HP attrition, illusionism and some dev notes

[Callan S.]

I was running a programmed sim the other day involving just one attack. At first I had the damage so high that if it hit, it was insta game over - in which case what is the point of hitpoints.

Then I adjust it for a new version, using a number from a particular RPG (let it go nameless perhaps, as I'm doing some serial number filing off). But here, on one attack, the average HP was far more than enough to soak one attack, so there was a 100% survival statistic (problem!!!)

Okay, you might say "But there can be multiple sequential attacks! And even multiple encounters in a day!"

But consider this model - you have 20 HP. You take 3 damage on an attack. And when you've taken 3 attacks, it's all over and your HP resets to 20 (That's the pivotal part - when it's all over).

Let's obsfucate it some more - you take 1D6 damage on each attack, but otherwise it's the same. Oh no, you rolled a 6! That's just soooo the worst! Right? I mean, it's 6 instead of 1! That's 6 times as significant, riiiiight? One time I was down to 2 hp.......

Okay, so that probably highlights that it's a matter of what controls when it's all over (when you get to reset) that is the actual game part of the game. Ie, whatever controls it determines if you will survive or not (presumably survival is the big deal - instead of leaving it loosy goosy up to any end users deep heart felt feelings, let's just make it fact and say survival just does matter)

That's what caught me - when I dialed it down to just one attack, the contrast became clear - how some damage meant auto live, some damage meant auto die. And atleast from the text I was working from, it made no effort to have an inbetween where HP mattered to a degree, instead of not mattering at all or making it an auto pass.

"But sequential attacks!"

The only happen if the opponent survives to deliver them. They are really not guaranteed - the players are optimising to avoid it even happening once, let alone three times how however many it'd need to actually be a risk of PC death.

"But they might hit and the attrition over a series of battles...oh wait, this ties into the title, right?"

Yeah. What's the control mechanism for when you can reset (traditionally)? Or to be more aligned with the fiction, when you can enter a village and rest there?

I mean, from a players perspective I know what it's like - I've played in D&D encounters games recently where I took a womp of damage from winter wolves and I was all oh noes, because who knew what the future held in store? Well, it held a village to rest in - oh, that's lucky...

But if I could have seen the bigger picture from the start, of the creatures damage, it's life expectancy and the fact that I could rest afterward - with the unknowns (the black curtains?) removed, suddenly its all an auto win.

The ambiguity of that village contact (as opposed to say if you rolled after combat to see if you found a village) leaves so much room for illusion. And indeed so much room for play which in gamism terms is actually entirely dead. Speculation: Possibly why many folk would go on to think an RPG is about something other than gamism - not because other agenda's were incentivised, but because D&D as a gamist game had a bolt gun taken to it's head. But that's wild speculation, because that would require people somehow seeing the big issue, or atleast sensing it.

In reaction to this I'm working on something where life threatening situations just involve a 1 in 600 chance of being 'crippled' (the PC likely cannot continue) and if that passes, a 10% chance of outright death. I know those odds are low, but on the other hand they are guaranteed. There is no 'danger latter, guys!' effect (much like 'fun latter, guys!') - if it's life threatening, then it definately is, right here, right now! It's not eating up some HP but then you get to rest before that matters! It's low odds but it can come about. Indeed further I have a wound system in it, in that you roll D700 (I know, I'm insane! It's (1D6x100)+(1D10x10)+1D10). It's really not much worse than D100). Wounds can go up to 100. If you roll D700 and get under your wounds (+100, since the roll range is 101 to 700), you reroll. So the more wounds you have, the more often you will reroll. It dials down the odds, basically. At 100 points of wounds, this dials you down to a 1 in 500 chance, if I've got the math right. I like having some kind of 'not only did you risk death but also things stack up on you!' mechanic. Gives some room for various ways of toying with that potential 100 points of wounds, without undercutting the inherent risk of each dangerous situation.

Currently the roll just resolves the combat or danger or whatever. There's no rolling for dealing with the situation or anything - it's just a question of whether you survive - if you did, then you resolved it somehow! I find no current interest in that side of it - I'm quite happy with the risk model as it is. That's the big dealio - facing risk, rather than methods of avoiding facing risk. And yeah, it's all heavy gamble based - that's the deal!

