Oddly Palladium games system was one of the ones to abstract this most effectively I think from the response I got from groups with a minor home adaptation
In them there is a pool of SDC and then a pool of hit points. SDC comes off first and represents the luck and fighting spirit and scrapes and bruises (says the man who grew up in an age of antibiotics) and hit points represent the wounds
the minor home adaptation I made was tracking all SDC in pencil while original hit points were blue ink and any hit point healing had to be some other color than blue ink. If Iād had available Iād have used colored candy or something. The idea being that hit points never healed back exactly as they were before
The author of course twisted himself into knots after this innovation in later books because reports of high SDC players leaping onto grenades and dusting themselves off. Showing that, perhaps, no simulation is at its absolute best outside of its original table and comfort with adaptation is an asset at the table. As I occasionally reflect (perhaps now because Castle Falkenstein was mentioned earlier) Iāll never see Sarah Bernhardt but when Lady of the Camellias was put on during undergrad by the theatre department I enjoyed it
I have considered trying to describe physics and biology that make sense of D&D hit points, but not very seriously.
Over on ENWorld, people periodically notice that D&D hit points are utterly unrealistic and start trying to create systems that make more sense. Then I explain how lots of other games have been working that way for almost as long as D&D. RuneQuest seems to have been the first example.
RQ has hit points. It has different types of hit points: hit points for individual body locations and a general pool of hit points. Itās still a simulation by depleting pools of hit points but it gives a slightly more detailed picture.
GURPS still has hit points and they are mostly a single pool but they can be put to many uses. Sometimes to describe individual wounds sometimes not.
ROLEMASTER has a lot of critical tables.
HARNMASTER (and I think ARS MAGICA) have wounds, individual wounds which build up and up until they do something that causes the fight to end in death or in something else.
We donāt have the ability to model being injured in any way that doesnāt involve some level of abstraction.
So I donāt think the DnD model is that far out on a limb.
Tunnels & Trolls (1975) uses the Constitution attribute for damage, so points of damage directly affect the character. Armour reduces damage rather than making the target harder to hit, too.
And most people donāt end up with waaaaay more of them than they started. They get harder to hit, they wear armour, maybe they get a little bt tougher.
Ditto.
That does still have increasing hit points (āconcussion hitsā) with level (or rather you can choose to spend some of your per-level development on hit points) but it has lots of other specific damage, inflicted by those critical tables, and almost all the time thatās what actually kills someone. Hit points are still attritional like D&D and more of them make you better able to survive a combat, but not getting hit and/or wearing armour are generally more important.
I donāt have anything like the problem with āa measure that is explicitly overall physical healthā that I do with āa measure that is physical health but can vary by a factor of ten or more between otherwise healthy and fit individualsā.
Yes on this quite a bit for reaction to D&D over the years as well
The only thing that even begins to address this to me as I consider it is the ratio of hit points to opponent damage output. Which while quantifiable in any D&D edition would be a job of work
That takes the simulation a step further away from an individuals health and fighting spirit and puts it near the 3e attempt at challenge rating. Hit points inform what opponents a character of a particular class and level can face toe-to-toe on a sand table for how long. Save or die effects make more sense in this context also because they were largely for items of dungeon environment to my memory outside of the context of miniature on miniature combat (Modulo certain special monsters, which I guess makes a save or die monster effect more analogous to a terrain and maneuverability challenge)
I always liked the Golden Heroes and Champions approach - two pools of Hits to Kill and Hits to Coma - HTK being wounds, and HTC being stamina, bruising, etc.
It meant you could mimic the comics where two bruisers stand up against each other and pummel the crap out of each other and theyād both be fine the next day, but when someone pulled out a gun, sword, or had a HTK power, things got a lot more serious very quickly.
Iām with most people on the thread, I think, in opposition to @MichaelCule (sorry!).
The D&D hitpoints are a completely non-diagetic mechanism - a mishmash of explanations and handwaving that satisfy the general ānumbers go upā school of character advancement. (And I submit before the court the names of the various healing spells - Cure Light Wounds will on average, restore a normal human from the point of death (1HP) but hardly touch the damage done to a skilled fighter in the same circumstance. (In 5th Ed itās just called Cure Wounds, but there things are even worse. Anyone, no matter their class or level, restores /all/ hit points with a good nights rest, as long as they have 1HP when drinking their night time cocoa.))