Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Removing Hit Points from the Game
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7580372" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Most people don't understand what hit points do.</p><p></p><p>The main advantage of hit points is that they make encounters mostly predictable. You can estimate how much damage monsters will do, and how much damage monsters will take, and assess whether that outcome is one that is reasonable. If you don't have hit points, you can't predict how things will play out, because everything devolves down to individual die rolls. Randomly one side or the other will roll well, and that one good roll determines the outcome of the fight. In that case, the best you can predict is the percentage chance that this will be the fight a PC dies or the PC loses, and that chance is always surprisingly high compared to systems with hit points. Think of systems without hit points as always devolving down to a situation where every threat is a "save or die" threat. You may have mechanically made the chance that the death is saved against fairly high, but it will still inevitably happen.</p><p></p><p>There is a corollary to that and that is that without hit points, players lose the ability to react to changing circumstances. If you don't have hit points, then when something goes bad, it tends to go back completely and without chance of recovery. One moment someone is fine and the next someone is dead. No one gets a chance to adjust their tactics to deal with a problem.</p><p>Finally, hit points serve a narrativist goal of giving heroes plot protection so that there is character continuity (or at least can be character continuity) over the course of a story. If you want to tell any sort of character driven story in an RPG, then you need to give the protagonists some sort of plot protection and hit points are some of the most efficient ways of doing that.</p><p></p><p>So all that said, you don't seem to really mind hit points per se. What seems to be bothering you is D&D's built in zero to hero story arc that tends to make all D&D stories some sort of Bildungsroman where a relative unknown rises from obscurity to centrality in the story universe and that typically in modern D&D this progession happens really quickly. </p><p></p><p>And I think you're going to find that it is very difficult to mechanically write that out of D&D, because if you pull on that thread you'll find it is attached to literally everything else in the game. In edition to having to adjust that, you'll need to also adjust the balance with monsters. And, further, you'll need to adjust the offensive balance since spells and attacks tend to inflate at a rate that lets them mostly keep up with the inflating hit point pool, so that if you adjust hit points without adjusting attacks you'll quickly end up where everyone is a glass cannon. </p><p></p><p>What you can do is introduce a cap of some sort. For example in 1e, hit points were mostly capped at 'name level' with only small amounts of hit points added for each level after that. However, this worked only because by 10th level, characters pretty much already had more hit points than almost anything they'd encounter. And even then, it didn't really work, because damage increases resulted in everything, both PC's and monsters tending to be glass cannons unless you really reworked how monsters worked. Similarly, many people in 3e capped hit points at 6th level, or 8th level or some other low level of advancement. But while these 'Epic 6th' level games work, they don't stop the problem you have nor do they easily deal with the fact that so much stuff is intended for more than 6th or 8th level characters.</p><p></p><p>But what you seem to be most concerned about is something much more narrow, and that is how fast leveling is in 3e or later editions.</p><p></p><p>And the solution I suggest for you is to slow the game down. Award half as much experience points, or even less. Or require increasingly large amounts of experience points to level up. Build in more down time between adventures and avoid the franctic paced compressed adventures typical of most modern published modules and in particular adventure paths. Note, this isn't actually a new problem as you can look at for example the 'G Series' 'Against the Giants' proto-Adventure Path from the earliest days of D&D and its abundantly clear that the writer (Gygax) is power leveling the party by dropping much more treasure than would be typical in order to ensure that the party levels up fast enough to allow the modules to be played back to back.</p><p></p><p>Pathfinder 1e has a really nice solution to this in variable advancement tracks that adjust the amount of XP needed to advance to the pacing that a table wants to have. </p><p></p><p>The thing about slowing the game down is that it is a change you can make without the need to adjust any of the rules. You simply have to adjust how you pace and write your adventures. </p><p></p><p>My longest running campaign is has about 140 4 hour sessions. Over the course of those 640 hours of play, the PC's have reached ~10th level. That means that they've leveled up only about once per ~71 hours of play, or roughly once per 18 sessions. This will not seem super fast. While your PC's will eventually reach the point where what was once challenging is now something that is trivial, it will not be 2 sessions later. Now, the thing is, I have been running what is effectively an adventure path and at this point only about 6 months of real time have gone by. So they are leveling up on average about every 20 in game days. This is still a rather quick rate of advancement all things considered, since 6 months ago they were nobodies and now they are big important people, but the player's experience of it is not "Wow this is so unrealistic how fast we've leveled up" unless they really start thinking about it. </p><p></p><p>One thing I strongly encourage you to consider though is player buy-in. Not every table is going to be great with only leveling up after 72 hours of play. Many players love to 'ding' and love to plan out characters and if the tables aesthetics of play are more mechanical than narrative and more character focused than player focused, you could end up with very dissatisfied players if you slow the game down too much.