"Have you got a good summing up for this post?"

Nah, I don't got one.

[Eero Tuovinen]

That's a peculiar deconstruction of the hitpoint thing. The way I usually see it minimalized is that hit point attrition is not about danger of death, but rather about player choice to continue risking it: you don't have absolute control over the attrition still ahead even if you retreat (how many attacks does the foe get before I'm away, will I have random encounters before I'm home, etc.), and for this reason you have to evaluate how much risk you're willing to take. Sometimes it's even safer to continue the fight, as you're at the brink of victory and it'll be much safer once you've won as opposed to once you escape.

From this viewpoint hitpoints are a Dutch auction: you start with enough to be willing to risk going into combat (with a particular foe, maybe, if they cause different amounts of damage), and then we'll see how low you have to go before you call for retreat. The cost of retreat comes into this, too, as a higher cost implies that you'll retreat at higher HP, but a higher HP also implies that you're more likely to win before losing, and that complicates the situation a whole lot.

All that aside, I personally like the sort of gamble mechanics you're outlining (perhaps not that exact mechanical implementation, but the idea of lessening resource management in favour of risk management). I've been thinking for a while that it might be worthwhile to play a D&D-like game with wargame-like rules where one hit kills and we just don't do the HP attrition thing at all. The game I see in my own head has simultaneous initiative, 50/50 success on hit for each combatant, one-hit-one-kill, and a very quick and functional means of bringing in new characters to replace the fallen. A major strategic issue would be to decide when it is actually worthwhile to risk your own skin in combat, and the more desperate party with more to lose would always have a major advantage simply for being more willing to risk their skin. I was just talking the other day about executing something like this in the world of Warhammer with some youngsters, on the principle that e.g. a 40k Imperial Guard regiment would have plenty of replacement characters available. Could even use the WH miniatures game dicing mechanics, it's not like they deviate much from the normal streamlined wargame processes.

[Callan S.]

That's a peculiar deconstruction of the hitpoint thing. The way I usually see it minimalized is that hit point attrition is not about danger of death, but rather about player choice to continue risking it: you don't have absolute control over the attrition still ahead even if you retreat (how many attacks does the foe get before I'm away, will I have random encounters before I'm home, etc.), and for this reason you have to evaluate how much risk you're willing to take. Sometimes it's even safer to continue the fight, as you're at the brink of victory and it'll be much safer once you've won as opposed to once you escape.

From this viewpoint hitpoints are a Dutch auction: you start with enough to be willing to risk going into combat (with a particular foe, maybe, if they cause different amounts of damage), and then we'll see how low you have to go before you call for retreat. The cost of retreat comes into this, too, as a higher cost implies that you'll retreat at higher HP, but a higher HP also implies that you're more likely to win before losing, and that complicates the situation a whole lot.

Hi Eero,

It's funny - I've certainly seen many games which go like this, with people pressing on until they all decide to give up, and I've played in quite a few myself. And it doesn't make any sense to me (even as I've played it!). Take this contrast - there's a video game side scrolling beat 'em up (called dragons crown - it's quite a hommage to D&D, actually) and you do a dungeon at a time. The thing is, if you do consecutive dungeons (which sap your resources), you will get a percentage more of gold, XP and treasure quality. Keep doing consecutive dungeons, the more you get. So in such a case I totally get the idea of 'well, can I just squeeze a lil' more out of my stuff and really take advantage of the next levels bonus? Hmmm!'

This doesn't apply to the traditional* dungeon - they are flat. There wont be more treasure in the next room. There's only ever the same amount. Maybe sometimes the GM puts more treasure in the boss room or something, but even then there's no direct benefit to doing each of the rooms before that consecutively.

Yet people press on anyway? And hell, I've played in the games where they do that. I'm playing in a D&D2E game the other day - in that session and like in all the others before it, people decide whether they press on.

