My latest, greatest take on Hit Points

[loseth]

[Multi-forum post: RPG.net and ENworld]


It’s probably my most serious failing as a Dungeons & Dragons player: I’ve never been able to accept hit points as an abstract mix of everything and anything—defensive ability, armour, reflexes, divine favour and the ability to absorb physical punishment. It’s especially the mixing of that last element with all the others that gets me. I just can’t refrain from analysing stuff and whenever you start analysing HP in anything other than metagame terms, they stop making sense.

In my youth, I played around with many homebrew systems that tried to turn HP into one concrete variable: the ability to absorb physical punishment. These systems invariably sucked donkey balls. As I got older, however, my HP systems tended more and more to specifically exclude the ability to absorb physical punishment. These systems tended to work much better but still bothered the analyst in me because they were always somewhat vague on what, precisely, HP were. So, in my latest thinking, I’ve tried to give HP a precise, rigorous definition, and think I’ve come up with one that works well:

Hit points are Anti-Pwnage Awesomeness. Now, that may sound like nothing more than a simple re-naming of HP, but the thing is that unlike the term ‘hit points,’ ‘Anti-Pwnage Awesomeness’ (APA) has a precise, scientific definition:

Anti-Pwnage Awesomeness (noun, uncountable). abbr. APA. The ability—arising from martial skill, danger-honed instincts, heroic luck and favour from gods—to narrowly avoid an attack that should by all rights have pwned you,.

Finally, I have an exact definition for HP. No more arbitrariness. APA is what happens when it looks like the sword is going to pierce your gut, but somehow you manage to twist out of the way at the last second. It’s when the axe is inches away from taking your head off, but you just manage to get your shield up in time. Of course, as a fight goes on, you become fatigued, lose your mental composure and feel your luck begin to run out. Your APA, and thus your reserve of HP, starts running out. This, of course, leads to the important question of what happens when your APA runs out. And here again, a precise, scientific answer can be given. So, do you want to know what happens when your reserve of hit points reaches zero? This is what happens:

You get pwned b*tch!

You don’t lose CON points. You don’t go into negative HP. You get PWNED!

And you can find out in precisely which way you’ve been pwned by employing that great and much underused Gygaxian tool: consultation of the relevant table. Just take the total amount of damage over and above your remaining HP and consult the appropriate table, according to weapon type. Here’s the table for light piercing weapons:

Light Piercing Weapons

1Your arm’s been skewered: bleed 1 point per round, passing out when your bleeding score equals your CON score and dying when your bleeding score equals twice your CON; suffer a -2 attack penalty with the arm
2Oh-oh! Your leg’s been run through: bleed 3 points per round, passing out when your bleeding score equals your CON score and dying when your bleeding score equals twice your CON; suffer a -3 attack penalty to all attacks
3-4Ouch! You’ve taken a sharp object straight through your gut: bleed 3 points per round, passing out when your bleeding score equals your CON score and dying when your bleeding score equals twice your CON; make a DC 12 WILL save or freak out (1d6: 1-2 run in terror, 3-5 collapse whimpering and trying to stop the bleeding with your hands, 6 go berserk)
5-6Your chest has been run through: bleed 5 points per round, passing out when your bleeding score equals your CON score and dying when your bleeding score equals twice your CON; make a DC 15 FORT save to stay on your feet and if you succeed make a DC 12 WILL save not to freak out (1d6: 1-3 run in terror, 4-6 stand there staring at the hole in your chest)
7-8Oh dear. Pierced jugular: bleed 8 points per round, passing out when your bleeding score equals your CON score and dying when your bleeding score equals twice your CON; make a DC 12 WILL save or freak out (1d6: 1-2 run in terror, 3-5 stagger around with your hands on your throat, 6 go berserk)
9-10You’ve been stabbed through the heart: drop dead on your next turn; make a DC 20 FORT or WILL save to get one standard or move action before the actual dropping dead takes place
11+This is very bad. You’ve been stabbed through the eye. And right into the brain. This has all sorts of bad effects, but the worst is that you’re stone dead.

I don’t have all the tables together yet, but I think I like this system. Someday I’ll get the chance to playtest it, but for now—any suggestions on improving it?

