What do hit points represent?

[Kavonde]

ONE Flaw... Take certain martial arts movies, where TONS of blows have landed one one another, ni your terms, there would be alot of critical hits being landed, and the whole idea behind a critial hit is that it's usually pretty rare

True, but still, you could abstract hit points here more as "technique" or "exhaustion" or what have you rather than straight damage threshold.

EDIT: Also, and this is for everyone, I'm really talking more about how RPGs portray damage than action games and shooters. That's a different can of worms.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

I've always thought of HP as pain tolerance. If you think about it in terms of something like WoW it makes more sense.

You build your Stamina which gives you more hit points. Now, in a game like WoW, you're constantly being beat on by various weapons and spells. However, with either the right magic or the wonderful healing powers of food and bandages, you can withstand huge amounts of torture.

I always figured it as magic heals your wounds to keep you from dying but there comes a point where the pain becomes to great and you eventually collapse without any magic to maintain your body. This also accounts for such things as poison and bleed effects.

I've spent the last few minutes trying to explain exactly why I think WoW is the worst offender here, but then I realized that I think Bliz is actually on about the same page as me.

So you start out at level 1, and you gradually grow in power and ability until you reach level 80. Along the way, you fight evil across two worlds and make the world a little bit safer for your fellow sentient beings. However, as capable and skilled as you might be, you will always be massively dwarfed by the power and strength of any given dungeon boss, and swatted like a gnat if you try to take on any of the faction leaders solo.

Basically, WoW scales with you. You're really not much stronger at 80 than you were at 60, or 40, or 20, at least according to the setting's internal logic. You've got a broader suite of abilities and much more impressive gear, but if you went back and fought, say, a version of Mr. Smite who's scaled to your level, you'd still get stomped into the ground. (Well, pier.)

So what I'm trying to communicate through this long and rambling post is that I think WoW already views your hit points less as "pain threshold" or "how many hits you can take before you die," and more like a formula derived from your skill, equipment, and experience relative to the world around you.

I have no freaking clue if any of that made sense.

Level scaling works to keep you in scale to the world you are in?
On some ways it works in some ways its cheap wankery >>

 

[Kavonde]

Level scaling works to keep you in scale to the world you are in?
On some ways it works in some ways its cheap wankery >>

Yep! Thank you, that was way shorter.

In WoW's case, and mind you I like the game, but they have to. If the whole concept of "levels" wasn't totally abstract, then there's no reason that a handful of level 80 undead from Icecrown couldn't obliterate all life outside the cities on the southern continents.

 

[Zacharine]

It actually changes from game to game and setting to setting.

For example, in nWoD Mage, spirits do not as such have hit-points, they have Essence. Once they run out of Essence, they cannot hold themselves together anymore, they begin to loose their form and the very core of their existance, their 'soul', is in danger of evaporation. You could say that damage to their Essence is loosening their confidence and faith in their own abilities and core behaviour. It is possible to directly leech off essence from spirits, but you can also damage them by shaking their confidence to what they are and what they want to do.

Mortal creatures still have hit-points though, albeit there is differentation between bashing ("shock/blunt") damage, lethal damage (bullets, normal supernatural attacks etc.) and aggravated damage. Loose your hit-points to blunt, you lose consciousness and any further blunt damage upgrades the bashing damage to lethal damage. Lose all hit-points to lethal damage, you die in short order, though you are in pain long before that. Aggravated damage is just nasty, it's akin to lethal, but very hard/impossible to heal fast and allows for a myriad of rules and effects to be applied to you (such as magically sapping your Willpower or mental stamina to empower others). Think of aggravated damage as badly broken bones, mangled intestines, doused in holy water for vampires etc style Big-Nasty-Need-Hospital-Now damage.

In Cyberpunk 2020 you got stat and skill debuffs based on the damage you carried around: you lose half your hit-points and you were making stat check to stay conscious, to crawl around and your effective stats were something like halved.

Then there are the Redshirt points in the RPG Starwreck. Any damage to your squad while on away mission killed redshirts. Once all redshirts were gone, you had to make stat throws against all succesfull attacks; fail and you died, period. This is very much akin to your 'luck' system.

 

[Lucane]

A problem occurs with your theory when it comes time to replenish your hit points with items it's just to fix (luck). but interesting idea for a twist of it for a series of games. where they drink stamina drinks to get hit points back but "X" amount of criticals would need actual medical attention.

 

[Kavonde]

A problem occurs with your theory when it comes time to replenish your hit points with items it's just to fix (luck). but interesting idea for a twist of it for a series of games. where they drink stamina drinks to get hit points back but "X" amount of criticals would need actual medical attention.

