Nuts and Bolts Discussion: Hit Points or Something else?

[souran]

So, as per the thread title, what are peoples thoughts on hit points as the damage tracking for pen and paper RPGs.

Obviously, this system is not great at reflecting real wounds, it does not (typically) involve death spirals. Characters/creatures pretty much act at full capacity right up until they are removed.

However, hit points are easy to track, easy to understand, and most people don't seem to mind the relative abstraction due to this ease of use.

If you were building a game from the ground up would you use hit points or would you use something like wound boxes? Also why would you chose the one you would?

[Kaelik]

If you were building a game from the ground up would you use hit points or would you use something like wound boxes? Also why would you chose the one you would?

I would use the condition tracks from Fiends and Fortress: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56536

[DrPraetor]

Kaelik and Frank have both floated hybrid systems of Shadowrun's condition monitor and D&D 3rd edition's status effects.

With quibbles about implementation and the number of damage tracks you want to keep, I would use such a system as well.

For what it's worth, I would also use ten boxes to track abstract success against other long-term goals, like sneaking into castles and convincing villagers to aid you.

[Grek]

The correct answer to this question depends on what genre you're going for. Shadowrun uses wound boxes because it wants to be gritty and human scale. Mutants and Masterminds uses resistance checks because it wants to scale from being afraid of muggers with knives to bouncing suns off of your manly four colour chest. If you swapped the hit point systems of these two systems without reflection, it'd end up with really stupid results.

[Foxwarrior]

Back in the old days before roll20, I thought triple digit hit points were absolutely terrible, a big bookkeeping thing that slows down the game a lot. Roll20 makes dealing 80d6 damage to someone with 4000 hit points totally tractable, but I've developed an appreciation for actions having consequences in large enough increments that you actually care about the distinction: you need to be really deep into the arithmetic to get excited about the difference between dealing 17 damage or 18 damage to an enemy with 87 hit points, and most people like math way less than I do.

[DenizenKane]

The way I see it the best way to go is with 10HP and an LMSD conversion.

For instance, if you rolled 3d6 + Str Mod + Attack Bonus vs 5 + Str Mod + Toughness.

0-3 = 1 HP
4-7 = 3 HP
8-11 = 6 HP
12+ = 10 HP

With equal mods this gives you a nice spread of 1.85% chance of none or 10 damage, 24.07% chance of 1 or 6, and and a 48.15% chance of 3 damage.

Of course everything can be adjusted for your game, but thats the basic idea.

[Dogbert]

My personal preference is conditions track a-la M&M, but my last two games had to use HP. The first one is a fantasy heartbreaker, so it had to use HPs because of dnd expectations. The second is a shounen anime emulator... which, given how the genre lifts so many dnd tropes, HPs were kind of a given.

[Dean]

All things being equal I think standard hit points is better than any alternative for any game you want to be consumed by the broad public. Hit points are the only system that joe public comes to your game already knowing, only require a single math step, and can be very balanced if you have some initial planning of appropriate DPS per level. D&D and it's clones have a problem that HP seems randomly and chaotically assigned with little planning but you can easily model an entire system so that it takes 1 hit to kill minions, 2 hits for most baddies, 3 for equal opposition, 5 for higher level stuff, and 10 for bosses and have that be true for all levels. Simple logarithmic scaling is totally within ones power when designing a hit point based game and as long as you don't make it with too many levels you can even stop things before you hit monsters with 1000hp and other nonsense.

Also to DrPraetor I've built an entire 10 point abstract success based skill modeling system and while it seems an elegant and broad solution for large scale skill uses it actually sucks pretty hard in application. The very thing that makes it appealing, it's universality, also makes it terrible to use. No one knows what any given roll means or what it has done so you and the players basically need to quickly come to an agreement on that every single time you use it. When neither you or your player know what it means that you moved the peasants from 4pts to 8pts in your attempts to rally them it's gonna end up bogging your game night down. The solution then of course is to put tons of additional word count into describing the scenarios in detail so that when your party sneaks into a castle and is at 5pts of success they can know what that means, but at that point you're spending huge amounts of word count tying everything into a universal mechanic that you could just as easily made several smaller subsystems for since you've already committed to writing 10,000 words to make the system work at all.

[Username17]

LMSD fixed hit points is strictly superior if you want to scale things a lot. It's smoother scaling and simpler math and faster resolution than fucking around with damage reduction and hardness and shit.

Regular hit points work fine if you don't intend to scale very much.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

If you're using fixed amount of HP, Wounds, then you can 'gain wounds' rather than 'lose HP'

Some psychology studies out there say folks are more averse to losing something than gaining something bad, I believe

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For hitboxes... most games do 10 yeah? I figure you could go lower for more immediate impact per wound, maybe up to 20 for more fiddliness

I've been thinking of a system where you're as wounded as the most severe wounds, but getting lightly wounded again doesn't add on. To represent somebody getting riddled with bullets/stabs but still fighting on, but also leaving room for an instant decapitation strike.

