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Petition to remove the hitpoint health system from all future RPGs

Cael

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Don't tabletop have some games with wounds and stuff instead of HP?
It basically boils back down to HP, just that you have various penalties applied to how many wounds you have. WoD, for example, you basically have 7 HP, with progressively bigger penalties the more damage you take.
 

Ismaul

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Don't tabletop have some games with wounds and stuff instead of HP?
Yes.

One of the most known type is a Damage Threshold system.

In Savage Worlds, for example, characters have a Toughness rating (influenced by Vigor skill and armor). Damage is rolled against it. If damage is below the Toughness, it does nothing, if it is close to it, it Stuns the enemy, and if higher it deals a Wound (double stun = a wound). Each wound gives a cumulative -1 to all rolls, 3 wounds = Dying + Injury (you roll on an Injury table to see where the wound is localized and what effect it has -- it can be pretty brutal, possible permanent stat reduction). Red shirt enemies often can only have 1 wound and then they're out.

Depending on the rules in use, either people never really suffer the consequence of Wounds and Injuries, or they always suffer them. There is a spendable resource (3 per game), that lets you absorb damage so you evade such bad fates. If you play with those (default) rules, you never even reach that state, never get Injuries. The elaborate rules are therefore useless in that case. If you don't play with that damage soaking resource, like my group did, then you always get fucked. Living with multiple wounds is the norm, rolling d4/d6-2 for skills is routine (for 2 unhealed wounds), and guess what, you don't kill the enemy, don't evade, and get hurt even more. The Death Spiral that I was talking about. Want to heal that wound? Well, roll that Vigor dice-2; good luck! Hope that your Injury will be temporary? Roll that Vigor dice-2, hope you can get 4 lol. Last campaign my character had multiple permanent Injuries, reducing his skill dice, in particular his Vigor from d8 Vigor to d4, in addition to the penalty from Wounds. The less you heal the less you heal, and the less you hit and the more you get hit. Having that much lasting penalties made for a gritty game, but ultimately turned everything we did in a try your luck type of thing, as rolling the max on dice was the only way to escape the curse of the Wound penalty.

That's not all. The Toughness system, while it does sound nice, has some problems. Say enemies have 4 Toughness. You can hurt them with most weapons, d8, d6, d4, whatever, you can get 4. Still, it's pretty jarring that a successful attack can end up often doing nothing if you don't pass the Toughness treshold. You end up wasting your turn, while in an HP system you'd deal less damage, but still advance on your goal, and be able to make it by small increments. The Toughness system is a system where only big increments are effective. Now, what happens when the Toughness goes up? Most weapons will simply be unable to do damage at all, it's futile. No skilled fighter with a knife can slip his blade between the plates of an armor, this is just impossible. So what the Toughness system does is put the emphasis on high damage weapons, those are good, the rest is shit. And boosting your Toughness can make you totally impervious to certain weapons and types of attacks. It's a limited design.


HPs are dominant for a good reason. They have those advantages:


They're simple, they allow for incremental success with damage, and give you a chance to come back from a tough situation, since they do not penalize the efficiency of the player in combat while they go down. No penalty to efficiency also allows for taking risks and experimenting in your strategy, and unique builds/personnalities such as characters built on self-sacrifice, hurt yourself to hurt them more type of things, be it blood magic, the me-hurt-me-angry trope, etc.

One argument for HPs is adrenaline. Often people defend non-HP systems because of realism/simulationism. But IRL, adrenaline makes you not even feel some hits, and allows you to continue despite injury. By simulating adrenaline, there is no more need for simulating some nebulous efficiency penalties for getting weaker. And so we can get rid of the Death Spiral.

Also, the advantages of the other systems can be added on top of the HP system if needed; lasting wounds for example. D&D 4E did something clever with this: at 1/2 HP, you got Bloodied. On its own it did nothing. But then you had some things that triggered on this status, such as some characters gaining beneficial abilities when they got the status (rage etc.), some feats or items activating their special abilities against bloodied enemies (life leech etc). Positive and negative. Despite what people say, 4E did many things right.
 
