Hit Points...to be, or not to be?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I'd be inclined to treat the effect from Elantris (the wound closing, then just opening right back up) as simply a special effect of using insufficiently-powerful healing.

I'm noticing that B59's description of the healing advantage...

Even 1 HP of healing will stop bleeding.

I probably took that to be a generic rule for all healing (ie magic healing, daily HT roll healing, Regeneraton) but maybe that's jumping the gun and shorting that expensive advantage of perhaps something which ought to be unique to it?

B420's rules for this, the "bleeding stops for good" situation requirement is "do not bleed for three consecutive minutes" where you get bleeding-stops-one-minute situations by a passed HT roll.

B424's First Aid is mentioned as being a way around it... which is I think the "one minute to apply pressure" situation. Possibly the "or a tournaquet" just means the tournaquet is on for one minute but the aider doesn't need to apply pressure after tying it off?

Not sure I get the "A later roll will prevent further HP loss" part. Like the usual "restores 1 HP" is ignored and instead it's "if you got aid in 1st min, don't lose the 1 HP if you failed the HT roll" ?

Seems like the skill of a FA user (IQ: B195) could sub for bad HT for stopping blood loss. Would be cool for situations where that might be influenced by DX (how well do you tie a tournaquet?) or ST ("the 100ft giant's wound gushes with the pressure of a firehose, can you even hold the bandage on?") could matter.

Could also be neat, since HT naturally helps with slowing blood loss, if instead of these being separate rolls if they somehow synergized into a single roll. Like maybe First Aid isn't super-perfect and instead you make a trio of IQ/DX/ST rolls simply to add a +1 bonus to the usual HT roll?

The two basic healing spells (Lend Vitality and Minor Healing) on B248 don't seem to mention stopping bleeding like First Aid skill and Healing advantage do... so maybe that's the exclusive purview of M91's "Stop Bleeding" spell?

Other means of restoring HP like DR with Absorbtion, getting Affliction (Advantage:1 HP +20%), using Leech... unlike Healing there isn't explicit mention of stopping blood loss so that'd be pretty cool if they actually didn't, emphasizing the use of the Healing advantage, Stop Bleeding spell, or First Aid skill.

In terms of how this affects Regeneration: since that comes with Rapid Healing built into it, if that +5 to HT rolls also helps with stopping blood loss it's probably sort of a moot issue for them.

To make blood loss more gruesome I was thinking you could have separate blood loss (1 hp per minute) not just for each 1hp wound, but for each 1hp in general.

This way we don't get the oddity where a 1 HP creature who suffered a 100% hp wound (down to 0hp) bleeds out an additional 100% hp per minute, while some 100hp creature who suffered a 100% hp wound of 100hp (down to 0hp) only suffers an additional 1% hp per minute.

Then for stabilizing you could have separate IQchecks on First Aid for each HP worth of bleeding you want to stop. That way it's less all-or-nothing and you might partially slow blood loss even though you can't completely stop it, which I've seen in medical dramas.

That'd only work with computer die rollers (total how many of the 100 HT checks passed) so sans-computer, it'd probably be simpler to say the HP you lose per interval is not 1hp but rather the HP of the specific wound.

In terms of first aid checks, there's a difference between a single 50hp wound on the torso of a 100hp giant vs fifty one-HP wounds on said giant. The former needs one massive sucking-wound bandage bigger-than-a-transport-truck while the latter might substitute fifty tiny human-size band-aids.

This definitely links into the conditional injuries concept from Pyramid 120 but I can't remember if it dealt with higher-HP wounds (rather than higher %) having ST/SM considerations.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rupert

No, because no amount of light wounds is actually equal to a serious one

Depends what you mean by 'equivalent'. Sandpapering someone with nicks and cuts will eventually kill someone, it just takes a lot of hits.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Depends what you mean by 'equivalent'. Sandpapering someone with nicks and cuts will eventually kill someone, it just takes a lot of hits.

Also depends on what he means by "serious" too, of course.

Having a hundred 1mm gashes on your body is probably worse than having one 10mm (1cm) gash, but probably not as bad as having a 100mm (10cm/1dm) gash?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Plane

Even 1 HP of healing will stop bleeding.

