Are Hit Points Really Necessary?

[AnBe]

I've played a lot of RPGs where hit points seem to be a necessity. I can understand this in some cases, but recently I have created a medieval fantasy system that does not use hit points, and it seems to be okay. Instead of hit points, when a character gets hit by an attack, you roll an Endurance skill check. If you succeed, you're still wounded (knife in the gut, arrow in the knee, etc.) but you manage to endure it well enough to keep fighting and you take no penalties. However, you might want to get those wounds treated soon before you bleed out or get infected. If you fail, you're knocked out, dead, or taking a penalty of some sort. It is a brutal system with a lot of deaths.

This seems to be working quite well in my opinion but I have gotten some complaints from my players (the elven necromancer keeps getting knocked out in one hit because his Endurance sucks). Should I keep the system the way it is, or should I actually include some kind of hit point system? I like the way it is because it feels more realistic and makes it easier to immerse myself in the situation, but I like hit points because it seems to be a staple of all RPGing and it does have its advantages and it is simpler. So, what should I do?

Thanks in advance.

[Seppo87]

Instead of Hit Points, give plot armor - yep, whatever you call them, hero points, safety points, survival points... duh. Let's go with Survival Points, ok?

X per day when the character would suffer an injury or fall unconscious or die, (due to a failed defense roll, save roll, being hit, whatever the system is about) instead you spend one survival point and prevent the threat from having any effect
(or get a retroactive bonus to the failed roll that might turn it into a success)
If the hit was especially lethal (by any rules your system provides) this might cost more points.
(this might easily happen if you use survival points as a retroactive bonus to a roll, if the DC is especially high you might need to spend more points)

this way, you get two benefits:
1) A high level warrior can still one-hit KO low level ones, who only have one survival point but might be required to spend 2
2) Having one point left does not mean you're guaranteed to survive the next attack. Makes the choice of keep goingvs resting less streamlined.

Keep numbers low tho, otherwise you're just recreating HPs. Hits that require 2 survival points to be prevented should be rare, 3 is exceptional, 4 should never happen unless you really want to go epic.

With a short rest you recover some survival points, with a long rest you recover all of them.
Survival points cannot heal existing wounds or conditions, only prevent them.

[Vitruviansquid]

Hit points are not *necessary* per se, but what hit points *does* is useful in heroic, medieval fantasy settings.

Hit points allows you to have a gauge on how close your character is to destruction all the time. So it gives you the excitement of "I'm low on HP! We gotta do something!" The way that hit points allow you to have so much it guarantees you won't go down in X number of round(s) allows you to plan fights in a more medieval fantasy way - your strong guy can take some hits, but not too many. As you have already seen, making a character's destruction based on a roll means players are less likely to want to take any risks at all, so it's harder to get a player to be a fighter who runs up to the enemy and smacks him as the main strategy. I'm sure hit points make sense for heroic, medieval fantasy settings in a lot of other ways, but the gist is, it mechanically gets players to act and feel in a way that makes sense with the setting.

What you have inadvertently done is made your mechanics fit a different setting. For example, an endurance roll when you get hit that can result in suddenly going down would make a lot of sense in a modern military setting, where you are tactically trying to avoid taking a first hit in the first place, and where it's a trope of the setting that people randomly die horribly all the time.

If you want to keep your roll-endurance system, there are a few things you need to do.

1. You need to change the rest of the rules to support how health is treated. Characters who are very fragile will need ways to reliably avoid taking hits. If you were playing DnD, you'd probably need to change the way shooting works, probably slow down movement, and insert other mechanics so that the necromancer and other low endurance characters can be out of the enemy's way while being able to contribute.

2. You will have to start telling different stories in your setting to make your players not feel out of place when they play with the new rules in mind. Perhaps there can be no more frail wizard adventurer who depends on allies and spells to hold off the enemy. Perhaps all the wizards in your setting know to bulk up because they want to reduce the chances of a stray arrow or slingstone taking them out.

[Noje]

When you think about it, any health system could be considered a hit point system under a different name. One popular system that isn't hit points (in the traditional sense, at least) is a wound system. where the player sustains wounds when they are hit which give penalties on future rolls. However, enough wound will lead to characters dying, so it's just a more complicated version of hit points.

[tomwalker154]

For me, it's extremely necessary! :D

[AnBe]

I appreciate your input.

The thing about the elven necromancer is, he charged right at a burglar with his knife, the burglar ran around a corner and the necromancer gave chase. As soon as the necromancer rounded the corner, the burglar decked him and he fell unconscious (failed Endurance check). This angered the player, but I was confused as to why he did this, since his Melee Combat skill and Endurance skills were low, yet he had a high Battle Magic skill, not to mention a Skeletal Grasp move and a Bone Barrier spell to protect him, but he did not use these :smallannoyed:
I guess he thought he could go all Rambo on that burglar, but his character wasn't really built for that.

I did say this was a medieval fantasy setting, but it is not really meant to be high-fantasy or ultra-heroic like D&D is. There are Sanity rules, Corruption rules, Notoriety rules, and so on. The point of my game is not to feel heroic, but to simulate a variety of situations in a medieval fantasy-type world. There are classes, but no levels. Character progression is slow.