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7580372, member: 4937"] Most people don't understand what hit points do. The main advantage of hit points is that they make encounters mostly predictable. You can estimate how much damage monsters will do, and how much damage monsters will take, and assess whether that outcome is one that is reasonable. If you don't have hit points, you can't predict how things will play out, because everything devolves down to individual die rolls. Randomly one side or the other will roll well, and that one good roll determines the outcome of the fight. In that case, the best you can predict is the percentage chance that this will be the fight a PC dies or the PC loses, and that chance is always surprisingly high compared to systems with hit points. Think of systems without hit points as always devolving down to a situation where every threat is a "save or die" threat. You may have mechanically made the chance that the death is saved against fairly high, but it will still inevitably happen. There is a corollary to that and that is that without hit points, players lose the ability to react to changing circumstances. If you don't have hit points, then when something goes bad, it tends to go back completely and without chance of recovery. One moment someone is fine and the next someone is dead. No one gets a chance to adjust their tactics to deal with a problem. Finally, hit points serve a narrativist goal of giving heroes plot protection so that there is character continuity (or at least can be character continuity) over the course of a story. If you want to tell any sort of character driven story in an RPG, then you need to give the protagonists some sort of plot protection and hit points are some of the most efficient ways of doing that. So all that said, you don't seem to really mind hit points per se. What seems to be bothering you is D&D's built in zero to hero story arc that tends to make all D&D stories some sort of Bildungsroman where a relative unknown rises from obscurity to centrality in the story universe and that typically in modern D&D this progession happens really quickly. And I think you're going to find that it is very difficult to mechanically write that out of D&D, because if you pull on that thread you'll find it is attached to literally everything else in the game. In edition to having to adjust that, you'll need to also adjust the balance with monsters. And, further, you'll need to adjust the offensive balance since spells and attacks tend to inflate at a rate that lets them mostly keep up with the inflating hit point pool, so that if you adjust hit points without adjusting attacks you'll quickly end up where everyone is a glass cannon. What you can do is introduce a cap of some sort. For example in 1e, hit points were mostly capped at 'name level' with only small amounts of hit points added for each level after that. However, this worked only because by 10th level, characters pretty much already had more hit points than almost anything they'd encounter. And even then, it didn't really work, because damage increases resulted in everything, both PC's and monsters tending to be glass cannons unless you really reworked how monsters worked. Similarly, many people in 3e capped hit points at 6th level, or 8th level or some other low level of advancement. But while these 'Epic 6th' level games work, they don't stop the problem you have nor do they easily deal with the fact that so much stuff is intended for more than 6th or 8th level characters. But what you seem to be most concerned about is something much more narrow, and that is how fast leveling is in 3e or later editions. And the solution I suggest for you is to slow the game down. Award half as much experience points, or even less. Or require increasingly large amounts of experience points to level up. Build in more down time between adventures and avoid the franctic paced compressed adventures typical of most modern published modules and in particular adventure paths. Note, this isn't actually a new problem as you can look at for example the 'G Series' 'Against the Giants' proto-Adventure Path from the earliest days of D&D and its abundantly clear that the writer (Gygax) is power leveling the party by dropping much more treasure than would be typical in order to ensure that the party levels up fast enough to allow the modules to be played back to back. Pathfinder 1e has a really nice solution to this in variable advancement tracks that adjust the amount of XP needed to advance to the pacing that a table wants to have. The thing about slowing the game down is that it is a change you can make without the need to adjust any of the rules. You simply have to adjust how you pace and write your adventures. My longest running campaign is has about 140 4 hour sessions. Over the course of those 640 hours of play, the PC's have reached ~10th level. That means that they've leveled up only about once per ~71 hours of play, or roughly once per 18 sessions. This will not seem super fast. While your PC's will eventually reach the point where what was once challenging is now something that is trivial, it will not be 2 sessions later. Now, the thing is, I have been running what is effectively an adventure path and at this point only about 6 months of real time have gone by. So they are leveling up on average about every 20 in game days. This is still a rather quick rate of advancement all things considered, since 6 months ago they were nobodies and now they are big important people, but the player's experience of it is not "Wow this is so unrealistic how fast we've leveled up" unless they really start thinking about it. One thing I strongly encourage you to consider though is player buy-in. Not every table is going to be great with only leveling up after 72 hours of play. Many players love to 'ding' and love to plan out characters and if the tables aesthetics of play are more mechanical than narrative and more character focused than player focused, you could end up with very dissatisfied players if you slow the game down too much. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Removing Hit Points from the Game
Top