Hit Points as Dodge / short term exhaustion

Short post today.

D&D HP is abstract, I know. But what if it weren’t?

I used to think mild bleeding would be the closest analog. But in my experience it doesn’t hold up.

I’ve had broken bones; they don’t work like HP damage at all. Same for disease.

In practice, HP loss basically: 

A) Make you closer to death, but; 

B) With the same effectiveness in attacking, running, etc., as if you were unscathed.

When I broke my foot, I was IMMEDIATELY out of any possible fight (which probably means 0 HP), but I also could run effectively, etc. Breaking an arm meant I couldn’t fight at all, but maybe I could still run.

Exhaustion didn’t leave me wounded or ready to attack either. But maybe slower to dodge? In other words, an slower reaction time (your running speed and accuracy remain similar). That works.

Boxers and MMA fighters accumulate damage, bruises, etc., but a similar thing happens in BJJ: as you get short-term exhaustion, you get gassed out and more vulnerable to an attack. But you STILL could get a lucky punch (although a “lucky submission” doesn’t happen as often, people DO win with late submissions after taking a great beating).

In AD&D, IIRC, marching too makes you temporarily lose levels; it works even better as it affects your attacks, spells and skills.

But HP as short-term exhaustion that makes you slower to dodge is easier and still makes sense.

You can STILL carry “wounds” from one day to another, but in this case the 5e method of recovering all HP in a day or two makes more sense, as short-term exhaustion cannot usually be carried for a long while.

And a trained fighter/adventurer can recover faster.

So maybe HP is a combination of accumulated internal/external damage AND short-term exhaustion. AND long term exhaustion... Guess we’re back to the abstract. Sigh. At least we are not using luck and plot armor in our definition.

Well, at least thinking of HP as exhaustion rather than just wounds easily explains why you can lose HP from starvation, dehydration, sleep deprivation, etc. (although Constitution damage seems to work better for those purposes, especially to disallow high-level PCs to survive two weeks without water as most people die after in day, both extremes sounding absurd for adult humans).

And this keeps 0 HP = open yourself to serious wounds, which is why we need a random table to make results more diverse, as they are in real life (a serious wound can take days, months or years to recover... IF you survive).

Realism, you ask? Nope; I'm into verisimilitude + fun.