I am intrigued by the Survival points system that was suggested. I think I can fit it in. I'll give it a try.

[Cespenar]

I've played a lot of RPGs where hit points seem to be a necessity. I can understand this in some cases, but recently I have created a medieval fantasy system that does not use hit points, and it seems to be okay. Instead of hit points, when a character gets hit by an attack, you roll an Endurance skill check. If you succeed, you're still wounded (knife in the gut, arrow in the knee, etc.) but you manage to endure it well enough to keep fighting and you take no penalties. However, you might want to get those wounds treated soon before you bleed out or get infected. If you fail, you're knocked out, dead, or taking a penalty of some sort. It is a brutal system with a lot of deaths.

This seems to be working quite well in my opinion but I have gotten some complaints from my players (the elven necromancer keeps getting knocked out in one hit because his Endurance sucks). Should I keep the system the way it is, or should I actually include some kind of hit point system? I like the way it is because it feels more realistic and makes it easier to immerse myself in the situation, but I like hit points because it seems to be a staple of all RPGing and it does have its advantages and it is simpler. So, what should I do?

Thanks in advance.

You can stretch it out the tiniest bit if you'd prefer a little more forgiving system. Say, add a Crippled condition between wounded and knocked out. You can still act, but with penalties.

[Vitruviansquid]

Well, I may have forgotten to mention that the players need to learn to get along with the rules and settings as well.

It strikes me from how you present it that the necromancer player was thinking something else besides getting decked would happen when he rounded the corner, and that's the source of his anger - not necessarily anything to do with the health system you've implemented.

edit: Also, I find it incredibly hilarious that Cespenar told OP how he/she can "stretch it out the tiniest bit."

[AnBe]

I agree with Cespenar's idea. However, I would say certain attacks from certain enemies can still instantly kill a character unless they are properly buffed.

I think the people in my group are so used to "Rush in, kill everything, loot it all, everything will turn out good."
There's nothing wrong with that play style, but I have grown weary of it over the years.
I do hope that this system I have made will encourage players to be more careful and thoughtful of their plans and actions. I want them to feel a real sense of danger for their characters. I want there to be tension and drama, not just rollplay or a video game in tabletop form.

I thank you for your responses

[goto124]

Have you checked if your players want such a change?

Consider switching to another system that uses wounds and/or is more lethal. This saves you the trouble of doing all the work and trying to balance the game mechanics. Again, only if your players want it.

[VoxRationis]

Ultimately, no, as you've already discovered. A system can work without hit points, and one can envision a system without hit points—indeed, many people have.

Vitruviansquid hit the nail on the head—hit points allow players to gauge how well their characters are doing and predict whether they will win or lose the combat with their current strategy. They make combat more predictable and give players a little more control over combat. (They also act as a limited resource dictating the pace of multiple-fight exploration.)

If you desire to have that without hit points, you could try supplementing the system with some sort of active/reactive defensive measures that give players some degree of control and predictability in their defense, while at the same time imposing cost/benefit tradeoffs to the act of defense. For example, you could include a system wherein stepping back as a reaction to an attack is a reliable countermove—with the obvious caveat that you might soon run out of space, and will have collapsed your team's front line. Other defensive options, or even defensive/offensive hybrid options like ripostes, could be envisioned.

[Darth Ultron]

Are hit points necessary? No.

Does a game need rules ''something exactly like a hit point system but called something else''? Yes.

In Real Life a person can't really take too much ''damage''. Anything more then a ''light tap'' can badly injure or kill a person.

But that sort of reality does not work for a game. A game needs a way for characters to take a hit and still be able to play the game.

[Jay R]

First of all, you haven't eliminated hit points. Each character has one hit point, and a saving throw on each hit.

Second, one big change that this has caused is that somebody who's been hit seven times and made all his saving throws appears to be in the same condition as somebody who's been hit once, or somebody who hasn't been hit. If that is not your goal, then the system isn't working.

Third, every rules change affects what proper play is. Endurance is now the most important stat for all players, and the necromancer either didn't know, or didn't notice, when he built a character who is close to worthless. (Since Endurance is the only factor on how many hits you can take, low endurance when surrounded by high-endurance characters is the equivalent of a first-level character in a high-level melee. (He also played foolishly. casters don't lead the charge.)

So the primary thing your players must know, at character generation, is to max out their endurance. If they don't do that, they can't use any other stat, as the necromancer has demonstrated.

[VoxRationis]

First of all, you haven't eliminated hit points. Each character has one hit point, and a saving throw on each hit.

Second, one big change that this has caused is that somebody who's been hit seven times and made all his saving throws appears to be in the same condition as somebody who's been hit once, or somebody who hasn't been hit. If that is not your goal, then the system isn't working.

Third, every rules change affects what proper play is. Endurance is now the most important stat for all players, and the necromancer either didn't know, or didn't notice, when he built a character who is close to worthless. (Since Endurance is the only factor on how many hits you can take, low endurance when surrounded by high-endurance characters is the equivalent of a first-level character in a high-level melee. (He also played foolishly. casters don't lead the charge.)

So the primary thing your players must know, at character generation, is to max out their endurance. If they don't do that, they can't use any other stat, as the necromancer has demonstrated.

