Hit points as luck

[jian]

This is, of course, a debate as old as D&D and roleplaying - to what degree do your hit points, Health Points, Life Points, Stress Capacity etc represent your plot protection and luck in avoiding injury and to what degree does it represent actual injury? A couple of games - Star Wars d20 1E comes to mind - actually differentiate between HP and actual bleeding (I think Star Wars called them Vitality and Wounds? It meant that Force Choke was incredibly optimal since it did Wounds damage only).

I think there's an essay by Gygax somewhere on this topic where he basically says most of your HP in D&D (especially at high level) is luck, using the example of the last duel in The Adventures of Robin Hood (IIRC) as an example - every time Robin and Guy of Gisbourne swing and narrowly miss, they're taking off each other's HP, until Gisbourne finally runs out first and loses. And that seems a perfectly valid interpretation, I don't know if Gary stuck with it.

So, if your HP are mostly luck, could you spend them in other ways? Could you spend your HP to improve your rolls, especially for saving throws? Which leads to some interesting conversations at the table:

Player: Damn, I rolled a 3. My save vs poison is 10, so I failed.
GM: Then you die.
Player: Well, that sucks. Can I spend HP to improve my saving throw result?
GM: Sure, go ahead. That'll cost you 7 HP.
Player: Better than being dead!

I think that would be an interesting place to take it - it would be a relatively easy bolt-on to many systems.

And of course, there's at least one RPG that does this - Cypher, which uses a d20 and which was designed by Monte Cook, who's very well steeped in D&D design to say the least. Cypher actually has three pools - Intellect, Might, Speed - which are reduced by damage and which you can spend to improve your rolls. I've never played or run a Cypher game but do wonder how that changes the flow of encounters.

What do you think? Has anyone ever used this sort of thing as a houserule? How do you think, having played/run Cypher, the Pool/Effort system makes it different from other RPGs?

 

[aco175]

I view HP kind of like a Captain America movie where Thanos gives him a beatdown and he stands up saying he can do this all day.

I would not advise using HP to do more things than just track alive/dead chart. Once you get to higher levels you can just spend a few hp to pass any roll and things become trivial. You can say that the 15th level fighter should never miss and never fail a saving throw, but at that point why roll.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

It's an age-old argument.

For me, the dealbreaker is things like Cure Wounds. If hit points were just your stamina, luck, position or something like that instead of wounds, there wouldn't be all these spells that interact with HP like if they were wounds.

But some games do approach HPs that way and I don't find it uninteresting. And you're right that if you model some kind of HP around luck you could technically bind it to other systems or mechanics to give interesting choices to the players.

 

[jian]

I view HP kind of like a Captain America movie where Thanos gives him a beatdown and he stands up saying he can do this all day.

I would not advise using HP to do more things than just track alive/dead chart. Once you get to higher levels you can just spend a few hp to pass any roll and things become trivial. You can say that the 15th level fighter should never miss and never fail a saving throw, but at that point why roll.

I do think it would be a good addition to systems with save or die effects - but then it would mitigate the sense of danger if you could spend HP to not get petrified by the medusa, so why have save or die effects at all?

Note of course that if you’re still losing HP, you’re still degrading your ability to survive other things.

 

[jian]

It's an age-old argument.

For me, the dealbreaker is things like Cure Wounds. If hit points were just your stamina, luck, position or something like that instead of wounds, there wouldn't be all these spells that interact with HP like if they were wounds.

But some games do approach HPs that way and I don't find it uninteresting. And you're right that if you model some kind of HP around luck you could technically bind it to other systems or mechanics to give interesting choices to the players.

This is a really good point, because what is CLW if you’re not closing a wound? At the very least you’d have to rename it to Minor Blessing or something.

 

[payn]

I've used luck in DCC which you can burn for HP and other effects. It can be pretty interesting in a wide variety of ways. Especially, in games without any success/failure by degrees interpretations. Players have to manage it like any of their PCs daily resources. For some, its a little too meta-currency for their tastes, if they allow meta-currency at all.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This is, of course, a debate as old as D&D and roleplaying - to what degree do your hit points, Health Points, Life Points, Stress Capacity etc represent your plot protection and luck in avoiding injury and to what degree does it represent actual injury? A couple of games - Star Wars d20 1E comes to mind - actually differentiate between HP and actual bleeding (I think Star Wars called them Vitality and Wounds? It meant that Force Choke was incredibly optimal since it did Wounds damage only).

I think there's an essay by Gygax somewhere on this topic where he basically says most of your HP in D&D (especially at high level) is luck, using the example of the last duel in The Adventures of Robin Hood (IIRC) as an example - every time Robin and Guy of Gisbourne swing and narrowly miss, they're taking off each other's HP, until Gisbourne finally runs out first and loses. And that seems a perfectly valid interpretation, I don't know if Gary stuck with it.

So, if your HP are mostly luck, could you spend them in other ways? Could you spend your HP to improve your rolls, especially for saving throws? Which leads to some interesting conversations at the table:

Player: Damn, I rolled a 3. My save vs poison is 10, so I failed.
GM: Then you die.
Player: Well, that sucks. Can I spend HP to improve my saving throw result?
GM: Sure, go ahead. That'll cost you 7 HP.
Player: Better than being dead!

I think that would be an interesting place to take it - it would be a relatively easy bolt-on to many systems.

And of course, there's at least one RPG that does this - Cypher, which uses a d20 and which was designed by Monte Cook, who's very well steeped in D&D design to say the least. Cypher actually has three pools - Intellect, Might, Speed - which are reduced by damage and which you can spend to improve your rolls. I've never played or run a Cypher game but do wonder how that changes the flow of encounters.

What do you think? Has anyone ever used this sort of thing as a houserule? How do you think, having played/run Cypher, the Pool/Effort system makes it different from other RPGs?

It is not a bad way to view HP, but ever since I read the War Spell series by Georg Huff and Paula Goodlet, I have started to think of hit point as an interaction between living things in danger and the magic field.
That they are a magical boost to awareness, reflexes and speed that allows one to evade a damaging blow, and the more that one encounters and survives danger the more they accumulate.
I would not recommend spending them on other things,

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is a really good point, because what is CLW if you’re not closing a wound? At the very least you’d have to rename it to Minor Blessing or something.

They should have renamed it to "restore vitality" or something long ago. Or changed the way hits, misses and damage are defined explicitly.

 

[loverdrive]

Conceptually, I'm not a big fan of "HP as luck". It makes little sense to me, especially in games where randomness (Actual Luck) is already a big thing.

Generally, I think a game should provide multiple orthogonal ways to represent the result of an attack, with bodily harm being just one of them.

 

[TheHand]

I view HP as mostly luck in games I run, but they also represent bruises, fatigue, and minor cuts and scrapes. I kind of like the 4e idea of “bloodied”, where the first real wound happens at half hp, and your character looks at the cut or spits out some blood, grimaces, and prepares to go back in the fight.

But it is an argument older than the old gods, and I respect other gamers having entirely different views on how hp work.