Consolation Ability Bump

Observation 1: New players often ask if there is any way they can increase their ability scores. Old school dogma states that only magic can do the trick (often, literally through a magical trick feature.)

Observation 2: The visible frustration in old school games when a player rolls 1 on their hit point die at a new level.

Solution:

Well, this works because all my classes roll d6 for hit points with various modifiers. But in a more standard game, it would end up giving benefits to small hit dice types over bigger. YOu can either roll with that as a feature, or try this hack; you gain the ability bonus:

d4: on a roll of 1 ,and 3-6 then rolled on d6:
d6: on a roll of 1
d8: on a roll of 1, or a roll of 2 if 5-6 then rolled on d6.
d10: on a roll of 1, or a roll of 2 if 3-6 then rolled on d6.
d12: on a roll of 1-2.

For monks' starting HP roll, if you're not using "maximum HP at first level" or similar, the stat gain ison a roll of 2 or 3 on 2d4; for rangers, 2 through 4 on 2d8.

Bite-Sized Camping Idea

From Notes on Camp to notes on camping ... I guess it makes sense. Inspired by this post of Telecanter's I boiled down a simple rule for the wilderness.

A tense camping situation is one in which you are foregoing the normal comforts of rest time - song, chatter, fire - in order to be inconspicuous. In this kind of situation, cowering silently in the dark, you only recover 1 hp / night no matter what your level. Bear in mind that I see hit points as intangible shielding against serious physical injury.

In a normal camping situation you incur a greater risk of encounters but sleeping recovers you 1 hp per level per night. In a sense the higher level characters get more benefit from whistling past the graveyard and living large.

In some of my previous games I tried and failed to grant this rate if you were not keeping watch -- it just didn't make sense in the wilderness and I could never get players to see that not keeping watch is a sign that you are feeling secure. So now, I'd say that if you have a normal camp you can keep watch and that might even help people feel more secure.

Now, for parties that insist on keeping watch when they are guests in an inn or someone's house... In civilization the expectations are different, and keeping watch (like CCTV cameras) makes you feel less safe, not more safe. So reverse the roles -- paranoid behavior at an inn will bust you down to the lower recovery rate.

Sleeping in armor definitely means you are not having a comfortable camp, no matter where you are.

High Numbers Should Mean Something

From the halcyon days of 2008, and the workshop of 4th Edition, comes this testimonial to the Ever-Rising Statistical Treadmill as design principle:

For example, we strongly disliked the inability of 3rd Edition D&D’s negative-hit-point model to deal with combat at higher levels—once the monsters are reliably dealing 15 or 20 points of damage with each attack, the chance of a character going straight from “alive and kicking” to “time to go through his pockets for loose change” was exceedingly high; effectively, the -1 to -9 “dying” range was meaningless. 

Okay. You've already survived two or three blows that would have pasted a lesser character. You are still on your feet and alive. And you are irked that the next blow certainly would kill you dead. You feel entitled to more, somehow, as a hero.

Think of it this way instead:

• When, as a low level fighter, you are one wimpy blow away from permanent death - you are at -5 hit points or something, unable to move or do anything else.

• When, as a high level fighter, you are one mighty blow away from permanent death - you are on your feet, able to flee, distract, negotiate.

yawn

This is known as a qualitative difference between low and high level play. It's what makes a giant's tree-limb club truly scary, rather than being just a force-multiplied kobold shillelagh.  Or to be (urk) simulationist about it - if negative hit points represent the wracking of your body instead of the wearing away of your heroism, how the hell does your twelfth-level body attain the durability of titanium, as in 4th Edition with its negative hit point threshold based on half the positive total?

Let's take another failure of imagination:

Ask any high-level fighter whether he’d prefer the second-to-last attack from a monster to leave him at 1 hp or -1 hp; I’d put odds on unconsciousness, and how lame is that?

Hold on. This preference has to be based on monsters who you know will rationally leave alone the fallen heroes to go after the living. In the world of Wizards D&D, are no creatures sadistic, hungry, bent on kidnapping, or mindlessly corrosive? Shouldn't you be just as worried about ending up on the floor in a dungeon fight as in a bar fight?  Don't some monsters save their second-to-last attack to see what your head looks like when it pops like a coconut?

