Ok so, not going to lie, I like D&D a lot, but I kind of hate Armor Class.
I don't mind the system of "roll your bonuses against a target number to hit". It's certainly more efficient than systems that require opposing rolls or success levels. I don't even mind armor being rolled into your defense (as opposed to providing damage soak). What grinds my gears is that outside of a few specific class features (usually restricted to monks), in most versions of D&D your armor class is almost completely locked in at character creation. You can get better armor (though it's usually only a one or two point difference), and in rare cases you might improve your dexterity modifier by one, but there's no inherent AC improvement through leveling up (even for fighters). I find it to be a bit immersion-breaking that a character can spend years of their life getting into swordfights, and not get any better at not being stabbed.
Thinking about this lately, I realized that it's probably the reason why hit points work the way they do in D&D. Gygax always insisted that HP partly existed to represent the characters' ability to avoid debilitating damage, which is why it increases with level when pure physical resilience probably wouldn't increase at that rate, and I suspect it developed that way because the AC system couldn't do it. My point is that the AC system makes a certain amount of HP bloat almost necessary.
This is borne out by looking at other games, whether it's Dragon Warriors, WFRP, Cyberpunk, or even Call of Cthulhu. In games where HP increases are rare or even impossible, it is almost always because defense is some kind skill or stat which you can improve with experience.
It's weird to me that more OSR and OGL games haven't tried to address this. The only one I know of is Radiance, which makes avoiding attacks another function of the save system.
Having a to-hit roll and hit point damage allows you to create a Cartesian plane. In the NE quadrant are threats that can hit you and deal a lot of damage; in the SE quadrant are threats that can hit you but only deal minor damage; in the NW quadrant are threats that are unlikely to hit you but deal a lot of damage when they do, and in the SW quadrant are 'mooks' that can't really hurt, and even if they do, it's insignificant.
There are other ways to create differing types of threats, but if you only have one axis, it's harder to differentiate them to create those four types of threats.
In 1st and 2nd edition, I felt that my AC always improved.
In the game that I play with my friends, we have a Base Defense Bonus that increases as you gain levels. While your AC doesn't get better very quickly, it is true that opponents that could hit you at low levels might miss you more often. If you want higher level characters to have less to fear from lower level opposition, providing some bonus to AC to reflect that might make sense.
From a 'satisfaction' stand-point, I think that players should expect to hit 'equal opposition' more than 50% of the time (I ballpark it at 75%). Hitting on a 6+ (instead of an 11+) makes a difference in how combat plays.
Yes it does, but maybe not the extent that you might think. After all, early D&D wasn't this bloated, and for most levels barely felt bloated at all to many people. Of course, where the line crosses into bloat is going to vary by personal preference, too.
There are several factors to consider, with each person having their own view of the pros and cons of trading off between the factors:
- How far do you want to push ease of handling? This includes the simplicity of avoiding armor as damage reduction versus whatever complexity your alternative brings, as well as tracking various states on each combatant.
- How many creatures in a fight? The more creatures you have, the more compromises you have to make here, despite what you think on the other factors. (Doesn't mean that you make the same compromises that I would make or start in the same place or set the creature threshold in the same place--but where ever you start, you are going to have to change past N number of creatures in the fight.)
- Where do you draw the line on bloat? I draw it on triple digit hit points, except in the rarest of cases (e.g. super tough dwarf fighter at maximum level, immense dragons, etc.) I'll force the math to cap it there, even if it costs me elsewhere. Others will work out the math of the system to suit, then let the hit points fall where that dictates.
- How much do you want low-powered creatures to threaten high-powered creatures, and how much? If you want it possible for any character to die at any time (e.g. crossbow bolt to the head), then a D&D-style system is a poor fit, though you might be OK with certain versions at low levels. If you want superheros running around until exhausted, everything short of bloat is a feature, not a bug. It's in the middle, where a lot of people live, that the margins matter.
How you deal with all of that isn't changing one thing in a vacuum. For example, I want less hit point bloat, AC getting better over time (moderately at first, then slowly), more deadly than any WotC version but slightly less deadly than early D&D low-levels, more risky than early D&D high-levels, weapons doing more damage than most D&D versions, and more variety in critical hits. Executed, that's going to produce something not exactly D&D, but still capable of using Armor as AC, increasing hit points, and at least mitigate most of your points. It can't eliminate them entirely, because that's the nature of the trade offs. Getting there is being clear about the goals of the system and then making the widgets and math do that.
For example, I let Armor and Ability mods to AC stack (like early D&D) but put some caps on magic boosts (but not entirely), and built the game around an implied setting where the better armor is hard to get and not everyone can learn to use it productively (more so than most D&D versions). Ability scores can improve slowly. Net result is that in the low levels, characters can find mundane armor to upgrade in most cases, with later magic and ability score improvements chipping in later. Between incremental AC improvements and slowly increasing hit points, later characters are more resilient, because the two have a multiplying effect. Slightly more hit points and slightly better armor class can be quite notable in combination. Then to keep the risk, I went with a Wound Point/Hit Point variant, and carefully considered what went directly into my equivalent of Wound Points, building it directly into the system and math from the beginning instead of trying to glue it onto an existing D&D version.
So there is room for nuance. The trick is there is only so far you can push an existing system when it made trades you don't like, before you are essentially rewriting the system from the ground up. Rooting out hit point bloat in place that you don't like is akin to pulling crab grass in a yard instead of spraying it or digging it all up and starting over.
Greetings!
Cap Character Classes at 50 Hit Points. Remember to reduce Monster Hit Points by 50%.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
The AC system fundamentally has nothing to do with hit point bloat. The AC system goes back to 1974 OD&D and one could argue that through Chainmail and other gaming traces back even earlier. There was no bloat back in 1974. It's all about the way the rules have evolved.
(1) Hit dice have changed. Supplement II Greyhawk in 1976 had magic-users using d4's but now they have d6's. Fighters have gone from d6 to d8 do d10. Making the types of HD larger means HP totals will become larger.
(2) The transition from rolling to averaged numbers. In the old days if you rolled a d6 sometimes you'd get a 1, sometimes you rolled a 6. The 5E way is to allow for each d6 to become an automatic 4 hit points. That can cause HP bloat.
(3) CON bonuses are greater now. Boxed set OD&D had a +1 HP bonus for each level if you had a CON of 15 or higher. 5E allows for a +1 if you have a CON of 12, +2 for a 14, +3 for a 16, and so on. Larger CON bonuses cause HP bloat.
(4) Higher levels cause HP bloat. A lot of OD&D games in the 70's tended to cap out at level 10 or so. AD&D lifted that to level 20. Those extra levels mean more hit dice and more CON bonuses, so philosophy has contributed to HP bloat.
So really all you need to do is look at the way the rules have evolved from edition to edition. Over time the norm has been an emphasis on "player friendly" rules, which almost always means more hit points. I've been pondering running a 5E campaign where every character gets half hit points but damage stays the same. :D
The armor system I liked was from Earthdawn (Savage World sort of uses its dice system, complete with exploding dice). You armor was just Damage Resistance, but the critical hits in that game (extraordinary hit) would defeat your armor.
That could be brought over to DND easy enough.
Using Ascending AC Your AC would be equal to your Dexterity score.
Level bonuses to AC for non-martials (+1 @ 3rd/+2 @ 6th/+3 at 9th/+4 at 12th) and every odd levels for semi and martial classes (+1 @ 1st /+2 @ 3rd/+3 @ 5th/+4 at 7th/+5 at 9th/+6 13th)
Shields add to both AC and DR, Buckler could be 1/1, Shield 2/2 and tower shields 3/3 but vs arrows would be 6/3
Armor's DR could be Leather 2 / Chain 5 / Plate 7 / Full plate 9.
Protection Rings would add to DR, Saves and AC. Bracers of Defense could act like shields bolstering both AC and DR since they don't work with Armor. Bracers grant an AC [11 + 1d4] but for this system it would grant 2 - 5 AC & DR (Using the AC normal Bracers of Defense grants and subtract 10)
Using OSE rules (b/x) a 1st level fighter with a 16 Strength(+2) & Dex (+1) wearing Plate Mail (3) and using a Shield (+1) would have an AC of 19
@5th level they have acquired +1 Plate and shield so now have an AC of 21 (19 without shield)
@9th level they have acquired +2 Plate and shield, AC is now 23 (20 without shield)
@14th level they have acquired +3 plate and shield, AC is now 25 (21 without shield)
Using the modified rules above our 1st level fighter would have
a base AC of 18(16 without shield) (Dex 15 +2 for shield +1 for level) DR of 9 (7 without shield).
@5th level 15 (Dex) (+3 for level) acquires +1 plate (8 DR) and +1 shield (3/3)
AC of 21 AC (18 without shield) DR of 11(8 without shield)
@ 9th level 15(dex) (+5 for level) acquires +2 Plate(9DR) and +2 shield (4/4) and a +1 protection Ring
AC of 25 (21 without shield) DR of 14 (10 without shield)
@14th level 15(dex)(+6 for level) acquires +3 plate(10 DR) and +3 shield (5/5) and a +1 protection Ring
AC of 27 (22 without shield) DR of 16 (11 without shield)
Using OSE rules (b/x) a 1st level Magic user with a 16 Dex (+2) wearing robes would have an AC of 12
@5th level they have acquired +1 protection ring and Braces of Defense (12) would have an AC of 15
@9th level they still have their +1 protection ring but found better Bracers of Defense(14) and acquired a Cloak of Defense +1, would now have an AC of 18.
@14th level they still have their +1 protection ring but found better Bracers of Defense(15) and acquired a Cloak of Defense +2, would now have an AC of 20.
Using the Modify rules MU with 16 dex
@1st level MU, AC of 16, 0 DR
@5th level MU, (+1 level) AC of 20, 2 DR
@9th level MU, (+3 level) AC of 25, 4 DR
@14th level MU, (+4 level) AC of 28, 5 DR
Using OSE rules (b/x) a 1st level thief with an 16 Dex (+2) wearing Leather (12) would have an AC of 14
@5th level they have acquired +1 Leather and +1 protection ring so now have an AC of 16
@9th level they have acquired +2 Leather and +1 Prot Ring & +1 cloak of defense, AC is now 18
@14th level they have acquired Bracers of Defense (+5) and +1 Prot Ring & +3 cloak of defense, AC is now 21
Using the Modify rules Thief with 16 dex
@1st level Thief, (+1 level) AC of 17, 2 DR
@5th level Thief, (+3 level) AC of 20, 4 DR
@9th level Thief, (+5 level) AC of 23, 5 DR
@14th level Thief, (+6 level) AC of 31, 6 DR
14th level fighter AC of 27 (22 without shield) DR of 16 (11 without shield)
vs 14th magic user AC of 28, 5 DR
ve 14th level Thief, (+6 level) AC of 28, 6 DR
The Thief would have the highest AC then the MU and finally the fighter but the first two would get hit a lot harder due to lack of DR.
For monsters, just base their DR around their AC. For non-ascending AC, it would be DR 10 - their AC. For Ascending AC their DR would be equal to their AC -10. Then adjust it by monster type. If they have scales add +2, if its dragon scales add 5.
1HD bandit with a 13 AC would have a 3 DR
6HD Basilisk with a 15 AC would have a 5-7 DR
10 HD Red Dragon with a 20 AC would have a 10-15 DR
From there just let Natural 20's simply be armor defeating hits.
So was this something you had in mind?
Quote from: finarvyn on August 12, 2022, 11:15:28 AM
The AC system fundamentally has nothing to do with hit point bloat. The AC system goes back to 1974 OD&D and one could argue that through Chainmail and other gaming traces back even earlier. There was no bloat back in 1974. It's all about the way the rules have evolved.
(1) Hit dice have changed. Supplement II Greyhawk in 1976 had magic-users using d4's but now they have d6's. Fighters have gone from d6 to d8 do d10. Making the types of HD larger means HP totals will become larger.
(2) The transition from rolling to averaged numbers. In the old days if you rolled a d6 sometimes you'd get a 1, sometimes you rolled a 6. The 5E way is to allow for each d6 to become an automatic 4 hit points. That can cause HP bloat.
(3) CON bonuses are greater now. Boxed set OD&D had a +1 HP bonus for each level if you had a CON of 15 or higher. 5E allows for a +1 if you have a CON of 12, +2 for a 14, +3 for a 16, and so on. Larger CON bonuses cause HP bloat.