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Cael

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So what the Toughness system does is put the emphasis on high damage weapons, those are good, the rest is shit. And boosting your Toughness can make you totally impervious to certain weapons and types of attacks. It's a limited design.
Reminds me of the original Shadowrun using the old d6 system. In one of the novels of the game, the author made a crack at the system, stating that one of the characters has so much dermal implants stuck on that even an Exocet missile would bounce off.
 

DraQ

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Two points:
  • Toughness/DT is NOT health system, for all intents and purposes it's an armor system. Toughness as a part of character system - as in stat that can develop as opposed to something conferred by gear, effects or race/template is retarded.
  • Any sort of wound system is a HP system. Anything that can be fully described by subtraction/addition to a single variable until dead is a HP system and, by extension, shit.
 

Cael

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Two points:
  • Toughness/DT is NOT health system, for all intents and purposes it's an armor system. Toughness as a part of character system - as in stat that can develop as opposed to something conferred by gear, effects or race/template is retarded.
  • Any sort of wound system is a HP system. Anything that can be fully described by subtraction/addition to a single variable until dead is a HP system and, by extension, shit.
You call it "shit" and yet you have not advanced an alternate system. Interesting. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
 

Ismaul

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Toughness/DT is NOT health system, for all intents and purposes it's an armor system.
Armor or Health can be mechanically abstracted in many different ways, and most mechanics can be legitimately used for both. Armor and Health and basically just different layers of "protection against death/failure" and have no intrinsic relation to any particular type of mechanics.

For example, Divinity Original Sin 2 has HP mechanics for armor, Savage Worlds has DT mechanics to express a combination of natural vitality and armor. Armor and Health do not need to be mechanically realized in a particular way to be armor or health, your fixed view only expresses your habits and preferences.
 

Infinitum

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Just have them represent luck instead of ability to soak damage. Hits that otherwise would prove fatal end up as close misses or glance off armour for as long as that characeter has enough hp. Once the characetr reaches 0 hp his luck runs out and he's consequently killed the next time he fails hi dodge/armor rolls. Example of surviving on low hp:

 

anvi

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The big problem with purely numeric simulation is that it basically creates bland, boring combat systems (especially in action RPGs), where you are just essentially comparing two numbers, and the larger number wins.
I was with you until that point, which is pure bullshit.

Bethesda games are a great example of this, as their "action" combat simply involves two parties whacking away at each other until the one with higher numbers wins.
Bethesda games are not a great example of anything except how to make millions from incredibly dumb, underdeveloped shit.
 

Cael

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I got a funny feeling that all these HP haters would hate the kind of mages I play in DnD 3.5 tabletop. Their arguments seem to consists of "HP is not realistic!" or "HP is all about two bloated numbers whacking at each other!" The mages I play specialise in stat damage, giving negative levels and battlefield control. After a few rounds against my mages, they would be crawling back to the feet of the altar of HP and sacrifice all of their children to it.
 

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Just have them represent luck instead of ability to soak damage. Hits that otherwise would prove fatal end up as close misses or glance off armour for as long as that characeter has enough hp.

That's actually very close to what they represent (in PnP anyway.) It's more "combat skill" than luck, but yeah, close to zero means "you are out of luck buddy, and the next hit is going to be fatal." From the AD&D Dungeon Master's guide Glossary:

Hit Points:The number of points of damage a creature can sustain before death (or optionally, coma), reflecting the creature’s physical endurance, fighting experience, skill, or luck

And on page 82:

It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage—as indicated by constitution bonuses—and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the “sixth sense” which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection.

Anyway, all of this is about characterization, description, or even LARPing, it doesn't affect the core gameplay mechanics.
 

Ismaul

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I was just going to say was Naveen said. HPs are not a health simulation; they're hit points, not health points. They're just there to define how much you can be successfully hit by attacks before there are tangible consequences. It's easy to confuse this though, because often even designers get confused on this issue, in the description of hits, powers, etc. Even though every D&D edition has defined HPs as a combination of stamina, combat experience, and luck, the writers consistently forget it when it comes to describing attacks. It's why many games have tried to rename HP as Stress, or Stamina, or the like, to avoid the confusion.
 

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You call it "shit" and yet you have not advanced an alternate system.
LRN2RD, scrub.

Toughness/DT is NOT health system, for all intents and purposes it's an armor system.
Armor or Health can be mechanically abstracted in many different ways, and most mechanics can be legitimately used for both. Armor and Health and basically just different layers of "protection against death/failure" and have no intrinsic relation to any particular type of mechanics.
As usual, there two purposes to health system - gamist and simulationist.