What's more, we are also imagining heroes who at 1 hp, or even 10 hp when fighting an average 20 damage dealer, irrationally fight on, instead of realizing they are near death and they need to go home NOW. If being unconscious is so great? Then fall down and fake it after the blow that turns you into a 1 hp fighter. The monster will go on to the next guy automatically and you probably won't even have to make a Bluff check.
Whatever system you're in, as I've mentioned before, approaching combat like a Rock'em Sock'em Robots toe-to-toe battle game is to blame for these absurdities. Fighting should be deadly, cruel, guileful - and it should not feel the same when you're battling orcs at level 1 as when you're battling giants at level 8.

One Page Damage

The rules for damage and healing. I'm particularly happy with "1 HP/level fatigue damage" because it covers so many situations - some to be expanded on in the wilderness rules in "52 Pages Expert Set". Walking through a rainstorm won't kill you, but it will make you less durable in your fight against those ogres.

"Injury" refers to my death and dismemberment table. I'll be refurbishing that a little, too.

Yes, I allow two saves for poison, just like getting knocked down to 0 HP won't usually kill you. I'm a softie like that.

One Page Vital Stats

Following the program of One Page Rules, today I present a kind of "master handout" that introduces many of the vital stats characterizing PCs, NPCs and other beings in the game.

This is page 2 ... right after the introductory page where the general play and point of the game, and such terms as "character", "creature", "DM", "d6" and so forth are described. I haven't laid that out yet.

This is a different system than the more elaborate Old School Players rules I'm using for my current campaign. It's built for concision.

More to come ... as always, let me know if this way of presenting rules is clear.

I'm also going to issue a blanket acknowledgment to Telecanter, whose silhouettes will show up throughout this series.

Hit Points are Player Morale

One more thing left over from my examination of what hit points mean: Players act a lot differently with 30 hit point characters than with 3 hit point ones.

So, in a hit point based gaming system, the HP dictate player morale.

I like to reverse-engineer this fact. Hit points are also character morale. If you play that zero HP or below is a serious physical injury possibly killing you, then any damage prior to that is the wearing down of confidence by near misses and glancing blows. And, as long as you have enough confidence, you just cannot be killed. Welcome to a heroic universe.

This means:

• Failure to regain HP losses when resting in less than optimal conditions makes sense. So does losing HP for staying in such adverse conditions. Inns where you can't bling out to the tune of X Gold Pieces/Level are just not going to restore your pampered morale!
• Magical fear can be modeled - and created in players - by a process of slow but nonlethal wearing down of hit points when in the presence of a terrifying creature or area.
• Clerics don't so much lay on hands most of the time, as restore confidence and will. This might be an argument for same-religion healing bonuses. If going this route there also needs to be a way they can heal serious injuries.
• Zero hit points might be "unconscious" but might also be "whipped and weary."
• Healing surges make total sense!!!! (Okay, forget I said that) How about ... bards can cast area effect cure spells?

The Character's Hit Points

My current game goes with the idea that the hit points of player characters and other beings with character levels represent some intangible essence that keeps them safe from serious harm until they fall to zero. Thereafter, a table of serious injuries applies. I have the severity determined by what fraction of the character's Constitution score they take below zero, though for simplicity's sake boundaries at -3 and -6 might also work, or even a die roll modified by the negative damage for real uncertainty.

Here's the table in one page rules format. In play we had some questions about how zero-level NPCs use this chart, so I created a "monster" result for them and monsters. Yep, monsters are going to be somewhat harder to kill now, though they'll at least have the grace to remain stunned for a while. Monsters without the appropriate body part will still be stunned.

click for full size

The one remaining question is what hit points mean under this system ... which I'll happily defer till next post.

The Battleship's Hit Points

Hit points evolved from the game Battleship? Close.

Dave Arneson in this interview traces the concepts of hit points (and armor class, for that matter) back to when he exapted his US Civil War ironclads rules to represent heroic characters in a skirmish game. Both this system and the Milton Bradley system are great to model floating hulls that can take only so much structural damage before sinking.

And by the way, the "hit or no hit" way armor works in D&D also comes from this simulation of a floating hull where the armor is part of the structure. A shell either bounces off or penetrates it. There is no partial damage reduction because there is no meaty interior to the armored shell.

So, all you 8th level fighters are running around absorbing hits like the Graf Spee. Ridiculous, from a simulation point of view. But perfectly adapted to a gamer's need to act heroically - and that, in the end, is why hit points won out in gaming over limb-maiming and eye-gouging wound systems. Arneson even noted that a main reason to adopt the battleship system was to protect heroic characters from the instant, low-probability death possible under the Chainmail rules.

The hit point system means you are a hero at full fighting capacity right to your last gasp. It doesn't wear you down in a death spiral of diminishing returns. And it's easier to choose your battles, withdraw from a hairy situation, know when you've had enough.

