A lot of people over the years have suggested that hit points are a bad mechanic. But from the point of view of game design, most of their reasons are dumb, as long as hit points are applied in the right way.
#osr #ttrpg #dnd

I've been saying this for decades.

People who hate HP or think it makes no sense are themselves 99% of the time senseless. Stupid. Ignorant. Or in a rare few cases. Compulsive liars.

HP, along with Alignment and Falling damage, is one of the most mis-represented mechanics in the game. Then other designers muddled the explanation, or outright dropped it. And later designers just compounded on this ad stupidium.

Whats even more hilariously pathetic is when they come up with their own HP-less systems that turn out to be some sort of HP system. This came up over on BGG last month with someone claiming their pet system was HP-less. But then described how damage was tracked by decrimenting dice one step as damage accumulated. d10 becomes a d8, d8 to d6 and so on. Yep. tooooootally not a HP system.

My only complaint about hit points is that, because of all the misinterpretations of them coupled with all sorts of video games that depicted hit point loss as taking an axe to the guy complete with massive sprays of blood... that the term has become almost synonymous with "meat points" and every attempt I've ever made to tailor mechanics based on their stamina, skill, luck and morale aspects has resulted in so much pushback (i.e. how can someone restore hit points by inspiring someone to dig deep and keep fighting? a rousing speech can't reattach someone's hand... never mind there were no rules for dismemberment in combat in the system).

Basically, the only time I've been able to get people to embrace the hit point concept in a form that is closer to how they were originally intended was to call them something else.

It doesn't matter if you think that hit points are dumb or not, they have been around as long as D&D and thus are an industry standard. D&D has been around for so long that it is considered its own genre, so all of its trappings (including hit points) are considered the standards of that genre. Your opinion on whether or not hit points are dumb is irrelevant if your game wants to emulate D&D, they have to be included.

Quote from: jeff37923 on March 18, 2022, 11:04:34 PM
It doesn't matter if you think that hit points are dumb or not, they have been around as long as D&D and thus are an industry standard. D&D has been around for so long that it is considered its own genre, so all of its trappings (including hit points) are considered the standards of that genre. Your opinion on whether or not hit points are dumb is irrelevant if your game wants to emulate D&D, they have to be included.

I don't know if you watched the video or not, but he says more-or-less this. The title is an example of Betteridge's law of headlines.

There is a difference between the concept of "hit points" as a resource indicating a character's ability to operate and Hit Points™ as that concept is implemented in D&D. The popularity of D&D is irrefutable, but is it because of, inspire of, or irrespective of Hit Points™? It is a big brand with a legacy and must do some things a certain way because said thing have always been that way and it would fee wrong not to, regardless of the effect on gameplay. I have never cared for D&D's inconsistent abstractions with some aspects being relatable to a physical world, while others are arbitrary or incomprehensibly implemented.

I find Hit Points™ to be little more than number or dice porn. Roll dice for high numbers to watch some other number go do down. Looking at all those numbers is boring to me, especially when they do not mean anything. Hit something hard enough it goes down, get hit hard enough and go down yourself feel believable and dangerous. Hit Points™ are an indemnity from harm to be slowly ablated away. Hit Point™ attrition is not fun to me, but neither is instant death or a mission kill by death spiral, once the death spiral is initiated the conclusion is predictably inevitable.

I strongly prefer Wounds and Vitality over straight Hit Points™, but with Wounds causing Vitality bleed and damage over a damage threshold causing proportional, but not directly equivalent Wound damage. As for what that represents, Wounds are physical damage that takes a long time to heal, but Vitality is a fighting spirit that can be roused with a Red Bull potion, and inspiring speech, an act of faith, or a short rest. Moreover, I would suggest that missed attacks degrade Vitality by the amount of the miss. This could then convert the miss into a hit or not depending on the trappings of the setting.

Quote from: Cat the Bounty Smuggler on March 18, 2022, 11:07:41 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on March 18, 2022, 11:04:34 PM
It doesn't matter if you think that hit points are dumb or not, they have been around as long as D&D and thus are an industry standard. D&D has been around for so long that it is considered its own genre, so all of its trappings (including hit points) are considered the standards of that genre. Your opinion on whether or not hit points are dumb is irrelevant if your game wants to emulate D&D, they have to be included.

I don't know if you watched the video or not, but he says more-or-less this. The title is an example of Betteridge's law of headlines.

Nope! I didn't bother to watch the video.

HP are dumb.

There, I said it! And saying that D&D has HP and D&D is popular, therefore HP can't be bad, is the Bandwagon Fallacy, plus the False Cause Fallacy (correlation does not imply causation). I also don't think that claiming that HP represent "Risk" is any better than saying that they represent Luck, Fatigue or anything other than "Meat Points", which is clearly what something meant to track injuries from multiple hits is meant to represent.

All these other terms are BS meant to obfuscate the fact that HP fail to properly illustrate the lethality of certain attacks, cuz when you have 100 HP and a knife does a whooping 1d4 damage there's no reason to be afraid of it. Except that IRL you would be scared of a knife, cuz those things can be lethal, or at the very least carve you up really bad or make you lose a couple digits.

That being said, most alternatives to HP also have their own problems, and are usually harder to track than HP, which is the real reason HP are all over the place. They're easy to track and simple to conceptualize (even if they suck at illustrating lethality), and probably better than anything else at keeping track of cumulative damage that could eventually kill you (just not right away), even if you don't get taken out by the first hit (or the second, or third).

So HP can work, they just don't work well on their own. They can be used to track cumulative damage, but in order to cover lethality there needs to be another mechanism to supplement them. And Pundit pretty much covers that in the video, which is to handle lethality through Critical Hit or similar systems.

