The fuck are hit points

>I think the problem is that in most systems you can take a bullet several times before falling down.

You know there are people who survive what is supposed to be an execution by firing squad, right?

One dude got shot like three times in the face and a few times in the body and he survived AND recovered.

f u c k

People survive stuff like that but I don't think they will return fire or continue running or hacking or spellcasting or whatever. They will be incapacitated for the moment.

>One dude got shot like three times in the face and a few times in the body and he survived AND recovered.
yeah but thats hardly the common occurrence that happens in rpgs

Nechronica has an interesting variant.

Everytime you take damage, you lose Parts which represent your body and some of your abilities.

Some Parts are made solely for you to dump damage in such as Guts which do nothing and Maggots which come back after the fight.

If you take enough damage, you start having to put damage into useful Parts such as your legs, arms, eyes, ect. This also applies to your equipment so you can lose your swords, guns and so on.

The way to regain Parts is that after combat, the number of foes you beat drop X amount of Parts to help replace those you lost.

It can get weird since as long as you have 1 Part left, you can't die. I once had a player who was stuck as a Hand for awhile.

Well most people in RPGs aren't normal people.

I've always headcanoned hp as some combination of luck and fortitude, they are pretty abstract tho.
I like better the systems where losing hitpoints actually hinders you before you die, like in Runequest, where your each hit location has their hitpoints and getting even to negative hp doesnt necessarily kill you outright, although you get severely hindered.

Surely the best system has some sort of balance?

On the one hand you don't want every nick and scratch incapacitating your players but on the other you hand you can still implement some penalties to your combat effectiveness when you are wounded

Here's how a realistic system would work. There's four kinds of injuries, with penalties for each.
>Fatal
You lose.
>Mortal
Maybe you can stab the other guy back before you trip over your intestines.
>Debilitating
You lose bodily functions temporarily or permanently, but you're probably not going to die from your wounds.
>Significant
Reduce your stamina and take penalties to checks that require that limb, or penalties to everything for body/head wounds.

The system relies heavily on stamina, and fights between individuals typically last less than ten seconds from when the first blow lands, unless they're trying not to hurt each other badly.

...

Eh, hp is simple enough for some games.
For a homebrew game I thought about using sort of stamina/light/severe/mortal-ticks. Stamina regenerates after each combat, light wounds rather quickly, heavier take longer etc. Stamina goes first, after which light is targeted, severe next... Criticals bypass stamina, having a wound in category gives penalty etc.

You think our player characters are average people?

Nigga we can play bird people, half demons, half giants, and half kings.

None of those are regular. Regulars for their race, maybe, but not to the average human.

This keeps getting posted, and keeps being useless. OP is ASKING for alternative systems for HP, and guess what: Not D&D is not an alternative system for HP. If you aren't contributing, then fuck off.

My house-rule is this: if a person has total damage (lethal + nonlethal) equal to half his maximum HP, he is Fatigued. If he has taken total damage equal to three-quarters of his maximum HP, he is Exhausted. That way HP loss does have some states in between "fine" and "unconscious".

>Not D&D is not an alternative system for HP.
It literally is, because guess what: most other RPGs don't have this problem, it's almost exclusive to D&D and its derivatives.

>D&D is the only game with hit points

Or you go the TRoS and successors rout where getting injured is the end result of a failed defense and combat revolves around actively defending as well as attacking.

>What is reading comprehension, anyway?

Hit points aren't a problem, because every single edition makes clear that they're an abstraction of a number of different factors that add up to plot armour.

Until you hit zero you've taken minor flesh wounds at MOST. The game is very clear on this.

>Hit points aren't a problem, because every single edition makes clear that they're an abstraction of a number of different factors that add up to plot armour.
And in every single edition the game mechanics completely fail to actually support the idea.

Hit points suck, but practically everything sucks. My issue with "not hit points" is that such systems generally run into something like a) shoot-first death spiral because wounded characters suck, b) everyone takes local feat-equivalent to ignore wound penalties, c) some fucking dev writes a Bonus When Wounded effect and you get builds who start the day by beating themselves upside the head.

M&M's toughness saves seem a decent variant that avoids these, though.

