Most of the time that I play with others in PFS, I feel like people don't really appreciate what hit points are, or just lethal damage in general. I want to know how it should be seen, or how others look at hit points in terms of taking and giving lethal/nonlethal damage.
I believe the rules are that if you're at half health you are bloodied, so should you gauge the damage given to your character is always on a % scale, or will 1 HP always be 1 HP? Any rules to describe how much damage hit point loss inflicts on someone?
I usually take into consideration that lethal damage is a big deal. It's the difference when you're in a bar fight, and people are just doing their nonlethal damage to others, then someone takes it too far, and pulls out a lethal weapon. People are so used to eating damage and getting healed that people in PFS will pull out lethal weapons on a drop of a hat when a tavern brawl happens, or someone that looks like a badguy shows up, and they go right in to slice and dice.
So please, any actual rules or thoughts on the subject? What do you think is the correct way at looking at hit points and damage?
I always envisaged each time you take hp damage equal to you con stat (if you have that many hps lol )..you take some kind of visible wound. ( a cut..a blood bruise..broken bone etc..)
and as your HP total becomes larger the wounds each become more minor..until you take so many you collapse (or X by the amount of damage from one hit and take one nasty wound)
Of course this is for RP and flavor purposes mainly.
There are some game systems, like Savage Worlds, that give characters penalties on everything they do the more injured they are. Personally, I'm not a fan. From a gameplay perspective, it promotes a rocket-tag mentality, which Pathfinder already has quite enough of.
Have a look at the wounds and vigor variant rules for Pathfinder. Maybe you'll find them to your liking.
Also, "bloodied" does not exist in Pathfinder, that's a 4e term. It doesn't do anything by itself, it just interacts with other special abilities. E.G. dragonborn deal more damage while bloodied, dragons recharge their breath weapons when they get bloodied, etc.
I always like to remind myself what Hit Points are:
What Hit Points Represent: Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one.
Given this abstraction, I tend to look at Hit point damage as being more akin to fatigue. Eventually a character just gets beat down so much he becomes disabled, unconscious, or he dies.
In a knife fight a character probably gets cut and bleeds, but the same is not true when he's being squeezed to death by a python--even though the Hit Point damage may be the same.
The more Hit Points a character has partially represents their ability to shrug off damage. A punch in the face, a sword slash across the chest, or a sonic shock wave just doesn't have the same effect on a seasoned warrior as it does to a common man and his chickens.
There's a difference between bleeding and Bleed Damage. Bleed Damage is when you're bleeding out so fast you'll be dead within a minute or two if you don't receive medical treatment. I've had many cuts in my life but never anything as serious as Pathfinder Bleed Damage.
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If you look at a system like Star Wars d20 revised, you have 2 types of hit points. You have Vitality Points and Wound Points. Your vitality increases with levels just like normal HP would do. Your Wound points are equal to your con score. Once you're at -1 wound point you're down and bleeding. Once you hit -10 wound points you die. You can only take wound points by getting critically hit or by losing all your vitality points first. The game system explicitly states that vitality represents the character dodging blows, or turning potential hard-hitters into glancing blows.
Now in pathfinder I've always seen HP as direct, herculean fortitude. A 1st level commoner with unexceptional constitution has 4 hit points. This means a dagger, thrust by someone with a +1 str mod, can drop a commoner to bleeding and dying in one solid hit - I can imagine it'd be the same if I took a solid hit from a kitchen knife.
Now let's say you have a character with 8 hp. He can take 2 of said attacks before the same happens. Is he dodging the first blow slightly? Perhaps, but he might as well just take 2 of the same types of hits. Hit points in pathfinder is akin to having such a thick skin, such immense vigour of body, that someone can legitimately land a downward swing on your naked collarbone with a greataxe, and even though the wound looks horrible, you're still standing because it was only 14 hps worth of damage. You may be laughing at the measly damage if you're high enough level.
"Why do you say that hp work that way? It looks silly to me when I imagine a 6th level fighter literally surviving several swordblows without barely caring, before then dispatching his enemies with ease."
