Quote from: Thondor on October 25, 2022, 10:56:02 PM

D&D's hitpoint system has only two states, perfectly fine or dead. (Ok you could be bleeding out, or making death saves.)

Many people will see anything that works differently than this as not a hitpoint system -- one of which is if every time you are hurt your capacities degrade (my #2), then it is certainly different.

Again you can have mixed ones -- looking at you nWod: 7 lifepoint, the first 4 don't impede you and the last 3 start subtracting dice. That's hitpoints with a death spiral/capacity degradation.

One interesting thing is that Arneson and Gygax both tried a variant systems and they never caught on. Theres also been a few tries in Dragon over the decades. And I am pretty sure one at least made it into 2e. I'd have to go digging to find it. Obviously hardly anyone used it.

What we learned was that, as you say above, this creates a death spiral. One that plagues about any game where as your HP deplete, your performance drops too. It means that whomever strikes the first wound may very likely have a slowly growing advantage over their opponent.

Star Frontiers has this as a feature and it works as the degradation of ability inly kicks in once are down to 50% health.

Albedo and my own system has its system where you accumulate wounds from being shot and these often cause bleeding and as this accumulates effectiveness drops. They fit there because these are not combat friendly settings. Sometimes death spirals are actually useful for a system.

Unfortunately too often they get generated by designers with no idea what the fuck they are doing other than "tee-hee! Me better than D&D!" which, sorry kid, ya aint!

5e's of all things presents a few options, like the woefully underused fatigue system and its optional wounds system.

I saw a Mecha game that didn't use hit points.  It just treated all machines as collections of working parts.  Each weapon, each sensor, each limb, the reactor, even the pilot compartment.

Every hit was one of those things knocked out.  If you hit the pilot on the very first time taking damage, it was over. 

However, Omega is really on the ball here.  A lot of games that claim they don't use hit points are deluding themselves.  They just renamed what a hit point is. 

My own experiment was using only critical hit tables, with progressive hits giving you more and more modifiers to roll on the "bad" end of the table that includes the worst result of "dead".  The other end of the spectrum were annoying things that are not permanent.  The key was to use a dice system that still works even if all combatants are barely functioning.  Right now I still have no way to make a come back, so maybe my experiment has run its course, if for no other reason than I'm never going to write my own RPG. 

Quote from: Omega on October 27, 2022, 05:12:59 PM
What we learned was that, as you say above, this creates a death spiral. One that plagues about any game where as your HP deplete, your performance drops too. It means that whomever strikes the first wound may very likely have a slowly growing advantage over their opponent.

Folks complain about death spirals, but I actually think they're good for a game.  I suppose it would be bad for the theoretical fighter vs orc death match in a 10x10 room, but who actually plays like that?  A death spiral encourage players to change tactics early if things aren't going their way rather than slogging it out until they're too low on hp to run away successfully.  If things aren't going well, run, evade, break out some spells, use some resources, negotiate, grapple, play dead, surrender, use combat maneuvers, whatever; don't just keep doing what you're doing.

Aggressive death spirals can turn combat into attack spam to chance a crit and nerf the opponent by initiating the death spiral. They may also penalize non combat tasks like running away making escape impossible. However, suffering no performance penalty for taking damage and knowing exactly how far one is from being combat ineffective can lead to boringly safe stand there and trade blows to out DPS the opponent instead of something dynamic like fire and maneuver. As such sustained damage/condition track causing HP bleed may be preferable to escalate the threat. I think True20 did something similar to Mutants and Masterminds with a save vs knockout for each successful attack received modified by the cumulative attacks received. Not knowing how many more hits you can take and having the possibility to on hit KO an opponent leads to the possibility of high risk high reward play instead of boringly predictable HP attrition.

Surprised Amber Diceless, Lords of Olympus, and Lords of Gossamer and Shadow have not gotten a mention. 

Quote from: Mishihari on October 27, 2022, 08:34:47 PM

Folks complain about death spirals, but I actually think they're good for a game.  I suppose it would be bad for the theoretical fighter vs orc death match in a 10x10 room, but who actually plays like that?  A death spiral encourage players to change tactics early if things aren't going their way rather than slogging it out until they're too low on hp to run away successfully.  If things aren't going well, run, evade, break out some spells, use some resources, negotiate, grapple, play dead, surrender, use combat maneuvers, whatever; don't just keep doing what you're doing.

There's nothing wrong with a death spiral, inherently.  It does need to be calibrated appropriately for the game. 

Moreover, there are other kinds of death spirals besides an individual character's health.  With any version of D&D, it's the overall party health that has the built in death spiral.  When every action is important, then losing actions is a huge penalty all by itself.  With early D&D, this is even more true, because of the various henchmen and hirelings, morale, magic effects, etc. 

Quote from: zircher on October 27, 2022, 10:07:55 PM
Surprised Amber Diceless, Lords of Olympus, and Lords of Gossamer and Shadow have not gotten a mention.

Probably because I've only heard of Amber Diceless, and the term diceless is a huge no-no. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 27, 2022, 06:36:02 PM
I saw a Mecha game that didn't use hit points.  It just treated all machines as collections of working parts.  Each weapon, each sensor, each limb, the reactor, even the pilot compartment.

Every hit was one of those things knocked out.  If you hit the pilot on the very first time taking damage, it was over. 

However, Omega is really on the ball here.  A lot of games that claim they don't use hit points are deluding themselves.  They just renamed what a hit point is.

Even the above example is a sort of HP system as the components act as the HP. I rather like those systems actually as they work really well for combats where the 'parts' are the actual 'meat' rather than effectively fatigue, skill, foorwork, etc.

