Quote from: Chris24601;1098054Regardless, a 6th level caster auto-kills the entire party with one fireball spell if the hp cap is 10 and there are no other mitigating rules. Just using normal D&D rules with a 10 hp cap, but otherwise unchanged is just about the dumbest rule I've heard in a long time. It's like the "Pile of dead bards" from The Gamers 2, only you're trying to take that approach to PC mortality seriously.


The OPs arguments are the poster child for why I had to call the resource spent to avoid lethal damage in my system Edge instead of hit points... because meat heads (pun intended) like him can't ever see hit points as anything other than meat and I got sick and tired of having to fight the meat head presumptions. I rewrote my falling rules so that they function consistently with spending Edge points to turn lethal situations into near misses just so there'd be no confusion that only the last Edge point is anything more than a bruise or trivial flesh wound.

There's just so much baggage attached to certain terms that you're almost better off using different terms instead of trying to fix people's perceptions of the original term. Hit points is definitely one of those terms.

Being able to see HP as something other than meat doesn't mean that you have to have them be something other than meat in a game you design. There are ways to avoid dying that don't have to HP. Not being hit is good. Armor reducing damage is good. Every game does not have to be a D&D clone.

This is kind of a weird thread. Implementing the OPs idea in a class-based, level-based system sounds unworkable or would at least require so much work as to not be worth the effort involved. After all, hit points that don't increase have already been implemented many times in many systems starting with Traveller in 1977 and Runequest in 1978. Why not switch to one of those systems. Honestly it seems like it would be easier to stick D&D spells on top of Traveller or some version of BRP than it would be to overhaul D&D.

Quote from: Bren;1098285This is kind of a weird thread. Implementing the OPs idea in a class-based, level-based system sounds unworkable or would at least require so much work as to not be worth the effort involved. After all, hit points that don't increase have already been implemented many times in many systems starting with Traveller in 1977 and Runequest in 1978. Why not switch to one of those systems. Honestly it seems like it would be easier to stick D&D spells on top of Traveller or some version of BRP than it would be to overhaul D&D.

Yes.  Or alternately, if one really wanted to tinker, go back and use GURPS, Hero System, or similar as the base.  

There is no "Just cap the hit points in D&D, and it will work solution."  There are going to be several other things that will need to change, and most of them are inter-related.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1098305Yes.  Or alternately, if one really wanted to tinker, go back and use GURPS, Hero System, or similar as the base.

Yes indeed.

And I just realized that Barbarians of Lemuria has fixed hit points and already has levels of ability for careers including magic using careers. One could probably add some intermediate career steps and then bolt on some version of D&D Magic to BoL.

Quote from: WillInNewHaven;1098279Being able to see HP as something other than meat doesn't mean that you have to have them be something other than meat in a game you design. There are ways to avoid dying that don't have to HP. Not being hit is good. Armor reducing damage is good. Every game does not have to be a D&D clone.

A lot of those have some unintended consequences though;

"Not being hit": Scaling defense scores tend to result in mooks becoming a non-threat much sooner than static defenses and scaling hit points do. If the PC has five times the hit points; five times the mooks can still be a threat. If the mooks instead can only hit on a natural 20, you need a lot more of them and the combat itself gets a lot swingier as singular lucky die rolls matter more than actual skill or ability. A particularly egregious example of this is 4E, where the presumption of +1 to hit and defenses per level across a 30 level range (in addition to scaling damage and hit points) led to most opponents being non-threats once the party was 4 or more levels above them (to be fair to it though; they did actually somewhat acknowledge the fact that low level mooks were non-threats in universe... in one of the epic level modules a literal sea of thousands of ghouls was part of a battle... as difficult terrain for the PCs).

