Combat Advantage - An Alternative to Hit Points

[Ishmayl]

Here's a system I've been working on with a friend of mine that completely, 100%, gets rid of hit points.

I've been thinking about ways to represent combat without simply charting the accumulation of wounds or fatigue, or any other demerits. I'm disillusioned with the idea of hit points and similar metrics. I don't want to race my enemy to see who can chip away at each other's health bubbles the fastest.

I want combat to swing wildly and unpredictably, and I want everybody involved in the game to have more say in the description of exactly how it goes down.

Here's the basic deal. Forget wounds and all that stuff. We're going to cut right to the chase: determining who has the upper hand.

I am imagining a fight system with a graduated scale of degrees of advantage. Opponents might be evenly matched, or one might have a slight advantage over the other, or even a major advantage or an overwhelming advantage, depending on just how out of balance things are. Anything more than an overwhelming advantage, and your opponent is at your mercy; you've won the battle.

Victory <---> Overwhelming <---> Major <---> Slight <---> Evenly Matched <---> Slight <---> Major <---> Overwhelming <---> Victory

The neat thing (to me!) is that we don't even have to involve wounds and injury in this at all, because we can define "advantage" however the hell we want to.

Advantage might include:
- having the high ground
- instilling fear in your opponent
- having superior inspiration (seeing a mentor struck down, whatever)
- drawing first blood
- the benefit of some kind of favorable circumstances
- being a stronger or better-experienced combatant
- having a better weapon/magic/kung-fu/etc.
- other

Disadvantage might include:
- your hands are tied up
- your are tired!
- you have been grazed by a minor wound
- a hex is upon you
- you have been thrown momentarily off-balance or forced into an unfavorable stance
- your will to fight has been shaken
- you are prone and your opponent has you at swordpoint
- two dozen archers are standing on the rooftop and have arrows pointed at you
- your enemy has your elderly granny as a hostage
- you have been disarmed/run out of ammo/mistaken your sword for a banana/etc.
-other

So this system can deal with straight up fights with lots of bloodletting or none at all, with magical duels or contests of superpowers, or with all sorts of situations. It can even be suitable for a kid-friendly game with no blood at all, if the descriptions are handled with that in mind.

Winning means you get to dictate how the conflict ends. It may mean that you capture your opponent, or that you kill him. But it may also mean that you convince him to agree to your demands ("Please stop destroying the city now!"), that you leave him with a scar and a dose of humiliation, or that you simply escape.

I guess I will try to make up some kind of examples, since maybe that will help me figure out what the heck I am saying.

 

[Ishmayl]

Combat Advantage - Examples

Some Kinda Example

This is a battle between Alex, a swordsman in service to the local duke, and Bruce, a fugitive on the run. Alex has chased Bruce through the streets of the city, and has him cornered in a dead-end alleyway. There's nowhere left to run.

Alex is brandishing a sword, is wearing lightweight armor, and is the more competent warrior. Bruce is in street clothes only, and is armed with nothing more than a lit torch he has snatched from a wall sconce. Right away, it looks like things are in Alex's favor, so he begins the fight with a slight advantage.

Alex wants to capture Bruce. If Alex wins, Bruce will be leaving in manacles. Bruce just wants to escape. If he wins, he'll be making a clean getaway somehow.

I need to come up with some kind of conflict resolution system, I guess, but it doesn't really matter.

I could easily use rock, paper, scissors for this, if I didn't want to use dice. I could deal everybody a hand of playing cards and use a "playing the highest card wins" mechanic, so players will have to save their high values for when it really counts. Who knows?

The two circle each other for a moment, then Alex closes for a cautious attack. Bruce, not thinking clearly, finds himself parrying the blow with a torch-- and shortly thereafter, finds himself holding a useless wooden haft. Oops!

Alex won the roll. Since he already had a slight advantage, it got boosted up to a major advantage.

Bruce is about to win the next roll, though. Let's see what happens.