Maybe it's an ego thing - no one really wants to broach the idea of retreat before it seems like a good idea, because no one wants to be a giver upper or something. But compared to the incetivised version that dragons crown has, this seems really drab. Everyones just avoiding looking bad - it's not very glorious? But I said 'maybe' - this is speculation. I don't know if it's the case. Certainly after one room has been cleared and someones gotten a few scratches (lost a handful of XP) I haven't suggested turning back. Thinking on it, for me, at about that point, having gotten a dang game organised, it'd be best to actually get into the dungeon bash thing that we came for than pull back and spend time messing around with down time (even though downtime can happen in the blink of an eye and often does). However, this isn't particularly tactical or strategic, in my opinion - and that's me evaluating the quality of my own play! Atleast near the start I'd rather die on my feet than live on my downtime knees, so to speak - though it really isn't terribly sensible.



* By traditional I mean how I imagine on average dungeons turn out.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I think that there are plenty of reasons for the "pressing on" phenomenon to make sense, even in impure D&D implementations with various amounts of railroading. Consider these examples:
- As you say, the reward may be variable, and I don't think that this is somehow unusual in adventure rpgs; rather, it's almost certainly the case unless all rewards are strictly tied to the encounters themselves. If you know that the treasure/hostage/mission goal is on this ship, and you've already fought on the deck and in the crew quarters, it's not like there can be very many dangers left. It makes sense that you're likelier to reach the goal after each fight, and thus the expected reward value of each fight is larger than that of the last one. Retreat makes much more sense before you board the ship in the first place, and less sense once you've almost certainly vanquished the entire crew.
- Mounting an expedition has overhead, and therefore giving up too early might cause the total to go negative, which makes it preferable to push on and thus improve the efficiency of the endeavour. If each trip into the dungeon costs 1000 gold pieces in various expenses, you're clearly better off if you can make each attempt count.
- Retreat itself might have costs such as missed opportunities (they'll kill the hostages if we fail in this raid) or dangers (if we don't defeat the enemy, they'll harass us all the way back to town). This again incentivizes pressing on.

Take all of those possible reasons to press on, and I have to say that I don't see anything strange in players pressing on after taking that one point of HP damage. It's only in the most static, simple games imaginable that I could see the choice of always falling back make sense. Of course all these possible scenarios are ultimately variations of the same risk management equations (risk of failure vs. cost of conservative strategy), but that was exactly my point: hit points are usually seen as part of this equation, and the equation is always at the forefront in play, so it very rarely feels pointless in D&D (the game that is foremost in using HP) to have HP attrition.

Of course all of these possibilities are dependent on somebody actually implementing them. I believe it when you say that in your 2nd edition game there were no practical reasons to push on, and it was merely convention that made players "play nice" about it. Doesn't seem to me like we can judge the entire idea of HP attrition on that basis, though, as it seems like that game isn't getting everything from the HP solution that it could. When we've played the simplest sorts of dungeon crawls, there has still been a cost of retreat in the form of downtime living costs, opportunity for dungeon denizens to fortify and the wilderness friction (random encounters, weather, etc.) involved in moving between the dungeon and the HQ. A very different experience, in other words.

Now 4th edition, in a game structured like that I concede your point entirely: I can't see any reason in that game to "press on", either. Most HP-using games, though, most of the time - perfectly understandable. Not the only possible way to construct a game, but it's not nearly as irrational as you make it seem.

[Callan S.]

Doesn't seem to me like we can judge the entire idea of HP attrition on that basis, though, as it seems like that game isn't getting everything from the HP solution that it could.

Well, to you it seems it's not getting everything it could from HP (though I'm not sure what you mean by 'HP solution'?), but to me it was following the given instructions just fine - the instructions basically give a suck result, but for some reason, time and again, the game does not crash over the unoptimised play.

Anyway, I decided to build it into the instructions and in doing so found the HP to be fairly extraneous. Not enough by themselves and when you implement more to make HP enough, it's easier to just cut to the odds of death than faff about with a HP system.

[Marshall Burns]

I've always liked systems where any given hit might kill you (it's what I cooked up for Madlands, and heck, look at Rustbelt, where any attack with a deadly weapon _will_ kill you unless you make it not).

But I can have fun with straight attrition-and-reset systems too. I was playing the original Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest outside of the US) for the Nintendo recently. When you're starting out, hitting the Reset Hitpoints button costs you like 6 gold or something close to that. At that point, you have to win six fights in order to get that much gold. So every time you venture out from the starting town to beat up some slimes, the challenge is to win more than six fights before you have to retreat to reset, because otherwise you don't profit and can't save up for the better equipment available at the store. (And if you lose a fight, you lose half of your gold.)

