Forked Thread: Alternatives to mountains of hit points

Forked from: The Issue of Hit Point Inflation and Related Materia

Originally Posted by Jack7
I see hit point inflation (and I'm doing something now I should have done a long time ago, I'm gonna do away with hit points in my game) as turning battles into grinding bar-room brawls instead of intense, dangerous, lethal, combat encounters.

I've got no interest in fighters who win combats through no better, more efficient, or more clever means than by slow attrition because that is the way a system is designed to promote the idea of combat.

Combatants should be efficient and effective killers, not brawlers, (especially fighters, in any other situation professional combatants are trained and practice to kill, not to "attrit away hit points") and monsters should be dangerous and highly lethal, not fat piñatas that it takes an hour to break open.

When I opened up the 4E Monster Manual and saw Orcus had 1,525 hit points, and that a Blue Dragon had 1,290 hit points I said to myself, "hell, these aren't creatures, or even beings, these are BOLOs and M1 Abrams."

If I wanted to fight a supercarrier or an imaginary walking tank with a thin sliver of something I hold in my hand I'll do it with Jedi mind powers and a lightsabre. At least I'd have some kind of cartoony chance of success.

But if I've got to put down a Demon with 1,525 hit points by no better method than hit point attrition (no matter the actual method of attrition) then as far as I'm concerned hit points have run their course of usefulness.



Ok lets discuss what can be used to measure what hit points do now. If we can come up with something awesome enough then we could have a better minion system too.

It's already been done. It's the Toughness save that Green Ronin introduced for Mutants and Masterminds and their True20.

I kind of like the way that Legend of the Five Rings does it. Basically you have different stages of wounds: healthy, nicked, grazed, hurt, injured, crippled, down and out. To go from one stage to the next you multiply your Earth Ring(which is the lowest of your stamina and willpower traits) rating and multiply it by 2(except to go from down to out, where you multiply by 5). You take penalties to act at each stage. At "down" you have to spend void to act, and at "out" you can't act.

Translated to D&Dese, I would say that you would have a number of hit points in each stage equal to your con and wis bonuses combined. I'd say that if you wanted to apply penalties for injury, you begin to do so at the "hurt" stage. Replace void with action points and you're set.

For a more drawn out combat(which 4E encourages) I would make the following alteration to the above. Instead of it being straight hit points in each stage, make each stage a threshold. So let's say that you have a total bonus of +5 for con and wis. To go from healthy to nicked, you have to take at least 10 points of damage from a single attack. If you get hit for 8, then nothing happens. On the other hand, if you get hit for 20, that would be enough to take you straight from healthy to grazed. This would favor heavy weapons and, conveniently enough, strikers.

Of course, I'm not sure how this could affect the overall math of the game. You may need to tweak other systems to make it work.

DEFCON 1 said:

It's already been done. It's the Toughness save that Green Ronin introduced for Mutants and Masterminds and their True20.

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This is exactly what I was going to bring up in the other thread when I saw this.

Divide the hp by 10. Sure there will be more dying.

DEFCON 1 said:

It's already been done. It's the Toughness save that Green Ronin introduced for Mutants and Masterminds and their True20.

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I don't know enough about the crunch of these to know how well they work. I will take a look at the basic rules and see how it works.

It depends on what sort of fights you want to model, and what role fighting plays in your game system.

In 4e, fighting has a very clear role- it is the thing that your characters rock at, and the thing that makes them special, and you win it through tactical decision making. This favors longer, less swingy combat. Under this paradigm you want combat to take up a reasonable amount of time, and you want the random factor to force the players to adapt and augment their tactics on the fly, but you don't necessary want the random factor to turn what should be a victory into a rout due to a few rolls of the dice. Higher hit points support this goal.

In a different game system, with different goals, you want different hit points. To use an extreme example, in Og: Unearthed, combat has a very different goal. The focus of the game is on player interaction, and on the game's unique language issues. Combat is intended to be nasty, brutish, and to go very bad for the PCs. So the rules of combat are very short, very easy to understand, and characters die very fast. There are hit points, but you get very, very few of them.

