Is there any penalty for removing an arrow in the middle of combat? Assume arrows are hooked/barbed (or whatever you call it). I'm thinking of adding a damage penalty for pulling an arrow out under certain conditions when extra care cannot be taken.
Just seems weird you roll 1d8 and that's it. Characters walking around with arrows stuck in them and nothing bad happens later when they're removed.
Hit points often cause a lot of confusion. People intuitively see them as damage, when the intent of them is to be far more abstract.
What I find is the best way to see hit points as is that the first level's worth of hit points largely reflects your ability to take punishment directly. So roughly, your first points from 1-10 are you're character actually getting hit and taking damage.
Anything above that is an abstract combination of luck and skill and avoiding being hurt. The fact that you are losing hit points, without necessarily getting truly hit, represents very close calls that required you to duck out of the way which exhausts you, or unnerves you, or simply you're running out of good fortune.
So, because of all of that, there isn't any specifics rules on how to deal with a specific "wound" or "hit" beyond the fact that some abilities allow for a bleed effect, and even those get abstracted out quite a bit.
From another thread with a similar issue I responded with:
The problem with hit points is that they are called "hit" points.
Despite the fact that going back to the original D&D hit points have always been intended as an abstraction, and have remained so after all of these decades, the nomenclature the system uses from the start has caused this confusion over all this time. People continue to tread down the path towards simulation because "roll to attack" and then either "hit!" or "miss!" is what is used to resolve a system that is actually very abstract.
This was made worse with 3.0 and beyond because the time of a round was reduced from a minute to six seconds, lending more of an idea that rolling to hit and doing damage actually represents making contact and causing physical damage.
The abstraction does come into better relief if you think of the pre-3.0 model. Combat rounds represented a minute of action. Now in a minute there are tons of swings, repositions, etc. However you just make one roll for that whole span of time, and so hitting in that regard and only taking a third of your opponents hit points represents a lot of different actions that are accumulating to the point where his guard is down and a fatal blow is delivered.
If I could go back in time and show up at Gygax's doorstep as a mysterious investor in his new fangled game, one of the things I'd stipulate before handing him wads of cash is that hit points be called something else, such as fate points, or really anything that makes it crystal clear that the points are an abstraction. And when you roll to hit... instead you roll to "threaten" or some other term that once again shows that it is an abstraction that is being resolved, and not a clear cut hit or miss.
So in answer to the OP, I'd say with a 20 point out of 60 point shot, I'd interpret it as meaning the bullet just wizzed by the opponents eyes, the shock wave battering his face and shaking him a bit. Or perhaps the shot hit some close by terrain, the bullet shattering itself and stone and spraying the opponent with minor cuts and scratches, or perhaps it was a graze in an arm or leg. Enough to be quite painful, but not so bad that it cripples the opponent.
Mok wrote: stuff And yet, arrows do go into bodies, they do cause tissue damage, and they can do this without being fatal (i.e., they can bring you closer to death without killing you). More to my point, yanking them out can cause even more damage, potentially making the situation worse. How best to represent this?
Typically this would be the kind of thing I would hand wave, but I have a specific circumstance in mind.
Assume you've been hit by an arcane archer who has cast Darkness, or maybe Alarm, on the arrow. Now you can't see, or you need to hide and the alarm is giving you away. Time is ticking and bad things are closing in. You pull out the arrow in a hurry and cast it aside.
If that arrow never penetrated your flesh, no problem. And given the abstract nature of HP, maybe that's precisely what happens. But sometimes an arrow really is sticking out of your ribs, and pulling it out recklessly should further the injury.
How do you tell? Am I nuts for pursuing this line of inquiry?
And yeah, I do get the whole abstraction thing, by the way. I'm a 1st edition guy myself and used to enjoy describing all the things that went on during that one minute round. Good times. Not necessarily better times, just good ones.
Pathfinder Maps Subscriber
Pathfinder Core, page 141 wrote: Ammunition: Projectile weapons use ammunition:
arrows (for bows), bolts (for crossbows), darts (for blowguns), or sling bullets (for slings and halfling sling staves). When using a bow, a character can draw ammunition as a free action; crossbows and slings require an action for reloading (as noted in their descriptions). Generally speaking, ammunition that hits its target is destroyed or rendered useless, while ammunition that misses has a 50% chance of being destroyed or lost.
Generally speaking, that arrow with whatever spell cast on it was destroyed when it hit, or at least damaged to the point that the spell stopped working.
However, if you're using the Arcane Archer's Imbue Arrow ability, the spell goes off at the point hit, but the arrow is still destroyed. Pulling the remains of the arrow out does nothing, the spell is centered where the arrow landed.
Lvl 12 Procrastinator wrote:
How do you tell? Am I nuts for pursuing this line of inquiry?
