Pathfinder hit points are weird
Feb. 8th, 2020 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI know in Pathfinder hit points are an abstraction meant to represent both "the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one"
which explains how you even can get more when you level up
though it still leaves a great many unanswered questions as to how that's meant to work
Prokopetz on tumblr reckons "Hit points in Dungeons & Dragons explicitly represent heroic luck and divine favour as well as endurance and bodily integrity, so if you survive something that logically ought to have killed you because the GM biffed the damage roll, you are absolutely allowed to invent some bizarre coincidence that saved you"
so a character whose hit points are because they're a slab of muscle is going to have a very different experience than a character beloved of the fates or with the kind of luck that looks like the comedy routine with the ladder and the bucket mixed with a particular sort of 'drunk' martial arts.
like some people are going to do serious training and get just that good at ducking and rolling with the blows, and others are just going to... not be hit. despite their apparent best efforts. dancing through a battlefield.
Hit points by that definition are deeply, deeply, weird.
But then they start interacting with healing, and it gets weirder.
Because it means a high level adventurer is almost as hard to heal as he is to hit, but his body could look exactly the same.
What is magical healing even doing? Stabilize stops you bleeding, and it don't take many Cure Light Wounds to fix everywhere an NPC has to injure. Bodies is, apparently, the easy bit.
But then there's this intangible abstraction, and it either tops uo the slow way through Heal skill and rest, or a healer pours in a ton of positive energy to make it work again.
Are hit points a positive energy battery? Not one the pc knows how to tap, but like, in general principle?
... is it the Force? Do they get strong with the force and have to actively tune back in when they've been beat up?
Because if hit points are divine favor and luck then the same spells that fix the meat also fix your fortune.
Which is really, really, weird.
Plus how exactly is even a high level fighter meant to mitigate the damage from say fireball? Dude is on fire, there is no breakfall for fire.
But there's luck and divine favor, so hey, guess that works out.
I wrote a whole scene yesterday that was very drama, an injured person needing mundane healing to get her through to dawn when the cleric's spells came back, and then I looked up some spell rules, and I think the whole scene wouldn't work like that? Because if the cleric is packing Stabilize, and they are, or can apply any heal skill at all, and they can, then as soon as they treat an injury at all people just... do not die. They don't lose any more hit points, they start healing, and they won't die. However bad the injuries were.
They go from dying to not dying. That's it. One orison, useable as many times a day as the cleric likes, and nobody dies.
... I somehow did not think that was how healing works.
... and like, anyone can do that? Not the orisons, the heal check. Might be tricky but they can study, and if they make one good check, no death.
Poison and disease and curses still have their own ongoing effects, but straight up kinetic damage is fixed in one.
... and I can't even find rules for ability damage from ordinary hazards.
So this particular set of abstractions makes it really really weird, compared to, like, any actual medical drama, let alone medicine.
It's like that bit in the Last Action Hero where they're like why are you even complain.
Which is not to say I'm deleting the thing I wrote, just that I've implied there was something beyond the obvious going on with that particular patient, so now I've got to think of something to do with that thread.
Also though it means it takes a LOT of injured people before a cleric will run out of saving their lives. They might still be injured, but they'll be stable until more spells arrive.
And a high level cleric? Not quite high emough to ressurect, that's a whole different level of shrugging off danger, more like Breath of Life where they can dive in and be like Nope on death in the last minute or something. They are going to have a lot of spells. A Lot.
And channel energy.
And maybe some domain powers.
and potions, and logically magic items, but at that point we can't get the scene I had in mind at all.
So I was thinking like a dozen injured people, but then I did math and I think it takes three dozen before this guy is out of cure, and that is a much larger crowd than I anticipated.
Clerics are awesome.
Except then you figure outhow many Remove Disease and similar they could cast in case of plague, and things get much more worrying for any reasonable sized urban population. Spell numbers calibrated to be useful to an adventure party without breezing through absolutely everything still come up short when there's a hundred times more people needing help.
So you wonder how good alchemy is, and what the limitations are on production that keep it some varity of rare.
And like, potions happen, too, a lot. And wands. So many magic items one could usefully use.
But they have to be high level characters to be able to make most of them, to be able to cast the spells, and that's... if the only way they can get xp is combat that's a bit of a concern. What have all these level 13 clerics been out doing?
The power curve of Pathfinder still throws me. I mean, I can make a GURPS character who knows a lot of spells, but they won't be the full equivalent packge without a LOT of points poured in what I would usually consider unrelated areas.
And their hit points are going to happen on a more or less fixed and human scale.
Getting actually hit in GURPS be a large problem, and medicine is hard.
Pathfinder, not so much.
Pathfinder hit points must have so many other GURPS things sort of mixed in.
It's a puzzler.
I'm trying to write things before I look up to see if Pathfinder rules work like that, because rules should be an inspiration not a bind, but sometimes the Pathfinder rules are SO far from my expectations they're just... very tricky to make fit.
Like, characters die. But Pathfinder isn't keen on that. So it seems to be actively tricky to make happen, if you've got a healer along.