(4) Higher levels cause HP bloat. A lot of OD&D games in the 70's tended to cap out at level 10 or so. AD&D lifted that to level 20. Those extra levels mean more hit dice and more CON bonuses, so philosophy has contributed to HP bloat.
So really all you need to do is look at the way the rules have evolved from edition to edition. Over time the norm has been an emphasis on "player friendly" rules, which almost always means more hit points. I've been pondering running a 5E campaign where every character gets half hit points but damage stays the same. :D
Greetings!
Great commentary, finarvyn!
You know, I think many people forget that AD&D didn't have any of these kinds of problems. People wigging out about how later D&D starts to become a mess or challenge problem after Level 10--well, again, AD&D kept everything tight almost entirely throughout the level 1 through 20 arc. Honestly, there were only some relative problems at level 18-20, because on one hand Players had epic power, but also the monsters often seemed gimped and restrained. That's at max level though. Lower Hit Points, smaller Hit Dice, less Con bonuses, all made Player Characters far more manageable, and over a longer campaign life span. Hit Point Bloating comes from several sources, and when you keep stacking them up, Player Characters become too uber, which then leads to the campaign becoming a mess.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Quote from: SHARK on August 12, 2022, 10:34:09 AM
Greetings!
Cap Character Classes at 50 Hit Points. Remember to reduce Monster Hit Points by 50%.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Or, optionally, play a game like Shadow of the Demon Lord that quite effectively does this for you.
Regarding Hit Points
In miniature wargaming with dozen if not hundreds of figures you don't want to be messing around the details of individual figures. So combat was abstracted to 1 hit = 1 kill. When Gygax introduced fantasy elements to Chainmail along with heroes and superheroes, once way he beefed them up was to require 4 hits in order to kill a Hero and 8 hits to kill a Super-Hero.
Dave Arneson started running Braunsteins and later Blackmoor. This was found hit to kill too harsh for when the campaign was starting out. So one 1 hit to kill became 1d6 hit points. And one hit became 1d6 damage.
What the hit point mechanic never addressed was injury. Instead it is solely a measure of combat endurance. For whatever reason sounds good, when you go to zero hit points, your character can not fight. Just as 1 hit took out a combatant in a miniature wargame.
Anything said afterward is after the fact justification and doesn't change the fact that the structure of the mechanic does not account for being only partially effective at combat. Which is the point of accounting for injury for an RPG campaign.
Hit Point Bloat
With OD&D everybody rolled 1d6 for hit points. Fighters got +1 to the die roll at first level and in general, got to roll an additional 1d6 hit points every level. Other classes rolled 1d6 hit points infrequently. Fighers had an average of 8 hit points at 2nd, 15 HP at 4th, 23 HP at 6th, and a whopping average of 39 HP at 10th level.
Later editions had varying reasons for inflating the hit points of the characters (and monsters). But in 5e we know that the reason was to allow more combat options despite both 5e and OD&D having the same rough power curve as characters level. By inflating hit points rather than muck around with bonuses, higher-level characters are distinguished by being able to do more damage in more ways than lower-level characters.
BY now there are options and combos that break 5e, but if you stick to the core rules I found that the outcome of various 5e encounters track the same as the outcome various OD&D encounters. It's just in 5e, you have more explicit mechanics for how that is played out.
Armor Class
For much of the same reason why hit points don't account for being partially combat effective. Armor Class exists as a evolution of how things worked in miniature combat. You want as few steps to resolve combats involving hundreds of figures. So wargames cleverly collapsed figures defending themselves and armor resisting damage into a single die roll.
Take for example GURPS or Runequest. You have a specific change of succeeding on a attack roll. Then the defender can roll to defend. If made the attack doesn't land. Then you roll damage and subtract the armor rating from the damage. So if you have a weapon that does 1d6 damage hitting a target with armor with 3 protection. Then it is a 50-50 shot whether you injure the target.
If you multiply the to-hit roll by the defense roll by the odds of actually inflicting damage then you can collapse three rolls into two. A to-hit roll and a damage roll. Of course, if you try to do that in a way that is playable with different combinations of skills, weapons, and armor you going to lose a lot of the nuances that GURPS and Runequest have by keeping them separate.
So while it is more abstract using Armor Class is no less unrealistic than how a more detailed system handle it with attack, defense, and protection. But obviously not as enjoyable if you like the nuances that result from keeping these separate.
But the consequence of having that in your campaign is that combat will take longer to resolve. Maybe not much longer but it will add up over a course of a campaign.
Not, not necessarily.
It is theoretically possible to have AC and no HP bloat, as exemplified by chainmail and, say, Kevin Crawford's games.
However, having NO HP bloat requires changing other things about the game. For example, the fact that a goblin can kill you in one round with a critical hit (or remove crits entirely). Also, it might require that you spend rounds and rounds of combat where both sides miss, which can be boring.
There are ways to fix this, however (e.g. escalation die from 13th Age).
So, depends on the system, really.
EDIT: curiously, in 4e IIRC AC would increase with levels, so it's been tried in D&D; it worked reasonably well, but not necessarily the most popular choice.
EDIT: I was reading "For Coin and Blood" 2e another day, it has no HP bloat apparently.
I have decided that it's just too "computer gamey" for me; to have both a large increase in HP, and a long ladder of increases in AC. I prefer to have a couple of meaningful increases in AC, early on for PCs; and then stop there. Let HP top out at maybe 60 HP for PCs.
Highly trained fighters become stronger, tougher, faster, and a little harder to hit; but they can always still be hit. Upsets happen pretty often.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 09:42:46 AMIt's weird to me that more OSR and OGL games haven't tried to address this. The only one I know of is Radiance, which makes avoiding attacks another function of the save system.
I switched my OD&D game to where the to hit value is based entirely on skill vs skill. So two fighters of equal level will hit each other 50% of the time (without modifiers, of course) and it will be very hard for a first level fighter to hit an 8th level fighter. The main reason I did this was to make armor less important as the characters leveled up. I've talked about my system quite a bit on these forums, dragonsfoot, and on /r/OSR but gotten almost entirely negative reactions to it. Despite this, I have used it in my home campaign for over five years now and it works great.
However, one of the main sources of hit point bloat isn't the combat system but, rather, the magic system. If a magic user is doing 1d6 or 1d8 per level then the fighters needs to keep up or they will be obliterated. This is why hit point limits don't actually help the situations.
No. The armor class system does not product hp bloat. I would go as far to say that is the only objective and correct answer to the question.
Hit point bloat has never been a problem in my own games. This should at least get the foot in the door of saying hit point bloat does not necessarily follow from use of an AC system.
For that matter, I'm pretty much just playing 1E by the book. In other words, I don't need a series of patches and fixes to ward off hit point bloat. And whatever way I do play is pretty close to the origins, something approximating "how it was meant to work." As common as it may be for hit point bloat to occur, in all cases I would attribute that to the edition played, house rules used, or a mismatch between the GMs vision and how the GM actually rules.
To understand how D&D's AC system actually worked, understand in 1E the baseline was assumed to be the 0th level human. They tend to be one-hit kills. Look at the Men section on the original monster manual. While there were leveled leader types, you might also see 0th levels who are more heavily armored and even mounted. You can even cross reference that with the mercenaries section in the DMG to note that, even though they don't have any "stats" per se that make them superior to other 0th level humans, heavy footmen and horsemen do in fact tend to demand higher pay.
Armor class, rather than hit point bloat, is one of the main things that distinguishes troop quality.
If you hit a "Men" section guy (d6 hit points) with a longsword, ~70% of those hits will be one-hit-kills.
If a similar 0th level is hit by a hill giant instead, its a ~95% chance of a one-hit-kill.
I'm not sure that's an earth-shattering difference. The real thing that makes the giant extra dangerous is the giant's hit tables are a lot better than a 0th level human. The giant IS a lot more likely to hit (70% chance to hit AC 5, vs 25% chance for a 0th level).
Giants having more hit points was to deliberately make them seem a lot tougher than men.
Giving humans extra hit points for being higher level was to make them seem larger-than-life heroes. That is the purpose and intent. Not a by-product of a broken system.
#1 reason most GMs gripe about hit point bloat is because they can't make up their minds what they even want. Their "preferences" are complete nonsense because they want contradicting things. They want PCs to be able to have the shit kicked out of them and still keep coming. While at the same time some pencil dick dweeb with a dark cloak and a curvy dagger is supposed to be able to one-shot them.
Old school D&D especially makes it easy enough to have the game you want. If you want heroes to be very much mortal who can be killed by the stroke of a single well-placed blade, then run a game of 0th and 1st level characters. If you want larger than life heroes who can walk around looking like a porcupine peppered with arrows and still kill a few more orcs, if that's what you think is cool, then run a higher level campaign. Either way, it's easy to implement. Because the mechanics are fine. You just need to figure out what it is you actually want.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
It is theoretically possible to have AC and no HP bloat, as exemplified by chainmail and, say, Kevin Crawford's games.
You not being clear by using possible in this context. It is possible to make all kinds of combat systems with a given set of elements like armor values, armor classes, hit points, to-hit modifier, skill level, etc. But there are consequences to these choices.
My point is that the consequence of D&D 5e having hit point bloat that allows the author to have characters to gain more ways to do damage as they level while keeping the odds of being successful with an attack on a flatter power curve. The part they call bounded accuracy. This means that even when you are 20th level, there is a decent chance (more than 5%) for a goblin to hit you. And a decent chance for you to miss that goblin (more than 5%).
Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a subjective question to answer on the basis of what one likes in terms of complexity and playability.
As for the utility of OD&D, I think made my opinion clear when I released the Majestic Fantasy RPG. The short answer it works and it works well. What I added were things that it didn't address like being better at stuff outside of combat and spellcasting. Even there I keep the complexity similar to the existing mechanics.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
However, having NO HP bloat requires changing other things about the game. For example, the fact that a goblin can kill you in one round with a critical hit (or remove crits entirely). Also, it might require that you spend rounds and rounds of combat where both sides miss, which can be boring.
In GURPS and Runequest among other system hit points mean something very different than D&D. It comparing apples to oranges.
The "whiff" problem is an issue in any system that opt to allow for a defense roll in combat. The designer has to account for that when creating the combat system. My personal recommendation is to look at how melee combat works in life and see what tactics combatants use to deal with that issue.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
There are ways to fix this, however (e.g. escalation die from 13th Age).
I sure it works for you and other folk. I dislike mechanics like that because I consider them game gimmicks. Mechanics that are there to make for a better board/war game not because it represent something in the setting or something that character can do within the setting.
Utimately they led to the same issue that hit points and armor class has. People forget why it was added in the first place and then start adding things because it makes sense for a game that uses a hit point and armor mechanic.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
EDIT: I was reading "For Coin and Blood" 2e another day, it has no HP bloat apparently.
If you need a copy, PM me for a copy of my Majestic Fantasy RPG. I come up with ways of handling the issues raised in this thread without having to jettison OD&D mechanics.
For example, knocking out a guard. For D&D (classic and new) a lot of folks, including myself, try to come up with some mechanic that allows a massive amount of damage to be done like the backstab ability of the thief. What I do instead is allow characters if they have a surprise, if they are attacking from behind, if the target is human-sized, to make a to-hit roll. If they hit then the target gets a save. If they fail they are knocked out. IF they wearing a helm their save is modified to be easier.
I also have a face shot rule but the attack roll is heavily penalized and is it all but useless against opponents wearing helmets with facial protection?
It doesn't matter how many hit points the target has or what level they are. If they fail the save they are out cold.
Remember that in pre-WOTC D&D the amount of hp you get per level slows considerably after about 9th level. Even in 3LBB OD&D, where there is no cap, fighting-men only get a full HD every other level after 10, and even then it's on average comparable to getting +2 hp/level.
So to compare editions more directly, at level 20 the average hit points for each of the main classes is:
Cleric -- 3LBB: 38, 3LBB+Greyhawk: 34, AD&D: 62.5, 3e/3.5: 93.5, 5e: 103
Fighter -- 3LBB: 53.5, 3LBB+Greyhawk: 52.5, AD&D: 71.5, 3e/3.5: 114.5, 5e: 134
Magic-User -- 3LBB: 38, 3LBB+Greyhawk: 32, AD&D: 36.5, 3e/3.5: 51.5, 5e: 82
Thief -- 3LBB: N/A, 3LBB+Greyhawk: 30, AD&D: 55, 3e/3.5: 72.5, 5e: 103
(I may have a made a few mistakes above but they should all be in the right ballpark)
So 5e hit points at level 20 are nearly three times what they were in OD&D w/Greyhawk supplement, and nearly twice what it was in AD&D.
