Quote from: Shipyard Locked;725795Right off the top of my head: Final Fantasy XIII. No defense stat, no armor "stat", just hit points and pieces of equipment that increased your number of hit points.

Not just video games, but there are TTRPGs like that as well.  The system used in Altus Aventum has a series of 4 different wound levels you can withstand before dying.  Armor simply increases those.  I'm sure there are plenty of other RPGs out there that do the same

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;725795Right off the top of my head: Final Fantasy XIII. No defense stat, no armor "stat", just hit points and pieces of equipment that increased your number of hit points. I kind of admired the simplicity, transparency, and honesty of it.

I suspect Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is similar.  (Maybe even simpler than Final Fantasy).

Awhile ago I looked at whether taking damage is variable or (relatively) constant in the game.

For example:

- Firing a rocket launcher against a wall at point blank range, caused the exact same amount of damage every time.
- Dropping a grenade at your foot, caused approximately the same amount of damage every time.  (The damage differed by 1 point).
- Falling off the same building height, caused approximately the same amount of damage every time.  (The damage differed by 1 point).
- Falling off of buildings of different heights, the damage looked approximately linear in proportion to the height of the building.
- etc ...

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;725752And cat-inflicted wounds are, apparently, especially prone to infection compared to those of other common animals.

I can testify to that. After my bit-to-the-bone finger swelled up and started turning purple my wife made me go to the hospital and get loaded up with antibiotics. Good old NHS earned their tax £ that day. :cool:

Quote from: Haffrung;725779Hit points are metagame. They were derived from a naval warfare wargame out of convenience. They simulate nothing. How else to explain that in perilous combat, through battle and wounds and blows and fire, a character continues to function at 100 per cent effectiveness until he hits a numerical threshold, then he dies. It's one of the gamiest mechanics ever devised for an RPG. There are literally hundreds of RPGs that use a more realistic combat system than AD&D.

Hits point created to make the Chainmail derived combat more interesting. 1 hit was expanded to 1d6 and likewise 1d6 per Hits to Kill.

Hit Points are not a metagame mechanic derived from an unrelated game. But you are correct in that hit points are not very detailed. That later games came along that provided more details that better simulated the complexities of taking injury during melee combat.

I don't feel that D&D Hit points are gamey at all. They are however very abstract thus how they "feel" is dependent on how the referee describes the results of combat to his players. If you want a more "realistic" gritty feeling D&D game then describe the combat results that way. If you want to that gritty feeling to have mechanic effects then D&D is not the game.

I also feel that the power creep in AD&D 1st and later editions hinders a more realistic description of hit points. OD&D has a distinctly flatter power curve. I feel this makes it easier to describe combat results in a more realistic manner even at higher levels.

Quote from: Haffrung;725779It's one of the gamiest mechanics ever devised for an RPG. There are literally hundreds of RPGs that use a more realistic combat system than AD&D.

Yeah, lots of them, personally I love RQ6.  However, in D&D, a housecat has less hit points then a veteran soldier, who has less hit points then an ancient dragon.  They are representational, even if HP use outside of combat is very lazily designed.  and, as I mentioned earlier fixing the HP issue where it becomes dissociative for you is very easy as opposed to, say, replacing all martial dailies.

Quote from: Haffrung;725779Tell you what. I'm running 4E Essentials right now. I don't intend to use minion for powerful monsters like fire giants. When the time comes around for me to disregard the minion rules, I'll be sure to let you know if the game is totally ruined and we have to stop playing.

Seeing as how you're running 4e right now, you and your players have no problems with metric tons of dissociated mechanics, so who cares?

Game ruined?  Take a breath, I never said the game would be ruined, I said if you're going to try and remove all dissociated mechanics from 4e, you might as well make your own game.

Quote from: Haffrung;725779And people are going to quibble over weak monsters dropping from one hit?

Yeah, if a normal Fire Giant can take 120 HPs of damage, and the "weak" Fire Giant next to him dies with 1HP of damage, then that's where the game enters FULL.RETARD mode.

Quote from: The Traveller;725783There's nothing that says HP can't be combined with a death spiral or hit locations.

Considering hit locations are in Supplement II: Blackmoor, I'd say that idea has been around since the beginning.

Quote from: The Traveller;725783There's nothing that says HP can't be combined with a death spiral or hit locations.

or critical hits, or stun, shock and bleeding, or anything else people have used to easily patch the HP system where it is too abstract for them.  Which is why always throwing HPs up as if that were some kind of argument to the fact that 4e seems as if dissociated mechanics were practically a design requirement is...I'll be nice and say misguided.

Quote from: CRKrueger;725832or critical hits, or stun, shock and bleeding, or anything else people have used to easily patch the HP system where it is too abstract for them.  Which is why always throwing HPs up as if that were some kind of argument to the fact that 4e seems as if dissociated mechanics were practically a design requirement is...I'll be nice and say misguided.

There is not a 'traditional' game out there that doesn't have dissociated mechanics. Using the 'concept' as a disparaging remark against 4e is laughable at best.

