What do hit points represent?

[Kavonde]

Level scaling works to keep you in scale to the world you are in?
On some ways it works in some ways its cheap wankery >>

Yep! Thank you, that was way shorter.

In WoW's case, and mind you I like the game, but they have to. If the whole concept of "levels" wasn't totally abstract, then there's no reason that a handful of level 80 undead from Icecrown couldn't obliterate all life outside the cities on the southern continents.

 

[Zacharine]

It actually changes from game to game and setting to setting.

For example, in nWoD Mage, spirits do not as such have hit-points, they have Essence. Once they run out of Essence, they cannot hold themselves together anymore, they begin to loose their form and the very core of their existance, their 'soul', is in danger of evaporation. You could say that damage to their Essence is loosening their confidence and faith in their own abilities and core behaviour. It is possible to directly leech off essence from spirits, but you can also damage them by shaking their confidence to what they are and what they want to do.

Mortal creatures still have hit-points though, albeit there is differentation between bashing ("shock/blunt") damage, lethal damage (bullets, normal supernatural attacks etc.) and aggravated damage. Loose your hit-points to blunt, you lose consciousness and any further blunt damage upgrades the bashing damage to lethal damage. Lose all hit-points to lethal damage, you die in short order, though you are in pain long before that. Aggravated damage is just nasty, it's akin to lethal, but very hard/impossible to heal fast and allows for a myriad of rules and effects to be applied to you (such as magically sapping your Willpower or mental stamina to empower others). Think of aggravated damage as badly broken bones, mangled intestines, doused in holy water for vampires etc style Big-Nasty-Need-Hospital-Now damage.

In Cyberpunk 2020 you got stat and skill debuffs based on the damage you carried around: you lose half your hit-points and you were making stat check to stay conscious, to crawl around and your effective stats were something like halved.

Then there are the Redshirt points in the RPG Starwreck. Any damage to your squad while on away mission killed redshirts. Once all redshirts were gone, you had to make stat throws against all succesfull attacks; fail and you died, period. This is very much akin to your 'luck' system.

 

[Lucane]

A problem occurs with your theory when it comes time to replenish your hit points with items it's just to fix (luck). but interesting idea for a twist of it for a series of games. where they drink stamina drinks to get hit points back but "X" amount of criticals would need actual medical attention.

 

[Kavonde]

A problem occurs with your theory when it comes time to replenish your hit points with items it's just to fix (luck). but interesting idea for a twist of it for a series of games. where they drink stamina drinks to get hit points back but "X" amount of criticals would need actual medical attention.

I think all you'd really have to do is replace "Lesser Health Potion" with "Protein Shake"

 

[Cheesus333]

I reckon it's how much failure the playable character is willing to put up with on the part of the player. Like they'll suffer for a certain time, then decide you're not worth it/clearly not going to win/doing it on purpose, and promptly die.

But that's just what I think...

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Isn't it like the state of your body at any given time? For example, 100% HP is as healthy as can be, 50% is kinda meh, and 0% is dead. When your max HP goes up, this is because you became an overall more powerful person, so you are healthier than others that have lower max HP.

Status effects like poison do reduce your health, but they don't have immediate effects. Think about it, a blow to your ribcage that breaks a rib or two is an instant effect. If you get poisoned, the poison has to run through your body before it can really take effect.

...I think anyway.

In most RPGs 0 health is not death you are merely passed out, how many RPGs have real death in the story but not so much in battles?

If your party is passed out your as good as dead.

Mmmmmm Anyone recall the old minus 0 bit in some ID games where you got gibed if you fell below a certain negative point, would it be neat if that was implemented in a RPG, say 25% negative health you are unrecoverable, least without teleportation,ect from local place of revival LOL

 

[Kavonde]

I reckon it's how much failure the playable character is willing to put up with on the part of the player. Like they'll suffer for a certain time, then decide you're not worth it/clearly not going to win/doing it on purpose, and promptly die.

But that's just what I think...

Best theory I've ever heard.

 

[rokkolpo]

YES finally an answer for all those enemies wih 1HP of a total of 20000HP left who still fight like jackie chan instead of my grandma.

i want enemies to get slower and miss more often when their HP is under 50%

 

[JuryNelson]

When I was playing Final Fantasy VII back in the day, I managed to construct a reality where Hit Points were like a drug that granted invincibility. And as they keep taking it, they get addicted and they constantly need more to get the effect, and that's why your max HP goes up. That's your tolerance to the 'Potions' and eventually you need harder stuff to get you there. 'Hi-Potions' 'Elixer' and 'X-Potion,' which I only ever used to kill the undead boss at Cosmo Canyon and which I always imagined had "X"s on them, so kids knew to stay away.

 

[Cheesus333]

YES finally an answer for all those enemies wih 1HP of a total of 20000HP left who still fight like jackie chan instead of my grandma.

i want enemies to get slower and miss more often when their HP is under 50%

Well Fallout 3 had the whole crippled limbs thing, so...

I personally loved the crippled head effect, just like every now and then they'd clutch their head and writhe around a bit. Whenever this happened I would yell 'The voices! THEY'RE BACK!' at the screen.