This seems like a fairly broad definition of "hit point." True, it is an abstract, discrete representation of the difference between top condition and mortal injury, but hit points are generally meant with the assumption that they are, at least in some characters and more likely in the vast majority of them, massed.

Regarding endurance: I don't actually think it's that important to mass for all characters. Good play (say, by not rounding a corner with your weakest hero first) can make up for poor Endurance/Constitution stats. In particular, a necromancer, a magic-user who (depending on level and system) is likely to be fighting from behind minions and may or may not have spells to compensate for physical frailty, can be forgiven for putting their best stat into something else. Furthermore, I'm not sure it's actually that much of a change in priority from before, since with a hit point system the logic still goes along the lines of "if you get hit, you need Endurance."

[Koo Rehtorb]

In Burning Wheel characters have a set of stats called Physical Tolerances that are derived from their stats. It's essentially a measurement of how wounded they get from different levels of hits. Based on how hard they're hit they can get: bruised (nothing), superficial, light, midi, severe, traumatic, and mortal. A mighty warrior might need a B12 hit to be mortally wounded where a feeble old man might only need a B7. The level of wound depends on how strong your opponent is and the weapon they're using.

Every wound you take reduces all your stats and skills by an amount equal to the level of wound. Individual wounds don't add in terms of running out of hp, but they do matter in that if any of your stats gets drained to zero you're incapacitated. So taking four different light wounds (-1 D each) is equal to taking one traumatic wound (-4 D) in terms of your ability to continue fighting effectively. But it makes a big difference in that the light wounds are much easier to heal later and don't leave you at risk of bleeding to death. You can basically shrug a light wound off with a few minutes to recover, where a traumatic wound needs an expert doctor and weeks or months of recovery time.

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In Torchbearer being wounded is a toggle. You're either wounded or you're not. The first time something happens that would leave you injured, falling off a cliff, setting off a trap, etc, you become injured. If you do something that would cause you to become injured again while you're still injured then you die. Being injured makes you less effective at doing anything. Additionally there's a whole slew of other conditions that reduce your effectiveness as well. Characters can be hungry/thirsty, angry, afraid, exhausted, injured, and sick, each coming with their own penalties.

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If you're looking to compromise with your players then you have room to get a little more lenient with a bit of middle ground between "up" and "down" with "up, but with reduced effectiveness". In my opinion the stupidest thing about hit points is how characters are at full effectiveness up until the moment they pass out.

[Knaight]

I've played a lot of RPGs where hit points seem to be a necessity. I can understand this in some cases, but recently I have created a medieval fantasy system that does not use hit points, and it seems to be okay. Instead of hit points, when a character gets hit by an attack, you roll an Endurance skill check. If you succeed, you're still wounded (knife in the gut, arrow in the knee, etc.) but you manage to endure it well enough to keep fighting and you take no penalties. However, you might want to get those wounds treated soon before you bleed out or get infected. If you fail, you're knocked out, dead, or taking a penalty of some sort. It is a brutal system with a lot of deaths.

This is pretty much how Mutants and Masterminds handles it - I'd actually recommend taking a look at the specifics there. As for the broader question, there are tons of games that use non-HP wounding systems, and plenty more that don't use wound systems at all. HP is absolutely not a necessary mechanic.

[tensai_oni]

I suggest taking a look at Mutants and Masterminds' bruises/wounds system.

To answer the thread's title: nowadays I play more RPGs that don't have hit points than those that do. So no, they're not necessary.

[Pugwampy]

You are DM , its your game so do as you like . Personally i find the HP systen to be even more important then XP .

[IgnisDomini]

I personally like Exalted 3e's combat system.

Basically, there are two kinds of attacks - decisive attacks and withering attacks.

Most of the time when a character is attacking they'll be using a withering attack. Withering attacks, instead of doing damage to the health track, steal initiative from the target if they hit (target loses initiative equal to the damage done, attacker gains initiative equal to damage done + 1). Narratively, these attacks are things like glancing blows which cause the opponent to stumble, attacks which cause minor scratches distracting the opponent, etc. - stuff which doesn't directly injure them, but puts them at some sort of disadvantage/gives you an advantage.

Decisive attacks directly damage the health track (and will often kill a character in a single hit). When a character makes a decisive attack, if they miss, they lose a bit of initiative. If they hit, the roll for damage with a number of dice (Exalted uses a dice pool/successes system) equal to their current initiative, and the target loses that much actual health. The attacker's initiative then resets to three.

There are other things which add complexity to this system, like the fact that characters are unable to perform certain actions when their initiative is zero or below, and decisive attacks can be used to disarm, grapple, etc. instead of damage.

[erikun]

Yep, I was going to bring up how Mutants & Masterminds has basically the same system you've come up with.

Hit Points are not necessary, but they are a convenient shorthand and simplification for everyone at the table. You could have a complex system of physical toughness and endurance and pain tolerance which each player could go through before determining when they finally submit and go down... or you could have HP, a universal system which quickly tells everyone what the toughest target is and how much longer something can stay up. It's designed to be a fairly simple way of determining how much damage a character can take.

As for the Necromancer, I'm not sure what is running through the player's head. They could be upset that they were jumped when going around a corner, and had expected a chance at an awareness roll to react in time. They could be upset that they were knocked out in one hit. They could be upset at the system. It's hard to say, although the low-"HP" wizard running up ahead of the group and confronting an enemy alone is pretty foolish in any variant of D&D, which this seems to be.

