I'd say "Hit Points: What are they good for? Absolutely nothing! Except war. "

HP are good for combat but not for falling, starvation, disease, etc.

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Should we get rid of D&D-like HP? I don't think so. It is still too useful for combat, and ditching it might cause more problems than it solves. I like the idea that a common soldier can die in a moment of fighting, while an experienced adventurer might have her fate defined by choice, more than chance. And most of the problems people seem to have with starting HP can be fixed by beginning on level 3 (more about that later).

There are plenty of systems that deal with HP differently, but the way HP works is one of the defining characteristics of every edition of D&D, and if you like D&D, you are probably fond of that, like me.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2015/12/hit-points-what-are-they-good-for.html

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OTOH... if you see HP as "plot armor", it definitely explains a lot of things...

My only real complaint against Hit Points is how they come back 100% after a long rest, and that is just D&D, and even that is easily fixed by making a few mods to the rules.

I do like how Microlite20 handles Hit Points by adding the Strength Stat as a an additional source of damage after the Hit Points or gone (or as extreme damage in my house rules).

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 09:39:35 AM
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".

Actually it does address it because of the most ignored parts of what hit points represent - Luck and Divine Favor.

In short, a knife is not dangerous to a high level character for the same reason a bandit pulling a gun on the Lone Ranger isn't dangerous... they both have Plot Armor. You might suffer some injury, but just like in fiction they're cosmetic... the hero gets shot in the shoulder and winces, grits his way through the danger and afterwards has a sling on for 30 seconds before the episode ends and it's gone next episode).

One thing I do have in my system to reflect this element is that damage scales with level. A knife in the hands of a level 9 opponent will do about 26 damage; enough to instantly drop a level 1 PC with a single strike (ETA: a commoner has only about 5 points and could be killed in 1-2 hits by a typical thug with a knife; PCs are expressly heroic figures with a degree of plot armor already in place).

Similarly, you don't lose plot armor for falling. You lose plot armor to keep yourself from falling ("damage" is based on the difficulty of avoiding the fall). If you actually fall (because you don't have enough plot armor remaining) then you're either dead or dying at the bottom of wherever you fell from.

Hit Points are not entirely accurate to real life where going down to the first good hit and lifelong crippling injuries are the norm, but they can be reasonably accurate to the genre of heroic fiction upon which the settings are based.

To quote Hackmaster 4e Player's Handbook:

"Unlike some wimpy wannabe games, damage in HackMaster is not handled abstractly or approximately.  All characters and monsters have a number of hit points...As your character gains levels he gets tougher and can take more physical abuse.  Do you think that cop in Die Hard could have taken all that damage as a rookie cop?  No way.  He'd have probably passed out from the broken glass in his foot alone.  But he was a higher level hero and took the hits to complete the adventure."

I honestly can't think of any alternative to hit points that cannot itself be described as a variation on hit points.

Three strikes mechanic? That just means you have three hit points.

Wounds and vitality? Two pools of hit points with different penalties.

Risus' death spiral? Hit points that double as statistics.

True20? Hit points that you track without needing more than one type of die.

Whether any given take on hit points is realistic or not is a completely different can of worms. Realism is too complicated to be represented in a playable fashion: all rpgs are ultimately abstractions and approximations. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a realistic hit point mechanic: There's only a sliding scale between "gritty" and "cinematic".

I can't really think of a better way of measuring a character's abstract longevity. I don't think they were so well thought out back in the day, but 40 years of hindsight we've managed to categorize them a bit better.

Although, still, they may mean different things to different people.

My only problem with them is when they get into silly numbers. AKA - with very high-level characters. Then combat becomes a chore to deal with and it feels very unrealistic. Basically at that stage, the characters feel like titanic superheroes. Which doesn't suit my style of gritty gaming. Most of the OSR games seemed to have nuked that old-school concept. So even tough characters are still vulnerable in bad situations as they don't have as many hits.

I don't like a 'wounding' system, as it really adds in a whiff factor. Sure, it's probably more realistic. But this plagued Vampire making it a pain in the ass to fight as you'd be missing all the time if you were wounded (and these were bad ass vamps!). I dropped that when I was running it myself.

I think crits work well. But you've got to get that 'balance' right, or you'll be rolling up a new character very quickly.

Hit points are a great mechanic for making the game fun.  They're terrible for representing anything that actually happens in real life.  Finding a mechanic that does both is hard, which is why we're still arguing about it 50 years later.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 19, 2022, 11:18:33 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 09:39:35 AM
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".

Actually it does address it because of the most ignored parts of what hit points represent - Luck and Divine Favor.

In short, a knife is not dangerous to a high level character for the same reason a bandit pulling a gun on the Lone Ranger isn't dangerous... they both have Plot Armor. You might suffer some injury, but just like in fiction they're cosmetic... the hero gets shot in the shoulder and winces, grits his way through the danger and afterwards has a sling on for 30 seconds before the episode ends and it's gone next episode).

