Finally, a more crunchy preview from Wizards... original article is here.

This actually seems remarkably sensible, to me (and the fact that monsters are likely to dish out more damage than in 3E somewhat justifies the higher starting hitpoints to me).

QuoteCharacter death is one of the ultimate threats in any RPG, and D&D is no exception. Besides the obvious, um, "inconveniences" that death might cause your character and his allies in both the short and long term—inconveniences which vary based on your level, the current situation, and of course your attachment to that particular character—death is a mark of failure. In some hard-to-explain but very real way, a dead character symbolizes that you just "lost" at D&D. That can prove a bitter pill for many players, and in my experience is even more frustrating than paying for a resurrection.

What We Hated

Early in the design process, Rob, James, and I identified a number of ways that we were unsatisified with D&D's current death and dying rules. For example, we strongly disliked the inability of 3rd Edition D&D's negative-hit-point model to deal with combat at higher levels—once the monsters are reliably dealing 15 or 20 points of damage with each attack, the chance of a character going straight from "alive and kicking" to "time to go through his pockets for loose change" was exceedingly high; effectively, the -1 to -9 "dying" range was meaningless. Ask any high-level fighter whether he'd prefer the second-to-last attack from a monster to leave him at 1 hp or -1 hp; I'd put odds on unconsciousness, and how lame is that?

Among other problems, this also meant that characters effectively had no way to "lose" a combat except by being killed. This removes a lot of dramatic possibilities for the story—for instance, the classic scene of the characters being captured and thrown in a cell from which they have to escape using only their wits and a pack of chewing gum (or whatever).

On top of all that, the game added a complex state of being at exactly 0 hp, which wasn't quite like being fully capable but also wasn't quite dying. Honestly, though, how often does any character actually get reduced to exactly 0 hp? Why did the game need a condition that existed at exactly one spot on the big, broad range of hit point possibilities?

What We Wanted

We wanted a death and dying system that added fun and tension at the table, scaled well to any level of play, and created the threat of PC mortality (without delivering on that threat as often as 3rd Edition did).

Characters had to feel that death was a possibility in order for combat to feel meaningful. If it seems impossible to be killed, much of the tension of combat disappears. However, if the majority of combats result in death (as is the case for a lot of high-level play in previous editions), the game is forced to reclassify death as a trivial obstacle in order to remain playable. 3rd Edition accomplished this with popular spells such as close wounds, delay death, and revivify—mandatory staples of any high-level cleric's arsenal due purely to the commonality of death. But that removes the tension, and now what's the point of death at all?

The system also had to be simple to remember and adjudicate at the table. Being able to keep the rule in your head is important, because you don't want to be bogging the game down flipping through a book when a character is clinging to life by a thread—that should be high-tension time, not slowdown time!

Finally, it had to be believable within the heroic-fantasy milieu of D&D. (Believability isn't the same thing as realism—an error which has ruined more games than I can count.) Put another way, it had to feel like D&D—one of those tricky "you know it when you see it" things.

What We Did About It

Back in 2005, this was obviously a much lower priority than, say, creating the new model for how classes and races worked, so we put it on the back burner to simmer. As the months passed, we and other designers proposed various models that tried to solve the conundrums set out above, varying from exceedingly abstract to witheringly simulationist. We playtested every model, from death tracks to life points, each time learning something different about what worked or didn't work. A few times, we even temporarily settled on a solution, claiming that the playtesters only needed time to get used to our radical new ideas.

Side note to all those would-be game designers out there: When you hear yourself making that claim, you might be in danger of losing touch with reality. Sometimes you're right, and your innovative game design concept just needs a little time to sink in. (The cycling initiative system used by 3rd Edition D&D is a good example of that—back in 1999, some very vociferous playtesters were convinced that it would ruin D&D combat forever. Turned out that wasn't exactly true.) But every time you convince yourself that you know better than the people playing your game, you're opening the possibility of a very rude (and costly) awakening.

Thankfully, our awakening came well before we released the game (or even before widescale playtesting began, for that matter). Despite some quite elegant concepts, none of our radical new ideas met all the criteria necessary, including simplicity, playability, fun, and believability.

The system had to be at least as simple to remember and at least as easy to play as what already existed. For all their other flaws, negative hit points are pretty easy to use, and they work well with the existing hit-point system.

It had to be at least as much fun as what already existed, and it had to be at least as believable as what already existed. In ideal situations, negative hit points create fun tension at the table, and they're reasonably believable, at least within the heroic fantasy milieu of D&D, where characters are supposed to get the stuffing beaten out of them on a regular basis without serious consequences.