[Beleriphon]

I suggest taking a look at Mutants and Masterminds' bruises/wounds system.

To answer the thread's title: nowadays I play more RPGs that don't have hit points than those that do. So no, they're not necessary.

M&M definitely different, in that is the escalating penalties to resist future successful attacks.

[Zman]

Hit Points are not necessary, but some method of trackingresience and/or plot armor usually is.

I like the idea of Fates Stress track and consequences. Alternatively, Wound/Vitality points is a fun change to Hit Points and separates your plot armor from your bodily damage capacity.

[Kami2awa]

There are other wound systems out there, but in my experience these often get complicated when it comes to unusual damage like falling, explosions, fire and so on. Abstract hit points greatly simplify the game.

However, the system you describe is also simple and easy to implement, but I would advise more levels of damage between 100% Healthy and Incapacitated.

Something like:

Healthy: No penalties.
Bruised: Minor penalties to dice checks.
Wounded: More penalties, may not be able to do difficult actions at all.
Badly Wounded: Major penalties, can't do much at all (but maybe can still crawl to the self-destruct button in time).
Incapacitated: Can't do anything.
Dead: Guess.

You can have really nasty attacks that drop you several levels on the table at a time, but use them sparingly and make it obvious to the PCs that the attack is worse than usual. You could also have one or more levels of "Super-Healthy" above Healthy that must be knocked off individually, to represent above-normal endurance from magic, superpowers etc.

Incapacitation in one hit may be realistic (perhaps, I'm not a medic) but it's frustrating for the PCs as they become hesitant to do anything. If death is too common, the game can easily become Tomb of Horrors, with PCs doing everything as if they are in a minefield.

[NRSASD]

I am quite intrigued by your system OP. Any chance you could post the rules somewhere, or point me in the direction of something similar? I'm doing a homebrew campaign of my own where the conventional hit point pools seem ill advised.

[AnBe]

I appreciate the replies people. You are fueling my mind with all sorts of awesome ideas.

There lies another problem with the game, and that is characters with really high Endurance. For example, the player characters were facing off against a huge boss enemy and his Endurance was +15. The player of the elven necromancer was frustrated by this, saying, "it is mathematically impossible to defeat this guy." So, I had him roll a Monster Lore check on the boss. He succeeded, so I gave him a hint: target and destroy his hands first, this will weaken him." The boss's hands were treated as a separate entity from his main body, and had a lower Endurance skill (+9). So they targeted his hands first and destroyed them, limiting his attacks and making the Endurance of his main body go down to +11. They were then able to defeat the boss, but the elven necromancer got covered in some nasty acid from the boss and nearly died.

The other player character was playing a Manbear Monk and as you can imagine, his Endurance skill was through the roof. In a different combat, he got ran through by two swords but was still able to keep fighting (though he needed immediate healing right after the battle). If a character's Endurance is "too high" then he/she becomes nearly invincible on the battlefield.

However, getting shot in the head with an arrow while you are not wearing a helmet is instant death, no matter how good your Endurance skill is. But, any warrior worth his salt is almost always wearing a helmet. Shooting someone in the head, though, is a pretty difficult shot (+5 to the DL).

I do use a d20 for this system and the occasional d6 roll but that's about it.

Also, if you win in a clash (two characters making opposed Melee Combat rolls against each other) instead of going right for the kill, you can "wear down" the opponent's Endurance skill, giving it a -2 penalty. This penalty can be rested off easily, but not in the middle of a fight obviously.

Still, despite all this, I am considering just having Hit Points in my game, although, the characters would not have very much HP to work with. And I would get rid of the Endurance skill as well. But I'm not 100% sure I want to do this yet. Hit points do simplify things, but the problem is it makes the game a bit too abstract and "video gamey" which is what I was trying to avoid when the idea of this game was first conceived.

I'm going to talk to my players about it, see what they think.

[Friv]

I'd definitely suggest ablative Endurance of some kind; your Endurance slowly goes down the more you get hit, making it more likely that you'll eventually fail.

I would also suggest a simple way for players (and possibly the most major of NPCs) to avoid one or two bad rolls. In Mutants & Masterminds, you can spend a hero point to reroll any die and always get at least 11 on the reroll, so you never get dropped in one unlucky hit.

And that's important, because getting taken out in one unlucky hit is extremely not fun, unless fights are of the sort that are resolved in five minutes of real time. It means a lot of sitting the battle out, even if you can recover after.

[JenBurdoo]

This makes me think about the way I'm doing it, which is basic hit points but with crit rolls when they run out, as in the Warhammer 40K rpgs. So far it's working okay, and it's a very "lite" game where as GM I feel free to impose whatever conditions seem appropriate without referring to a rulebook.

I like the idea of "one hit point with saves," but how about this: The save gets worse with each hit. If you pass your con save the first time, you're OK but next time you take one you have a -1 to all rolls, including the save. Then -2 and so on. You can get the minus reduced if you take a potion, a rest, a bandage, etc. This would be better at indicating a difference between injured, heathy and strengthened characters?

I do agree that overall it sounds better for gritty games such as modern day.

