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

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

It would be entirely reasonable, if more book keeping, to require healing magic to heal the entire wound all in one go. 1 and 2 HP scratches would still be nothing, but a 15HP wound to the vitals could push the healer into -FP and incapacitate them or require burning up valuable energy storage items.

I'd suggest eliminating iteration penalties in that case, as there would no longer be the problem of characters healing a bit at a time to fix severe wounding - although I'll note that once you're tracking individual wounds, it may be appropriate to switch to something more like Conditional Injury. A part of me also feels that getting close to the original wound's severity should do something (hence why my suggestion for Conditional Injury had it reducing severity if you get close; for those without the article, my suggestion essentially worked out to reducing a 10 HP wound to 7 HP with 5+ HP healing, 5 HP with 7+ HP healing, or 0 HP with 10+ HP healing; I'll note here I was assuming healing a single wound at a time, healing the entire body at once should probably cut per-wound healing potency in half).

Or maybe reducing them? It just occurred to me the purpose of the iteration penalty may be more to make healing a limited resource than to prevent "Restoration by a Thousand Band-Aids" (the healing version of Death by a Thousand Cuts).

[Mister Negative]

Responding more to the original post than subsequent discussion, I feel like 'giving a higher sense of danger' should be, at least in good part, a roleplaying consideration.

If you have enough switches turned in GURPS that a knife to the neck is something that can reasonably cause intense pain, severe injury, and possible death (like in the real world), then the players should probably be reacting to it as such, whether it threatens a PC or an NPC.

If you have enough switches flipped in GURPS that heroes don't ever reasonably anticipate any major pain or suffering from a knife to the neck, then you shouldn't expect the players to react to it with any dismay.

As a 'default' assumption, I would generally assume that most GURPS games would intend threats that are clearly quite hazardous in the real world to be regarded as such in the game world. Otherwise, narration is quite confusing (is the rattlesnake not to be avoided? Is the lava just there for colorful description? Are those bullets whizzing past my head just to get my attention?). Now, individuals in that game may dismiss the hazard (they are invulnerable, or in a suit of power armor, or insanely brave), but they still would perceive a clearly dangerous situation was present.

If you're running a game where knives to an unprotected neck aren't supposed to even be considered as significantly dangerous, then your game assumptions are quite different and I would expect you to communicate that to the players and have PCs react accordingly.

If you have a game world where knives to the neck are dangerous, severely painful, and potentially deadly, and the PCs still cooly calculate the likelihood that the attack will actually kill the victim before they can repair the injury with a spell, I would generally have NPCs treat the PCs as Callous or similarly impaired (or possibly penalize them for bad roleplaying, if appropriate). Even if the attack isn't statistically certain to kill someone, it's clearly going to be dangerous, painful, and potentially crippling, so the PCs should respond to it as such.

(digression)

Part of my response may be that I feel like GURPs is trying to simulate something, and if the rules fail to simulate something (whether that is reality, or the dramatic reality of a setting), I don't feel constrained by the rules in that circumstance. The rules aren't simulating what I intend them to simulate. If the rules prevent someone from being able to die from a 20' fall onto stone, and it is actually possible for someone to die from that kind of fall in your world, then the rules aren't functioning properly and you need to make an GM adjustment in this instance. People would know such a fall was dangerous in your world.

If, on the other hand, you view the rules as actually underpinning your simulation (which is completely valid as an assumption, I think), then when the rules conflict with your expectations, your expectations are wrong. The rules actually describe what happens in your world. If it's impossible for someone to die from falling from a particular height according to the rules, then it is impossible for them to die from that. People would know that in your world, such a fall was not mortally dangerous.

[Boge]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Depending on the GM, once.

Sorry, that was rhetorical. It could take quite a few before you're even rolling any HT rolls is my point. Maybe they can't even get past your armor and you don't even take damage. The players I play with just aren't afraid enough for their characters and they play their characters that way knowing that real damage is unlikely.

Last week one of the players actually got their arm chopped off. After the combat was over, my "doctor" sewed the arm back on and rubbed some healing salve on it and it's fine. I think she got like -2 dexterity in that arm for a couple of hours is all. I'm a player, by the way, so I don't determine this stuff. I thought I was just sewing up her stump so she wouldn't bleed to death. The GM corrected me and I completely sewed her arm back on.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Mister Negative

If you have a game world where knives to the neck are dangerous, severely painful, and potentially deadly, and the PCs still cooly calculate the likelihood that the attack will actually kill the victim before they can repair the injury with a spell, I would generally have NPCs treat the PCs as Callous or similarly impaired (or possibly penalize them for bad roleplaying, if appropriate). Even if the attack isn't statistically certain to kill someone, it's clearly going to be dangerous, painful, and potentially crippling, so the PCs should respond to it as such.