Point being, the hp bloat is mostly coming from the choice to give a new hit die at every level all the way to 20.
In OD&D a fighter advanced about 1d6 HP per level +8 by level 10, average 38-46
Magic Users and Clerics averaged 25-29
On AD&D Fighters at level 10 average 48-52
Magic users averaged 20-25
Cleric averages 38-42
Interesting the differences. Clerics got the biggest bump while MU's actually lost HP.
5e oddly enough does not vary too much from A and 2e. Wizards get a bump up from a d4 to a d6. Fighter averages 50-55 + 5-5.5 if allow starter extra HD. I do not and do not know any other DMs that do.
Wizards are 30-35
and Clerics are 40-45
Con bonuses, if any, can really throw all this into a spin. O and A/2 had certain restrictions on what classes could get CON bonuses or how much. 5e has no such restriction.
Also once past 10th level things start to skew a little for AD&D You've usually stopped getting HD and are oft just getting HP. While in 5e you get HD all the way to 20. So a 5e Wizard will average at 20 some 60-70 hp. while the AD&D one would have around 31-36. A 5e Fighter will have 100-105 HP while the AD&D one has at 20 just 78-82 I believe.
So 5e is not too far off from AD&D. They just go at it differently. CON bonus is where the bigger factor is. In AD&D CON does not give bonuses till 15, and caps at +2 for non Fighters. Whereas in 5e CON bonuses start at 12 and go all the way to +5 as stats can go to 20. Though at 18 CON both versions are +4 sooooo it evens out till someone in 5e gets CON to 20. But a 5e Wizard could end up having a fair amount more potential bonus HP from CON.
So overall the bloat is not as much at its basics. But 5e still has the potential to leap ahead depending on what rules are used or not.
In addition to CON bonus, I also neglected the effect of Hit Dice and Second Wind in 5e, as these effectively increase HP by quite a bit -- about 50% for hit dice (since you restore half of them each long rest). Second wind gets less important as you level but at early levels it basically refreshes half the fighter's hit points after every battle.
I should probably have known that writing that post, and then leaving for a work day where I knew I was not going to be able to respond to anything, was a mistake. It's now kind of too late to go back and respond post by post, but let me address a few of the more common rejoinders, and try to refine my point a bit.
-Some people seemed to think I was advocating for either armor soak or active parry rolls. I wasn't. I genuinely think combining getting past an enemy's defenses and penetrating their armor into one roll is quite an elegant design choice.
-A greater number of people countered that hit point bloat was not an issue in older editions of D&D. I'm less than convinced by that, but I can't claim to have extensively played every edition of D&D, so set it aside. I probably shouldn't have used the phrase "bloat" anyway, since that is so thoroughly a matter of preference.
My core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC. For whatever reason, the vast majority of D&D editions and derived games have chosen to prioritize HP. Whether designers want to tune the players' survivability up or down, they're more likely to change HP than AC. When they do change AC, it seems like its usually just by advising DMs to give out fewer magic items. As far as I can tell, the way that AC is calculated has barely changed since B/X.
With so many in the OSR world wanting to restrict both HP and magic items, personally I think a re-tuning of the way AC is calculated would be a valuable --if not necessary-- step towards that. It seems like some people agree, too, since there were a few comments of people saying how they'd homebrewed leveled AC into their games.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PM
My core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC. For whatever reason, the vast majority of D&D editions and derived games have chosen to prioritize HP. Whether designers want to tune the players' survivability up or down, they're more likely to change HP than AC. When they do change AC, it seems like its usually just by advising DMs to give out fewer magic items. As far as I can tell, the way that AC is calculated has barely changed since B/X.
I think that's fair. As someone else mentioned, some of the third-party d20 System spinoffs did increase base Defense as you leveled -- I know the Wheel of Time RPG did, and IIRC so did the original A Song of Ice and Fire d20-based system. I never played any of those but it seems like a decent idea.
An easy version that should work easily for most major OSR systems and classic D&D editions would be to improve AC by 1 every 3 levels for fighters, every 4 levels for clerics and thieves, and every 5 levels for magic-users (same as the saving throw advancement rate), maybe up to a maximum improvement of 4. For 5e you could make AC 8 + proficiency bonus + armor, which also caps it at an effective +4 (+6 prof bonus but offset by starting at 8 instead of 10). I feel like that latter is an optional rule either in the core books or an Unearthed Arcana post, but I can't be bothered to look it up.
Quote from: Krugus on August 12, 2022, 11:28:43 AM
The armor system I liked was from Earthdawn (Savage World sort of uses its dice system, complete with exploding dice). You armor was just Damage Resistance, but the critical hits in that game (extraordinary hit) would defeat your armor...
...So was this something you had in mind?
Quite close. If I was writing a D&D clone for myself, I would probably keep AC as a component of armor, but add in the level-based improvements, and I do like those intervals for them, and then either drop the base AC number to 8 or improve attack bonuses to compensate. My only real issue with the AC system as it is is that equipment is such a major part of it, and skill such a minor one. That's all I think that needs tweaking.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
Not, not necessarily.
It is theoretically possible to have AC and no HP bloat, as exemplified by chainmail and, say, Kevin Crawford's games.
However, having NO HP bloat requires changing other things about the game. For example, the fact that a goblin can kill you in one round with a critical hit (or remove crits entirely). Also, it might require that you spend rounds and rounds of combat where both sides miss, which can be boring.
There are ways to fix this, however (e.g. escalation die from 13th Age).
So, depends on the system, really.
EDIT: curiously, in 4e IIRC AC would increase with levels, so it's been tried in D&D; it worked reasonably well, but not necessarily the most popular choice.
EDIT: I was reading "For Coin and Blood" 2e another day, it has no HP bloat apparently.
I'm running Dragon Warriors at the moment, which has something close to my optimum system. It has Defense as a statistic which improves at different rates per class, and then modifies the target number for the attack roll, followed by a separate roll to bypass armor (that part being why I don't consider it perfect). That game does kind of have that issue that multiple rounds can go by without a hit (especially in 1-on-1 fights). I do find that is well balanced out by the fact that even a high level fighting class can be knocked out in a handful of melee attacks (a 12th level Barbarian averages about 24 HP in that game, and weapon damage works basically the same as in D&D).
One thing to consider is that in the transition from Chainmail to the alternative combat system, D&D lost its parry rules. In Chainmail Man-to-Man combat you could sacrifice an attack to penalize your opponent's attack roll, albeit at the risk of your weapon breaking. If your weapon was light enough you could even counterattack if the opponent misses, so you didn't lose your attack.
Thinking about it, there really should have been at least a small bump to AC as you leveled up just to replace parrying.
Quote from: Cat the Bounty Smuggler on August 12, 2022, 09:53:34 PM
One thing to consider is that in the transition from Chainmail to the alternative combat system, D&D lost its parry rules. In Chainmail Man-to-Man combat you could sacrifice an attack to penalize your opponent's attack roll, albeit at the risk of your weapon breaking. If your weapon was light enough you could even counterattack if the opponent misses, so you didn't lose your attack.
Thinking about it, there really should have been at least a small bump to AC as you leveled up just to replace parrying.
Interesting. I did not know about that. A house rule I've been running for a while now is that if you roll a 1 on your attack, instead of a fumble, your enemy gets a free counter-attack against you (with modifiers determined by the individual game system). Cool to find out that Gygax already thought of that.
I have decided that a character of any given level, should on average be able to one shot another character that is half his level. Average attack damage from a level 6 character, should be able to one shot a 3rd level character, etc. I don't see that as hit point bloat.
Quote from: Jam The MF on August 12, 2022, 10:49:30 PM
I have decided that a character of any given level, should on average be able to one shot another character that is half his level. Average attack damage from a level 6 character, should be able to one shot a 3rd level character, etc. I don't see that as hit point bloat.
This can almost happen in OD&D + Chainmail, but is foiled by the fact that at 3rd level fighting-men count as a Hero -1 and so you're supposed to use the Fantasy Combat Table. But between you and me, the Fantasy Combat Table strikes me as kind of meh. So if we ignore it, then a fighting-man gets a number of attacks per round equal to his level (actually at level 7 it jumps from 6 to 8 ), up to a max of 8. They also have roughly a number of hit dice equal to their level. Since each hit does 1d6 damage and each hit die gives 1d6 hit points, it's not out of the question for a fighting-man to one-shot another fighting-man of half his level, at least until name level.
Something just occurred to me that I never thought of before: at level 3, fighting-men start using the fantasy combat table for most monsters, and that table doesn't take weapons and armor into consideration unless they're magical. So from 3rd level on, it does not matter much of the time what armor, if any, or what weapon the character is using. Only against normal men types does it still matter, and then the multiple attacks the fighting-man gets should generally matter more.
Same consideration for the other classes just at different levels.
So barechested Conan wrestling a giant snake, or bucknaked John Carter fighting the Green Martians' champions, and apparently none the worse for it is totally a thing in OD&D.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 10:03:03 PM
Quote from: Cat the Bounty Smuggler on August 12, 2022, 09:53:34 PM
One thing to consider is that in the transition from Chainmail to the alternative combat system, D&D lost its parry rules. In Chainmail Man-to-Man combat you could sacrifice an attack to penalize your opponent's attack roll, albeit at the risk of your weapon breaking. If your weapon was light enough you could even counterattack if the opponent misses, so you didn't lose your attack.
Thinking about it, there really should have been at least a small bump to AC as you leveled up just to replace parrying.
Interesting. I did not know about that. A house rule I've been running for a while now is that if you roll a 1 on your attack, instead of a fumble, your enemy gets a free counter-attack against you (with modifiers determined by the individual game system). Cool to find out that Gygax already thought of that.
That makes a lot of sense when someone does fumble, why wouldn't the other guy take advantage of your mistakes? That is quick way of handling things, and it benefits both the npc's and players alike. I like your house rule :)
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PMMy core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC. For whatever reason, the vast majority of D&D editions and derived games have chosen to prioritize HP. Whether designers want to tune the players' survivability up or down, they're more likely to change HP than AC. When they do change AC, it seems like its usually just by advising DMs to give out fewer magic items. As far as I can tell, the way that AC is calculated has barely changed since B/X.
There is a reason that D&D has never given out bonuses to AC as a character levels up, because it doesn't work. Or more correctly, it works too well. You might think that if a fighter gets a +4 bonus to AC, then that character wouldn't need to wear heavy armor but the exact opposite is true. A bonus to AC is significantly more valuable the better your armor already is. For example, if you are getting hit on a 13 or more, you'll be hit 8 times out of 20 attacks. A +1 to AC drops that to 7 times out of 20. However, if you already have an AC so high you are getting hit on an 18+ then that same +1 bonus will raise it to 19+. So instead of getting hit three times out of 20, you will get hit two times out of 20 which reduces your incoming damage by 33%. This is equivalent to giving that character a 50% bonus to their hit point total. The result is even worse hit point bloat.
Which is why, IMO, if you are going to give characters a bonus to defense as they level up, you HAVE to remove armor from the to-hit process. Personally, I use an all-or-nothing armor save but there are plenty of other methods.
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 02:34:32 PM
My point is that the consequence of D&D 5e having hit point bloat that allows the author to have characters to gain more ways to do damage as they level while keeping the odds of being successful with an attack on a flatter power curve. The part they call bounded accuracy. This means that even when you are 20th level, there is a decent chance (more than 5%) for a goblin to hit you. And a decent chance for you to miss that goblin (more than 5%).
Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a subjective question to answer on the basis of what one likes in terms of complexity and playability.
I agree. This is how 5e does it. I'd still say it is possible to do this in other ways, so not sure how we disagree here.
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 02:34:32 PM
As for the utility of OD&D, I think made my opinion clear when I released the Majestic Fantasy RPG. The short answer it works and it works well. What I added were things that it didn't address like being better at stuff outside of combat and spellcasting. Even there I keep the complexity similar to the existing mechanics.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
However, having NO HP bloat requires changing other things about the game. For example, the fact that a goblin can kill you in one round with a critical hit (or remove crits entirely). Also, it might require that you spend rounds and rounds of combat where both sides miss, which can be boring.