[Jormengand]

While it's not an RPG, I feel that Dreadfleet's ship damage system could easily be converted to one: an attack either deals some damage or it doesn't (your damage roll is really just a second attack roll) and if it does, you draw from a damage deck which might reduce your speed, tear apart your hull, or kill off your crew. Your crew and hull do act as sort-of hit points, but your crew are also used for your attacks and you could always substitute it out.

An interesting idea is to have attacks deal damage to some kind of ability score - say slashing attacks deal dexterity damage, piercing attacks deal strength damage and bludgeoning attacks deal intelligence damage, for example - but that wouldn't really work in a D&D-like system where you usually have at least one ability score where 12 points of damage to it is always enough to off you (or at least leave you in a coma).

[Knaight]

I've already recommended looking at Mutants and Masterminds, but it occurs to me that you should also look at Savage Worlds. It also has a system where you make a roll to resist damage (Toughness instead of Endurance), and while it technically speaking does have HP it only barely does. Anima Prime also has some cool stuff worth looking into for how to handle a system like this.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've seen a few alternatives to hit points in my time.

Wound Levels: the simplest, here (almost) everyone has a certain number of 'wound levels' that have incrementing penalties. A successful attack requires you to use wound levels to soak the damage, and when you're out of 'wound levels' you're unconscious or dead. However, it's really just a small number of HP with attached penalties, although I prefer it.

Ablative Toughness: in Mutants and Masterminds you roll a Toughness save to avoid taking damage. Fail by up to five and you get stunned, reducing your actions next turn. Fail by between six and ten, and you lose one point of Toughness until you can heal, making it easier to take you out. Fail by more than ten and you're out.

Wound Accumulation: something like Legends of the Wulin, where you take negative conditions when hit until one takes you out. LoW also has ripples, which every damaging attack inflicts and are what determines the severity of your wounds.

Stress and Consequences: okay, what Fate does is a little weird, but rather nice. Every character has 2-4 boxes on their character sheet, each with a numeric value (1-4, with all characters getting a 1 box and 2 box). When you get hit you can fill in any free stress box of a value equal to or greater than the value of the attack. Stress does not have to be filled in sequentially, and heals quickly. However, if you don't have the Stress to absorb an attack you can take a consequence to absorb the hit. Everyone has three consequences worth 2/4/6 damage, with some characters having an additional value 2. Each consequence reduces a hit by its value, so if I take a 4 hit but only have a 3 Stress box available I can take a Mild (value 2) Consequence and fill in my Stress Box, or take a Moderate (value 4) Consequence. Consequences heal slowly and can be invoked and compelled as an Aspect by you or your enemies. If you can't soak a hit you're taken out and your enemy decides what happens to you, but you can also choose not to soak a hit you could, removing you from the conflict but letting you have a say in what happens to you.

[Vitruviansquid]

I don't think it's actually that much of a problem when the monsters have high Endurance. Monsters get to break the rules, it keeps the game fresh. But the monk being indestructible is a problem.

Making endurance ablative was already suggested.

It also strikes me that the system may have a problem with how Endurance is earned. I don't know how you've set up character creation, but if it costs the same amount of character generation resources to raise your endurance from 9 to 10 as it does from 14 to 15, you've created a system where raising endurance causes your effective survivability to increase exponentially while the price is still linear. Some kind of cap on how much Endurance you could ever have (perhaps at some level of character advancement, or so long as you are a certain race or class) is an inelegant way to do this, but may not be as inelegant as increasing the cost of raising your endurance each time it is already increased.

There might also be weapons and spells that cap the amount of endurance you have to roll - for example, if I throw a fireball at you, you roll endurance to see how badly you took the hit, but if I drain your soul, your actual endurance doesn't matter so much, and you roll as if your endurance is, I dunno, 12.

[RickAllison]

If you want a way to represent withering defense while remaining, how about stealing a bit from Fantasy Flight's Star Wars? They tend to have really low HP levels, but that only represents going unconscious. Then, there are criticals that are rolled with a d100, with a table that goes up to 151+. Each time someone would take damage while unconscious, or suffer a bad blow while conscious, they would roll for the criticals with each unhealed critical adding +10 to the result.

Low results (1-45) might offer a penalty for the next round, medium results (46-90) might result in penalties that last for the encounter, high results (91-120) cause penalties that last until healed, extreme results (121-150) either permanently maim the character or put them at imminent risk of death (including The End Is Nigh from 145-150, where the medic has to rush over and hope he makes his check otherwise the person dies at the end of the round), and 151+ just outright kills the target.

There can be an immediate attempt to fix the critical wound, but otherwise it is one check per critical per week. Such a system gives you a way to keep the players whittling down high-Endurance creatures without having to kill them. Frankly, the critical system was one of the best components in that system...

The HP-Soak system made people either glass cannons playing rocket tag or nigh-unkillable behemoths with lacking social skills. The class system created the paradigm where people either just focused on that or totally ignored it to focus on skills. The dice system made it so there was no floor and the results were incredibly swingy (though I liked the dice manipulation mechanic).

[BayardSPSR]

There lies another problem with the game, and that is characters with really high Endurance.

