Quote from: Old One Eye;675501I have always imagined things like life transfer, energy drain, or whatnot as causing physical wounds when they deal hit point damage.  Do you not describe any physical symptoms of the victim?  Victom's skin loosing it's color, victim becoming more sluggish, victim's nose bleeds, or whatever makes sense?

if that's how you interpret it, more power to you.  There's no wrong way.  However, it's not explicit in every edition that things like negative energy cause physical wounds.  We've always described a spell like energy drain as just that: your character feels the life force being drained from them.  No wounds involved.  The fact that a spell like HEAL specifically calls out that it only heals HP loss from injury and wounds implies to me that there are other forms of HP loss and gain.  Combine that with all these other examples, and it seems clear to me that HP loss and recovery aren't always tied to a physical wound

Quote from: LibraryLass;675416Try it this way. "Hm... goodness, I'm a bit lightheaded. Like I've been poisoned... Damn, is that a scratch on my arm? I thought that arrow just caught the sleeve of my coat."

A scratch on the arm is a physical wound.  You need to invent a narration that  a person can be poisoned by an arrow without that arrow actually causing physical damage, not even a scratch.  It doesn't sense but that's the argument being made.

Quote from: Psychman;675489For what it's worth, my understanding is the Hit Point cognitive divide has always been with us since Gygax and Arneson named the hit point recovery spell "Cure Wounds".

Nah, the divide was created when the first nerd had an aneurism when they heard the term "HIT point" and couldn't bend their pedantic minds around the fact that it included aspects that didn't include hitting.

Quote from: hamstertamer;675550A scratch on the arm is a physical wound.  You need to invent a narration that  a person can be poisoned by an arrow without that arrow actually causing physical damage, not even a scratch.  It doesn't sense but that's the argument being made.

Yeah. Physical damage. But not an injury. WP damage represents things that might actually debilitate you, VP represents something that is painful or that you can't keep up for long, but isn't especially likely to, on its own, bring you to your knees. To use the analogy of boxing, it's the difference between taking a quick jab to the chest or a big uppercut right in the jaw. You're getting hit either way. You take enough jabs or block enough haymakers, eventually you'll be worn down and tired. You catch it right on the chin, though, there's a good chance that you'll be on the mat for at least a second or two.

Quote from: LibraryLass;675559Yeah. Physical damage. But not an injury. WP damage represents things that might actually debilitate you, VP represents something that is painful or that you can't keep up for long, but isn't especially likely to, on its own, bring you to your knees. To use the analogy of boxing, it's the difference between taking a quick jab to the chest or a big uppercut right in the jaw. You're getting hit either way. You take enough jabs or block enough haymakers, eventually you'll be worn down and tired. You catch it right on the chin, though, there's a good chance that you'll be on the mat for at least a second or two.

A scratch is an injury, a scratch is physical damage.  I don't think you making the argument you think you are.

I wanted to hear a narration of how a poisoned arrow can poison someone if it never causes physical damage to that person.  That means without even a scratch.

Quote from: hamstertamer;675562A scratch is an injury, a scratch is physical damage.  I don't think you making the argument you think you are.

Pedantism 101.

Quote from: hamstertamer;675550A scratch on the arm is a physical wound.  You need to invent a narration that  a person can be poisoned by an arrow without that arrow actually causing physical damage, not even a scratch.  It doesn't sense but that's the argument being made.

Naw the argument being made is the argument the rules make.  They explicitly say poison can include things like contact poison or inhaled poison, neither of which is a wound inflicted by an arrow or dart or anything solid.

Similarly, there are psychic attacks from psionics that can cause hit point loss.  For example, in AD&D Damage from psionic attacks is deducted first from defense total until you run out of defense points, then any remainder gets deducted from your attack total until that runs out, and then any remainder is carried over as direct hit point damage (as is all subsequent damage).  All with no wound, and nothing "physical" involved at all.

Quote from: Mistwell;675565Naw the argument being made is the argument the rules make.  They explicitly say poison can include things like contact poison or inhaled poison, neither of which is a wound inflicted by an arrow or dart or anything solid.

Similarly, there are psychic attacks from psionics that can cause hit point loss.  For example, in AD&D Damage from psionic attacks is deducted first from defense total until you run out of defense points, then any remainder gets deducted from your attack total until that runs out, and then any remainder is carried over as direct hit point damage (as is all subsequent damage).  All with no wound, and nothing "physical" involved at all.

Poisons can be different kinds, so what? We both know that we are talking about the injury type of poison that are used on weapons like arrows. This is why LibraryLass added the "scratch on my arm" to her narration.  She knew that in order for it to make sense, that an injury, even a slight one, was needed for the poison to have effect.

BTW, an arrow is not a psychic attack. So that's irrelevant.

Quote from: Benoist;675497I agree. The people who are playing the "it's ALWAYS like this" and "it NEVER does that" and "it's OBJECTIVELY like this and that" rhetorical game are not the ones Emperor Norton likes to point the finger at, here.

That's a funny thing to say considering Sacrosanct is probably the person closest to my own viewpoint on HP and he's the one arguing with the people making those exact claims.