In GURPS and Runequest among other system hit points mean something very different than D&D. It comparing apples to oranges.
I disagree here. I played plenty of GURPS and D&D to say HP are at least similar in both systems. There are many differences but "apples to oranges" is exagerated.
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 02:34:32 PM
The "whiff" problem is an issue in any system that opt to allow for a defense roll in combat. The designer has to account for that when creating the combat system. My personal recommendation is to look at how melee combat works in life and see what tactics combatants use to deal with that issue.
Yup, agree here too.
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 02:34:32 PM
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
There are ways to fix this, however (e.g. escalation die from 13th Age).
I sure it works for you and other folk. I dislike mechanics like that because I consider them game gimmicks. Mechanics that are there to make for a better board/war game not because it represent something in the setting or something that character can do within the setting.
Utimately they led to the same issue that hit points and armor class has. People forget why it was added in the first place and then start adding things because it makes sense for a game that uses a hit point and armor mechanic.
The escalation die represents something within the setting - escalation. Fighters trade a few blows, measure each other up, test distances, before they go for the big blows. I'm not a big fan of 13A, this is just one example.
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 02:34:32 PM
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 12, 2022, 01:16:00 PM
EDIT: I was reading "For Coin and Blood" 2e another day, it has no HP bloat apparently.
If you need a copy, PM me for a copy of my Majestic Fantasy RPG. I come up with ways of handling the issues raised in this thread without having to jettison OD&D mechanics.
For example, knocking out a guard. For D&D (classic and new) a lot of folks, including myself, try to come up with some mechanic that allows a massive amount of damage to be done like the backstab ability of the thief. What I do instead is allow characters if they have a surprise, if they are attacking from behind, if the target is human-sized, to make a to-hit roll. If they hit then the target gets a save. If they fail they are knocked out. IF they wearing a helm their save is modified to be easier.
I also have a face shot rule but the attack roll is heavily penalized and is it all but useless against opponents wearing helmets with facial protection?
It doesn't matter how many hit points the target has or what level they are. If they fail the save they are out cold.
I have a different edition, apparently (Majestic Wilderlands). I really like how you handle skills and weapons. Also, sub-classes and races. A great game overall.
Quote from: hedgehobbit on August 13, 2022, 11:51:54 AM
There is a reason that D&D has never given out bonuses to AC as a character levels up, because it doesn't work. Or more correctly, it works too well. You might think that if a fighter gets a +4 bonus to AC, then that character wouldn't need to wear heavy armor but the exact opposite is true. A bonus to AC is significantly more valuable the better your armor already is. For example, if you are getting hit on a 13 or more, you'll be hit 8 times out of 20 attacks. A +1 to AC drops that to 7 times out of 20. However, if you already have an AC so high you are getting hit on an 18+ then that same +1 bonus will raise it to 19+. So instead of getting hit three times out of 20, you will get hit two times out of 20 which reduces your incoming damage by 33%. This is equivalent to giving that character a 50% bonus to their hit point total. The result is even worse hit point bloat.
Which is why, IMO, if you are going to give characters a bonus to defense as they level up, you HAVE to remove armor from the to-hit process. Personally, I use an all-or-nothing armor save but there are plenty of other methods.
It's a good point that the higher a roll the opponent needs to hit you, the more difference a single point of AC makes, and worth considering. However, it seems like your math relies on the assumption of low or non-existent attack bonuses. You would need to buff those up to compensate for higher AC numbers, at least in most old school games. 3.x attack bonuses get so high that you might not need to change them at all.
I don't see that it creates hit point bloat, though. 1. As I said, you could modify attack bonuses and wind up in the same place, but with a system that better reflects the growing skill of a higher level character. 2. As chance to hit decreases, you can decrease HP along with it and keep the characters at the same staying power in battle.
You might say that adds up to the same thing, but I would argue there are benefits to reducing HP that are external to combat. Traps, falls, poisons etc. all become more dangerous. It also makes being caught in unawares or in a position where you can't defend yourself more impactful. You no longer get the situation where holding the fighter up at crossbow-point is useless, because he can easily tank the one shot while he draws his weapon.
Armor as a binary save works perfectly well (see my earlier comment about Dragon Warriors), but it adds another roll to every attack, which I would prefer to avoid. I don't think it should be beyond the wit of man to come up with a system where armor is included in a single attack roll, without making skill irrelevant.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PM
-A greater number of people countered that hit point bloat was not an issue in older editions of D&D. I'm less than convinced by that, but I can't claim to have extensively played every edition of D&D, so set it aside. I probably shouldn't have used the phrase "bloat" anyway, since that is so thoroughly a matter of preference.
My core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC. For whatever reason, the vast majority of D&D editions and derived games have chosen to prioritize HP. Whether designers want to tune the players' survivability up or down, they're more likely to change HP than AC. When they do change AC, it seems like its usually just by advising DMs to give out fewer magic items. As far as I can tell, the way that AC is calculated has barely changed since B/X.
With so many in the OSR world wanting to restrict both HP and magic items, personally I think a re-tuning of the way AC is calculated would be a valuable --if not necessary-- step towards that. It seems like some people agree, too, since there were a few comments of people saying how they'd homebrewed leveled AC into their games.
1: HP "bloat" is not as big a thing at its basics as more than a few want to 'bloat' it to be. 8)
The shift has been where you get any con bonuses and how much and who for. 5e just allows everyone to get full HP bonus from CON and keeps giving HP all the way to 20. Cap HD at level 10 and just allow CON bonus thereafter and it shifts things a bit as late game monsters have alot of HP and can do alot of damage in one shot for certain types.
So changing one element might require adjusting others to keep things from edging towards impossible at the higher ends.
2: 5e went with the idea of putting certain limits on AC. By core game magic armour can not go past +3 I believe. That alone can shift things slightly. Especially as magic weapons have the same restrictions. Some other editions capped bonus at +5, or more.
But keep in mind that in older editions the to-hit range was sometimes different as well so theres that factor.
3: I think too many look at one factor and dismiss the other. Ehich I believe is a major mistake. AC and HP are intertwined with the To-Hit ratios and magic bonuses. It is a potentially delicate web that changing one thread might make part, or all of the weave become unstable or outright fail.
5e is a good example. Change one thing without factoring in all else and the game breaks in ways bit or small. AC works pretty well as is. Gets the job done with as few moving parts as can. I thought I was going to have issues with it. But I ended up liking it quite a bit.
HP is my personal bugaboo. Feels like PCs can potentially end up with oodles of HP if they play their level-ups right. Problem is. The rest of the system more or less is geared around whittling away at oodles of HP. A fireball can fry off an average of 28hp at its base. 45 using a 9th level slot. Two could probably end your average CON 14 wizard. 4 if they kept getting lucky with saves. heh.
Cap HD at level 10 and all of a sudden a single high end fireball or two could possibly take down the same Wizard.
Things to consider. Things I have considered.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 13, 2022, 02:27:23 PMIt's a good point that the higher a roll the opponent needs to hit you, the more difference a single point of AC makes, and worth considering. However, it seems like your math relies on the assumption of low or non-existent attack bonuses. You would need to buff those up to compensate for higher AC numbers, at least in most old school games. 3.x attack bonuses get so high that you might not need to change them at all.
I understand, it is all math. Target Hit points divided by (attacker's chance to hit time average damage per attack) will yield the number or rounds the target can survive. Too many hit points and that number is too high and too low a chance to hit and the number is also high. Because of this, I don't really care if the numbers are high or low. A fight against a monster with 100 hit points when you are doing 20 damage per round will be less of a slog than a fight with a monster that has 10 hit points but you are only doing 1 point of damage per round.
I based my entire combat system on trying to keep this "number of rounds" to a reasonable level as the game progresses. Thus characters do increasing damage as they level up in ratio to their hit points. And spells and traps also increase in damage correspondingly. But it is a complete re-write of the combat system from base D&D.
QuoteArmor as a binary save works perfectly well (see my earlier comment about Dragon Warriors), but it adds another roll to every attack, which I would prefer to avoid. I don't think it should be beyond the wit of man to come up with a system where armor is included in a single attack roll, without making skill irrelevant.
Not every roll. As the number you need to roll to hit a monster is also increasing as they get more hit dice, you really don't need armor saves for the majority of encounters. So I reserve armor saves only for leader-type monsters and monsters that are notoriously hard to kill (i.e. dragons, giant turtles, etc). Your average orc or goblin won't need an extra roll unless they are specifically an elite, well armed force.
Yes, but that's only half of it, the other half being the intuitive desire to make higher level characters tougher against physical damage. If you want high level PCs to survive more physical attacks and want AC to be fixed, increasing HP is the only simple solution.
One curious thing to consider, barely related, is that beyond level 9 in old school games you actually gain HP a bit faster due to decreasing XP requirements. In other words, if XP requirements would keep doubling after level 9, you'd need 12 million XP (I think?) to become a level 15 fighter (with about 80 HP).
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2016/05/some-thoughs-on-level-xp-progression-hp.html
But many things could be done to reduce HP bloat, including increasing AC and saves more often. Even in 5e, a goblin has +4 to-hit and always hits on a natural 20 (IIRC), so you could have a 20th-level paladin with AC 27 and still think twice before fighting a hundred goblins with bows.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 15, 2022, 04:36:19 PM
One curious thing to consider, barely related, is that beyond level 9 in old school games you actually gain HP a bit faster due to decreasing XP requirements. In other words, if XP requirements would keep doubling after level 9, you'd need 12 million XP (I think?) to become a level 15 fighter (with about 80 HP).
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2016/05/some-thoughs-on-level-xp-progression-hp.html
But many things could be done to reduce HP bloat, including increasing AC and saves more often. Even in 5e, a goblin has +4 to-hit and always hits on a natural 20 (IIRC), so you could have a 20th-level paladin with AC 27 and still think twice before fighting a hundred goblins with bows.
Interesting! And good work.
That said, I think it's worth considering that the amount of XP you get per monster of equal HD generally trends down as you increase in level. I've attached what I got if you plot amount of HP gained per monster vanquished for a fighter by Greyhawk supplement rules. Suffice it to say, it's pretty weird.
Greetings!
A few weapon-modifications providing certain weapons with devastating armour-piercing or armour-crushing properties can serve to open up heavily armoured Player Characters like cans of Tuna being popped with a sledge hammer. War Mattocks, Heavy Maces, Flanged Maces, and War Hammers do very solid work against heavily-armoured opponents.
That is one way to crack that problem, such as it is.
I also restrict the availability of Half Plate and Full Plate Armour. Most Warriors or Fighters, even running into higher levels, have only a 16, 17, or 18 AC. That also doesn't account for magical armour though. Keep AC from getting crazy, and even higher level Characters are again, threatened even by 4th, 5th, or 6th level opponents. Add in a favoured Critical Strike Table, and the threat of even lower level opponents, such as level 2, 3, or 4th level Goblins or Orcs also maintain a formidable threat ability.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 09:42:46 AM
. . . there's no inherent AC improvement through leveling up (even for fighters). I find it to be a bit immersion-breaking that a character can spend years of their life getting into swordfights, and not get any better at not being stabbed. . . .
There is no support in mythology, folklore, history, or literature for the typical D&D combat style of tanks soaking damage supported by repeated battlefield healing. Imagine a play-by-play: "Look, the knight got bitten by a dragon. The knight is now laying in a clump on the ground. The fight is over. The dragon is roaring triumphantly. Wait. What's this? A healer has beamed a ray at the knight, and now the knight suddenly stands up and the knight hits the dragon again with the sword! What a crazy turn of events."
When the only strategy is attrition of hit points and the side with more battlefield healing always wins, it isn't simulating anything recognizable.
If you're in combat, avoiding an attack is your best defense. Experienced warriors are better at placing themselves and moving on the battlefield to avoid being hit. Games that provide for this are more interesting than D&D and its derivatives.
Late to the party but I had something to say in responce to the OP.
I don't really think having an AC based system inherently gives you HP bloat, I feel like having HP gained every level with a careless regard of adding HP every level is how you get HP bloat.
You can have AC based combat systems, they work well enough, and I agree that HP can get too high, so there does need to be a lower max number of hit dice that characters can gain, or a lessened progression.