I've further found that scaling up "Edge" and damage dealt better reflects the flow of combat where endurance is a factor (i.e. it doesn't work for modern/sci-fi vehicular combat very well, but its great for personal scale melee combat). Once you hit a basic level of competence you can direct a weapon accurately enough that the defender has to expend some effort (Edge/hit points) to avoid it landing; how much effort depends on the difference in skill between the two (the larger Edge/hit point pool reflects their ability to be more efficient with their movements and providing fewer openings that require a lot of effort to counter in addition to increased stamina from training; larger damage values reflects a better ability to force mistakes and wear down the opponent).
It also means that, just like in real life, even massive skill can't counter sheer weight of numbers. Ten guys coming at you is going to tire you out quickly (i.e. you're going to burn a lot of Edge/hit points) until you make a mistake and drop... whereas with scaling defenses (if you don't also have a system of Endurance... in which case you're just measuring non-physical hit points via another score) its just a matter of the luck of repeated dice rolls eventually winning out.

Armor reducing damage: I explored this, but what this ultimately does is add another step to each combat turn, which slows things down a lot in aggregate without adding a meaningful amount of realism to a fight vs. "you were able to use your armor to minimize the hit with no effort" or "you had to spend Edge/hit points to minimize the hit." There's also the issue of scaling a damage reduction system so that it stops enough damage to be meaningful, but not so much that those in heavy armor become entirely invulnerable (see 3.0e DR/energy resistance) or so little that even wearing it is a waste of effort (see 3.5e Unearthed Arcana rules on "armor as DR"). You also realistically need a means of bypassing the DR, because even full plate had points you could exploit (which is generally why in D&D it has a high AC; it is very hard to bypass it in a way that requires much effort by the wearer to defend against it).

In short, there are plenty of ways to model combat in a pen & paper game with accuracy scaling inversely to speed of resolution/complexity. From my experience though, D&D is in the sweet spot for most players in terms of the accuracy vs. speed/complexity of resolution curve. In terms of fantasy, I generally find that scaling non-physical hit points/damage with almost flat hit/defense scores is a lot better for modeling person-based combat without being overly complex.

Quote from: Chris24601;1098324A lot of those have some unintended consequences though;

"Not being hit": ...
Armor reducing damage: ...

GURPS addresses both those topics in detail, suffice to say that numbers (of combatants) tell in the game, and actually the challenge in play becomes how to avoid your group of mooks pounding the 'heroes' into chutney. There are tactical options, advantages to be bought and the application of skill that all help both address resisting large numbers of foes and overcoming heavily armoured / highly skilled opponents.

QuoteIn short, there are plenty of ways to model combat in a pen & paper game with accuracy scaling inversely to speed of resolution/complexity. From my experience though, D&D is in the sweet spot for most players in terms of the accuracy vs. speed/complexity of resolution curve. In terms of fantasy, I generally find that scaling non-physical hit points/damage with almost flat hit/defense scores is a lot better for modeling person-based combat without being overly complex.

My experience of running GURPS Dungeon Fantasy for a group of D&D experts / GURPS noobs is that this can be picked up pretty quickly and becomes fast in play, too. Once the players start to grasp the options available to them it's actually pretty quick resolution. And a high-skill character against a low-skill opponent can be quite a brutal, one-sided affair.

The bigger point here, as several people have suggested, is that the adaptions needed to move to a game where there are reasonable expectations of survivability in a classic adventuring context without ever increasing HP are not small, so you are better off starting from a game that already has these ideas baked in.

Let's say that your PC is suffering 1d6 of ongoing fire damage, per round; until rolling a successful save.

If your PC has 100hp, this is merely a small challenge.

If your PC has 12hp, this is a dire threat.

Quote from: Chris24601;1098324"Not being hit": Scaling defense scores tend to result in mooks becoming a non-threat much sooner than static defenses and scaling hit points do. If the PC has five times the hit points; five times the mooks can still be a threat. If the mooks instead can only hit on a natural 20, you need a lot more of them and the combat itself gets a lot swingier as singular lucky die rolls matter more than actual skill or ability.

I think your ideas here are muddled.

It doesn't take more mooks. You just need better math skills.

   Example: Let's suppose a hero hits another hero 25% of the time and that a mook hits a hero 5% of the time. Now 5 mooks against 1 hero have the same expected value to hit as does one hero, ergo 5 mooks are dangerous and you don't need more of them to be a threat.

In the 70s and 80s Runequest was famous (or infamous) for the deadliness of many against one combats in the system.