This predates rules that have First Aid penalized (or rendered inadequate, such as for Vitals wounds) by wound location and severity. It's up to the GM if the Healing Advantage will suffer penalties for healing more severe wounds, but if it does I'd certainly allow the "1 HP of healing will stop bleeding" to go into effect (if it doesn't, the GM may put it in an odd slot, where Healing will restore HP but leave the character to continue bleeding... or just say "It's an expensive Advantage, so it just works better").

Originally Posted by Plane

Not sure I get the "A later roll will prevent further HP loss" part. Like the usual "restores 1 HP" is ignored and instead it's "if you got aid in 1st min, don't lose the 1 HP if you failed the HT roll" ?

Bandaging someone who has lost 5 HP from bleeding out over the last several minutes won't restore those lost HP, but stops the character from losing more, which I think is all that part is getting at. I'd need to check the books to see if there's any indication there are cases where you don't get the 1 HP restored from bandaging; I'm pretty certain that still applies regardless anytime simple bandaging is an option. And if you got aid in the first minute, you never need to make the HT roll to avoid losing HP to bleeding - by the time that check rolled around, the bleeding had already been stopped.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I'd need to check the books to see if there's any indication there are cases where you don't get the 1 HP restored from bandaging; I'm pretty certain that still applies regardless anytime simple bandaging is an option. And if you got aid in the first minute, you never need to make the HT roll to avoid losing HP to bleeding - by the time that check rolled around, the bleeding had already been stopped.

I guess I wondered if "first aid recovers 1 hp" is meant to give it a benefit just when not using the optional blood loss rules.

Sort of like how the LT rules for limiting HP loss to impaling torso attacks varies on whether or not you use them. Potential HP loss is double if there's no bleeding rules, because you can rely on bleeding to make up the difference.

B424's "one minute .. to stop" vs "successful First Aid roll within one minute of his injury" though ... when do you actually make the roll, when you begin compression or after 60s of it?

I could see maybe 60s as the base time (ie if you immediately apply bandage when injury is inflicted, you've done 60s of compression and make your roll to prevent the HT check just as it comes due?) but maybe you could alter that via "Time Spent" rules? Like you could make your skill check in 90% of the time (54 seconds) at -1 to first aid skill, if you were only able to apply a compress to the wound 5 seconds after it began to bleed?

All the way down to maybe -9 to first aid if you got there with only 6 seconds to spare?

Being able to negate 54 seconds worth of bleeding with a last-second arrival seems kinda odd though. Martial Arts acknowledges this by switching to 30-second intervals but you still get a "ignore 25 seconds of spurting" impression there.

Part of the increased wound multiplier for veins/arteries Hit Locations is meant to reflect instantaeous blood loss I think, but doesn't really bridge the middle-ground of what 5/10/15/20/25 second gap differences before applying compression can mean.

Probably the issue is hesitance to deal with 0.1 hp intervals of blood loss which could allow more regular seepage. Would be more realistic and add more sense of urgency to second-by-second combat/medic treatment though.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Otaku

GURPS Third Edition (Revised) beat you to it.

Compendium II, pages 154-157 features I'm Not Dead Yet! An Optional Wound System by John M. Ford. Originally, it appeared in in Roleplayer 16. The first section, titled Specific Injuries, introduced the idea of injuries being tracked separately to GURPS. Note that the total HP loss still mattered for things like seeing whether your character passed out from their injuries, death checks, etc. What changed was "wound care": the injuries are still recorded and tracked separately, including what it takes for them to heal.

In the next section, Advanced Healing System, we get to something at least resembling what it is you were looking for. In terms of damage taken, by a human with 20 or less HP, it breaks down injuries by the damage taken:

• Superficial Wounds (1)
• Light Wounds (1 to 3)
• Serious Wounds (4 to 8)
• Critical Wounds (9+)

The rest of the article details how this affects recovery (Natural, Medical Care, Healing Spells, and Psionic Healing). Relevant to your Elantris example, Minor Healing and Major Healing are revised, with Critical Healing added in because spells can only handle wounds of a specified severity and lower, with no effects on wounds of a higher severity. Limitations are presented for Psionic Healing if your power can only treat wounds of a particular severity. Most of the time, you cannot heal multiple injuries in a single attempt.