EDIT: as for some other peoples ideas, HP was originally supposed to be some kind of exhaustion/luck for you avoiding lethal blows. Taking 6 points of damage do your HP wasn't supposed to be you getting hurt in combat, it was supposed top represent you expending effort to avoid taking damage or a lethal blow, with your character going down to zero hp meaning they were finally dealt a strike that hurts them and takes them out of the fight. So gaining HP from levels IS supposed to represent "getting better at not getting hit" as opposed to gaining AC from leveling up.
Quote from: Lunamancer on August 12, 2022, 02:16:35 PM#1 reason most GMs gripe about hit point bloat is because they can't make up their minds what they even want. Their "preferences" are complete nonsense because they want contradicting things.
Well said. As for other issues with D&D and other games. It's Tigger Syndrome.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PMA greater number of people countered that hit point bloat was not an issue in older editions of D&D.
Most things were not an issue in older editions of D&D - and Traveller, and other games. In most cases game designers get the game as good as it's going to get in the 1st or 2nd edition. After that they usually go the gearhead way, making it overly complicated in order to please the unique special snowflakes and Bitter Non-Gamers.
QuoteMy core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC.
There's a third and fourth: the magic of characters in the party, and magic items. Other player-characters can be tossing around spells to help, and they have more of them at 9th level than 1st. At 1st level you will probably not find some plate mail +5, by 9th level you probably will not still be wearing non-magical chain mail. Those two factors are significant.
One of the fundamental problems with RPGs is that character advancement is illusory because encounters typically scale with it to maintain a sense of challenge. HP bloat is symptomatic of that.
It's obvious with DCs: as your skill rolls get better the monster DCs increase to compensate, meaning that your chance of success remains the same no matter your level.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PMA greater number of people countered that hit point bloat was not an
QuoteMy core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC.
There's a third and fourth: the magic of characters in the party, and magic items. Other player-characters can be tossing around spells to help, and they have more of them at 9th level than 1st. At 1st level you will probably not find some plate mail +5, by 9th level you probably will not still be wearing non-magical chain mail. Those two factors are significant.
AC being so intrinsically tied to equipment is precisely the problem I want to see solved in D&D. A 10th level fighter caught in his shirtsleeves should not be worse at defending himself than a 2nd level fighter who gets to wear his equipment. The means D&D has of representing that is that the higher level character has more HP.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 23, 2022, 12:02:35 PM
AC being so intrinsically tied to equipment is precisely the problem I want to see solved in D&D. A 10th level fighter caught in his shirtsleeves should not be worse at defending himself than a 2nd level fighter who gets to wear his equipment. The means D&D has of representing that is that the higher level character has more HP.
I disagree on the assertion, though I suppose it falls into what kind of capabilities one views as being intrinsic to a 10th level fighter.
I want a fair amount of number of opponents matter, and when facing several opponents at once, armor matters a lot, even for the very skilled guy. the primary purpose of the higher skill is taking out some of those opponents quickly to make the numbers more tenable. So that particular example doesn't do it for me.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 23, 2022, 12:08:45 PM
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 23, 2022, 12:02:35 PM
AC being so intrinsically tied to equipment is precisely the problem I want to see solved in D&D. A 10th level fighter caught in his shirtsleeves should not be worse at defending himself than a 2nd level fighter who gets to wear his equipment. The means D&D has of representing that is that the higher level character has more HP.
I disagree on the assertion, though I suppose it falls into what kind of capabilities one views as being intrinsic to a 10th level fighter.
I want a fair amount of number of opponents matter, and when facing several opponents at once, armor matters a lot, even for the very skilled guy. the primary purpose of the higher skill is taking out some of those opponents quickly to make the numbers more tenable. So that particular example doesn't do it for me.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. 10th level fighter gets to take opponents out faster than a 2nd level one, meaning less attacks back at them.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 23, 2022, 12:02:35 PM
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PMA greater number of people countered that hit point bloat was not an
QuoteMy core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC.
There's a third and fourth: the magic of characters in the party, and magic items. Other player-characters can be tossing around spells to help, and they have more of them at 9th level than 1st. At 1st level you will probably not find some plate mail +5, by 9th level you probably will not still be wearing non-magical chain mail. Those two factors are significant.
AC being so intrinsically tied to equipment is precisely the problem I want to see solved in D&D. A 10th level fighter caught in his shirtsleeves should not be worse at defending himself than a 2nd level fighter who gets to wear his equipment. The means D&D has of representing that is that the higher level character has more HP.
Doesn't this mean that AC and HP are somewhat redundant to one another?
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 23, 2022, 12:02:35 PM
AC being so intrinsically tied to equipment is precisely the problem I want to see solved in D&D. A 10th level fighter caught in his shirtsleeves should not be worse at defending himself than a 2nd level fighter who gets to wear his equipment. The means D&D has of representing that is that the higher level character has more HP.
D&D won't break if you come up with a different way of assigning AC.
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Doesn't this mean that AC and HP are somewhat redundant to one another?
Which accounts for the fact that a number of games simply treat armor as additional hit points and forgo armor class all-together.
Quote from: overstory on August 21, 2022, 02:25:05 PM
If you're in combat, avoiding an attack is your best defense. Experienced warriors are better at placing themselves and moving on the battlefield to avoid being hit. Games that provide for this are more interesting than D&D and its derivatives.
Quote from: rkhigdon on August 23, 2022, 04:41:21 PM
Quote
Doesn't this mean that AC and HP are somewhat redundant to one another?
Which accounts for the fact that a number of games simply treat armor as additional hit points and forgo armor class all-together.
While I agree that in a movie or TV show, 'not getting hit' is what everybody would aim for, in an RPG having 20+ attacks with 'nobody getting hit' followed by one where something actually happened wouldn't be good, either.
Tracking hits really should reflect 'luck' and 'fatigue', and successfully dodging 3 or 4 attacks probably makes you just that much easier to injure in the next moment.
For our purposes we use Wound Points (WP) which are relatively small in number and relatively difficult to heal during a fight, Vitality Points (VP) which characters have more of, and they have some non-magical abilities that allow them to heal (like taking a breather). Of course they also have Armor Class (Defense) and a very small amount of Damage Reduction (DR).
My 4th level Knight (crazy focused on high defense sword & board) has DEF 28, DR 5, WP 28, VP 52. Rough average, we'd expect a normal attack to do about 15 damage at this level. Some attacks go directly to wounds and impart some status effects. To my way of thinking, the status effects also add a lot to 'cinematic combat' so it's not just trading hit points.
While I tend to like those mechanics in theory, be they wounds/fatigue or the toughness systems (ala True20) I've yet to find one that doesn't seem to break down at some point. Generally everyone starts to concentrate on crits and toughness, and combat turns into a drawn out affair where no wounds are scored until suddenly a dramatic hit knocks someone completely out of the fight. While the "feel" is different it ends up having the same effect as just using AC with a boatload of hitpoints.
Quote from: rkhigdon on August 23, 2022, 06:19:55 PM
While I tend to like those mechanics in theory, be they wounds/fatigue or the toughness systems (ala True20) I've yet to find one that doesn't seem to break down at some point. Generally everyone starts to concentrate on crits and toughness, and combat turns into a drawn out affair where no wounds are scored until suddenly a dramatic hit knocks someone completely out of the fight. While the "feel" is different it ends up having the same effect as just using AC with a boatload of hitpoints.
In our case, normal attacks do VP damage. When you run out of VP, you start taking WP. When you take at least 1 point of WP damage, you're 'wounded' which is a pretty substantial debuff. You can fight like normal D&D where you keep swinging until you're completely out of hit points, but unlike normal D&D you have an incentive to break combat if you're wounded.
Having too much DR would be a problem, so we tend to keep it pretty small. We don't subtract toughness from hit point damage; most DR comes from armor.
One of the reasons that we allow some attacks (like criticals) to deal wound damage directly, regardless of the amount of VP a target has, is that it helps create situations where even a villager can potentially seriously hurt a high level character. Balancing things like that has been a bit of a challenge, but having a few different toggles to play with has allowed us to really dial in to a spot that works for us.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 23, 2022, 10:24:17 AM
One of the fundamental problems with RPGs is that character advancement is illusory because encounters typically scale with it to maintain a sense of challenge. HP bloat is symptomatic of that.
I meant to reply to one of the OP's replies but didn't have the time. The meat of one of the points I was going to make refutes this. So I'll do that real quick right now.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 12, 2022, 07:57:28 PM
My core point is that as long as you agree with the idea that characters' ability to defend themselves should improve as they level up (which I think most people do), the D&D system only provides two means of doing that: HP and AC. For whatever reason, the vast majority of D&D editions and derived games have chosen to prioritize HP. Whether designers want to tune the players' survivability up or down, they're more likely to change HP than AC. When they do change AC, it seems like its usually just by advising DMs to give out fewer magic items. As far as I can tell, the way that AC is calculated has barely changed since B/X.
I'm not against a character's ability to defend themselves improving with level per se. But just because most people agree doesn't mean it's something that should actually be done. Even if your only design goal is to make happy those of us who agree. The reason is this:
You could ask people "Should characters' ability to do X improve as they level up?" and most people will probably say yes no matter what X is. But if you actually did that for all X that people agree to, characters will get better at hitting, better at dodging, deal more damage, be able to take more damage, cast more spells, cast more powerful spells, cast even the less powerful spells more powerfully: improved range, improved area of effect, improved damage, harder to save against, etc. This is precisely the path to linear fighter/quadratic wizard (or perhaps more accurately quadratic fighter, exponential wizard). This problem is not a problem that's fundamental to advancement in general. It's endemic to an aggregation of these sorts of design decisions--which happen to be design decisions almost everyone would agree to.
Once you accept that you have to put a lid on some of these things, the next question is which ones. And I would suggest when it comes to determining which ones, the wisdom of the crowd will lead you astray once again.
In D&D, characters get better at hitting (but not necessarily damage) with each level. If you asked most people, we'd probably agree then that it seems reasonable that it should be AC rather than hit points that improve with level. Being harder to hit balances out the fact that your enemies are getting better at hitting. Do it this way, and hitting neither gets too easy with level, nor begins too hard. We more or less preserve the hit probability as we scale through the levels.
Conversely, if we accept that it's going to be hit points that increase with level, then it would make more sense that characters would deal more damage rather than getting better at hitting with each level. Just like above, the two would better balance out one another. Do it this way, the number of hits it takes to kill neither becomes too many nor too few. We more or less preserve the number of hits it takes to kill.
The problem with either of these approaches is it creates the power treadmill, where everything you work for and earn for your character to get better at is canceled out by the scaling up of challenges.
Whereas if you stick with the idea that improvements in offense is going to be primarily hit probability, and improvements in defense is going to be primarily hit points, then what you experience when characters level up and the challenges scale up is that hits go from low probability to high probability, but hits to kill go from few to many. You may or may not find combat still lasts roughly the same number of rounds. Even if you've balanced things out carefully enough so that it does, the game still plays out very differently. The experience of playing 10th level characters against 10th level enemies will not be mistaken for the experience of playing 1st level characters against 1st level enemies.
And so I'd say the idea that "advancement is illusory" is definitely NOT fundamental to RPGs. It's endemic to specific design decisions. And what makes it so dastardly is that the design decisions that cause the problem are ones that seem so reasonable, sensible, rational, logical, and even objectively "correct."
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 23, 2022, 12:31:18 PM
Doesn't this mean that AC and HP are somewhat redundant to one another?
Given the above, I'd say the answer is a resounding No.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 23, 2022, 12:02:35 PM
AC being so intrinsically tied to equipment is precisely the problem I want to see solved in D&D. A 10th level fighter caught in his shirtsleeves should not be worse at defending himself than a 2nd level fighter who gets to wear his equipment. The means D&D has of representing that is that the higher level character has more HP.
I have two points here. First is just my personal preference. But the second is really hard to avoid.
#1
This is the exact sort of thing I can't stand in RPGs. I don't like stats ruling the day. I'm cool with them skewing the odds. Otherwise what good are they? But I like to tilt the tables to circumstance and choice. To state the obvious, it's players who play the game. I want to see their choices matter more. And to that end, a well-prepared 1st level fighter should be a legitimate threat to a 10th level fighter who gets caught with his pants down.