Maybe, but we're talking about people resolving a hostage situation. Kid gloves are rarely in play there. It wouldn't be considered out of line to flashbang a room containing hostages, for instance. Taking a nasty wound and then immediately erasing it with powerful healing magic would be less harmful than that in physical terms. Obviously a bit hard to say for mental trauma.

(Powerful magic healing is one of those setting elements that if you really look at it clashes hard with our intuitions about how life works.)

Originally Posted by Mister Negative

Part of my response may be that I feel like GURPs is trying to simulate something, and if the rules fail to simulate something (whether that is reality, or the dramatic reality of a setting), I don't feel constrained by the rules in that circumstance. The rules aren't simulating what I intend them to simulate. If the rules prevent someone from being able to die from a 20' fall onto stone, and it is actually possible for someone to die from that kind of fall in your world, then the rules aren't functioning properly and you need to make an GM adjustment in this instance. People would know such a fall was dangerous in your world.

If, on the other hand, you view the rules as actually underpinning your simulation (which is completely valid as an assumption, I think), then when the rules conflict with your expectations, your expectations are wrong. The rules actually describe what happens in your world. If it's impossible for someone to die from falling from a particular height according to the rules, then it is impossible for them to die from that. People would know that in your world, such a fall was not mortally dangerous.

That can be a legitimate dichotomy, but it omits the notably-present-in-this-discussion situation where there are highly divergent ideas of how the reality being simulated actually works. Speaking for myself, I think the rules are meant to simulate something...but that following the wounding rules simulates what I want to better than imposing instant death mechanics would.

Originally Posted by Boge

Sorry, that was rhetorical. It could take quite a few before you're even rolling any HT rolls is my point. Maybe they can't even get past your armor and you don't even take damage. The players I play with just aren't afraid enough for their characters and they play their characters that way knowing that real damage is unlikely.

Last week one of the players actually got their arm chopped off. After the combat was over, my "doctor" sewed the arm back on and rubbed some healing salve on it and it's fine. I think she got like -2 dexterity in that arm for a couple of hours is all. I'm a player, by the way, so I don't determine this stuff. I thought I was just sewing up her stump so she wouldn't bleed to death. The GM corrected me and I completely sewed her arm back on.

At risk of being obvious, it sounds like the GM there is actively invested in preventing the PCs from suffering real harm to the point of using extraordinarily generous custom medical rules. The lack of threat you're seeing in that game isn't likely to be attributable to GURPS RAW unless the RAW in question is something like Toon...

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Boge

Sorry, that was rhetorical. It could take quite a few before you're even rolling any HT rolls is my point. Maybe they can't even get past your armor and you don't even take damage. The players I play with just aren't afraid enough for their characters and they play their characters that way knowing that real damage is unlikely.

Last week one of the players actually got their arm chopped off. After the combat was over, my "doctor" sewed the arm back on and rubbed some healing salve on it and it's fine. I think she got like -2 dexterity in that arm for a couple of hours is all. I'm a player, by the way, so I don't determine this stuff. I thought I was just sewing up her stump so she wouldn't bleed to death. The GM corrected me and I completely sewed her arm back on.

That kinda sounds like things are working as intended. I remember a webcomic I read years ago (Elf World, maybe? the main character was Baughb - pronounced "Bob" - the Elf, if that helps anyone) wherein part of the main character's backstory involved him being in the military of an ancient kingdom functionally ruled by powerful fae. Their combat exercises involved live combat, with the faeries patching up any wounded and reviving any dead (although there was a short time limit to that), to train their soldiers to be fearless in battle, knowing any wounds they suffered would be healed. In a setting where things work similarly, fearlessness in battle and disregard toward the lasting effects of wounds is to be expected amongst combatants. Sure, real-world folk would be less cavalier about themselves, their allies, and those they protect being injured - but that's because real-world folk don't have access to fantastical healing!

[Plane]

I like the idea of applying conditional injury, but wouldn't that still reduce major wounds into minor ones?

I like the idea of "surface healing but deep infection"

[Varyon]

[QUOTE=Plane;2369238]I like the idea of applying conditional injury, but wouldn't that still reduce major wounds into minor ones?

