The Hit Point Problem
With the revised GSL for D&D 4E just released and my latest mini-campaign almost complete, I've been pondering role playing games again. Obviously, that involves musing upon my Quixotic quest to make my Dream RPG, wondering what things I love about the games I play, what things I hate, and what things I think can be improved. And today this lead me to think upon that most iconic and pervasive problematic game mechanic of Dungeons and Dragons: the lowly hit point.
The hit point problem is not just confined to D&D, mind you. No, it has spread, like a hereditary disease, throughout all of the versions of Dungeons and Dragons, its multitudes of derivatives, and become a cornerstone of not just the pen-and-paper RPG industry but the entire video game industry itself. Whether you wish to call them hit points, vitality points, health levels, life, hearts, or energy tanks, they all serve the same purpose: to determine, quantitatively, just how long an individual character can remain an active participant in a combat situation (as a side note, my favorite HP name remains the term used in Sidewinder d20, where it is known as “grit”). In the video game industry, hit points are taken for granted and rarely ever even thought about, leaving it to those that created the concept to truly ponder its ramifications.
The problem with the hit point is that it was integrated from the get-go into the concept of resilience against injury; how much damage a physical body could sustain without dying. With D&D's escalating hit point accumulation, this becomes a problem almost as soon as player characters start gaining levels. Exactly where a person draws the line of incredulity varies: some people have a problem with a fighter taking hundreds of arrows from an army of archers without any real effect, others become annoyed when a player character has a knife to her throat and just shrugs off the 1d4 points of damage, and still others have problems with the idea that a high-level D&D character can fall out of orbit and take only 20d6 (for a paltry average of 70 points of damage, easily survivable by any non-magic user after 10th level or so). While even at the beginning, Gary Gygax wanted to declare that hit points were an abstract mechanic and that a 10th-level fighter taking 6 points of damage wasn't the same as a 1st-level thief suffering the same, the flavor rarely corresponded with this (most specifically, hit points could only be recovered by spells called “cure serious wounds” and such, not “recover from being attacked but not seriously injured”). And so, in the mind-spaces of most gamers, hit points have a direct relationship with actual physical injury.
While one could describe hit points as a character's ability to dodge attacks, this works better in games (like D&D) with no real means of avoiding attacks then in games (like...well, pretty much almost any other moderately-simulationist RPG) with an actual mechanic focused on dodging. And even in D&D, it is not the swift and agile characters with all of the hit points, but those described as big and beefy and able to take lots of wounds without flinching. I've heard countless ways of redefining and re-describing hit points within a D&D framework, but they generally fail due to the fact that an equivalent mechanic already exists, such as Armor Class, Reflex saves, Defense rolls, or similar mechanics in variant systems. Duplicating described effects with two different game mechanics is confusing for everyone, and is an inelegant solution to this problem.
(In case anyone is wondering, 4E has not only not solved this dilemma, but actually compounded it by adding “healing surges” into the mix. With the inclusion of allowing warlords to “heal” by giving pep talks, 4E really doesn't seem to know what it wants hit points to be. Again, the designers constantly claim that hit points are an abstraction and combine taking damage with avoiding attacks, but the countless threads on ENWorld arguing about “quantum damage” and characters in an “indeterminate state of being healed and not healed” seem to show that their audience isn't buying it. It's not clean or obvious, and the actual players of the game seem to be reacting to it.)
Which, of course, leads me to my answer for my Dream RPG (or at least, my answer for now). In this game, characters would have some kind of “health” mechanic, which is lost whenever a character is successfully attacked; however, this mechanic would be low and very few attacks would be necessary to slay even the most accomplished of characters. Instead, player characters would possess a pool of 1d6's called “fate dice” and represent a character's luck, good fortune, and the will of the story to keep them alive. These dice can be used whenever a character needs to make a check, but they are particularly intended to keep them alive: whenever they are successfully attacked, they can use 1 or more of their fate dice to make sure that attack actually failed. Thus, fate dice become the mechanic that determines how long a character can remain active in a combat situation (thus, hit points), but are divorced from any correlation to their actual physical health. Likewise, as the system already includes a Defense roll mechanic, agile characters already have a mechanic to describe how they do what they do; conversely, the system will include armor as Damage Reduction, to give those wearing heavy armor something that differentiates them.