Yeah, you've hit on the exact two problems with this kind of system (which I love): instant death, and mathematical invincibility. Recognizing these two problems has made me less mad about hitpoints than I used to be, but I still find systems without them more interesting (and have actually drifted further from the hitpoint concept with my own systems than I had before).

As other people have pointed out, imposing conditions other than death/unconsciousness/"you lose" solves the instant death problem. Having an upper limit on endurance can solve the mathematical invincibility one - but so can the "ablative toughness" concept mentioned by Anonymouswizard. The solutions are not exclusive; once you drop hitpoints, you open the door to a whole new world of interesting mechanics.

EDIT: Nice name, by the way.

[VoxRationis]

I'm not actually sure the mathematical invincibility is a problem per se. So long as you tie in attack strength somehow, it nicely models how certain attacks (mosquito v. human, BB gun v. tank, etc.) are not going to succeed in doing significant damage. Just make sure that you can scale attack strength somehow v. Endurance saves such that such a behemoth as you described would fare less well against, say, a 5-talent ballista.

[AuthorGirl]

This sounds very, very interesting. I like the fact that there are consequences, such as infections and blood loss, that do not seem to manifest themselves in Dungeons and Dragons. The realism of the combat sounds excellent as well, but the problem with my group is that their characters are all rather stoic. They would make an Endurance roll for something that, honestly, no one would keep fighting through; I can seriously imagine them trying that for having a sword literally stabbed right through their bodies. I do very much love the system you described, though, and I think I will adapt it for mental trials in spellcasting, which is turning into rather a consequence-free art. Hit points seem very necessary in my game, because they are a nice, simple, one-glance factor in an excessively chaotic situation; I will, however, put in an Endurance threshold (maybe this could be the new Bloodied?) into the hit point system, stating that after such-and-such an amount of hardship has been absorbed, the character is incapable of fighting; blood loss, spellcasting trauma, physical trauma, whatever - it would all play in to their temporarily being crippled.

A brutal system sounds quite inappropriate to my game, as really it gets rather ridiculous at times, and some of my players would certainly react badly to character death (there is much roleplaying). However, what works, works. Personally, I might introduce a semi-HP system that goes like this:
-your level and Endurance score (is that a thing?) determine your Endurance points
-say EP = 10. You can only do Endurance 10 times until the next long rest or game equivalent
-healing would help reset EP

It's a lot like hit points, but also more realistic. I might introduce it myself, or an equivalent, but everyone in my group has played various systems that are all HP-based. I myself am rather habituated.

[NichG]

I wrote a system where the premise is that characters have abilities that give them guaranteed evasion, but cost points to activate. In that system, you could choose to avoid everything for a round or two, but you'd quickly run out of points to spend. Alternately, you could permit some attacks to hit you and save your points to avoid the really dangerous stuff.

Using abilities also costs (though potentially from a different pool), so there's a bit of a bluffing game. You want your opponent to spend a lot to avoid things that didn't cost you much, so that they don't have anything left to spend but you still have enough to use a sufficiently lethal attack at the end. If you immediately come out with your most lethal attack, the enemy will just spend the same amount to dodge it as anything else.

Once the active dodge pool is through, characters are by default very fragile (one solid hit will take them down), but it's also possible to become passively non-fragile against specific things. So e.g. maybe you're fine letting swords hit you all day without spending a dodge, but if you let one fire attack through then you're toast.

So it's somewhere between hitpoints and non. Worked alright, but it took a few months for us to understand correct tactics in the system. Before that, players would let an attack hit not realizing that they'd be oneshotted, etc.

[Psykenthrope]

It sort of has hit points, but the One Roll Engine system tracks health in a way that I like.
Each body location has a certain number of health boxes. The more of these that are filled, the more bad things happen to you. Not sure if there's a hard and fast rule for whether or not a limb becomes unusable at full boxes, or if that's when it's destroyed.

[Morty]

Other people have already answered this question, in the only way that's true - no, they're not. And it's extremely useful to explore different ways of measuring the characters' endurance and resistance to injury or hardship. It's also a mistake to assume it's about realism - D&D's hit points aren't realistic, but they're pretty terrible for unrealistic games as well.

Really, though, "hit points" are kind of a varied in themselves. I mean, D&D, GURPS and Dark Heresy all use a measure that could be called "hit points". And yet, they don't really work alike, and getting wounded means completely different things in all of them. A pool of points gets depleted, but the devil's in the details.

[Cluedrew]

As people have said, no hit points are not necessary, there are other ways to represent character health. Of course if getting hurt is not really part of the game, then you don't need a health system at all. Most RPGs have some combat element thought (and the one in post 1 does) so most will then have some health. Not all though.

[Fri]

There's systems without hit points, as other people has mentioned.

Mutant and Mastermind is one, with similar system that you thought of.

Legend of the Wulin also use a rather similar system, but more narrative (you get and describe specific injuries on top of making next "knock out" rolls easier)

[Knaight]

With everything said that's been said: The original title was "DM Help...", and that does imply D&D. Getting away from HP In a D&D format and doing it well is going to take fairly extensive retooling. It's doable, as both Mutants and Masterminds and one of the Iron Somethings games show, but there's a lot involved in doing it. Most of this thread has been focused on a broader game design sense, where it's pretty obvious that HP is unnecessary as a great many games don't use it. With D&D specifically though, it's a bit trickier. Removing HP entirely is doable; it's not easy and it's not quick.