[souran]

So is the general consensus that D&D would be better with damage codes and hit boxes?

[Username17]

So is the general consensus that D&D would be better with damage codes and hit boxes?

D&D would be better with damage codes and hit boxes or dumping the idea of having Kaiju in the setting.

D&D works fine with hit points as long as nothing is tough enough that it needs DR to shrug off arrows from random militia.

If your dragons are tough enough that they are arrow resistant, you should just cut the crap and have a soak step built in.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Hit points are nice because you can just add more of them to compensate for higher damage. But therein lies the problem: damage and hp (and for extra fun and giggles, armor class) don't often scale up together in any kind of meaningful fashion.

That is, it doesn't take the same number of hits for a Level 6 Goblinkiller to kill a turbo-goblin as it did for a Level 1 Goblinkiller to kill a goblin at level 1, and it doesn't mean that six goblins are the same level of challenge for a Level 6 Gobklin killer as one goblin was at Level 1, even if the total number of hit points is the same.

So to the degree that hit points are an abstraction of toughness, they are often badly misapplied because people just pull numbers out of their ass. People complain about three-digit hit point totals, but in practical terms D&D damage rarely gets into the range where that's a serious problem; you're more concerned with weirdness at the lower end of the scale - how many peasants the average cat can kill, for example.

[DrPraetor]

JRPGs and MMORPGs have established a particularly bad precedent.

These games have complicated soak formulas and also exponential growth in hit points. This works at all because it's all done in software, but in FFVII, is +10 Def better than +150 hit points? The math is needlessly complicated ( https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Attack_(command) - each point of Def reduces incoming damage by 1/512, as it happens, but this is a proportionally larger reduction the more Def you have...)

At the table, all of that works much better if you just scale the 10hp you have by moving the soak bonus around. For one thing, it forces disciplined thinking, where you ask - do I really want a tabletop RPG battle where I have to resolve more than 10 successful attacks before the target goes down and we can move on with the game? No, you don't, and if you think you do you're wrong.

[deaddmwalking]

For one thing, it forces disciplined thinking, where you ask - do I really want a tabletop RPG battle where I have to resolve more than 10 successful attacks before the target goes down and we can move on with the game? No, you don't, and if you think you do you're wrong.

I'm not gonna disagree, but I am going to quibble.

A true 'boss monster' that should take 3-4 rounds for the party to defeat is going to be really close to 10 'successful attacks'. Or at least 2-4 actions from each player that move the boss toward defeat (even if that includes positioning for advantage or healing/buffing party members). In any case, setting the number of attacks too low encourages abandoning any other strategy and ganking the boss with a couple of summoned monsters and disregarding every other possible strategy.

So if you mean 'I'l as a single character who has to succeed 10 times, along with companions that also need to succeed like 10 times for 40-60 total successes, that's absolutely crazy. If it's each character succeeding 2-4 times for a total of 8-24, that's not ALWAYS crazy.

[jt]

I agree with Dean - HP is the default, and usually you should use it just because your audience is familiar with it. And it's a decent default.

If you start totaling up all the things people say they want out of an HP system for a D&D-like game (combat heavy heroic fantasy), you hit a mathematical contradiction. Doubling the number of old monsters you can fight at least five times, room on the low end for housecats, less than 100 max HP... any two of these can be done with just HP and damage scaling. It's worth stopping to decide if it's acceptable to toss one of those constraints. Otherwise you need to add some parallel thing like damage categories, damage reduction, or rapidly escalating miss chances.

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I don't know what it's called in RPG land, but one HP-alternative I like is having multiple parallel kinds of damage tracks with low numbers. The purest version is in Incan Gold (aka Diamont), in which you can brave one of each of fire, spiders, falling rocks, mummies, and snakes, but when you see the second instance of any of them you run away screaming. This has a lot more tension to it (after the first "wound" you're always in peril), and that tension always escalates, which is why it's favored by push your luck games.

[Unity]

I think the regular hit points system works best for heroic fantasy, without wounds that fuck you up the more of them you accrue. The way hit points feel different from degrading wounds is a big deal and is easy to overlook when thinking just about realism versus easy bookkeeping. Hit points dropping provides an easy sense of rising tension - you know you're going to croak soon if you can't get the fight over with. Simple to understand, and something very bad gets closer and closer whenever your current HP goes down. Going up a level and seeing your max HP go up is nice, and perhaps the simplest single way to express that your character is awesomer now.

