D&D General Are Hit Points Meat? (Redux): D&D Co-Creator Saw Hit Points Very Differently

D&D co-creator Dave Arneson wasn't a fan of hit points increasing with level. According to the excellent Jon Peterson's Playing at the World he felt that hit points should be fixed at character creation, with characters becoming harder to hit at higher levels.

Of course, this is an early example of the oft-lengthily and vehemently discussed question best summarised as ‘Are hit points meat?’— a debate which has raged for over 40 years and isn’t likely to be resolved today! (but no they’re not)

Arneson's Hit Points for Characters

Game Wizards is very decidedly not a book about who invented which system in D&D. But early drafts of the book did track one design choic...

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

Arneson later created a hit point equation in his 1979 RPG Adventures in Fantasy which was a game in which he hoped to correct "the many errors in the original rules".

 

[cmad1977]

Hit points are meat when they are, and aren’t when they aren’t.

This isn’t hard people.

 

[Lanefan]

Vitality/wounds is a wishlist for 6e for me, I think it solves so many of the narrative issues with hit points and healing, and offers new mechanics.

the reason it failed for Star Wars IMO was the allowance of crits/sneak attacks to bypass vitality. It just turned high level combat into “who can crit first”.

In our body-fatigue system, pretty much the only time I let attack damage bypass fatigue points and go straight to bodies is when trying to, say, slit the throats of held or sleeping foes but not rolling well on the attempt. A good roll = outright kill, a really bad roll means you failed completely, and a low but not awful roll means you didn't get the kill but the damage you roll is all b.p. - and as most people don't have many b.p. chances are the target will end up dead or dying anyway.

 

[Li Shenron]

People say meat points are 'realistic' because you die from one stab, happily ignoring that people have survived being stabbed a dozen times, falling from terminal velocity or having rebar pinioned through their brain.

Luck is basically WAY more realistic than meat points.

That is only because you hear a million times the story of that single guy who survived 12 stabbings, while the other thousands who died of a single stab just make a small line in the news.

It's the same misinformation mechanism that still make a lot of people believe gambling is convenient (and let's stop at gambling to avoid being banned).

 

[Argyle King]

It does seem more like WWE American Wrestling where the hero can be beat on for 10 minutes and appears near dead laying on the mat after being beat with a chair- only to hear the chant of the crowd and draw upon his inner reserves to shake off the damage and rise to finish off the BBEG with a super-cool stunt.

True, but when wrestling is done well, there's still some semblance of verisimilitude.

Ring-psychology is part of putting together a coherent match.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think the discussion should not forget the main practical point at the gaming table, which is about having tactical choice points between the start of a battle and the possible end in defeat.

In all editions of D&D your HP increase by level and so does the average amount of damage you expect to take each round. What matters most is how many rounds you have to change your plan or make a choice that can steer the battle in your favor before you lose.

Arneson probably had in mind that the probability of being hit at all was sufficient to create a proper combat length and choice points, without the need for HP to also scale.

The difference between the 2 approaches is in the fact that with Arneson rules your relative losses of health would be more sudden and conspicuous at higher levels: you would be hit less frequently but probably your higher-level opponents would take a bigger chunk of your health each time they hit, making higher level combat more dramatic (but not necessarily faster at all).

Whether this would be a good idea or not is itself debatable: on one hand it makes sense for characters that fighting gets easier because they get better, but from a gaming perspective it also makes sense that the game difficulty increases...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This is exactly the problem with most wound/vit systems I've seen. The whole point of vitality is to act as a shield against random death. If you allow crits, which are totally random, to bypass it, then the shield no longer works and the whole mechanic was a waste of time.

I wouldn't mind seeing D&D embrace a wound/vit system (without allowing crits to bypass vit, obviously), but I can't imagine it will ever happen. Hit points get the job done well enough and have both simplicity and tradition on their side.

I agree that was a fundamental problem of the wound and vitality system as implemented back then.

An alternate take I could see is that crits and some other effects only inflict a small amount of wound damage normally, so you can have wounds occuring occassionally that can trigger effects that only make sense if serious injuries are caused.

