Counting blows instead of HP

[BryonD]

nevermind

 

[ravenheart]

Apparently the series of articles I wrote a few months back has stirred some conversation, so I thought I'd pop by.

Haze over at Exploring Infinity posted a system like this for the DM's side of the screen. Shouldn't be that difficult to convert over to the player's side.

Part 1: DnD without Hit Points, Damage without Math (Part 1) | Exploring Infinity
Part 2: DnD without Hit Points, Damage without Math (Part 2) | Exploring Infinity
Part 3: DnD without Hit Points, Damage without Math (Part 3) | Exploring Infinity

I've used this for one game so far and I like it a lot. We only used it for the monsters, though.

Glad you like it!

Red this over. Several other systems have a model similar to this but this one seems like a good representation for the DND system.

The only major issue I have is that I don't know if the damage thresholds scale properly. For example, at 1st level the damage threshold is 4. Considering most players have a 16 if not an 18 in their prime stat at 1st level then everyone is going to be dealing hard hits.

Also, I think the x2 threshold is important for big damage, but once you start going to x3 and x4 your expecting the same kind of math that the standard system requires.

Well, the idea was that everyone should be dealing hard hits. This might have been a bit confusing, since I altered my formula while writing this series (brought it up in part 2). Apologies for that!

A hard hit represents 1/8 of a monsters hit points, which means that a party of 4 non-strikers should be able to take one out in no more than 2 full rounds (assuming each party member attacks once every round). Note that the threshold is modelled after the average expectations of at-will damage, incorporating likelyhood of landing a hit, miss effects etc.

This might seem a bit on the slow side, but this also assumes no strikers, extra damage, terrain effects, encounter/daily powers, action points, minor action attacks etc. Considering those it quickly speeds things up.

And when it comes to the multiples, that's where the chart comes in handy: it's an easy reference guide, and you'd still be adding all those dice and modifiers together with this system.

I can attest to that in our last game (2nd level) we only had one soft hit. It may very well need some adjustments. I didn't mess with the thresholds, but I lowered the number of hit boxes for each monster (and increased the damage output accordingly) just because I like to keep things speedy and my players are largely inexperienced, so things have a tendency to slow down.

Now, being a low level group, nobody rolled damage under the soft threshold, but I don't plan on narrating those as 'non-hits'. Just narrate them as I would any low roll.

The soft hit threshold is really there to mitigate trivial and incidental damage, but also to buff up higher level monsters (and encourage players switching to more potent powers). It works sort of like damage resistance, but I must confess it might be a tad too much at higher levels as it effectively renders low ongoing damage obsolete. One idea is to have ongoing damage "burn" the thresholds a bit for a turn, making it easier to damage the monster temporarily.

And as Viking said, a low roll can be narrated just like that. This is all off-screen anyway, so why bother with such miniscule detail and micromanagement? It's not like it makes much of a difference. And I always feel it is sort of silly and anti-climactic when a monster is bloodied or killed by falling on its own feet or something similar (barring the case where such hilarity is called for and appropriate, of course).

Well, I think the tables are very handy. I just look up the numbers on the table.

I like this for the DM side of things because I find it makes keeping track of things a lot easier. The player tells me the damage he rolls and I consult the table and tick the appropriate number of boxes. Somehow, it just feels more intuitive to me.

I also found this true while playtesting, which seems to indicate I at least somewhat succeeded in my design. A few things did occur to me though:

1. Player Insecurity: I didn't openly present this system to my players at first, partially to see how they responded to it without knowing of it (this was a behind-the-screen tool for me as a DM anyway, and I was fairly condifent in its balance. If issues would arise, I could just wing it.). I noticed that the players started to feel unsure about what effect their damage had on the enemy, and as the game continued and I bit by bit revealed and exposed my system to them some of them started to speculate how they should retool their characters to better handle such a system. This made me realize how important metagame assumptions and rules transparency is to 4E (especially compared to the olden thymes when players got their hands severed if they so much as touched the DMG or MM). Something to keep in mind at least.

2. Minions: As I explained in my article, I use the two-hit minion variety. To compensate for this, they lose their immunity to miss effects. Also, their soft hit threshold is always 0. This accomplishes several things. First, any two separate instances of damage will kill them, regardless of their level or hard hit threshold. This makes environmental factors and splash damage deadly to them. Second, dailys with miss effects are much cooler. Third, minions can be bloodied, which opens up new design space (without much micromanagement). Just find some convenient way of tracking which is which and you're all set to go.

3. Incidental Soft Hits: Although the system is built to compensate for low and high damage based on averages, it made me cringe every time a player just fell short of hitting a multiplier, ergo they lost a good portion of their damage. So I started ahnding out an incidental soft hit like it was candy. And I just did it ad hoc; if it made sense that they should be dealing more damage or bloodying/killing a creature in that one epic blow, fine by me. I mean, a crit is always a crit, right? So I house ruled my own house rule: If appropriate, add an incidental soft hit or treat a near multiple of a hard hit as a multiple.

