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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

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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.

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.