This came up in an older thread a few months ago.

Once you are at 0 HP, even if revived with a spell or potion, you are out of it to one degree or another.

Page 82.
Even if brought back to positive HP, anyone brought to 0 or less is in a COMA for 1d6 turns! and after that must rest a full week and is just short of bedridden the duration. Unable to even use magical devices or scrolls or research. The Heal spell was the only way to avoid this.

Oh and if you went to -6 or lower HP then there was a chance of scarring or loss of use of a limb. The example was horrible burn scars from a fireball that brought a character to below -9.

I never liked the -10 rule. Want them to have more HP? Give them +10 HP and kill them at zero.

Quote from: Spinachcat;912086I never liked the -10 rule. Want them to have more HP? Give them +10 HP and kill them at zero.

The -10 was to represent where things have reached the critical stage and death is imminent if nothing is done. And its easier to handle as a threshold. Rare will something take you to exactly 0. you tend to go into negative a little or alot right out the gate.

Quote from: Spinachcat;912086I never liked the -10 rule. Want them to have more HP? Give them +10 HP and kill them at zero.

You forgot "have them pass out at 10 HP remaining".

At least part of the point of not dying until some number of negative HP instead of at zero, for me at least, is to insert an intermediate state between "active and fighting at 100% ability" and "dead".

Quote from: estar;911977page 82, second column third paragraph. Note also that even if you are healed above zero hit point your character is still in a coma for 1d6 TURNS! That is covered in the next background. So while you didn't die, you are still screwed pretty bad as far as that fight goes.

After being a sack of potatoes for 1-6 turns you are still weak and unable to anything except rest, move short distances, eat, and so forth for an entire week even if potions or healing spells short of a heal spell are applied.

If this kind of rule existed in 5E you wouldn't see so many instances of waiting till someone is dropped to throw a healing spell.

Well, at least I'm in good company in thinking it was an optional rule (actually, that's probably where I got the idea from).

Quote from: Spinachcat;912086I never liked the -10 rule. Want them to have more HP? Give them +10 HP and kill them at zero.

What I dislike isn't so much the negative numbers per se. I have a problem when characters have more hit points "dead" than they do alive. Even with a -3 threshold (the most lenient option), a level 1 mage, for instance, is alive at 0, -1, -2, and -3--that's four hit points, vs the four at most (barring CON bonus) he'll have IF he rolls max hp.

I also find the bit about the coma and the weak week to be not particularly fun and potentially distracting. It's so much cleaner just to say the character dies. There are enough other ways in the game PCs can become KO'd, comatose, or take continuing damage that threatens their very life so that you haven't ruled out all these less-lethal possibilities, and when it's tied to a particular monster, trap, environment, attack form, or magic rather than some generic, omni-present game mechanics, it's a lot more engaging.

That seems like an unavoidable consequence with level-dependent hp (and either 4 hp to -3 or 11 hp to -10 being huge at level 1 and merely notable at upper levels). GURPS has PCs dropped at 0 and dead at -1xhp, but their hp totals are semi-static and much lower than high level D&D.

One alternative (that I have not put enough thought into, so just take it as a rough-hewn outline) is that whenever a character is dropped to 0 hp or less, regardless of damage, their status moves to "dropped." Unless they are CDG'ed or someone drops a fireball on the area where they fall, they retain that status until the end of combat. At that point, some non-hp method is used to determine whether they survived combat and are comatose (a save, system shock, etc.). That eliminates worrying about whether they drop to -1 or -3, whether they bleed past -6 or not, and whether 4 or 11 hp is a little or a lot of negative hp compared to positive hp, and you can still make it as easy or hard as you want it to be.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;912107GURPS has PCs dropped at 0 and dead at -1xhp

Close.

GURPS characters have to start making rolls every round to stay conscious at zero HP, and a death roll at -1xHP and then every 5 hp lost.  Death is not unavoidable until -5xHP, IIRC.  This is mostly based on 3e, so that could have changed in 4e.

FWIW it is actually stupid for any damage/injury/death rules system to have people going from fully or mostly functional to dead as a normal outcome. Unless a building drops on you or your head gets cut off, people and large animals take a while to die in response to injuries. Whatever else you want to say about it, the way HP loss and death works in 1E is more realistic (there, I said the R word!) than a lot of games.

This.  Running at 100% and then dropping dead is the kind of thing you expect from someone at the end of a Berserk.  
Of course Running at 100% and then dropping unconscious to start dying isn't all that much better.  

