From: tao@mace.Princeton.EDU (Terry Tao)
Subject: Re: healing
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 16:52:03 GMT

The basic root cause of the discussions about critical hits, healing,
inflated hp, etc is basically the hp system is bad.  Real bad.  However,
it's virtues are : it`s simple, and its about the only real way to
differentiate a 10th level fighter from a 1st level fighter.

A realistic system would murder fighters in a jiffy.  Even a 20th level
fighter fighting a few kobolds will get scratched.  A few scratches later
and somebody will get lucky.  In real life, even 30 hp is virtually
unattainable.

A compromise system would be very complicated, and I'm afraid I can't offer
one.  However, it may include the following:`

high level fighters dodge and parry rather than sustain massive amounts of
damage.  This means they can only dodge and parry against a certain number
of monsters, mind you: if six kobolds swarm on the guy he may only be able
to use his excellent skills on say three of them (i.e. he splits his parry
skills against them.).  Also, high level fighters will take less damage
from weaopns that do hit, but maybe the best this does is avoid criticals.
(twist the body so the sword hits a expendable part of the anatomy). 

"physical hp" gain very slowly per level, and only for fighter-types.
Constitution bonus only gets added once.  However, high level fighters get
a lot of "pain threshold" and "fatigue" type hit points: these allow you to
sustain all these flesh wounds that do not penetrate into the vital bits.
This means that a damage from, say, a short sword may either be superficial
(in which case hp are subtracted from the pain etc.) or deep (i.e.
subtracted from the physical).  This gives high level characters some king
of massive hit points, but there is always the risk that a lucky blow will
hit bone instead.. also, physical damage would tend to hurt physical hp
like falling, hit by catapult, etc. making this far more dangerous.  Saving
throuws against eg dragon breath may basically convert much of the damage
into pain hp only (i mean, if you are flamed by red dragon you are going to
suffer deep burns, the question is what degree.)  Once you run low on pain
endurance some penalties like initiative loss and spell recall problems
occur, but with loss of physical hp more serious things crop up like
movement loss and the bane of munchkins: attribute loss!! running out of
endurance makes you pass out (like 0 hp) but running out of physical hp
means dying real bad.

Different classes can also have other hp, like bezerk hp, coming from
either fanatic faith, mother love (see MC entry on mother bears etc), or
illicit substances, and perhaps sheer willpower (like Raistlin's in the
Dragonlance series).  Also some classes might have "divine hp" as suggested
in an earlier post.

The point of the above paragraphs is to show that a realistic system is
going to be insanely complicated.  Might be nice for a computer game (the
current D&D computer games have no flavor to the combats, and suffer from
extreme munchkinism) to have detailed damage (you are in agony from sword
wounds but physically intact, etc) but the bookkeeping is awful.

Terry