I've always considered that D&D style Hit Points to be one of the most of the depressing things in the RPG world.
Gygax himself was open about why they were there. He stated that they served the purpose of making the game predictable such that the players would know if they could win, and slowed things down so that if they weren't- they could retreat. In one article from the old days of the Dragon (I believe it was), he even stated that Saving Throws were originally incorrectly done with their 'Save or Die' nature- that they should be altered to fixed damage amounts to uphold this single goal.
Hit Points serve this goal well, and that usage is why they are found in the most popular RPGs table top or computer. Because the lowest common element in players is that they like to win, and HP systems are easy to win in. Find the right pattern, use it, repeat and victory is yours with small margin of error.
And this in turn makes things easy for the GMs the world over. Adventures are easy to make and manage. MMORPGs easy to design and balance.
But they are so terrible for any other use. And perhaps worse is the hoops that people leap to to justify them in other terms.
To use one example, I'll often see people claim that they represent your classic lengthy sword fight (think of The Dread Pirate Roberts against Inigo Montoya). Well, yes- you have a long fight with a winner and a loser (any system could do that by starting the battle and going out to dinner before resolving it). But I didn't read or see them hacking chunks out of each other- which is what 'roll to hit, roll to damage' indicates. I saw them striking and parrying/dodging blows until someone was disarmed.
And what about those fights where someone dies before the first D&D round can even finish? These are even more common in the source material, and not just for minion level foes which didn't even exist in D&D until recently.
"But", claim the HP people, "D&D includes that- it's just all abstract."
Sure, if one is good with an abstraction system that does Y and then afterwards claims that it did X. Do people get on an America Airlines Flight to go to New York and call it acceptable when they end up in LA? Order a steak and then are good when given a hamburger for their $25?
One possible suggestion is to just rename Hit Points and call them what they are- either Fatigue or perhap Battle Advantage. Stop rolling to damage, and instead roll to Press the attack. Add an 'actual damage' table to anyone taken below 1 HP to represent the final outcome of the battle. Then at least things are clear, and the only remaining objection is that so much of the source material (i.e. any quick kill) either can't be done or must overturn the core combat system (such as extreme critical hit systems).
Such a mess.
There are other options, and I've used them for decades. Age of Heroes uses a strike/defense system combined with a damage system that typically will drop a foe in a single blow. One's ability to hit and defend (and length of combat) is thus very dependent upon the relative skill of the combatants.
And what is interesting about this is that over the decades nearly any player I've encountered likes that better than D&D style Hit Points. New Players, old players, D&D haters and D&D (originally) fans. The couple of exceptions almost prove the rule.
Most recently we did two tests with different players comparing Star Wars SAGA with a Star Wars modified version of Age of Heroes. One group was basically new to rpgs and tested blind, the other was my own experienced gaming group.
No one in either group liked the SAGA approach (done first in the blind test, second in the experienced group). Or rather, the blind novice group liked it until they tried the other option. After that they completely rejected the SAGA approach as boring, in their view AoH seemed much more exciting and modelled the movies so much better.
But my experience seems to be the exception.
While other games have attempted a different approach, they either failed or at best are 'also rans'. Some (like HERO System) can be played in different manners, are instead typically used in the D&D style. Others use the D&D style, but attempt to hide it (Dark Heresy).
It may be due to D&D's ownership of the market. It may be due to players who want simple HP systems because the other options are too uncontrolled for them. Or it may be due to the system design failures of the early non-HP game systems (like Rune Quest) giving other non-HP designs a bad name. Or it may be that non-HP systems require too much of their GMs.
Whatever the cause...
...it's just depressing.
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22 comments:
At least part of the problem is sheer damn laziness. I have no beef with any of your arguments; I just can't be bothered to rework such a central core of D&D type roleplaying. Tacking on a crit system is a poor compromise, but it's the only one that works for me after the theoretical discussions end and the dice start rolling.
If I had to pick a reason, I think laziness and this style of design is one of the reasons D&D holds the market.
It takes effort to look for different options, and in many cases (HERO System)- more effort even after on has selected something. Add in the cost, and it's no wonder people just pass on making the attempt.
Thus I think market ownership (D&D, and in past years to a lesser extent White Wolf) is the gamer's first choice.