----------------------------

Now, before anyone points it out: Yes, this has little to do with implementing a blow by blow system instead of Hit Points for PCs as my work has been all about monsters/NPCS.

But maybe there are things to be learned from it, something one can adapt to fit the other side of the table. That's what I'm thinking, at least.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

/Haze

 

[Janx]

As an aside, Nd6 yields 6^N permutations which have 31 combinations ranging from 6 - 36.

make a stupid math or terminology mistake and everybody misses the point


rolling multiple dice for damage creates a bell curve. If everybody has HP that are equal to that maximum result, you've got a rarer but possible chance for a single fatal blow.

the downside is, most fights end after 2 hits. Which is pretty lethal and short. You'd be relying on the stormtrooper effect to keep people alive by increasing AC.

Another idea (and none of these are tested) is stick with 12 HP, but damage is 1d6. And allow for critical hits to double the damage.

Then, the average attack will be 3.5, meaning it will take 4 hits to kill a guy, unless he rolls a 6 and a crit.

That would probably play closer to a 1st level with a shortsword attacking a 1st level barbarian. in terms of outcome.

Obviously, I'm just modeling lower HP scales, but using the concept of how many hits to kill to feel out the numbers.

I think one of the challenges is whether you want to accept that it WILL take 6 hits to kill a guy, regardless of skill.

There are times, an instakill makes sense. Other times (like for equally skilled opponents) that a longer fight makes sense. Going to a pure HTK system means all fights require 6 hits to finish. Just like a sparrring match.

Conversely, even D&D doesn't really have instakill. Vs. weak enough opponents, sure you can do enough damage to just kill something. But more often than not, the PC will face things with more HP than they can inflict damage in a single round.

 

[mmadsen]

rolling multiple dice for damage creates a bell curve. If everybody has HP that are equal to that maximum result, you've got a rarer but possible chance for a single fatal blow.

the downside is, most fights end after 2 hits. Which is pretty lethal and short.

Again, this is the nature of hit points, where multiple die rolls are summed up until the total crosses some threshold. If you want any chance of a one-shot stop, then you'll almost always get a two-shot stop, maybe three-.

If we move away from hit points though, we can move away from that pattern. For instance, if you want fights to last roughly six hits, then something more like a saving throw, with a 1-in-6 chance of going down, provides that -- but without longevity clustering tightly around six hits. Sometimes the first hit does the job, sometimes the second, ..., sometimes the sixth, etc.

 

[Janx]

Again, this is the nature of hit points, where multiple die rolls are summed up until the total crosses some threshold. If you want any chance of a one-shot stop, then you'll almost always get a two-shot stop, maybe three-.

If we move away from hit points though, we can move away from that pattern. For instance, if you want fights to last roughly six hits, then something more like a saving throw, with a 1-in-6 chance of going down, provides that -- but without longevity clustering tightly around six hits. Sometimes the first hit does the job, sometimes the second, ..., sometimes the sixth, etc.

an extreme of that is to rely on to-hit and BAB and everyone has 1 HP.

the storm trooper effect, where everybody misses a lot, until the fatal/disabling hit.

Or like Palladium, where you make a dodge roll after the attack roll.

 

[mmadsen]

an extreme of that is to rely on to-hit and BAB and everyone has 1 HP.

Yes, one extreme version of the idea would be to fold all forms of defense and toughness into AC and all forms of attack and damage into the attack bonus, so that a successful attack roll would not mean hitting but hurting the target.

A less extreme version would be to replace AC with a Defense stat reflecting just dodging, parrying, and avoiding attacks (like Touch AC) and a Toughness stat reflecting armor, size, constitution, and ability to withstand attacks that hit.

So the first roll would determine if the attack hit, and the second roll would determine if the attack put the target out of the fight.

the storm trooper effect, where everybody misses a lot, until the fatal/disabling hit.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Stormtrooper Effect:

Imperial Stormtroopers in the original Star Wars trilogy possessed overwhelming numbers, professional military education and training, full armour, and military-grade firepower. At the beginning of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the Stormtroopers are portrayed as lethal when boarding a rebel ship, overwhelming it and killing most resistance in what seems like mere moments while taking only minimal losses themselves. At one point Obi-Wan Kenobi even comments on their effectiveness to Luke Skywalker when the pair find the destroyed Jawa sandcrawler, saying "These blast-points... Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise." Despite this, stormtroopers appear to be incapable of defeating the film's protagonists.

