Hit Points, and Fixing Them

>How would you "fix" hit points to mean what the rulebook says even in practical values, with as few mechanical changes as possible?

Unfortunately like said, you are going to need to add new mechanics to make HP a better representation of overall health and I am fond of the suggestions found in I play Savage Worlds which has increasing penalties as characters get more injured. Nowhere near realistic but it does give the general feeling of being worn down.

Scrapping hit points tends to involve wound systems, which lead into death spirals.

Personally, I'll take binary dead-alive hitpoints over death spirals any day.

>How would you "fix" hit points to mean what the rulebook says even in practical values, with as few mechanical changes as possible?

No rules changes whatsoever. Just change how you describe damage happening.

Above half HP: "The mace comes down on your shield over and over, jarring your bones, driving you back. You can feel yourself tiring."

A half HP, you start describing physical wounds.

If you want a more detailed damage system, that's gonna be more mechanically complex. I really like the Dark Heresy crits system, if you're looking for one.

Well, some people like death spirals and dying a lot (i.e. Fantasy Vietnam), which goes back to being "relevant to the desired style of play". To each their own.

Use a non d20-rulebook.
It sounds like magic, I know. But give it a try.

How would you describe the healing spells? How does it make sense a low-level cleric can cast a single Cure Light Wounds spell to bring his fellow commoner to full health, but can't heal so much as a scratch of a great hero? Indeed, why is it that all healing spells are called Cure Wounds, if most of the hit point loss isn't about physical health at all?

>Hit points:
d4=1, d6=2, d8=3 d10=4, d12=5
+ constitution modifier.

>Wounds, and the injury table:
When characters reach 0 hit points, roll 1d20 on the injury table.
0 or below = death.
1-5 = permanent injury. (To be detailed appropriately, may be cured later.)
6-10 = wounded. (All rolls on the injury table are made at a -1 until proper medical attention has been given. Wounds stack.)
11-15 = winded. (-2 / disability on checks for one round.)
16+ = second wind. (+1 hp.)

>Problems
If you get injured, then you will probably get hit again and get another injury, but this does seem somewhat 'realistic' or 'gritty'. Do you keep pushing your luck, or retreat?

Also, permanent injury should also grant a stack of 'wounded'.

It wasn't D&D, but I once played a character that was supposed to be the tank in my university's homebrew campaign. They had wound systems AND massive damage systems, which made me feel pretty fucking useless because more than half of my hit points never even got used. However, just sticking with one system or the other might be fine, not that I'd ever have the privilege of being in a game that makes sense.

It cures the wounds to your pride?

>why is it that all healing spells are called Cure Wounds, if most of the hit point loss isn't about physical health at all?
You answered your own question: healing spells only heal physical damage. Where a level 1 commoner with 4 hit points in total is grievously injured, a single first-level healing spell miraculously bringing them back to full health, a level 10 fighter having suffered the same 4 damage was never even hurt to begin with, and the same spell therefore doesn't even really effect him either.

>But in practice, virtually every mechanical rule just reduces them to simple meat points
The "fix" to this is to stop acting like a retard.

The hero and the peasant are both fully healed from their scratches, but the peasant isn't a match for the hero even if he is in prime condition, while the hero has been through a lot of fighting and still has energy to spare to kill him several times over. The cleric can't channel enough healing to thoroughly revitalize him (and in every edition of D&D high level characters are superhuman)

Well you see, everything made sense until inflation hit. You used to count your wealth in coppers, a kobold was a half dozen experience, you died in three hits if you were lucky. Now it's raining gold and platinum and astral diamonds and you gain two levels a dungeon and the Wizard has more fireballs per day than he's got turns in combat and the Cleric is throwing around Mass Heals because he can bill the insurance company more. Modern adventuring just ain't right, I'm telling ya.

This plays a big part of it.

Gygax in autistic style statted out Conan in AD&D as a level 13 fighter/7 thief and he has 100 HP.

That's what an average level 10 fighter has in the current edition.

no, it's not boring

the first thing I experienced is the best and that's definitely a coincidence

I think the problem is mainly how the fluff is implemented and not a mechanical problem. You either get DnD levels of HP, which as you said are luck, meat points, and skill all in one, or Riddle of Steel levels of lethality, where one sword blow typically means the end of a fight. I think Dark Heresy and OWoD try and do a middle ground with lower wounds higher damage but giving you a broad skillkit to evade the damage rather than it being a number to beat like Armorclass from DnD and other rpgs.

