The Definition of Hit Points

Ah, the joys. With 5e in the works, the message boards proceed to go mad with all the old discussions again. With the most recent being "just what are hit points?"

Now, this is a topic where everything turns into a tangled mess, because there is no good definition that actually works in all cases. They're toughness. No, they're luck. No, they're skill. No, they're divine favour. No, they're...

I don't really fancy rehashing the whole debate again. However, I think it's worth noting the definition of hit points that I use, both in my 3.5e campaigns and also in Nutshell Fantasy. Other groups and other GMs will define them differently, and that's fine; this is just what I use.

Hit points are an abstraction of various things: toughness, luck, skill, divine favour, script immunity, and whatever else you want to think of. And not all hit points are created equal: some creatures will have a lot of hit points because they're especially tough, some because they're especially lucky, and so forth.

Whenever a character takes damage, even a single hit point, this means that he has in some way been injured, even if it only amounts to a paper cut. Thus, if a character is hit with a poisoned blade and takes any damage, this allows the poison to enter his system and take effect. (Conversely, if the character's damage reduction negates all the damage, this also negates any special effects tied to the damage - something that saved Avon's life in the last session of the Eberron Code.)

However, an increased amount of damage does not reflect a more serious wound, whether this is in absolute terms (the attack does 25 hit points of damage instead of 1), or relative to the character's total. It's all just nicks, cuts, scrapes...

The exception comes when the PC is dropped below 0 hit points, and especially if he is killed outright. In this case, the wound can be a bit more descriptive - the character can be said to have suffered a potentially-fatal blow (for sub-zero), or to have suffered a particularly spectacular demise (if he's killed outright... but only if he's killed outright!). The key here, though, is to remain somewhat ambiguous - the wound needs to be potentially fatal, but it shouldn't be clearly fatal, in case the character stabilises, receives timely first aid, or otherwise needs to survive without magical assistance.

(With monsters, I tend to play a bit fast-and-loose with this, and may well describe the monster as losing a limb somewhere along the line, or suffering a mighty blow, or whatever. Conveniently, monsters tend to feature in exactly one combat, so it's much less important that they be able to survive afterwards. But with PCs, ambiguity is key.)

Now, the big problem with this model is healing. The healing spells all do fixed healing codes - 1d8+lv for cure light wounds, and so on. Which means that when cast on a low-level character, it actually heals all but the most serious of wounds, while when cast on a high-level character it barely heals a scratch. (Not to mention that most characters don't ever actually take anything more than light wounds - they just take a lot of them!)

If I were inclined to fix this for 3.5e, I believe the key is to drop the "Cleric's level" part of the equation, and instead have CLW heal 1d8 plus the recipient's level plus the recipient's Con modifier. That way, the tougher you are, the more you heal. (The various caps can probably stay in place.)

For Nutshell, I'm looking at a slightly different model. Firstly, I intend to introduce various conditions for wounding: Bloodied, Wounded, Seriously Wounded, Critically Wounded...

When a character takes damage in combat, the player may opt for his character to become Bloodied as a result. This reflects the point at which the character is injured such that his wounds impair him. It imposes a -1 penalty to d20 rolls, but also allows the character to benefit from healing. There will probably need to be a rule that you can't become Bloodied by friendly fire, to prevent abuse.

(The later wound categories impose greater penalties; they are imposed by specific attacks, rather than player choice.)

During the short rest at the end of combat, any Bloodied character may regain some hit points (based on Endurance), and will lose the Bloodied condition. Alternately, any of the healing spells, when cast on a Bloodied character (only) will restore hit points and remove the Bloodied condition. (This means, of course, that a character can only benefit from one healing spell at a time - no more wands of cure light wounds!)

And, naturally, each cure spell will remove the corresponding condition, allowing the character to get back in the fight that much more quickly.