reasonable opportunity of victory against similar bruiser types like ogres, trolls and giants. In their first adventure, some mook gets thrown against a "CR 4" guy with 60 HP, 20 strength and a 4d10 breath weapon at first level and is expected to die and suffer a "death level" (whatever the fuck those are, I can't find rules for that in the adventure or DMG).

Eh. Fighters are flawed, but not being able to solo a hard encounter for a level 3 party isn't why. A well-built level 2 fighter can, on the other hand, manage to solo a CR 2 ogre with a reasonable chance of success. As far as I can tell 'death levels' aren't a thing. Rez magic does give a fuckoff lingering penalty though (-4 to pretty much everything, which shrinks by -1 for each long rest)

After the mook PC gets thrown into the literally impossible scenario to get killed, the villagers heal him back up and you're supposed to do 6 more levels of this bullshit. In the preposterously unlikely scenario that the PC wins, the victory is counterfeited by this guy coming back all throughout the adventure, repeatedly "challenging" the 1st and 3rd level PCs to unwinnable 1 on 1 combats.

Stupid, but after attempt #1, the party should be saying go fuck yourself.

The stupidity of this Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure just floors me.

I'm not surprised. First adventure for the edition being absolutely horrid was set with Keep on the Shadowfell for 4th, with several numerically un-winnable encounters. That it's by a third party publisher just makes it even less surprising. Particularly since they (and other early publishers of 3PP) have mentioned that they didn't have the full rules when writing their material.

[hamstertamer]

Since nothing besides hitting zero has any effect on you, it's reasonable to claim there's no actual injury until that happens. Just fatigue or combat weariness or whatever.

No it is not.

• If hit point loss isn't wounds, why are the spells that restore them explicitly curing wounds?
• If hit point loss isn't wounds, how do they deliver poison, disease, and other rider effects?

The simple fact remains that damage doesn't do anything to you until you fall unconscious.
I'm reiterating what the game is telling me about how the reality of the game world works. The only opinion I offered is that it's a reasonable to take the position that hit points are tracking something other than just physical injury. And I stand by that opinion.
Either you deny how the game works, or you have to accept that hit point damage is tracking an abstraction and not just (I would argue barely) physical injury. Or you have to do all kinds of fundamentalist (or 4e) style mental gymnastics to reconcile the book fluff with the book crunch and with reality.

If hit point loss is wounds, how do you get more when you gain a level? Are you gaining more muscle mass and stronger bones that prevents you from taking more damage when hit with a longsword? Or is it an abstraction?

If hit point loss is wounds, how does one go from nearly dead to fine in the space of roughly a week, no matter the extent of the injuries? How does a wizard heal faster than a barbarian in this case?

Stupid, hit point damage is wounds, always has been. The narrative that is invoked to resolve the damage depends on the DM. When you gain a level you not gain meat, you simply gain the ability to resist more damage. There is no narrative implicit in the act of gaining HP from levels or receiving damage.

It seems that you trying to make an argument of realism in order to justify a un-realistic narrative of hp damage. It's a bad argument.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Can the PCs just say no and dogpile this guy?

[Wiseman]

Then how do temporary hitpoints work?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

In my heartbreaker, you will have 3HP at any and all levels, with an explicit gradient from "doing fine" to "a mangled mess", but after you've stacked your Epic Points sufficiently high enough, you'll have enough DR that falling from orbit can't hurt you.

[DSMatticus]

ISP's "insane extreme position" is about the only position that has ever been even remotely coherent.

Stupid bullshit

The only thing your posts ever seem to do is remind me why I keep putting you on ignore. I just do not have any patience at all for you. I'll give you one shot at not being a dumbass: you are attempting to derogatively summarize the position that high level characters can take a ballista bolt to the face and laugh as "realizmz." If that is the quality of discussion you have to offer, don't.

The property actually being discussed is not realism, it is internal consistency. You and Voss are somehow under the mistaken impression that abstracting things magically makes them consistent and you can just stop giving a fuck. That is gibberish. 4e martial dailies are an abstraction, and they are very clearly inconsistent with the fluff they are an abstraction of. Claim made, counter-example offered, claim disproved.