Under the current system, a character with a 10 HP Injury can fairly reliably be healed to full with 3 uses of a 1d healing spell (absent iteration penalties; this would be easy to pull off with RPM, particularly as such healing would generally fall under a Lesser Effect). In Conditional Injury, that's a Wound Potential of 4, for Severity 0 (Crippled) against a typical Robustness 4 character. A 1d healing spell will range from Healing Potential -2 (roll of 1) to Healing Potential 2 (4-6), for Efficacy -6 to -2. By normal Conditional Injury rules, Efficacy -6 (1) or -4 (2) does nothing, Efficacy -3 (3) drops the wound to Severity -1 (Reeling), and Efficacy -2 (4-6) drops the wound to Severity -2 (Major Wound). Under my suggestion, only Efficacy -2 (4-6) has any effect initially, and reduces it to Severity -1 (Reeling).

Under default rules, the chance of 3 separate instances of 1d healing restoring the character to full is the same as 1 instance of 3d healing doing the same - 62.5% (roll 10 or better on 3d), and you can manage it with 2 healings 1/6th (16.7%) of the time (rolls of 4,6 5,5 or 5,6). Conditional Injury makes this a bit less likely, as there's a 1/3 chance of each spell simply doing nothing (on a roll of 1 or 2) and only around a 50% chance of pulling it off within 3 healings, you can manage it within 2 healings 1/4th (25%) of the time, and there's a 3.7% chance you'll accomplish nothing between the three attempts. My suggestion is markedly harsher - about a 21% chance of pulling it off within 3 healings, it's impossible to pull off within 2 healings, and 1/8th (12.5%) of the time you'll accomplish nothing between the three attempts.

Originally Posted by Plane

I like the idea of "surface healing but deep infection"

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. If you do want to allow for surface healing but have the internal injuries remain, you certainly could do so, but I think the above is more visually interesting (and avoids issues where the character thinks he's healed someone, but they're still dying; of course, that might be appropriate in some stories, and I could certainly see an evil character severely wounding his victims, purposefully doing an incomplete healing, and then watch amused as aid-givers try to figure out what's wrong with the person).

[Boge]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That kinda sounds like things are working as intended. I remember a webcomic I read years ago (Elf World, maybe? the main character was Baughb - pronounced "Bob" - the Elf, if that helps anyone) wherein part of the main character's backstory involved him being in the military of an ancient kingdom functionally ruled by powerful fae. Their combat exercises involved live combat, with the faeries patching up any wounded and reviving any dead (although there was a short time limit to that), to train their soldiers to be fearless in battle, knowing any wounds they suffered would be healed. In a setting where things work similarly, fearlessness in battle and disregard toward the lasting effects of wounds is to be expected amongst combatants. Sure, real-world folk would be less cavalier about themselves, their allies, and those they protect being injured - but that's because real-world folk don't have access to fantastical healing!

I'd guess it's a pity play. My character is a doctor in a pirate/fantasy setting. But the GM also throws into our party a healer that uses magic. The entire campaign so far, she's been healing anyone that gets hurt while I don't help.

So on this one situation, he has her unable to help, so I accept that our ship mate lost her arm and I'll sew her up. He decides that I sew her arm back on and apply some healing salve and she's basically fine with only 1 damage left in her arm.

Okay...it doesn't make me excited or anything. No hip hip hurrays for my character. I prefer the realism. Her arm should be gone. Whatever.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I once killed a PC on the first turn of combat during the first hour of play with a ST 12 NPC flailing around with a hammer. It was AOA (Strong) that was a random critical success with a random hit to the skull and dealt maximum damage (dealing 32 HP of damage). The PC had HT 12 and HP 12, they rolled a '16' on their survival roll, so they dropped dead right then and there.

PCs are doing a prison rescue. They're in the process of unlocking cell doors when a guard rushes in and points his Mosin-Nagant at a PC and yells for them to put their hands up. A PC (not the one with the rifle pointed at him) steps forward and starts trying to talk to the guard in calm tones, to defuse the situation. The guard interprets the step forward as hostile and shoots... Hits... PC takes 28 points of damage to the chest, rolls a 17 and hits the floor, dead. Oh, well, buy more Luck next time (that was pretty much what the player said at the time).

That was the first fight for many sessions, and a sharp reminder to all that low-grade mooks are still dangerous if they have guns.

[MrFix]

The issue is that you can't exactly ditch HP without replacing it with a different metric for damage and health. Conditional injury, in effect, is obtuse HP with extra steps. OP, you're bemoaning mechanic designed to fairly and consistently portray damage to subjects for not letting you provide inconsistent, unfair results.

On the other hand, if your PCs solve problems by counting the odds and making calculated sacrifices, to your chagrin, you might wanna speak to them, threaten them with something else or not run a game like that. If players are not interested on their own, what are you to do?

And of course, any system can be gamed and optimized for, so you can always try freeform injury, but it'll add arguments and confusion to your game as people who did spend points on 17 HT will demand leeway in their survival chances. Or, again, consider not playing a game of deep.roleplay with optimizers and super rational decision makers.