As a dedicated non-D&D player I am all for alternates to HP systems that "feel" more realistic. 

Our first RPG was Palladium.  Yes, it still has hit points, but not many, and they're the secondary set of damage points.  Structural Damage Capacity (SDC) was the main points you had.  I.E.  a character could start with 30 SDC and 10 HP.  SDC is easy to recover and is superficial injuries.  Lost HP probably means bed rest and doctors. 

Or D6 Star Wars.  You have 5 damage states.  Fully healthy, stunned, wounded, severely wounded, and incapacitated.  Your strength attribute is instead used to determine how bad a hit you receive.

I prefer games that don't make you tougher as you level up, but harder to hit instead. 

Quote from: Wisithir on March 20, 2022, 08:52:32 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 20, 2022, 08:21:00 PM
We can do realistic but its not going to be fast or fun and there maybe a seperate dysentery table involved

Simulation is a goal onto itself, generally separate from playability. Emulation is far more important. Does it feel like whatever it is intend to feel like or not. I do not find high HP combat to be fast or fun. With the risk buffer filled up, there is no tension to the action and it feels inconsequential. Perhaps HP is better off in two pools, a per encounter and a per day. Any adventurer can go one encounter, but a seasoned one can refill the encounter risk buffer from the daily risk allowance to "safely" fight all day. Each fight can risk a knock out and mission failure, but not character death unless the enemies execute the fallen PC after combat.

If you have low HP combat then everything devolves into rocket tag or fantasy Vietnam - if the first people to win initiative hit then they win the combat.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on March 20, 2022, 09:12:45 PM
As a dedicated non-D&D player I am all for alternates to HP systems that "feel" more realistic. 

Our first RPG was Palladium.  Yes, it still has hit points, but not many, and they're the secondary set of damage points.  Structural Damage Capacity (SDC) was the main points you had.  I.E.  a character could start with 30 SDC and 10 HP.  SDC is easy to recover and is superficial injuries.  Lost HP probably means bed rest and doctors. 

Or D6 Star Wars.  You have 5 damage states.  Fully healthy, stunned, wounded, severely wounded, and incapacitated.  Your strength attribute is instead used to determine how bad a hit you receive.

I prefer games that don't make you tougher as you level up, but harder to hit instead.

The key term being "prefer," as it is really just a flavor preference.  Objectively, there's no difference in play between "I roll and miss five times before I hit and incapacitate the enemy" and "I roll and hit the enemy, subtracting hit points each time, until the sixth hit removes all of the hit points and incapacitates the enemy."  If anything, there's a psychological aspect that might prefer the feeling of progress (reducing hp) as opposed to simply missing over and over.  But the overall effect is the same...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on March 20, 2022, 09:29:14 PMObjectively, there's no difference in play between "I roll and miss five times before I hit and incapacitate the enemy" and "I roll and hit the enemy, subtracting hit points each time, until the sixth hit removes all of the hit points and incapacitates the enemy."

No it isn't. HP damage is progress and a chance of a hit is completly different. Because with HP going down your garunteed progress, but also generally denied good tactics.

Maybe I have a low chance to hit my opponent, but trying for tactics that deny them defenses doesn't work because its dependant on my damage scaling. If the Jedi is deflecting all my lasers because of his HP, then I can't throw a grenade to throw him off, or try to make him fall down a pit where his deflection is useless. The grenades damage has to scale, and so does the depth of the pit to the level of the Jedi.

This is the big problem with HP bloat, and HP as a primary measure of defense in the first place.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on March 19, 2022, 10:56:59 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on March 19, 2022, 09:01:45 PM

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on March 19, 2022, 03:03:03 PM
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.

  Disagree about Conan, he often suffers wounds that would drop lesser men, and in one story had to be taken from the edge of death by that sweet golden wine after fighting off a horror from beneath the decadent city.  Fighting Belit's pirates, he is wounded multiple times, and other stories he takes significant damage (thus the reason he is covered in scars with a well broken nose as king)  He gets hit A LOT.  Much less than a lesser skilled fighter would (though often, especially in his early years his prowess is derived more from talent than practiced skill) He rarely gets hit with a one shot type hit, and even when he does his helmet or some armor save him.  I always though the Mongoose version of Conan the Rpg did a pretty good job of emulating this with the massive damage threshold, your level and class affecting how hard you are to hit,  and having armor actually block damage. 

  I agree 100 percent about high level D&D combat emulating high stakes combat very well though, especially when compared to Conan-like stories or high stakes cinematic fights.