Hitpoints very specifically make you better at surviving a bunch of things which are not dodged, and very specifically do not make you better at not being affected by a bunch of things which are attached to damaging effects as riders. Hitpoints represent physical injury. If you declare them to be plot armor (even partially), then you are dumped into the absurd position of trying to describe how the plot is protecting someone from the bottom of that cliff and why a poisoned weapon is so much more accurate than an unpoisoned one and how characters even fucking know how close to death they are. Those are all stupid. They are genuinely stupider than a level 10 fighter being impaled by a ballista bolt and surviving, in that being impaled by a ballista bolt and surviving is exactly the sort of thing a level 10 fighter needs to be capable of.

And the game has repeatedly defined hit point damage as both physical and superficial luck based plot armor nonsense. Simultaneously. It is literally what the actual rules actually say.

Are you even paying attention? Do you understand what is being argued?

It is true that you can slap any fluff on anything, but it is not true that you can slap any fluff on anything and have it make sense. 4e declared that martial powers were a matter of skill and opportunity and that this would be represented with daily limits. That is the particular flavor coat they chose to apply onto their mechanics, and it very specifically was not the least bit coherent, and that incoherence pissed a lot of people off. But the fundamental incoherence of what they were doing didn't stop them from putting those words on paper; it just meant a bunch of people got to go on the internet and correctly identify that two plus two does not equal five. Exactly like when you try to tell people that D&D hitpoints are plot armor and not actual injuries, a bunch of people get to respond to you that two plus two does not equal five. Because fall damage. Because lava. Because poison. Because the cure spells. Because everything.

[PhoneLobster]

The property actually being discussed is not realism, it is internal consistency.

That's still "realizmz". "realizmz" idiots often try to cloak their argument in various other essentially meaningless motherhood statements when their indefensibly stupid demands are rapidly crumbling under scrutiny. What you mean to say is "I likez myz realzizmz".

And HP still don't provide the realizmz you are wanking over. People are flat out pointing out to you that HP as they exist lack internal consistency. But hey, you have blind faith in the realizmz so you just keep on trucking, you are about 2 seconds of "Realizmz can't fail HP, only HP can fail Realizmz!".

Hitpoints very specifically make you better at surviving a bunch of things which are not dodged,

But not ALL the things which are not dodged, and its not actually purely "not dodged" because your Armour Class isn't actually a dodge bonus but incorporates armour and other random non-dodge related shit, and not all the things it makes you survive are physical damage.

But you have a realizmz wank on, so basically nothing is consistent here and your realizmz wank specifically will, as they all seem to, be the least consistent thing of all.

If you declare them to be plot armor (even partially), then you are dumped into the absurd position of trying to describe how the plot is protecting someone from the bottom of that cliff and why a poisoned weapon is so much more accurate than an unpoisoned one and how characters even fucking know how close to death they are.

I... can't even believe you are so stupid as to think fluffing any of that is hard... have you never encountered ANY FICTION EVER.

I'm also amazed you think existing HP systems DON'T still require you to make exactly those explanations like that on a regular basis anyway when you have to explain how the hell people took less damage from those things when damage rolls low or saving throws to reduce damage are made, or when a Miss occurs only because a character just added a laughably light armour suit, their own muscles in a con score to AC (i hear thats a thing now) or more traditionally their wisdom or intelligence bonus to AC. Or a thousand other things.

How the heck you can keep the intellectual dissonance going being perfectly happy with AC (and saving throws and...etc...) being "dodge or absorb damage" while claiming it's just plain IMPOSSIBLE to describe abstracted HP as "dodge or absorb damage" because such a mechanic is just plain UNREALIZMZ amazes me.

But aside from that I'm just even more amazed that you think that is somehow some sort of killer argument... I mean how dumb are you?

[Voss]

Are you even paying attention? Do you understand what is being argued?

Yes. Your fan want mindcaulk is wrong, so you're going to simply repeat yourself as if that somehow supports or gives further evidence for your position rather than simply repeats it.

But all your specific examples of physical damage doesn't change the fact that the rules for hit points specifically tell you that it is both physical damage and plot armor. It doesn't even matter, either, since surviving a ballista bolt through the chest only makes sense if it is a combination of physical damage and plot armor. Just like the 'badasses' in fantasy stories you specifically brought up, who have shitloads of plot armor to shield them or miraculously negate the injuries they sustain all the damn time.

Shall we examine frodo, who was smashes so hard it was like being between a hammer and an anvil, but went from certainly dead to lightly bruised in a matter of moments?

