Petition to remove the hitpoint health system from all future RPGs

[Siobhan]

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.

I both agree and disagree. If one wants to be simulationist at all, then I agree that one should go all the way and produce a proper simulation with tons of variables that are too complex to reason about explicitly. But in anything turn-based, which is how I like my RPGs most of the time, I want a highly abstracted experience instead where a few simple primitives give rise to tons of complex pattern thanks to combinatorial explosion.

 

[gestalt11]

A single shot can kill but only if: it is in the right place (stab someone in the heart) or so huge it destroys enough tissue to indiscriminately destroy the right place ( a missile).

A single shot can disable a working limb under similar conditions (the tendon of a limb or blow the limb off ).

Hit point systems do not capture the first condition which can happen via luck or skill but they don't do this for a very fundamental reason; RPG are abstractions of an incredibly complex physical scenario and they abstract things out via what is essentially a statistical based model.

There have been some system that tried to overlay other model on top of HP to deal with the loss of fidelity that happens in any abstraction for example the wound system of Warhammer Fantasy RPG (note that HP in WHFB is radically different than D&D). For PnP puproses these have often been overly cumbersome, but of a computer game you can push most of that encumberance onto software and it is mostly alleviated. This is typically not done because the devs make an evaluation that understanding the system itself is too complex for players (which I think is dubious).

In general the idea that the overall body or a limb on the body has a certain amount of damage it can sustain is a highly flawed abstraction. It does not actually take much damage at all to kill or completely disable a limb, although it must be noted the greater the damage to more likely these things are to happen of course. If you cut the right artery some can bleed out very very fast and you may have done very little damage in total. However cutting such an artery is not at all easy because they are positioned into places that are not exactly easy to and are naturally highly protected by the behaviors of your opponent (even untrained people will highly protect their groin and armpit arteries). So you are not actually very likely to hit these. Similarly other "critical points" are typically highly protected by armor, the neck is typically protected by a gorget-type of thing. The gut/chest is almost always heavily protected.

The creators of D&D understood this to some degree and in point of fact HP are not really meant to represent physical damage. One of the main abstractions of D&D is that HP also repesents a character's martial ability to minimize physical damage. Thus fighters do not have 2.5x the HP of magic-users due to being more physically fit, because you would have to be utterly ignorant to create such a stupid abstraction when single thrust to the inside of the thigh can kill the most physically fit person. Rather AC is about hitting because one typically needed to slide through the gaps of armor thus the "to-hit" and then a fighter would be trained to re-position and/or partially guard any hit that did slip through and thus would have more "HP" because he was turning a hit into a graze where as for a magic user it would be a full hit. The creators of the D&D system were fully aware that this was a very flawed abstraction but for the sake of moving a game along at a decent pace they considered it an acceptable compromise. There were of course tons of just plain silly corner cases.

But then we get an RPG like Pillar's of Eternity which uses HP but has a whole hit/crit/graze system, but clearly the HP of POE is not the same abstraction as that of D&D. In D&D HP itself was the hit/graze system and was purposely designed to prevent an extra roll and just wrapped up the statistics of it into the HP formula. Now POE is a computer based system and having many extra rolls to simulate this sort of thing is not actually a bad thing. But in order to do this you need to re-think what HP means because by adding that extra roll/concept you must necessarily make HP more a representation of overall physical damage rather skill/behavior.

This is the heart of the problem with the vast majority of HP systems, they copied D&D but they have no idea of the vast compromises D&D did to move the game along and it is explicitly stated in the original 1st edition DM's guide that HP is far more than just a representation of physical damage. While in the case of some monster it may actually be almost exclusively that, you can get the exact reverse in the case of a high level fighter. Why else would an elephant wind up with roughly similar HP to a 9th level fighter?

It really doesn't matter how big or small or strong or weak you are a dagger in the gut will kill a human (although that is a slow death which is also not captured in most RPG systems). But trying to kill a bear in the same way is not a good thing to try since physically bears musculature and fat make getting enough penetration to flat out kill extremely hard and dangerous, however it is actually possible to kill a bare with no weapon at all as a human: https://huckberry.com/journal/posts/man-kills-grizzly-with-hands-and-teeth. In this case the human was actually unable to rip out the bears jugular and in fact choked it unconscius via a blood choke with his teeth then killed it while it was passed out.

It would be incredibly hard to model an RPG system that could capture a battle like that, but it is feasible to have far less abstractions in a computer game since you can have far more rolls. However most RPGs always come back to HP but they almost always do so not really addressing the original abstraction they took from D&D which is a truly huge abstraction. HP in 1st edition D&D abstracted out an incredible amount of things. If you have an RPG system where HP is mostly about "physical damage" and fighters still have 2.5 times the HP of mages, then you have doen something fundamentally wrong.