As the game goes on, you gain more HP and abilities, giving your journeys more leeway and scope, but the enemies also get more HP and abilities, and the cost of a reset increases in terms of either gold or the amount of distance (and thus danger) between you and a cheaper reset price. And this whole issue of profit per journey doesn't fully become trivial until you've managed to buy everything you need to buy, at which point you should be attempting the endgame already.

I've brought this dynamic to my own D&Dalike games by making sure that every dungeon expedition has a monetary cost -- overland travel (to get to and from the dungeon) requires so much food per person per hex (and I just read in LotFP the idea of toll roads, which for some reason never occurred to me), and then there's provisions like oil and rope and whatnot, and I feel no qualms about putting weapons and armor at risk during the delve -- and I've done a little bit of experimenting with calculating XP from net treasure instead of gross.

Of course, Adventures & Accounting isn't for everyone, but it really excites me, and it creates some fruitful tension -- do we leave now since everyone's hurt even though that will mean taking a loss on this venture (I haven't gone so far as to take away accumulated XP for going into the red, but I want to try it out), or do we press on and push our luck for now?

[Callan S.]

Yeah, that's a solid implimentation, Marshall. Though I'm curious as to what happens if you don't make enough gold? I'm second guessing something like you still get a reset, but your gold is set to zero before you can buy anything. Gotta win before you can move on? Or something else? I can only quibble on personal preference, in that it's ah 'Ouch, you hit me in my wallet!' sort of play - which works fine. But it's not quite about life and death (somewhat like 4e is more about whether you'll spend time lying on the ground unconcious or not, rather than about whether you'll die (especially given resurrection), but when taken for what it is, that works well. Thematically, given how - well, to me anyway - D&D and other fantasy or sci-fi games have touted death as a 'real risk', I'd like to actually get at that atleast at the moment. But potentially being punched in the wallet is a really good model and something cool to play! Hell, given it's imaginary characters maybe dying, really it's not much different from losing game gold anyway.

Of course, Adventures & Accounting isn't for everyone, but it really excites me, and it creates some fruitful tension -- do we leave now since everyone's hurt even though that will mean taking a loss on this venture (I haven't gone so far as to take away accumulated XP for going into the red, but I want to try it out), or do we press on and push our luck for now?

Yeah, that's sweet. It's like theme for gamism!

at which point you should be attempting the endgame already.

Endgame, man! :)

I've brought this dynamic to my own D&Dalike games by making sure that every dungeon expedition has a monetary cost -- overland travel (to get to and from the dungeon) requires so much food per person per hex (and I just read in LotFP the idea of toll roads, which for some reason never occurred to me), and then there's provisions like oil and rope and whatnot, and I feel no qualms about putting weapons and armor at risk during the delve -- and I've done a little bit of experimenting with calculating XP from net treasure instead of gross.

Yeah, I've just found ration costs are basically paltry compared to the huge amounts of gold characters run into. And for myself I'm none too keen on 'a powerful force comes to tax you'. In that AD&D game I played, there were tax collectors who hung around town and took half of what you got out of the dungeon (though I think we got the XP before having to hand it over). But it bugged me - instead of being the up and coming badasses of the area, we were just some badasses - and the other badasses were to appathetic to save the day. Soooo...we kind of clean it up, 'cause no one else can be bothered (even though they are several levels higher). Just takes the shine off things in a way.

So the apparent default D&D settings (I emphasize apparent default), because of the cost of food and gear, seems in antithesis to placing some kind of 'ante' (ie, the ration costs) of any significance to be at risk in play. I'm not saying one can't do it, but to me it seems to leave D&D behind (even as it heads towards risky cool play). I have to admit with a number of RPG's I found myself basically counting the additions I need to add to support juicy play, and in counting them, counting how far away I seem to drift from that RPG (Rifts is a prime example of my count. Like a book of grudges, I keep a meticulous account of drift).

[Eero Tuovinen]

My experience of D&D is that maintenance costs are very, very real. Some numbers from our currently on-going campaign follow; we're playing Stonehell Dungeon as a sort of longer-term megadungeoneering exercise, putting roots in the place and planning to stay. (I'm the party accountant at the moment, so pretty good handle on the numbers, although I don't have the paperwork right here.)

