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".

 

[Lanefan]

For a wounds/vitality system to catch on with the general D&D populace, you'd have to catch the interest of a far larger population of end-users than is likely given most of them, well, just don't care. That's the price of being the largest game in the market with concurrent inertia.

First you'd have to catch the attention of the designers, without which nothing will happen.

FWIW we've used a homebrew body-fatigue hit point system for nigh on 40 years. It's a bit clunky, but we accept that because it works and in some (but not all) cases can add greatly to the realism.

 

[Minigiant]

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.

I'm still trying to do a writeup for a Pro Wrestling style fighter subclass for 5e whose HP is more tilted to drama.

 

[J.Quondam]

If hit points are meat, then the people in D&D 5e are sitting on an untapped gold mine industry. Just shave a bit of HP meat off something (or someone), sell that meat in the market, then wait for those HP to come back overnight, and then repeat.

Inspirational! My next necromancer PC's background will be "deli counter clerk".

 

[HammerMan]

I find this interesting because of the wargame roots (my wargame days were over a decade after I started in 2e).

In war games I have seen hit=dead, some major 'heroes' can take multi hits (normally 2 sometimes 3-7) hence hit points... however I have also seen some 'heroes' get to deal 1/2 d6 hits.

So I always assumed (and swore others talked about) that Dave and Gary and Co orginally had everyone rolling d6 damage against d6 hit dice per level so INTHEORY each level is about 1 hit, and the variable (daggers do lesser hits so a d4, longswords do more d8 and great swords deal 2 d6) then variable HD coming from 'well wizards can take less so they get d4s and fighting men can take more so they get d8's' then add con and str to the hp and damage.

 

[robus]

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.

Falling damage is one of the most egregious cock ups in the rules IMHO. It doesn’t take any account of momentum. The dice should scale with size (being a rough equivalent to mass).

So:

Tiny, no damage.
Small, Xd4
Medium, Xd8
Large, Xd10
Huge, Xd12
Gigantic, Xd20
And X should scale more rapidly. (hand wave ).

 

[Charlaquin]

Not entirely, but the tiny scratch has to be part of it or else poisoned weapons don't work.

No, the damage could be the addition effort it took to avoid being scratched by the weapon (which you would not have had to do if if wasn’t poisoned).

To me that's a narration of the poisoned weapon missing, not hitting.

And you can narrate it that way as you so choose, but it doesn’t have to be. Loss of hit points can also be narrated as representing avoiding what would have otherwise been a lethal blow. With ordinary weapons, that may only take a small amount of hit points, since all you have to do is turn a direct hit into a glancing blow. With a poisoned weapon, you have to avoid it touching you at all, which takes more effort/luck/whatever and therefore more hit points. In this model, “hit” and “miss” are just game jargon, they don’t necessarily mean “made contact” and “didn’t make contact.”

Obviously this model isn’t for everyone. But it is internally consistent.

 

[RareBreed]

Hit Points are one reason I never got into D&D that much. It's too much of an inconsistent abstraction for my tastes. If hit points represent dodging, blocking, superior tactical experience, luck or divine favor (as 1st edition rules do explicitly state), it is hard to explain how those factors protect a character from a coup de grace or poison attack. I guess the Gods or "experience" are somehow making the blade miss on a totally helpless character? Another thing I disliked was how if a 100HP character was reduced to a single HP, he was just as effective as before. I've heard this explained as "the character's luck ran out", and yet D&D also had rules for regular non-magical healing. Actually a lot of D&D rules just didn't make sense to me, like the concept of AC making a character harder to hit rather than soaking damage (another topic that invites lively debate).

It wasn't until many years later after looking at what 3.5/Pathfinder had become, that I realized that the D&D world had become (or perhaps always was?) "Fantasy Super Heroes". Looking at it from that perspective, I realized that the game was (at mid level and beyond) more about a group of super-powered characters in fantasy archetypes. From that perspective, I could see the rationale for hit points the way the rules were written. But I wanted something more gritty and raw.

Regardless, for me personally, D&D's damage system stressed my suspension of belief to the breaking point. That's why my experience with (A)D&D was rather short lived in 1st edition, and didn't even look back until Pathfinder (and then, mostly for nostalgia's sake). I much prefer the use of some meta game fate/luck/karma whatever you want to call it to help avoid some unlucky rolls or poor choice in action, which I believe James Bond 007 was the first game to introduce (could be mistaken).

Come to think of it, D&D's lack of dodging or parrying rules is probably where the whole idea of hit points as more than meat came from.

If all this sounds like I am a simulationist grumpy grognard, color me guilty. Maybe I am a relatively young one at 49...and I don't have a scruffy beard. I am ok with some kind of meta gaming points to correct hideous luck or keep a story on track. For me, the story is derived and given form from actions and not the other way around. For me, how something happens is just as important as what and why.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, the damage could be the addition effort it took to avoid being scratched by the weapon (which you would not have had to do if if wasn’t poisoned).

And you can narrate it that way as you so choose, but it doesn’t have to be. Loss of hit points can also be narrated as representing avoiding what would have otherwise been a lethal blow. With ordinary weapons, that may only take a small amount of hit points, since all you have to do is turn a direct hit into a glancing blow. With a poisoned weapon, you have to avoid it touching you at all, which takes more effort/luck/whatever and therefore more hit points. In this model, “hit” and “miss” are just game jargon, they don’t necessarily mean “made contact” and “didn’t make contact.”

Obviously this model isn’t for everyone. But it is internally consistent.

I would find a model in which hit is described identically to a miss super jarring.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would find a model in which hit is described identically to a miss super jarring.

A hit would not be described identically to a miss. In this model, a miss is an attack that took no effort/luck/etc. to avoid being potentially lethal; for example, if the attack missed you by a wide margin, or had little force behind it and plinked harmlessly off your armor. A hit, unless it reduces you to 0HP, is one that could have been deadly, and therefore took some amount of effort/luck/etc. to not be killed by (with the exact amount determined by the damage roll); for example, an attack directly on course for a gap in your armor that you’re only barely able to party at the last moment, or one that came down heavily, that you had to “roll with” to avoid having your bones shattered, the effort leaving you winded.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

A hit would not be described identically to a miss. In this model, a miss is an attack that took no effort/luck/etc. to avoid being potentially lethal; for example, if the attack missed you by a wide margin, or had little force behind it and plinked harmlessly off your armor. A hit, unless it reduces you to 0HP, is one that could have been deadly, and therefore took some amount of effort/luck/etc. to not be killed by (with the exact amount determined by the damage roll); for example, an attack directly on course for a gap in your armor that you’re only barely able to party at the last moment, or one that came down heavily, that you had to “roll with” to avoid having your bones shattered, the effort leaving you winded.

Yeah, not working for me. I'd think that having your normal AC defence already assumes that you're darnest to not get killed instead of just standing there like a lemon. But whatever, if it works for you, then great.