Wow, this looks similar to lwcamp's "Semi-cumulative wounding system" that I usually fall back to when I'm worried about these things. I suspect he based it on the compendium rules?


(as a quick summary, he makes six wounds in one category count as one wound in a higher category).

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Wow, this looks similar to lwcamp's "Semi-cumulative wounding system" that I usually fall back to when I'm worried about these things. I suspect he based it on the compendium rules?

Honestly, the Conditional Injury rules have a pretty strong resemblance to those (enough I was honestly surprised to see the author of the latter was Doug rather than Luke). My own inclination is to merge the systems, having each character with a cheat sheet for the wounding thresholds that cause each level of wound severity (rather than using the simplification of Robustness vs Wound Potential), but that might get unwieldy for the GM if he opts to run an encounter with multiple NPC's of varying HP's. I do like the way his version tracks individual wounds, however (I think Conditional Injury lumps everything together, but I could be mistaken).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Wow, this looks similar to lwcamp's "Semi-cumulative wounding system" that I usually fall back to when I'm worried about these things. I suspect he based it on the compendium rules?


(as a quick summary, he makes six wounds in one category count as one wound in a higher category).

Whether or not someone passes out seems like it could be somehow covered by having HP lost to blood loss in extremities transfer as HP lost to blood loss in torso and eventually in head.

[Opellulo]

I'm quite puzzled by all the rule-based answers to what is, in his core, a question on the philosophy of role playing systems.

"Hit points" are a concept that multiple rulesets have already discarded: think games like "Tales from the Loop" (where the characters cannot even die) or "Duralande"... And both are adventure-heavy settings with characters that are meant to be facing mortal threat and enemies. Heck, even the old World of Darkness had like 5 (or 6?) wound levels for every character type (no idea about the new one but i would be surprised they changed this).

And after the rule system, there is the GM: I find quite interesting the "referee VS storyteller" thing because I have a yet different take: IMHO roleplay is collective storytelling, the goal is to have fun times together not to inflict and endure the caprices of fate and written rules (for that I have already my normal life thanks).

Why a GM chose to include a scenario where certain death (of a PC or a NPC) is necessary? Maybe is a plot device (damn you Salazar, I will have my revenge!) maybe is a teaching moment (never wake up a sleeping dragon!) maybe is the climax of a story (where all bets and brakes are off).

I personally don't like the genocide level of killing there is classic fantasy roleplay games: I like instead to build my scenarios around moral and ethical challenges, and then let the players chose their own path around (or through) it. In my games the fights are quite scarce (no more than one or two for session) and they are almost always because of PC choices: so I design them to be challenging, dangerous and interesting in an effort to make them memorable.
In my games Hit Points are no more than a resource used to make interesting choices: can we chose to fight? How long we can push this? Are we at risk of losing someone? If so, what that PC thinks and can he/she suggest another course of action?

For this reason I try to limit supernatural healing (it's a scarce last resort thing for exceptional cases only) and when I run the baddies I am going for inflicting lasting injuries more than "generic HP loss" because of the memorability above. Players are usually fine in having equipment loss, characters limitations for the next sessions or a new disadvantage if the story was worth it. And if they are not, then the quest to regain the missing "thing" is an excellent plot hook for the future sessions.

THIS is another reason why I cannot stand "level", "tier" (or even "points"... And their use in GURPS is for sure another good discussion thread) based game system. Once you put this frame you are shielding your PC from the mundane world... And I frankly don't understand why you should do this.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Opellulo

I'm quite puzzled by all the rule-based answers to what is, in his core, a question on the philosophy of role playing systems.

"Hit points" are a concept that multiple rulesets have already discarded: think games like "Tales from the Loop" (where the characters cannot even die) or "Duralande"... And both are adventure-heavy settings with characters that are meant to be facing mortal threat and enemies. Heck, even the old World of Darkness had like 5 (or 6?) wound levels for every character type (no idea about the new one but i would be surprised they changed this).

World of Darkness games had hit points with a really nasty death spiral attached to them, that's all.