How many hits should a 1st level Fighter be able to take?

[Dragonblade]

There are many assumptions in this thread for people's preferred playstyle.

I've never felt it heroic that level 1 parties are expected to gang up on and slaughter lone orcs and kobolds. Even at level 1, a fighter PC should be able to duel and defeat a monster of equal level by themselves at least 75% of the time.

A 1st level party should be able to explore a small 10 room dungeon facing about 5 encounters before needing to camp or rest. Not every encounter has to be a 4e style big tactical battle. But I don't want it to be lone kobolds and single orcs room after room either.

That means that the party needs to be durable enough that even at level 1 they can potentially take on multiple foes of their level in a single battle and be reasonably expected to come out on top, and after resting momentarily they should be able to recover, or still have enough resources to be able to do that 2-4 more times before they need to camp.

 

[RangerWickett]

If HP represents your ability to avoid death, plus actual physical injury, then yeah, maybe we should do away with attack rolls altogether. To make an attack, roll the appropriate damage die of the weapon. You'll always remove some HP from the defender. It certainly cuts down on the number of dice rolled, and you could arrange it so combat lasts as long as it ever did.

You do, of course, lose some simulationism, because a near-miss could still drop someone at 1 HP. Then again, the current HP system is pretty damned far from simulationist.

 

[TrippyHippy]

A weapon like a sword should, in theory, be able to kill a 1stlevel fighter in one blow. It would have to be a good hit (max die roll) and a good con could still save him (extra HP). If we are to take an equitable weapon on a damage roll of d8, then a 1st level fighter should have 8 HP (+con bonus). On average, this would mean two blows to drop a fighter to zero. Wizards, on the other hand would be dropped on average with just one blow. Of course, this makes an assumption about the damage being dished out by an Orc, but if you give characters too many HP at the start, it takes away the tension of 1st level play, in my view.

 

[CM]

...the party needs to be durable enough that even at level 1 they can potentially take on multiple foes of their level in a single battle and be reasonably expected to come out on top, and after resting momentarily they should be able to recover, or still have enough resources to be able to do that 2-4 more times before they need to camp.

Totally agree.

Judging from the majority of the responses from this thread, people want a 1st-level party to run screaming from a group of 6 kobolds...

 

[DEFCON 1]

Forgive me if this point has already been made, but that hit point poll was totally skewed.

Two potential reponses - 12 and 14 - were exceptionally close together, with the highest option -29 - being much, much higher.

I think the designers want a figure somewhere around the 12-14 mark, so they create a poll that makes that happen. Why not have <20> in there?

Because there's no current way for an average fighter of any edition to get 20 hit points to start with.

The hit point totals in the poll represent the kind of totals you would get from the various HP generation methods of the different editions. 12 & 14 are maximized d10 + CON mod / d12 + CON mod for 1st level a la 3E, and 29 is 4E's 15 + CON score. And the smaller totals are the earlier editions using average rolled hit points with no CON mods (since in 2E and earlier, CON bonuses to HP didn't start until your score was 15 I think.)

I think that what we can take from the poll is that very few people want to roll for a random number of hit points at 1st level. They want at least a maxed hit die to start with.

 

[Kannik]

I put myself in the 3 hit camp, with the wizard in the 2 hit camp. I say this is a good balance point between making hits meaningless and making combats too brutal. Three hits gives the fighter's player a chance to do their job, go through the states of "ouch, that hurt but I'm still good" to "uh oh, that's not good... " and then to "aarrgh!" with enough close misses in between to put them on edge. Any less than 3 hits and I think it would rob them of an experience of both competence and of the tenseness that creates excitement, and could make them become overly cautious. Any more and hits might be just a thing that happens, not to worry about too much, and thus lessen the experience of tactical tension and drama.

For the mage, especially given they have lower defences, 2 hits will probably equal two hits -- if someone gets through the defences and hits the mage he's in a world of trouble and the party (and especially mage) gets all the joy of figuring out how to save the mage. If it's one hit then it's punishment: Play this game 100% perfectly every moment or be forced to stop playing because you're unconscious.

I think defences (or chance of being hit) and number of hits need to be both considered, and together 3 hits for fighter is a good number (with 2 for the less robust and more easily hit (in melee) mage).

peace,

Kannik

 

[Dragonblade]

Because there's no current way for an average fighter of any edition to get 20 hit points to start with.

Actually a 4e fighter can start with nearly 30 HP. But people who freak when they look at the number, do so because their expectations are grounded in prior edition math.

HP in a vacuum are meaningless. If I have 30 HP, but a kobold can do 50 HP of damage on a hit, then I'm playing a game more lethal than 1e AD&D. What HP do is give you a number that work in tandem with hit percentage and avg. damage output that you can use to set the lethality and playability of your game.

People are getting way too caught up in fiddly verisimilitude and simulationist notions of how many HP a human should have or be able to do, but none of that matters.

You have to look at the big picture first. How durable should the party be as a whole? How many encounters should they be able to overcome before resting? Then start breaking that down into smaller elements. How durable should the Fighter be, the Rogue, the Wizard and so on. How much damage should a monster output? How much can it take? Some of these decisions are already partially set simply by virtue of using d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 dice for weapons.

Then what hit percentage feels fun, without being automatic, and without leading to frustration after successive misses. Also you have to consider that missing or hitting too often also has an effect on durability when considered with HP totals, damage output and combat length.

Then once you have baselines, you can go back and forth from micro (individual PC damage and HP) to macro (party durability and recoverability as a whole), fine tuning and tweaking as needed for balance, fun, and yes a bit of verisimilitude.

This is also why I also firmly believe that randomness has a place in adding variability, unpredictably, and tension to say combat, or any scenario where success is in doubt, but has no place in character creation. Rolling too high, or too low for stats, or HP can completely screw with the expectations of one's game. Over my 25 years of playing D&D, I have seen many DM's and/or players get frustrated because PCs are too effective, or not effective enough, all as a direct result of randomness in character creation throwing off the underlying balance expectations of the game.

 

[Dirge]

I think a 1st level Fighter should be able to take 2 to 3 hits (depending on the weapon used).

Ideally, Hit Points would be determined something like:

HP = Con score + class bonus per level (where class bonus was 1 for Wizard-types, 2 for Rogue-types, and 3 for Fighter-types)

This would leave that 1st level, 14 Con Fighter with 17 HP (which would turn into 44 HP by 10th level). That seems about right to me. He gets tougher, but not so bloated with HPs that he starts to resemble a large herd animal.

Under this system, a 1st level, 12 Con Wizard would have 13 HP (which would turn into 22 HP at 10th level).

Similarly, a 1st level, 13 Con Rogue would have 15 HP (which would turn into 33 HP by 10th level).

All these numbers seem acceptable to me and would go great with the new flatter math that hopefully will prevail in 5E.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

To add my preference on the subject of hits: I do not want anything like verisimilitude in my D&D game. Hit points are an abstract system, and do not lend themselves to 'realism'. Nor do I want my 1st level characters do be normal people. I want them to survive past 1st level unless they get really unlucky or make a huge mistake. If the odds were as heavily stacked against them as they were in 1E, only a lunatic would become an adventurer. And don't pretend you didn't fudge the dice rolls back in those days to save having to wait for another character to be generated!

"Those days" were last week. And I have never fudged a die roll and never will. Why bother? It takes longer to find a pencil than it does to generate a 1e character.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I think that what we can take from the poll is that very few people want to roll for a random number of hit points at 1st level. They want at least a maxed hit die to start with.

Not I. I prefer to roll, although I do give a minimum of average rounded up at 1st level.