Gamist is, among other things, what you have said. Those other things include things like (again, as usual) differentiating between threats (when health and armor are separate you can, for example have different and differently behaving enemies that are hard VS tough), preventing death by RNG on one hand and boring attrition on the other.

OTOH you have simulationist considerations - health is generally supposed to mean something and behave in certain ways that are directly or indirectly based on how bodily harm works IRL. Guy who just cannot be stabbed because toughness violates natural expectations, so does linear attrition.

Good mechanics is to be found on some intersection of gamist and simulationist considerations.
Simulationism has inherent worth even from purely gamist perspective as it introduces complex and interesting mechanics that isn't arbitrary, is intuitive, and is somewhat protected from certain particularly nasty balancing pathologies that often arise in artificially complex mechanics.
OTOH blind simulationism can often lead to death by RNG, but it generally can be amended by adding more control. For example, when instakill attack is possible adding extra control allows avoiding it, turning related gameplay from mindless gamble to tactics involving, on one side setting up such attack so that it isn't avoided and on the other managing the threat of such attack.

HP mechanics is very abstract and in cRPGs is generally bad because there is no room for such sweet spot intersection - on simulationist side HPs are sound when the ranges involved are small enough that anyone can be 1HKd by anything, meaning death by RNG, which is naturally awful in a game where you have only a small bunch of non-expendable combatants on one side (and that still only works with humanoid, medium sized combatants, when sizes and types of combatants diverge you get a whole mess of what can hurt and what can kill what and your system starts to grow nasty, tumorous, never ending tables); on gamist side you immediately go over to attrition which is boring - you hit enemy and watch progress bar to death.

Good mechanics should protect against both irrecoverable failure by RNG (because from gamist PoV any failure should be player's fault, otherwise you've got a shit game) and attrition (because from gamist PoV doing same thing repeatedly for the same purpose is boring and from simulationist PoV it causes all sorts of stupid, especially when you try to setup meaningful in-universe situations with it). Since you can't get good mechanics by scaling HP pool one way or another as it just transitions from one kind of absurdity to another, you need to:
  • Replace it with something more involved and since we are talking computer games, there is no reason for this something to not involve even things like complex collision detection to determine what part of combatant was hit and what are the consequences (by "part" I mean not just things like limb or torso, but individual armor pieces and, if penetration occurs either by defeating armour or bypassing it, organs and systems in the body). See the links I have provided above for more elaboration on this kind of mechanics.
  • Try inferring a sort of state machine describing combatant in combat and how it transit from one state to another when subjected to different kinds of attacks and marry it to some (ideally still more involved than HPs) secondary damage system (that handles consequences of minor wounding). For example if you manage to imbalance an enemy you might try to knock them down and then bypass HPs by coup de grace. This approach is inspired by Larian's status effect system and should in principle yield quite naturally flowing, yet abstract combat, but I am not convinced it would be workable and sufficient in practice, especially as primary combat system.
  • Some combination of both.

For example, Divinity Original Sin 2 has HP mechanics for armor
And it's generally agreed to be a worse game because of that.

Armor and Health do not need to be mechanically realized in a particular way to be armor or health, your fixed view only expresses your habits and preferences.
If you don't express armour and health as separate mechanics, you lose ability to differentiate between armour and health using mechanics. So you no longer can, for example have, say, an orcish barbarian and fully armoured knight that behave differently and require different tactics.
 

Cael

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LRN2RD, scrub.
Linking to a bunch of threads is not advancing an alternate system. It is shotgunning in the dark and hoping for a hit.

And no, I am not going to read through all that. Advance an alternate system. Briefly, concisely, coherently.
 

Spectacle

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I remember playing a tabletop RPG back in the day that had a wound state system: you could either be uninjured or lightly, seriously or critically wounded. Why isn't this just a 3HP system? Because injuries were not cumulative. Take light damage and you're now lightly wounded. Take light damage again and you're still only lightly wounded. Take serious damage and you're now seriously hurt, the light wound no longer matters.
 