#2
With magic weapons in D&D, you can get hit bonuses up to +5 in core 1E. Armor also goes up to +5. But the difference is you can stack +5 armor with +5 shield. You can double-dip on defense. (Triple dip if you also had a +5 defender sword and used those 5 points for defense). It kind of comes with the nature of the items. That equipment is bound to favor AC to a greater degree than stats. You'd have to do some crazy gymnastics to get around that. And so if you are stuck with this fact, then you can't have AC advancing at the same magnitude as hit tables without creating the potential for run-away ACs.
Quote from: rkhigdon on August 23, 2022, 06:19:55 PMcombat turns into a drawn out affair where no wounds are scored until suddenly a dramatic hit knocks someone completely out of the fight.
There are a few like Harnmaster, Ars Magica and Vampire/etc 1e which had "wound levels" with a malus on actions for each, so as you were wounded more you became weaker and more clumsy and started missing more. So in a duel you could get two guys staggering around for hours with multiple wounds and missing each-other. At best it was comic, at worst tedious.
Quote from: Lunamancer on August 23, 2022, 11:06:11 PM
You could ask people "Should characters' ability to do X improve as they level up?" and most people will probably say yes no matter what X is. But if you actually did that for all X that people agree to, characters will get better at hitting, better at dodging, deal more damage, be able to take more damage, cast more spells, cast more powerful spells, cast even the less powerful spells more powerfully: improved range, improved area of effect, improved damage, harder to save against, etc. This is precisely the path to linear fighter/quadratic wizard (or perhaps more accurately quadratic fighter, exponential wizard). This problem is not a problem that's fundamental to advancement in general. It's endemic to an aggregation of these sorts of design decisions--which happen to be design decisions almost everyone would agree to.
Once you accept that you have to put a lid on some of these things, the next question is which ones. And I would suggest when it comes to determining which ones, the wisdom of the crowd will lead you astray once again.
Agree with this. Will extend it to say, for non-D&D or games similar to D&D but not matching it exactly, that some of the options can be mixed, if done carefully. There are still limits, though. You can't mix everything. And the things you do mix will inevitably lead to other limits.
I can, for example, do a system that supports all of scaling hit points, scaling damage, attacks increasing, and defenses increasing. The caveats are:
- The system has to be designed for that.
- There will still be limits on the amount of scaling and increase (keeping in mind the multiplicative effects), some not obvious.
- To avoid the treadmill feeling, some of the scaling and increases will be deliberately asymmetric, with related abilities to help avoid the problem.
Hero System is a good example. They system being supposedly generic and universal, it is wide open on character health, damage, attacks, and defenses. Except, one of the first things a good Hero GM learns (and some of the Hero books will even tell you), is that it is up to the GM to rein in all 4 axes to fit the genre and feel of the particular game (along with several other factors, such as how fast a character can act, how long can they do it, and what special options are available for bypassing the usual flow). Because it turns out even with point costs assigned to everything, and pretty well worked out, you can still break it fast, absent those limits.
Quote from: Lunamancer on August 23, 2022, 11:06:11 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 23, 2022, 10:24:17 AM
One of the fundamental problems with RPGs is that character advancement is illusory because encounters typically scale with it to maintain a sense of challenge. HP bloat is symptomatic of that.
I meant to reply to one of the OP's replies but didn't have the time. The meat of one of the points I was going to make refutes this. So I'll do that real quick right now.
My articulation was mistaken, but I agree with your overall point.
Quote from: Lunamancer on August 23, 2022, 11:06:11 PM
I'm not against a character's ability to defend themselves improving with level per se. But just because most people agree doesn't mean it's something that should actually be done. Even if your only design goal is to make happy those of us who agree. The reason is this:
You could ask people "Should characters' ability to do X improve as they level up?" and most people will probably say yes no matter what X is. But if you actually did that for all X that people agree to, characters will get better at hitting, better at dodging, deal more damage, be able to take more damage, cast more spells, cast more powerful spells, cast even the less powerful spells more powerfully: improved range, improved area of effect, improved damage, harder to save against, etc. This is precisely the path to linear fighter/quadratic wizard (or perhaps more accurately quadratic fighter, exponential wizard). This problem is not a problem that's fundamental to advancement in general. It's endemic to an aggregation of these sorts of design decisions--which happen to be design decisions almost everyone would agree to.
Once you accept that you have to put a lid on some of these things, the next question is which ones. And I would suggest when it comes to determining which ones, the wisdom of the crowd will lead you astray once again.
In D&D, characters get better at hitting (but not necessarily damage) with each level. If you asked most people, we'd probably agree then that it seems reasonable that it should be AC rather than hit points that improve with level. Being harder to hit balances out the fact that your enemies are getting better at hitting. Do it this way, and hitting neither gets too easy with level, nor begins too hard. We more or less preserve the hit probability as we scale through the levels.
Conversely, if we accept that it's going to be hit points that increase with level, then it would make more sense that characters would deal more damage rather than getting better at hitting with each level. Just like above, the two would better balance out one another. Do it this way, the number of hits it takes to kill neither becomes too many nor too few. We more or less preserve the number of hits it takes to kill.
The problem with either of these approaches is it creates the power treadmill, where everything you work for and earn for your character to get better at is canceled out by the scaling up of challenges.
I want to quibble. Well, actually I want to do more than quibble.
If we assume that two 1st-level characters are relatively equal to each other, and two 5th-level characters are relatively equal to each other, while I agree
that on some level you could call that a treadmill, that's really only true if their opposition was originally always 1st level and is now always 5th level. A higher level character facing opposition that used to be threatening but is now a 'speed bump' proves that it is NOT a treadmill - you have advanced in power and NOT ALL OF YOUR OPPOSITION has done the same.
For our system, we do increase damage by level. We felt that Rogue Sneak Attack gives a pretty good baseline for how a higher-level character could be more dangerous than a lower-level character. So our Berserker gets extra dice of damage when raging. As a result the higher level berserker will have a better chance of hitting his 1st level counterpart, he'll deal more damage than his 1st level counterpart, he will have better defenses, and more abilities.
Evaluating yourself in a vacuum can be misleading. A dynamic world that includes plausible challenges (rather than sculpting the world in real-time to conform to what poses a challenge to the party) means you are making real progress, even if your fights remain roughly the same difficulty. And if a fight that took 3-5 rounds at level 1 still takes 3-5 rounds at level 6, but the fight is epic (more things happen in that same amount of time) they don't even SEEM the same.
Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 24, 2022, 10:27:09 AM
I want to quibble. Well, actually I want to do more than quibble.
If we assume that two 1st-level characters are relatively equal to each other, and two 5th-level characters are relatively equal to each other, while I agree that on some level you could call that a treadmill, that's really only true if their opposition was originally always 1st level and is now always 5th level.
Counter-quibbles.
1) Keep in mind, I was responding to someone else stating advancement was an illusion, and I was showing a path where that is not true. Any counter-example is good enough to refute the point. That you would refute the same point differently does not amount to any quibble with me at all.
2) I could have used your argument to refute the point I was refuting. But I chose not to because you have to assume too much about the campaign. Maybe the GM really does only do balanced encounters. If that's what melts their butter, then whatever. Just understand, if that's the sort of GM that is bemoaning illusory advancement, your argument does not meet the GM where they live. And in fact seems to side-step the concern.
3) You don't need to go from always 1 to always 5. It could be a range of 1/2 to 2 at 1st level, then 2 1/2 to 10 at 5th level, and still feel like a treadmill.
QuoteA higher level character facing opposition that used to be threatening but is now a 'speed bump' proves that it is NOT a treadmill - you have advanced in power and NOT ALL OF YOUR OPPOSITION has done the same.
It doesn't have to be all so long as it's the ones that matter.
In a sandbox, you could easily encounter something 5 times more powerful than you. And if you're smart, you don't fight it. You run. And so it doesn't really matter if it's 5 times tougher, 10 times tougher, 20 times tougher. You could go up a lot of levels. That monster doesn't scale at all. So you do close the gap. But it's still enough of a gap where you don't fight it. So it doesn't matter, and so it won't disprove the treadmill.
On the opposite end, you've got creatures that are so weak, they don't collect any significant treasure, or don't cause sufficient trouble to ever be worth your time and resources fighting. You could go up levels, become 5, 10 times more powerful. It's still not worth your time engaging creatures on that low an end. So they don't matter, either, and they won't disprove the treadmill.
QuoteEvaluating yourself in a vacuum can be misleading. A dynamic world that includes plausible challenges (rather than sculpting the world in real-time to conform to what poses a challenge to the party) means you are making real progress, even if your fights remain roughly the same difficulty.
Sandboxes do not as a matter of principle hand you balanced encounters. But they do as a matter of principle give players the freedom to choose what to engage. When players have the freedom to choose what to engage or not engage, they're going to tend towards a range they find comfortable, fun, and rewarding. And that range is going to shift as the PCs level up. Balanced encounters emerge as a second order effect. It happens without real-time sculpting.
QuoteAnd if a fight that took 3-5 rounds at level 1 still takes 3-5 rounds at level 6, but the fight is epic (more things happen in that same amount of time) they don't even SEEM the same.
Which was exactly the main point of my comment. Not only do you not have more than a quibble. You don't even have a quibble. Not with me, anyway.
We have been playing an OSR game called Dungeons and Delvers Dice Pool Edition.
It doesn't use hit dice or even damage rolls. Instead each class's level just tells you how many hit points you have. A fighter starts with 5, and at max level will have increased to just 8. Everyone else had less, but not by much. A Wizard stats at 3 HP, and maxed out with 5.
Contrast this to weapons. You don't roll damage. One-handed weapons do exactly 1 damage. If you use a two-handed weapon, then you do 2 damage. Ranged or melee is the same. So, a Ranger with a bow and a Barbarian with a big Conan sword will be doing 2 damage per hit. A Fighter with a mace & shield, or a Thief with a couple of boomerangs will do 1 damage per hit.
This I like.
Some players may like crunchy rules so that every type of weapon has pros and cons to them. I don't. I like that there is no "best" weapon to min-max your character with. If I want to use a two-handed polished wood club from Polynesia, or a one-handed spear and a zebra skin shield as an Zulu warrior/barbarian. I won't be at a disadvantage when compared to a Norse Viking/barbarian with big two-handed hammer, or a Celt with his round shield, hand axe, and painted in woad blue stripes.
You know I still don't know what "HP Bloat" means. Does it mean scaling? That the system is modeling that a powerful hero is more resilient than someone with less experience?
In game discussions "bloat" is always used to mean "proliferation to a point where the amount of proliferation is itself a problem". When developers of an MMO get tired of balancing an ever-increasing number of buttons (which were added as a reward for playing the game to max level or whatever), they will criticize it as "button bloat" and simplify your rotation and remove some buttons. Then they will add new buttons, etc.
If there's "talent bloat" or something, it's that you have a huge number of talent tree options or feats or skills, and of the large number you must select a pretty big number as well. In this case, the concern is that the system isn't offering you choices that make sense or have mechanical impact. You could criticize skills in 3.X d20 games for having this, or world of warcraft at around Lich King. In 3.5 D&D leveling up and putting 6 skill points into move silently, hide in shadows, listen, and spot, perhaps your 14th point for each of those four skills, and then the remaining two points go to up one infrequently used skill from +5 to +6 and another from +3 to +4, you can make the case that this is a bloated system. Pathfinder pruned away some of the skills and 5ed get rid of the the point by point assignment, so you can argue that both of these systems were attempting to debloat.
But what does "HP Bloat" mean? It's not very complex to have 1000 hit points or 10. Sure, having 14102 hit points would be a bit obnoxious to track, especially if everything was dealing 1d1000 hit points of damage, but that's not the topic.
Generally, hit points go up if you want higher level characters to be able to stomp lower level characters and challenges. AC has nothing to do with it- in fact, if you removed to-hit rolls in a given game and assumed everything hit, you'd need to increase the hit points of your most fragile characters by 20 to 50 percent, and you'd likely need to double or treble the hit points of your sturdier characters, to keep similar time-to-kill.
The desire for incredible distinction by level is what causes hit point bloat. If your players at level 1 can be taken unawares by a drunk with a knife and grievously wounded or even killed, and you decide that it is realistic for a level 20 character to have this happen as well, then you might want a system that doesn't give that guy the ability to survive the 100 of said drunks. But at this point, why is there a level 20 character in your game? The entire point of a system that levels a character up to 20 is to do that, after all. If you can't imagine that there's a guy that is so experienced that the drunk with the knife to his neck would never be able to kill him, then you aren't really envisioning a level 20 character the same way the designer did, and the same way the developer implemented it.
