Hit Points and "Threat Zones" in Step On Up Play

[James_Nostack]

IN DEFENSE OF THE HUMBLE HIT POINT

People, including me, have been talking a lot of smack about Hit Points lately.  Ron in particular was pretty down on that design.  But it's worth taking a close look at what Hit Points actually do.  Much like other forms of resource management in D&D, there's a lot going on under the hood.

Pacing Mechanic.  "Uh, guys, I'm down to 3 Hit Points.  We've got some decent loot, can't we just haul ass out of this dungeon?"  Losing a character sucks for the player, and losing a party-member can really screw up a small group's capabilities.  When someone is running on fumes, it's time to think about calling it a day.

Tension Mechanic.  Death in D&D is nearly always uninteresting, often random, occasionally tied to player skill, and infrequently temporary.  But the march toward death can be fun.  If your Fighter rocking a comfortable 25 hit points suddenly takes 16 points of damage during a single round versus a Werebear, that'll get your attention in a hurry.

Threat Prioritizing.  As above with the Werebear, if some bad guy whomps out a hell of a lot of damage in a single blow, that's often the guy you want to target.  The threat is poorly correlated due to the plethora of save-or-get-screwed monsters out there, but odds are if someone's dishing out 1-3 hit points of damage, they're not worth taking seriously.

"Associated" Playstyles.  Hit Point differentials between the classes - much more pronounced after the Supplement I: Greyhawk came out - encourage different modes of play.  Purely as a matter of game mechanics, my 25 hit point Fighter can afford to brave crude physical dangers that your Magic-User with 10 hit points cannot, and that supports the fiction of a warrior-guy and a scholar-guy facing peril.  It also gives the classes with low Hit Points, traditionally the Magic-User and the Thief, reasons to want to "party up" with meatshields (either PC's or NPC's).

Niche Creation.  On one level, D&D is a game about resource management: spell slots, encumbrance, torches, hirelings.  But the baseline resource for everyone is Hit Points.  And hey presto!  Here is the Cleric class, valuable for a couple reasons, but especially because this guy's healing spells completely change the Hit Point economy of the game.  Managing the party's Hit Points becomes, in part, a question of managing the Cleric's healing slots.  A party with a large number of Clerics runs very differently than a party with only one, or none. 

Similarly, on the adversarial end of the screen, once the players are managing their Hit Points wisely, there's room for a bunch of wacky monsters whose devastating powers don't depend on pure physical damage.  A Minotaur is just a 6 Hit-Dice glob of horns and teeth, but a Cockatrice, Spectre, or Rust Monster can all ruin your day without touching your Hit Points at all.  Special mention goes to the Mummy, who not only has a pretty serious fear attack, but can zap you with a magic whammy where healing spells don't work, which is yet another tweak to the Hit Point economy.

Educational Funnel.  Playing by the book, surviving to 3rd level in D&D is serious business.  Our gang has kept a running tabulation, but it's hard to figure out absolute numbers since some guys don't stick around.  But at least 80% of all 0 XP characters die before hitting 5000 XP (which seems to be an inflection point in character mortality).  As you watch character after character perish horribly, you learn a few things.
* Don't get attached.
* Seriously, don't get attached.  Let the character emerge through play instead of writing a backstory.
* Flaming Oil is your best friend (until it's not!) (awww, flaming oil, how could I ever stay mad at you)
* Some spells are more useful than others, but keeping your plans flexible is best of all
* If you have a chance to talk with an NPC, talk... or better yet, connive
* Information about the dungeon is super-extra-crucial
* Never fight fair when you can cheat
* Never cheat in a fight when you can have someone else fight for you
* Never have someone else fight for you when you can steal
* And the whole rest of the curriculum for Murder Hobos 101.

Though linking a particular Hit Point threshold with character death is arguably bad design, that choice has several far-reaching (and, in most instances, fun) ramifications which, to some extent, have come to define D&D play.  I don't think the basic Hit Point idea was copied so often because people were dummies: I think it was copied because it does some neat stuff. 

This is not to claim that no alternate system couldn't exist to achieve these ends.

[Ron Edwards]

I did specify that hit points made perfect sense in the context I described, and they're also fine for non-tourney play which preserves most of its tactical aspects. Your list is a great summary of the sense they make.

My objections were careful to specify that hit points of this kind are pretty much dysfunctional for other kinds of play.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

It's interesting to see how most of the "tournament modules" of the late 70s and early 80s tried to bypass the HPs mechanism with a lot of "save vs x or you are death" traps and monsters (or even "death without any saving throw" in some cases).

The HPs increase turn D&D into a resource management game: you can take calculated risks, fight until you have resources and then turn back, getting rich and powerful bit by bit without the "sudden death" risk associated with OD&D play.

So, to get back the previous kind of game (where you win by avoiding fights and risks) they bypass the HPs mechanism with "sudden death" random risk that can't be managed, timed or avoided.