... I should read the healer's book again...
which explains how you even can get more when you level up
though it still leaves a great many unanswered questions as to how that's meant to work
Prokopetz on tumblr reckons "Hit points in Dungeons & Dragons explicitly represent heroic luck and divine favour as well as endurance and bodily integrity, so if you survive something that logically ought to have killed you because the GM biffed the damage roll, you are absolutely allowed to invent some bizarre coincidence that saved you"
so a character whose hit points are because they're a slab of muscle is going to have a very different experience than a character beloved of the fates or with the kind of luck that looks like the comedy routine with the ladder and the bucket mixed with a particular sort of 'drunk' martial arts.
like some people are going to do serious training and get just that good at ducking and rolling with the blows, and others are just going to... not be hit. despite their apparent best efforts. dancing through a battlefield.
Hit points by that definition are deeply, deeply, weird.
But then they start interacting with healing, and it gets weirder.
Because it means a high level adventurer is almost as hard to heal as he is to hit, but his body could look exactly the same.
What is magical healing even doing? Stabilize stops you bleeding, and it don't take many Cure Light Wounds to fix everywhere an NPC has to injure. Bodies is, apparently, the easy bit.
But then there's this intangible abstraction, and it either tops uo the slow way through Heal skill and rest, or a healer pours in a ton of positive energy to make it work again.
Are hit points a positive energy battery? Not one the pc knows how to tap, but like, in general principle?
... is it the Force? Do they get strong with the force and have to actively tune back in when they've been beat up?
Because if hit points are divine favor and luck then the same spells that fix the meat also fix your fortune.
Which is really, really, weird.
Plus how exactly is even a high level fighter meant to mitigate the damage from say fireball? Dude is on fire, there is no breakfall for fire.
But there's luck and divine favor, so hey, guess that works out.
I wrote a whole scene yesterday that was very drama, an injured person needing mundane healing to get her through to dawn when the cleric's spells came back, and then I looked up some spell rules, and I think the whole scene wouldn't work like that? Because if the cleric is packing Stabilize, and they are, or can apply any heal skill at all, and they can, then as soon as they treat an injury at all people just... do not die. They don't lose any more hit points, they start healing, and they won't die. However bad the injuries were.
They go from dying to not dying. That's it. One orison, useable as many times a day as the cleric likes, and nobody dies.
... I somehow did not think that was how healing works.
... and like, anyone can do that? Not the orisons, the heal check. Might be tricky but they can study, and if they make one good check, no death.
Poison and disease and curses still have their own ongoing effects, but straight up kinetic damage is fixed in one.
... and I can't even find rules for ability damage from ordinary hazards.
So this particular set of abstractions makes it really really weird, compared to, like, any actual medical drama, let alone medicine.
It's like that bit in the Last Action Hero where they're like why are you even complain.
Which is not to say I'm deleting the thing I wrote, just that I've implied there was something beyond the obvious going on with that particular patient, so now I've got to think of something to do with that thread.
Also though it means it takes a LOT of injured people before a cleric will run out of saving their lives. They might still be injured, but they'll be stable until more spells arrive.
And a high level cleric? Not quite high emough to ressurect, that's a whole different level of shrugging off danger, more like Breath of Life where they can dive in and be like Nope on death in the last minute or something. They are going to have a lot of spells. A Lot.
And channel energy.
And maybe some domain powers.
and potions, and logically magic items, but at that point we can't get the scene I had in mind at all.
So I was thinking like a dozen injured people, but then I did math and I think it takes three dozen before this guy is out of cure, and that is a much larger crowd than I anticipated.
Clerics are awesome.
Except then you figure outhow many Remove Disease and similar they could cast in case of plague, and things get much more worrying for any reasonable sized urban population. Spell numbers calibrated to be useful to an adventure party without breezing through absolutely everything still come up short when there's a hundred times more people needing help.
So you wonder how good alchemy is, and what the limitations are on production that keep it some varity of rare.
And like, potions happen, too, a lot. And wands. So many magic items one could usefully use.
But they have to be high level characters to be able to make most of them, to be able to cast the spells, and that's... if the only way they can get xp is combat that's a bit of a concern. What have all these level 13 clerics been out doing?
The power curve of Pathfinder still throws me. I mean, I can make a GURPS character who knows a lot of spells, but they won't be the full equivalent packge without a LOT of points poured in what I would usually consider unrelated areas.
And their hit points are going to happen on a more or less fixed and human scale.
Getting actually hit in GURPS be a large problem, and medicine is hard.
Pathfinder, not so much.
Pathfinder hit points must have so many other GURPS things sort of mixed in.
It's a puzzler.
I'm trying to write things before I look up to see if Pathfinder rules work like that, because rules should be an inspiration not a bind, but sometimes the Pathfinder rules are SO far from my expectations they're just... very tricky to make fit.
Like, characters die. But Pathfinder isn't keen on that. So it seems to be actively tricky to make happen, if you've got a healer along.
... I should read the healer's book again...