red-headed android

i mean it. we gotta get rid of them. delendae sunt.

not everyone knows the history of hit points. basically, old D&D was based on wargames that its creators played. in a wargame, if one of your soldiers gets hit by something, they probably die. but in D&D, you were only ever controlling one character, and besides, a dragon should be tougher than a human.

so they looked at some wargames they were familiar with, and in the ones about ships, the ships actually had ‘hit points’ that measured how many times you could shoot them before they actually sank. and the developers were like, yeah, that sounds good. let’s make dragons and wizards and stuff have hit points to measure how many times you can hit them before they die.

this was maybe the most important design mistake in the history of tabletop roleplaying games.

i know, i know, that’s a strong claim. but it’s true. here’s why.

first of all, they were a good enough system. if you go down to zero, you die! the system doesn’t need any rules beyond that, because it’s about avoiding death. we have stuff in here for what happens if the attack was poisoned, and we don’t need to write down any rules for being injured, because… we can just say that hit points are an abstraction of luck, skill and stamina! there. let’s move on to the Monster Manual.

this wouldn’t be terrible on its own. actually, there are games where hit points working this way makes a lot of sense. Mork Borg is one, because in that game, you’re a loser and if you get stabbed you roll 1d4 to see if you die, so your hit points are your ‘not getting stabbed points’. and you only get like 6 of them, so they’re barely a barrier to that.

unfortunately: hit points were just okay enough at deciding when you’re dead (and when a fight is over) that the game didn’t need to model all the other consequences of fighting; D&D is about combat, so combat has to last longer than one hit, making things’ HP increase over time & through the editions; and D&D became the most popular RPG of all time, so everyone copied it.

this led to a landscape where a lot of RPGs are games about fighting where getting hit doesn’t mean anything until you actually die, there are lots of fun and exciting ways to make the other guys’ hit points go down, and therefore, designers and players don’t feel a real need to explore the other consequences of combat and what those might look like. hit points made the design space stagnate.

and this applies to all the other stuff not called ‘hit points’ that’s obviously a hit point, too. Wounds in Righteous Blood Ruthless Blades aren’t much better just because you only ever get 3 or 4. They’re still an ‘are you dead yet’ gauge. Same with the various damage types in White Wolf games like Vampire and Werewolf. Same with a game I think is awesome, Tenra Bansho Zero, which calls its hit points Wounds but doesn’t really treat them any differently than a death gauge (plus, they eventually start making you better at fighting once you take enough).

and that leads us to the second thing. conflict is a pretty big deal. conflict where someone might die is an even bigger deal. if you’re in a roleplaying game, expected to be portraying a character who really lives in this fictional world you’re talking about with your friends… why does the game frame matters of life and death with a number that goes up and down, instead of, i don’t know, shit that feels life or death?

i’m gonna give some examples of that, in order from weakest to strongest.

in Ironsworn, you have ‘health’. now, ‘health’ is hit points, but it’s how it’s handled that makes me like it more than every other hit points system. you only get 5; some wolves can get you down to 0 if they manage to take a chunk out of you twice. whenever you get hit, you roll to see if your character shrugs it off and keeps going, or if they’re even more fatigued and exhausted than that minor injury would suggest. as it dwindles, losing health turns into losing momentum–a resource you spend to succeed on important rolls. as you get hurt, you feel the weight of being hurt more. it starts to eat at you.

and if you hit zero, and then roll badly? well, you could take a permanent wound that fucks you up for life, like losing a hand. you could take a temporary wound that nonetheless requires you to go out of the way of your quest to fix. you could die. eventually, one of those things is going to happen to you. so you need to make a choice: can i afford to fix the consequences of getting my ass kicked by a wolf and a blizzard and a raider and a fall down a gorge? or is it too much of a distraction from my quest? then, when you do go fix your injuries, the dice will start throwing complications in your path. the town you go to for aid is stricken by plague. the local wise woman mistrusts you. you need the help of the elves.

Ironsworn’s system is better than hit points because it reflects the grimy, wear-you-down nature of fulfilling difficult oaths, and because all the means you have to restore your health will lead you into further complications. it’s an odyssey generator. but it’s still kind of hit points.

in Blades in the Dark, you have a reserve of stress that you can burn off to avoid bad things happening. this isn’t hit points. it hitting zero doesn’t kill you, it doesn’t represent you getting hurt, spending it isn’t directly tied to the level of danger you’re in, it can be spent on things besides getting hurt, and most importantly, you choose how to spend it. the GM says ‘okay, there’s a citywide manhunt out for you now’ and you’re willing to eat it? you don’t have to spend stress! enjoy your infamy!

but Blades’s best effort at making stress Not Be Hit Points is having a separate system for when you actually do get hurt. like physically, that guy just shot you and you’re bleeding everywhere. it’s too punishing (the developers wanted you to swap out characters when one got hurt, so they made harm last a fucking eternity), but its design principles are really strong. here they are:

when you get hurt or otherwise messed up (curse, humiliation, you’re drunk), it gets written down on your sheet and tracked as a status. if you get hurt a little, you can shrug it off with stress–if you get hurt a lot, you can usually only make it better, not totally avoid it. when you’re messed up, your character is worse at everything that harm affects. drunk? good luck picking a lock. shot and bleeding everywhere? good luck charming the local shopkeep to let you come inside.

this means danger feels dangerous–stress won’t totally save you from the rampaging ghost or the Emperor’s guard. tangling with that shit is really scary now. it also means getting hit feels nasty–what do you mean, my best skills are now way less reliable? that’s messed up! i have to avoid having that happen again in the future, and we should think about calling off the heist too! and because it lasts practically forever, fixing it costs you opportunities, time, and even stress (since you might have to choose between recovering stress and fixing harm).