You can't- changing how hit points works is a large mechanical change- any additional effect to losing health will incentivize players to dump their resources at the start of the fight to avoid being caught in a death spiral.

Rocket tag is already a problem in most editions of DnD with save or suck spells and scaling attacks. It is a little bland but it fits the systems it is in. You have to retool everything if you are going to change hitpoints.

>representing the character's luck, fatigue, divine favor, skill at avoiding injuries, toughness, and other such factors
This is a pet peeve of mine but this is so retarded. All of those except toughness are otherwise represented by mechanics.

What's the problem with people in a fantasy realm just slowly becoming physically tougher, eventually becoming superhumanly tough in some cases?

>What's the problem with people in a fantasy realm just slowly becoming physically tougher, eventually becoming superhumanly tough in some cases?

But it's never really represented that way in fantasy stories, barring anime.

>What's the problem with people in a fantasy realm just slowly becoming physically tougher, eventually becoming superhumanly tough in some cases?
Nothing, in fact I personally prefer it that way, but some people don't like that specific fantastical element in their fantasy games

This is a house rule that I brought up in another thread.

Remove the CON modifier to HP but give everyone an automatic increase to their HP equal to the average of their HD.
>d6=4
>d8=5
>d10=6
>d12=7
Also, when you spend HD to restore health, you automatically restore health equal to your CON modifier for a short rest and double that if you're doing a long rest.

That way, taking 1d8+STR damage is fucking scary as hell and getting to the point where you can survive a longsword to the face actually means something beyond just being an expectation of the system.

Because its not "realistic"

If I cared anything about realism I wouldn't be playing a game with HP in the first place

I can assure you no one in this thread cares one bit about realism. It's just that tanking like four axe hits in the face, then a cannonball, before jumping down the sky pirate ship a five hundred feet to the ground and surviving that, is not only unrealistic, but also inconceivable in anything but a superhero high fantasy.

Assuming DnD, how does it really mechanically represent any other fantasy? To me, it is it's own thing and creates it's own type of stories.

And I personally dont use your pic related's version of this either. I like to think of it as the skin, muscles, and bones, just the entire body of the character becoming physically tougher, to where eventually the bite from a Dragon at high level hurts to the same extent that sat Wolf's bite would have at low level.

That's my point though. At high levels, the game becomes fantastical to the point where it's like superheroe high fantasy story. You should also be facing superheoe high fantasy level threats at that point.

Or traditional fantasy like the lay of Roland, where flight to the moon, lots of magic items, and fighters smashing down cliffs with a holy sword is the norm in between dueling fifty Saracens and bisecting them through armor like its anime in 2017.

Even low end bandits like tales from the water margin can rip trees out of the ground as impromptu missile weapons.

>What's the problem with people in a fantasy realm just slowly becoming physically tougher, eventually becoming superhumanly tough in some cases?
There's nothing wrong with it per se, but in WotC era D&D games for example, the damage that you're taking doesn't properly scale with the amount of HP that your character will have.

You can easily break 100 HP as early as level 12 with every single fucking character if roll (above) average though. I can accept that a high level Barbarian is going to be able to take a lot of punishment but at level 6? That shit's just not even feasible to imagine relative to what you should be facing as a level 6 character.

Level 3 is a elite veteran soldier or master craftsman making masterworks.
Level 5 is 'peak human,' the top dudes of their generation.

Level 10-15 is heroic, ala Roland. In 2e, fighters could get divine rank 0, demigodhood, by pure badassitude at lvl 15. They'd already gotten a castle and small household warband around lvl 10.

Yeah it never happens outside of anime...

youtube.com/watch?v=DP3MFBzMH2o

At that point you're facing giants and bigger magical creatures.

One character gets to shoot Fireballs from his fingertips, the other can take said Fireball to the face and shrug them off.

They just get supernaturally tough. I dont see the problem.

Make things that should be deadly do a lot more damage. Duh. Otherwise, you can't really fix HP without a lot of mechanical complexity. That's the whole point of a simpler system - get some kind of result and move on with the story, even if that result isn't mechanically accurate.

"death spirals" are an over stated problem from people who want to try and replace hp with an injury system and continue to play dnd as an unending combat slog.

Actual motivation to fuck off after get a big gash or bullet wound via damage related debuffs is pretty fine design imo, you just have to execute it right on the dm side

4e also introduced fighters as casters which was ported into 5e and is an utterly shit mechanic.

>le everyone is casters meme
I bet you think it's WoW as well.