When we finally arrived at environs of Stonehell after assorted misadventures our party consisted of 3-5 PCs (changing session-by-session; we don't track PC state unless the player is also present), one trusted henchman, two porters and a linkboy. At "Guido's fort" we emptied the local hireling pool and managed to attract five more fighting NPCs to bolster our ranks. About a dozen people from session to session, in other words, depending on deaths, new hires and player characters popping in and out.

To supply this expedition we had 2000 SP (LotFP is in silver standard - those are basically gold pieces by different name) worth of "general goods" (tools, rope, clothes, etc.) we'd won over the negotiation table from some bandits during aforementioned misadventures. We also had three horses, a cart and food for 118 man-days. Unfortunately our guide actually owned the cart, and because we'd managed to lose his horse, I loaned one of our three to him so he could get his cart back to civilization. The team had negligible fungibility at this point, although we did have our personal arms and equipment. Everybody is 1st level despite our misadventures so far, we might maybe get together maybe 50-100 SP if we pooled our resources after the harsh journey into the distant eastern borderlands where Stonehell is.

Now, Guido's Fort is a piddly little waystation, but it's the only civilization in the area, so we parked our excessive amount of trade goods there and started a general store to get much-needed funding for the endeavour. (The store maybe will score some money for us after a month in operation - I've negotiated the dicing with the DM, we'll see later how it goes.) After arranging that we went to Stonehell, which is a full day's journey out of Guido's.

At this writing we've spent the last three sessions exploring Stonehell and its environs, and preparing to go in deeper. We've spent about a week of fictional time doing so: one day to get there, another to get back for more equipment once we saw the grounds, then a third day to get back (again), another day exploring and recovering, then again a trip to Guido's for some mantlet-construction equipment, a day's journey back, and finally last session's ill-fated expedition. The team is about 10 people strong, and after the first week-or-so we have food for about 60 days left - enough for another week, but no more.

Thing is, food costs a SP per day or something like that. We have some rudimentary living space at Guido's thanks to my store arrangements (I basically profit-shared an excess house for it, they had some abandoned real estate), and of course we're hardy adventurers who don't mind sleeping out (at least during the summer - fortunately our DM is lax about seasons, in my campaign we'd be in the middle of winter right now). However, it's still about 10 SP per day in living expenses for the party before any human foibles are accounted for, and the only reason we've made do so far is that we happened to have a pretty good stock of preserved foodstuffs with us as we arrived. We have to strike rich within the week, or we'll go broke.

Most significantly: we've spent a week of fictional time, and have yet to find any treasure - unless you count the wound fever a couple of us managed to contract last session in an encounter with giant rats. This is not particularly exceptional in my experience, a lot depends on the strategy and tactics of the players. And of course this Curtis fellow (the designer of Stonehell) is a very tough nut to crack, he isn't making life easy on us.

What is all of the above to say? It is to say this: I do not recognize the D&D where living expenses are not a significant part of the mathematics. Most of our play is low-level (by necessity, not choice - it's fucking hard to get to 2nd level in this game), treasure is a big triumph instead of a guarantee, and organizing expeditions into dungeons costs money. Of course I recognize that there are very different paradigms out there, but to me this is what D&D is, and the other kind of thing is a peculiar evolution towards something else.

I don't even think that the sort of play I describe above is that far out of the canonical range of D&D. Consider the 1st edition DMG, which I read in the fall: "Each player character will automatically expend not less than 100 gold pieces per level of experience per month. This is simply support, upkeep, equipment, and entertainment expense. These costs are to be deducted by the Dungeon Master automatically, and any further spending by the PC is to be added to these costs." This seems to me to be saying the exact same thing, and surely the AD&D DMG is a pretty good source on what D&D is like as a game.

[Marshall Burns]

You're right, Callan, that such an implementation ultimately isn't really about the risk of death; it finds tension elsewhere, and everything flows from that. And it probably does require an economic overhaul to some degree, to make sure all the numbers make sense -- in the versions of D&D that I've read, the de facto basic unit of the Currency is the gold piece, but the games were apparently built based on what felt right rather than taking "GP is the central pillar of the game" and building from there according to gameable principles. So it takes a lot of groundwork, house rules, and GM judgment to actually get that kind of tension out of the game.