Every one of our new ideas failed to meet at least one of those criteria. Maybe they were playable but too abstract to feel fun or believable, or they were believable but too complicated to remember. Nothing worked, and I admit we experienced a couple of freak-out moments behind closed doors.

The Breakthrough

Eventually we got it through our heads that there wasn't a radical new game mechanic just waiting to be discovered that would revolutionize the narrow window between life and death in D&D. What we really needed to do was just widen the window, reframe it, and maybe put in an extra pane for insulation. (OK, that analogy went off the tracks, but its heart was in the right place.)

Characters still use a negative hit point threshold to determine when they move from "unconscious and dying" to "all-the-way-dead," but now that threshold scales with their level (or more specifically, with their hit point total). A character with 30 hit points (such as a low-level cleric) dies when he reaches -15 hit points, while the 15th-level fighter with 120 hp isn't killed until he's reduced to -60 hit points.

That may seem like an unreachable number, but it's important to remember that monsters, like characters, aren't piling on as many attacks on their turn as in 3rd Edition. At 15th level, that fighter might face a tough brute capable of dishing out 25 or 30 points of damage with its best attack... or nearly twice that on a crit. The threat of "alive-to-negative-everything" on a single hit remains in play, but it's much less common than in the previous edition. That puts that bit of tension back where it belongs.

The new system also retains the "unconscious character bleeding out" concept, but for obvious reasons speeds it along a bit. (There's not really any tension watching that 15th-level fighter bleed out at a rate of 1 hp per round for 30 or 40 rounds.) Thanks to some clever abstractions, the new system also removes the predictability of the current death timer. ("OK, Regdar's at -2 hp, so we have 8 rounds to get to him. Yawn... time for a nap.")

It's also less costly to bring dying characters back into the fight now—there's no "negative hit point tax" that you have to pay out of the healing delivered by your cure serious wounds prayer. That helps ensure that a character who was healed from unconsciousness isn't in an immediate threat of going right back there (and you'll never again have the "I fed Jozan a potion of healing but he's still at negative hit points" disappointment).

Monsters don't need or use this system unless the DM has special reason to do so. A monster at 0 hp is dead, and you don't have to worry about wandering around the battlefield stabbing all your unconscious foes. (I'm sure my table isn't the only place that happens.) We've talked elsewhere about some of the bogus parallelism that can lead to bad game design—such as all monsters having to follow character creation rules, even though they're supposed to be foes to kill, not player characters—this is just another example of the game escaping that trap. Sure, a DM can decide for dramatic reasons that a notable NPC or monster might linger on after being defeated. Maybe a dying enemy survives to deliver a final warning or curse before expiring, or at the end of a fight the PCs discover a bloody trail leading away from where the evil warlock fell, but those will be significant, story-based exceptions to the norm.

Oh, and speaking of zero hit points? You're unconscious and dying, just like every new player expects it should be. It's not as harsh as the "dead at 0 hp" rule of the original D&D game, but it's still not a place you want to be for long!

Try It Now!

If you want to try out a version of this system in your current game, try the following house rule. It's not quite the 4th Edition system, but it should give you an idea of how it'll feel.

1) At 0 hp or less, you fall unconscious and are dying.
Any damage dealt to a dying character is applied normally, and might kill him if it reduces his hit points far enough (see #2).

2) Characters die when their negative hit point total reaches -10 or one-quarter of their full normal hit points, whichever is a larger value.
This is less than a 4th Edition character would have, but each monster attack is dealing a smaller fraction of the character's total hit points, so it should be reasonable. If it feels too small, increase it to one-third full normal hit points and try again.

3) If you're dying at the end of your turn, roll 1d20.
Lower than 10: You get worse. If you get this result three times before you are healed or stabilized (as per the Heal skill), you die.
10-19: No change.
20: You get better! You wake up with hit points equal to one-quarter your full normal hit points.

4) If a character with negative hit points receives healing, he returns to 0 hp before any healing is applied.
In other words, he'll wake up again with hit points equal to the healing provided by the effect—a cure light wounds spell for 7 hp will bring any dying character back to 7 hp, no matter what his negative hit point total had reached.)

5) A dying character who's been stabilized (via the Heal skill) doesn't roll a d20 at the end of his turn unless he takes more damage.

