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".

 

[Minigiant]

HP in D&D is a combo of Meat, Stamina, Mental Stamina, Luck, Blessing, etc

One option I originally though 5e would do is have a option of separating the bucket as a variant.

Like a level 6 fighter could be 1d10+Con Meat, 3d10+Con Stamina, 1d10+Int Guile, and 1d10+5 Luck.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This of course leads to scaling issues with the math in every subsequent edition of the game. Which is why they all have issues the higher in level the game progresses. Stuff like CR, and the right amount of HP for x at high levels are off because it is just too much to playtest and calculate ahead of time given all the variables introduced into the system via spells and class abilities.

Well...I mean, 4e had no problem with balance or playtesting. Fights could be lengthy to resolve (though definitely no moreso than 3e), but they weren't super weird about that.

Part of the reason 4e worked as well as it did is that characters did not have two sources of bonus HP. That is, you added your Con score at first level, not your mod at every level. This means that max-level 3e (and 5e) characters actually tend to have higher HP than even max-level equivalent characters in 4e, because a 4e character only ever gains 29*(class's flat HP). E.g. a level 20 Fighter in 5e, with 20 Con, has 15 (level 1 HP) + 19*(6+5) = 224 HP, while a level 30 Fighter with theoretical maximum Con (starting 20, investing +8 from levelling up, and getting another +2 from Epic Destiny) has 15 (base HP) + 30 (Con score) + 29*6 (static HP per level) = 219. And, again, this is spread out over 30 levels, not 20, and considering the most extreme comparable case in the game.

Also, 4e's equivalent of CR--the XP Budget--was actually highly effective, very rarely having issues. The vast majority of the time that it did have issues was when you took extremely high-level monsters and scaled them down to extremely low levels, such as a down-scaled dracolich (a common discussion example at the time). The only exception I can think of that was generally understood to be out of line was the Needlefang Drake Swarm, and that's really only because they had unusually high damage on top of being a Swarm. (4e Swarm creatures are resistant to melee and ranged attacks, but vulnerable to close and area attacks.)

 

[jmartkdr2]

I disagree.

D&D was the first mover. So people are used to HP bloat

And while some things about the game have changed, we all know that there are certain sacred cows that D&D designers cannot touch without risking fanbase revolt because they do not like things changed that they are used to.

Being better is irrelevant when D&D's sacred cows and fandom are concerned.

I categorically reject the idea the DnD players will not allow changes to the game (or we'd all still be playing Basic) or that they don't know what fun feels like.

If versions of DnD contain a thing and players like it / it makes the game better, it tends to stick around. CF ascending AC, races separate form classes, nonmagical healing, balanced classes, bards as a based class, warlocks, et al.

 

[Stalker0]

Vitality/wounds is a wishlist for 6e for me, I think it solves so many of the narrative issues with hit points and healing, and offers new mechanics.

the reason it failed for Star Wars IMO was the allowance of crits/sneak attacks to bypass vitality. It just turned high level combat into “who can crit first”.

remove that and you can create a really solid system.

 

[Minigiant]

Vitality/wounds is a wishlist for 6e for me, I think it solves so many of the narrative issues with hit points and healing, and offers new mechanics.

the reason it failed for Star Wars IMO was the allowance of crits/sneak attacks to bypass vitality. It just turned high level combat into “who can crit first”.

remove that and you can create a really solid system.

One of my bigger hopes for 5e initially was an official Resolve/Luck/Vitality/Wounds variant rules. I still hope for one for 6e.

Allowing groups to decide which types of buckets are in their campaign and building the matching narrative would really fix a lot of issues.

 

[Dausuul]

the reason it failed for Star Wars IMO was the allowance of crits/sneak attacks to bypass vitality. It just turned high level combat into “who can crit first”.

This is exactly the problem with most wound/vit systems I've seen. The whole point of vitality is to act as a shield against random death. If you allow crits, which are totally random, to bypass it, then the shield no longer works and the whole mechanic was a waste of time.