Now, a game that's all about the risk of death -- it seems to me that there you need the basic unit to be lives, and proceed from there. What does it cost the player when a character bites it, for instance? That's something that hasn't been very well handled, and it could certainly benefit from some insightful design work. In video games it's been especially horrible -- the cost of dying is either too great (you have to stop playing) or it's so low that death is actually trivial, so unless there's something else to provide tension, such as the gold issue in Dragon Warrior (in which case the game isn't about death but rather gold), then there isn't any tension to be had, and so there's ultimately not much of a game there (for example: almost every Final Fantasy title).

In games where the player has multiple characters at his disposal, like strategy games, I've seen lives turned into a meaningful unit Currency -- for instance, in Dwarf Fortress, every dwarf counts and they're legitimately at risk quite often, and even in Pikmin, I get a little pang every time one of those little pikmin ghosts goes floating up -- but in games with a 1:1 player to character ratio, I haven't seen anything that wasn't pretty much dreadful or just making the best of a bad job.

[Nikolai]

I've definitely experienced what you are describing in terms of how HP attrition might be an illusionist mechanic. However, you can also look at it as a simulationist mechanic. If the game world is full of champions who regularly fight demons and we establish that a specific forest is filled with dire wolves which feast on travellers. If the heroes go through that forest and are attacked by dire wolves, that's simulationist. The GM is just going by what would happen in that area, as established by the setting. However, since the PC champions are so powerful, the dire wolves attacks are not significant and they have no real chance of death. It's not necessarily illusionism, it could simply be a lack of Step on Up.

Now, the problem is that this is not at all gamist because there is no challenge to be had in such a battle. A gamist GM would up the ante by having something like "fiendish" dire wolves (more difficult, etc.) which could challenge the party. Once that happens, there is real risk and real challenge and all the gamist mechanics align properly. Hit points become a limited resource. Suddenly the party needs to Step on Up to the challenge.

So really the phenomena you describe might be the consequence of two creative agendas clashing. Just my thoughts.

[Callan S.]

Hi Nikolai,

I'd largely agree, but I'd sort of pitch it that such a system failing to do any type of gamism to well in it's default form (let me stress default and let me stress to anyone protesting that that I will ask for play accounts as you are likely to have made perhaps subtle additions, but additions that facilitate an agenda). So it creates a weird psychological skinner box, in that the players don't want to lose/die (the traditional stance in boardgames that they played before playing an RPG), so they do not lobby for having dangerous things. But at the same time the gamism is boring - this combo makes fine tuning 'realism' or genre emulation the primary source of fun. Ie, you pitch it as stalling step on up or agenda clash - I pitch the default settings as a (possibly inadvertant) simulationism trainer.

The other thread shows there's contention about the idea of a default D&D. But here, take it as if there are a bunch of option sliders, all which have a default. I doubt even Gary used all sliders at their default setting (I'd even say it's likely no one has played D&D at it's true default setting - and it'd probably be very boring to do so). To me this seems reasonable to say.


Eero,

Well, I think you've dialed down the base currency from gold to silver, which makes rations cost alot more effectively. In the 2e D&D I'm familiar with, gold is the base currency and from using the random dungeon generator tables (along with the random chance of treasure Vs monsters), I found the PC's swimming in gold. Well, enough to make paying for food no big deal.

Really as I understand your set up, it sounds more fun than the random treasure generator stuff, in a 'Shit, are we going to go bankrupt!?' way. I feel you might want to argue what really the D&D experience really is and it's not like the dungeon generator I described. But apart from keeping a record of history, it doesn't matter to me to argue that. The structure you describe sounds like some tension filled fun (more fun than swimming in gold), it's fun - that's it (apart from writing down how you did it so others can play that way or adapt it to their designs). Though come to think of it, the 2e game I'm thinking of does not use the living costs rules (those are in the hundreds of gold per month)


Marshall,

Yeah, good observation on the lives thing and a seeming significant difference from when you go from multiple lives assigned to one player to just one life assigned to one player. Strange difference, isn't it?