 

[Ellef]

All of these HP alternatives are intellectual wankery. Unnecessary complications on a system non autists have no issue with, where X number of hits means you're dead, modified by multiple factors.

 

[Cael]

All of these HP alternatives are intellectual wankery. Unnecessary complications on a system non autists have no issue with, where X number of hits means you're dead, modified by multiple factors.

Multiple factors that include weapon type and armour worn. Which is exactly what the HP system in DnD does, ironically.

 

[Iznaliu]

All of these HP alternatives are intellectual wankery. Unnecessary complications on a system non autists have no issue with, where X number of hits means you're dead, modified by multiple factors.

I agree with you that most of the HP alternatives in this thread fail to advance the genre, but that doesn't mean making a good one is impossible.

 

[Cael]

Fallout has a pretty decent crippling system that is simple to understand and with combat impacting wounds but also relatively easily healed after combat. However, to translate that system to tabletop would be a nightmare of dice rolling (roll to hit, roll to crit, roll for crit effect, roll damage, roll knockdown/knockout, all for one pull of the trigger; good luck if you use a burst weapon).

 

[Ismaul]

Fallout has a pretty decent crippling system

It goes on top of the HP system, does it not?

HPs are a pacing mechanism, a buffer before combat-ending blows to allow for the gameplay and the tactics to happen. Else, fights might be over by whomever wins initiative, making all other mechanics futile, be it character builds, combat actions, consumables, and equipment.

 

[grimace]

The problem with being injuried giving a negative modifier to combat effectiveness has been know for a while in PnP. We call it the Death Spiral.

Once you start going down, there's very little chances of coming back, because if you went down then it means the fight was already hard, and so with diminished effectiveness it most likely becomes harder if not impossible.

This is the point in which I load a previous save and try again.

In pen and paper the Dungeon Master would not allow this.

If you change the HP system in your cRPG how will you design your save system?

 

[Cael]

It goes on top of the HP system, does it not?

HPs are a pacing mechanism, a buffer before combat-ending blows to allow for the gameplay and the tactics to happen. Else, fights might be over by whomever wins initiative, making all other mechanics futile, be it character builds, combat actions, consumables, and equipment.

Yes. That system sits on top of the HP system.

I agree with you with regards to HP being a pacing mechanism. One of the problems with Fallout is that you can aim for the head or eyes and instant kill things. In fact, a crit build aimed at maximising damage or gunning for instant kills with every shot is practically a requirement for Fallout because you're going to get tooled otherwise. I am talking Fallout and Fallout 2 here, by the way. I don't truck with FPS masquearding as RPGs, although I don't mind FPS per se (was a CS player back in the day; too much sniper rifle love led to me being banned from using it ). It restricts your options in terms of character. For example, in Fallout 2, your Level 9 and 24 perks are basically pre-filled in. By the time you start on the Enclave, you had better have something that can crit through all that power armour or you are in deep doo-doo. And if you try to fight Horrigan without a crit based character and without the traitor squad and the turrets on your side? Yeah, good luck.

You may think that what I am saying is a case against HP, but the opposite is actually true. You see, it is the bloody crits and the instant kills that is causing the problem. When everyone else has it, you had better have it, too. That is why most other systems just plain don't work. Fallout only marginally works because you can heal crippled limbs with one Doctor roll, which doesn't even require any resource for you to use other than skill points. Yeah, it may be great and realistic when you are fighting one on one in that both of you have equal chance in killing and crippling one another, but if you are the protagonist of a game, it is ONE of you vs THOUSANDS of them. So what if one of them gets crippled and takes forever to heal? YOU, on the other hand...

 

[SCO]

There are several games where 'winning the initiative' is a encounter ender and they're not unfun. The difference between those and a bad rpg is that 'winning the initiative' is determined by solid planning during the encounter, and efficiency moving to advantageous positions, not a numerical abstraction of a ordered list of opponents at 10 feet. Last game i tried like that was Valkyria Chronicles 3 and i'd take 1 rpgs with that system (and level design) over a 10 abstract simulations full of crunch every time.

Even a 'simulation' that replaces HP can be fun, if the whole design makes it possible for the player to be active at all stages, and maybe inject one or more component that takes player skill. Puritanism in rpgs is good to avoid 'yet another action game calling itself a rpg' syndrome, but not good for actual innovation.

Granted that system is a elegant mix of phase based and realtime movement so it's not suited for TB fetish.

