Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 170 - Narrative Combat, Armor Class and Hit Points

Episode Date: April 9, 2023

This week I'm picking a fight and a lot of DMs will disagree with me.  I talk about what Armor Class and Hit Points really mean and how that can affect narrative combat.   NOTE:  Fixed the audio edit error about 11 minutes in.  Sorry about that.   #dnd #opendnd #pathfinder #narrative #combat

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. In the first example, that spear probably pierced a vital organ of that first-level character. That same spear strike maybe barely scratched the 19th-level character, or maybe, just maybe, used up some of the skill and luck that character had for the day. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Taking 20 Podcast, episode 170. This week about narrative combat, talking about armor class and hit point. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Insects. I recently discovered that a tree behind my house is infested with indecisive spring insects.

It's just riddled with may-bees. Hey, we have a website, www.taking20podcast.com. Come visit the site, leave some comments on some episodes, and see more details about me and the podcast in general. Now, this may sound like a weird topic to cover this week, and it probably is, but as someone who's played a crap ton of role-playing games, I've had a lot of time to think about weird crap, so every now and then, one of these weird topics will bleed into an episode. Just accept my apology right now. Combat is so very important in Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder 2e, and just about every other RPG

that you can name. Most RPGs have classes, and most of those class powers are built around combat, with rogues using flanking abilities, paladins smiting an evil foe, and druids wildshaping into a freaking dinosaur and stomping bad guys into a bloody oatmeal-like substance. Combat can be meticulous by the numbers grindhouse, where everyone focuses exclusively on the results of the roll instead of a narrative result of the attack. I believe one of the best ways to make combat a bit spicier

is to weave a narrative depth into the combat itself. So let's begin with the obvious. Do groups need to describe combat narratively? Absolutely not. There is nothing wrong with an at-the-table exchange that sounds like this. I'm going to attack with my spear. I got a 24. That's a hit. Roll me some damage. Six points. Very good. The goblin sapper's looking way worse for wear. Anything else? Nope. Okay, good. Josh, your turn. You like your game that

way? Run it that way. No judgment here. Go with the gods, my friends. However, I've also played with groups where the same exchange would sound like this. I thrust my spear at the goblin, and I got a 24 to hit. Your spear sinks deeply into the thigh, and the purplish blood gushes out of the goblin's wound. You yank out the spear, and the goblin staggers back, clutching at his leg. He looks up at you with desperation in his eyes. Meanwhile, Josh, what's Teled the Dwarf doing right now? The first example of what I would call a typical non-narrative combat

that focuses on the mechanics of the game based on two important statistics, armor class and hit points. For those of you who have not played tabletop RPGs, let's define some terms. Armor class is a numeric representation of how hard your character is to hit when others attempt to stab you or shoot you with an arrow or hit you with certain magic spells and so forth. It's affected by your dexterity, the armor that you wear, and other bonuses and factors. Some characters wind up with a higher armor class by covering most or all of their body in animal hide, leather armor, breastplates, chainmail, or even solid

metal plate mail. However, some characters that aren't as good in armor, maybe they're a lot more dexterous, they may wind up with a higher armor class by not wearing armor, sometimes even at all. That makes sense, of course. You take a nimble, fast, roguelike character and pour them into a suit of solid steel with metal joints and a full visor, they're not going to be able to dodge as quickly, and they may get hit even more often than they would be just wearing a simple leather breastplate. Hit points, on the other hand, are a numeric representation

of how healthy and survivable your character is. Higher-level characters tend to have a higher number of hit points, making them more likely to survive an encounter or maybe even an entire adventuring day. Why is this important? Because understanding what these two values really mean is critical for groups that like to describe combat narratively. Let's start with armor class, sometimes abbreviated AC. In game mechanic terms, armor class is a subset of the difficulty class or DC mechanics in both 5e and Pathfinder. This number represents how hard it is for attackers to hit you and cause your character harm. That last part is really important. A character with a 19 armor class will naturally

be harder to hit or bruise than a character with a 14 armor class. That could be because the character is fast, nimble, or could be wearing armor that may not prevent the sword from making contact with you, but prevents that contact from reaching flesh and causing a wound. In game mechanic terms, there is no difference between a hammer blow bouncing off your chainmail and one that misses you entirely. Either way, the attack causes zero damage to your character. The good news is that in 5th edition and Pathfinder 2nd edition, there aren't a lot of different ACs you have to worry about when you have a character. Armor class is armor class, whether it's a throne dart or an acid arrow. is armor class, whether it's a throne dart or an acid arrow. The bad news is that earlier versions of Dungeons & Dragons, like 3.5e and earlier especially, and in Starfinder, there are different