• If you score a critical hit, you deal 1 wound damage.
• If a character becomes bloodied (has lost more than half his total vitality) by an attack's damage, he takes 1d4 (or also just 1) wound damage.
• If a character has no vitality points remaining or is subject to a coup-de-grace, he takes the listed damage directly to wounds.
• Falling damage: Make relevant ability/skill check to slow or catch your fall to reduce the effective height of the fall in half. For every full 10 ft you fall after adjusting for the check, you suffer 1 point of wound damage, plus 1d6 point of vitality damage (to a maximum of Height to reach terminal velocity d6). If you failed the check, you suffer an additional d6 wound damage. (Wound damage may be adjusted by character size class - d4 for small, d8 for large?)

If wounds = constitution, you can probably not build around trying to get 8+ crits in a fight (at least not without also removing the target's vitality points), and a single lucky crit isn't going to do anything serious.

But you have the chance of taking some minor wounds before you run out of vitality, which gives you some game mechanicical support for the fiction saying that you took some injuries in a fight without requiring you to run out of all vitality points. Depending on how hard it is to restore wounds and what other effects being wounded causes, you also have a dial to define what long-term effects wounds would have in your game.
And you can make poison and similar effects a special mechanic that only applies when you inflict a wound to someone, and design and balance them level accordingly.

 

[Iry]

Even Gygax said that they were more like "Points until you are hit."

 

[Michael Linke]

D&D co-creator Dave Arneson wasn't a fan of hit points increasing with level. According to the excellent Jon Peterson's Playing at the World he felt that hit points should be fixed at character creation, with characters becoming harder to hit at higher levels.

Of course, this is an early example of the oft-lengthily and vehemently discussed question best summarised as ‘Are hit points meat?’— a debate which has raged for over 40 years and isn’t likely to be resolved today! (but no they’re not)

Arneson's Hit Points for Characters

Game Wizards is very decidedly not a book about who invented which system in D&D. But early drafts of the book did track one design choic...

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

View attachment 145544

Arneson later created a hit point equation in his 1979 RPG Adventures in Fantasy which was a game in which he hoped to correct "the many errors in the original rules".

View attachment 145545

His exploding dice mechanic is interesting. It has strange implications. For example it's impossible to deal exactly 2 damage. If your initial roll is a 2, you would roll a 2nd d6 and add it to the result

 

[Michael Linke]

I did a quick check in my browser's js console and got this distribution for his damage mechanic:



1: "16.706%"
3: "2.7851%"
4: "2.8011%"
5: "3.221%"
6: "3.6879%"
7: "4.234%"
8: "4.824%"
9: "2.7613%"
10: "3.6266%"
11: "3.5924%"
12: "3.7377%"
13: "3.8243%"
14: "3.8246%"
15: "3.7099%"
16: "3.5276%"
17: "3.6539%"
18: "3.6337%"
19: "3.5619%"
20: "3.4205%"
21: "3.242%"
22: "2.9772%"
23: "2.6969%"
24: "2.3983%"
25: "1.9995%"
26: "1.6737%"
27: "1.2828%"
28: "0.9548%"
29: "0.6649%"
30: "0.43%"
31: "0.2729%"
32: "0.1524%"
33: "0.0741%"
34: "0.0343%"
35: "0.0106%"
36: "0.0021%"

It's impossible to roll a 2 with this rule, and the most common result is 1.

(function(){

    function roll() { return Math.floor(Math.random() * 6) + 1 };

    var results = {};
    const len = 1000000;
    for(let c = 0; c < len; c++) {
        const pn = roll();
        let n = pn;
        for(let d = 0; d < pn - 1; d++) {
            n += roll();
        }
        if(!results['' + n])
            results[ '' + n] = 0;
        results['' + n]++;
    }
    for(let result in results) { results[result] = '' + (results[result] / (len / 100)) + '%' }
    return results;
})()

Edit: the percentages above are based on 1,000,000 randomized trials. The actual probability differs slightly.

 

[lingual]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record...

In 5e, hit points have to be meat, and heroes are demigods. Any reasonably healthy PC at level 5 or so can, every evening, walk off a 5 story building and land on the cobblestones below (5d6), to to bed, and feel 100% fine the following morning.

The fact that this can be done EVERY DAY means it can't be "luck". Of course sometimes people fall from 5 stories and are fine (ish), but the great majority of the time, such a fall is lethal. The heroes aren't ducking the ground.

I've always felt that these types of falls that don't kill would be like Batman type of falls. Where they use walls, ledges, trees,.etc. to slow their fall.

Now if a player says they are going to belly flop off a skyscraper, I just warn them beforehand that they will just be dead.