4e's reasoning there (As well as for the scaling cost to raise someone from the dead) was that death clings more tightly to great heroes as it desires to claim them.

Fuck you, Wayne.

Combat loses its edge when you know for a fact that the thing you're fighting can't kill you before you kill it and on the odd chance that the situation's reversed, you can just run away and deal with the monster later on after you've put a few more levels under your belt.

In my extremely houseruled 3.PF game (inb4 3.PF) Con no longer gave HP/level and instead gave a flat amount of Damage Resist (DR) against most forms of injury. Armor also gave an amount of DR (I toyed with RNG DR like 1d10 for fullplate to simulate getting stabbed in the armpit where the armor is weak, but the time crunch was too drastic so we settled for roll 1d10 or take the average of 5).

This drastically reduced player hitpoints as the game progressed, keeping regular sword and bow wounds relatively dangerous as the players leveled. It also put some value on Con for caster classes, since it is so appealing early game to survive attacks. Also, the shift from armor giving AC to armor giving DR helped curb AC creep, ensuring that a fighter or paladin was still tankier than a thief. BAB was used as the armor replacement for calculating AC as an idealized "your combat proficiency helps you avoid taking damage."

I also implemented a Critical Intensity table from an old 2e book. If you crit, in addition to dealing double or triple damage, you'd roll for a location and intensity of the crit, which could range from "No effect" through "arm broken, drop weapon/shield" up to "Decapitation, instantly killed." Larger weapons rolled higher intensity dice and were more likely to dangerously wound on crits. This kept combat with scrubbo bandits still relatively dangerous because of the possibility of a high-intensity crit fucking somebody up.

All of these accomplished a couple things. Firstly, players had less HP, less AC, but more DR, making human-on-human fights a bit more interesting than "I deal 10 damage again, now he's at 100 HP." Secondly, against large monsters (who have large DR pools), requiring the right weaponry was paramount. The players used cannons against mammoths, dragons and demons a couple times, because they bypassed DR. Armor was also less impactful against fucking dragons, because they're huge, so bossfights were tense.

In a side note, I've housed-ruled so much of the PF ruleset that I almost have my own game made. It works really well in the level 1 to 10 (casters)/12(martial) range, when the PF ruleset creep starts to overpower the house rules. Maybe one day I'll get around to compiling it all up in a PDF and see what you guys think of it.

But why PF?

I had a good amount of the books from a previous campaign as a player, so working off of PF was easier than finding a new system (cost and time prohibitive) or designing my own from scratch (super time intensive).

Also, for all the hate PF gets, if you put some work into it and fix some things up, it can actually work pretty well.

Fatigue points.

Running, dodging, blocking, your character can only take so much. Eventually he's going to run out of the energy to lift that sword to parry, to hold that shield against merciless onslaught, to dodge unblockable forces. Everything your character does should drain your fatigue until it gets harder and harder to continue on. It creeps up on you slowly at first, you get a cut here, a jab there, then as the combat continues to wear on you, you take heavier and more grievous blows until one of them strikes home and retires you.

I can think of a dozen ways that could go badly just because of how screwy PF gets. Archery and TWF would be pretty much useless because they're dependent on volley fire OR archery's blatantly fucking overpowered because of Clustered Shots, Barbarians are even better than before because they shit out high attack bonus high damage attacks that would punch straight through DR, Eidolons would get fucking retarded because of their natural stats as they increase in size, and it really doesn't do anything about some faggotron targeting weak saves over and over.

Eidolons are extremely broken, as they always are, and are banned from play (for good reason).

Barbarians are fine.

Archery and TWF are decently balanced, dealing with softer targets well but lacking on more armored opponents.

The whole system lends itself to a group composition with balanced roles.

>but lacking on more armored opponents.
d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/clustered-shots-combat/

OP you think every system has this problem.

In GURPS the rules are very explicit in that your strength equals you HP. ST 12 is 12 HP. You can increase this number of HP up or down and justify it however you want (magic, mutation, anime powers, etc.) based on the setting, but your initial HP is based on stength and you physically (and mentally) suffer for having your HP too low.

Which can be easily fixed by GM fiat (inb4 this is a bad thing). Also, archers don't deal much damage at all relative to many other classes, so Cluster Shot isn't even particularly gamebreaking, and not worth tuning around.

Powergaming is pretty easy to solve with a little work.

Battle Century G, a game for emulating giant robot animu, actually had a good idea via not beating around the bush with their HP system.
It just straight up calls it's health system "plot armor," and gives you a number of thresholds of it that only have effects when your cross it (in the game's case, a straight up save-or-lose that increases in difficulty per threshold crossed, but you could easily turn it into some kind of injury/fatigue system).

