Everything is Uncertain, Including Death (and Taxes)

“Quick, we must retreat!”

“Why? You look absolutely fine to me.”

“Yes, but the next the next sword blow will surely kill me.”

Or

“Have no fear, I will leap into the fray and hold them off, for I am fresh, so even if they all strike me I shall remain standing.”

Such are the caricatures of the abstraction of HP; combatants can take HP ‘damage’ without risk until they’re right down to the little numbers. These caricatures, and the implicit criticism, have some merit. Players do know that the Orc with a handaxe (1d6 damage) will not be able to kill their 8HP Fighter on this round. And they do know that their 6^th Level Fighter, whittled down to 3HP, is now in serious trouble, even if we can see no difference in his physical capabilities. 

Or rather, we think we can see no difference in his physical capabilities. The 5e Basic pdf says "The loss of hit points has no effect on a creature's capabilities until the creature drops to 0 hit points" (v0.2 p75). Of course I know why the rule book says this: we don't apply penalties to characters and creatures that have taken HP damage. But it is language like hinders and 'proper' understanding of the abstraction of HP and D&D combat - though as I note below the abstraction of HP is terminally undermined in newer editions. When the abstraction is understood, we can see that of course a loss of hit points does have an effect on a character or creature's capabilities. A PC with 3HP has far less ‘fighting ability’ than one with 30HP, even if their AC and THAC0 or BAB remain unchanged. Simply put, the 3HP Fighter will survive fewer rounds of combat than the 30HP.

But anyway, it is often difficult to grasp such abstraction, and the 'certainties' (see above) that it produces can sit uneasily with players and DMs. We might intellectually understand the abstract nature of D&D combat, but we often - instinctively - fall into making sense of these numbers (HD, HP, AC, ‘to hit’ rolls, etc.) as if they had a one-to-one correspondence with world.

So, let’s make things a little more uncertain, shall we?

Carcosa has PCs roll their HP at every encounter. You also have to roll to see what type of HD you have! Fun for a diversion, but the certainties in the two 'examples' above are not mitigated. Why not have the PCs roll their HD every time they are 'hit'?

Here’s how it would work:

Characters and creatures start with 0 'hit points' (HP). They have not yet been 'hit'. When a character or creature is 'hit', damage is rolled as normal, and this many hit points are added to their HP, which accumulate. A character or creature rolls their HD every time it adds points to their HP. So that 6^th Level Fighter would roll 6d8 (assuming no modifiers from CON), giving him somewhere between 6 and 48HP. It wouldn’t be quite as 'swingy' as that might look as the multiple dice produce a pronounced bell curve. If the total rolled is greater than the accumulated HP of damage, the character or creature can fight on. If the number roll is equal to or less than the accumulated HP, the character or creature is either dead or has suffered a serious wound.

Naturally, I need a good critical hit chart to generate the wounds and determine the chance of death. I am tempted by the extended critical hit charts from WHRP1e (found in the Character Pack, maybe one of the Apocrypha books) which have different charts for all kinds of weapons and sources of damage. ACKS’ ‘mortal wounds’ table might also be a suitable base. While I would want the procedure to be relatively simple, I'd also have to work out a simple set of modifiers to rolls on this chart. Presumably these would involve level, CON modifier, and perhaps the difference between accumulated HP and the last rolled HD total. And death? This would either be an automatic result on the far reaches of the chart, a consequence of a wound that is not treated or bound in time, or perhaps, to keep things simple, a Saving Throw (vs Death). For simplicities sake, most monsters and NPCs might die as soon as the HD roll is not greater than accumulated HP - this is a system about PCs, after all.

Or maybe the 'dice-drop' table I suggested ages ago... 

Whatever table I eventually use I've a feeling that it will have to be kind to the PCs. Or, at least, as kind as a critical hit/serious wound table can be. PCs are going to be more vulnerable using these rules. While 1st Level PCs will get killed/wounded by a single blow in this system and the traditional one, the real effect will be on PCs with around 3 or 4 HD. In the traditional system there is no chance that the first sword blow will drop them (especially with the kind of house rules that boost HP - max HP at 1st Level, re-rolling 1s, re-rolling all dice at each level, etc.), in this system some of those formerly 'insulated' PCs are going to fall in the first round of combat. But then, so are some of the monsters in the same HD range, which brings a much wider range of the bestiary into play much earlier on... along with larger treasures and greater XP rewards. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

But why do this?

Well, it gives me an excuse to use a critical hit chart. And do I love me a good critical hit chart. But it also means that even PCs (and monsters) of moderate to high level/HD are in an uncertain amount of danger once the daggers, axes, and swords are drawn. The cartoon criticism of D&D's accumulating HP is disarmed. Sure, higher level characters are far more likely to be able to fight for longer than low or zero level characters, but there will rarely be the guarantee that the next swipe of a sword will not do for them.