Confident, Alex presses the attack, making a wide swing to try to back Bruce into a corner. Bruce leaps nimbly out of the way, grabbing at a run-down awning to try to get some sort of leverage, but the fabric rips off in his hands. Frustrated, he throws it at Alex-- and it touches the severed torch-head on the ground and ignites. Alex is forced to back away to avoid the flames and tangling cloth at his feet, so Bruce gets a breather.

Bruce won the roll, and he didn't have the advantage already. So now he has a major advantage over Alex.

Note the the advantage didn't change magnitude, it just switched sides. The magnitude of the advantage (and hopefully, the intensity and exciting feel of the battle) can only increase as the scene goes on.

Note that this gives me problems if I ever want to think about something like a stalemate, in which both opponents would ever return to an evenly matched state. Oh well, guess I'll burn that bridge when I come to it!

Each time a "roll" (or whatever) is made, something happens. If the person with the advantage wins, the advantage widens. If the person without the advantage wins, they get the advantage. The way to win combat is to have an overwhelming advantage and win one more roll (think of it as widening your advantage to "victorious.")

Of course, if your opponent has an overwhelming advantage against you, and you win two rolls in a row, you've snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. That's how quickly the tables can turn.

I have encountered two issues thus far:

One definite problem is that I have no idea how this would work in a three-sided fight.

The second problem is that the system does not take into account issues like in Herreman's example of someone falling, or wounds being taken outside of combat. Maybe the system could be added to be based on statuses instead of "points of advantage?" That way, for battle, "Combat Advantages" would work, and at the end of battle, the victor decides his course of action. In non-battle situations, people are always in a specific state of health, such as:

-Perfect Condition
-Mostly Healthy
-Stressed/Slightly Wounded
-Fatigued/Moderately Wounded
-Exhausted/Critically Wounded
-Burnt-Out/Close To Death
-Incapacitated/Prone/Dead

A fall from a heigh of 0 - 20 feet could move you down 3 positions on that chart, a fall of 20 - 40 feet could move you down 4 positions, a fall of over 40 feet could move you down 5 positions. Meaning, if you're perfectly healthy, a fall of 50 feet would leave you "Close to Death." This could be represented in the inability to move more than a few feet, and in a "Combat Advantage" state of "Overwhelmingly Disadvantaged" (one step from defeat), and in a non-combat situation, it means you need healing now. Similarly, healing spells could move you up one category, and days of rest could as well. If you fall that 50 feet, and are "Close to Death," but have a week's worth of rest, or a good healing spell, you can move up to Moderately Wounded.

You'll see I also put other non-wounded options in there to account for situations of tiredness and preparedness.

I don't know, thoughts?

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Hello Ishmayl,

I moved this over to its own thread as I thought it deserved specific attention.

Your example clarified quite a few questions I had. If you do away with hit points, what is it that matters? With your ideas, it is the concept of advantage, balanced until it eventually tips irrevocably in one participant's favor - at which point, they succeed in the outcome they were looking for.

With Alex and Bruce, I can see a problem or two but at the same time, I think I can add a couple of ideas into the mix.

1. The preferred destination of combat is victory. However, in this situation, it appears that Alex is trying to achieve more than what Bruce is. Alex wants to catch the guy and manacle him up. Bruce on the other hand is just looking to escape. To have to go through the steps from even to slight to major to overwhelming to victory seems a lot of things to do just to escape. I would say in this case (Bruce is just against one guy), if Bruce can turn any sort of advantage into his favor, he should be entitled to escape - or perhaps just getting to major advantage is enough?

2. While I like the idea of big shifts from one side to the other, it does mean that as written, the only challenge that matters is the last one, where victory goes to one or the other (or you have a situation similar to deuce in tennis). My point being that the first few challenges had little impact on the final result. With whatever your resolution mechanic is, perhaps you could have a regular win, and then an extraordinary win. A regular win just moves things back the other way one step, while an extraordinary win gives you the big shift you are talking about.

Tell me your thoughts?

On a related issue, I'm pondering some of the effects of doing away with such a staple of D&D such as hit points - something which as I mentioned on the other thread is the most sacred of sacred cows aside from the six standard attribute scores. You mentioned something that I thought cogent:

...I don't want to race my enemy to see who can chip away at each other's health bubbles the fastest.

