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".

 

[LoganRan]

"Each character has a varying number of hit points, just as monsters do. These hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck and/or magical factors."

Gary Gygax, 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook, pg. 34

 

[Lyxen]

"Each character has a varying number of hit points, just as monsters do. These hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck and/or magical factors."

Gary Gygax, 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook, pg. 34

And after this, you can like it or not, but for me it was really innovative, and allowed the simulation of the high fantasy genre which is not about meat, but more cinematics.

 

[Blue Orange]

Agreed, the games like Call of Cthulhu where characters are much more mortal don't increase them at all.

 

[aco175]

Nah, the real world doesn't have hit points. They don't simulate real life in any way whatsoever.

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.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Whilst I really don't need D&D to simulate realistic injury, I have to say that the recent editions have gotten a tad too gamey for my liking. I find it super jarring that it is literally impossible to be hurt so badly that you wouldn't be perfectly fine the next day! I use a bit modified gritty rests and healing kit dependency, and whilst far from realistic it seems more suitable for my somewhat fragile disbelief suspenders.

As for character resilience being measured by increased chance of defending instead of some sort of depleting resource like hit points, that results very different experience, even if on average the odds of survival would be the same. Latter is definitely less like the real life, but it can be argued to be better for a game, as it makes things more predictable and lets players make more informed tactical choices.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I just accept that all of this stuff is purely to create a game to play and everything is in service to the game (with only a small handwave towards the fiction that is layered on top of the game.)

The fact you could take the Attack rolls / damage rolls / AC / HP and reskin them all to create a Social Combat system that works just the same (if the game cared about having rules for determining the "winner" of philosophical debate) shows us that the fiction isn't the important part for all of this existing-- it's the attack roll / AC into damage roll / HP dance of the game rules is what matters.

Getting too concerned about the story not layering perfectly over the game rules kind of misses the point I think.

 

[The White Sorcerer]

Anyone more versed in old school D&D able to tell me what "you take 9 hits (but you could take as many as 36 hits)" means?

 

[Zubatcarteira]

I personally find the luck points idea pretty silly, and some things you just can't really evade with only skill and experience, so meat is certainly a factor, although everyone just being super durable also doesn't quite work in a lot of ways (you can survive a meteor to the face, but a few hundred arrows will kill you anyway).

 

[wingsandsword]

After 30+ years of gaming I've never been able to reconcile hit points and what they actually mean. If it's just narrative luck points then how does healing work? It just recharges your luck points. If getting stabbed for 1d4 damage the equivalent of me being stabbed in the real world? i.e. Does it leave a bleeding wound? I stopped asking these questions long ago because I could never find a satisfactory answer.

I reckon it as that Hit points aren't just one thing, they're a combination of several things, since they're an abstraction of how much injury or trauma someone can withstand.

They're partly "meat", that's why you can get extra ones from high CON scores.

They're partly exhaustion and fatigue, that's why you can recover some from resting overnight, far faster than you could if it was a serious injury.

They're partly heroic luck, which is most of why you get more at each level.

Magical healing heals the "meat" injuries and relieves the exhaustion. . .and is to an extent also a divine blessing that restores that intangible heroic luck.

 

[wingsandsword]

Anyone more versed in old school D&D able to tell me what "you take 9 hits (but you could take as many as 36 hits)" means?

I think that means you take 9d4 damage. . .between 9 and 36 points. Old D&D books weren't very good about spelling out actually how many dice were to be rolled, and would often list the minimum and maximum amount of the roll and you had to figure out what the dice would actually be.