armor class values depending on the type of attack. I'm going to focus our discussion on 5th edition and Pathfinder 2nd edition to keep things simple, but these same concepts could be extrapolated out to the other game systems fairly easily. Let's jump in the 5e player handbook. On page 14, it says, Your armor class represents how well your character avoids being wounded in battle. Now let's parse over one part of this description. Quote, How well your character avoids being wounded. So a missed attack could be the result of the attack not making any contact with your character, or it makes contact but doesn't pierce the armor, shield, magical protection, or whatever

else your character is wearing. The attack could even strike in a place where there's no armor, but due to factors like a bad swing, slight sidestep, or pure dumb luck, it doesn't pierce the skin, leave a bruise, or cause any mechanical damage whatsoever. Per game rules, that is a valid way to narratively describe a miss. Have you ever accidentally touched the blade of a sharp knife and not drawn any blood? Sure, I mean, it's rare, but it does happen occasionally. In these instances, I would consider that a missed attack. Similarly, and more controversially, there may be hits on a character that don't actually draw blood or cause a wound to appear on the character.

Now, I hear your skepticism. You're thinking, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. If a dagger misses, it shouldn't cause any damage to the character. And I agree, if it's a mechanical miss, it shouldn't. However, not so fast, my friends. To prove my point, we need to talk about what hit points are it shouldn't. However, not so fast, my friends. To prove my point, we need to talk about what hit points are and aren't. The 5th edition player's handbook says it very well. Hit points represent how tough your character is in combat and other dangerous situations.

Creatures with more hit points are harder to kill than those with fewer hit points. And on page 196, it continues by saying hit points represent a combination of physical durability, mental durability, the will to live, and luck. As your character takes damage, the damage is deducted from your current hit point total. Rules as written, whether you have all your hit points or just one hit point left,

you are fully combat capable, as my brother-in-law likes to phrase it. Once you reach zero hit points, however, you're unconscious. In 5th edition, you'll start making death saving throws to stay alive. In Pathfinder 2nd edition, you'll start making flat checks to wake up, and additional damage can increase what's called your dying condition. Barring special feats or class abilities, in 5th edition, if you fail 3 death saving throws before making 3 of them, your character is dead. In Pathfinder 2nd edition, if your condition reached dying 4, you're dead. As your character increases in level, your total maximum hit points go up based on the class level that you're taking.

Barbarians and fighters tend to gain more hit points than rogues and sorcerers do. Almost without fail, and barring some really shitty hit point rolls, your level 10 character should have more hit points than a level 5 character would. So let me ask you something in the real world. Suppose you take 100 people at random from all over the world. There are elite athletes, couch potatoes, young and old people, just a general cross-section of the planet. Would any of them more easily survive getting impaled on a spear or having an arm bitten off or being at the center of a massive explosion? The difference in survivability would be trivial when we're talking catastrophic damage to the human body. In the French Revolution, none of the aristocrats, regardless of whatever class levels

they may have had, could get up from the guillotine without their heads and walk it off. The same would be true in your fantasy world. Your 19th level fighter with 160 hit points would be just as dead as a first level fighter with 13th hit points if you remove their head. So why does this matter? Why am I talking about this? Because hit points aren't just a representation of how many times you can get stabbed and survive. They also represent skill, will to live, and luck. That spear strike that does 16 points of damage would drop your first level fighter unconscious with a single hit. But to the 19th level fighter, it would only be like 10% of your hit points.

Was it because the effect of the spear strike was relatively less deadly to the 19th level fighter, it would only be like 10% of your hit points. Was it because the effect of the spear strike was relatively less deadly to the 19th level character? Yes. That spear strike that impaled the first level character likely only scratched or only made the 19th level character more exhausted. The first level character hasn't been tested by long adventuring life. It doesn't know the tricks to roll with a strike and hasn't developed the seemingly preternatural luck that a higher level character hasn't been tested by long adventuring life. It doesn't know the tricks to roll with a strike and hasn't developed the seemingly preternatural luck that a higher level character has. In the first example, that spear probably pierced a vital organ of that first level character.

That same spear strike maybe barely scratched the 19th level character or maybe just maybe used up some of the skill and luck that character had for the day. Either way, both characters' current hit points dropped by 16. Do you need more proof that not every hit draws blood? What happens to your character when they rest? They recover hit points. In the real world, actual major wounds take a long time to heal. Trust me.

I've had my brain and skull opened up twice in the last year, and my right shoulder operated on twice the year before that. I know how long shit like that takes to heal, and it's a long time. In my head canon, absent magical healing, long rests or overnight rests allow your muscles to recover, small wounds to sit closed, and large wounds to begin to scab over and heal. Rules as written, though, after a long rest in 5E, which is 8 hours long, by the way, a character regains all lost hit points. All of them. All their hit points they regain.