There are other times it just doesnt fit which is why I like D&D's abstract. You can call it whatever and run.

I enjoy and endorse the death spiral as i find it quite realistic; of course I use a system (D6) that puts the impetus on the players to actively play to parry or dodge and not get hit, whereas something like becmi has you trading blows hit after hit unimpeded until somebody runs down to zero hp and falls over...tink, tink, tink, thunk, crack, tink, tink....boom!

Technically in anything older than say 2e, just being in combat should be a fail state if we are focused on gold for xp and the original games dungeon-delve cycle, and so i'm sure Gygax would say that the abstract hp system not tied to injury is to reinforce the goals of the game rather than get you distracted playing table-top mortal kombat.

Regardless, an hp only system just falls far short for me personally if i'm going to run the game for sure, and irks me pretty good besides even if I'm just playing and not GM'ing. It's not even that I oppose hp, I'm perfectly happy with hp in Pendragon for example, and in our last D6 Fantasy-Dragonlance playtest we added damage dice from dnd to the normal D6 damage roll (so a greatsword was doing str damage + 3D +1d10) and hit dice/hp from dnd to the equation (treating hp as ablative DR resting under armor but above wounds) and the presence of such merely gave the typical creature an additional hit or two before the normal death spiral begins. So it's not a matter of hating hp or them being wrong, more like they are incomplete, as someone stated above they function on the binary of all is fine or shit i'm dead... I want the in-between layers of harm that wound levels provide.

In a game w/o the mechanical option to do anything other than soak hits (such as becmi which is my current favorite source to steal from) then a death spiral is dismal and no fun, as there is nothing one can do under that mechanical umbrella but stack ac or hp and pray for good rolls...not even a meta currency available to influence the rolls if we wished. If we look at Pendragon, which uses hp sort of tied to wound levels, we see that the death spiral and the injury and the slow healing etc are all part of the design and intended experience, and if we alter it, like altering gold for xp in becmi, we wind getting an entirely different experience very far afield of the rails we launched on. I would posit that most rpg's could be improved by a wound lvl system. If nothing else I would suggest the critical hit system from 2e's combat and tactics book if i could not contrive another method to reasonably include injury states between fine and dead. Of course no one likes losing an arm to a dragon bite either i guess...

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 27, 2022, 11:17:22 PM
Probably because I've only heard of Amber Diceleas, and the term diceless is a huge no-no. 

How so?  The official Amber Diceless forum is right her on this we site, isn't it?

Quote from: Mishihari on October 29, 2022, 11:56:36 AM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 27, 2022, 11:17:22 PM
Probably because I've only heard of Amber Diceleas, and the term diceless is a huge no-no. 

How so?  The official Amber Diceless forum is right her on this we site, isn't it?

Covered this in the 8the reply to this thread. It's my number 3.

I do enjoy me some ADRPG

Quote from: Thondor on October 25, 2022, 10:42:03 AM

Quote from: jaseoffire on October 25, 2022, 08:46:03 AM
Well, off the top of my head, Mutants and Masterminds is a big one. Uses a similar system that you described, actually. Just hit them, until you hit them so hard that they aren't moving anymore. You can optionally hit them again after that to kill them. For a less classic take on hit points, you've got World of Darkness/Exalted that use a damage track. Exalted also uses your initiative as a sort of hit point pool, which is kind of cool. FATE uses a weird damage track, that, once filled, you then start taking injuries that your opponent can exploit to make things worse. Also works in social encounters in FATE as well, which is cool.

Yeah, I'd put World of Darkness firmly in the "uses hipoints" category. Here's a basic breakdown of what I have seen.

1. Uses hitpoints.
a) Just hitpoints and lots of em.
b) limited hitpoints with penalties when you get low. nWoD
c) multiple hiptoint like tracks -- typically a physical and mental track but may have more.

2. Just conditions/negative modifiers of some sort/losing options.
a) Roll less dice, or loose other resource (card, token, runes).
b) Opponents can use the condition against you
c) Just damage attribute - but this may be better under 1 depending on implementation.

3. Irrelevant to play, or if you are injured run/surrender or die
a) there's no real fighting / damage -- mostly narrative story-games like say Wanderhome or The Quiet Year. In the later case you aren't even one person.
b) Injured? run/surrender or die - here the GM is really warning you that you are over-matched, perhaps Amber Diceless fits here.

4. ??
I here Mutants and Masterminds has some sort of save mechanic. But I don't really understand it.


Note that systems can use both -- Fate Core is 1c + 2b.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on October 29, 2022, 09:36:03 AMOf course no one likes losing an arm to a dragon bite either i guess...

In my experience, players get far more upset at their character being crippled or imprisoned, than their character being killed. You can after all simply roll up a new character who is not crippled or imprisoned.

Phoenix Command uses measures wound severity in physical damage (PD). The more PD one accumulates, the higher one's chance of incapacitation, disability, and death, but there is no theoretical limit to how much PD one can take and continue functioning*. I've never seen any other game that does it like this.

*Someone on enough adrenalin and who lucks out on the knockout roll can get his head blown off and keep on running for a few seconds.

If theres no theoretical limit then that does sound like an actual HP-less system.

How does it work then? Like an escalating chance the character passes out or flat out dies?

Sounds similar to my system that used a table you roll on to discover how badly you're hurt.

For example.  A table that runs from 1 to 6.  The 1 is something annoying, and 6 is dead.  Roll a D4 when hit, but next time you roll the next biggest dice, the D6, then 3rd hit is a D8, 4th is a D10, and 5th+ hits are a D12.

Theoretically you could die in just 2 hits, or you may never die as you keep rolling 1's.