I wouldn't mind seeing D&D embrace a wound/vit system (without allowing crits to bypass vit, obviously), but I can't imagine it will ever happen. Hit points get the job done well enough and have both simplicity and tradition on their side.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, SPIs Dragonquest had Endurance and Fatigue (wounds and vitality) which were (pretty much) fixed at character creation. I can't remember off hand when 1e DQ was published, but we played 2e in the early '80s and it had been around a few years then.

First Edition was, indeed, published in 1980.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I categorically reject the idea the DnD players will not allow changes to the game (or we'd all still be playing Basic) or that they don't know what fun feels like.

If versions of DnD contain a thing and players like it / it makes the game better, it tends to stick around. CF ascending AC, races separate form classes, nonmagical healing, balanced classes, bards as a based class, warlocks, et al.

While its easy to blow off too much of carry-over to habit, I don't think its any more sensible to argue that some elements only stick around because people actively like them; more accurately some stick around because people are used to them and don't actively disike them. That's all that's needed, really.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is exactly the problem with most wound/vit systems I've seen. The whole point of vitality is to act as a shield against random death. If you allow crits, which are totally random, to bypass it, then the shield no longer works and the whole mechanic was a waste of time.

Eh. There's a middle ground there, where it functions to prevent routine sudden death, but bad luck is still a risk. It tends to work better in systems where most damage doesn't vary as much as D&D does, though (i.e. where a single crit isn't a given to kill you the way it can in D&D with a wound system because you can spend a good part of your career fighting things who's expected damage will do that, as compared to spending most of it fighting things where one hit won't likely do you in).

 

[Voranzovin]

I've always been tremendously frustrated by how difficult it is to make a coherent fiction out of hit points...but I also think they're inevitable. I've tried a lot of alternate systems and found most of them to be wanting in one way or another. WP/VP, for instance, strikes me as just being hit points under another name. If you were to remove the thing where crits go straight to WP (which, as has been pointed out by a number of posters already, undermines VP's role as the buffer between you and actual damage), all it really does is fix the point at which "damage" is actually damage rather then leaving it floating around, without really solving any of the issues with HP (healing and poison, for instance, still make absolutely no sense). Systems that use a small number of hit points and use DR or luck points or something to increase survivability don't really provide a reliable barrier against harm, and don't work well (in my experience) with DnD's zero-to-hero-to-superhero arc (though they may be great for other games).

That oft-quoted passage from the 1e DMG seems like a case in point to me. On the one hand, I think that passage means a lot less then it's generally imputed to mean. Maybe Gygax intended hit points to represent bundled meat/luck/skill/divine favor, but the game he actually released treats them as meat points in it's mechanics and terminology. A few paragraphs in the DMG don't outweigh how the game actually acts when played. If this weren't true, we wouldn't still be arguing about this. At the same time, it's hard to see what else he should have done. Hit points are such a good game mechanic that their destructive effect on fiction is something we're forced to rationalize away, just as Gygax was.

What I've started doing is trying to use one of the worst aspects of hit points--that they're such a vague and leaky abstraction--to my advantage in terms of widening the kinds of characters the system can support. Right now I'm playing a Cambion in a Planescape game, represented as Teifling + Barbarian/Path of the Beast, with the class and subclass refluffed to represent a demonic physiology. If another member of the party takes eight points of damage from a sword thrust, they parried at the last second and avoided most of the blow. If she does, she got stabbed in the chest--which mainly has the effect of pissing her off. And her wound will, quite literally, heal overnight.

For all their failings, the abstract nature of hitpoints lets me play distaff Hellboy in a party that's otherwise at a normal human level of bodily durability. I've considered DMing an entire campaign this way, where all PCs are demigods or immortals of some kind, without changing any of the rules at all.

Basically, if we didn't have hit points, we'd be forced to invent them. They are wonderful and terrible, simultaneously. Which is extremely on-brand.