So even if, to quote the movie Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, it's been a doozy of a day, officer, your 19th level character who has lost 159 of their 160 hit points, after a long rest, they're all the way back to full hit points. Wow, that is great recovery. I don't know how many hit points I have in real life, but I can tell you that it took a hell of a lot longer than 8 hours before I started feeling normal after my surgeries. Boy, I wish that was the way things work in the real world.

That'd be fantastic. Go in for major surgery, take one nice long eight-hour nap, and then you're back in the real world, no worse for wear. So logically, if we want to inject a modicum of realism to our narration games, there's no way that every strike that deducts hit points actually draws blood. If all those strikes drew blood, then your long rests would have to be eight weeks for your character to recover, not eight hours. Here in the Taking 20 household, we have a blender that my wife uses called the Ninja. I think that's the brand name, but it doesn't matter for this story. The blade of that thing thirsts for my blood and has tasted it multiple times. It hungers to feast on my life

essence and leave me a desiccated, bloodless husk on our kitchen floor. This blade has an uncanny ability to find my fingers wherever the blade happens to be. I'm convinced. It's intelligent and keen. It's Jeremy Bain. It's plus three blender blade of life stealing that one day I'm going to melt down in a foundry and giggle as it's destroyed in the hellfire that spawned it. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, objects have hit points too. It's possible to do enough damage to doors and windows and shields and weapons and ninja blades that need to die to damage or even destroy them. Most of the time, these things don't come up outside of very special circumstances. I originally had a longer discussion about object hardness and hit points, but I think I'm going to save that for a future object-centric episode.

All of this discussion about armor class and hit points brings us to the topic of narrative combat. Narrative combat focuses more on actions and results than game mechanics and die rolls. The game mechanics and die rolls determine hit, miss, and so forth, but you narrate the combat in a more fluid style, if you will. As I mentioned earlier, there's nothing wrong with announcing the die roll, saying whether it hits or misses, and rolling damage appropriately. One side deducts the damage taken from current hit points and you move to the next creature and initiative until one side is either wiped out or flees from the encounter.

However, narrating combat actions allows players to feel more cinematic. They're heroes and you can visualize the result as described and you feel like the action's frenetic and hectic and motion and dramatic. Sword and sorcery, nick of time saves and timely deflections of attacks. As I talked about earlier, I don't believe all hits, quote-unquote, actually make contact with skin. It could be that that strike would have stabbed the chest of a lesser character, but your character's luck, skill, and will to live turns into a near miss or a lesser wound. I always keep that in mind when players ask to make a check to determine how wounded a creature

is. This is not in a rulebook anywhere I could find, but years ago I came up with a simple way of describing how hurt someone or something is. Let's say my PCs ask how the warrior they're fighting is doing. If the opponent is still above 50% hit points, I'll generally say they don't look very damaged at all. If the opponent is lower than 50%, but above 25% of their remaining hit points, I'll say that they look bloodied. That's actually a holdover term from D&D, I think 3.0 through 4.0. That term is burned into my brain, so it's easy for me to remember. But if the opponent has less than 25% of their hit points,

I'll say they look very wounded or bleeding profusely or almost dead or barely alive. Words to that effect. I might take some poetic license in my description, describing a combatant that's been fighting for many rounds as winded, tired, covered in tiny cuts or something similar. That's part of the fun of narrative combat. Taking a little bit of license with a number on the page and describing it in a way that everyone can visualize in their brain. My beloved DMs, my friends, I know that many of you disagree with

what I've talked about here about how hits and misses work. You run your game with the simple rule that hits always make contact with skin and draw blood. Okay, no judgment here. I love you just the same as if you agree with me 100%. But be open to the idea that hits are also sapping energy, taking the will to fight, draining them of not only physical but mental strength as well. Also, if you disagree with the way I run hits and misses, try sprinkling some narration into your combats. I'm not saying you go from no narration to full Matthew Mercer with nothing in between. No, no, no. Ease into this. Start by describing the occasional critical hit or critical miss rather than every sword swing and ranged attack. If you are interested in sticking your foot in the water

of narrative combat, here's some tips that I want to give you. One, fun is more important than story, which is more important than rules. For my new listeners, that means that the rules should not get in the way of the story the players are telling, and the story should not get in the way of fun. Two, add background music to your fights. Nothing loud that makes it hard for players to communicate with each other or the GM. Keep it well below conversational volume. You'd be surprised what a little two-step from hell or game background music from Final Fantasy or Elden Ring or Heroes of Might and Magic will do for narrating combat moves. The music sounds amazing and epic and you want the strikes that you describe to sound amazing

and epic too. I've found that music in the background tends to draw out more narration from the players at the table. 3. Be verbose and vivid. The sword didn't hit the goblin in the arm. The sword slices through the shoulder muscle hit the goblin in the arm. The sword slices through the shoulder muscle and the goblin yells out a pained cry. It looks at the blood pouring from the wound and throws all caution to the wind, grinning madly as it brings its short sword up to your chin. Prepare some good verbiage to use ahead of time, and keep it behind your DM screen until you have a good set of words memorized.