I guess I haven't read enough Conan. I stand corrected; thanks.

But, does he ever "whittle down" enemies? Or just dispatch them with a single blow?

I've never seen D&D combat to emulate anything except itself. It doesn't create cinematic or literary effects, it's its own animal.

  He does have a few fights where he whittles enemies down (the great ape on the isle of the black ones) the abomination in the city of xuxthal (probably spelled wrong), his brutal fight with the Stygian prince, Strangling the "professional strangler" ( I think Bael Paetor, but memory is fuzzy) while being simultaneously choked,  several of the duels he has with either angry nobles or pirate captains are back and forth affairs where neither of them really "take a Hit" but are worn down in a way that could simulate a more D&D abstraction of hit points.  For the most part Conan does in fact pull a one hitter quitter on dire foes or in dire circumstances.  Again, this is poorly emulated in dungeons and dragons (which I agree 100 percent with you about) but fairly well emulated in the D20 mongoose version of Conan, where massive damage (doing 20 hp or more forces a death check from the recipient at diff equal to total damage or they drop dead, in gory fashion) can kill you in one hit even if you had well beyond what one hit could do.  It makes sneak attacks and critical utterly devastating.  Which I think can be a bit lost at times in D&D.   

   I think DCC can also emulate to a degree that feeling of high stakes combat as well with the use of critical tables.

Quote from: Shasarak on March 20, 2022, 09:22:55 PMIf you have low HP combat then everything devolves into rocket tag or fantasy Vietnam - if the first people to win initiative hit then they win the combat.

Perhaps medium HP, equivalent to 5 wound level systems, is the way to go. 3-5 average hits or 1-2 crits to KO. Crit factor could also be based on amount success over DC instead of straight d20 roll. This way skilled attackers could rack up multipliers and wipe low skill opponents easily but exchange only limited HP reduction against skilled defenders.

When it comes to low HP one on one combat, I find Know Your Role would alleviate rocket tag. Declare action in inverse initiative. Make an opposed action check, d20 + maneuver modifier, best result takes place. Thus, poor initiative could declare a safe defensive move with a low modifier, while good initiative gets a choice to respond with a safe counter, or high-risk high reward.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on March 20, 2022, 09:45:57 PMNo it isn't. HP damage is progress and a chance of a hit is completly different. Because with HP going down your garunteed progress, but also generally denied good tactics.

I agree. For me the question is if gameplay is making decisions or rolling dice. High HP is great for rolling lots of dice and drooling over big numbers, but not much in the way if interesting decisions to be made, mostly "I attack the nearest enemy." I find it far more satisfying to trade superficial damage while maneuvering for a one shot knock out over whittling away the enemy's risk gauge.

When it comes to outmaneuvering a force user, my best was intervening in a fight against an inquisitor. The party was at a stand off because he had a hostage, however, my character realized that he would deflect incoming fire instead of taking it and killing the hostage. Thus, I launched some dummy grenades that got force pushed away, then had one droideka fire and get the blasts deflected. Once the inquisitor was out of action, the other droideka rolled up into a ball and used tackle. No HP ablation to be had at all.

Hit Points are great for what they're designed to do.  You're right that Hit Points serve as a risk assessment tool and incentivizes a genre of play. 


Differences in play:
I remember many years ago when my old group was split on playing NWoD. One guy wanted to run a gritty, 80's style horror game based around Stephen King's "Fire Starter."  NWoD had just released "Second Sight" which had the kind of system and rules he was looking for.  One of the players who was reluctant to try it made a hard-boiled detective.  He had a variety of skills and merits, was good with a pistol and could rough people up.  Early on we were following clues, avoiding capture, and getting a feel of the world.  Then we stumbled onto something big.  We had to get there before the government and we were running out of time.  When we were coming out the place was surrounded.  A swat team with rubber bullets came in to subdue us.  The hard-boiled detective beat them up pretty bad and got one in a lethal choke hold.  A member of the swat team drew his knife and closed in.  At first the hard-boiled detective was unimpressed.  He kicked him and almost KO'd him.  Then he got stabbed.  In NWoD there's a rule called "10 again".  If one of your dice is a '10' you roll it again, adding to your success.  The single success exploded into 4 total, which is 4 lethal damage.  That was half of his health in a single attack.  The player was shocked.  Risk assessment: knives are always dangerous.