Low hit points will make single die rolls matter more...just like including critical hits in D&D makes single die rolls matter more.

Quote from: Razor 007;1098334Let's say that your PC is suffering 1d6 of ongoing fire damage, per round; until rolling a successful save.

If your PC has 100hp, this is merely a small challenge.

If your PC has 12hp, this is a dire threat.

Yes. And?

Quote from: Razor 007;1098334Let's say that your PC is suffering 1d6 of ongoing fire damage, per round; until rolling a successful save.

If your PC has 100hp, this is merely a small challenge.

If your PC has 12hp, this is a dire threat.

Some types of damage do scale with the threat.  In 3.x, suffocation (drowning) is just as much of a danger if you are 1st level or 15th level (ie, regardless of your hit point total).

Quote from: Bren;1098350Yes. And?

If your PC being on fire isn't a dire threat, then your PC has already become a demi-god.  I want to see more mortality in the game, than that.

Quote from: Razor 007;1098356If your PC being on fire isn't a dire threat, then your PC has already become a demi-god.  I want to see more mortality in the game, than that.

Then I'd suggest that you implement one of the following;

• Pick one of the many, many systems folks here have mentioned that don't inflate hit points.
• Set things like drowning, fire, starvation, and such to damage = level x 1d6 instead of simply 1d6.

I think 1/2 level x 1d6 is better than 1xlevel x 1d6 so that MUs aren't borked and higher level characters have a better chance than 0 level characters to survive fires and drowning while still keeping such things as a significant threat to all character

• Divide hit points into Body and Fatigue. Fire, drowning, poison, and critical hits do damage to body. Sword swings and such do damage first to fatigue .

This solution is used by multiple systems. Chivalry & Sorcery came up with it in 1977. Other people considered and provided solutions to the problem that concerns you in the first 3-5 years of the hobby.
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Quote from: dbm;1098332My experience of running GURPS Dungeon Fantasy for a group of D&D experts / GURPS noobs is that this can be picked up pretty quickly and becomes fast in play, too. Once the players start to grasp the options available to them it's actually pretty quick resolution. And a high-skill character against a low-skill opponent can be quite a brutal, one-sided affair.

My experience running GURPS 3E and Fantasy Hero (mostly 4E, but some of 1E) is that what you say is true of some styles of fights but not others.  In particular, the more detailed the combat the less well the system will hold up as you increase the number of players (and also opponents, though that is secondary).  The exact threshold will vary with every group, but there comes a point at which the extra resolution--even if well learned--will cause people to tune out.  The same thing will happen in a system like D&D as well, though the threshold occurs so much later, that most groups will never get sufficient numbers of players to hit it.  (However, this is one way in which D&D 3E and its derivatives, as well as 4E to some extent, are closer to GURPS and Hero than they are to other versions of D&D.)

Every system (and every group) scales a little differently as the fights get larger and more involved.  Individual GM skill in managing the scaling counts for much, as well.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1098419My experience running GURPS 3E and Fantasy Hero (mostly 4E, but some of 1E) is that what you say is true of some styles of fights but not others.  In particular, the more detailed the combat the less well the system will hold up as you increase the number of players (and also opponents, though that is secondary).

Sure. We are playing six round the table, including me as GM. The trick, in my experience, is to keep things moving quite quickly in real-time as the game runs on 1 second rounds. That takes adjustment, as people are typically used to rounds of 5-10 seconds game-time or even longer.

In the beginning, as the GM I try to keep options 'under the cover' until the players want them. So, you have to choose a manoeuvre each round, and positioning is important so everyone needs to understand the basics, here. Called shots get brought in once a few rounds of combat have passed and people see that just hacking doesn't work very well. More involved options get brought in like deceptive attacks after a few rounds where the enemy keeps defending. It isn't a fully simulationist view of what the characters would do, but it helps ramp up the complexity and gets people learning.

QuoteThe exact threshold will vary with every group, but there comes a point at which the extra resolution--even if well learned--will cause people to tune out. The same thing will happen in a system like D&D as well, though the threshold occurs so much later, that most groups will never get sufficient numbers of players to hit it.  (However, this is one way in which D&D 3E and its derivatives, as well as 4E to some extent, are closer to GURPS and Hero than they are to other versions of D&D.)