It's like if, wanting to have "a game where you can do anything you want", they showed together two incompatible games with incompatible winning strategies (a very, very big pare of "being a good player" in the old days was the ability to "read" the GM and know the kind of game he was playing)

Another problem is that that kind of game is very roll-intensive, as I did show in my previous post. With a lot of HPs and damage done only to Hps you have tens or hundreds of rolls where you don't roll for "life or death" or even "win or lose" alternatives, but most combat was about rolling to see if you did stay at 47 HP or if you dropped to 43 or something like that.

Older editions worked better because they were more simple and the characters had a lot less HPs (so, less rolls, and more risk even in HP-only attacks) but the HP increase after AD&D turned the HP mechanism into a grindstone around the neck of the game.

James, you say that "the HP idea was copied often". I don't see that. I mean, there are hundreds of fantasy heartbreakers that are in practice D&D with some house rules, written by people who did know only D&D, and there was in more recent times the d20 craze. But if you turn back to REAL game design, the "D&D-HPs" tree dry up real fast. By the early '80 the "skill-based" paradigm born with Runequest (and then Champions, Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, Warhammer, D6, Ars Magica, etc.) is in practice the main branch, and the "rising HP" branch is almost totally abandoned. After Rolemaster/MERP I don't remember a game with that that wasn't a short-lived D&D heartbreaker.

By the early '80, "modern" game design is all about fixed HP (and not many of them), defense rolls and abilities and sometimes "metagame" saving mechanism like "life points" or something. D&D is seen as a relic, that in the late '80 still has things like the "THAC0"

All this to say that historically, mixing rising HPs and attacks that bypass these rising HPs didn't work well. There was a war between these paradigms, and illusionism won. (removing any value in the HPs at all)

[Moreno R.]

It's interesting to see how most of the "tournament modules" of the late 70s and early 80s tried to bypass the HPs mechanism with a lot of "save vs x or you are death"

"Save or you are dead".

Having BOTH no-editing and broken previewing in the same forum is going to do a lot of damage to my reputation as a translator....

[Callan S.]

I was thinking of this notion - the idea (this is a pivotal point - this is an idea, not a mechanic) that the character (if a fighter) has damage reduction equal to their level.

I'm not saying actual damage reduction as in reducing the mechanical points of damage delt.

I'm saying a fictional damage reduction as in how you treat the fiction of damage delt.

Say the level 5 fighter takes 8 damage from a longsword. He has a fictional damage recution of 5, making it more like a 3 point hit. He loses 8 points from his hitpoints, but for descriptive purposes, describe it as a three point hit.

If the fictional damage reduction reduces it to zero, then it's nicks and cuts - the classic sort of slice across the cheek, etc that you see in many movies! (sorry, I just can't buy Gary's close miss stuff!)

Possibly for wizards make it half your level is your fictional damage reduction.

I guess I wanted to note this, because it strikes me this is a really odd type of rule I haven't really come across before. It is not a hard mechanic. Yet it does speak into the fiction. To me it seems kind of like a prosthetic, to cover some of the distance between hard mechanics and fiction that you get when you don't just treat mechanics as game world physics. So it's a rule that's there to assist with the integration of mechanics use into our common parlance at the table. Perhaps a translator rule might be a good name for it.

Ask for brainstorming and this is what thou shalt suffer from me... >:)

[Callan S.]

What Moreno was talking about with increasing HP reminded me of the warhammer quest board game - in that at first level, if a random event card (this is full on boardgame, no GM, just event card decks) blocks the way behind you with a boulder and the way forward turns out to be a dead end...well, then your characters are trapped in a hole in a ground and dead. HOWEVER, it explicitly says for level 2 and higher, to simply assume a way out from the dead end is found. But you've failed the dungeon - missed out on the end treasure and you are to start a whole new dungeon from the start. You can't jut go around and return to where you were (which a simulationist would allow - which just undercuts the nature of losing)

At about level 4 or 5 (I think top level was 10) the wizard gets a pretty much low/zero consequence resurection spell. To me, what was a great game, suddenly sucked (and please don't give me any 'don't choose that spell then!' guff).

However, if you took the model as explicitly saying that you basically have 'hazing' levels (at first you can die to a mere blocked cave, even) but at a certain level you hit a themepark sandbox mode, that's viable. Lots of people might want to see what characters survive, but then have a certain point where gameplay is indulgence with no real risk*. But I think you'd need some text to explicitly say that the step on up (or atleast the big stakes step on up) ends at a certain level.

* I guess the wizard had to pay with power points, but by that point could probably pay for atleast one or two insta rezzes a dungeon. Possibly if drained enough that would not happen. Or if the wizard got killed.

[Ron Edwards]

I think we're done here unless James says otherwise.

As an aside, when in Finland, I was chatting about playing D&D (mostly Lamentations but not always) with two individuals who shall remain nameless except that they are Eero Tuovinen and James Raggi, and certain statements concerning not playing with hit points as written were made. Another topic for another thread.

Best, Ron