Blades’s system is better than hit points because it makes danger feel real, forces you to choose your risks, consequences and the resources you spend rather than homogenizing everything down to ‘you take 12 damage’, and makes getting seriously injured feel a lot more like getting seriously injured, with recovery time and a sudden drop in capability and a feeling of ‘oh, shit, we have to get out of here’.

but we can do better. let’s talk about Slugblaster. see, Slugblaster is a mission-based episodic game about friends taking on the world, just like Blades, but in Slugblaster you’re teens trying to become the multiverse’s coolest skate crew. so it takes everything Blades does… and makes it about the themes of its game! which don’t involve getting shot and bleeding everywhere.

totally faceplant into a nest of alien stinging nettles, or concrete, or the Space Pope’s marble flooring? you get a slam! that means you got hurt, but you’ll be fine; this game isn’t about physical trauma. don’t want to take slams, because it’s really important to you that you look cool by finishing the mission (because that’s what ALL the game’s mechanics are about)? well, then, you have to rack up Trouble. that sticks around. the only way to clear it is by having bad stuff happen in your character’s home and personal life, which adds tons of teen, relationship and family drama to the game.

oh, why should I be worried about this stuff, you say? what happens if i take too many if the game isn’t about physical trauma? well, it’s not about physical trauma. what happens when you take too many? some interesting non-physical trauma happens!

you get arrested by the intergalactic time cops. your doppelganger shows up and claims to be you. you DO get hurt really bad this time and after you get out of the hospital your parents won’t let you travel the multiverse (the killjoys). you lose your skateboard!

and this is what’s really insidious about hit points. by focusing so much on the threat of death, by making everything in some way about that stupid little number, games forget that death doesn’t have to matter. it doesn’t even have to be on the table. when games are forbidden from making the consequence ‘number go down’, when they must tell the GM how to make the character’s story more interesting with a bad consequence, when they have to inspire you to make shit cool–that’s when TTRPGs transform from games that could exist in any other medium into games that are unique in their potential.

Slugblaster’s system is better than hit points because it asks the question “what consequences do I want to see, and want to have the players care about?”

and the answer that Slugblaster came up with was that it didn’t need an abstraction of health, since that would distract from all the far more interesting things it could threaten, and change, and create. all TTRPG designers can learn from Slugblaster. not only are hit points a bad tool for reflecting physical harm, reflecting physical harm doesn’t even matter for a lot of intriguing, exciting, memorable types of story. and TTRPGs have been shackled to it and to hit points for far too long, because the guys who made D&D happened to play a lot of naval combat sims. do your duty. dare to kill the hit point.

i’m working on a game too. who knows, maybe it’ll be here on this website one day. it’s a gritty, violent game about superheroes who got life-altering powers from ordinary traumas, and now have to live with the consequences. here’s how my system applies the lessons of these other games:

from Ironsworn, i learned that danger and pressure should wear you down. in my game, you can avoid getting hurt, but you have to erode your skills and powers’ strength and reliability to do so, and those don’t come back cheaply.

from Blades, i learned that if your game is about getting hurt, it had better feel like life and death. the text for taking a wound–the least hurt you can get at once–is ‘if you take a wound, that’s really bad, and you probably have to go to the hospital’. taking that wound also exploded your odds of doing anything that it affects. concussed by flying rubble? good luck using your psychic powers until you recover! you can try, but it’ll be way harder and make you spend more to succeed.

from Slugblaster, i learned that whatever your ‘getting hurt’/’consequences’ mechanic is, it should support and further the story you’re telling, not get in its way or be irrelevant to the drama. in my system, you know what’s the best, and sometimes only, way of getting your stats and powers back to full strength, so you can go into super-danger without risking your and others’ lives? it’s having your character act out in a way that mirrors the worst aspects of their personality, coloured by the trauma that gave them powers to begin with. in this game, your character’s psychology will determine the trouble they get into–and if they don’t get into trouble, after a few scrapes they’ll barely be functional. you have to tell a story full of misfortune and bad decisions, but it’s your choice how, and the character you built will point the way.

in conclusion, hit points should go back to video games where they belong. if you’re a GM, and your favourite system uses hit points, don’t despair. just look past hit points more often; hand the characters consequences that are independent of their physical well-being. threaten an ally. threaten a place. threaten a principle. threaten a reward. give out more XP for solving problems a certain way (see my article about xp). you’ll find your games are more compelling.