I use the rule Gary intended.  So 100 foot fall would be 55d6 damage, or 192 damage on average.  Go ahead and walk off that if you like.

Quote from: Mistwell;593070I think they should adapt the Bloodied concept.  The hit dice mechanic can heal hit points above the 50% mark, representing the non-physical injury aspects of hit points.  However, once you're damaged below the 50% mark, those represent physical wounds that cannot be healed by a short rest.

This sounds worthy enough to playtest.

...yeah, I always kinda liked the Bloodied concept and maybe it can work here.

I mean, hit points have always been kind of weird in ways that have been talked about over and over and over and over again, but still, the thing about a game where dudes fight with swords is that it's dumb if you completely elide the case where one of your dudes gets hit with a sword. Or...

Quote(2) I absolutely can't play with mechanics that treat every wound as if it were Schrodinger's cat, the nature of which cannot be determined until somebody decides to heal the wound.

Yeah.

I also like the various things Aos does with wounds in his house rules.

Quote from: JRR;593160I use the rule Gary intended.  So 100 foot fall would be 55d6 damage, or 192 damage on average.  Go ahead and walk off that if you like.

This stuff is always hard to model.  There are some extreme falls that people survive:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/survival/stories/4344037

(see Alan McGee for the kicker).

So you want heroes to have some chance.  After all, they survive things that are actually more brutal all the time with saving throws (fireballs, serious poisons).  It's part of what makes hit points a hard mechanic once it moves outside of simulating melee.

What about just saying after a short rest you heal up 1/2 of the HP's you lost and then say you heal about 1 or 2 HP's after every full nights sleep?

The way I see it, it would model the 'HP's are fatigue' aspect by allowing quick recovery of some of your lost HP's ( which can never fully heal you ), and also model the more serious long term injuries by having it take a while to heal up to full HP's when healing naturally.

Quote from: Votan;593236This stuff is always hard to model.  There are some extreme falls that people survive:

I am well aware of this.  A friend of my father's was a paratrooper in WW2.  His chute failed to open and he fell thousands of feet and landed flat of his back in a plowed field.  He got up, walked a few miles to a small villiage where he got a ride to a hospital where he spent the next 6 months with a broken back.  But then, he probably wasn't an npc since he had the coolest name ever:  Buck Austin.

Quote from: Monster Manuel;592838Sorry if this is disjointed. I'm a bit sick.

Healing surges were an awful mechanic in 4e, and their resurgence in 5e is unwelcome to me. For that matter, the way Healing works in 5th edition is lame. For those who don't know, short rests let you roll a hit die, long rests give you all of your HP back. The problem is that it breaks immersion to have healing be so easy.

That does indeed suck.

Heck, even in 3e, I found the ability to come back from a knock-down drag-out fight and be fine the next day, even with magical healing, to be disconcerting, so I worked out a system where you get longer term side effects when low on HP.

The problem with saying that you can't be at 100% fighting effectiveness only 1 day after being on death's door is that you are at 100% effectiveness to do anything else that doesn't cause HP damage.

So your fighter has this stomach wound that prevents him from routing the local goblins that the townsfolk are complaining about without a few weeks of rest, but has no real problem quarrying stone 8 hours a day with said stomach wound, or whatever other improbable task you can name that causes no HP damage but absolutely can't be done by anyone who was stabbed in the gut by a sword just yesterday "realistically".

That's always going to be the problem with less abstract HP and 'wounds'.  The D&D equivalent of Buck Austin doesn't spend 6 months in a hospital with a broken spine.  He spends <6 months doing anything but suffering attack rolls while recovering that broken spine.

Maiming and crippling wounds aren't things modeled with HP mechanics at all really.  The answer to what happens when you get stabbed in the gut with a sword in D&D is that you die, and so you only suffer a serious stab from a guy swinging a sword when it reduces you to below 0 (or -10, or -Con or w/e) HP.

Otherwise I just got stabbed in the gut and am bleeding black, and I'm going to skip, and cartwheel and dance back to the inn to rest up for a few weeks or a few months (depending on my level, which makes even less sense) because it really doesn't matter so long as I don't cartwheel into a monsters den, or off a cliff.

TSR D&D, as I know 1e and 2e has them, had rules for Constitution exertion. There were assumed averages, then rules for forced march or other long-term exertion -- which would give penalties if not properly rested thereafter. Further you could push yourself even farther and roll against STR or CON to push your limits, taking subsequently more penalties until you exhaust -- and then you take a bucket more penalties that take even more time to recover.

So, it's sort of an addressed issue that doesn't directly correlate to HP. Another tangential issue to look at I'm sure, but not a failing of the original HP concept.

Second, AD&D 2e (I'm assuming 1e has as well, but Im' not gonna dig out my DMG or Wilderness Guide) had an explanation why there's an averaged limit to falling damage while having guidelines on resolving inescapable, certain death. They cited, IIRC, a Russian woman falling two miles from a plane and surviving, and then said falling damage is rather difficult to model because of such outliers and lack of 100% certainty of death.

However the next section immediately goes into how to resolve 100% certain death. They gave examples such as sealed in a room with a falling ceiling trap crushed by tons of rock, or sealed in a pool of high concentrate acid with no air or escape. Their guidelines were that there's no need to model let alone play out such a scene as each would just be an exercise in futility. And that's where 100% certain death was left to be resolved by GM judgment.