I don't think you actually understand how the human body works.

>Waah why aren't le games le realistic

It's a fucking abstraction of a real-life concept, just like MP and every single other stat present in your average RPG. Because RPGs are games and entertainment comes before realism in the vision of the producers

Is it bait? Or a real opinion?

The
Riddle
Of
Steel

It's how much meat you have left.

The systems that seem to do "not hit points" the best also tend to be the ones that put an emphasis on the defender being just as strategic and active at defending themselves as the attacker is at hitting and injuring them.

>shoot-first death spiral because wounded characters suck
Some mecha RPG uses reverse death spiral which makes characters stronger as they take wounds. This promotes cinematic style of play.

It's not their fault if people consider every attack until the HP goes to 0 as a sword shoving on the middle of their hearts.

Curiously enough death spiral mechanics make the games less lethal. Hefty wound penalties mean that you're less likely to fight to the bitter end, and start looking for alternative means to survive. It makes the players less prone to start fights too, because a lucky hit from the opponent could mean months of game-time recuperating.

I've always considered HP to represent plot armour; you "get hit" but really you're deflecting attacks, taking minimal scratch damage, and tiring yourself out.

Like how Conan (or any Hollywood action hero) never really gets wounded, he just gets bruised and bloodied and keeps fighting at full strength. But you know he's "lost hit points" because he's breathing hard, he's got his own blood all over him (but he's not really bleeding), and he's bruised / blackened from enemy attacks.

It's why I liked the old Star Wars d20 vitality system. You have a small amount of wounds, and the rest of your hit points are vitality that represent you ducking out of the way at the last second. Too much combat will wear out your plot armour, and you'll die. NPCs don't get vitality, so they die like plebs to blaster fire that PCs wouldn't care about.

Hit points are a currency. You decide how you spend them.

As you likely all know by now, hit points aren't meat points. They're not literally how alive you are. Someone down to their last HP isn't literally missing all their internal organs. This has been the case for every single edition of DnD ever.

And likewise, your character doesn't necessarily know how many HP they have. They're an abstraction, not an in-world concept. They might feel "pretty worn out" or feel like their luck is about to run out, or desperate, or scuffed up, but you can't go to the healing temple and get told "OK, looks like you're four-fifths alive".

But the great thing you can do as a player is realise that hit points are narrative currency. You get to decide how they're spent! Hit points aren't meat points - they're "I'm not dead yet" points.

(Important note at this stage - this is how hit points work for Player Characters, not necessarily for other entities)

How the game works is that when an attack beats your AC, or your save, or whatever, you go down. You're beaten.
Unless you spend hit points to stay up. When you 'take 8 damage', it's up to you, if you want it to be, to say how you're spending those HP! You might say "I just barely dodge out of the way", or "I catch the blow on the edge of my shield, gritting my teeth", or if you're playing that kind of campaign, even say "I take it straight in the chest and laugh. They can't hurt me."

How you choose to interpret healing is up to you. As noted, hit points aren't meat points - so you might consider it an infusion of luck, and of feeling re-invigorated or particularly blessed. If you've just recently had Cure Wounds cast on you, then you might describe the next hit you take as "a golden holy shield intercepts the blow, then gently dissipates" to show that all those cured wounds are no longer cured.

Hit points are a narrative tool with narrative currency - use them entertainingly!

An italian tabletop, evolution pulse (based on fate), have an interesting system:
You basically have physical and mental armor (called stress), that differs from class to class, and after you lose them you start to get wounded.
There are 4 kind of wounds, and everyone of them gives different malus

That's literally no different than Fate's normal Stress tracks and Consequences....

oh, i'm sorry, i never played other fate based tabletop, so I didn't know

It is when nothing in the book but the one paragraph where they try and say "HP is totally abstract you guys! Just ignore everything else the book implies!" is the only time it's ever even implied that HP is something other than meat points.

You should read Call of Cthulhu's health system, it's glorious for realistic combat, but hard as balls for dungeoning settings

Not know all Fate games work like that aside, I think it's a good system. You've got wounds you can shrug off, eventually building up to wounds that stick with you- and just by taking those type of wounds your opponents get a bonus against you.

Best answer so far.

