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".

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Many DMs and many adventures put 1st level PCs is situations you'd neeeeeveeeeer hire rookies for unless you want them to fail and/or die.

Well, don’t? Problem solved.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, don’t? Problem solved.

If "Well, don't do that" actually solved all that many problems, people would not say that "common sense isn't so common."

Getting people not to believe a thing they've believed for a very long time is very difficult. Making it so the thing they believe is true is in fact true is relatively easy in this case, since human designers can decide what the thing in question is. (It is often not easy; there's a reason we have mathematical "paradoxes" that are actually just true but confounding facts, such as Simpson's paradox or the medical test paradox.)

Though I freely grant that this option doesn't cost me anything, and thus there's probably some bias toward it there, it really does seem to be a pretty straightforward issue. People have not behaved as though they believe level 1 is supposed to be particularly fragile, the books do not describe level 1 as being particularly fragile,* and designers and the 1st-level adventures they write are not structured as though 1st-level characters are particularly fragile. With things stacked so thoroughly on the "1st level is supposed to be ADVENTURE!" side, something that's been ongoing for decades and possibly even before WotC took over the brand, I just don't see how it's reasonable to say that we will have an easier time convincing players and (primarily) DMs that they've been wrong this whole time.

It just seems really blatantly, dramatically easier to admit that what the game has been designed to be (in every edition except 4e) simply isn't how people actually play D&D, and thus design the game people clearly want to play instead of insisting that everyone else correct their behavior to what the game is designed for.

*Consider that the 5e PHB explicitly says that people who are fighters have experience already. Under the heading "Trained for Danger," it says (emphasis added), "Not every member of the city watch, the village militia, or the queen's army is a fighter. Most of these troops are relatively untrained soldiers with only the most basic combat knowledge. Veteran soldiers, military officers, trained bodyguards, dedicated knights, and similar figures are fighters." The book ain't tellin' you you're some wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn.

 

[Michael Linke]

But Mr. Arneson...increased hit points are the characters becoming harder to hit at higher levels.

Yeah.
One of his equations has dexterity improve HP. The only way that makes senses is if the HP aren't meat, but includes your capacity to avoid being hit.

But i also think it's clear that the two mechanics mentioned in the article, his weird damage mechanic, and his weird HP mechanic, were not in use together in the same system. It looks like his damage mechanic was an early D&D mechanic, and his HP mechanic belonged to something he worked on after D&D was in the wild.

 

[Michael Linke]

There is such a system in 5e. It is called levels one and two. All is needed is big box that says that it is fine to start on level three if you want to avoid 'can be killed by a cat' experience.

It's not uncommon in video game RPGs to start higher than level 1. FF VII starts you off at level 6, and you automatically increase to level 7 after the first fight. FF VIII starts you at level 7.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that true newbs don't see any obligation to begin play at level 1.

 

[Minigiant]

Well, don’t? Problem solved.

I don't

The problem is a great of deal of the community does.
Once D&D designers and community take tiers seriously and consistently, a lot will be fixed.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't

The problem is a great of deal of the community does.
Once D&D designers and community take tiers seriously and consistently, a lot will be fixed.

Call me cynical, but given this would require recognizing that 4e did something genuinely right, and that 5e failed to sufficiently learn from...yeah. Snowball's chance in Avernus.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I really don’t think that “players don’t read or understand instructions so we need to change the game to match their misconceptions” is a terribly solid design paradigm.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I really don’t think that “players don’t read or understand instructions so we need to change the game to match their misconceptions” is a terribly solid design paradigm.

How about if we instead phrase it as, "D&D player and DM culture has, overall, rejected a particular design idea. We should change the game to the idea they've accepted instead."?

 

[Minigiant]

Call me cynical, but given this would require recognizing that 4e did something genuinely right, and that 5e failed to sufficiently learn from...yeah. Snowball's chance in Avernus.

5e didn't do it wrong per se.

It tells you about tiers of tier early in the PHB. And a lot of the DMG advice is tier based.

People skipping these didn't help.

The problem was that it used old adventurers without tier adjustments. And it didn't come out with the popular VP/WP variant.

 

[Minigiant]

I really don’t think that “players don’t read or understand instructions so we need to change the game to match their misconceptions” is a terribly solid design paradigm.

It's not.

But if the fans won't change, at a certain point designers must.