One thing I do have in my system to reflect this element is that damage scales with level. A knife in the hands of a level 9 opponent will do about 26 damage; enough to instantly drop a level 1 PC with a single strike (ETA: a commoner has only about 5 points and could be killed in 1-2 hits by a typical thug with a knife; PCs are expressly heroic figures with a degree of plot armor already in place).

Similarly, you don't lose plot armor for falling. You lose plot armor to keep yourself from falling ("damage" is based on the difficulty of avoiding the fall). If you actually fall (because you don't have enough plot armor remaining) then you're either dead or dying at the bottom of wherever you fell from.

Hit Points are not entirely accurate to real life where going down to the first good hit and lifelong crippling injuries are the norm, but they can be reasonably accurate to the genre of heroic fiction upon which the settings are based.

This is just reasserting your definition of what HP represent, which doesn't really address my point, but expects me to just accept your definition without justifying it.

A knife is dangerous to anyone in the hands of anyone. Most of these are just your own personal conceits of what should/shouldn't kill someone based on their (heroic?) status/level and/or what you consider dramatically appropriate, as far as I can tell. But that says nothing about the lethality of a knife (specially if I want to play anything approaching gritty realism, or even heroic realism where shit can still happen) or what happens if a low level thug places a knife in the back of a bound character that happens to be a "hero". Using Critical Hits or similar mechanics the way Pundit suggests and I expanded upon in my first post does, though.

Also, if you lose Plot Armor to keep yourself from falling, then what is your character doing at the bottom of the 50 feet pit after taking damage from the fall? Cuz that's what always happens in every game I've ever been on or witnessed where characters take falling damage. Telling me that it's impossible to drop a character down a ledge because "Plot Armor" doesn't really address falling damage, or the very real possibility that a character could fall down a cliff and still survive despite taking real, bone breaking damage from the fall.

All of that is just handwaved away in favor of reasserting that HP HAVE to be interpreted as "Plot Armor", period. But where does damage that doesn't kill you go if we're forced to just interpret it as "Plot Armor"? And why should the rest of us ignore the existence of cumulative long lasting injuries just because you personally insist on interpreting the game as an action flick where "cosmetic" superficial scrapes magically disappear the next scene?

And note that I'm not even disputing that HP don't accurately map to real life as I may have done in the past when this discussion has come up (I'm pass that now; Critical Hits and similar stuff fixes the lethality issue). But just because HP don't map 1:1 with real life that doesn't make cumulative damage that's not immediately life-threatening go away. And the fact that you personally choose to handwave it away doesn't address the issue (as you claim at the start of your post). It just means you choose to ignore it exists.

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 01:54:16 PMAlso, if you lose Plot Armor to keep yourself from falling, then what is your character doing at the bottom of the 50 feet pit after taking damage from the fall?

There are also other issues, in that HP is generally linked to theoretical in-game 'health/stamina' stats and not a 'plot favor' stat. Being beefy makes you resilient (it should) but at the same time your only tanking hits if your beefy, but dodging them if your not beefy.
There are also other problems, like say being lit on fire, or being poisoned. Where the fire is in a quantum state of not actually burning you, until it suddenly incinerates you instantly.

But I do think HP can be FUN, even if its dumb. RAW in D&D I don't think it corresponds to any kind of system of taking hits be it narrative or 'realistic'. Even things like superheroes generally don't operate on a HP system.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on March 19, 2022, 02:04:23 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 01:54:16 PMAlso, if you lose Plot Armor to keep yourself from falling, then what is your character doing at the bottom of the 50 feet pit after taking damage from the fall?

There are also other issues, in that HP is generally linked to theoretical in-game 'health/stamina' stats and not a 'plot favor' stat. Being beefy makes you resilient (it should) but at the same time your only tanking hits if your beefy, but dodging them if your not beefy.
There are also other problems, like say being lit on fire, or being poisoned. Where the fire is in a quantum state of not actually burning you, until it suddenly incinerates you instantly.

But I do think HP can be FUN, even if its dumb. RAW in D&D I don't think it corresponds to any kind of system of taking hits be it narrative or 'realistic'. Even things like superheroes generally don't operate on a HP system.

Yeah, and I would even add that I don't mind interpreting HP as "Plot Armor" to some extend (which they kinda are, if you get more from leveling), just not 100%. But there's also a physical dimension to them that gets snuffed away if you just declare "HP are 100% just Plot Armor" and pretend that cumulative injuries don't exist or that just treating HP as Plot Armor fixes anything.

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 02:09:55 PMYeah, and I would even add that I don't mind interpreting HP as "Plot Armor" to some extend (which they kinda are, if you get more from leveling), just not 100%. But there's also a physical dimension to them that gets snuffed away if you just declare "HP are 100% just Plot Armor" and pretend that cumulative injuries don't exist or that just treating HP as Plot Armor fixes anything.