I say hp work that way, because it seems to be what is mechanically implied by certain abilities and game-mechanics.
Take a 14th level barbarian - this guy is a demigod in the eyes of mere NPCs, an expression of battle made manifest in the shape of a mortal man. This dude has 133hp. Now imagine him fighting an old red dragon with the Snatch ability - for the purpose of this demonstration the barbarian is naked. The dragon bites him and grapples him in its jaws, and because of the snatch ability, the barbarian is now held firmly by the teeth of the dragon - meaning he is denied his reflex save vs its breath weapon. So the next round the dragon breathes fire on him - burning him for 16d10 fire damage, that would normally allow a character to throw themselves for dear life, to avoid damage, by granting them a reflex-save, but not this time. This time, the barbarian takes 16d10 points of dragon-fire directly to his person. The dragon burns him, and a 60ft conal area directly behind him for 104 damage. After taking this damage directly to the face, the barbarian still has 29 hp - or around 7 commoners worth of hp. Meanwhile the building behind the barbarian, that also happened to be in the conal area is completely wrecked, the facade visibly melting like chocolate under the onslaught of dragon-fire. But the barbarian is fine.
That is one of the reasons hit points represent a godly ability to take damage and live. Another example would be falling damge. Point remains - you're taking the damage, yet surviving. You're perfectly free to describe your swashbuckler taking 20 points of damage from a longspear as him spinning sideways, barely getting graced by the weapon, before dashing in and cutting his opponent to ribbons - we should not limit the feel a person want to invoke with the character. But just as said player is justified in saying his character gets grazed, he is also justified in saying his character takes the spear directly in the gut, a hit that would drop an ox, then pulls the spear from his body, spits out a bit of blood, looks to the dude holding the spear and says 'my turn'.
Hope it helps :)
-Nearyn
Last Action Hero, a movie starring Arnold Schwartzenegger. In said movie his character is an action movie star sucked by magic into the real world. He gets shot in the real by a single bullet and is dying badly. At the last second the other protagonist of the story manages to get him back into his "movie world" whereupon the other movie characters pronounce "what are you kidding? This is nothing but a flesh wound!"
Pathfinder PCs are super heroes, action stars, fairy tale characters. They are meant to lead legendary lives. The HP system does EVERYTHING everyone above me said so well because it is an abstraction of ALL of the things these supernatural figures have been shown to do in the various media.
Hit Points are Hit Points. They are whatever you need them to be at the time. They are a means to an end. They are not the ONLY means. The variant above is another. On these boards there's Evil Lincoln's strain/injury variant as well. I've also seen no less than three homebrew versions in my own gaming groups: Con +level, that's it and hits are solid hits; HP is always divided in quarters with penalties for each quarter gone; after half HP you suffer the Fatigued condition.
Ultimately HP are nothing more than one more tool in your arsenal to tell a good story. HP are fluid, not just ONE thing. Sure when a 10th level Fighter loses a grapple with a dragon and is thrown over a 100' cliff, they survive the fall; the why is up to you. HP may represent hitting all those branches on the way down. Maybe he braced for the impact behind his shield. You could say though that he's just SO battle-hardened that when he hit he was just simply legendary.
In the end its your game, to be written by you and your friends at the moment it happens. Some rules are set in stone: injury poison happens on an injury. Other things in the game are purposely left to the imagination. Why? Because this is not a video game or a board game or a collectible card game.
This is Pathfinder. It is an extension of 3x D&D, which is the 3rd edition of original D&D. This is a game written by people with imagination for people with imagination.
Hit Points are Hit Points. Anything else is up to you.
Most of the time that I play with others in PFS, I feel like people don't really appreciate what hit points are, or just lethal damage in general. I want to know how it should be seen, or how others look at hit points in terms of taking and giving lethal/nonlethal damage.