For example, missed attacks, I've used phrases like blocked and parried and absorbed, dodged, swinging wide, missing wildly, bouncing off of armor or hide, negated, resisted, and other similar words. Narrative words I use for hits include things like slice and pummel and whip, chop, carve, puncture, impale, break, bleed, slash, gush, scratch, and so forth. When you're describing these attacks, don't be afraid to do so with a flourish. The goal is to make combat feel more exciting and engaging for the players.

Tip number four, antagonize the PCs. When the electric arc fails to do any meaningful damage to the bugbear, have it laugh at the sorcerer. Pitiful, pathetic whelp. You die first. This will draw the players into the combat. It's not just bugbear number three. That's the one with the eye patch

that just called our sorcerer a whelp. That'll naturally draw out more narration and engagement from your players. Five, GMs. Let the players help you narrate the action. Be excited in describing your actions. Where I always start with this when it comes to narration is allowing the players to narrate their killing blows. When those killing blows happen,

Matthew Mercer, for example, from Critical Role says, how do you want to do this? Skidmar at Glass Cannon simply just says, describe your kill. Use one of these phrases or another of your own making that gives the player the spotlight. It's always interesting when you do this early on while playing with new players. Sometimes you'll get surprised that the quiet one that doesn't really speak up much when the party is discussing things relishes narrating their killing spell or weapon blow. And players, while we're at it, support your fellow players and celebrate as they describe the final sword stroke that takes down the basilisk. It's a big moment and one of your fellow players just bravely stepped into the spotlight, going out on a limb to narrate the final strike as they see it in their mind. Cheer, shake their hands, lift a glass, whatever

is appropriate at the time. Either way, DMs, you need to get your players involved. Ask them to describe their actions in combat. This helps them feel more connected to the battle. Makes combat more engaging. Instead of just saying, hey, the fighter attacks the goblin, you could ask the player to describe how their character attacks. Are they bringing their sword down in an overhand chop? Are they swinging it sideways trying to catch it in the side? Sixth tip. Players and DMs. Try to keep the pace moving. Narrative combat can be slower paced, so it's important to keep the game moving. Try to avoid long pauses between turns and keep the pace moving. Narrative combat can be slower paced, so it's important to keep the game moving. Try to avoid long pauses between turns and keep the action coming. It helps keep players

engaged and makes the combat more exciting. Don't take five minutes to describe your kill in ridiculously gory detail. Describe it, let the DM add a few details if they need to, and then move on to the next person in turn. Seven, be prepared for anything. Combat, by its very nature, is unpredictable. So be prepared to describe what's happening. This might mean having to improvise or make quick decisions on the fly. No one is going to judge you because you said impregnate instead of impale in the heat of the moment.

Although I would probably make sure I know the difference between those two. Because if you're in a public place and say you're going to impregnate somebody, that's probably uncouth. But then again, if you say you're going to impale someone, that's probably even more problematic. Similarly, at the table, if you say you're going to impregnate the goblin with your spear, I mean, I'm not going to kink shame, you do you, or that goblin, whatever you prefer, but that might raise an eyebrow or two around the table.

And finally, and the most important tip I have for narrative combat, fucking have fun. The number one goal of every player in DM, whether brand new or an old gray beard like me, whether in front of the screen or behind it, whether in person or remotely on Zoom and Twitch and whatever else. Whether you're playing with brand new people or people you've known for years. Make sure everybody's having fun.

Support the players in the DMs if they want to try narrative combat. Get into it, and I bet you and everybody else at your table would have fun doing it. I'm looking for ideas for sponsors for the podcast and possibly sponsor my fellow RPG streamers, podcasters, and enthusiasts out there. If you have an idea for potential partners for the podcast, other streamers, podcasters, and so forth, send me the idea or have them get in touch with me,

feedback at taking20podcast.com. Tune in next week when we'll talk about taking your quest giver game up a notch or two. How to make quest givers make sense in your world and make them memorable and fun. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Insects.

Once the maybes left, another insect moved in. They took away the sour smell that was coming out of the tree. I think they were deodorants. This has been episode 170, all about narrative combat, especially armor class and hit points. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope

that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.