I would expand that to include any type of situation that could potentially get you killed, such as taking massive damage from a single hit, being attacked while helpless or completely unaware, or similar circumstances. Any time you could potentially die on the spot you get a save or something, and if you fail you die (or get maimed or something), if not you just take the HP damage and live to potentially die another day.

But HP on their own are dumb, and D&D handles them badly—way too few at level 1, way too many at higher levels, specially in later editions.

Hit points are the worst way to track damage, except for all those other ways that have been tried from time to time.

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 18, 2022, 06:11:29 PM
A lot of people over the years have suggested that hit points are a bad mechanic. But from the point of view of game design, most of their reasons are dumb, as long as hit points are applied in the right way.
#osr #ttrpg #dnd

Depends on what the players want in a game. Truth be told, most players don't know or think about game mechanics.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll on March 19, 2022, 02:48:42 AM
Depends on what the players want in a game. Truth be told, most players don't know or think about game mechanics.

I find than many people do not critically evaluate their wants, and fewer still can articulate their conclusions. Players often give unhelpful or useless feedback. They are able to point at something and say "like that," but not why or if the experience would be enhanced with more of one thing or less of another.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 18, 2022, 10:50:53 PM
My only complaint about hit points is that, because of all the misinterpretations of them coupled with all sorts of video games that depicted hit point loss as taking an axe to the guy complete with massive sprays of blood... that the term has become almost synonymous with "meat points" and every attempt I've ever made to tailor mechanics based on their stamina, skill, luck and morale aspects has resulted in so much pushback (i.e. how can someone restore hit points by inspiring someone to dig deep and keep fighting? a rousing speech can't reattach someone's hand... never mind there were no rules for dismemberment in combat in the system).

Basically, the only time I've been able to get people to embrace the hit point concept in a form that is closer to how they were originally intended was to call them something else.

It doesn't help that D&D in the rules wordings, reinforces the idea of hit points as meat points.
Heal, Potion of healing, Cure Light Wounds...

Quote from: Ratman_tf on March 19, 2022, 04:13:24 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 18, 2022, 10:50:53 PM
My only complaint about hit points is that, because of all the misinterpretations of them coupled with all sorts of video games that depicted hit point loss as taking an axe to the guy complete with massive sprays of blood... that the term has become almost synonymous with "meat points" and every attempt I've ever made to tailor mechanics based on their stamina, skill, luck and morale aspects has resulted in so much pushback (i.e. how can someone restore hit points by inspiring someone to dig deep and keep fighting? a rousing speech can't reattach someone's hand... never mind there were no rules for dismemberment in combat in the system).

Basically, the only time I've been able to get people to embrace the hit point concept in a form that is closer to how they were originally intended was to call them something else.

It doesn't help that D&D in the rules wordings, reinforces the idea of hit points as meat points.
Heal, Potion of healing, Cure Light Wounds...

Indeed. Since the points in my system are predominantly stamina+morale, the primary means of recovery are the Rally (which is proportional to the subject and which "healing" abilities trigger more efficiently than PCs doing it themselves) and the potion version is "potion of vitality."

Another important point though is one of the big problems with hit points being equated with meat is the level scaling of defenses that WotC D&D fell into. When AC is mostly static, then it's easier to present increased hit points as improved skill and stamina. You have more points you can go longer in a fight without suffering a serious injury, but can still be overwhelmed by sufficient numbers because your AC is not so high that you can't be hit.

But with scaling AC it was harder to do that because the rising AC's explanation was said be improved parrying/dodging skill (whereas those were a part of hit points in pre-WotC D&D). It also quickly rendered the prospect of losing to even hordes of mooks a virtual impossibility... feeding the superhero/MMO aspects where an orc army that could raze the continent "cons grey" to the PCs and so can't actually be credibly be claimed as a threat.

It likewise means that certain monsters necessarily "con red" meaning PCs basically can't even attempt to fight them because their defenses are so high.

The thing that I think really broke hit points was adding the defense axis to make survival quadratic. A level 10 PC didn't just have 10x the hit points, their defenses were also 10 points higher so instead of the orcs needing a 15 on the die to hit you, they now can only hit on a natural 20 so you're getting hit 6 times less often.

WotC broke a lot of things when they made 3e because, to paraphrase Chesterton, they didn't actually understand why the wall was built. Hit Points was just one of them.

What's broken about HP isn't how people conceptualize them (Meat Points vs Luck/Stamina, etc.) but the fact that regardless how you choose to explain what they are they don't properly illustrate lethality or the threat level of getting stabbed with a knife and other low damage attacks (or even high damage once vs uber high HP characters). Once you solve that, the real problem goes away and what you call them becomes irrelevant. Cuz it was never about what you think HP represent, but the fact that high HP characters can't get killed by a knife or a nasty fall.

But once you go down the re-conceptualizing route (they're not Meat Points, they're really Stamina!), not only are you not addressing the actual issue, but creating the additional issue that now nothing represents wounds that don't outright kill you. And everything is either an instant kill wound, or "you just lost some energy trying to dodge that nasty fall".

Ironically, d20 Star Wars (and later, Starfinder) kind of resolved this by splitting HP into two pools. One was your actual meat, health, vitality, etc, while the other represented your ability to evade serious injury, turn a crippling blow into a scratch, etc.

Hit points aren't a GREAT mechanic, but they do work reasonably well as long as you recite the MST3K mantra about it and don't worry too much.

If it gives you that much heebie-jeebies, go play another system.