Hit Points Aren’t Wounds

or, I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation

One of the things that regularly pops up in tabletop RPG conversations — and one that drives me absolutely batshit — is the idea that hit points directly equate to wounds sustained. It has done for literally decades, mostly because it sustains itself due to a combination of poor game design and players’ inability to actually read the damn books.

Here’s the problem: players expect and demand from GMs that, if their character scores a hit with an arrow for 1d6 piercing damage, that GM must describe the physical wound that arrow makes. 

Nonsense.

In D&D (and many other RPG systems) hit points are an abstract concept. Here’s what Fifth Edition has to say about it:

Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill.

It’s been that way since the earliest editions of the game, as well as with games that developed concurrently with D&D, like Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying engine. 

Here’s an example, using Fifth Edition numbers: 

• A riding horse has 13 hit points. Its hooves deal 2d4 + 3 bludgeoning damage, for an average of 8 on a hit.
• A 10th-level fighter has 90+ hit points. She can attack multiple times with a weapon that deals an average of 8 to 10 on a hit.
• In a fight, the character is likely to kill the horse in one blow. If the horse “hits” the character, the character won’t even notice. 

If you’ve ever been kicked or even just stepped on by a horse, you’ll know how patently absurd that is. I don’t care how badass you are; if you get kicked by a horse you don’t just shrug it off, you suffer an immediate physical consequence. Now we’re supposed to expect that a person can get kicked by a horse ten times before they suffer any consequence? Poppycock. Balderdash. Horsefeathers.

That shows it’s absurd to think of “damage” in the game engine as actual, physical wounds. Therefore we must think of them as the book says we should: An abstract measure of physical endurance, skill, luck, and will to fight on. 

But That’s Boring!

No crap! Combat at the table becomes a sequence of numbers passing around. YAWN. 

The good news is it’s easy to fix. And you do it through narrative.

Let’s Go to the Movies

Films are a great guide for evoking cinematic combat without letting hit points and cure wounds confusing things. Think back on famous film fight scenes and steal their tropes for your table.

Barring Boromir at Parth Galen, few movie heroes end up a mess of wounds. Even then their heroism comes (partly) from overcoming the deleterious effects of being grievously wounded, which is something D&D doesn’t do at all; you’re fully functional or dead. 

All those old swashbuckling fencing scenes featuring Tyrone Power, Basil Rathbone, and Errol Flynn are superb sources. You’ll note that they don’t continually stab each other, inflicting wounds. Nor is it conceivable that they miss over and over again. Rather, what happens is they whittle down each other’s hit point totals until one of them (the hero) deals the telling blow: the hit that reduces the foe to 0 hit points. That blow ends the fight. It doesn’t have to be fatal, either; it can be something like Vader cutting off Luke’s hand. It just had to end the fight.

I like to simulate this using narration, describing an array of parries and dodges, where the foe deflects the blow or nimbly avoids being skewered. Same with other forms of combat, like fisticuffs. Rocky and his opponents pummel each other before Rocky lands the telling blow. Irrespective of combat form, I don’t narrate misses at all. 

The key is the telling blow, the “hit” that reduces the opponent to 0 hit points. The punch Rocky lands that knocks out Ivan Drago. The thrust Inigo Montoya lands on Count Rugen. 

Critical Hits. Okay, you say, so what about critical hits? Easy. When Count Rugen lands an actual wound on Inigo Montoya, that’s a critical hit! When Tyrone Power as Zorro slashes Captain Pasquale, he scored a critical hit. It has no real effect, because D&D and other “all or nothing” systems don’t simulate wounds accurately (or indeed at all), but it ramps up the drama — which is the point of combat in the first place! 

But What About Cure Wounds?

There are any number of spells and effects that “cure wounds” that really restore hit points.

Nobody ever said the D&D game was perfect. In many ways it’s a terrible game that gets in its own way and confuses its players with archaic legacy rules and terminology that persist for no other reason than “that’s how we’ve always done it” or “it’s the D&D way”. 

Hit points and damage are the most obvious. They’ve been poorly expressed since Gygax and Arneson started filling notebooks. Like gold pieces, even the OG designers knew they were screwing things up, but by the time they realized it, it was too late: fixing the problem would run headlong into customer expectations. 

Cure Wounds. Aha! But what about magic abilities that specifically say they cure wounds? Equally easy. They don’t cure wounds. They restore hit points. They instill more will to win. They energize. In my D&D game, potions of healing are bitter, oily, black liquids that taste like they’re made from beans roasted until they’re nearly charred. (They sometimes have names like Yrgracheffe and Sidkalang and Mandheling). Out of all versions of D&D, 4th Edition actually got this the most “right”. Cure effects didn’t actually cure anything. They allowed you to spend a healing surge, which was literally you reaching within yourself for more chutzpah. Even that was misnamed, with “healing” in it, which is unfortunate.

Bloodied. Interestingly, 4E introduced mechanical effects that mechanically leveraged sustaining wounds. The Bloodied condition is when a creature is at one-half or fewer of its maximum hit points. When Bloodied, the creature is visibly wounded. A bunch of game-mechanical stuff triggers off this condition. This makes for awesome Rocky moments, or like Captain Mal in the Firefly episode “Shindig”. It gives the hero the chance to say, “I got stabbed. Right here” when later telling the tale of their duel. It’s one of the many 4E mechanics I really wish 5E would have retained.

Conclusion

Remember: hit points are a badly-named and poorly-realized game mechanic that symbolizes not physical health but chutzpah, the will to go on. While a certain amount represents actual, physical wounds, those are only the last few before zero. Hits scored do little actual physical harm (and certainly none that impairs the creature’s function). However, as Gygax put it:

[T]he sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the [10th-level] character due to the fighter’s exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment.

Solve your “but how do I narrate all the wounds” problems by realizing they’re self-inflicted due to your misunderstanding of how hit points work. Make your life easier!