Contrast this with D&D and the differences are clear.  D&D is designed for heroic play.  A peasant with a club?  My 10th level fighter will defeat a hundred.  We know that 95% of their attacks will miss completely, while 95% of mine will hit.  All of my attacks will kill them instantly.  Hit Points in D&D incentivizes heroism, like Aragorn charging headlong into a patrol of Uruk Hai.  Aragorn suffers minor cuts and bruises but ultimately wins.  Other games like Marvel Super Heroes incentivizes super heroic play.  When you have Hulk level Monstrous(75) armor, anything less than a battle tank using HEAT rounds is a spit ball.

Then there are games that have a version of Hit Points like "Call of Cthulhu", where Sanity is like a hour glass: once the sands are gone your time is up.  Again, it's a different style of play than either D&D or Super Heroes.

Quote from: Wisithir on March 20, 2022, 10:44:04 PMPerhaps medium HP, equivalent to 5 wound level systems, is the way to go.

I know some people complained against it, but I ultimately like Savage Worlds for having bennies or 'fate points' effectively that act almost like HP, but not exactly separately from your own wounds. They represent you getting lucky or tanking a hit in a way that reduces harm.

You can make the game more or less lethal by increasing/ decreasing the maximum number of raises you can get on a damage roll.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on March 20, 2022, 09:45:57 PMthen had one droideka fire and get the blasts deflected. Once the inquisitor was out of action, the other droideka rolled up into a ball and used tackle. No HP ablation to be had at all.

My man. Good taste. What system?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on March 20, 2022, 10:56:01 AM

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 20, 2022, 10:15:09 AMI don't know about any of that. Outside of discussions on the criticism of hit points, I never hear anything like this. D&D gamers and DMs overwhelmingly are saying just the opposite. That there are too few hit points at low level. And some of the old-school mechanics, like save-or-die poison, are called "buzz kills." Most gamers just don't like the idea of someone losing a character just due to an unlucky die roll.

Well its more you go from: So fragile that you must have 100 pre-existing conditions to be that weak in real life, and then explode into 'I eat grenades for lunch'.

I mean we are talking about the D&D HP system here. If your using some custom thing where HP is heavily consistent and restrained and follows some new internal logic pattern, then we are not talking about rules as written at which point you are reafirming their issues in the core rules.

About 30 years ago, I started running pure, core 1E by the book, and that's the only D&D I've run since then. I do not encounter what you're describing here at all. Even this business about to what degree hit points are meat and what degree they're other stuff, there's a fairly detailed discussion of that in the 1E DMG. Everything in my post is straight out of the core 1E manuals.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 20, 2022, 07:18:47 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on March 20, 2022, 04:16:37 PM
Most of my problems with Hit Points are tuning issues and not fundamental concerns. There are too many Hit Points, which leads to a lot of math and tedious bookkeeping, and the Death Spiral is weak to nonexistent.

The opposite is, of course, wounds a la Savage Worlds. I would say this isn't less faulted so much as having opposite faults; the bookeeping is very streamlined, but you can't emulate glancing blows, and the death spiral in Savage Worlds is exceptionally aggressive. Going too far the other way on all counts doesn't fix the problems, but in this case it does make a more generally usable system.

If you can't tell, I prefer to wind up between these two extremes. Except for Death Spirals; I can appreciate why some players and game designers like them, but I really would prefer that particular mechanic to die in a corner, at least if all you're going for is a vanilla "you get worse as you get hit" implementation.

If you are only talking about a bare-bones game which the game designer hasn't spent time optimizing, wound systems are far superior because they're inherently streamlined. A streamlined game pops out with little effort. That said, I do think that if you took some efforts to streamline out some of the arithmetic and bookkeeping, Hit Points are closer to the ideal. It's just that it takes significantly more design homework to get there.

I also prefer streamlined systems. What I would like is a system that can both simulate glancing blows and abstracts attack/damage/defense/soak/etc into a single roll.

I'm actually curious to see what you think of my homebrew's approach because it almost fits your description, except for the glancing blow part. Glancing blows and whittling down with weak hits is often one of the sticking points for HP systems, and I confess I didn't really think about it when I put this together. FYI: This is for a theater of the mind tactics game, if that means anything.

The core mechanic is a dice pool which outputs between 0 and 8 successes (usually 2-4). Weapons have 2 stats; Power and Critical. The Power is the damage the weapon deals immediately on a successful hit, and the Critical is the amount of power each success past hitting can add. For example, if you are attempting to shoot an enemy (2 successes required) and roll 4 successes, and your weapon has Power 5, Critical 2, then you deal 5 + 2 + 2 damage, or 9 damage total.