Quote from: Venka on August 25, 2022, 11:50:03 AM
You know I still don't know what "HP Bloat" means. Does it mean scaling? That the system is modeling that a powerful hero is more resilient than someone with less experience?
I take it be that more experience ought make you harder to hit. Instead D&D games are oddly about more and more hit points
This is one of the reasons I preferred Palladium Fantasy over D&D. It seemed more realistic to level up with more strike bonuses, but likewise also get more parry and dodge bonuses. The game used opposed rolls. Armor was essentially just extra hit points.
If that's the sticking point, then the systems that have different types of hit points are probably what you would want. Alternity has stun, wound, and mortal hit points, for instance. The issue here is that the system has to be wise to this to not just deal the most lethal kinds of damage in unlimited amounts.
Quote from: Venka on August 25, 2022, 11:50:03 AM
But what does "HP Bloat" mean? It's not very complex to have 1000 hit points or 10. Sure, having 14102 hit points would be a bit obnoxious to track, especially if everything was dealing 1d1000 hit points of damage, but that's not the topic.
It's in the eye of the beholder. There's the design intent of the game and whether or not the scale of hit points selected supports it or not. Then there are people who knowingly disagree with the design intent of the game, and use "hp bloat" as kind of a short-hand way of saying that the design should be different. Then there are people who don't really have much of a thought out position on design or hit point ranges, but they "know" from experience that they don't like hit points that exceed some threshold. There are, of course, those that take it as axiomatic that a character should be killable by certain weapons and certain conditions in "one blow" however they envision that, and for them hit points past single digits are rarely a good fit. It doesn't help that it is very difficult to see sometimes when a person is using a short-hand for preference versus when someone takes their preferences as the "correct way" for all designs, and reasons from that. That is, "Given my preferences, X follows" often leaves off the first part, so you never really know for sure.
However, taking all of the above into account, there's a line for just about anyone. I don't mind, for example, the general design goals that hit points are meant to support in leveled characters, but I start to balk pretty hard at some of the upper ranges in some versions of D&D. Note, I can give pretty clear reasons for why hit points into the triple digits at upper levels doesn't usually work for me, but it started mainly as an aesthetic reaction. It was only later that I saw that it was more than that.
It also doesn't help that hit points never exist in a vacuum. They are part of the system, and the naive approach to just change them without changing anything else doesn't work for many people (depending on their exact reasons for finding bloat past a certain point). D&D 3E/3.5 "E6" approaches really don't work for me, whereas others find it a quite elegant solution to their issues in those games.
Finally, sometimes "HP bloat" is just the whipping boy for a more general dislike of the target system. In the same way that "Armor as AC" used to be a prime target, and still is for some.
Yea, I think the idea is that if you figure that even the mightiest of men can still be laid low by a clever sword cut, then high level D&D is simply not going to map to reality. My interpretation of a level 1 guy who has his knife to the throat of a 20th level warrior is that hit points aren't a stand-in for pure physical constitution, and when he tries to cut that guy something is gonna happen that will prevent it. The hit points aren't intended as a simulation of raw physicality purely, and the simulation is bigger than that and can't be honed in on a knife cutting a neck. Sure, a the blow would be lethal, but he has too many hit points for that, so the blow doesn't occur like that- instead he jerks his head away or there's some unfortunate twitch in the hand of the knifeman. Whatever.
Now, there's a problem with my argument, and that is that hit points are sometimes portrayed by the game engine as just raw physicality, or at least, intended that way. They are not, in any D&D system at least, used perfectly consistently in all cases. I view those cases as suspect and subject to houserules- I want a game that feels real, but hit points are not that gritty, so the parts where some developer thought that they were are what needs to get sanded down.
Anyway, as you say, if someone wants a game to have a chance to kill someone with a powerful enough weapon- a knife to the throat, a big fucking axe, a plasma blaster at close range- then just the simple D&D abstraction of hit points doesn't work. I feel you need a bigger change than just houseruling everyone to 20 health tops or whatever though, and I also feel that even old systems have this issue, as hit points as an abstraction- and complaints, and everything I just said- is a debate that goes back to the 1970s I think. Certainly you can read people with commentary about it in 1980s Dragon magazines.
Quote from: Venka on August 25, 2022, 02:09:01 PM
Yea, I think the idea is that if you figure that even the mightiest of men can still be laid low by a clever sword cut, then high level D&D is simply not going to map to reality.
If it can be assigned a probability then likely a mechanic can be created to handle it in a way that is consistent with how high-level D&D normally plays. There will be consequences in terms of extra die rolls but if it is a concern then it can be added.
For example in GURPS the odds of a one shot kill is effectively the odds making a critical hits, and the odds of rolling the right critical result.
For example, a high point GURPS character
A 6 or less is a critical hit which equals 9.26% chance of a crit occurring on an attack.
A critical hit means the opponent gets no defense roll.
Triple normal damage (which is devastating in GURPS) is gain by rolling a 3 or a 18. A total of a 0.92% chance.
Roughly 1 in 1,200 swings in GURPS by a character with skill of 16 or better will result in what is, in essence, a one-shot kill.
To emulate this in D&D, just throw a d100 and a d12. If they both come up with a 1 then you killed your opponent.
Or a referee cared about the in-between result then say that a nat 19 or 20 is a crit. Roll on a chart where the low probability results wipe out a proportion of the target's hit points instead of a fixed number. For example a result of 3 causes loss of all hit points, 4 to 5 causes a loss of 3/4rd of one's hit points, and so on.
My own solution to the issue of one shot kills is to allow another roll to be made if a nat 20 is rolled. As long as you keep rolling nat 20s the damage from the blow adds up. I adapted this mechanic from Hackmaster 5e.
In addition, I have a bunch of stuff that can be attempted like knocking out an opponent, disarm, trip. However, the catch is that the target gets a save. This means the attempt is less effective versus high-level and high HD opponents. Which is also the case in GURPS with high point, highly skilled characters.
I agree RAW D&D of any edition doesn't handle this kind of stuff well. But I found that there are way to adding this in without turning D&D into a completely new RPG.
I agree that hit point damage (especially small damage against a large pool of hit points) doesn't represent 'instant death' well. For many games that do have hit points, there are circumstances where hit points aren't used, like a save against Death or Petrification. Since those exist alongside hit points in most systems, it's not conceptually difficult to imagine an attack that (at least situationally) bypasses hit point damage and instead is resolved differently.
Maybe stabbing someone with a knife COULD be 1d4+4 slashing damage, but having them pinned and the knife to their throat is 1d4+4 slashing damage plus save versus death. Obviously having situations that are resolved differently depending on circumstances adds complication and an adjudication step that some people will dislike. But if you primarily want piles of hit points but still want to have 'one hit, one kill' threats, there are ways to achieve that without cranking up damage to d1000s or anything.
The AD&D1e system does mention that a to-hit and damage roll are not necessary when dealing with a helpless opponent, for example a bound sacrifice victim. If the evil high priest is about to sacrifice Conan with his 100 HP while he's bound with chains, he doesn't have to make dozens of attacks. He states he is slaying him and cutting out his still-beating heart, and it is done.
Further, a perusal of the assassination table under the assassin character class description will show that it's also to be used by characters trying to kill someone quietly in their sleep, and that sort of thing. This could be used by the DM if a 1st level character is holding a blade to the throat of a 20th level character - though one might ask how it is that a 20th level character let a 1st level sneak up to them and put a blade to their throat unopposed?
Other than earlier in the thread when Shark suggested it; it seems every design device known to man is suggested to tame HP bloat, except the most straight forward.
Just cap HP at a fixed amount like almost every other RPG out there that's not a D&D derivative.
For some reason, this never gets looked at seriously in OSR/D&D land.
A Level is just a way to do Advancement. There is no inherent reason why Hit Points have to increase with every level in class and level based games.
From ESTAR:
QuoteRegarding Hit Points
In miniature wargaming with dozen if not hundreds of figures you don't want to be messing around the details of individual figures. So combat was abstracted to 1 hit = 1 kill. When Gygax introduced fantasy elements to Chainmail along with heroes and superheroes, once way he beefed them up was to require 4 hits in order to kill a Hero and 8 hits to kill a Super-Hero.
Dave Arneson started running Braunsteins and later Blackmoor. This was found hit to kill too harsh for when the campaign was starting out. So one 1 hit to kill became 1d6 hit points. And one hit became 1d6 damage.
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That is a good way of deciding the power level of a fixed HP D&D game. Start all PC's at 4HD max die roll equivalent and it never goes up. Maybe you let them add their CON bonus to the total (not for every HD) and that's it. Done.
This makes the implementation of things like major wounds when you take more than 1/2 at once more fixed and predictable as a PC advances.
The continual expansion of HP in D&D always creates scaling issues. Albeit in earlier editions of the game this issue was much less pronounced.
Fixed HP cures HP Bloat and all its knock-on effects straight-up.
A maximum hit point total doesn't represent anything that makes sense in game. I mean, theoretically there's something that's tougher than everything else that represents the most youncould ever have
. Let's call it a Tarrasque for convenience. If something is tougher than that, it should have even more hit points. If you just say 'nothing can be tougher than the Tarrasque because 500 hit points is the absolute maximum', well, that's very gamist. It's not like we're an old computer game where there were only 256 possibilities (0-255 hit points).
An artificial cap doesn't solve any problems. It just refuses to admit that they exist or are worth solving for.
Let's be real. Hit points going up vs attack success rate going up is just how it's done in this set of rules.
But maybe not. A lot of OSR games make changes. Some go for combat changes to be what that author hoped D&D would have been.
I go for different rules altogether. This hit point system is one of the main faults I see in D&D.
Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 25, 2022, 08:36:45 PM
A maximum hit point total doesn't represent anything that makes sense in game. I mean, theoretically there's something that's tougher than everything else that represents the most youncould ever have
. Let's call it a Tarrasque for convenience. If something is tougher than that, it should have even more hit points. If you just say 'nothing can be tougher than the Tarrasque because 500 hit points is the absolute maximum', well, that's very gamist. It's not like we're an old computer game where there were only 256 possibilities (0-255 hit points).
An artificial cap doesn't solve any problems. It just refuses to admit that they exist or are worth solving for.
I will assume that you misread my post.
I clearly stated that PC hit points would be capped. I never said anything about NPC's or monsters.
Naturally, it goes without saying, that NPC's and Monster HP would be scaled in the system to the desired threat level for the PC's within the genre the game is trying to emulate.
Just like every other game that has a version of fixed HP: Like Runequest, Vampire, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, and most any other game not a straight D&D derivative.
Now the natural result is that the "powerband" the PC's will progress through will be shallower than the zero to superhero of modern D&D. But for those games that is a feature, not a bug.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on August 25, 2022, 09:40:25 PM
Let's be real. Hit points going up vs attack success rate going up is just how it's done in this set of rules.
But maybe not. A lot of OSR games make changes. Some go for combat changes to be what that author hoped D&D would have been.
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It doesn't have to be so. A "level" is just a way to dole out advancements. "Level" does not have to equal: exponential power jump.
There is nothing inherent in a d20 roll high vs. DC or AC system that demands HP increase every level. Nothing whatsoever.
It's just a roll +mod vs. a target number. Nothing special.
Class + Level + HP Bloat just the traditional style of play everyone expects. To the point that it is virtually a design blind spot when discussing OSR rules variants like in this thread.
PC's having more or less low fixed Hit point solves the scaling design issues that class/level based HP bloat games run into in varying degree's. You just need to be willing to set aside the zero to hero tiered play paradigm to implement it.
This is maybe a good time to point out that not only do hit points not represent meat points, they don't represent anything in particular. What they mean can vary wildly from situation to situation.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 12:29:53 AM
PC's having more or less low fixed Hit point solves the scaling design issues that class/level based HP bloat games run into in varying degree's. You just need to be willing to set aside the zero to hero tiered play paradigm to implement it.
That's always been the real problem--not understanding that some degree of zero to hero is intended or wanted, whether that be set at "none" or "crazy land range of we really mean zero is lower than that and hero is off the charts". Or often, somewhere in the middle, where some hit point scaling is warranted, but not to the degree that D&D does it.