I like the way Savage Worlds dilineates plot armor vs 'physical simulation', but I just like SW in general. I think it comes the closest to allowing a PC to both generally not fear and fear a knife at the same time. A tough PC is likely to ignore knives 95% of the time, but there is always a chance it can really mess you up. And then there are further adjustable rules to make it more or less gritty.

Phoenix Command assigns injuries Physical Damage points. The higher the PD the less likely a character is to be willing to continue fighting, and the less likely to survive long term. PD can be anything from 1 for a stubbed toe, to 30,000+ for a decapitation.

High-level D&D combat, for comparison, isn't realistic, and doesn't even emulate films or comic books. Every combatant in the Conan universe goes down with one hit, for example. Conan never "loses hit points" and then suffers physical injury, he just never allows himself to get hit by virtue of his exceptional skill.

I prefer Call of Cthulhu's system, which retains the fact of human frailty.

I would rather start from a realistic system and modify it to emulate the movies, than have to struggle with a non-realistic system to explain what exactly went on in a fight.

Quote from: Mishihari on March 19, 2022, 01:46:30 PM
Hit points are a great mechanic for making the game fun.  They're terrible for representing anything that actually happens in real life.  Finding a mechanic that does both is hard, which is why we're still arguing about it 50 years later.

This.  Plus, there is the aspect that the more complex the tracking of wounds becomes, the longer it takes, and thus the more the mechanical accounting begins to take players out of the imaginary space.  There are, of course, different trade offs for different people.  I think you can get away with some modest complication on wounds tracking with almost any player, but once you get close to their limit, the negative aspects of complexity begin to hit particularly hard. 

Likewise, it affects how many opponents you can have.  If you particularly want to have grand battles against hordes of lesser opponents, then something has to give, somewhere.  If you'd rather have something a little more aligned with realism, then there's only so far you can go with the numbers.  Not everyone is going to make that call the same way, either.

I do agree with others above that escalating hit points mixed with escalating attacks and defense is bad voodoo.  Not to say that there can't be movement in both, but at least one of them needs to be kept under tight control, and to the extent that the tight control starts to slip, the other one then has to be reined in to compensate.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 19, 2022, 01:04:48 PM
I honestly can't think of any alternative to hit points that cannot itself be described as a variation on hit points.

Three strikes mechanic? That just means you have three hit points.

Wounds and vitality? Two pools of hit points with different penalties.

Risus' death spiral? Hit points that double as statistics.

True20? Hit points that you track without needing more than one type of die.

Whether any given take on hit points is realistic or not is a completely different can of worms. Realism is too complicated to be represented in a playable fashion: all rpgs are ultimately abstractions and approximations. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a realistic hit point mechanic: There's only a sliding scale between "gritty" and "cinematic".

There are quite a few out there

Here's one I rather like from an unfinished game project I worked on some years ago.

For each attack, attacker and defender make make a die roll with modifiers, figure the margin of success (MoS) = attacker roll – defender roll

Result:
MoS <= 0  |  no effect
1<= MoS < =5  |  Impaired:  Target gets -1 on all rolls til recovered.  Impairment is cumulative.
6<=MoS<=10 | Limb disabled:  No actions with a random limb til recovered.  Various penalties.
11<=MoS<=15 | Unconscious:  no actions
16<=MoS |  Dead

It needs more development, but right out of the gate it's a lot more realistic then hit points can ever be.  The biggest challenge is making the game fun when any attack could possibly kill your character.  It's worth noting that as a combat progresses, increasing impairment makes disabling hits more and more likely.

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 01:54:16 PM
A knife is dangerous to anyone in the hands of anyone.

In real life this is true. To Conan its not dangerous at all because he's the hero of his story. At best he gets a few superficial cuts before continuing his adventure after gutting the random thug with his blade.

The distinction is that PCs aren't "random farmer #257." They're heroes. The gods and Lady Luck favor them with plot armor such that no random thug is going to end their adventure with a knife (they could easily end another random passerby though because they only have a few hit points) unless they're also blessed with incredible luck.

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 19, 2022, 01:54:16 PM
Also, if you lose Plot Armor to keep yourself from falling, then what is your character doing at the bottom of the 50 feet pit after taking damage from the fall?

They AREN'T at the bottom of a 50 foot pit. They stopped themselves from falling remember? They're hanging from the ledge and can try to pull themselves up, just like pretty much always happens to the protagonists in heroic fiction. You burn the plot armor so you DON'T go over the edge.

If they run out of plot armor, they plummet to the bottom of the 50' pit and are either dying or dead. They aren't getting up, gritting their teeth and starting to climb back up with only a few bruises (unless they have an ability like the monk's slow fall or a feather fall spell) because that would be silly and unrealistic.

As I said, hit points aren't realistic to real life... but they're pretty realistic to how things work for the protagonists in heroic fiction.