Just speculating, but maybe there's a kind of nihilism to it that's too unforgiving. Like, you had this character, you thought about how he thought - but just forget that as if it never happened and make a new character. It's a kind of brutal nihilism. That's kind of why I'm working on more of a chance of crippling/being forced to stop adventuring as being what happens 90% of the time. These crippled characters can still be interacted with/cared about (probably worth having a mentor system that gives mechanical bonuses). Thus making the one life per player thing simply melancholy rather than brutally nihilistic.

As said, that's speculation. I really dunno - needs testing in play.

[Tom]

in which case what is the point of hitpoints.

I think this is the only question that needs an answer. What is the point?


In computer games, hitpoints are mostly used like a resource. In fact, there's often little difference between health and mana or whatever other resources you have. In those cases, HP do two things: a) they limit characters, avoiding the "I've been questing this dungeon for 20 years" problem and b) they soften the move from "all good" to "dead".


Personally, I dislike hitpoints. They abstract one of the most immediate, unfiltered personal experiences. A combat wound is something that no character can possibly ignore, it's something damn serious. And it fucking hurts! Usually, A LOT. So I once wrote a game that had no hitpoints, but instead every damaging hit caused some specific damage with specific game effects. Essentially, no hitpoints, roll on the critical hit table every time, but there are lots of non-fatal critical hits.

[RangerEd]

Tom,

I agree with your opinions on hit points and have struggled to find a workable alternative. Hit points simply do not have the same story potential that specific injuries have during gameplay. I would love to see your solution if you don't mind sharing.

In quid pro quo fashion, my best (but uninspiring) working solution (from a 2005 heartbreaker) employed the Lund-Browder Charts mixed with the Hand Method, and adjusted for the skewed probability of center-of-mass aiming. I developed a d100 chart to determine the part hit.
Body Part Hit      %Roll   Part %
Head         01-05   5
Neck         06-07   2
Chest         08-24   17
Gut-Groin      25-37   13
R Upper Arm-Shoulder   38-42   5
L Upper Arm-Shoulder   43-48   5
R Lower Arm-Elbow   49-52   3
L Lower Arm-Elbow   53-56   3
R Hand-Wrist      57-58   2
L Hand-Wrist      59-60   2
R Thigh-Hip      61-68   8
L Thigh-Hip      69-76   8
R Calf-Knee      77-84   8
L Calf-Knee      85-92   8
R Foot-Ankle      93-96   4
L Foot-Ankle      97-100   4

Damage could occur to multiple areas of the body during a single damage event. Armor and armor-like effects provided damage reduction for the parts that were covered. Damage to specific areas could cause specific effects. During development, I thought it was great and easy to use. During play testing, a problem came from called shots or situations that applied to specific areas of the body. I had no solution to push the random probability towards one area or another, so I abandoned the rule.

I am interested in alternatives to hit points if you have any. I would like the decision of "pressing on" during gameplay to be visceral and dramatic.

Ed

[Callan S.]

I'd like to steer the thread a bit.

The concern is fatality - not as in getting away from it, but instead getting toward it.

Damage too low and unless you guarantee multiple hits will occur, no fatality will occur. Even if you do guarantee multiple hits, the attack rolls and damage rolls are really kind of of secondary importance - it's what sets the number of attacks that will occur that is the big cheese. This hidden dependence is certainly useful for illusionists.

Damage too high and there is no point in rolling damage or having HP, as there is no gamble and the HP are overwhelmed to the point where only the to hit roll matters. Which is a fine mechanic, but I want to hit and damage rolls, not just the former.

This thread isn't about whether wounds hurt or anything - a binary life/death thing is fine. It's just a question of making the damage roll not being pointless (either because it's an auto kill no matter what you roll, or it's an auto live no matter what you roll). As a side note, the thread mentions that trad games that use HP can better lend themselves to illusionism.

[Ron Edwards]

Callan, thanks for steering. I agree with you completely about the number of strikes being the main issue, and as long as we're focusing on D&D a bit, I think that's one of the core variables at all levels - attacks per round, the durability of the party to make it to multiple rounds (instead of halfway through the second like clockwork), and encounters per session ...

Ed and Joshua, if you're interested in talking about alternatives to hit points, one of you should start another thread. There's a fair amount of design history I think neither of you has encountered.

Best, Ron