 

[adrix89]

The whole DnD HP are about luck, skill, concentration thing excuse.
They are Lying.
If a mage throws a fireball that turns an area into an inferno, what is the HP fire damage supposed to be? Are you sweating luck? Do you dodge the flames?
What about poison damage? Are you sweating poison?
And at last what if you are paralyzed or sleeping? Is that 1d4 dagger in the mage hands so unskilled that they are missing your jugular? Do you doge in your sleep?

HP is an abstraction for body damage. Be honest. Critical damage is something particularly nasty happening in your body.

 

[DavidBVal]

Vampire's Health Levels system was pretty elegant, simple and realistic.

For those not knowing it, everybody has 7 possible "injury" levels, each with an associated penalty:

So everybody had the same health levels, but a character with higher STA could soak up part of the damage. Let's say a sword swing does 5 damage, a regular human (STA 2) would take on average 4 damage, a top STA human would take 2-3. This solves the most common issues associated with hps: no inflation, wounded characters are penalised, etc.

Now that was a very realistic system and in theory is great, isn't it. But how well would it translate to a cRPG? For most rpgs, poorly. Vampires can heal easily and quickly, even in mif-fight, which makes the system good for a vampire game. And it was not a combat-centered RPG, at all. If you try to use this for a dungeon crawler, chances are it will kill the fun. Nobody likes to run around with huge penalties, so in the end what you do is force everyone to constantly heal between fights, and prepare yourself to use a lot of bandages/healing spells/potions with all the clicking and inventory management that implies. Plus forget about progression, imagine in the endgame you have attacks that do 2x damage compared to the beginning. It becomes too lethal to be fun.

WFRP 1st edition was a very good compromise. It is a HP system, (called them "Wounds", not HP) but it was non-inflationist within a system in which damage indeed scaled up. Average human has 7hp, and the most resilient hero ever has 16hp. Each blow typically deducts 1D6 or a bit more, depending on stats, armor, weapons, etc. 0hp didn't mean you die, but it meant a chance to become incapacitated plus any further damage would incur in scary critical hits, and half of them were lethal. Add to this that every natural 6 rolled had a big chance of being a crit and keep rolling and adding, repeating in case of another 6.

WFRP health system had other problems (naked dwarf syndrome) but it is probably my favorite system for a combat centered RPG. Damage feels scary, yet you can deal with a few wounds and keep going. More importantly, it still allows your character progression to allow you to gain "+1 Wound" and make you feel it makes a big difference. At the end of the day, we're all little mice in our Skinner boxes and if after a full game session we don't see our little numbers going up, even by a little, we feel sad, don't we?

 

[Naveen]

The whole DnD HP are about luck, skill, concentration thing excuse.
They are Lying.

That interpretation was there from the very beginning and has been confirmed by Tim Kask, who betatested D&D in the 70s. It's how Gygax and co. played and it's how they understood the game.

If a mage throws a fireball that turns an area into an inferno, what is the HP fire damage supposed to be? Are you sweating luck? Do you dodge the flames?

No, you roll, duck, find cover, spit into the fire/whateveryoulike and take less damage than the lvl 1 normies. This is really a staple of actions movies: the hero jumps at the last moment before the grenade goes off and instead of being eviscerated (like the rest of NPCs) he is wounded but not dead. Really, high-level characters are exactly that: action heroes. You need to understand that your hero is John McClane. 8+ level characters are literally superheroes (that's the title they had in old editions, a fourth-level character was a "hero.")

What about poison damage? Are you sweating poison?

Poison damage is a saving roll which ignores HPs and some were instakill (in fact, originally, it was quite common,) although some reduce HPs even if you fail. The damage is, however, high enough to kill normal humans. Again, it's just the same logic, HP are as much hero points as hit points. Keep in mind that D&D was inspired by the sword & sorcery genre, and that's the genre it tried to emulate, and those heroes (Conan et. al) were badasses.

And at last what if you are paralyzed or sleeping? Is that 1d4 dagger in the mage hands so unskilled that they are missing your jugular? Do you doge in your sleep?

If your character is sleeping, tied, or paralyzed (and has no allies nearby) the damage is instakill, that was in the official rules by the way.

 

[gaussgunner]

The whole DnD HP are about luck, skill, concentration thing excuse.
They are Lying.
If a mage throws a fireball that turns an area into an inferno, what is the HP fire damage supposed to be? Are you sweating luck? Do you dodge the flames?
What about poison damage? Are you sweating poison?
And at last what if you are paralyzed or sleeping? Is that 1d4 dagger in the mage hands so unskilled that they are missing your jugular? Do you doge in your sleep?