AbounI

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You can have wounds to certain body parts like in Rimworld or Unreal World. That doesn't get rid of hp entirely (each body part has its own hp) but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than games where you can still fight at 100% effectiveness when you're 99% dead.
Don't you think it's a too hardcore feature which could force players to ragequit when a party member can loose his arm, leg or even be cut in two ?:

otv9P1Z.png


Of course it's a lovely system, but it's not made for everyone.
(courtesy of Felipepe paper)
 

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One of my favourite PnP systems so far, Mutants & Masterminds, has no hitpoints, but an injury system.

My memory is a bit foggy, since it has unfortunately been some years, but IIRC it went like this:

Basically, whenever you are hit, you roll to defend against the damage. You do receive an injury if you remain under the damage value in your roll.
The further away you are from the damage value, the worse the injury.
All injuries worse than the slightest (a bruise, I think?) cause a malus on that damage roll.
And if you are really far away from the damage value, you die (or go unconscious, etc.).

No hitpoints, yet sturdy characters will last longer because they will have better rolls against incoming damage to begin with.
 

Raghar

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Don't tabletop have some games with wounds and stuff instead of HP?
Yes.

One of the most known type is a Damage Threshold system.

In Savage Worlds, for example, characters have a Toughness rating (influenced by Vigor skill and armor). Damage is rolled against it. If damage is below the Toughness, it does nothing, if it is close to it, it Stuns the enemy, and if higher it deals a Wound (double stun = a wound). Each wound gives a cumulative -1 to all rolls, 3 wounds = Dying + Injury (you roll on an Injury table to see where the wound is localized and what effect it has -- it can be pretty brutal, possible permanent stat reduction). Red shirt enemies often can only have 1 wound and then they're out.

I'm kinda glad there is someone who mentioned another system, and I don't have to use my PhD equivalent in game development from 15 years ago to actually show alternative system.

This kind of system is often used in table top wargames where a quick and fast combat resolution is needed. It has few flaws, but it removes HP bloat and some disadvantages of HP systems.

One of main disadvantage is the result is often too binary, in wargames where 30 soldiers are killed per round on average, it doesn't matter that much, the average situation is the same.
Compare Dominions 4 with COE4.
 

DraQ

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One more thing - it generally helps to think of it that health, just like saving throws, doesn't really exist for player's benefit. Good tactics shouldn't rely on soaking up damage, or at least not on soaking up damage with your flesh. Health should be something that doesn't let player predicate their tactics on reliably taking down particular (aware and actively defending themselves) enemy here and now.

Of course player does benefit, from having beefy character or good saving throws as it helps recover from otherwise disastrous errors and risks, but tanks, as name suggests, require adequate armour, first and foremost.

In the end, good gameplay system should never require nor benefit from performing the same action against the same target for the same effect twice in a row.
 

Siobhan

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That there are alternatives is pretty clear if you look at it mathematically. The limits are mostly imposed by setting and either user interface (CRPG) or complexity of calculations (PNP).
Some quick thoughts:

1. A standard HP model is the algebra of natural numbers with subtraction. A character has a certain number of HP, and from that we can deduct numerical values until we reach 0. What number is deducted depends on the rest of the system (AC, parrying, natural resistances, etc), and depending on the deduction special events may be emitted (e.g. wounds for high subtractions or HP dropping below a certain threshold). Let's ignore these additional factors and focus just on the algebra.

2. The first generalization is to consider any well-founded linear order instead of just natural numbers. Then we can have just general categories like death < critical wound < heavy wound < light wound < a-okay.

3. Once we look at arbitrary linear orders, it makes sense to consider other operators. If we use min instead of subtraction, we get the system Spectacle describes.

4. Of course we can have multiple independent linear orders (each one with its own operator, if desired). For instance, a character might have multiple values such as physical, stamina, sanity, poison, which correspond to specific attack types. As soon as one of them reaches the bottom of the hierarchy, the character is incapacitated (and possibly dead, depending on other rules of the system). If I remember correctly this is similar to what you have in Renowned Explorers.

5. We could also take a hint from number theory and move to a system where multiple orders are linked to each other. For example with imaginary numbers. A concrete example: suppose you have an RPG where characters can shift between a physical form and an astral form. While they each can have different HP-systems attached to them, we do not want them to be completely separate --- if you're almost dead in one domain, you shouldn't be all powerful in the other. So we set them up as a two-axis system like the upper right quadrant of a coordinate system, and we use imaginary numbers to shift between the two axes in specific ways.