I think all you'd really have to do is replace "Lesser Health Potion" with "Protein Shake"

 

[Cheesus333]

I reckon it's how much failure the playable character is willing to put up with on the part of the player. Like they'll suffer for a certain time, then decide you're not worth it/clearly not going to win/doing it on purpose, and promptly die.

But that's just what I think...

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Isn't it like the state of your body at any given time? For example, 100% HP is as healthy as can be, 50% is kinda meh, and 0% is dead. When your max HP goes up, this is because you became an overall more powerful person, so you are healthier than others that have lower max HP.

Status effects like poison do reduce your health, but they don't have immediate effects. Think about it, a blow to your ribcage that breaks a rib or two is an instant effect. If you get poisoned, the poison has to run through your body before it can really take effect.

...I think anyway.

In most RPGs 0 health is not death you are merely passed out, how many RPGs have real death in the story but not so much in battles?

If your party is passed out your as good as dead.

Mmmmmm Anyone recall the old minus 0 bit in some ID games where you got gibed if you fell below a certain negative point, would it be neat if that was implemented in a RPG, say 25% negative health you are unrecoverable, least without teleportation,ect from local place of revival LOL

 

[Kavonde]

I reckon it's how much failure the playable character is willing to put up with on the part of the player. Like they'll suffer for a certain time, then decide you're not worth it/clearly not going to win/doing it on purpose, and promptly die.

But that's just what I think...

Best theory I've ever heard.

 

[rokkolpo]

YES finally an answer for all those enemies wih 1HP of a total of 20000HP left who still fight like jackie chan instead of my grandma.

i want enemies to get slower and miss more often when their HP is under 50%

 

[JuryNelson]

When I was playing Final Fantasy VII back in the day, I managed to construct a reality where Hit Points were like a drug that granted invincibility. And as they keep taking it, they get addicted and they constantly need more to get the effect, and that's why your max HP goes up. That's your tolerance to the 'Potions' and eventually you need harder stuff to get you there. 'Hi-Potions' 'Elixer' and 'X-Potion,' which I only ever used to kill the undead boss at Cosmo Canyon and which I always imagined had "X"s on them, so kids knew to stay away.

 

[Cheesus333]

YES finally an answer for all those enemies wih 1HP of a total of 20000HP left who still fight like jackie chan instead of my grandma.

i want enemies to get slower and miss more often when their HP is under 50%

Well Fallout 3 had the whole crippled limbs thing, so...

I personally loved the crippled head effect, just like every now and then they'd clutch their head and writhe around a bit. Whenever this happened I would yell 'The voices! THEY'RE BACK!' at the screen.

 

[jowo96]

Depends upon the game I would imagine. Most modern games however do show blood from being hit so I would think it is more likely that hit points is how much damage you can take before dying.

 

[HandfulofWolf]

That's a cool way of looking at it pal.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Level scaling works to keep you in scale to the world you are in?
On some ways it works in some ways its cheap wankery >>

Yep! Thank you, that was way shorter.

In WoW's case, and mind you I like the game, but they have to. If the whole concept of "levels" wasn't totally abstract, then there's no reason that a handful of level 80 undead from Icecrown couldn't obliterate all life outside the cities on the southern continents.

Well level scaling can work to but you do not take the things you killed 20 levels ago and make them 25 levels higher, I perfered it when games brought out a newer version of X or Y with a mix of the old........scaling what you got up to your level is boring IMO.
Also it would be neat if they did more with it like make every other critical hit from a lesser level creature do 3 or 5 times as much damage to keep things fresh other than just keeping them in your shadow.

Also the way wow dose level scaling is how most other games do it IE the game tries to stay ahead of you and you are kept as a drone always doing menial tasks, I wish MMOs would use more customization let me pick my skills the rate(1% to 1000%) at witch I gain EXP,money and what not because skills and abilities have a min lvl req you can easily keep things balanced for PVP and what not while allow alot more customization.
/mandatory MMO rant
LOL

 

[Premonition]

Personally I don't think to much of it. It's just a representation of your characters health.

 

[Silver]

That's pretty much exactly how it works in most (relatively modern) D20 systems. You have hit points, and vitality points. Vitality is real wounds, hit points is just focus, luck and whatever. You lose hit points first, which causes your character no permanent harm, just throws you off balance, after that, you take vitality damage, which will kill you. Hit points go up each level, vitality points are just as many as your constitution score.

It's still very inelegant and outdated, especially in video games, and we should have gotten rid of it years ago, but, well, people are slow.

 

[Malyc]

Hit points are the amount of damage you can take before suffering a critical existance failure from a death of 1000 cuts.
Just go on to tvtropes.com to figure out what both of those are, but BE WARNED!!! you may not make it back here for several hours.

 

[The Procrastinated End]

Its not meant to be realistic its meant to tell you how long you have until you die.