[Hicks]

IIRC, that was due to his hidden mithril shirt, "light as a feather, but as hard as dragon scales!" The item turned what should have been frodo-kabob into light brusing.

[ScottS]

Here's a funny line from Banewarrens, describing how to adjudicate an 1100 foot fall:

"Roll 20d6 points of damage for any character who falls. A
character surviving the damage from the fall should be
assumed to have actually landed on a bridge or ledge 100 or
so feet below rather than falling all the way down."

So Monte Cook in 2002 is telling you that the falling PC is in a superposition of |dead at the bottom of the hole> and |alive on a ledge 100 ft down> which collapses to one of those states after you roll the dice.

Why do you hate Monte Cook/3e/fun/freedom/'Murica/QM so much, DSM?

[infected slut princess]

Here's a funny line from Banewarrens, describing how to adjudicate an 1100 foot fall:

"Roll 20d6 points of damage for any character who falls. A
character surviving the damage from the fall should be
assumed to have actually landed on a bridge or ledge 100 or
so feet below rather than falling all the way down."

So Monte Cook in 2002 is telling you that the falling PC is in a superposition of |dead at the bottom of the hole> and |alive on a ledge 100 ft down> which collapses to one of those states after you roll the dice.

Why do you hate Monte Cook/3e/fun/freedom/'Murica/QM so much, DSM?

Oh that makes a lot of sense. So you roll 20d6 damage, which is damage for a fall of 200 FEET OR MORE, but if you survive, you are assumed to have only fallen 100 feet. PURE FAILURE.

Meanwhile, what is basically happening here is that I basically agree with DSMATTICUS on something (therefore armageddon must be nigh), and Phonelobster and his deathfuck friend are fapping to Mealrs and healing surges.

Protip: If your interpretation of hit point damage opens the door for healing surges, you are a Mearls-fapper and therefore you are automatically wrong. QED

[Voss]

IIRC, that was due to his hidden mithril shirt, "light as a feather, but as hard as dragon scales!" The item turned what should have been frodo-kabob into light brusing.

Yes. It was due to his hidden armor that the writer went out of his way to give him so that one incident could occur and the character could be perfectly fine after someone finally takes a hit.

Are you going to tell me that gandalf and the balrog cushioned each other's fall next? Plot armor, motherfucker.



Also, chain mail doesn't work like that. To test this, feel free to take a 10 year old, dress him in chain, and stand him against a wall, and hit him with a metal bat* as hard as you can. For even a chance of the brat surviving, do this in a hospital where the doctors can immediately get to work on the pulped organs and shattered bone where his chest cavity used to be.

*note the novel uses a sword rather than a spear.

Protip: If your interpretation of hit point damage opens the door for healing surges, you are a Mearls-fapper and therefore you are automatically wrong. QED

So... every edition of D&D that didn't have healing surges and still had hit points as a mix of physical injury, luck and plot armor is....what? This, by the way, is all of them.

Good thing DSM saddled himself with defending your insanity.

[Blicero]

Also, chain mail doesn't work like that.

So magical armor made of a magical material invented by magical people in a magical world has to obey the same properties as real armor? Are you trolling?

[Voss]

Also, chain mail doesn't work like that.

So magical armor made of a magical material invented by magical people in a magical world has to obey the same properties as real armor? Are you trolling?

Nope. They make a big deal about the properties of mithril and how it can't be cut. They say jack/shit about its ability to magically create an inertial dampening field inside the amor. But since it isn't magical, isn't made by magical people and the mineral is naturally occurring, your point is bullshit anyway, and you should feel bad for jumping in and shouting 'Magic, magic, magic!' as if that were an actual argument.

Even if it were, it still doesn't stop it from being an literal fucking example of plot armor in the most egregious and hamfisted fashion.

[Foxwarrior]

Well, Blicero, Voss does have a point. Mithril is described as supernaturally strong and light, but no mention is made of the links spontaneously going rigid to work like plate when struck, or absorbing kinetic energy and dissipating it into the aether, or whatever other magical thing would actually be relevant.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Wands of Cure Wounds + a menagerie of creatures that do all sorts of nasty things which somehow never amputate or ruin limbs, eyes, or organs have always been with us. Mearls just gave Defenders and Leaders ways around the action economy regulating the use of the cure wands.