Are Hit Points necessary?

[GSHamster]

The hit point system works, but I think it would be nice if players got to choose whether it represented actual hits or more like plot armor. I don't like the idea of my level 5 character actually being stabbed eight times and still standing, I'd rather it was more like Plot Armor.

What if players had a method of choice involving the narration of hit point loss?

Despite its other problems, this was the one great strength of the Wounds/Vitality systems. It clearly separated hits into grazes/small cuts/plot armor and actual body wounds.

I always found that a lot of the "narrative" problems with hp went away with Wounds/Vitality. They were replaced by other problems, of course, like over-focus on Wounds, and increased swinginess in combat, if I remember correctly.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

Despite its other problems, this was the one great strength of the Wounds/Vitality systems. It clearly separated hits into grazes/small cuts/plot armor and actual body wounds.

I always found that a lot of the "narrative" problems with hp went away with Wounds/Vitality. They were replaced by other problems, of course, like over-focus on Wounds, and increased swinginess in combat, if I remember correctly.

I like how FantasyCraft does Vitality and Wounds.
Here is what they are in FC:

Vitality - mixture of endurance, luck, and will to fight, measuring a character's ability to avoid injury. Losing Vitality does not mean actual physical damage but rather combat fatigue, as it gradually becomes more difficult for the character to avoid being hurt.

Wound Points - direct measure of a character's remaining vigor, measuring his ability to sustain injury. These are real, physical attacks. Your dead at -10 Wounds, but this can easily be changed for different types of games with campaign qualities.

Threats and Critical Hits in FC:
If you roll a natural roll in the threat range, you may spend 1 (or more Action Dice) to make it a critical.
1 Action Die - the attack goes straight to Wound Points or, if the the damage exceeds the target's Constitution score, he can
2 Action Die - inflict a critical injury, and roll on the Table of Ouch (a really cool table that inflicts actual injuries on a person).

This is what I like.

What helps player characters out in this game is that only Special Characters in the game can do Critical hits, unless a Standard character has the Treacherous npc quality. By splitting NPCs up according to type (Special and Standard), with standard being the most common, Player Characters will hardly ever be suffering those random critical hits by the minions in the game. Only those special NPCs that are the boss and BBEG's will get the honor to inflict critical hits, and therefore hits direct to wounds.

 

[Pain Noodle]

I prefer the wound box method a la WoD or Cyberpunk. Deadlands had a decent system as well. Hit points annoy me. If my character has one hit point remaining it drives me crazy that he isn't operating at penalties. Also, hit locations aren't a must but are highly appreciated when available. Another system that does a great job with damage is A Song of Ice and Fire. You can take damage and if you take a certain amount, you die. You can also choose to accept Wounds which negate a certain amount of damage taken and give minor penalties or accept Injuries which negate all damage but give major penalties. As for d20, I'm working on a new damage system...

 

[1Mac]

Well, you're still keeping track of a number - just using a physical representation rather than a pencil mark. You could use M&Ms for your hit points, you know...

Yes, yes, but I'll say it one more time: I'm not advocating zero bookkeeping; I'm saying there are systems that involve less bookkeeping than hit points!

Dice pool mechanics like that are pretty heavy on the "death spiral" - getting wounded = losing dice = losing ability to accomplish stuff. And, of course, with lots of dice meandering around the table, making sure dice don't accidentally wander in and out can be troublesome.

Which is mostly to say - nothing is perfect.

Fair enough, but what I was originally responding to was the contention that hit points are advantageous because they involve little bookkeeping, which I think is not only untrue but a bizarre claim. Any damage system will have it's problems, of course.

 

[Umbran]

Yes, yes, but I'll say it one more time: I'm not advocating zero bookkeeping; I'm saying there are systems that involve less bookkeeping than hit points!

My point is that I don't see how this is less bookkeeping.

For hit points, you have a number of hit points. It goes up and down.

In a dice pool you have a number of dice, it goes up and down.. If you want to claim that the physical representation of the dice makes it easier to manage - use tokens for your hit points and then they look pretty much the same.

How are they different?

And, honestly, I don't see that adding and subtracting from a single number - with no repercussions - counts as heavy bookkeeping. Now, if you had to feed that number through other sub-systems to do accounting for fallout (say, do calculations of how the hit point loss gave you modifiers on various checks and saves) then I would agree with you.

But it's one number! I am not sure you can get any simpler.

Now, one might make an argument that in the dice pool system, the number goes up and down less frequently. I'd call that highly anecdotal, for one thing. For another, I'd ask if this were as much an issue of the adventure design as mechanic - D&D may have more combat bookkeeping because the archetypal D&D game has more fights, not because the mechanic itself is bookkeeping-heavy.

I've run D&D campaigns where there was typically one combat per session. Nobody was wearing holes in their sheets keeping track of their hit points.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I am mostly pro hp in a D&D sense: not necessary physical harm. Combat as abstract as possible makes a game more fun (at least for me)

Having heroes rest for weeks just to recover from a wound is not so fun. 4e is on the right track with surges and hp as different resources. And Minions having no hp. (thus you don´t have to rationalize why there are crippled people and such)

Th only thing i agree with is the escalation of hp beeing a bit problematic.

I know it is designed that way, to lower the influence of luck. In older editions you were hit less, but harder. A single hit could take you out of combat. (due to hp or due to conditions)

I don´t now how to reduce hp in 4e however. The way the attacks work, you need a little buffer.

 

[Votan]

People have tried alternatives to Hit Points in many systems. My favorite early example was Rolemaster which used both "Concussion hits" (for minor damage) and "criticals" (for serious damage). Armor increased concussion hits but reduced the severity of critical hits. It took a lot of complexity yo implement, though.

 

[El Mahdi]

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[El Mahdi]

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[1Mac]

My point is that I don't see how this is less bookkeeping.

Smaller numbers mean less bookkeeping. D&D characters can have dozens, or even hundreds, of hit points. Dice pools typically involve fewer units than that.

The system I'm working with now uses damage saves, where passing a save means you earn a hit token that makes subsequent damage saves more difficult. Failure basically means death*. Healing removes hit tokens. No one ever gets more than 10 hit tokens, usually far less. There's still a little bit of fiddly-ness, but I don't have to wait for people to add and subtract hit points. We just toss tokens back and forth. It's a lot smoother.

There's a separate issue, by the way, of calculating hit points during character creation, which for me is up there with skill ranks among tedious things I don't want to deal with.

*There's an intermediary "bloodied" stage that's a bow both to condition tracking and to 4e mechanics, but I could have built the system without it.