HP is an abstraction for body damage. Be honest. Critical damage is something particularly nasty happening in your body.

It's an abstraction of luck, skill, concentration, body damage, panic, and anything else.
Maybe a fireball is just a flash of flame, not like napalm that sticks to you and boils your flesh in burning oil. Maybe your higher level characters have thicker skin, sweat more in combat due to their higher stamina, feel less pain, or have enough experience not to go into a hypochondriac panic "oh god I'm on fire, I'm gonna die!!" everytime a mere fireball singes the hair off their arms.

Sleeping? Yeah that's not a realistic combat mechanic anyway. Nobody "gets drowsy" in a fight to the death. If you get knocked out by a head injury you are as good as dead.
I like how the Shadowrun crpgs handle it: some attacks distract you, which subtracts AP. If your AP drops below 1 you're helpless for that round, and you're easy to hit and crit.

Vampire's Health Levels system was pretty elegant, simple and realistic.

For those not knowing it, everybody has 7 possible "injury" levels, each with an associated penalty:

So everybody had the same health levels, but a character with higher STA could soak up part of the damage. Let's say a sword swing does 5 damage, a regular human (STA 2) would take on average 4 damage, a top STA human would take 2-3. This solves the most common issues associated with hps: no inflation, wounded characters are penalised, etc.

Now that was a very realistic system and in theory is great, isn't it. But how well would it translate to a cRPG?

I think VTM Bloodlines changed that to a continuous 0-100% health bar and dropped the wound penalties (the risk of getting instakilled is enough). There's no HP bloat. You can only get better armor and increase a few stats to soak up damage and dodge attacks. Works well for a game that's mostly about the story.

 

[Cael]

I think VTM Bloodlines changed that to a continuous 0-100% health bar and dropped the wound penalties (the risk of getting instakilled is enough). There's no HP bloat. You can only get better armor and increase a few stats to soak up damage and dodge attacks. Works well for a game that's mostly about the story.

Depends. If you get a clan that has Fortitude, you can basically end up being a walking tank.

 

[Üstad]

An improvment of Deus Ex hp mechanics would be nice to be standardized.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Numerically represented HP is the best thing ever. Why wouldn't more RPGs (looking at you, PoE!) include it?

 

[grimace]

An improvment of Deus Ex hp mechanics would be nice to be standardized.

I love this old thread.

Vampire's Health Levels system was pretty elegant, simple and realistic.

For those not knowing it, everybody has 7 possible "injury" levels, each with an associated penalty:

So everybody had the same health levels, but a character with higher STA could soak up part of the damage. Let's say a sword swing does 5 damage, a regular human (STA 2) would take on average 4 damage, a top STA human would take 2-3. This solves the most common issues associated with hps: no inflation, wounded characters are penalised, etc.

Now that was a very realistic system and in theory is great, isn't it. But how well would it translate to a cRPG? For most rpgs, poorly. Vampires can heal easily and quickly, even in mif-fight, which makes the system good for a vampire game. And it was not a combat-centered RPG, at all. If you try to use this for a dungeon crawler, chances are it will kill the fun. Nobody likes to run around with huge penalties, so in the end what you do is force everyone to constantly heal between fights, and prepare yourself to use a lot of bandages/healing spells/potions with all the clicking and inventory management that implies. Plus forget about progression, imagine in the endgame you have attacks that do 2x damage compared to the beginning. It becomes too lethal to be fun.

WFRP 1st edition was a very good compromise. It is a HP system, (called them "Wounds", not HP) but it was non-inflationist within a system in which damage indeed scaled up. Average human has 7hp, and the most resilient hero ever has 16hp. Each blow typically deducts 1D6 or a bit more, depending on stats, armor, weapons, etc. 0hp didn't mean you die, but it meant a chance to become incapacitated plus any further damage would incur in scary critical hits, and half of them were lethal. Add to this that every natural 6 rolled had a big chance of being a crit and keep rolling and adding, repeating in case of another 6.

WFRP health system had other problems (naked dwarf syndrome) but it is probably my favorite system for a combat centered RPG. Damage feels scary, yet you can deal with a few wounds and keep going. More importantly, it still allows your character progression to allow you to gain "+1 Wound" and make you feel it makes a big difference. At the end of the day, we're all little mice in our Skinner boxes and if after a full game session we don't see our little numbers going up, even by a little, we feel sad, don't we?

At the end of the day, we're all little mice in our Skinner boxes and if after a full game session we don't see our little numbers going up, even by a little, we feel sad, don't we? Don't we?