And yeah, I do get the whole abstraction thing, by the way. I'm a 1st edition guy myself and used to enjoy describing all the things that went on during that one minute round. Good times. Not necessarily better times, just good ones.
I'd say that anything that unless you've dropped below half HP, you are nothing more than winded, scratched, bruised, etc.
At half hit points, weapons are causing non-fatal, but serious injuries. Swords are taking gashes out of you, arrows are stuck shallowly in non-vital areas or cut you as they whizzed past, maces are causing crushing bruises and cracked ribs.
At 0 hit points, you've taken a fatal or life-threatening injury. Broken femur, major artery sliced, massive brain bleed/concussion.
If you want specifics, toss together your own version of critical hit decks, put together one for 'bloodied' hits for piercing, slashing, bludgeoning, magical damage. Put another for 'deadly' hits. Then, you can know if those arrows need to be pulled out or not, and give rules for them.
I'd hesitate to put any serious mechanical effects on these cards, and just use them when you need the description of a particularly brutal hit.
This is assuming you need something other than fiat when describing the wounds, however.
In my games, first level characters get half their hit points as wound points, and the rest as defense points. At second level and their after, all the first level points are wound points and everything else is defense points.
Characters that still have even 1 defense point left are considered unharmed. After five minutes rest, all defense points return so long as no hit points were lost.
If someone actually lost hit points due to an arrow, sure, I'd say hit them with another d4 for yanking it out. Otherwise, all that supposed damage was just the god's frowning on them, counting down the hour glass.
SlimGauge wrote:
However, if you're using the Arcane Archer's Imbue Arrow ability, the spell goes off at the point hit, but the arrow is still destroyed. Pulling the remains of the arrow out does nothing, the spell is centered where the arrow landed.
This is an explanation I can live with. I was hoping to see what the players would do when confronted with a decision about whether to risk extra damage to shake off the ongoing effects of an imbued arrow. I think, though, that my line of thinking leads down a rabbit hole into which I'm not willing to descend. Things like effects of arrows on movement, infection and gangrene, whether the archer imbued the arrow's tip or shaft (and what happens when the shaft is broken), etc.
Thanks.
Lvl 12 Procrastinator wrote: Assume you've been hit by an arcane archer who has cast Darkness, or maybe Alarm, on the arrow. Now you can't see, or you need to hide and the alarm is giving you away. Time is ticking and bad things are closing in. You pull out the arrow in a hurry and cast it aside. Ah, that is kind of an interesting situation. Assuming the arrow is sticking in the person, I guess I'd do a heal check, with success avoiding injury, but failure resulting in some damage, say 2 points.
Lvl 12 Procrastinator wrote:
If that arrow never penetrated your flesh, no problem. And given the abstract nature of HP, maybe that's precisely what happens. But sometimes an arrow really is sticking out of your ribs, and pulling it out recklessly should further the injury.
How do you tell? Am I nuts for pursuing this line of inquiry?
No, I don't think you are. Trying to wrestle successfully with the abstraction is something that I've gone into before. I just laid out all that previous information because a lot of people do tend to overlook the abstraction, which can lead to head banging on the wall type of results.
In my experience, the best system that has come out of the D&D tradition to handle the balance of the abstraction was with the Star Wars Saga game. They had a condition track, and every character had a Damage Threshold. This was calculated in a way that wouldn't be done in Pathfinder, but generally resulted in a score between 12 and 20 depending on the PC.
If any attack you took was above this score then you got dinged on the condition track. It's steps were: 0, -1, -2, -5, -10, Unconscious. Those modifiers applied to basically anything about your character.
The great thing about this method is that it allowed you to get a bit of particularity out of the abstract hit point system, without being cumbersome. If you got critted, then you likely too damage above your threshold, but also if you just got hit hard by something, then it might also ding you on that condition track.
One thing about the condition track is that sometimes you'd get nailed with an effect that would have a "persistent condition" that wouldn't go away until you go back up on the condition track. So it basically gave some room to get very particular at times, while most of the time remaining abstract.
Players had some control over this condition track by being able to take feats that allowed you to pump up your Damage Threshold by +5 points, making it a lot harder to get knocked about and shaken by attacks. There were also attacks that might only target the condition track, or cause hit point damage + auto condition track damage. It is a neat a tidy system that can be used in many different and satisfying ways.
Anyway, for Pathfinder... you could adopt all of that, but another way would be to just say that any time you take a crit you can consider it a real honest to goodness contact "hit" with the hit points. Likewise, anytime you take more than your fortitude bonus + 10 would also be considered a real hit, and make whatever significance you like from that result.
As far as the game goes, I would rule that arrows could be yanked out without incident.
However, many arrow heads are actually designed in such a way that "yanking them out" would probably do considerably more damage than the arrow did on the way in. In most situations, you would actually snap off the shaft just before the feathers and jam the arrow completely through, removing it from the other side.
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