Yeah, i saw that. There's one problem to my thinking. Characters with low hit dice are being 'punished' twice. With hps becoming more of an abstraction (what with 2nd wind, and other morale based healing) it doesn't work in the negatives. If hit points are this big mash up of skill, luck, morale etc, then you can easily justify the different hit dice folks are getting. But once you're unconscious, how do these abstractions still come into play? You can't employ your skill whilst lying on the ground. Thus, i think that basing your negative threshold on 1/2 hit points isn't the way to go (also the fact that lower hit point people are being gimped twice). At least in 3e, everyone had the same threshold.

I see what they are doing and why, but i wouldn't use hit point totals to do it. Either make the threshold bigger and the same for everyone or do something like make it the Con score of the character. Then double that score when they reach the paragon tier and triple it when they reach the epic tier of play.

Well we all know D&D hitpoints are stupid We have been using this homebrew system for about 10 years ... Might not work with monstered sealling consistently more damage now but that is just a tweak to levels

A 6th level Fighter on about 40 hit points merely laughs at the man holding the loaded cross bow 10 feet away (in first edition you could have got away with using the assasination table to make it a bit more scary).
Why can a reasonably experienced fighter take more damage than a warhorse?

We know the rationale. The fighter moves their body so that a deadly thust becomes a light scratch. In effect its the % of the hit points that matters.
However, in that case how can a 1st level wizard with 3 hit points loose 1/3 of their hits and totally recover after 1 day whereas a 15th level fighter can loose 1/3 of their hit points say 30 and it takes them a month to recover...

So with that in mind.

Your hit points beome a pool you can use to absorb damage. You can absorb 1/5 of your hit points from any strike. Hit points recover at at rate of 10% of your hit points every hour of rest. So evereyone has all their hitpoints back after 10 hours of complete rest.
As well as Hitpoints you have wounds. Every player have 4 wounds + their con bonus. When you take a hit you take your absorb off it (1/5 of your max hitpoints) the rest hits you as wounds. Each wound taken takes 1 week to heal. If you want to play 'realistic' fantasy then each wound also gives you -2 or -10% on all dice rolls don't recommend this myself under most conditions.
When you have taken all your wounds in damage you are unconcious at -4 wounds you are dead.
All Spells, area affects, and similar gross damage comes straight off hits and only impacts wounds after all hits are exhausted.
Cure spells - Cure light wounds cures 1 wound - extrapolate the rest from there.
Hitting someone when they are tied up asleep or otherwise helpless just goes straight to wounds. No longer does it take 6 blows for the headsman to decapitate the Duke.
Mosters just have hitpoints cos no one wants to track this stuff. Humanoid , npc type oponents have wounds. You can use wounds on the big stuff and do the 'there is a single weakness in their armour bit' If so a creature has 2 wounds per hitdice. I usually wouldn't bother but it does let Bard Bowman kill Smaug with a single arrow if that is your bag.
Backstab is an issue. the old double trible quad stuff is too tough. No idea how this was handled after 2nd edition but we said... if you can suprise your opponent from behind and we made that more difficult you had to move silently or be hidden in shadows then they had to fail their suprise check your hit would come straight off their wounds. They were in effect helpless. The old damage bonus mulitplier became a bonus to suprise in this situation. You could not of course use backstab in a combat situation.

Effect on game play
i) Low level. People get wounded but die less often in effect everyone has 4 extra hitpoints. At low level single hits can be leathal a 6 damage will put you down. This means you need to be careful.
ii) Mid level. Guards holding loaded crossbows pointed at your stomach become an actual threat. Any hit round about 10 points is going to hurt critical hits and specialization can lead to death. However, overall the run of weapons on the d6 d8 range will not cause wounds instead they will ablate the hitpoints. The rapid recovery of hit points means you don't need to carry 10 potions of healing or drag a cleric round with you. We do faith based clerics with restricted spell pools so in general gods of healing give out healing spells but are crap at everything else and no one wants to play one. Suddenly a team of theives or assassins or barbarian raiders don't need to rely on magical healing. And clerics can role play spell choices rather than fitting a template healer role. Magic users don't suddenly become lethal with Fireball. 8d6 off your hits is actually a little less scary than 1d8 +5 with a chance to wound and kill. An 8th level fighter with 50 hit points can take 8d6 and it will not wound him it will fry a big chunk of his hit points mind. a d8 +5 can deal 13 damamge that would be 10 absorbed off hit points and 3 wounds.
iii) High Levels - damage spells no longer rule the roost. They really just ablate the Hitpoint pool. This means Wizards are no longer as overpowered as they once were and have to rethink how they do magic to its best effect which makes for more creative play and better roleplaying. Again after a fight the 18th level figher no longer needs to lie down for 3 months to recover. You don't have to have healing poitions and clerics as a given essential which leaves you with more options to do other stuff. The 18th level figher with 90 hitpoints rarely gets injured fighting low level oponents he can absorb 18 points from any one hit. However his hit pioints still ablate so in prolonged combat he is only 1 hit stronger than he was in the old hitpoint system as in effect he has an extra 4 (well usually 6 with con bonus) hitpoints. But a crit hit from a Dragon is ging to hurt....

