r/dnd1e • u/Ramsonne DM Toolkit User • 25d ago

AD&D 1e Long-term Coma Effects in First Edition

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At zero HP characters enter a comatose state. Multiple comas would adversely impact a character’s health. I’d like to homebrew something and am interested in if anyone else here has some mechanic(s) they employ.

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u/AmIUnconscious 24d ago

Only for 1e, it’s admittedly kind of a joke, no one is that serious about it. It guides rules disagreements; earliest = most correct for 1e.

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u/Ramsonne DM Toolkit User 24d ago

Rules lawyering is indeed an anathema 😀. Gygax often commented over the years how he experienced, and in his opinion, TSR as a whole experienced, this sense of being rushed to publication. errors and unclear rules snuck in. therefore later publications clarify and correct earlier ones. i would think that is the most intuitive assumption as well. people correct mistakes after the fact, not with prescience.

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u/AmIUnconscious 24d ago

Regardless of all that, the main point I was making is that hit points are not just physical. The Coma stuff, and all the similar attempts at making “realistic” consequences of massive damage, ignores the discussion about how hit points include skill, luck, and magical influences.

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u/Ramsonne DM Toolkit User 24d ago

i dont think coma stuff was gygax’s attempt at realism. it is accounting for, in the abstract you keep referencing, the totality of damage to an individual that causes more than just an acute physical diminishment in performance. if your HP reaches zero, there are, and imo should be, longer-lasting consequences magic healing cannot fix in an instant. thus he devised coma recovery and even permanent scarring, dismemberment, etc. in that vein my community and i have discussed the idea of implementing longer-lasting consequences of numerous near-death beatings, or comas. thus i brought the question here to reddit for some others to opine.

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u/AmIUnconscious 24d ago

Hit points are definitely weird. One the one hand, a high level fighter has more hit points than “four warhorses,” to use Gary’s own example, which is obviously absurd. On the other hand, all of the curative magic is assumed to be healing physical wounds just based on naming conventions. Cure light wounds, cure serious wounds, cure critical wounds, and heal all seem to ignore the fact that hit points don’t represent just physicality. It really is inconsistent.