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]

While things like this look great on paper, in practice I've learned it's simplest and easiest for all involved if 99.9% of the time WP/BP damage doesn't start until you're out of VP/FP. The only exceptions would be (attempted) coups-de-grace, some poisons, and rare occurrences such as limb loss.

I still think a third bucket for luck and blessings fixes many issues for only CDG, poison, and amputatation effects WP the PC who still has VP

 

[Stalker0]

Actually considering the strong inclusion of temporary hit points over the last several additions, it might be easier to do regular hp/ temp hp as your vitality/wound system…since dnd users are already “comfortable” with those terms

 

[MichaelSomething]

How about...

You have HP equal to con (and that's it).
You get two hit dice per level.
Whenever you would be damaged, you may spend hit dice to reduce the damage by the hit dice amount. This happens automatically, you can as many hit dice as you wish, but you'll always take a minimum of one point of damage.
Cure spells beyond first level restore hit dice after the first d8 instead of more hit points.

 

[Lanefan]

Actually considering the strong inclusion of temporary hit points over the last several additions, it might be easier to do regular hp/ temp hp as your vitality/wound system…since dnd users are already “comfortable” with those terms

Interesting idea though I think you'd really need to chop the numbers down some - everyone including monsters already have enough h.p. as it is.

Which raises a question: how does this work with monsters? How do they gain temp h.p.?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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).

Well, consider how 4e handled Hit Points vs Healing Surges.

Things attacking your surges don't kill you (and are pretty rare and difficult to exploit). Only losing HP kills you. But, having surges makes it a hell of a lot easier to get back up and not just die. While it's obviously fantastical, this isn't too far off from how fatigue works in real people: most of us can't do a ton of effort all at once, but give us a break and a snack, and we're often back to almost-normal very quickly. It's why marathons are such a huge impact on a person, they force you to tap on everything, and you can quite literally collapse, even die, if you try to do that unprepared.

In 4e, only death saves (or massive damage, which is how my first death occurred!) can cause you to die, and you only deal with either when you're at or below 0 HP. Surges have nothing to do with that system. And poisons, etc., attack hit points--your "easy to gain, easy to lose" resource is the thing that keeps you alive, but Surges allow you to have a semi-inaccessible pool of extra HP, just out of reach unless you have help...from a support character ("Leader" role, in 4e terms.) Since all healing restores you from 0, no matter what your 0-or-less HP were, this means a Surge-based heal gets you back in good enough shape that you can usually continue fighting, or have enough HP to run away if you need it (and yes, sometimes, you SHOULD run away from 4e fights).

And then, at very high level in 4e (specifically, mid/high Epic tier), characters literally start getting features that only trigger when a character dies--in other words, you're supposed to be dying every now and then, because a mere one death a day is nothing for an Epic-tier character.

Personally, I think this rather neatly weds the benefits of HP (straightforward and familiar) with most of the benefits of a VP/WP system (there's a buffer beyond just your "frontline" points, and once that buffer's out, you really should rest if you can.)

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

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.

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

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

Right. And this is why the system Dave Arneson was advocating for was also fundamentally not going to do what D&D does. If both an 8th level superhero and a 1st level neophyte can be killed by one sword blow, but the difference is just that on any given round the neophyte is 40% likely and the superhero is 5% likely to suffer that blow, it makes it harder to make smart decisions or observe a changing game-state of increasing danger as a combat goes on. The hero may simply get unlucky and die in the first round.

Hit points allow the game state to change over time observably- my hero is being worn down, suffering small wounds, and after a couple of hits I can SEE that one more lucky shot will kill him, and it's time to run! This mechanic enables meaningful decisions in play. OR, if I judge that the party is in desperate need and I can't afford to run, everyone at the table can similarly SEE that this is a dramatic decision- Harbard the Hero is on his last legs, but has decided to stay and try to save Connor the Cleric rather than back off and save his own skin.

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

This is true, but on a side note, his point applies directly to the Weapon vs. Armor to hit adjustment chart from Greyhawk and 1E AD&D. In Chainmail the to-hit target number encapsulates both hit and damage. Any successful hit means one serious enough to disable or kill. When D&D added hit points, creating the weapon vs. AC chart to import basically the same modifiers from Chainmail into D&D became, to some extent, double-dipping.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hit points allow the game state to change over time observably- my hero is being worn down, suffering small wounds, and after a couple of hits I can SEE that one more lucky shot will kill him, and it's time to run! This mechanic enables meaningful decisions in play. OR, if I judge that the party is in desperate need and I can't afford to run, everyone at the table can similarly SEE that this is a dramatic decision- Harbard the Hero is on his last legs, but has decided to stay and try to save Connor the Cleric rather than back off and save his own skin.

Yeah, this is a really really really important thing that, frankly, I wish 5e had ported over from 4e, because it's not like it's hard and there's no way most 5e fans would know enough about 4e to know that it was ported.

That is, 4e characters start with seemingly very high HP, but gain HP seemingly very slowly. For anyone who doesn't know: In 4e, every class has a base HP value, to which you add your Constitution score--not modifier, the whole actual score--at first level. A Fighter, for example, gets 15+Constitution at 1st level. If their Con increases later, that gives them more HP, but they only add their Con score once. After that, it's just a static amount of HP per level (6 for Fighters), unless you spend other resources (mostly feats, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were PPs, EDs, or maybe even magic items/boons/etc. that could increase hit points).

This means that, yes, 1st level PCs look incredibly beefy....but it's not because they ARE beefy. It's because now they can actually take two hits and decide to get out of dodge. It's because they no longer have the issue where two hobgoblins ganging up on the Wizard means instant death, which the brand-new Wizard player could not possibly have known. It's because they have the ability to make a mistake or two and correct for it, rather than just ending up splattered on the floor.

That's an incredibly valuable thing, especially for bringing new blood into the hobby. The fact that such a thing can conflict with the (perfectly cromulent) desire for a "zero-to-hero" story, where classic fans WANT that risk of getting splattered for making one wrong move, is why D&D desperately needs a robust "zero levels"/"novice levels" system built into the PHB. That way, the default--which is where newbies are going to start--will be welcoming and effective for introducing them to the hobby, while the well-supported option to go for high lethality remains for those who want to opt into doing that.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That's an incredibly valuable thing, especially for bringing new blood into the hobby. The fact that such a thing can conflict with the (perfectly cromulent) desire for a "zero-to-hero" story, where classic fans WANT that risk of getting splattered for making one wrong move, is why D&D desperately needs a robust "zero levels"/"novice levels" system built into the PHB. That way, the default--which is where newbies are going to start--will be welcoming and effective for introducing them to the hobby, while the well-supported option to go for high lethality remains for those who want to opt into doing that.

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.

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

That is pretty accurate. And lines up with the low XP needed to get through those "trainee levels".

It also was, of course, a house rule at a lot of tables, going back decades. Gygax also listed starting at level 3 as one of his common house rules for pick-up games or convention games.