6. The previous system is also suitable for a gradient system of combat stances. For instance, damage in defensive mode works differently from offensive mode. But rather than a binary choice, the user can weigh the two, doing something like 75% offensive and 25% defensive. This corresponds to a particular rotation in this two-axis system, and hence to a specific multiplication with an imaginary number.

7. Quite generally, you can treat an HP system as an n-dimensional vector space and then define specific operations within this vector space.

8. Alternatively, we could go back to point 2 and instead generalize from a linear order to a partial order or even Boolean algebra. Among other things, this would allow for a more elaborate wound system such that if a user already has "broken arm" and "concussion", they automatically also have the least upper bound of the two, which would be, say, "comatose".

9. If you want to get really creative, you'll move to cyclic structures, e.g. the algebra of natural numbers modulo n. This is more like a dial that you can cycle through several positions. For instance, attacks would no longer do damage but rather cycle the status of enemies. So an animal might switch between fearful and blind rage. If you combine that with a system where certain statuses like rage spread through a mob, a fight can turn into a puzzle of how to get all the enemies into a fearful state so that they flee/surrender.

Quite generally, the world is your oyster once you're willing to think a bit outside the box. But the more outside the box you think, the harder it will be for the player to understand how the system works. I think for cRPGs that can be offset by good UI design and explicit information about the possible results of any given decision, but few cRPGs are so heavy on mechanics that all the extra effort would have a sufficiently large pay-off compared to just an HP system.
 

DraQ

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2. The first generalization is to consider any well-founded linear order instead of just natural numbers. Then we can have just general categories like death < critical wound < heavy wound < light wound < a-okay.

3. Once we look at arbitrary linear orders, it makes sense to consider other operators. If we use min instead of subtraction, we get the system Spectacle describes.
Of course, the downside in this case is that character will survive arbitrary number of heavy wounds.

8. Alternatively, we could go back to point 2 and instead generalize from a linear order to a partial order or even Boolean algebra. Among other things, this would allow for a more elaborate wound system such that if a user already has "broken arm" and "concussion", they automatically also have the least upper bound of the two, which would be, say, "comatose".
That would be quite close to the second (state machine) concept I have proposed, although I have seen it as a more general directed graph with arcs associated with sets of effects that would move the state machine from one state to another.

Still, I think that on a computer you really can benefit from abandoning minimalistic, but mathematically elegant systems in favour of going to whole different level of abstraction, more appropriate for the task, or using hybrid of both systems.
For example, basic physical damage state should IMO be handled as concretely as possible, so should determining hit location and effect, using exact geometry and whatnot.

9. If you want to get really creative, you'll move to cyclic structures, e.g. the algebra of natural numbers modulo n. This is more like a dial that you can cycle through several positions. For instance, attacks would no longer do damage but rather cycle the status of enemies. So an animal might switch between fearful and blind rage. If you combine that with a system where certain statuses like rage spread through a mob, a fight can turn into a puzzle of how to get all the enemies into a fearful state so that they flee/surrender.
Now, that probably won't be too useful for your typical damage system and there are probably better ways of realizing AI. Might be interesting for some particularly bizarre enemies, though.

Quite generally, the world is your oyster once you're willing to think a bit outside the box. But the more outside the box you think, the harder it will be for the player to understand how the system works. I think for cRPGs that can be offset by good UI design and explicit information about the possible results of any given decision, but few cRPGs are so heavy on mechanics that all the extra effort would have a sufficiently large pay-off compared to just an HP system.
The main sin of cRPGs is that, due to their PnP RPG heritage where all calculations had to be explicit, simple and human compatible, dashboard is treated as equivalent to the engine. This is folly as this severely limits the complexity of the mechanics. The game shouldn't be obliged to provide exact information of its working to the player, and in most genres it just doesn't. As long as player can make sense of what's happening, for example because it is based on RL to a sufficient degree for player to use their built-in heuristics known as "experience" and "intuition", all is well.
 

luj1

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I welcome any innovation e.g. wounds systems in games such as Copper Dreams/Neo Scavenger. However, there is nothing inherently wrong with HP. If a game which employs HP sucks its probably for another reason.
 

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