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".

 

[MGibster]

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.

Some people smoke like chimneys and spend decades being overweight yet somehow manage to live longer than the average life expectancy while someone who exercises daily, doesn't smoke, and eats well dies at age 45 from a heart attack. These are statistical outliers. If you stab someone in the brain pan there is an excellent chance they're going to die or suffer some serious impairments for the rest of their life. If you stab someone dozens of time they'll probably die without modern medicine intervening (or magic works too).

I don't think in terms of realism when it comes to RPGs I think of verisimilitude. The way hit points are used in D&D doesn't resembled anything close to realism or even give the appearance of realism. How many times have you seen the Wizard throw a fireball into a crowd knowing it'll hit a fellow PC but having done the calculations and figuring that between Saves and Hit Points the PC will likely be fine? Can you imagine throwing a grenade at the enemy while your pal is engaged in melee with them? Generally speaking, I've made my peace with hit points and I don't really care for verisimilitude when it comes to combat in D&D. But it irks me when players make those kinds of calculations during the game.

 

[el-remmen]

How I rationalized hit points:

Heroes (and monsters) are special. They are tough, lucky, quick healers, fated, what have you . . but since they have a dangerous job, they still tend to die.

Most other people in the world, on the other hand, have 1 to 4 hps, leaning towards 1 or 2 - thus they avoid that life but STILL tend to die.

 

[schneeland]

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 took this as an alternative system that sounds like you have a number of hits you deal in one round (e.g. 3d6). You might then have a number of hit points that indicate how many hits you take as well as saving throws that help you to avert an attack that would normally hit you.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

The probelm is that the correct answer is "yes, but not really" - to every attempt to define what hit points are and aren't. They're a mash-up of a lot of things, like meat points, parry points, divine favor, luck, endurance, and more.

One thing I've suggested but never actually bothered with is breaking up hit points by source, so that you would actually have a pool of meat points form your Con, and other types of hit points form class/etc. It would make describing things (and reconciling the fiction) a little easier even if each hit point works the exact same way regardless of source.

But mostly I play with people who've accepted the hp don't really make sense (but make the game more fun than the alternatives) and have moved on.

 

[dbm]

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?

He’s describing a process where you roll 1d6 as the first step, then that governs how many d6 you roll for the second step. That second roll governs your HP.

In his example, the first roll is a 3, so the second roll is 3d6 and the final result is 9.

The best possible result is a 6 on the first roll, then all 6s on the second roll which would give 36 HP.

 

[The White Sorcerer]

He’s describing a process where you roll 1d6 as the first step, then that governs how many d6 you roll for the second step. That second roll governs your HP.

In his example, the first roll is a 3, so the second roll is 3d6 and the final result is 9.

The best possible result is a 6 on the first roll, then all 6s on the second roll which would give 36 HP.

Thanks, I get it now. I thought maybe this specific character that rolled 9 could somehow potentially take 36 hits, and that confused me.

 

[Ace]

Deleted as accidentally redundant

 

[Kannik]

"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

For extra context and background to the conception of HP, to continue the Gygax quote from above from the 1E PHB:

A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being killed. let us suppose that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This is the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The same holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.

(A bit repetitive at the end, but it describes quite well -- with a little Gygaxian editorializing in the middle -- the foundation for HP within D&D.)

 

[Ace]

The formula says character (men), it that to mean there is another chart for woman like in older editions where strength was different or is that more generic use, like humanoid. Either way it seems outdated like Thac0 and level limits for non-humans.

It could be either

In those days a certain amount of realism was assumed to be the default and so many systems limited physical strength or other purely physical stats for female human characters compared to males.

It often wasn't a serious limit, in AD&D for example it as a maximum strength of 18/50 well above any real world record.

Runequest IIRC used different die rolls for Size which was a characteristic.

It wasn't always handled that well and was used to pigeonhole female characters in some questionable stereotypes but the past was a foreign country as they say.

Also not while its sounds off to us now, there were very few female warrior archetypes at the time and they were considered quite novel.

We don't do this now which I think is an improvement, such house rules can be used if wanted but way I figure its fantasy so if you want to do some super strong shield maiden I say go for it

 

[Ace]

That's the important point. One could argue that "meat hit point" like the ones from Runequest want to simulate normal life (they are I think correctly based on size as well as constitution). But D&D's hit points simulate heroic fantasy and even high fantasy, the books/movies/shows of the genre where the heroes continue to fight at full capacity until knocked down, and even that is extremely rarely fatal, despite looking deadly almost every time. Not realistic in the slightest.

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

Its kind of an odd situation. Historically it wasn't rare in fights for people to take horrendous even lethal hits and keep on fighting. Mutual kills were also pretty common though few games have rules any such things

I know of a real life situation in which a female police officer was shot through the heart with a .357 magnum probably the deadliest commonly encountered handgun round at the time and was able to defeat her assailant and recovered fully.

Hit points serve as a good abstraction for this maybe better than wound levels and saving throws against same which tend to add complexity without better results. Some may disagree Savage Worlds and Vampire both sold well but the abstraction is a matter of taste more than naything

The biggest difference in the most modern games is that we have a pretty good idea now how actual combat worlds as we have a lot more combat veterans, martial artists and historical fencing experts among game designers now.

This expanded knowledge base colors our reaction to rules as vs when Runequest was the "realistic" option because its combat was based on Society for Creative Anachronism combat (FWIW its still holds up very well)