For what it’s worth, I find it uncomfortable to have to think and make decisions about things that don’t exist for my character, and that don’t correspond to anything that my character has to deal with and decide about.
Good point, that blends into what I think of as shifting out of immersion into writer mode, to think e.g. “what would be a dramatically appropriate thing to happen now”. (It’s bizarre that I don’t mind this in Genesys.)
Listening to the second half of the podcast after a brief (but not random) encounter with the hospital system.
You chaps ought to take a look at the system in James Bond 007 for random encounters. In the first place, each encounter in the tables is a piece of Bond-genre business: something happening, somebody doing something, such as might happen in a Bond movie. In the second place, it’s all structured to drive the characters along in a Bondesque series of events from “cold” areas to “hot” areas, and in “hot” areas into contact with the Major Villain and his or her stereotyped entourage and Nefarious Scheme.
I cheat with random tables. I read them and mark down ones that I like and think the folks at the table will get their teeth into as a break from moving along an investigation
Game books that lean into their atmosphere go a long way on this and the second edition of WFRP did very well with this to my tastes
I find Luck reasonably easy to deal with. I use it in that “oops, got it wring moment” that we all experience when something goes awry. I find it much harder to play Intuition, which requires much more of an authorial viewpoint. I usually just forget to use it.
There is a oft-quoted example of luck/intuition from my games club, from a Golden Heroes game (before I joined the club). The villain had a base inside a skyscraper where he had installed a doomsday machine. The PC’s burst into the entrance lobby, beat the goons guarding it and pile into the lift. The player with the luck or intuition power (I forget which, but matters little for the purposes of the tale) says “I press a button” and the power ensures it is the right one to go straight to the right floor. The team exit the lift and engage with the enemy. The lucky player gets to the domesday machine console and presses a button - which is (of course) the “Stop” button. - The session turned out a lot shorter than the GM had planned for…
@RogerBW is right about hit points being an abstraction. There is no way to reconcile it with anything that exists in the game world… unless you are doing something like LitRPG where abstract game mechanics are a part of the world.
In traditional RPGs, each die roll made on behalf of the character corresponds to a single action/reaction. Roll to hit. Or pick the lock. Or dodge that dragon breath. Or find the clue. And so on. When there are game mechanics that alter the die roll (such as by spending Luck in Call of Cthulhu), this is really no different than adding modifiers for difficulty or whatnot. You could give some in-world explanation of what happened, such as recovering at the last moment, but it’s not really necessary. When the game mechanics call for a re-roll, you have to decide is this because of some additional action by the character (to maintain the one action = on roll paradigm) or just pretend the first roll didn’t happen (in the same way we ignore cocked dice or rolls that fell off the table*). You don’t have to be consistent with it either–just delcare what makes sense and/or amusement for the current situation.
In a world with magic and/or gods, if Weirdness Magnet can be detected, I see no reason why Luck should not be. And I feel the same about Alignment.
Take a demon. Could a Detect Evil or Know Alignment spell work on it? I see no reason why not, unless the demon had a means to mask itself. Demons, angels, and similar beings are supernaturally tied to cosmic forces of Good and Evil and/or Law and Chaos. Of course, your world may different, but follow along with me here. If there are these supernatural forces and beings, they could also affect moral souls (to use @MichaelCule’s body, mind, soul framing) in a way that could be detected. You can still have two good-aligned people or countries have differences of opinions on matters of morality, politics, and strategy. “No, I’m not going help you defend against the evil invaders. Yes, they will come after us next, but my people have the best chance of survival if you weaken them first and give us more time to build our defenses.”
Re: unsatisfactory rationalisations for D&D hit points. No-one ever explained to me how healing spells, healing potions, first aid, and bed rest restored expended luck, divine favour, and fatigue, but proportionately less for high-level and healthy characters
Healing of fatigue makes some sense, but yeah, it’s a problem if we insist that hp have to mean something other than an abstract number.
It’s also a problem when damage is classified as piercing, bludgeoning, poison, lightning, fire, et al. The distinction is important for damage resistance and vulnerability and helps a bit with the color. In my last D&D game (on Saturday), the Wyvern sting did a bit of piercing damage and a lot of poison damage. If hp represented, say, defensive fighting skill (as some have proposed), how does it make sense? And how are healing potions supposed to fix my fading parrying?
Does anyone else imagine D&D characters with depleted hit points as being in a superposition of states that have different combinations of wounds? “Schrödinger’s corpse.”
This also ties to D&D combat being essentially attritional, of course. Even if you walk all over the enemy, you expect to lose some hit points, and an essential part of the game is managing that loss and deciding when to break for healing.
In the GURPS dungeon bash I ran a few years ago, the combat was high-powered but still worked like standard GURPS: we make a lot of strikes at each other, and the first to hit will often win the fight (because of injury and pain penalties). It is entirely possible to come out of a “nuisance” fight having used up no resources, or none that can’t be replaced in a few minutes.
Neither of these is bad from a game perspective, but they lead to different shapes of adventure.
Sounds like a good discussion to have on which systems have the “best” or most realistic way of representing hit points/damage or health. Of the top of my head, I liked the West End Games D6 Star Wars approach but would need to refresh my memory of the exact details of the system. It was something like comparing rolls for damage with rolls for target’s strength (health) for the effect on the target, with intermediate effects reducing the target’s dice pool for subsequent actions. Been 35 years or so since I played it though and surely other systems have better mechanics for this.
I don’t see any difficulty in magic healing both physical damaage and luck though I think it would make an interesting world background to have seperate resources to restore luck and to heal damage.
And yes, first aid should work differently from luck restoring. When you start to bleed and need an actual hands on healer that should be the point to realise how near your ending you have come.
I don’t expect this idea to run: there’s so much inertia and investment in the way things are now. But it makes sense to my mind.
And on the other tentacle I’m shouting this advice from way outside the DnD using community.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? We’re patching round this “why can A take ten times the damage that would kill B” when the answer is “because that’s what the D&D rules say, and lots of other games don’t have this problem”.
I think one of the reasons explanations for high hit points always feel a bit pasted on goes back to something else I mentioned in the episode: to me hit points are an imperfect abstraction, but to a die-hard rules-first player they are some kind of physical truth about the universe.