[BayardSPSR]

With everything said that's been said: The original title was "DM Help...", and that does imply D&D. Getting away from HP In a D&D format and doing it well is going to take fairly extensive retooling. It's doable, as both Mutants and Masterminds and one of the Iron Somethings games show, but there's a lot involved in doing it. Most of this thread has been focused on a broader game design sense, where it's pretty obvious that HP is unnecessary as a great many games don't use it. With D&D specifically though, it's a bit trickier. Removing HP entirely is doable; it's not easy and it's not quick.

It seems like the fact that D&D already has multiple kinds of damage might help that, though - you could make all damage do ability point damage, or be save-or-consequence effects.

[goto124]

Or set up situations where there are things to be done other than 'kill the opponent to the death'? I heard it suggested before, but I can't remember what exactly was suggested.

[NichG]

Setting strong time constraints on the length of fights helps avoid the 'trade blows until only one side is left standing' thing. Basically you have to give a reason that players must choose between 'achieve purpose' and 'kill that guy', rather than having 'kill that guy' be the easiest way to achieve a purpose unimpeded.

Otherwise it's almost always advisable to kill first, deal with the fiddly stuff later.

[James_the_Giant]

To maintain a sense of realism in combat and staying away from Hit Points, the OP might try incorporating a set of combat rules for 'aimed shots' with increases in difficulty to land a hit depending on the where on the body the blow landed. Then incorporating a small set of 'disabling effects' depending on that strike location such as getting hit in the head would be more difficult than getting hit in the torso and a solid blow to the head would result in a 'concussed' state requiring an Endurance roll to determine whether or not the target falls unconscious. Leg blows could result in minuses to the target's mobility and ability to dodge and such things. It would add a little complexity to combat, but would be more realistic than saying that just any old attack could render someone unconscious if they fail a single roll. I will grant that the Warlock in OP's example acted foolishly, but all the same it's supposed to be a game so a little bit of forgiveness within the game mechanics is necessary. If for instance the same Warlock had rounded the corner and simply been Kneecapped and unable to give chase he probably wouldn't have been as peeved by the result as he was by simply being rendered unconscious by just any old attack that happened to land with normal difficulty.

I'm making assumptions on the OP's 'difficulty to hit' mechanics. I'm assuming they have similarities to the Armor Class system in D&D being based off of Dexterity and Gear bonuses.

Just some suggestions, to add a level of realism while still being a little more forgiving in most instances.

[hifidelity2]

Star Wars (D6) uses this system

Roll Weapon Damage. The roll Characters Strength
If St > damage then no damage to PC

Damage Roll > Strength Roll By: Effect
0-3 Stunned
4-8 Wounded
9-12 Incapacitated
13-15 Mortally Wounded
16+ Killed


Stuns wear off after 1 round

If (wounded) damage is taken again then drop down to the next level – so a PC has

- No Damage (or just stuns)
- Wounded
- Double Wounded
- Incapacitated
- Mortally Wounded
- Killed

Obviously you can go from wounded to killed in one round if the failure in the Dam v St roll is large enough

[kyoryu]

The funny thing is that, in one way, hit points are actually more realistic than most alternatives.

Most "actual" fights don't involve landing strings of hits. It's a matter of testing defenses, trying to get someone out of position, and then once you've got them to create an opening, you go for the kill shot.

Hit point based systems model this a lot better than most "realistic" alternatives. A "realistic" model of that would be a bear to keep track of, so doing it fairly abstractly seems to work decently.

Of course, hit points work fairly poorly in lots of other situations.

[NichG]

The funny thing is that, in one way, hit points are actually more realistic than most alternatives.

Most "actual" fights don't involve landing strings of hits. It's a matter of testing defenses, trying to get someone out of position, and then once you've got them to create an opening, you go for the kill shot.

Hit point based systems model this a lot better than most "realistic" alternatives. A "realistic" model of that would be a bear to keep track of, so doing it fairly abstractly seems to work decently.

Of course, hit points work fairly poorly in lots of other situations.

This gives me an interesting idea. What about hitpoints as relative positioning/maneuvering? So when you engage an enemy/set of enemies, you start to lose hitpoints as they maneuver you to a more advantageous position for themselves, and they lose hitpoints as you do vice versa. But if at any point one side lets up the pressure, the other side fully 'heals'. Maybe in this system when you 'damage' the opponent it always heals your side, so the hitpoint counters are more like a tug of war to control the situation than an injury tracker.

So then the question is, how to shape that into interesting gameplay? I could see something where the game system encourages a sort of cycling of party members into the 'reserves' to heal, while the healthy ones stand up front and hold the line. To do that, you'd want groups to tend to damage each-other more slowly the bigger the groups become, so that individuals can rotate out without causing the group to collapse, so long as the group is kept above a critical mass. That could create interesting situations if individual party members are bringing functionally different things to the group - each party member's resting rounds create a challenge for the others to deal without the thing they provide, and give a tactical opportunity in the form of a specific weakness that the other side might be able to exploit if their timing is good. Also, if multiple party members end up needing to hit the reserves at the same time, then more extreme strategies might be necessary (e.g. maybe one guy can 'hold' multiple enemies but they're definitely going to drop, letting everyone else get a full refresh out of it). It also has room for quite a bit of elaboration. For instance, you could have maneuvers that sacrifice 'health' in order to inflict status conditions, then in turn have those status conditions impact the ability to refresh/disengage/etc. Maneuvers that let you transfer 'health' to an ally would let you have someone whose role is to find ways to cycle in and out of the reserves, essentially bringing fresh hitpoints into their side and letting the front-liners stay engaged. In-combat stealth would become very important, since an assassin who hides and ambushes someone trying to disengage can basically block them from refreshing and mess up the timing.

