D&D General Hit Points are a great mechanic

[loverdrive]

And yet, no hit point game treats an unarmed character as completely at the mercy of an armed opponent unless something else is in play. And if you do drop someone to zero, in a 5e game at least, there is a better than 50% chance they'll fully recover in no more than an hour at most with no intervention.

Sure. No model is going to be free of some weird cases.

I debated whether to include the tangent on verisimilitude, because ultimately it's secondary to all the real-life logistic benefits of HP system.

 

[loverdrive]

I don't mind HP when they're unambiguously "meat points". Personal taste and all that.

Instead of critical hits, I'm toying with the idea of "exploding" damage dice.

There's an interesting GDC talk about "pink noise" randomness in boardgames where it's supposed that randomness where the result is mostly predictable, but sometimes generates very impactful outliers "feels" nice for the players, and that seems empirically true -- there's a reason people adore crits so much, after all.

And one of the suggested ways of achieving such randomizer was exploding dice.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, I really want to lift the abstraction veil enough for injuries to result when you hit zero, at the very least.

Yeah, I've been thinking the same. It doesn't even need to be some super grievous permanent injury, but something that cannot be instantly fixed. It would also give combat more nuanced defeat and attrition conditions, as you could sustain an injury that is not healed just by taking a long rest.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

when you drop to 0 HP, you get exhaustion level.
if critical hit drops you to 0 HP you take 2 exhaustion levels.
when you fail a death save, you take 1 exhaustion level.

these exhaustion levels are removed when you are healed above 50% of max HP.

Using exhaustion track or something similar to abstract this seems fine to me, but it going away by normal healing (and thus by long rest) sort of defeats the point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. No model is going to be free of some weird cases.

I debated whether to include the tangent on verisimilitude, because ultimately it's secondary to all the real-life logistic benefits of HP system.

Secondary to your needs, of course, but not everyone sees ease of use as more important than anything else.

 

[loverdrive]

I am on board with inflicting long-term debuffs on drop 0, especially if there's a nice way to visualize it on the table. Like, the main problem of injuries in Blades is that you get them pretty often, and it's very easy to lose track of what's going on. Not really a problem if you go down once a session and then the injury persists for a while.

Alternatively, Apocalypse World style system where you have HP, but getting hit incurs problems beyond just loss of it is also pretty nice.

AW also has a cool thing where if you are at high HP it restores by itself, and if you are at low HP, it goes down by itself, but that also can be annoyingly fiddly.

Alternatively-alternatively, Fate has lingering injuries, but invoking them is optional, rather than mandatory. You forgot that the enemy is *Bruised which can be used to get +2? Skill issue.
This is noticeably smoother than Blades where you have to always remember that you roll with -1D when you have Level 2 Harm.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

@loverdrive

Funny enough, this actually connects to another thread here recently about what exactly constitutes a “hit” in RPG combat. On the surface it looked like a different question, but I think it ties directly into what you’re describing here. My response there was that you can’t really talk about a single mechanic—like to-hit rolls or hit points—in isolation. The meaning of a “hit” only becomes clear when you see how the whole system resolves it: attack, defense, damage, and the way the game defines consequences.

That’s why I read your take on wounds systems as more about implementation in play than about whether the idea itself is good or bad. A wounds mechanic can look clean in theory, but if at the table it creates friction—extra bookkeeping, retroactive modifiers, slowed pacing—it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. That’s where hit points shine: they’re fire-and-forget. You only think about them when they change, and they don’t ripple into other mechanics unless you drop to zero.

Where I land personally is that the problem isn’t complexity, it’s disconnection. A lot of wound mechanics feel like they’re bolted on top of a preexisting chassis instead of being part of its engine. When that happens, you’re right—they’re annoying. But when they’re integrated into the foundation of the system, they can create clarity and consequence without slowing play.

That’s what I like about Daggerheart. The way it handles hits, wound severity, and armor mitigation runs intuitively, and the results tie directly into stress, hope, and fear. You don’t need to bolt on extra conditions because the consequences already feed into the other mechanics that drive the game. It doesn’t feel like an extra layer of crunch—it feels like the game showing you why the hit mattered.

Now, D&D works better as-is precisely because it never had a narrative need to define hit points or wounds in the first place. It was designed around a big abstraction where you don’t ask whether you’re winded, bloodied, or just lucky—you’re “fine until you’re not.” That’s why HP fits it so well. Problems arise when people try to make the game something it isn’t by layering on fixes that address only a single part, like hit points, without rethinking the whole system. At that point, you’re no longer really playing the same game by standard rules. You're only tempting to break it, or begging it to be something else.

 

[rmcoen]

Without figuring out the exact math every round my barbarian would be adding close to 4 points of damage. The thing is though that my barbarian already does quite a bit of damage and this particular build would benefit more than most others (unless you apply it to sneak attack damage which could get pretty bonkers).

But either it's giving a boost to some builds over others or giving such a minimal boost that it doesn't matter and it's just adding extra rolls for no real reason. I've played with various versions of crits over the years I've never really hit one that stands out as any better.

This is HackMaster's solution. That greataxe doesn't do 1d12, it does 3d4 (actually, I think in HM it does 4d4).... much more likely to trigger incremently small-but-frequent damage boosts. Most weapons' damage is reconfigured around this 1d4 concept, except intentionally Ranged/Missile weapons. That Longbow is still 1d10; it doesn't land an exploding blow often (10%), but you notice when it does!

This also would make interesting (well, interesting to me) distinctions possible between weapons - the GWM argument between greataxe and greatsword - where the longsword is 1d8 but the broadsword (1e!) is 2d4...

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is HackMaster's solution. That greataxe doesn't do 1d12, it does 3d4 (actually, I think in HM it does 4d4).... much more likely to trigger incremently small-but-frequent damage boosts. Most weapons' damage is reconfigured around this 1d4 concept, except intentionally Ranged/Missile weapons. That Longbow is still 1d10; it doesn't land an exploding blow often (10%), but you notice when it does!

This also would make interesting (well, interesting to me) distinctions possible between weapons - the GWM argument between greataxe and greatsword - where the longsword is 1d8 but the broadsword (1e!) is 2d4...

Well that's very cool! I need to look into that.