This concept can also apply to aerial combat. In Something Something Something Dark Side (a Family Guy parody of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back), Peter Griffin (as Han Solo) comments in the space battle, "Don't worry, we've got four of the five main characters on this ship. I'm pretty sure we're safe."

The GURPS roleplaying game makes reference to an "Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship", whose graduates are inexplicably poor shots; for example, "The Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade must all have studied at the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship."[3] The game system includes optional rules titled Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy designed to make large numbers of nameless characters ineffective.​

What you describe is more of a glass ninja.

 

[Umbran]

If not, what is the point of switching from hit points to blows? It's just the same thing with different numbers.

Well, let me bring up Classic Deadlands as an example of a potential difference between damage and blows...

In Deadlands, every hit does some number of points of damage. Divide that damage total by the target's size (usually 6, for PCs, and generally rounding down), and you get some number of wounds. The wounds are what the players track, not damage points done - wounds from each hit are applied to some area of the body (arm, leg, head, or guts). If an area takes 6 wounds, that area is "maimed", and no longer functions. If you get maimed in the head or guts, you die.

You could shorten this (and I often do, when I have a whole lot of mooks shooting), and say that your standard pistol does 1 or 2 wounds, and be done with it - essentially tracking blows. The game doesn't do that because the swinginess is a desired feature, but it'd be simple to implement. Same for the rounding error in determining the number of wounds.

So, part of the point may well be to use some basic hit locations. Or just to keep the numbers small - that's often a desired feature as well.

 

[Janx]

What you describe is more of a glass ninja.

Nope. i meant stormtrooper. They miss a lot. In starwars, if you get hit, you die, unless it is plot related to keep you wounded (which how many "I'm hit!" scenes did it have? Zero?).

Cranking up hit DCs results in the StormTrooper Effect. A whole lot of shooting, not a lot of dying.

Moving on...

I can see value in having lower numbers. Useful for LARPs. Useful for simpler bookkeeping.

HTK would keep the BBEG alive long enough to finish his monologue. Keep some fights challenging, etc.

I think the concept will get muddy though, when you go from "it takes 6 hits to kill a man" and then start making men that need 10, or attacks that count as 2 hits.

 

[mmadsen]

Nope. i meant stormtrooper. They miss a lot.

I think the Stormtrooper Effect is not that the stormtroopers miss a lot; it's that they always miss the heroes. They hit everyone else quite consistently.

It's almost as if the PCs have plot protection points...

Cranking up hit DCs results in the StormTrooper Effect. A whole lot of shooting, not a lot of dying.

That's just realistic combat, actually.

I think the concept will get muddy though, when you go from "it takes 6 hits to kill a man" and then start making men that need 10, or attacks that count as 2 hits.

I think the urge to simplify the math is perfectly reasonable and even laudable, but moving from dozens of hit points to exactly six hits isn't the way to do it.

In discussing this and looking at the math, I think it's become clear that D&D-style hit points involve a lot of rolling and a fair amount of arithmetic to create the illusion of much more randomness than there really is.

Switching to using average damage for every attack would reduce the "work" and eliminate the (minimal) randomness, while keeping the distinction between big, dangerous attacks and minor ones.

That's what I would suggest to the original poster, even though it's not to my own tastes.

 

[howandwhy99]

Blow Points are Hit Points in that each is representing how many solid hits someone can take.

1 attack does 1 blow of damage and these are subtracted from Blow Points - how many blows a person can take before death or destruction. It's simple and straightforward.

Hit Points do the same thing, but with greater variability. To understand how we have to go back to the beginning.

1 attack always did 1d6 HPs of damage. Every class level equaled a 1d6 Hit Die of damage sustainability. So in the original game an average 1st level character could sustain only 1 average attack. However, the variability allowed them a chance of taking less and staying alive. Of course variability also meant the damage rolled could be over the Hit Die rolled, so zero Blow Points - death - was still a possibility.

By rolling for an outcome, in this case both Hit Points and Damage, we allow for more variability and a greater number of outcomes in the game. Level 1 characters have 1 to 6 HPs possible and basic (level 1) weapons deal 1 to 6 HP of damage.

Of course after that base core game relationship we got tons more variability with different Hit Dice for classes, different weapons dealing different damage amounts, not to mention crits and fumbles and all kinds of more additions. Later games even remove 1 hit for 1 level too for an easier game at start.

I think both Blow Points and Hit Points can work well, but each comes down to where players want to account for odds in the game. Hitting is still rolled for in both systems, right? Damage and Hit Point variability allow players to know the top and low ends of the bell curve of their damage ability and also how good their PC is at taking a hit, while not necessarily being the same as everyone else.

Rolling hit points is less popular now, but it allows for PCs and NPCs too to have variation. This adds some flavor of its own after fighting orc after orc who are all 3 Blow Points becomes dull.