We used this for about 4 years in a cycle where the two lead characters were a theif and a barbarian and it made adventures playable without recourse to the streotypical healing cycle.
You do have to have a long think about how you deal with critical damge though as in this area a 4th or 5th level character is about as strong as a 1st level guy in the old rules but a hit for double damage on a 1st level thief was always a risk they could ill afford
You can play with the base number of wounds if you like your PCs to live longer more rewarding lives. Up it to 6 or even 8 ... but that i think would be a stretch.
You an also play with stuff like poisons, save or take x wounds, falls 1 wound per 10 feet or save for 1/2 ..deadly :-) and all sorts of other stuff.
As I say we played with specific wound details and penalties for wounds but book keeping got onerous so we dumped it.

Just an idea that radically alters the entire game :-)

Quote from: jibbajibbaWell we all know D&D hitpoints are stupid

Who is this "we" you speak of? A lot of people who play D&D - I'd guess the majority - don't think that.

Quote from: ColonelHardissonWho is this "we" you speak of? A lot of people who play D&D - I'd guess the majority - don't think that.

You they're the ones... they surely must realise that their beloved hitpoint system is illogical and in no way internally consistent...

You did read the rationale for this statement before you posted didn't you ? would hate to htink you might have just commented on a statement without reading its basis

If you can defend the classic hp system and can couter the arguements , especially the time it takes to heal back to full HP and the whole what happens if I am shot with a crossbow bolt from 10 feet away.. then I would love to hear it

Oh NOH!

A Runequest-Fanboy argument STILL used after 30 years!

No Hate Runequest. Didn't mind the Elric makeover...
I like Hit points as an Idea but just think you need to explain how they work... full details posted above please read before tarring me with a lable

Some good bits in there.

Quote from: WotCOn top of all that, the game added a complex state of being at exactly 0 hp, which wasn't quite like being fully capable but also wasn't quite dying. Honestly, though, how often does any character actually get reduced to exactly 0 hp? Why did the game need a condition that existed at exactly one spot on the big, broad range of hit point possibilities?

At lower levels this happens a lot more frequently.  If you have 3 hit points and a monster attacks for 1d4 damage, you're at 0 hp 25% of the time.  However, since this style of game is no longer included in the game it makes sense to remove supporting rules, which probably includes the 0 hp rule.

Quote from: WotCSide note to all those would-be game designers out there: When you hear yourself making that claim, you might be in danger of losing touch with reality. Sometimes you're right, and your innovative game design concept just needs a little time to sink in. (The cycling initiative system used by 3rd Edition D&D is a good example of that—back in 1999, some very vociferous playtesters were convinced that it would ruin D&D combat forever. Turned out that wasn't exactly true.) But every time you convince yourself that you know better than the people playing your game, you're opening the possibility of a very rude (and costly) awakening.

:haw:

Quote from: WotCCharacters still use a negative hit point threshold to determine when they move from "unconscious and dying" to "all-the-way-dead," but now that threshold scales with their level (or more specifically, with their hit point total). A character with 30 hit points (such as a low-level cleric) dies when he reaches -15 hit points, while the 15th-level fighter with 120 hp isn't killed until he's reduced to -60 hit points.

180 hit points? At level 15... which is more like old D&D level 10... That's a TON of hit points.  Like... Palladium mecha level.

Quote from: WotCThat may seem like an unreachable number, but it's important to remember that monsters, like characters, aren't piling on as many attacks on their turn as in 3rd Edition. At 15th level, that fighter might face a tough brute capable of dishing out 25 or 30 points of damage with its best attack... or nearly twice that on a crit. The threat of "alive-to-negative-everything" on a single hit remains in play, but it's much less common than in the previous edition. That puts that bit of tension back where it belongs.

Okay, so if you divide it all by 10... 12 hit points... dead at -6... monster does 2-3 damage, twice that on a crit.  Interestingly, that's the same basic formula as low-level D&D.

Quote from: WotCMonsters don't need or use this system unless the DM has special reason to do so. A monster at 0 hp is dead, and you don't have to worry about wandering around the battlefield stabbing all your unconscious foes. (I'm sure my table isn't the only place that happens.)