There was a lengthy section about this in the first edition AD&D DMG, and Gygax addressed this question at some length. Of course, there's no normatives involved, since you play the way you want to play, and it's silly to say you should play this way if it's fun for everyone at your table to do it another way.
It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual
physical ability of the character to withstand damage
constitution bonuses- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" whith warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness).Harkening back to the example of Rasputin, it would be safe to assume
that he could withstand physical damage sufficient to have killed any four normal men, i.e. more than 14 hit points. Therefore, let us assume that a character with an 18 constitution will eventually be able to withstand no less than 15 hit points of actual physical damage before being slain, and that perhaps as many as 23 hit points could constitute the physical makeup of a character. The balance of accrued hit points are those which fall into the non-physical areas already detailed. Furthermore, these actual physical hit points would be spread across a large number of levels, starting from a base score of from an average of 3 to 4, going up to 6 to 8 at 2nd level, 9 to 11 at 3rd, 12 to 14 at 4th, 15 to 17 at 5th, 18 to 20 at 6th, and 21 to 23 at 7th level. Note that the above assumes the character is a fighter with an average of 3 hit points per die going to physical ability to withstand punishment and only 1 point of constitution bonus being likewise assigned. Beyond the basic physical damage sustained, hits scored upon a character do not actually do such an amount of physical damage.Consider a character who is a 10th level fighter with an 18 constitution. This character would have an average of 5% hit points per die, plus a constitution bonus of 4 hit points, per level, or 95 hit points! Each hit scored upon the character does only o small amount of actual physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points.
I'd add to that that "bloodied" is (IMHO) when you start actually taking real wounds as opposed to when you start taking serious wounds. That's what the word means away from the gaming table. But this means that the top half of your hit points are basically bruises and fatigue.
Hit points are a hideous abomination of several different descriptions merged into a generic term.
Hit Points are Hit Points. They are whatever you need them to be at the time.
There was a lengthy section about this in the first edition AD&D DMG, and Gygax addressed this question at some length. Of course, there's no normatives involved, since you play the way you want to play, and it's silly to say you should play this way if it's fun for everyone at your table to do it another way.
All of this, yes!
According to Old Geezer of RPGnet, who played under Gary Gygax himself, hit points were originally just a rule to make the game more fun. That's it. There was no in-game explanation; hit points existed so that players had a finite resource to track as their characters progressed through the dungeon. Hit points create a tension which, barring cheap and easy healing, slowly builds up as a party progressed through a time-sensitive adventure. And at the hobby's start, that was the beginning and end of the concept of hit points.
But then fans started asking what hit points mean. After getting over his initial surprise that anyone even cared what such a game rule means, Gygax came up with the various situationally-dependent explanations that most D&D (and PF) gamers use today. I.e., skill, luck, endurance, divine favor, or whatever else the character and situation call for.
Alternatively, many gamers just don't think about it. In the words of Old Geezer, "Hit points are hit points. They represent hit points, and they simulate hit points." ;)
(Apparently Arneson didn't like hit points, favoring a 'damage save' mechanic instead.)
On a personal note, I prefer that my hit points have some concrete meaning; but in D&D (and PF) this requires an absurd degree of mental gymnastics outside of 4e.
Tequila Sunrise, Mark Hoover & Orfamay Quest's comments all match my internalized feeling for HPs - they're an abstract method of keeping score in a fantasy game of how close you are to being put out of action (unconscious or dead).
A great movie reference for how this can be perceived to play out when two heavy fighters are battling is in Robin & Marion. The final duel between Robin and the Sheriff of Nottingham has them fully armored, beating on each other, until they were at the point of collapse from exhaustion and wounds. There was no limbs being hacked off or critical penetrations of the armor (stab to the heart), just two old foes hammering each other into submission.
Hit points lend themselves to providing a rough structure for dramatic descriptions: i.e. you do 20+ points on a critical at 1st or 2nd level, and the GM says "The Ogre reels back from your mighty blow. He is definitely hurting, staggering, but still a threat as he waves his club and roars his defiance at the puny adventurers trying to surround him."