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This started in a different thread, but I didn't want to derail it too badly so I moved it here.

Your hit points represent a combination of several factors. They include your physical durability and overall health, your speed and agility to avoid harm, and your overall level of energy. They also account for luck, divine favor, and other mystic factors.

In short, hit points are an abstraction. While you are at or above half your maximum hit points, you show no signs of injury. At less than half your hit points, you have acquired a few cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points or fewer strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious.

The 5E description of HP is treating them as additive, in discrete chunks: luck/fatigue on top of cosmetic damage on top of actual injury.   It makes sense that you could "second wind" to restore some of the first chunk, but the second and third chunks would require magical healing or just take forever.  A lot of the issue that I've been having is when you're very low on HP, because you shouldn't be able to "shrug off" the actual damage portion, and it feels goofy to use divine blessings to make you feel slightly less tired.  This system could actually work really well if everyone had temporary hit points that you could "second wind" through and real physical hit points that you couldn't, but it might require too much bookkeeping for casual use.

I think it could solve a lot of problems if they approached HP as multiplicative: your actual structural damage capacity is spread out over your HP, and then luck/fatigue/training represents a reduction in the amount of injury caused by an attack.  It's like, a first level character has 10 HP and a tenth level character has 100 HP.  A dagger wound at 1st level causes 5 damage because it's all actual damage, but a level 10 character can use skill/luck/energy to reduce that down to a tenth of the effectiveness - a minor scratch.  Every attack that does HP damage represents an actual wound, but most wounds are minor.  (I actually borrowed this interpretation from the armor system in the old Synnibarr.  Check them out on Kickstarter.)

Of course, the problem with that model is that it becomes harder to fix a minor scratch in an accomplished hero (10 HP) than a minor scratch on a rookie (1 HP).  That's why I favor the "normally I would be dead now" model.  Every wound is equally bad for everyone, and our intrepid heroes are just better at not dying from it.  Some guy might keel over after you stick a dagger in his gut, but Brock Samson is just going to ignore that and snap your neck.  It still takes 5 points of healing to cover the wound, because it's still the same wound.  Whether it's divine luck, endurance training, or however you want to explain it, you're not dead after being shot with a dozen arrows and set on fire.  Afterward, though, you're going to need a month in a hospital or (preferably) divine magic.  This method also has the benefit that everything is exactly what it says it is: a hit is a hit, a critical hit is a really solid hit, healing is actually healing, etc.  (The first method is much harder to narrate: "He swings his axe and comes very close to hitting you before you narrowly dodge - take 8 damage.")

I think it is important to ask in a topic about HP: what benefit does your approach have on the game? Is it complexity to fix simulation concerns? Narrative concerns? Or do you want to implement game mechanics? 

In your post it seems you just want to redefine the abstraction of hit points to better represent the actions taking place (e.g. your example of "He swings his axe and comes very close to hitting you before you narrowly dodge - take 8 damage."). That approach is really only misunderstanding the term abstraction. If you want to represent the effects of damage it would be better to propse a wound system.

Yeah in my campaign world a sleeping wizard will always be autokilled if the rogue gets close enough to swing.  Now I might give the wizard a penalized perception check to wake up.  I never believed in a coup de grace doing max damage.  It kills you in my book.

Fundamentally for the game design and fun of play, HP has to remain as an abstraction of many factors.  Too many game mechanics from spells to potions to attacks to combat balance all hinge on this fact.

If it bothers you that high level characters can survive high falls or other "lethal" situations, then you have a few options.

One, you can take a page from E6 house rules for 3.X.  Cap levels at a lower value (6 or 8 or whatever) and allow players to still accrue feats and other things they qualify for (but stop spell progression and class ability progression).

Two, you can add some sort of wound system to the game.  This can be using vitality points or something similar taking inspiration from pre-SAGA Star Wars, or it can be something simpler such as accruing penalties under certain circumstances that take time to heal.  The latter can borrow a page from FATE and let characters stay up after they lose hit points by accepting a penalty and regaining some hit points.

But I don't think it can really work to change what hit points are.  There would just be too much work required.

Jul 3, 2012 -- 12:26PM, Emerikol wrote:

Yeah in my campaign world a sleeping wizard will always be autokilled if the rogue gets close enough to swing.  Now I might give the wizard a penalized perception check to wake up.  I never believed in a coup de grace doing max damage.  It kills you in my book.

Don't you die on me, man!!! Don't...you...die on me!!!