An interesting side-effect to this mechanic is that fate dice become hit points that apply to more then just physical injury. Shortly before the announcement of 4E, a new idea was emerging around ENWorld that if hit points were defined as I've stated elsewhere in this post, then it isn't fair that so many status effects exist that simply bypass them. Although I never saw anything concrete, quite a few mechanically-inclined gamers were considering how to turn hit points into a mechanic that works against not just sword swings, but spells that hold, charm, paralyze, petrify, and outright kill characters. While that was not its original intent, fate dice can do just that, since they can be used with any “saving throw” just as easily as any Defense roll.
Also, fate dice offer up a convent way of describing “mooks:” they are anyone that doesn't have their own pool of fate dice. While each major NPC should have their own pool of fate dice, the GM should have a general pool that applies to all other NPCs. And thus, while these minor NPCs could be mechanically identical to a PC in every other way, the GM could just decide not to spend one of his fate dice to save them from a particularly gruesome attack. When fighting a group of such NPCs, the players are facing off against a single fate dice pool, regardless of the number of opponents: they are more of a single entity in this regard.
Finally, fate dice can be used to set the level of cinematic physics exist within the setting. The fewer fate dice that the players have available to them, the more grim and dangerous the setting becomes, as they have very limited resources to avoid the worst of assaults upon them. On the other hand, players with an overabundance of fate dice will not feel compelled to horde them for strictly defense, and can use them to pull off otherwise impossible stunts semi-regularly; likewise, they can easily mimic the Stormtrooper Effect even when facing accomplished attackers, since they have so many fate dice to spend.
Just something I was thinking about today before and after I took a Building Codes test (open book, open note, open Internet! Whee!). As usual, comments, concerns, and criticisms are always welcome!
The hit point problem is not just confined to D&D, mind you. No, it has spread, like a hereditary disease, throughout all of the versions of Dungeons and Dragons, its multitudes of derivatives, and become a cornerstone of not just the pen-and-paper RPG industry but the entire video game industry itself. Whether you wish to call them hit points, vitality points, health levels, life, hearts, or energy tanks, they all serve the same purpose: to determine, quantitatively, just how long an individual character can remain an active participant in a combat situation (as a side note, my favorite HP name remains the term used in Sidewinder d20, where it is known as “grit”). In the video game industry, hit points are taken for granted and rarely ever even thought about, leaving it to those that created the concept to truly ponder its ramifications.
The problem with the hit point is that it was integrated from the get-go into the concept of resilience against injury; how much damage a physical body could sustain without dying. With D&D's escalating hit point accumulation, this becomes a problem almost as soon as player characters start gaining levels. Exactly where a person draws the line of incredulity varies: some people have a problem with a fighter taking hundreds of arrows from an army of archers without any real effect, others become annoyed when a player character has a knife to her throat and just shrugs off the 1d4 points of damage, and still others have problems with the idea that a high-level D&D character can fall out of orbit and take only 20d6 (for a paltry average of 70 points of damage, easily survivable by any non-magic user after 10th level or so). While even at the beginning, Gary Gygax wanted to declare that hit points were an abstract mechanic and that a 10th-level fighter taking 6 points of damage wasn't the same as a 1st-level thief suffering the same, the flavor rarely corresponded with this (most specifically, hit points could only be recovered by spells called “cure serious wounds” and such, not “recover from being attacked but not seriously injured”). And so, in the mind-spaces of most gamers, hit points have a direct relationship with actual physical injury.