Quote from: Opaopajr;593685Their guidelines were that there's no need to model let alone play out such a scene as each would just be an exercise in futility. And that's where 100% certain death was left to be resolved by GM judgment.

But then you're just playing Magical Tea Party!

Quote from: Bobloblah;593697But then you're just playing Magical Tea Party!

Only until Kryten shows up with the blowdarts and tank.

Quote from: Bobloblah;593697But then you're just playing Magical Tea Party!

Well, I always personally disagreed there myself. I thought it'd be rather moving to act out the general panic, suffering, and eventual resignation toward certain death. But then no one really brings flowers to an rpg game, so what'll be my reward afterwards (besides a few discreet masculine tears and thunderous applause)?

Quote from: Wolf, Richard;593568The problem with saying that you can't be at 100% fighting effectiveness only 1 day after being on death's door is that you are at 100% effectiveness to do anything else that doesn't cause HP damage.

So your fighter has this stomach wound that prevents him from routing the local goblins that the townsfolk are complaining about without a few weeks of rest, but has no real problem quarrying stone 8 hours a day with said stomach wound, or whatever other improbable task you can name that causes no HP damage but absolutely can't be done by anyone who was stabbed in the gut by a sword just yesterday "realistically".

I think the reason for this not being explicitly covered in the rules is that D&D is not typically thought of as "that game where you quarry stones all day".  In other words, its assumed that the GM will place his own judgment as to what an injured person can or can't do.
Note that in many versions of D&D, you don't heal anything naturally if you aren't RESTING.


RPGPundit

I agree that introducing healing surges or any sufficiently similar mechanics that flat out appears to be (poorly rationalized from an in-game POV) 'self healing ability' might have a repercussion on 'what HP represents'.

But personally I don't think that healing surges were not introduced in that way in 4E (like the RPG.net discussion alludes to). Rather, it seems to me they were introduced for the following two reasons (and as often, I think understanding a design rationale is helpful to understand whether one wants to bring a mechanic into one's game or not - one may, for instance, find the rationale on the right track, just dislike the implementation, and then adjust the latter to fit the former):

1. Healing surges are there to mechanically control how many healing potions the party has each day; so it 'solves' an alleged balance issue. This becomes especially clear once you read what the magical items actually called 'healing potions' do in 4e - they let you spend a healing surge (plus some little extra), so it's basically giving you additional 'second wind' actions where you blow extant surges (if also at a minor instead of standard action). I.e., healing potions do NOT substantially interfere with the amount of healing you get per day - that amount is still controlled by your surges.

2. Healing surges are a resource mechanics without the 'hassle' of tracking them. Healing potions were things you had to buy and keep track off, like ammunition. Guess what 4E did to ammunition (caveat: I'm not sure you don't need to track ammunition in 4E once it becomes magical, say +1 vampiric arrows; but ordinary ammunition is not tracked). Same here.

So here's my problem with the mechanic. I'm fine with 2., but I don't like 1. I don't like the fact that the game designers encoded their assumption as to how many resources a party should have per day into my game. Guess what. If you have less than 4 encounters a day, you are not going to threaten a party, because they are - thanks to the designer - swimming in an abundance of free healing (this is what killed 13th Age for my playtest groups - same error, except aggravated). That's horrible, because instead of 'expanding the sweet spot' the game has just narrowed the 'sweet spot'. That, to me, seems the biggest problem with 4E, even today after years of playing it, and the biggest self-delusion or lie (take your pick) of the design parlance that came with it. 4E, more than any other edition before, came with a very strict idea of how you were meant to play it.

Healing used to be a resource with its own scarcity dynamic. As soon as you introduce auto-healing you efface, not just the 'hassle' of resource administration (2.) but also the tactical challenge and story-driven potential associated with the mechanic. That's why re-theming healing surges into anything else - 'let's just call them healing potions, and let's just assume the players cautiously buy the same amount of them each day, no matter where they are' (this in line with 'don't hassle with resource keeping, move forward and on to the fun!') - will not do, as I once thought.

What I've done in my own 4E games is change the amount of healing surges the PCs get back per long rest so something drastically less, and more random. They roll a dice. That's the 5E mechanic. At least that gives back the idea of SOME challenges associated to resource keeping. But I'd agree that it doesn't come anywhere near the pre-4E gameplay.

Quote from: RPGPundit;593970I think the reason for this not being explicitly covered in the rules is that D&D is not typically thought of as "that game where you quarry stones all day".  In other words, its assumed that the GM will place his own judgment as to what an injured person can or can't do.
Note that in many versions of D&D, you don't heal anything naturally if you aren't RESTING.


RPGPundit

And the rules are pretty explicit as to what constitutes 'rest'.  Magic Users can carry on spell research or possibly re-charging magic items (creating magic items implies casting permanency and losing a point of Con wouldn't be allowed), Clerics can attend ceremonies and other daily religious responsibilities, and unless noted, all classes can perform routine daily maintenance: eat, get dressed, go to the market, etc, and of course simply remaining abed for the day.  Basically, anything you would feel up to in real life if you had a moderate to severe flu, although it isn't stated as such in so many words.  Strenuous activity like any kind of training, fighting, riding a horse and so on would prevent any healing for the day.

I think 2nd Edition provided for 1hp per day, plus Con bonus or something.  Maybe that was just a popular houserule.  In any event, your character would be healed up after a month of rest, regardless of the daily rate.  That seems reasonable enough, but the numbers can certainly be tweaked for whatever rate a particular table agrees with.