Quote from: hamstertamer;675562A scratch is an injury, a scratch is physical damage.  I don't think you making the argument you think you are.

I wanted to hear a narration of how a poisoned arrow can poison someone if it never causes physical damage to that person.  That means without even a scratch.

Well, you're not going to hear it, because that's not what VP fucking represents.

Vitality points are a measure of a character’s ability to turn a direct hit into a graze or a glancing blow with no serious consequences. Like hit points in the standard d20 rules, vitality points go up with level, giving high-level characters more ability to shrug off attacks. Most types of damage reduce vitality points.

Quote from: hamstertamer;675570Poisons can be different kinds, so what? We both know that we are talking about the injury type of poison that are used on weapons like arrows. This is why LibraryLass added the "scratch on my arm" to her narration.  She knew that in order for it to make sense, that an injury, even a slight one, was needed for the poison to have effect.

BTW, an arrow is not a psychic attack. So that's irrelevant.

The argument presented in this thread is that all hit point damage represents a physical wound.

It's not true.  It's not even true with all poison attacks, and I gave you two types of poison attacks that do not involve even a scratch.  In addition, I added psionic attacks which do hit point damage, and others have mentioned a litany of other attacks which do hit point damage (life drain, etc.).  

I think at this point the question is not if the original post was wrong (we know for sure it was), it's just a matter of how wrong.  We know some hit point damage involves no physical injury at all, and we know some hit point damage involves some physical injury and some non-physical harm, and so the remaining question I suppose is whether there is any hit point damage which represents purely physical injury?

Hit points are an abstraction. Pretty much any position on them will encounter inconsistencies under a microscope. They are obviously meant to carry a lot of things. I think the dividing ine for most people is how closely they associate hp with physical damage. I wouldnt argue they are inteded to be purely physical, but i will admit that i personally have difficulty seperating the physical from hp loss and recovery. I imagine everyone is a bit different on that. For some reason i can accept that a high level fighter can take several max damage stabs from a sword, but have a much harder time with stuff like non-magical instant healing and the like. I think it is because the sword thing doesnt pop out at me when it happens (i tend to notice that sort of thing in hindsight) but the fast non-magical heals create an instant image in my mind of someone self healing their wounds. I do not expect to find any consistency in that position. It is just my purely subjective reaction to hp and how they play out.

Quote from: Benoist;675483That's the real problem with discussions like this.

Or understand the history of the mechanic.

And for those who don't know hit points in D&D started out like this.

In Chainmail one hit killed one figure.
Then in the Fantasy Supplement there was the Hero and the Super-Hero. A Hero took four hits to kill and the Super-Hero took eight hits to kill.

Also there was a Man to Man combat chart that cross indexed weapon type versus armor. If you rolled the number or higher the target died.

Of course in the Blackmoor campaign and slightly later in Greyhawk campaign the one hit = one kill rule was found to be too harsh. So a hit was expanded to do 1d6 damage and a hit was changed to a hit dice and also made 1d6 hit points varying slightly between classes.

A 2nd level fighter was considered twice as effective as a 1st level fighter and so on.

In the Greyhawk Supplement the d6 with modifiers was replaced with 1d4 for M-U/Thieves, 1d6 for Clerics, and 1d8 for Fighters.

Finally in AD&D and UA this was expanded to 1d12 for Barbarians, 1d10 for Fighters and so on down the line to M-U.

The basic concepts were not designed, they evolved through actual play. At the start hit points represent how many successful attacks it takes to down a target.  All the explanation of why hit points are what they are are "after the fact" explanations including those by Gygax and company.

The real reason for hit points is because the mechanic worked in actual play and thus persisted unlike others mechanics that did not.

Of course to those more versed in combat D&D style hit points look stupid and unrealistic. Which is why Runequest and other RPGs developed their own version more tune what their designer thought it should be. However like so many other elements of D&D, hit points are good enough for many and thus persisted nearly unchanged to the present.

So why is knowing the history of how hit points are developed important?

Because all of you are wrong and all of you are right. Because beyond the one hit = one kill design of Chainmail, hit points never really were anything. So precisely what they are is what you choose to make them in your campaign. If you like it and make it your own more power to you. If you don't that why there are alternatives.

Quote from: estar;675624At the start hit points represent how many successful attacks it takes to down a target.  .

IMO, this is exactly right, and is further proven by the fact that a round was a full minute long and all weapon damage was 1d6, meaning that in a full round, the 1d6 was how many hits you were able to make on your target during that full minute of combat.  Not that the weapon does 1d6 points in a single attack.

Quote from: estar;675624The basic concepts were not designed, they evolved through actual play. At the start hit points represent how many successful attacks it takes to down a target.  All the explanation of why hit points are what they are are "after the fact" explanations including those by Gygax and company.

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This makes a good deal of sense to me, and also explains why many of the arguments that do try to pin it down, usually dont work out very well. I've experienced this my self when working on games, particulalry ones designed to deliver a d&d like, dungeon crawl experience. There are plenty of logical issues that emerge when you contemplate HP but they work very well at the table delivering the kind of play people expect from dungeons and dragons.