Hit Points: Why do people hate human toughness, but love inhuman reflexes?

[Kasz]

Personally I tell people that they get "hit" every time they're hit. The hammer wracks your body with pain, the blade's tip finds flesh and your body shivers with agony... there's nothing wrong with those attacks describing the loss of 5hp or 50hp...

I think most people's issues with attacks hitting is they don't slow you down, say what you want about people surviving a sword to the chest or whatever, they're typically not still sprinting around at 30ft per round, they could fight sure... but they're not impaired at all. Which is why I describe with nicks, and scratches, and gouges, and pain... 
 
Although we use the warhammer wound tables too. Specifically Josef's ones further down the page. When it seems appropriate.

As for real human toughness there's Tsutomu Yamaguchi who survived two nukes and didn't die until 50 years later.
You've also got cases of people falling asleep in the bath and drowning.

[TechyKat]

I think that the whole argument boils down to preference. In battle you can survive grievous wounds, but most of those people were pumped up on adrenaline and pulled out arrows and kept fighting and then died of their wounds, or blood loss or infection some time later. People survive being shot, but tend to die of shock or bloodloss, those who survive are usually giving medical help quite quickly. The man who had a spike through his head got incredibly lucky in that the brain is very good at recovering and then moving stuff around to continue functioning (even if it is said that his personality changed completely.) Some people like being a tough man, hard as rock and tough as mountain. Some people like being the dodgy guy who takes scraps and minor wounds until his luck runs out.

It is all story telling archetypes anyway. I tend to describe blows as scraps or minor wounds, you deflected it away with your shield etc, but if someone wants to be the tough barbarian, ending a fight with 20 arrows sticking out of him and surviving? More power to him. Humans are incredibly tough, people defy the bounds of normality all the time (like those people who lift cars to rescue loved ones.) Since the PCs are always the exception rather than the normal, they will and do survive stuff which is crazy to normal people. But it is a fantasy game and as such it should really serve the story and your preferences.

Though I do always enjoy the stories of absolute badasses in reality who took on impossible odds and survived. Real life protagonists there.

[oslecamo]

Though I do always enjoy the stories of absolute badasses in reality who took on impossible odds and survived. Real life protagonists there.

Thanks, it was probably something like this I was trying to convey. If a real world person can accomplish a specific great feat of badassery, a D&D character should be allowed to pull off something similar.

[Raineh Daze]

I think that the whole argument boils down to preference. In battle you can survive grievous wounds, but most of those people were pumped up on adrenaline and pulled out arrows and kept fighting and then died of their wounds, or blood loss or infection some time later. People survive being shot, but tend to die of shock or bloodloss, those who survive are usually giving medical help quite quickly. The man who had a spike through his head got incredibly lucky in that the brain is very good at recovering and then moving stuff around to continue functioning (even if it is said that his personality changed completely.) Some people like being a tough man, hard as rock and tough as mountain. Some people like being the dodgy guy who takes scraps and minor wounds until his luck runs out.

Speaking of Phineas Gage: eventually, he and his family moved away, and doctors lost contact. From what has been learned since, his personality actually recovered over time, despite the spike-through-head deal.

[Nicklance]

I think hit points explains John McClane very well.

[SneeR]

I've always been a fan of the claymation-fighter perspective: you can get stabbed, sliced, and beaten, but your willpower/resolve/manliness makes you as clay, and organ damage really isn't so important in the long-run. I always figured the fact that the regeneration spell specifically calls out broken bones meant that hp loss just meant soft tissue damage, and the cure spells just sort of melt you back together (like clay) and fills in the missing parts.

I guess that's a problematic view, but I didn't even know about the Luck-based hp) until a few years ago, and that never rang true for me. It seems like a general inability to accept heroic characters.

Maybe it's because I grew up with adventure video games like Mario 64, God of War, and Soul Reaver where the cause of losing hit points was getting hit, and, in fact, not dodging.

[Hades]

I think problems come about when you see "hit points" as solely a simple physical damage meter.