Absolutely. Again, it's about keeping pace up as the GM for me, irrespective of the system. I guess the bottom line is, more options, more thinking needed. But the mitigator, for GURPS at least, is that a lot of the complexity comes from providing rules for real-world tactics and gambits, so you can apply your knowledge of the real world or close analogs like cinema and books to help decide what you want to do. Only the GM needs to know these rules initially, and the other players will pick them up as they see them used by the GM and other PCs.

Quote from: Chris24601;1098324A lot of those have some unintended consequences though;

"Not being hit": Scaling defense scores tend to result in mooks becoming a non-threat much sooner than static defenses and scaling hit points do. If the PC has five times the hit points; five times the mooks can still be a threat. If the mooks instead can only hit on a natural 20, you need a lot more of them and the combat itself gets a lot swingier as singular lucky die rolls matter more than actual skill or ability. A particularly egregious example of this is 4E, where the presumption of +1 to hit and defenses per level across a 30 level range (in addition to scaling damage and hit points) led to most opponents being non-threats once the party was 4 or more levels above them (to be fair to it though; they did actually somewhat acknowledge the fact that low level mooks were non-threats in universe... in one of the epic level modules a literal sea of thousands of ghouls was part of a battle... as difficult terrain for the PCs).

I've further found that scaling up "Edge" and damage dealt better reflects the flow of combat where endurance is a factor (i.e. it doesn't work for modern/sci-fi vehicular combat very well, but its great for personal scale melee combat). Once you hit a basic level of competence you can direct a weapon accurately enough that the defender has to expend some effort (Edge/hit points) to avoid it landing; how much effort depends on the difference in skill between the two (the larger Edge/hit point pool reflects their ability to be more efficient with their movements and providing fewer openings that require a lot of effort to counter in addition to increased stamina from training; larger damage values reflects a better ability to force mistakes and wear down the opponent).
It also means that, just like in real life, even massive skill can't counter sheer weight of numbers. Ten guys coming at you is going to tire you out quickly (i.e. you're going to burn a lot of Edge/hit points) until you make a mistake and drop... whereas with scaling defenses (if you don't also have a system of Endurance... in which case you're just measuring non-physical hit points via another score) its just a matter of the luck of repeated dice rolls eventually winning out.

Armor reducing damage: I explored this, but what this ultimately does is add another step to each combat turn, which slows things down a lot in aggregate without adding a meaningful amount of realism to a fight vs. "you were able to use your armor to minimize the hit with no effort" or "you had to spend Edge/hit points to minimize the hit." There's also the issue of scaling a damage reduction system so that it stops enough damage to be meaningful, but not so much that those in heavy armor become entirely invulnerable (see 3.0e DR/energy resistance) or so little that even wearing it is a waste of effort (see 3.5e Unearthed Arcana rules on "armor as DR"). You also realistically need a means of bypassing the DR, because even full plate had points you could exploit (which is generally why in D&D it has a high AC; it is very hard to bypass it in a way that requires much effort by the wearer to defend against it).

In short, there are plenty of ways to model combat in a pen & paper game with accuracy scaling inversely to speed of resolution/complexity. From my experience though, D&D is in the sweet spot for most players in terms of the accuracy vs. speed/complexity of resolution curve. In terms of fantasy, I generally find that scaling non-physical hit points/damage with almost flat hit/defense scores is a lot better for modeling person-based combat without being overly complex.

I have been playing a game with combatants improving by becoming harder to hit (among other benefits) and not gaining hit points, with armor mitigating damage, not preventing being hit. I've been playing it since I switched form OD&D in the early eighties and there are lots of people playing it where I used to live (the New Haven area) and that game, Glory Road Roleplay, like GURPS and Runequest, manages to model combat differently, I don't say more realistically, without slowing the game down. I did not lose players when I switched and some other DMs became GMs.

You probably can't just bolt "hit points don't improve" onto D&D, I will concede, but HP are not the only way to do things.