So... really, it depends on your goal. What do you want the focus of your game to be? How much time do you want to spend on combat? How do you want combats to be won?

Here are different ways I've seen things done.

1. 4e style, tactical combat.
2. Simulationist.
3. Combat description focused.
4. Combat as something you get through in order to get back to the real game.
5. "Creativity" combat. By this I mean, your characters win fights by ignoring the rules and doing things like lobbing fifteen pound barrels of alchemist's fire into the enemy stronghold.
6. Poorly written, unfocused rules that don't know what they're trying to accomplish, or that try to accomplish too much and fail at everything.

Each one of these rewards different ways of handling combat, and therefore different ways of handling hit points. Well, [6] doesn't reward anything at all, but you know what I mean. There are probably even more options than this, and some of these categories could be broken down a bit more, but this is a start.

So in order to know what should be done with hit points, decide where you are on the chart. Or add to it.

Cadfan said:

...you want the random factor to force the players to adapt and augment their tactics on the fly, but you don't necessary want the random factor to turn what should be a victory into a rout due to a few rolls of the dice. Higher hit points support this goal..

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There is more than one way to skin this particular cat. We use the Martial Pool "roll many / keep one" system to shape the odds. So rather than giving the players, (high level NPCs or major Monsters etc.) ridiculous amounts of hit points that stretch fights out into endless, boring attrition matches, you just give your higher level players more dice to roll with each attack or defense, they keep the highest die and discard the rest.

This way they can shape their luck, making them much more powerful than regular mooks without distorting them so much that they are literally completely invulnerable to being shot with twenty arrrows or falling off of a 100' cliff or being thrown into a lava pit. Instead your PCs have the flexibility to assign priorities in different ways so that combat is never predictable.

Sure there are various goals for a given gaming system, I don't grasp why DnD has decided to go into only one specific direction, but for those of us who are willing to tinker with the rules a little (and I do mean a little) I think there are always more creative options, we don't have to buy into all these same old assumptions just because a lot of other people did.

You don't have to make every PC into Jason Vorheez to have fun, thats just one kind of Character from one kind of movie. There are other types of horror movies, not to mention sci fi, fantasy, western, film noire etc. etc.

G.

Galloglaich said:

There is more than one way to skin this particular cat. We use the Martial Pool "roll many / keep one" system to shape the odds. So rather than giving the players, (high level NPCs or major Monsters etc.) ridiculous amounts of hit points that stretch fights out into endless, boring attrition matches, you just give your higher level players more dice to roll with each attack or defense, they keep the highest die and discard the rest.

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That reduces randomness. Lengthier combats allow randomness to occur, but reduce the effect of randomness on the overall outcome of the battle. In individual rounds, your fortunes will ebb and flow more with the high hit point/longer fight system.

Whether the longer combats are endless attrition matches or tactically rich experiences is... partially the system, and partially personal taste.

Cadfan said:

That reduces randomness. Lengthier combats allow randomness to occur, but reduce the effect of randomness on the overall outcome of the battle. In individual rounds, your fortunes will ebb and flow more with the high hit point/longer fight system.

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No, you are wrong, it allows the PC (NPC etc.) to influence where the randomness impacts the fight, rather than muffling it in general so that it only has a marginal incremental effect. They decide where they put their dice, on offense, defense, counterattacks, disarms, multiple attacks, more damage, saving throws or whatever. So do their opponents if they are powerful enough. This makes for a very dynamic, dramatic fight rather than a drawn out contest of battering rams.

Whether the longer combats are endless attrition matches or tactically rich experiences is... partially the system, and partially personal taste.

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My only problem is that certain systems channel us into only one way of playing the game, where every high level PC is basically Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorheez. I saw Freddie vs. Jason, it was kind of boring.

Not everybody wants to play that way.

G.