Then the defender will subtract their character's DR stat from armor and may choose to spend AP and negate further damage with a defensive action (no dice needed; spend 1 AP to prevent 2 damage, etc.) or to mark it onto their character sheet.

The real question is if this is better than dice. One of the key advantages of a large HP pool a la D&D is that it lets you use a wide variety of dice for the damage outputs, which gives you beautiful damage output curves. That said, players do not accurately perceive the output of their dice, and you are adding complexity to the operation, even if you instruct players to roll damage dice with their D20. I generally think the tradeoff for damage rolls is that the the game forces the player to do a whole lot of math so that the game designer can admire a perfectly boob-shaped bell curve.

The Power and Critical approach above comes in clicky chunks and never deals a trivial amount of damage (although to be fair, it may all get absorbed with DR and active defense, so in practice it can still wind up with low damage connecting to the target in the end which would have been approximated in a D&D-like system with a higher AC.) But the big lacking is it doesn't have that attractive damage output bell curve.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on March 20, 2022, 10:53:54 PM

Quote from: Wisithir on March 20, 2022, 10:44:04 PMPerhaps medium HP, equivalent to 5 wound level systems, is the way to go.

I know some people complained against it, but I ultimately like Savage Worlds for having bennies or 'fate points' effectively that act almost like HP, but not exactly separately from your own wounds. They represent you getting lucky or tanking a hit in a way that reduces harm.

You can make the game more or less lethal by increasing/ decreasing the maximum number of raises you can get on a damage roll.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on March 20, 2022, 09:45:57 PMthen had one droideka fire and get the blasts deflected. Once the inquisitor was out of action, the other droideka rolled up into a ball and used tackle. No HP ablation to be had at all.

My man. Good taste. What system?

I love Savage Worlds. It is the only combat system I am happy with out of the box for a pen and paper game. Bennies are the real risk gauge; wounds are just a nasty complication. The world is brutal, combat is fast and furious, but the PCs get bennies to "cheat" reality with.  The death spiral can be mitigated or its initiation can be fended off with benny rerolls. 

Conversely, I somewhat like StoryPath combat. One roll to make sufficient success to beat the dc, buyoff "yes-but" complications, and spend the remainder on perks. Thus, a great roll might lead to, I shot the heavy weapon guy, no one saw me, so no return fire, and as he fell his weapon went off and hit his buddies. I also like that weapon have descriptors instead of stats and just do bruising, lethal, or aggravated damage, with descriptors affecting how they interact with the world. Conversely, I hate the initiative mechanic, and the describe the damage that goes with the wound level is flavorful but interacts badly with "I didn't get hit" players. Must have been another low to the head causing delusions. Then, the rest of the system goes downhill for me.

Droidekas vs inquisitor happened in Satar Wars: Saga Edition. During that incident my character was literally screaming over the coms "He's not going to die to kill the hostage. Just shoot him!" No one listened, so I had to blast and crash land my way into the building to deploy my droids.  A Jedi and two or more soldiers standing around and the medic/mechanic has to take down the bid bad.

One thought I did have for accelerating D&D HP attrition and avoiding miss, miss, miss, hit, too low to beat DR, miss cycle was allowing or making all attacks auto hit at the cost of HP equal to the degree of miss. Missed by X? Take X HP damage yourself and roll damage on the enemy. Beat the target by X? Add X to damage rolled. This would also avoid the Wounds/Vitality death spiral by reducing the risk gauge faster when rolling low due to penalties instead of making the combatant ineffective.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on March 20, 2022, 09:29:14 PM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on March 20, 2022, 09:12:45 PM
As a dedicated non-D&D player I am all for alternates to HP systems that "feel" more realistic. 

Our first RPG was Palladium.  Yes, it still has hit points, but not many, and they're the secondary set of damage points.  Structural Damage Capacity (SDC) was the main points you had.  I.E.  a character could start with 30 SDC and 10 HP.  SDC is easy to recover and is superficial injuries.  Lost HP probably means bed rest and doctors. 

Or D6 Star Wars.  You have 5 damage states.  Fully healthy, stunned, wounded, severely wounded, and incapacitated.  Your strength attribute is instead used to determine how bad a hit you receive.

I prefer games that don't make you tougher as you level up, but harder to hit instead.