On a related note, what the fuck is EXP anyway?

That's more or less how Wastburg (french/canadian rpg) works, but it's a game that relies heavily on DM fiat and the "narrative" side of RPGs. While I'm usually not a fan of so-called "narrativists" RPGs, this one has some smart little mechanics and, regarding comabt, give really useful and solid advice to the DM on how to handle it.

I also really like the Traveller way of handling HPs. Your HPs are actually your Dex, Str and Con stats and you suffer temporary loss in them when you take damage. Take too much damage at once and you're instantly KO'd or killed.

If your DM isn't explaining what each hit is doing to an enemy based on the number of hit points taken, then your DM is shit.

Yeah RuneQuest HP solved the D&D HP issues, including explaining what HP damage means and keeping the system consistant with that.

A lot of systems have state of wounds, like Open D6
FFG's Star Wars has critical hits that stacks, with various negative effects, until you're dead.

Aaaaand I forgot the pic.

FFG's would threshold system is hot garbage, but that table is pretty decent.

>liking death spirals

Check out cyberpunk2020's system, you basically get shot once and probably gotta start rolling to not bleed out

For me HP are pretty much like fatigue/focus.
At the start of a fight you're pretty focused so you can dodge attacks. Every time some huge blow "hit" you you just exhaust yourself by dodging at the last second or whatever you want.
HP = 0 means you're completely exhausted and the next guy WILL deal a fatal blow to you

This.

It has always been the case since early editions that HP worked this way.

D&D has really just been corrupted via a telephone game of various peoples' campaigns and books

And environmental damage from lava or 120ft falls

See

If HP is fatigue/focus then what do the cure wounds spells heal?

Something like that
news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove-research-082912/
Also I know it's a stupid argument but don't think too much about how HP exactly works, everything is some tool for the DM to build a story and can be interpreted however you want (so something it's fatigue, other times its armor durability or just wounds)

>in the vision of the producers
And anyone who isn't pants on head retarded.

I use them as a sort of game abstraction representing total "aliveness"

They aren’t a Thing in the world, just a quantifier.

Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, or any number of systems that use wound/fatigue rules.

>what
>is
>4e

You don't have to deal HP damage to someone who falls in lava, or from orbit. You can just say they die.

It's really abstracted. Yes it represents the meat your character has, but it also represents luck, willpower, ability to dodge blows, fate, etc.

Personally, I hate that. I usually like abstracting things in games, but I am autistic and want a hit to actually be a hit. Which is why I play systems that do that, or when I play dnd I use the vigor/wounds rules (along with armor as DC) which satisfies my autism.

Problem is, with a lot of systems you're alive and dandy unitl you reach 0hp (or equivalent limit), and then you're dead.
Someone that just took a Claymore to the face and has the equivalent of 1hp left shouldn't be as combative as someone that just entered a fight.

The edition that explicitly calls you bloodied at 1/2 hp.

HP is an abstraction, and not always an elegant one. Essentially, your HP is both how much injuries you can sustain AND how much energy you have left in you to avoid fatal injuries.

Essentially, it exists entirely because D&D battles at higher levels drags on for several rounds but players would get bored if all they did was make their opponent more tired with each hit, and works incredibly poorly when the games are translated to vidya and you get to see characters take hit after hit with no ill effects what so ever before they suddenly fall over.

The problem does not exist in games that care less about making combat a shore to get through where even a single hit with a dagger can be fatal even for an experienced warrior.

I think most people who makes games are aware of this flaw. What you have to consider is the opportunity cost. Anything which departs from such a simple abstraction is prone to increase the complexity of the combat mechanics, which almost invariably increases the time spent meta-gaming.

Tldr; you should know better

What an eloquent post

HP represents the amount of trauma you can take before your body is incapacitated by shock

The interesting point of Fate's Stress is that it's narrative protection from lasting harm. You can let your Stress get eaten up but you'll run out of plot-immunity eventually. I like how they distinguish this protection from the real Consequences.
Having a double-digit number that decreases before you collapse/die is a lot less dramatic.

that would be your "gittin' gud" coefficient

I treat it as every attack is glancing or blocked until you get to half-hp, where you finally start taking real damage.