I like to think at the "experience" part of "experience level": an high level adventure with 100 hp is not 10 times tougher than a 1st level char with 10 hp: he's mainly more expert avoiding nasty wounds.

I assume than even when hit, an high level char is adept to avoid being hit in vital spots, and the like. That's why "8 points of damage" is a nasty wound for a 1st level char, and just a scratch for a high level one.

Also, the whole "high level D&D chars are not just simple mortals". That's quite like a manga/anime char, that takes a lot of hits but is still able to fight. Let's remember the good old "Gandalf was a 5th level magic user" thing.

[RedWarlock]

I always took hit points as the amount of pain/damage you could take before passing out. Five hit points of damage is always five points, thus why curing means the same, but you yourself can take more of those blows before you fall unconscious due to trauma. When you gain hit points at a new level, they're not being added on the top, but between the 1 and 0 positions.

[LudicSavant]

It all goes back to the "Fighters can't have nice things" mentality.  It doesn't apply to everyone... I'm perfectly fine with insane durability.

Even arrow catching is nothing more than a myth

Just thought you would want to know:

The show you linked later recanted after a guy showed up on their show and started catching arrows.  They did a second arrow-catching episode about it and everything, where they admitted that they were wrong and that the little experiment you linked was flawed on a basic conceptual level, for all of the obvious reasons.

You really shouldn't give the Mythbusters too much credit.  I appreciate the spirit of their show and the practical reasons they do their work the way they do it, but at the end of the day they don't engage in basic standards of scientific rigor, and therefore their conclusions are frequently unreliable.  You should always double check your sources when you see such demonstrations on TV.

[SneeR]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EaYIrWvSig

[awaken_D_M_golem]

1e had Hit Points, Subdual Hit Points,
a smidge of zero and below hp mechanics,
and the Paladin and Monk healed
with non-cleric-spell-ish healing.


I'm guessing what do they'd have to do?
Maximum Vitality ... hit points + natural healing downtime max ; easy numbers
Encounter Vitality ... an intermediate value with lots of quirks ; semi-complicated class numbers
Resurgant Vitality ... to coin a term, for in-combat "heal" that shalt not be named healing ; very complicated multi-system numbers

Grade 2 Concussion Insta-Cure
Cure Stun condition, -2 penalty to next Daze category save, lose 5 enc hit points, gain 5 temp hit points, -3 penalty to Ranged Attacks til end of encounter

[Wrex]

     Of course, if you want the most violent critical hit tables i've ever seen, there are Josef's Extended Critical hit Charts for Warhammer Fantasy. Now, "Wounds" in Warhammer fantasy is your ability to turn a nasty hit into a less nasty one. You get enough for about one hit from a peasant armed with a rusty sword, maybe two if he rolls poorly, none if he rolls well (Which is 10% of the time). Once your wounds run out, it's off to the crit tables of permanent injury for you. For each point of damage you took over your wounds, you scroll over to the value, roll 1d100, and use the resulting critical hit for the location injured.  For example, if I have taken a single extra point of damage to the torso from a dagger (And all weapons do some value of d10-ordinary Hand Weapons deal 1d10+Strength Bonus, while daggers do 1d10-3+Strength bonus), the injury can range from "The point of your weapon scores a line across your opponent’s chest, causing him to stumble backward. He may not perform any attack action on his next turn."  to "You ram your weapon into your opponent’s solar plexus, rupturing the diaphragm muscles he breathes with and damaging the abdominal aorta. It is an even bet as to whether he expires from breathing difficulties or massive loss of blood first, dying inevitably in a widening pool of blood in d10/2 turns. A last-ditch desperate attempt at magical healing may be performed before then, at a penalty of –30% to the spell test, success leaving him unconscious but alive with a permanent penalty of –20% to S and T due to reduced breathing capacity."

It's worth noting that magical healing is rarer than Unicorns. The obvious side effect of these tables is PC's rendered unusable within a few sessions, which was generally the design intent of Warhammer Fantasy.