Besides, there is always a cap and a lower limit. Giving everyone bonus points and then not scaling hit points at all just says that the cap and the floor happen to be the same. There will still be someone else come alone and not like where it is set, whether that be because for them the floor is too low or too high for their sensibilities or ditto the cap. The cap is not a bad house rule when using an existing system, but is hardly the only design choice. After all, it's only the underlying math of the system. If I have a floor of 3 and a cap of 20, I can set that explicitly or I can build it into the math of the system. Same for any other numbers. If I want a bigger range than that, but starting at a higher number, say 8 to 98, I can likewise do it explicitly or with the math.
Now granted, when it's done with the math, you always run the risk that someone later is going to come along and tack on extra numbers just because, thus invalidating the design. Which is how we end up with WotC D&D. So called "professional" game designers should know better.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 12:29:53 AM
I will assume that you misread my post.
I clearly stated that PC hit points would be capped. I never said anything about NPC's or monsters.
And my point is that is very gamist. What is the difference between a PC and a monster in terms of 'toughness'? We can probably safely assume that some monsters are tougher than all PCs (like Dragons) so you don't cap those. But how does it make sense to cap PC hit points? Effectively you're saying there is a maximum number of hit points a character CAN have, and eventually all characters reach that. So this maximum (whether 25, 50, or 500) eventually says that a Wizard with this many hit points is exactly as tough as a Fighter with that many hit points. As soon as you allow for the possibility that one OUGHT to be tougher, the cap doesn't make any sense.
What happens if the wizard turns themself into a dragon?
Either hit points have meaning in game, in which case if you can conceive of a situation where someone would be 'a little tougher' than another character (and thus deserve more hit points in excess of the cap) or they're not (making them gamist). There's no real reason why Pac-Man gives you 3 lives when you play - that's just what they decided makes sense. Arbitrarily saying 'PCs can have a maximum of 80 hit points' does the same thing - it picks a value for the sake of having one, not for having explanative power over what that means in the game.
Even if you don't have an arbitrary fixed cap, you absolutely can have 'maximums'. If players get 10 hit points per level, and they get a bonus of up to 2 per level, the most they can have is 12/level. If you know that 10th level is the highest they can get, the most hit points anyone will have is 120. But that doesn't really mean it's a cap. I would expect that if another character is getting 5 per level, they'd hit 50; they wouldn't keep getting additional hit points until there was no difference between squishy and tough characters.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 26, 2022, 09:19:27 AM
That's always been the real problem--not understanding that some degree of zero to hero is intended or wanted, whether that be set at "none" or "crazy land range of we really mean zero is lower than that and hero is off the charts". Or often, somewhere in the middle, where some hit point scaling is warranted, but not to the degree that D&D does it.
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Maybe I misread you - but in my view the problem in WotC D&D has always been the inability to restrain the "zero to hero" powerband when it comes to HP Bloat.
1-2e had a restrained power band where hit dice stopped going up around level 10-12. Yes, they still had scaling issues, but no where near to the degree that every WotC edition of D&D does.
WotC would solve a lot of design issues if they implemented a similar solution.
Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 26, 2022, 10:03:30 AM
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And my point is that is very gamist. What is the difference between a PC and a monster in terms of 'toughness'? We can probably safely assume that some monsters are tougher than all PCs (like Dragons) so you don't cap those. But how does it make sense to cap PC hit points?
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So I thought you misread my post. But now I think you legitimately don't understand what I am getting at.
Do you not know how games like Runequest, Shadowrun, Or Cyberpunk work? And that PC's in those games have low, essentially fixed HP?
Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 26, 2022, 10:03:30 AM
And my point is that is very gamist. What is the difference between a PC and a monster in terms of 'toughness'?
Hit Points are not a measure of toughness. They are an abstract measure of combat endurance, how long a combatant can continue to function in combat. If folks want hit points to represent health, toughness, etc, then they need to come up with a new system.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 01:18:56 PM
So I thought you misread my post. But now I think you legitimately don't understand what I am getting at.
Do you not know how games like Runequest, Shadowrun, Or Cyberpunk work? And that PC's in those games have low, essentially fixed HP?
Of those, I know Shadownrun best. I don't think Hit Boxes directly compare to Hit Points as they're usually used. If you have 10 hit boxes, each box can be thought of as 10% of
your health total. It's very clear that a very tough troll can take a lot more punishment than a very svelte (non-tough) elf. If the same hit is 4 boxes of damage to one person, but only 1 box of damage to another person, you're abstracting 'hit points' very differently to the standard conceit (a pile of survivable hits that are ablated by each incoming attack).
So I disagree with the premise - there are lots of ways to 'track damage' and 'hit points' represent one commonly used style - but a maximum hit point cap without connection to the narrative fiction is a gamist convention. That's not always a bad thing - D&D
is a game and there are going to be things that are required to make it work, even if they don't make much sense. But given my druthers, I want things to make sense in the game.
Generally, if you say 'this is how something works in the game', I think you ought to be able to say 'and this is what it represents'. The most common definition of hit points as a mix of fatigue, luck, avoiding serious blows and minor wounds as an abstraction works as long as you don't rigorously define 'hit' as 'an attack that successfully makes someone bleed'. Hit points in that sense have a narrative function and if you can imagine someone being tougher, luckier, better able to avoid blows/turn blows into near-misses, you basically have a theoretical justification for not capping hit points. If you cap it anyway, I think you should
at least be able to say what that
represents.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 01:18:56 PM
Maybe I misread you - but in my view the problem in WotC D&D has always been the inability to restrain the "zero to hero" powerband when it comes to HP Bloat.
1-2e had a restrained power band where hit dice stopped going up around level 10-12. Yes, they still had scaling issues, but no where near to the degree that every WotC edition of D&D does.
WotC would solve a lot of design issues if they implemented a similar solution.
My point is really that I don't disagree with your analysis, but think that WotC aping 1E/2E is not the only way to solve it. Assuming the game is going to be rewritten anyway, which they haven't been shy about doing. Besides, much of their bloat has been because of multiple sources of piling on, not a single thing. 3E, for example, would be notably improved in this respect just by using AD&D attribute ranges, thus pulling back on the Con bonuses a little. Not fixed, but improved. Or you could do what I'm doing in my system, which is spread out the hit die improvements to only the odd levels, not every level. I'm still capping at 12 dice, but not "seemingly arbitrarily" at 12th level. And of course, using smaller dice would help.
To do any of that requires touching the math. i can't just, for example, go change 3E to only give dice every odd level with no other changes, as that will make the mid-level characters much weaker than the design expects. I'd need to adjust monsters too.
So my point is that the math needs to cap it. How that gets implemented in the game system is not limited to an explicit cap.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 26, 2022, 02:01:08 PM
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So my point is that the math needs to cap it. How that gets implemented in the game system is not limited to an explicit cap.
I agree that it is not limited to an explicit cap. Having limits on PC HP like in RuneQuest is just one solution.
And given its widespread implementation among non-D&D games it is one that works fairly well.
The whole reason I bring it up is that going to a RQ style HP model for OSR games is almost never talked about as a possible solution when hacking the OGL system.
Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 26, 2022, 01:48:07 PM
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Of those, I know Shadownrun best. I don't think Hit Boxes directly compare to Hit Points as they're usually used. If you have 10 hit boxes, each box can be thought of as 10% of your health total. It's very clear that a very tough troll can take a lot more punishment than a very svelte (non-tough) elf. If the same hit is 4 boxes of damage to one person, but only 1 box of damage to another person, you're abstracting 'hit points' very differently to the standard conceit (a pile of survivable hits that are ablated by each incoming attack).
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You are not understanding my point then. I'm talking hit points the way they are used in the games I listed where I said they have a
more or less fixed total.
Of course there will be variation of HP between a PC troll vs a PC Elf. I shouldn't have had to spell that out; it's self-evident from the game examples I cited.
SR hit boxes, RQ hit points, Cyberpunk Life points = all HP by different names. The difference is that they all use the
HP = meat point model because what a PC has at the start of the game tends to not vary much during the course of play.
D&D has a rationalization for HP - yet even the way D&D does HP is very gamist, and gets downright nonsensical at high levels. The 100' jump, or lava walk done by PC's because they have the HP to survive it has been a classic joke/trope among players for decades now.
Most newbies these days thinks of HP = meat points. You can say that HP is representative of this or that but CRPG videogames have killed that perception, because they explicitly use them as meat points that go down as you take damage. And people have by and large accepted the conceit that more HP = 'superhero' style resilience to absorbing blows.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 03:14:22 PM
SR hit boxes, RQ hit points, Cyberpunk Life points = all HP by different names. The difference is that they all use the HP = meat point model because what a PC has at the start of the game tends to not vary much during the course of play.
I think that there are lots of ways to potentially model 'taking damage', and hit points are a well-accepted example of that. I don't think that Hit Boxes are 'just' hit points by a different name.
When you play Doom you don't have hit points that count up to infinite levels. You have 100% maximum health and you don't get increased health (generally). While that might count as an example of 'not getting tougher', that's a different way of tracking damage than hit points. Calling it a hit point system causes needless confusion.
The OP is about whether or not armor creates hit point bloat, so the conversation is automatically about how different ways of modeling attack/damage have different consequences for how you should track attack/damage.
If your weapons do 'hit point damage' and you apply that damage directly to a 'hit point total', it's very clear you have a hit point system. If you have a system where weapons do 'trauma' and trauma is resisted/negated then applied to a condition track, that's NOT a hit point system. Even if it does 'largely the same thing'.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 03:14:22 PM
I agree that it is not limited to an explicit cap. Having limits on PC HP like in RuneQuest is just one solution.
And given its widespread implementation among non-D&D games it is one that works fairly well.
The whole reason I bring it up is that going to a RQ style HP model for OSR games is almost never talked about as a possible solution when hacking the OGL system.
I've been meaning to try using RQ style HP for an OSR game. But I never seem to get around to implementing it. Or, at least, trying to divvy HP via hit location. Alas, another idea I might not get to.
Quote from: Jason Coplen on August 26, 2022, 05:13:44 PM
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I've been meaning to try using RQ style HP for an OSR game. But I never seem to get around to implementing it. Or, at least, trying to divvy HP via hit location. Alas, another idea I might not get to.
You can virtually port it straight across: RQ used 1-18 for stats. You just need to figure out how you want to implement the SIZ stat into an OSR PC. I'd just go with assigning a fixed number based on race.
Then hit locations can be done in a 1d10 roll - so you can throw both a d20 and d10 at once.
You don't even need hit locations - you can just do HP the way magic world does and just have one pool of them.
But nobody's done it because BRP fans like to roll under, and can't imagine doing it any other way for the same result. And D&D/OSR fans like escalating HP, and can't imagine doing it any other way, because D&D.
I think that thee is a whole OSR design space to be explored with a RQ style HP Mostly fixed play model, but no one has tapped into that design space yet.
Quote from: estar on August 26, 2022, 01:44:03 PM
Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 26, 2022, 10:03:30 AM
And my point is that is very gamist. What is the difference between a PC and a monster in terms of 'toughness'?
Hit Points are not a measure of toughness. They are an abstract measure of combat endurance, how long a combatant can continue to function in combat. If folks want hit points to represent health, toughness, etc, then they need to come up with a new system.
This is essentially the point I was trying to make, but much better stated. Thank you.
Quote from: Jaeger on August 26, 2022, 06:09:28 PM
Quote from: Jason Coplen on August 26, 2022, 05:13:44 PM
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I've been meaning to try using RQ style HP for an OSR game. But I never seem to get around to implementing it. Or, at least, trying to divvy HP via hit location. Alas, another idea I might not get to.
You can virtually port it straight across: RQ used 1-18 for stats. You just need to figure out how you want to implement the SIZ stat into an OSR PC. I'd just go with assigning a fixed number based on race.
Then hit locations can be done in a 1d10 roll - so you can throw both a d20 and d10 at once.
You don't even need hit locations - you can just do HP the way magic world does and just have one pool of them.
But nobody's done it because BRP fans like to roll under, and can't imagine doing it any other way for the same result. And D&D/OSR fans like escalating HP, and can't imagine doing it any other way, because D&D.
I think that thee is a whole OSR design space to be explored with a RQ style HP Mostly fixed play model, but no one has tapped into that design space yet.
I have a hit location die. Heh. I love it!
Magic would need a reworking when it comes to damage or the first fireball will level anyone hit. LOL That would wake the players up in no time flat!