Instead of combat feeling like a scene of rising tension, penalty-inducing wounds can make combat can feel more like a scene of rising incompetence. I can see how in theory the lowered capability of combatants could feel like a dramatic scene where the battered hero and villain struggle to stand so they can get to the Sword of Smiting first. In my experience it's always seemed more like "you got punched in the face really hard and now can't remember how to punch anymore". You start rolling dice for a lot less effect, and the bad guys do the same. Getting hit sucks because it means your character now objectively matters less for the rest of the scene, and more of your rolls will be goofy fumbles. It makes the battles more lopsided in favor of whoever happens to be winning. Perhaps worst of all it makes the characters on both sides of the fight seem comical as they just start being bad at everything. This can work well in games meant to be intentionally comical, but not usually very well in Serious Games about Serious Characters doing Serious Things.

Maybe I've just not had a good MC for wound-based mechanics. I have seen this mechanic work really well in contexts outside of TTRPGs, though. Games where you are meant to lose eventually and the real challenge is dealing with mounting problems as long as you can are potentially very fun. Some boardgames and video games have missions that are "hold this objective until you all get killed", and there is a lot excitement in the struggle to hold things together just... one... more... turn. However, a system which involves your PCs getting killed at the end of every battle is going to need to be built around that exact conceit.

[Foxwarrior]

Well, while wound penalties are easier to implement when you have a health system with fewer digits, you don't have to use them in a wound boxes system, and you don't have to not use them in a hit points system. Personally I'm inclined slightly in favor of some offensive wound penalties of some sort, to give the enemies a reason to split their attacks instead of ganking PCs one at a time.

[Suzerain]

If you want to implement a wound penalty system, you need to avoid death spirals on the PC end at the very least. Death spirals may be interesting to watch in a narrative - see any story where the final fight is between two exhausted, unarmed, depowered people - but to play they are godawful. Any system that allows a death spiral for a PC is one that really only has three stages of wounds - not yet fucked, probably fucked and actually fucked. For any combat to have tension you need to be able to be knocked into that probably fucked zone but once you are it's very easy to be knocked into the actually fucked zone, especially against opponets that stayed in not actually fucked.

There's two dials you can have here. How early penalties kick in and how significant they are. These two factors must necessarily be inversely related. Early kicking in paired with high significance is what leads to death spirals, and late kicking in paired with low significance gives you a glorified HP system. Early kicking in with low significance could work, but would take significant mathematical finesse to not lead to longer death spirals. Late kicking in with high significance could also work, but you run the risk of effectively just having a HP pool that ends where penalties begin.

Ideally, I'd like a mixed approach - a pool that accounts for about half of your total vitality that is easy to lose and easy to regain, and a secondary pool that is hard to lose and hard to regain. Damage to this secondary pool provides the penalties. That way, even if you are taking wound penalties, if you manage to get out alive and regain some of your first pool, you won't be knocked along the penalty track immediately next time you fight.

[Harshax]

I like condition tracking, personally. But, reading some replies, can someone point me to the definition of “LMSD”?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Regarding LMSD damage, in previous editions of Shadowrun weapons didn't have a numerical damage value telling you how many boxes of damage they did, instead damage came in four levels: Light, Medium, Serious and Deadly. These corresponded to 1, 3, 6 or 10 boxes of damage respectively.

Now, a weapon would still have a damage code which told you what base level of damage it did, however this was a letter showing which damage level it started off at. The important part was that every two net successes on your attack roll bumped you up to the next damage level. This meant that rather than the current system that requires a DV3 weapon to get 7(!) net hits to increase to 10 boxes, or even a DV6 weapon to get a not-inconsiderate 4 net hits for a one hit kill, you only needed 4 or 2 hits respectively. This meant that weapons could do fairly low base damage whilst still having the threat of one-hit kills be a real thing. There might be some other side effects of the different systems, but I haven't played Shadowrun since 1998 so someone else should be able to expound further on that score.

[Chamomile]

Death spirals should affect defenses, but not attacks. As you get more heavily injured, the risk of still further injury climbs upwards, but your ability to damage the enemy doesn't diminish until you become ineffective.

[Foxwarrior]

When death spirals affect defenses but not attacks, then the incentive to gank one enemy at a time goes up even more than the already quite large incentive in a basic hit point system.

[Stubbazubba]

I like condition tracking, personally. But, reading some replies, can someone point me to the definition of “LMSD”?

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57291

[OgreBattle]

A game that does 'wound penalties' well... Smash Bros

- Your ability to execute offensive & defensive maneuvers isn't hindered
- The CONSEQUENCES of being hit increase

That's a real time action based game, so in a turn based format I can see it as...
1) once you're more wounded you're easier to force movement, knock down, disarm, shake, stun
2) So it's "your enemy is exploiting your wounds" instead of "your wounds have made you incompetent"

Stun and so on wears off after one round, so you need to be continuously punched in the head to continuously be penalized, but an ally heroically leaping to shield you gives you the breathing room to be back at 100%.

Teamwork abilities, interceptions, covering allies, getting allies out of harm's way needs to be baked into the core maneuver/combat system. That way the party naturally 'spreads damage across everyone'

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Bloodbowl feels like a good starting point for a hypothetical D&D4e...