The key term being "prefer," as it is really just a flavor preference.  Objectively, there's no difference in play between "I roll and miss five times before I hit and incapacitate the enemy" and "I roll and hit the enemy, subtracting hit points each time, until the sixth hit removes all of the hit points and incapacitates the enemy."  If anything, there's a psychological aspect that might prefer the feeling of progress (reducing hp) as opposed to simply missing over and over.  But the overall effect is the same...

In return of objective results, yes it's the same.  In terms of subjective fun, not so much.  I was in on a discussion at ENWorld some years ago of some research that WotC released.  They found that folks had the most fun with a 70% hit rate.  So making the game fun is not just about the end result, it's also about the process that gets you there.

Quote from: Mishihari on March 21, 2022, 03:14:31 AM
In return of objective results, yes it's the same.  In terms of subjective fun, not so much.  I was in on a discussion at ENWorld some years ago of some research that WotC released.  They found that folks had the most fun with a 70% hit rate.  So making the game fun is not just about the end result, it's also about the process that gets you there.

I agree that the process matters. Disagree that there's any merit at all to the 70% hit rate. I mean, casinos do similar research, and I'm sure far more accurate and in depth, trying to figure out that optimum frequency in which one should win to keep them hooked. I'm not privy to their research. But I'm fairly certain their answer isn't 70%.

But let's talk about the process. Gary wrote two other fantasy RPGs after AD&D. Both of those RPGs, generally speaking, give you a better hit rate and more hit points than D&D, and have critical hits. Both also have armor work to reduce harm rather than make you harder to hit. They check the boxes of the common items that come up in these discussions.

The way these games play out is, you get plenty of hits in that do very little damage that is of no threat to characters with their many hit points. But every now and then, you score a crit that does a ton of damage. It's one of the possible ways to resolve the contradicting feelings gamers have about wanting a measure of safety for their character but still have weapon attacks be deadly.

I know the average stats for Lejendary Adventure really well, so I can give a more concrete example of how it rolls. All weapons do d20 harm--the average human has 20 health. But average starting characters have 65 health, a +5 damage bonus, and 12 points of armor. There is a strong hit rule that anytime damage scored is over 10, there is a minimum of 1 point of shock harm that accrues even if the total damage does not exceed armor protection. So it works out that 25% of hits do no damage at all (only to armor), 15% do 1 damage, and 60% to 2-8 damage. If you're following along at home, that means hits are doing an average of only 3.15 damage each, which means it's going to take 21 hits to kill.

Enter critical hits. Crit type #1 happens on 5% of hits, where maximum damage is rolled on the d20 calling for additional bonus damage rolls, potentially doubling that base damage to 40. Crit type #2 happens on 10% of hits (special hits), and that calls for armor protection to be bypassed. So this average dude can easily go from scoring 3 points of harm per hit up to 45 points.


Now in a lot of ways, this process is more fun and better matches peoples expectations of the flow of combat. And personally I think Lejendary Adventure is a better RPG than D&D. And that's all well and good. And if isolated combat to do a study, it would probably confirm that LA's combat system is a lot more fun than D&Ds.

But I find myself wishing that combat in LA were more like D&D. Because combat is just one challenge to the overall game, and just one act in the overall story. When you're not isolating it, when it's part of a larger whole, there's a certain tedium to whacking away at each other, just chipping away at each other's health, while waiting for the big crit to come.

It's almost like.... how about we speed things up and skip right to the crits?

If you did that, combat would look a lot like (low level) AD&D. Rounds that represent an unusually large block of time. Assumption of many parries and thrusts going on that we ignore and do not represent mechanically. Lower hit probability (because we're only concerned with the crits, not the ordinary hits). We're mostly dealing with single-digit damage rather than double-digit so the math is easier. Armor makes you "harder to hit" because it's possible to do significant damage without a crit if someone has little or no armor absorbing damage.

I do not think they are dumb. I agree with the earlier sentiment that even systems that try to provide an alternative basically just rebrand them. For example, I see a three wound system as roughly equivalent to a one damage per hit, three hit point one.

I believe there is often an issue with execution. HP bloat is a real thing, and can be compounded by combat resolution mechanics such as to hit and damage amount. Also, healing rates in games can suffer from a porridge is too hot or too cold situation by being either too slow, such as one point every other day after a day of rest, or the too fast system used in 5e.

Given anybody with an itch account or google drive can be a game designer, I agree it has become more common to see people attacking HP as a concept while pushing their so called innovation. Often it turns into a focus on the wrong D word; difference instead of design.

I don't know, what have they got to do with elf games?

[I'll get my coat on the way out? 😜]