Quote from: estar;725828Hit Points are not a metagame mechanic derived from an unrelated game.

Whether they are metagame or not, I don't really care, but unless you want to call Dave Arneson a liar, he did pull it from a Naval wargame. The original interview is missing, but there is a metric fuckton of references to the exact interview saying the same thing.

EDIT: Wayback machine got it: https://web.archive.org/web/20060209235156/http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/august02/gencon/arneson/

QuoteAnyway, when we tried to use the old matrix rules (for Chainmail) only one die decided combat. So either the player would die or the monster would die. Well, the players didn't like that, so that's where I came up with hit points. Actually I got that from a set of Civil War Naval Rules where you had Armor Class and Hit Points and guns would do different damage.

Quote from: Sommerjon;725835There is not a 'traditional' game out there that doesn't have dissociated mechanics. Using the 'concept' as a disparaging remark against 4e is laughable at best.

There's not a single book published that doesn't have a typo.  There's a difference between that and a book that never went through any editing or spellchecking before it was published.

Dissociated mechanics, like providing rules that are meant to give the player, not the character, tactical options to make the minigame of combat interesting is a hallmark of 4e design.  That the option may make no sense in the context of the character wasn't even a design consideration.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;725838Whether they are metagame or not, I don't really care, but unless you want to call Dave Arneson a liar, he did pull it from a Naval wargame. The original interview is missing, but there is a metric fuckton of references to the exact interview saying the same thing.

EDIT: Wayback machine got it: https://web.archive.org/web/20060209235156/http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/august02/gencon/arneson/

Yes the idea of hit points comes from Naval Games as Jon Peterson documented in Playing at the World. However the APPLICATION is based on translating Chainmails hits to kill into a XD6s. This can be seen by a one to one correspondence between the HD of OD&D monsters and the the Hits to kill of their chainmail equivalent. A 4th level Fighter is a Hero, a Hero in Chainmail has 4 hits to kill. The Giant in Chainmail takes 8 hits to kill, in D&D the Giant has 8 HD.

Chainmail's Hits to kill represented the innate toughness of the figure and this was carried over to OD&D. Likewise in Chainmail the figure's armor rating determined how resistant it was to damage. And when translated over to OD&D Gygax and Arneson reach once again to their naval wargame experience and used the easier to use system of armor class from Don't Give up the Ship.

The main difference at first was that the chart was level/HD vs Armor instead of the weapons type vs armor of chainmail. This is because unlike chaimail character progression was a centerpiece mechanic.

Later in the Greyhawk supplement the weapon vs armor table was ported over in the form of bonuses and minuses.

Again the OD&D combat system is abstraction of combat that made sense to the participants in light of their war gaming experience. Later when D&D spread to people to who didn't share that experience they opted to create different systems like Runequest that reflected their experience. OD&D sin that it was poorly organized and poorly explained.

Quote from: CRKrueger;725855There's not a single book published that doesn't have a typo.  There's a difference between that and a book that never went through any editing or spellchecking before it was published.

I think this is a pretty good example, though i might say it is more like "most every book uses exclamation marks at some point but you shouldn't end every sentence with one." I can handle HP and AC, but i do not want every single mechanic to be that abstract. It is about using stuff where it is needed. If we put aside the dissociative argument for minute, which often just turns into people trying to prove if you don't like come and get it, you can't like hit points either, i think the issue here is for people who don't like the feel of 4E, it is ends every sentence with exclamation marks. A few we could handle. It was the sense that the game said, well D&D has HP and Vancian magic, so lets make everything gamey and abstract. It is an exageration to an extent, but that is how it felt to me.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;725795Instead, it's as if they totally skip the "to hit" roll and use the abstraction of hit points and damage to represent a poor attack instead. Like this: "Ooh, you rolled very low for damage against a creature with very high HP, so in this abstraction it's as if you swung wide and the creature only tired itself out a little bit to avoid it."

Are there any tabletop RPGs out there that exploit the abstraction of HP to the fullest like that?

I don't know if its exactly what you're after, but Tunnels and Trolls has a combat system where both sides compare combat totals for the round, and the difference goes to the loser in damage, after subtracting armour. Its hit points aren't especially abstract - damage comes directly off Constitution score or Monster Rating- though it generates some strange results like the greatsword guy (6 combat dice) being more likely to win the combat round ('hit') than the guy with the shortsword (3 combat dice).

Quote from: Haffrung;725779And people are going to quibble over weak monsters dropping from one hit?

I don't have an issue with that. It happens all the time in my OD&D game.

The part that becomes an issue is when we are dealing with a monster that is no longer weak.

Goblin minions- no problem.

Balrog minions- problem.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;725884it generates some strange results like the greatsword guy (6 combat dice) being more likely to win the combat round ('hit') than the guy with the shortsword (3 combat dice).

What do you think happens IRL if you put a guy with a greatsword vs a guy with a shortsword? The greatsword guy pokes the shortsword guy whenever the shortsword guy closes to strike, while the greatsword guy can strike while staying out of shortsword guy's reach. That's the main difference between the weapons - not amount of damage inflicted by a strike.