More realistic combat systems hold open the possibility of random death or disablement with every blow. With smart players, this can make for an interesting game. It deters players from going into combat with weak creatures just to rack up experience points; makes them afraid to fight and eager to embrace alternative solutions. But sometimes you do want a game where characters fearlessly fight on, and hit points help that along.

My preference is for a game system that hedges its bets, combining these two features in a fair and fun way. Early on in D&D, house rules often adopted critical hit systems to make combat more realistic and deadly - the most influential of these being Iron Crown's Arms/Claw Law which would later evolve into the Rolemaster system. These also seem to be inspired by the critical hits found in some naval warfare systems, simulating lucky shots that blow up a ship's powder magazine or kill its captain. All very well when you have no personal investment in this or that ship. But the problem, as Gygax astutely notes in AD&D, is that spearing monsters through the eye may be fun, but having your own heroic character speared through the eye is not so fun.

The alternative Gygax proposed was a system of critical injury at zero or negative hit points, where player characters could still survive but were in danger of bleeding out at -10, losing 1 hp/round. Later refinements on this system have tied the negative points to Constitution, applied damage beyond hit points to ability scores more generally (for example Errant RPG), or effectively scored random critical hits with each blow received at zero or less (for example, the many variants on death and dismemberment tables).

In actual play, the last of these gives a nice balance; a zone where characters feel safe, and then a zone where they are at risk of death but still can survive by luck, and get afflicted with really impressive scars, maimings and war wounds. More on the nuts and bolts of that system next post.

The Panda's Hit Points

I guess everyone who writes about D&D has to tackle the enigma of hit points sometime. Here's the basic paradox:

1. Hit points are a gross abstraction, representing nothing more specific than how long a being can stay in combat without dying. By most accounts, a fighter with 50 hit points taking damage is dodging, ducking, wearing down her favor with the Gods, running out of luck. A dinosaur with 50 hit points taking damage, though, is taking huge slashes to its flesh and hide. This is poison to those who want their game to be a sensible simulation. It's one of the most frequent "problems" that tinkerers try to fix in D&D - by separating body points from luck points (Star Wars d20, etc. etc.), physical damage from defensive skill (Runequest, etc., etc.).By the standards of simulation, hit points are terrible.

2. Hit points are the most successful game element to be exported from D&D. Almost without exception, any computer or board game that simulates a fight at the skirmish level for the past 35 years has used hit points, life points, health bar, or some variation thereof, instead of a more realistic system where individual injuries are tracked. Compare the longevity and sales of Soul Calibur vs. Bushido Blade. By the standards of meeting gamers' needs, hit points are great.

I'm going to take a roundabout trip to explain the discrepancy between the two. I want to argue that hit points are an evolutionary exaptation in game design, adapting to needs gamers have that a more realistic system would not meet.

Exaptation in evolutionary biology means the development, through natural selection, of a new function for a given structure. The concept was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould in an essay on the panda's thumb. This appendage, used to grasp bamboo, actually evolved from one of the panda's wristbones. Another example is feathers, which originally evolved on dinosaurs for temperature regulation but then became important in flying.

Games also have selection pressure. In the game designer's ideal world, the best-selling games will be those that use elegant mechanisms to capture the essential experience of that which the designer is simulating. In the real world, market-dominating games tend to be meatballs like AD&D in its heyday and Monopoly.

Faced with this tragic state of affairs, designers will often resort to a narrative in which, Microsoft-like,  industry leaders achieved their position through sheer corporate throw-weight and user conservatism. I am not discounting these factors. But I want to present an alternative view. Although these games are anathema to intelligent design, they often hold within them features exapted from other games that crudely address some of the very real needs of game players. The crudity of these panda thumbs may offend the sensibilities of refined gamers, but they help explain how these games come out ahead in the more rough-and-tumble process of mass market natural selection.

Take Monopoly as a simulation of real estate dealing, for example. In real life, real estate moguls do not randomly move house from street to street, hoping they will not be forced to pay rent in an an expensive location. Their purchases do not depend on their physical residence, either, and precious few of them enter beauty contests. What a lousy simulation, huh?

These features make more sense in accounting for Monopoly's longevity as a family game. They are exaptations from dice-and-track games (Parcheesi, Snakes and Ladders) that let young kids play along and even succeed sometimes by sheer chance. Monopoly also gathers a couple of other game concepts alien to the simulation of real estate dealing - set trading and collecting, chance cards.

So where are hit points exapted from? Some of you may already know, but here's a roundabout clue:

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More next time.