The really big downside of this is I can see fights taking forever. Hitpoints normally serve a purpose as a sort of monotonic winding-down of resources, so eventually the conflict is forced to conclude. When its so easy to heal, you lose that aspect of it. So you'd want something else to take over that role - I'm not sure what it would be, per se.

[kyoryu]

Except that they're not monotonic counters, thanks to healing magic.

Hit points have always represented a lot of things - luck, fatigue, positioning, etc. "Meat" has pretty much always been the smallest factor in hit points.

[NichG]

Except that they're not monotonic counters, thanks to healing magic.

Hit points have always represented a lot of things - luck, fatigue, positioning, etc. "Meat" has pretty much always been the smallest factor in hit points.

Well, healing magic usually is designed to either have a limited number of uses (so it can be thought of as an extra pool), or to be unable to outpace damage on average. When healing can outpace damage, you're mostly looking at games with asymmetric rules, so the PCs can heal but enemies can't (so fights are a robustness/endurance challenge).

[Ravens_cry]

Depending on the style and tone, you could also have bonuses when at whatever the equivalent of low HP is, encouraging a do or die, hail mary style of play. Is it realistic? Hell no, but it fits thematically.

[napoleon_in_rag]

Hit points have always represented a lot of things - luck, fatigue, positioning, etc. "Meat" has pretty much always been the smallest factor in hit points.

I agree with you as far as describing PC hit points differences. For example, that explains why a Lvl 1 fighter has 2d10 hp and a Lvl 8 fighter has 8d10 hp even though both characters are the same size with the same job.

But "Meat" has everything to do with why an Orc, an Ogre, and a Hill Giant have different hp.

[VoxRationis]

Not to mention that all the associated rules, descriptions, and "fluff" point to physical wounds, physical healing, etc. Damaging effects rely on "hits" (and indeed, difficulty-to-hit is modeled quite differently from resilience), poisons are applied based on "hits" (implying actual connection of the blow, rather than a "near-miss" or whatever the "not-meat" camp calls it), morale effects and confidence boosters rely on other mechanics, rather than increasing or decreasing HP (with the exception of the 5e bard's Vicious Mockery). Basically, every aspect of the rules surrounding hit points points to them reflecting physical injury and resilience except the description of HP, which was thrown in as a weak cover to dodge criticism.

If you really wanted hit points to reflect the myriad defensive attributes and techniques the "not-meat" camp ascribes to them, then most other defensive statistics and attributes (AC/Defense, etc.) would be folded into hit points.

[Jormengand]

I feel that the number of hit points should be your ability to withstand damage, whereas hit point damage is the same amount of injury for all people. So if you only have two hit points, then a cut across the chest from a single sword slash will knock you out by bringing you to -2. Action McHero, on the other hand, is still just as injured when he gets taken from 28 hit points down to 24, but he can withstand that cut on his chest a lot better. After another 7 cuts across random parts of his body, dealing 4 or 5 damage each, McHero finally gives in and collapses. Note that McHero never necessarily had any more "Meat" than you, but instead was just better at taking a hit. This makes sense: when a boxer gets hit round the face, they get hit round the face. They don't get any more or less hit-round-the-face than you, or if they did, that's because their enemy rolled low on their damage roll. They don't tend to have any more or less face than you (although the image of a boxer having a face that's 14 times as big as yours is mildly amusing). They're just better at taking a hit.

[malloyd]

Still, despite all this, I am considering just having Hit Points in my game, although, the characters would not have very much HP to work with. And I would get rid of the Endurance skill as well. But I'm not 100% sure I want to do this yet. Hit points do simplify things, but the problem is it makes the game a bit too abstract and "video gamey" which is what I was trying to avoid when the idea of this game was first conceived.


Hit Points don't *have* to be particularly simple or video gamey. Most "modern" RPG systems (i.e. written after about 1985) use hit points but with lots of add on complexity - consider Rolemaster's convoluted "critical" (i.e. maybe half of all hits) tables, or the GURPS combat system (which I really like, but if you play with all the optional rules on fights can take *hours* of play time).

Your system reminds me of Ars Magica, so you might want to look at that for how somebody else handled a similar idea with maybe a little more complexity. Looks like you can still get the old edition legally for free at
http://www.warehouse23.com/products/ars-magica-4th-edition-core-rulebook

[Morty]

There are games where "hit points" of some sort represent positioning, endurance and such. There's Exalted 3e, as mentioned. Pillars of Eternity, although a video game, has an endurance bar and a health bar. The former refills by itself or through abilities. The former is depleted when you run out of endurance, and is hard to refill without resting. D&D, though, isn't such a game, despite people's attempts to rationalize its hit points this way.