>Also, archers don't deal much damage at all relative to many other classe
WRONG

WRONG WRONG WRONG

Weirdly this is one of the only things about 4e that 5e players like
Every fighter player I've ever seen posting in /5eg/ has played a battlemaster or one of the UA superiority dice classes

That's because EK is shit for anything other than abusing high defenses and Champion is ultra-shit and loses to the BM in a raw damage race on top of lacking utility.

How do crits work then?
What is stronger about them?

So I'm not sure how exactly it'd translate into a D20 system, but Iron Claw of all things has a really interesting mechanic when it comes to damage. Attacks don't deal damage over time, instead they're measured on how hard they hit with each level on the scale inflicting a status ailment (up to and including death). Plus character's don't have HP, instead they have Soak, which is basically how tough they physically are (based on that games equivalent of CON. +WILL if you take a common feat) and their armor. So in that system a Barbarian or Warrior could take a lot of superficial blows while a squishy Warlock or Rouge could get one-shot even higher level if they let some big bad get too close.

Granted that system's entire combat is more focused around not getting hit.

I see far more people complain about champions being boring than I see complain about them being slightly suboptimal (we're talking single digit amounts of damage per round)

Single digit amounts of damage are pretty relevant in a game with damage as low as 5E's.

Close calls, calls so close they nearly give you a heart attack from the panic and you might have to change your pants afterward.

Seriously love the mech thresholds removing limbs in that game. In general to the topic, renaming HP seems to solves the problem pretty well. Remember reading in rpg.net someone suggesting replace HP with badassery. Example in play being 'no, you don't kick down the door, the door is just too damn badass.'

I think this is an important thing to consider. Combat being more dangerous isn't inherently bad, unless there is no way to mitigate said danger.

As far as the "save or die" builds go, most of my players who play wizards want to be the dude shitting out thunderbolts and firestorms, not casting a bunch of save spells. This probably is still an issue, but it hasn't been with my players.

There are still some problems with that because CON no longer gives HP, just DR and (presumably) elemental resistances too. Consider a troll: by default, they've got 63 HP, but under your rules they've got 27 and some DR. A blaster who's trying is probably going to kill everything in one hit if they didn't have resistances naturally and it's very possible to get around that with elemental substitution.

4e also tied healing to your surge, which meant it neatly sidestepped the whole "but then why does a CLW only heal superficial injuries if I'm level 20?" thing.

SW SAGA edition had another interesting solution with splitting HP between your actual meat points and your luck more explicitly.

>How would you "fix" hit points
Remove hitpoints.

Attacks create wounds, wounds have attached penalties. Hitting someone with pre-existing wounds gives the option of creating new wounds, or making existing wounds worse by stages, until you reach 'takedown', which can be death, unconsciousness, or other based on the situation.

Look into non-dnd systems.
A) separate mechanics for luck/fatigue points and actual wounds. Wounds happen when character runs out of luck. Luck/fatigue points are restored completely when character has a minute where he isn't fighting while wounds/consequences actually require healing and rest (7th sea, fate).
B) Your DnD meat points (wounded but still fighting), but make it really hard to make even 20 hp. Tough guys can dodge/parry and have damage reduction (wfrp, dark heresy and other Warhammer games)
C) Lots of hp can be attained, like 100+, but character gets more hindrance to his actions the more he is wounded, up to "out cold" that comes before "dead".

I've autistically statted my own 200+ monster bestiary under my rule set. I don't use the core bestiaries for anything more than inspiration.

The only problem with death spiral are guys trying to treat 72 hp In L5R as 72 hp in DnD. Death spiral not only makes fights quicker, but also makes characters change tactics during the fight, which is almost unheard of in DnD.

I like this.

>but also makes characters change tactics during the fight, which is almost unheard of in DnD.
4e saw tactical changes with features tied to bloodied conditions. Most obvious on enemies that have triggered effects when bloodied, but players also had things like Berserkers getting to activate their rage without spending a daily.

I don't think death spiral changes tactics that much. The optimal strategy will stay the same, you'll be just worse at doing it.

I'm open to the idea of being wrong though, could you give me an example maybe?

Should really work in disease more too so players that suffer a laceration can theoretically die.

From my experience playing Shadow Run, players tend to approach combat much differently once they know that they can only afford to take a handful of hits before dying.