But more importantly than that, much more, it allows me to incorporate an aspect of ‘newer’ D&Ds from which I have always recoiled – easy HP recovery (or easy HP reduction, given what HP 'mean' in this system). As I've said, the abstraction of HP and D&D combat is often difficult to maintain in the imaginations of the DM and players. And players and DMs really do need to buy the abstract nature of HP and D&D combat in order to understand how the game effect of low HP = reduced overall fighting ability = a ‘wounded’ state. But for this abstraction to work, HP ‘healing’ has to be slow and/or difficult. If a PC can easily replenish their all HP, say with a ‘long rest’, the HP abstraction is terminally undermined. If a good night's sleep allows a PC to recover all their lost HP, then low HP very definitely does not = wounded, not even as an abstraction.

But at the same time I will concede that rapid HP recovery can improve some aspects of the experience of play. If PCs can recover their HP by taking a rest, swigging some brandy (see Crypts & Things), or hearing a rousing speech, then (of course) they can get a lot more adventuring done, especially during the first few levels of play. And these early levels are the key to a sustained campaign. So I'll be experimenting with this system in the next games that I run.

As a final point, easy HP recovery and no ‘real’ wounds means that PCs can fight all day, every day. This puts them on the 5e track – which given the 'XP per adventuring day per level' table in the DMG pdf I can safely caricature this as 'How to Hit Name Level in 30 Days, or Your Money Back!' I know that this meant to make players feel 'epic', but I can't imagine feeling less 'epic' than having my character, starting at 1st Level, is set to become a mighty lord in a matter of mere weeks of game time.

Unstoppable Pincushions - HP in D&D

In D&D, characters steadily amass HP at each level, which means that a fifth-level character has, on average, five times as many HP as that character had at first level. Now, it doesn’t make that much sense to imagine that a fifth-level Magic User has acquired five times the capacity to have pointy bits of metal stuck in him. Without an injury system, the idea that each ‘hit’ scored in combat is an actual stab, slice, or bash with a club breaks the coherency of the fiction pretty quickly. Characters can quickly end up imagined as Saint Sebastian crossed with a Terminator.

Crivelli's Saint Sebastian says, "Is that all you've got? I'm a Paladin with 80 HP!"

If the concept of HP makes any sense, it is better to understand and, more importantly, to encourage players to conceive of them as ‘Hero Points’. Rather than the number of times the character can actually get hit, think of HP as the number of times the character can nearly get hit, can manoeuvre so as to take a glancing blow, can absorb sub-injury fatigue and bruising; the dead legs, the aching shoulders, the bruised ribs, the burning, gasping lungs, before a character takes a telling, fatal blow. Think of HP as a combination of fighting skill, experience, conditioning to the peculiar physical and psychological – e.g. dealing with stress, terror, and exhilaration – demands of combat, and perhaps most importantly luck and/or the blessings of fate. For human-sized characters at least, only a very small component of HP should be the ability to fight on with actual wounds. Because a human or demi-human ought to need only get stuck with a sword once before he dies, no matter the level, but then no ‘hero’ ought be killed by the first ‘hit’ in a role-playing game such as D&D.

Of course, the HP value of monsters need not represent exactly the same thing as it does for characters. HP is an abstract value. A Fighter’s 50 HP does not represent exactly the same thing as the 50 HP of a dragon. A dragon should be able to take many more actual sword blows than the human, in which case a greater proportion of the HP value is taken up by physical resilience, and less is derived from luck, fate, and that peculiar ability to make that last minute, but exhausting adjustments in the face of potentially lethal blows.

Narrating combat of this kind as a GM can be demanding. Draw on the choreography of the sword fights of cinema – characters arms grow heavy from constant parrying, the deflected blows of edged weapons still strike their victims, but on the flat, when weapons are locked the character with the upper hand is able to land a kick, a knee, a punch, or a headbutt, and characters scoring a 'hit' will have put their opponents in a series of awkward positions. And yes, a sub-lethal hit will sometimes be a nick or a graze. When done well this helps new players pick up on the level of abstraction found in most RPG mechanics – I have found that it breaks the coherence of the fiction for some new players when they are faced with the idea that they can ‘hit’ for maximum ‘damage’, but their opponent is able to fight on without any injury of significance to the game mechanics.

Healing lost HP can present new narrative problems – if the physical aspect of HP are ‘sub-injury fatigue and bruising; the dead legs, the aching shoulders, the bruised ribs, the burning, gasping lungs’ etc., surely a simple rest will be enough to restore a character to full HP? Having played rugby as a front row forward – a sub-lethal level of physical confrontation – I know that this is a gross underestimation of the effects of a physical contest, even when they do not produce discrete, identifiable injuries such as sprained joints and broken bones. Sub-injury pain and fatigue can last for days. The biographies of professional rugby players talk of them having to be helped out of bed and into their clothes on the days after particularly brutal matches, and as for boxers… These are sub-lethal physical contests. Add in the psychological stress of engaging in deadly combat, and the concept of ‘using up’ luck, or the blessings of fate, and there is a good reason why it can take a character some time before they are back up to full HP after a particularly brutal fight – in game terms I allow recovery of 1 HP per Hit Dice(HD)/Level per day, with 1D3 HP per HD/Level per day if properly resting, and more if being nursed. Add in any narratively/mechanically significant injuries you might impose on the characters, perhaps when ‘hit’ within the range of their last HD, and you have a recipe for justifying why characters can’t simply bounce back to full HP after a good sleep, while at the same time maintaining that high HP characters aren’t being stuck with pointy bits of metal over and over again.