So someone who gets critted above half health just barely blocks/dodges a barrage of attacks whereas someone with less than half ends up taking a slash across the chest or head.

What the hell is a half king?

Until the healing spells stop having names like 'cure light wounds' people will still be confused.

And until all the edge cases that ONLY make sense if HP is direct physical health go away.

That is like saying AC is somehow useful instead of an idiotic idea that should have been scrubbed decades ago.

The enemy rolling to hit, you trying to dodge, your fatigue, your armour stopping blows and your health should all be entirely separate things.

Abstractions are worthless if all they do is harm immersion or cause confusion.

I just roleplay. In my DH campaign, I took a heavy hit to the leg which dropped me from 10 to 2 wounds. Although mechanically nothing was wrong with me I limped around, using one arm to brace myself against tables or the wall. The party needed to go upstairs to clear the second floor and I stayed to make sure nothing came out of the basement because going up stairs would be difficult. Seems like most game mechanic gaps should just be filled with roleplay.

Apparently something you don't have a firm grasp of?

And you actually need a book to say to you that someone don't get a fatal blow (considering the target vitality and resistance) until the target life reach 0 HP?

>The enemy rolling to hit, you trying to dodge, your fatigue, your armour stopping blows and your health should all be entirely separate things.
>thinking fatigue and armour should only be two stats
No, you should separate mental and physical fatigue, also exhaustion from breathing, and each armour part should have two different stats for blunt deformation and holes due to slicing.
health should also be separated between trauma, scars, numbness, aches, and open wounds... for each part of the body of course

The son or daughter of a king will be at least half king, often also half queen, and sometimes half princess.

Not him, but " D&D and its derivatives" is quite different from "Only D&D".

And technically, all tabletop rpgs are D&D derivatives.

Yes, it's an incredibly abstract concept that in no way reflects real life combat.

Go ahead, suggest an alternative. inb4 "injury pips"

I like HP, HP is a much less limiting abstraction than AC.

A very interesting, and very fun, system is mentioned here . Unfortunately despite being my absolute favorite HP system it simply cannot be ported to a lot of games without things suddenly becoming way more lethal than intended. Your brain being a discrete entity that can and will get damaged is very bad for most things' longevity.

I suppose you could try the "Rimworld" method: HP for every major organ as well as an all-encompassing "Pain" meter. Every hit is allocated semi-randomly depending on where a player aimed. If the attack strikes an organ that organ takes damage. Individual organs actually have very low HP, because you liver is not designed to eat a sword wound and work well.

Certain organs, when hit, can instantly kill, cause short or long term penalties, or just hurt a bunch. Hits to these areas can be saved by reflexes and armor, the latter varies depending on location of the wound (So a heart wound is next to impossible for a fighter in full plate).

On top of all this, each player tracks how much pain they are in. As pain rises they must save against collapsing every turn. Saves get harder as pain increases. This way, you can still down people and be downed without dying.

Heal checks now vary depending on location and severity, but a holy healer cuts through the bullshit with his divinity. So now having a cleric on your team is almost an autoinclude. Alternatively you can go the Theive's World route and make even the Clerics only nominally effective for increased lethality.

Finally, recovery times, infections, and scarring can all be tracked with associated penalties to play. So your in continuous low-level pain during recovery, infections can knock the last hitpoints off your liver and kill you if your not clean, talking with people with a broken jaw gives you a penalty to Charisma, scars can make it harder to move and function, and so on.

...Yea, not happening. I'd rather track HP and keep the came moving, but I'm sure alternatives exist somewhere in the middle. All this simulation works great in a video game though, since all that shit can be done in the background leaving you to focus on "Aim for the Chest" "Keep wound Clean" "Find best Doctor" "Ow I am Wounded" and so on.

some people consider HP to be luck. Dodging attacks, attacks hitting your armor, getting a flesh wound, glancing blow, etc etc.

Things only get REALLY bad when someone takes a big meaty chunk out of you with their sword.

Idk...wounds and Crits are okay sometimes, but people get bitchy when they shoot someone in the head and they take a wound, but don't die or get shot in the arm and don't drop their weapons...but crit effects are cool