In Shadow Run, five damage is dangerous no matter how high up you are on the totem pole because it generally means that you're taking a -1 penalty to your next dice pool, which can easily spiral outwards since you're rolling less dice, which means that you're less able to defend yourself, which opens you up to more damage over time.

Unlike D&D, where five damage matters less and less as you gain levels and more HP. The most optimum strategy of any martial build is to hit something until it dies because there's no reason to employ strategy when there's no real punishment for trading blows in the hopes that you take out the other guy first.

Things do more and more damage in D&D as you level though (or they can just circumvent your HP/defenses and maze you or something).

If anything, getting the first hit in is even more important in SR, since even if you didn't kill what you hit (fat chance unless it's a tank but w/e) because whatever you hit will be now also looking at conditions, even if it's still alive.

Optimal build for martial in D&D: come first, kill enemies before their turn.
Optimal build for samurai in SR: come first, kill enemies before their turn.

I just don't see the difference, I guess, aside from SR being more lethal (but then so is OD&D).

It can changes tactics in a game correctly built for it.
In Burning Wheel wound, he usually start changing tactics, defending more, making counterstrike, or try to use a maneuver that is not penalized by his wounds.
If you have no options, of course it changes nothing, but the problem isn't the wound system, it's the combat system.

when one of my players get a wound*

>Things do more and more damage in D&D as you level though
Which doesn't fucking matter when creatures have to spread that out between 3-6 party members.
>If anything, getting the first hit in is even more important in SR, since even if you didn't kill what you hit (fat chance unless it's a tank but w/e) because whatever you hit will be now also looking at conditions, even if it's still alive.
There's a few things that you need to consider first.
>Anytime you're attacked, you get a roll to dodge and a roll to soak.
>Armor increases your dice pool to soak.
>There are spells that outright ignore armor or spells that deal stun damage instead.
>Some attacks such as electricity or fire lowers the amount of armor you can add to a soak roll.
>You're generally going up against groups of enemies that know the area better than you.
>Gremlins fuck up augmentations.
>Certain spirits can only be affected if you're dual-natured.
Etc.

You have to go in prepared more often than not.

This is a good example. Yeah, if the wound system is set up right, with wounds actually interlinking with your combat options, I can see it changing tactics.

This , however, is missing the point. None of what he's saying applies to wound systems. SR could have HP and it wouldn't change the strategies employed the least. Hell, OD&D has about 80% of that when you get into spells and shit (which makes sense since SR is OD&D dungeon crawl except cyberpunk).

>Hit Dice max (d8 -> 8) + CON Mod score is your damage threshold (DT)
>You have Light Wounds and Severe Wounds that go from 0 to your DT
>Every time your light wounds track reaches your DT, you suffer a severe wound and the damage continues to add up
>Each Severe Wound is a -1

I.e. d8 HD with +3 Con means 11 DT, damage of 15 would mean +1 severe and +4 light

Forgot to add
Either Level or Level*CON Mod adds up to your Severe DT each level

Wouldn't this make you stupid easy to kill anywhere past level 1-2?

Damn it
Your CON mod gets added each level, not your Level*CON

I mean, probably
But who starts at level 1 nowadays?

I mean past that, as it's pretty easy to put damage on things so they're taking lots of severe wounds.

Have you tried not getting hit

There's plenty of attacks that are just about impossible to avoid.

I was just memeing you
What would you suggest to make it work then? Rebalancing damage? Increasing the thresholds? Keeping damage as-is but giving more defensive or evasive options?

Could a system that works like abstract wealth be applied to hit points?

Apply damage to physical stats, just like Traveller does.

You take 3D6 damage? yeah well you lose that 3D6 from your Dex or Strength or Con (choose one). Once one stat reaches 0, the rest of the damage goes into the next stat.
Once 2 stats reach 0, you are unconscious.
Once all 3 physical stats reach 0, you are dead.

Don't forget to apply your new modifier for your lowered stat to everything you do while wounded!

I usually apply the damage first to CON (called "Endurance" in Traveller) and then once that reaches 0, make the PC take a CON check at their original modifier (to represent their inherent toughness), and if they pass they stay conscious until 2 stats are at 0. If they fail - they are unconscious.

With this system of wounding, wounds actually have an effect on how well the PC can do things. - your hands and legs are hit? your dex is now awful - your con is hit? you now have a lower resistance to things. -your STR is hit? you are now weakened.

>How would you "fix" hit points to mean what the rulebook says even in practical values, with as few mechanical changes as possible?
Cap it at first, second, or third level, depending on tastes. Boom, done.