If combat is just the wearing down of hit points until one combatant's health bubble bursts, then I agree that things are going to become boring if this is the standard. Combat will be mechanical, and it will all be about who can dish out the most damage.

I think what is important here is to be very clear on the DMs side of the screen how your monsters/npcs are going to react in combat and use that as the key to combat. For example:

A Pack of Wolves: They will attack unless they sense they are easily outmatched (usually being outnumbered). Or if the pack leader is slain or is made to run away, the rest of the pack will scatter. Also, they will act cautiously around fire. This gives the party plenty of tactical options other than "kill them all".

Bruce the Fugitive: Fresh from outrunning Alex, he has the PCs to outrun otherwise they're taking him to their underground leader to give up some information (a fate worse than death and poor Bruce knows it). In this case, Bruce will run and do the most desperate things to escape. Keeping up with Bruce will not be enough. They have to find some way of catching him, and him winding up dead is not good enough (the PCs do not want to force him into a situation where he will jump off a building to escape - even if it's to his death).

A Band of Street Thugs: This might be where a fight to a "bloodied" condition might be enough to get one group or the other to back down and/or look to run. I think perhaps one of the greatest errors in D&D is that it's so difficult for the PCs to run away. Most creatures fought move more quickly and so the only reasonable means of withdrawal is the use of magic (teleport at higher levels). Aside from that, there seems an in-built motivation to stay and fight - encounters in the main are generally won if the PCs stay around long enough to win and maintain firepower rather than looking for a tactical withdrawal. The use of overwhelming encounters seems almost discouraged in the main - and I suppose with good reason. If a character falls, the rest of the PCs will generally be forced to stay around trying to win, rather than abandoning the PC.

Zombies: Perhaps the most frightening thing about these creatures (and this only works if this is more the exception, than the rule) is that they will always fight to the death. They will wear you down, and they will not run. Your character is going to get hurt, it's just a case of by how much. In this case, a group will hopefully look to escape and play it smart rather than just treating it as a test of different bags of hit points.

Anyway, I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if there is good variation in terms of how an encounter may be won, hopefully this situation of constantly trying to burst the hit point bubble won't be such an issue - and thus when it is a fight to the death, it actually means something.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[LotusBlossom]

Never thought of getting rid of HP entirely. The idea is interesting, but not sure how multiple participants would work. One would need a matrix to represent all the good guys against all the bad guys. Area of effect spells would also have to be worked into it: if someone 'injured' all the bad guys through an AOE spell, would it flip all the markers to the advantage of all the good guys or just the mage.

I have my doubts about this as a workable replacement for HP, but it does sound similar to the 4E skill challenge system where one needs multiple rolls to get the job done. One could start in the middle of this track (representing the current situation) and as progress was made along the track, the PCs would be getting closer to the final goal, or for setbacks, they would be moved back towards the center or even to the other side (representing negative conditions).

Interesting idea overall and good food for thought.

 

[Walknot]

Never thought of getting rid of HP entirely. The idea is interesting, but not sure how multiple participants would work. One would need a matrix to represent all the good guys against all the bad guys. Area of effect spells would also have to be worked into it: if someone 'injured' all the bad guys through an AOE spell, would it flip all the markers to the advantage of all the good guys or just the mage.

I have my doubts about this as a workable replacement for HP, but it does sound similar to the 4E skill challenge system where one needs multiple rolls to get the job done. One could start in the middle of this track (representing the current situation) and as progress was made along the track, the PCs would be getting closer to the final goal, or for setbacks, they would be moved back towards the center or even to the other side (representing negative conditions).

Interesting idea overall and good food for thought.

Yes, how the idea applies in a complicated melee might be a key question.

Traditional wargames handled this without HP. You know, like the napoleonic wars with litlle cannons and horsemen and all that. Anywho, you would attack and if you were successful force a retreat. If the enemy couldn't retreat fast enough they were overrun and that meant killed, captured, dispersed and so forth.

You could imagine a D&D battle with the minis facing off on a board (or in your imagination). Then when one character is gaining advantage, then the other retreats. There could be some back & forth as one side advances vs the other.