 

[jowo96]

Depends upon the game I would imagine. Most modern games however do show blood from being hit so I would think it is more likely that hit points is how much damage you can take before dying.

 

[HandfulofWolf]

That's a cool way of looking at it pal.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Level scaling works to keep you in scale to the world you are in?
On some ways it works in some ways its cheap wankery >>

Yep! Thank you, that was way shorter.

In WoW's case, and mind you I like the game, but they have to. If the whole concept of "levels" wasn't totally abstract, then there's no reason that a handful of level 80 undead from Icecrown couldn't obliterate all life outside the cities on the southern continents.

Well level scaling can work to but you do not take the things you killed 20 levels ago and make them 25 levels higher, I perfered it when games brought out a newer version of X or Y with a mix of the old........scaling what you got up to your level is boring IMO.
Also it would be neat if they did more with it like make every other critical hit from a lesser level creature do 3 or 5 times as much damage to keep things fresh other than just keeping them in your shadow.

Also the way wow dose level scaling is how most other games do it IE the game tries to stay ahead of you and you are kept as a drone always doing menial tasks, I wish MMOs would use more customization let me pick my skills the rate(1% to 1000%) at witch I gain EXP,money and what not because skills and abilities have a min lvl req you can easily keep things balanced for PVP and what not while allow alot more customization.
/mandatory MMO rant
LOL

 

[Premonition]

Personally I don't think to much of it. It's just a representation of your characters health.

 

[Silver]

That's pretty much exactly how it works in most (relatively modern) D20 systems. You have hit points, and vitality points. Vitality is real wounds, hit points is just focus, luck and whatever. You lose hit points first, which causes your character no permanent harm, just throws you off balance, after that, you take vitality damage, which will kill you. Hit points go up each level, vitality points are just as many as your constitution score.

It's still very inelegant and outdated, especially in video games, and we should have gotten rid of it years ago, but, well, people are slow.

 

[Malyc]

Hit points are the amount of damage you can take before suffering a critical existance failure from a death of 1000 cuts.
Just go on to tvtropes.com to figure out what both of those are, but BE WARNED!!! you may not make it back here for several hours.

 

[The Procrastinated End]

Its not meant to be realistic its meant to tell you how long you have until you die.

 

[Kavonde]

Hit points are the amount of damage you can take before suffering a critical existance failure from a death of 1000 cuts.
Just go on to tvtropes.com to figure out what both of those are, but BE WARNED!!! you may not make it back here for several hours.

You know what's sad? I knew both right away.

Gorram TVTropes.

Its not meant to be realistic its meant to tell you how long you have until you die.

I wasn't saying anything about realism, just we can look at hit points different ways (some of which might be more realistic, though, so...yeah).

Ack! Anyway, enough of this, got to go buy StarCraft 2 now. kthxbbye.

EDIT: Never mind, Blizzard's online payment site broke already. Typical.

 

[Lawyer105]

Some RPG's tend to use 'Health' and 'Stamina'.

Health being actual, physical health, and will be quite limited e.g. an average gun does say 4-16 damage, and health is around 10-20. While not perfectly realistic, it means you can survive 2/3 bullets if they hit you in the leg/arm, but will be one-shot killed if you get shot in the head/chest. Even if you aren't one-shotted by the bullet, you'd start taking penalties to your actions as health-damage builds up.

Stamina would represent all the accumulated cuts, scrapes, bruises and 'narrow misses' that are the daily bread of you average, fun-loving hero. In-game, at high level you could have say 100 stamina. So you could easily absorb a bunch of bullets from the enemy cannon fodder because even when they 'hit', you're still diving behind cover, dodging at the last second or whatever, and only getting a 'scrape'.

When Stamina runs out, however... watch out. Even the biggest hero can be worn down by sufficient volumes of cannon-fodder. If you don't have the stamina to absorb the damage, it goes straight to health.

=========================================================================================

In other games, you have a similarly limited amount of health, but have the ability to 'absorb' damage instead of having 'Stamina'. This represents things like wearing a bullet proof vest allowing you to ignore small amounts of damage from a .22, and still reducing but not eliminating damage from an assault rifle.

 

[Kavonde]

Well level scaling can work to but you do not take the things you killed 20 levels ago and make them 25 levels higher, I perfered it when games brought out a newer version of X or Y with a mix of the old........scaling what you got up to your level is boring IMO.
Also it would be neat if they did more with it like make every other critical hit from a lesser level creature do 3 or 5 times as much damage to keep things fresh other than just keeping them in your shadow.

Also the way wow dose level scaling is how most other games do it IE the game tries to stay ahead of you and you are kept as a drone always doing menial tasks, I wish MMOs would use more customization let me pick my skills the rate(1% to 1000%) at witch I gain EXP,money and what not because skills and abilities have a min lvl req you can easily keep things balanced for PVP and what not while allow alot more customization.
/mandatory MMO rant
LOL

Hrm, I think I gave ya the wrong idea here. The monsters in WoW don't scale with your characters, but the challenge does. You're never an elite one-man killing machine, unless you ditch the story to go rampage through a lowbie dungeon.