Thanks in advance,

loseth

 

[WhatGravitas]

Hehe, but hit points are really due to the Dude Field(TM)!

But your approach is nice and I like the fact that you can still get a last action before dying, nice touch... however, since it contains actual rules, shouldn't it be in House Rules?

Cheers, LT.

 

[loseth]

... however, since it contains actual rules, shouldn't it be in House Rules?

Doh!


Mods?

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

Have you ever looked at the Rolemaster or MERP critical hit tables? They could save you a ton of work, or just help out with ideas. There are five severity levels (A through E, with E being very major), and multiple types (piercing, slashing, crushing, et cetera). When your hit points run out, you could take an A critical. The next hit would mean a B critical. Et cetera. Or some other scheme.

Incidentally, I think your approach works just fine with the concept of hit points -- you're dodging, blocking, taking a nick on the cheek that would've decapitated a lesser man...until that last blow finally nails you.

 

[Grymar]

I like the concept, but can't get past the fact that you used the meme "pwned."

 

[Thanee]

That string cannot even be properly pronounced. Geez.

Bye
Thanee

 

[loseth]

Have you ever looked at the Rolemaster or MERP critical hit tables?

I loves 'em! I've heard that the WFRP critical tables are pretty sweet as well, but I don't have any the rulebooks.

 

[Trouvere]

That string cannot even be properly pronounced. Geez.

It can if you're Welsh. Not that pwned is an actual Welsh word, I think. But pwnad means a beating or thrashing, which is just oh so close.

 

[1 hp]

Neat idea, but I have a quibble.

Monsters.

APA could work for PCs, but they don't seem right for many monsters. For example, what about an animated oak tree? Such a creature would take a lot of damage to defeat , so it would naturally have a lot of APAs. But I just can't see an animated oak tree beeing all that "awesome."

The tree won't spring out of the path of an arrow, twisting in mid-air to avoid a longsword...until finally, FINALLY, it is out of APAs and dies from a single axe-chop.

Instead, a animated tree gets beaten like a rented mule. Successful hits will strip away bark and cause it to leak sap. Chunks of woods will leave its body. Round after round this will continue...until, finally, the tree collapses into a pile of its own woodchips.

HPs do a good job of representing this kind of abuse, IMO.

 

[loseth]

Neat idea, but I have a quibble.

...

For example, what about an animated oak tree?

Very good point. That hadn't occurred to me. My first though was 'Yes, trents, golems, elementals etc. do seem to take physical damage as they run out of HP.' But then I realised that, even if visually the trent has chunks flying from it, it's still going from 100% functionality while it has HP to a sudden 0% functionality (or very low functionality using my pwnage tables) the moment it loses that last point. That still seems a lot like APA.

So, I think perhaps the best way to accomodate creatures like this is to say that for a certain subset of creatures (zombies, living trees, living rocks, golems, etc.), thier APA consists not just of luck, skill etc., but of an actual physical barrier (their flesh/bark/whatever). In a combat scene, this wouldn't make any functional difference (just a difference in narration), but after the fight the difference would become apparent: standard living creatures would just need to rest a few minutes to recover their composure, catch their breath and go back up to full HP (maybe minus a few HP to account for scratches and bruises), while creatures with physical APA would take much longer to heal unless they received magical healing or repair.

Perhaps physical APA cretures could also be given the right flavour by making them suffer a small to-hit/move/AC and/or other penalty as they get down to their last 10/20/30% or so HP. This would represent the fact that they're taking actual physical punishment. As compensation (because we'd need to make sure they don't move down a CR or two) we could give them milder pwnage tables to represent the fact that these things are bloody tough in terms of the raw damage they can absorb. For example, scoring a 5 on the normal slashing table might mean your opponent's arm comes off and he's bleeding and freaking out, but scoring a 5 against a physical APA creature might mean that his arm/branch/appendage has come off, but he's not especially bothered by that fact: no bleeding, no morale failure or to-hit penalty--he just can't do anything that involves using that arm/appendage. That would help to give PCs the feeling that 'you're going to have to literally hack this thing apart to stop it.' The trick would be balancing the penalties for getting reduced to low HP against the reduced effects of being pwned.