While one could describe hit points as a character's ability to dodge attacks, this works better in games (like D&D) with no real means of avoiding attacks then in games (like...well, pretty much almost any other moderately-simulationist RPG) with an actual mechanic focused on dodging. And even in D&D, it is not the swift and agile characters with all of the hit points, but those described as big and beefy and able to take lots of wounds without flinching. I've heard countless ways of redefining and re-describing hit points within a D&D framework, but they generally fail due to the fact that an equivalent mechanic already exists, such as Armor Class, Reflex saves, Defense rolls, or similar mechanics in variant systems. Duplicating described effects with two different game mechanics is confusing for everyone, and is an inelegant solution to this problem.
(In case anyone is wondering, 4E has not only not solved this dilemma, but actually compounded it by adding “healing surges” into the mix. With the inclusion of allowing warlords to “heal” by giving pep talks, 4E really doesn't seem to know what it wants hit points to be. Again, the designers constantly claim that hit points are an abstraction and combine taking damage with avoiding attacks, but the countless threads on ENWorld arguing about “quantum damage” and characters in an “indeterminate state of being healed and not healed” seem to show that their audience isn't buying it. It's not clean or obvious, and the actual players of the game seem to be reacting to it.)
Which, of course, leads me to my answer for my Dream RPG (or at least, my answer for now). In this game, characters would have some kind of “health” mechanic, which is lost whenever a character is successfully attacked; however, this mechanic would be low and very few attacks would be necessary to slay even the most accomplished of characters. Instead, player characters would possess a pool of 1d6's called “fate dice” and represent a character's luck, good fortune, and the will of the story to keep them alive. These dice can be used whenever a character needs to make a check, but they are particularly intended to keep them alive: whenever they are successfully attacked, they can use 1 or more of their fate dice to make sure that attack actually failed. Thus, fate dice become the mechanic that determines how long a character can remain active in a combat situation (thus, hit points), but are divorced from any correlation to their actual physical health. Likewise, as the system already includes a Defense roll mechanic, agile characters already have a mechanic to describe how they do what they do; conversely, the system will include armor as Damage Reduction, to give those wearing heavy armor something that differentiates them.
An interesting side-effect to this mechanic is that fate dice become hit points that apply to more then just physical injury. Shortly before the announcement of 4E, a new idea was emerging around ENWorld that if hit points were defined as I've stated elsewhere in this post, then it isn't fair that so many status effects exist that simply bypass them. Although I never saw anything concrete, quite a few mechanically-inclined gamers were considering how to turn hit points into a mechanic that works against not just sword swings, but spells that hold, charm, paralyze, petrify, and outright kill characters. While that was not its original intent, fate dice can do just that, since they can be used with any “saving throw” just as easily as any Defense roll.
Also, fate dice offer up a convent way of describing “mooks:” they are anyone that doesn't have their own pool of fate dice. While each major NPC should have their own pool of fate dice, the GM should have a general pool that applies to all other NPCs. And thus, while these minor NPCs could be mechanically identical to a PC in every other way, the GM could just decide not to spend one of his fate dice to save them from a particularly gruesome attack. When fighting a group of such NPCs, the players are facing off against a single fate dice pool, regardless of the number of opponents: they are more of a single entity in this regard.
Finally, fate dice can be used to set the level of cinematic physics exist within the setting. The fewer fate dice that the players have available to them, the more grim and dangerous the setting becomes, as they have very limited resources to avoid the worst of assaults upon them. On the other hand, players with an overabundance of fate dice will not feel compelled to horde them for strictly defense, and can use them to pull off otherwise impossible stunts semi-regularly; likewise, they can easily mimic the Stormtrooper Effect even when facing accomplished attackers, since they have so many fate dice to spend.
Just something I was thinking about today before and after I took a Building Codes test (open book, open note, open Internet! Whee!). As usual, comments, concerns, and criticisms are always welcome!