Looking at some old notes I split the difference.
From 0 to -3 the character could make System Shock rolls to stay awake and functional, with a penalty to everything equal to their negative HP bonus.
If you were exactly at 0, you weren't actually dying, just trying to stay conscious.
Once they hit -4, then they dropped and started dying, with final death kicking in at -(10+HP mod).  So it could be sooner than -10 if you had a suckass Constitution or as much as -18 with a Barbarian with an 18 con.

Healing I always thought was just that, healing.  It seemed to be that there was some mechanic under the hood like "Wound" that got checked when you went below 0, and that normal healing healed HPs, but didn't touch that "Wound", which could only be healed through rest or the Heal spell.  I decided I didn't want to deal with it, and healing just healed you.  
I experimented with a tiered system:
Cure Light - Can heal you but Coma rules work as normal.
Cure Serious - Can heal you when you're in that 0-3 range, and you are healed with no special ill effects.  Lower than that, Coma rules kick in.
Cure Critical - Can heal you when you're in that -4 to -10 range, and you are healed with no special ill effects. Lower than that, Coma rules kick in.
Heal - Can heal you when you're in that -10 to death range, and you are healed with no special ill effects.

Then I realized that you were actually kind of getting penalized for having a great Con.  I also realized that what if you were healed up to full with Cure Light Wounds, but still in a Coma, couldn't someone come by and toss on a Cure Serious and remove the Coma?  So then we started keeping track of how wounded you were, basically having a Wound state, based on the healing system.

Sometimes we used it, sometimes we played RAW, sometimes we said fuck it, healing is healing, that's why they call it Magic.

Quote from: Larsdangly;912111FWIW it is actually stupid for any damage/injury/death rules system to have people going from fully or mostly functional to dead as a normal outcome. Unless a building drops on you or your head gets cut off, people and large animals take a while to die in response to injuries. Whatever else you want to say about it, the way HP loss and death works in 1E is more realistic (there, I said the R word!) than a lot of games.

Eh. Don't be so quick to just gloss over your "unless" clause. There really are plenty of instances of going directly from fine to dead. And the game does have plenty of attack forms that incapacitate, cripple, or cause loss of consciousness without causing death. The bases are covered regardless of the status of a negative hit point rule. So of all the reasons pro- and con-, the R-word just ain't one of them.

Quote from: Larsdangly;912111FWIW it is actually stupid for any damage/injury/death rules system to have people going from fully or mostly functional to dead as a normal outcome.

OD&D and later BECMI style of hit points makes sense if you understand how it was developed from a system, Chainmail Man to Man combat, where one hit equal one kill. It worked 'as is' for a lot of people. However it understandable why people would want the hit point mechanic to account for incapacitated as well as alive and dead. In my take on OD&D I use negative hit points as well.

But my preference for more detail in how injuries are handled doesn't mean that the RAW rule of OD&D/BECMI is stupid.  Hit points are an implementation of the statement that a Hero is four times harder to kill than a ordinary Man at Arms. That Super Hero is eight times harder to kill. Each level of "hard to kill" represented by one Hit Dice that you roll for hit points. Chainmail did not make provisions for injured troops during battle. And when the Blackmoor/D&D rules developed out of it neither did they.

If folks want to come up with a different explanation of what actually hit points represents so be it, however the above is what they mean in terms of how D&D was developed.

Quote from: estar;912119OD&D and later BECMI style of hit points makes sense if you understand how it was developed from a system, Chainmail Man to Man combat, where one hit equal one kill.

Similarly, Savage Worlds has three states: up, down, or off the table.  It's a level of abstraction intended to make things run faster.

I know I never saw as many character deaths in either OD&D or AD&D as some people claim is typical. Hell, I had my first TPK a couple years ago. But then, in my experience, what's reducing the lethality is greater caution on the part of PCs + monsters not always attacking immediately and fighting to the death.

I never liked any negative hit point rule and I'm not sure I actually used it when I ran AD&D, although I don't think it ever came up. What I prefer these days in OD&D is to track total damage instead of deducting from hit points. Any time damage equals or exceeds hit points, the victim is dying (assuming the intention of the attack was to kill.) If it was an attack aimed at a vital organ, death is instant if a system shock roll fails. Otherwise, the victim dies at the end of ten minutes unless aided by someone. The result is pretty close to what you'd get in the AD&D system, but without the need for all the fiddly rules about negative hit points and tracking bleedout.