Second (likely by a good distance) is genre and is how I think most who are not brought into the hobby by an existing group enter it. This provided a opening for games like Shadowrun, the original Vampire and Deadlands- at least for a short while.
If true, then the hobby is and will continue to be D&D. No matter the changes they make.
That does it, I have to do a AoH playtest.
~AoB
Adaen of Bridgewater:
Good luck with that, I doubt that I wrote the rules well enough for you to follow :)
If you like, I can send you the Star Wars supplement we used for our test. It's not complete of course- but has the basics in there for some starting adventures.
For some reason the system really shined in that setting, highlighting just what a lightsaber *should* do. And it's not a handful of HP :)
Please do! I have always been intrigued by the ruleset, but haven't had the inclination (time really) to sift through it (I'd seen a review in which there was some confusion as to how it actually worked).
~AoB
Adaen of Bridgewater:
I'll sned a copy of the SW supplement to you tonight. As I said, it's not finished but is playable within its limits.
Send me what email address you want me to use.
Of Note- I didn't attempt to balance Jedi and non-Jedi. I felt the setting viewed Jedi as flatly better (in rpg combat terms). I can think of a couple of ways of handling this in a rpg campaign, but I haven't noted that them in the supplement yet.
As to the review, yes. The reviewer were rightfully overwhelmed by character generation. AoH has a very complex system for that as it's intended to control it enough for Generation Campaigns (requiring much from character advancement and generation). It's also rather detailed.
I'll shoot you some example characters for your test.
I think part of it is that realism isn't fun. Plenty of systems have optional rules for taking penalties to do things once you've taken a certain amount of damage, which makes good sense. But it's not fun. Come from behind victories are a lot harder when you're at -6 to hit because your enemy spent the last five rounds hacking you to bits. Any kind of system that takes into account realistic fatigue/injuries from fighting has to have some kind of penalties for it. And that's just not fun.
Disclaimer: I'm aware some people probably will respond that taking a -6 to hit when they're already losing is fun for them. I have yet to meet such a person in real life.
adaen@
highadventuregames.com
Swordgleam I don't think realism has any bearing here, for I was speaking of the game matching the source materals. Last I checked neither Lord of the Rings nor Star Wars were actual historical events.
HP systems simply put don't match genre (let alone the real world) except in a select subgroup of possible outcomes (and even here, not in the method of getting there).
BTW: the type of mechanic you're speaking of is called by many a death spiral, and it's really it's own subject unrelated to HP.
As to people liking them, ask players of Shadowrun. It has a serious death spiral as part of its mechanics.
But I'm with you, I don't like them as Shadowrun presents them (or as you did).
While I'm not a big fan of Death spirals, I do lament their absence because it tends to change player behavior.
In a multi-participant combat, it becomes more important to drop an opponent than to make sure everyone is "covered"/engaged. So players try to all target the same opponent, being sure to "drop" them, before moving onto another.
~AoB
Adaen of Bridgewater: That's a valid point, for HP systems do heavily reward concentration of attacks.
Which is another break with just about any genre.
But I dislike death spirals enough that using them to avoid that behavior is counter-productive to me.
amazing,
you spoke short, but you managed to enflame my heart.
I am currently working on my own "perfect" (at least to me) RPG system. And I was thinking for 2 weeks now how to create a more realistic damage system. Now I will definatly look into something like the aoh system...
thx
arg, forgot the most important part
I would like to read your starwars rules, too. (I am a big SW fan, read around 90 of the books). I would like to recieve a copy, too. Thank you.
ps: please excuse the double-posting
It seems like how you view hit points is more of a semantics issue than a mechanics issue. My character has a finite resource to draw on in a combat situation. Over time, that resource is depleted such that I can no longer participate in the combat. I am aware of the process of depletion, and can take actions to minimize that. There is risk involved in waiting too long to take action on my dwindling resources.
In any sport I've participated in (mostly soccer and fencing) I have had to make decisions about how to best use my energy. Sometimes I have been too tired, or hurt, to be effective. I would say that I was low on hit points. That's my interpretation, FWIW.
I pretty much agree with you on all of what you said Gleichman. I get why hit-points exist, and I don't really like them and there is a special dark crusty spot on my soul that level-scaling hit points have created with the contaminating presence.