While that would actually be more believable / realistic, I think it's a good design decision to just have monsters out of play at 0 hp

Quote from: WotC3) If you're dying at the end of your turn, roll 1d20.
Lower than 10: You get worse. If you get this result three times before you are healed or stabilized (as per the Heal skill), you die.
10-19: No change.
20: You get better! You wake up with hit points equal to one-quarter your full normal hit points.

"It's Just a Flesh Wound!" :haw:

I would have gone with a d6 50/50 (because d6 roll nicer than d20, and you don't need the d20 for a 50/50 roll) and dropped the natural 20 bit -- or give the player the option: "Stay down, or get up... but your at 1 hp and if you get hit again you're more likely to "die" etc. If it was tied to your constitution somehow, then it would be a d20 + constitution modifier.

Quote from: WotC4) If a character with negative hit points receives healing, he returns to 0 hp before any healing is applied.
In other words, he'll wake up again with hit points equal to the healing provided by the effect—a cure light wounds spell for 7 hp will bring any dying character back to 7 hp, no matter what his negative hit point total had reached.)

5) A dying character who's been stabilized (via the Heal skill) doesn't roll a d20 at the end of his turn unless he takes more damage.

Both very good.

I'm not sure about the artificially inflated numbers, but the system seems good.

Play GURPS if you want a "realistic" handling of hit points. Otherwise there is nothing wrong with how D&D handle hit points.

the problem with house ruling D&D is that the system has little else to defend you against being one shotted by a crossbow bolt. In GURPS, Runequest and other games of the type, the high level character is defined by his skill. So while a crossbow bolt may kill the hero, it would be hard to get a clear shot in combat.

D&D hit points are stupid.  But they're the kind of stupid that gets the job done.  Personally, I prefer hit points plus the occasional graphically and mechanically elaborate critical hit.  Not "double damage" but more like "oops, you're ear just got chopped off.  +5 damage and -4 to all Listen rolls".  But if I have to choose either stupid hit points or fiddily mechanics, I choose stupid hit points.

Quote from: StuartOkay, so if you divide it all by 10... 12 hit points... dead at -6... monster does 2-3 damage, twice that on a crit. Interestingly, that's the same basic formula as low-level D&D.

This was my understanding, that they were going to aim for the preceived damage/HP ratio sweetspot to happen all the way along the levels, from top to bottom.  To keep the tension up but not too high.

QuoteI would have gone with a d6 50/50 (because d6 roll nicer than d20, and you don't need the d20 for a 50/50 roll)

Yeah but they've branded D&D as d20. They made that die nearly synonomous with the D&D, from a marketing POV. The default is to use a d20. *shrug*

Quote from: jrientsD&D hit points are stupid.  But they're the kind of stupid that gets the job done.  ... But if I have to choose either stupid hit points or fiddily mechanics, I choose stupid hit points.

But the healing time and the requirement to drag a cleric round with you or have magical healing. Conan, Grey Mouser, Robin Hood, Arthur, Lancelot, Rolland, Beowulf... these guys didn;t chug back potions of healing every 5 minutes or drag a saint round with them to stand at the back of a fight calling down the power of the lord every time they flagged.....

These mechanics are not that fiddly really I promise

To Live and Die in 4E. I'm getting a bit worried. Is the game becoming more crunchier ?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: jrientsD&D hit points are stupid.  But they're the kind of stupid that gets the job done.  Personally, I prefer hit points plus the occasional graphically and mechanically elaborate critical hit.  Not "double damage" but more like "oops, you're ear just got chopped off.  +5 damage and -4 to all Listen rolls".  But if I have to choose either stupid hit points or fiddily mechanics, I choose stupid hit points.

I prefer Harnmaster's system where injury degrades your ability to act effectively via a minus to your skills. All the other horrendous results are from failed saving throws (modified negatively by how much injury you take). Horrendous results can include shock, unconsciousness, death, amputation, bleeding, etc.

For example a shot in the vitals from a crossbow may require nothing, a shock throw, or a death throw depending on how much damage was done. In all cases a bleeding throw is required and if failed which means you will keep taking injury until treated or healed.

Again Hit Points is a simple to use and understand mechanic that gets the job done.

QuoteIf you can defend the classic hp system and can couter the arguements , especially the time it takes to heal back to full HP and the whole what happens if I am shot with a crossbow bolt from 10 feet away.. then I would love to hear it

The classic hp system works (you *aren't* shot with the crossbow -- you dive out of the way!) but the following associated systems aren't as smooth:  armour, healing.