Now professionally I'm a trauma medic and so I've got a fair understanding of how the human body reacts to damage, and that knowledge helped a fair bit when I worked out some of Hardkore's trauma system, which is rather good, but it's also frustratingly complex, and that's still after we've simplified the entire concept of trauma to it's raw bones. The fact is, it is HARD to simulate the variances of blood loss, understand at what point shock sets in, and what the mechanical difference between a broken leg and a bullet wound to that same leg are. This gets exponentially more difficult when you try to convert these mechanics to non-humans.
You have to understand, I hate hitpoints as much as you, but having been in the trenches of the war to make something better for the better part of two years, I know why they still dominate. Don't get me wrong, I will keep plugging away at creating a better way, but to my knowledge none exists yet.
Virenerus: Do you happen to already have a copy of AoH from way back? It's sort of needed to make sense of the expansion.
anarkeith: I believe I covered your point in my article (see the section where I rename the components of the classic D&D system).
I don't don't feel that viewpoint resolves enough of the problems, i.e. it still doesn't allow me to emulate genre events.
Further I will say that personal combat to the death isn't akin to sports- be that personal combat genre or real life. You rarely wear someone down to score points- you kill them and move on.
Helmsman: I certainly agree about the simulation of real world injury, and that still leaves open the question of how that injury happens.
I choose instead to model the source material, which treats the matter rather simply- but still with more detail than D&D does.
@Gleichman. Well currently our model includes hit location, and then a variable to how likely a person is to suffer significant trauma based on whether the damage is puncturing, edged, blunt or elemental. Our resolution here is pretty well refined but relies on a lot of slightly uncomfortable abstractions that I'd like to get rid of.
We keep the ugly truth and details of the trauma out until the healing Roll after combat is done, choosing to deal only with the death-spiral penalties and whether or not a character's life is in immediate peril due to a given hit. So basically if you get hit in the leg for a significant wound rather than saying "They've shattered your femur in 3 places severing your femoral artery..." we simply set it up as "bone broken, roll to remain standing, and you're bleeding [X] fatigue per-round." Fatigue is the current word we're using to model Cellular Perfusion, which is a mouthful but conceptually is perfect for our purposes, because ultimately it is the lack of cellular perfusion that shuts down the vital functions of all life forms.
I managed to find a copy of your work from back than after one hour of searching^^ Irony is just that the site is one of my favourite, but it is off atm due to technical difficulty.
But I will wait for a chance to look at your work, that I found only described as "complex, and well thought through", as I like my games^^ So in a month or so I hope to have a copy
Just spitballing, but suppose you have a fatigue pool that gets replenished by a set amount every turn and governs how many offensive, defensive, and maneuver actions a character can take before being forced to wait the round. The fatigue pool can, in theory, be drained by any action in combat so dodging or blocking an attack could cost FP, and attacking would cost FP, and moving would cost FP. Maybe make the costs based on the weapon's size(1d2 small, 1d4 medium, 2d4 large, +2 for a size category difference?) or strength requirement for offense and use a dodge bonus and a damage reduction feature instead of AC, costing the difference between DEX and CON(DEX-CON=Cost to dodge an attack, DEX-CON-damage=Cost to absorb an attack). That basically eliminates the need for BAB, too, if you take it far enough. That might be fun to try out...
In my homebrew D&D variant, I've split hit points into two categories: ``hit points'' and ``miss points''. Hit points represent actual physical damage, miss points battle position and fatigue. You generally lose miss points first, then hit points. For one fight, it is approximately the same as having the sum as hit points. But you recover your miss points with a brief rest. (On the other hand, clerics can't heal miss points, and miss points don't help against sneak attacks.)
While there are secondary advantages, the main motivation is how fights get narrated. Instead of whittling down the opponents, the first few blows of a battle are feints to get your opponent off balance, followed by one or two killing blows. The exact ratio also depends on the nature of the opponent.
The giant requires chopping up repeatedly, but the evil mage is decapitated with a single stroke once his defensive charms are disabled.
Russell
Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast's Star Wars RPG actually did originally use a system like you describe for handling damage: A character had a fixed number of Hit Points and it's their Vitality Points that went up with level and were affected by their character class. Most "hits" would in-game actually be near-hits and dodges and parries, etc., going to the Vitality Points, whereas hit points would only be used up with critical hits or once a character's Vitality was gone. They went back to the HP-only system for Saga Edition as part of "streamlining".
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