Health Systems

As I've said before, I was originally conceived and implemented as a D&D character.

First Edition AD&D, to be precise, back when Bard was an Appendix that had me start out as a Fighter.

The upshot is that I've always known my way around which end is pointy and where to put it, and I've always been pretty sturdy. It also means I was there, many times, as our players stopped the game and left us, the characters, frozen in time with a weapon just reaching its target so they could discuss what it meant that seven more "hit points" were going to be deducted from our amorphous bag of Life.

The blob of HP has become so ubiquitous that many don't even question it any more. Video games just blithely take it for granted, as do many TTRPGs. Yes, it's absolutely possible for someone to get shot and keep coming, but seventy-four times in an afternoon?!?!?

People, Bactine isn't that good. Wrapping a little gauze around it isn't going to make it all better.

So what *should* we be doing?

The Mechanism Isn't The Problem.

I mean, yeah, a pot of points is a bland methodology, but it's really all you need if you want to be technical... The problem is that some folk are just so lazy with it!

What? Oh, of course I didn't mean you...

I have an old friend whom I dearly miss, however crass he may have been - a half-orc Barbarian who was tougher than any mortal had a right to be, and he knew it. He was cocky. He strutted into towns, and the guards saw trouble, and often as not harassed him. One pointed a cocked hand crossbow, and my friend blustered.

This is where the players had another of those conversations about hit points -

My friend's player decided that the big guy would put his fists on his hips and glare at the guard, and tell him to go ahead, pull the trigger. THAT was when time stopped in the game and the players had their discussion.

The GM blinked. "You what?"

The Barbarian's player said "I have over a hundred HP. That thing does a d4. I let him shoot me."

The GM's face broke into an absolutely demonic grin. "You forego your defense, and just stand there?"

Barbarian: "Yeah..."

GM, positively drooling: "Save vs. Death."

There was no sentence that terrified that player more. "WHAT?!? Wait a minute! Why?"

Because hit points aren't some magical Barkskin that has to be shorn off with a wood chipper. They aren't insurmountable protection magic (unless they are...) 

They do not measure how tough the character's skin is, or how hard his bones are to break. 

Hit points serve exactly one and only one major purpose in the game: they are a resource to spend to make a character cooler. They let him stay in a fight when "lesser men" would fall.  They give him the courage to stand against a dragon, and the currency to burn to stand there for another round. 

So why do they not let him take a crossbow bolt, you ask? 
That's what we're here to discuss!

Hit points aren't a representation of the character being physically resistant to harm. If you poke a needle into the character with a hundred hit points it doesn't bend and blunt and break, it sinks in just as it would with the character who has only one. Hit points represent a specific type of experience that teaches the character how not to let a knife thrust at his belly slash him open like a melon, and they represent the luck that sort of experience collects. Good habits, the favor of the gods, and the sense not to just stand there and be shot.

They are Plot Armor, of a sort. As long as the character is trying to minimize harm, then those spare hit points represent success, even when the dice say otherwise. They are Dice Padding. They are a mechanical means to represent a narrative truth, that a hero doesn't just get knocked over by a lucky shot unless it's at the end of a long and arduous scene that has earned it.

In Fate they call it Stress. Characters have a few "Stress" boxes they can check when damage is being dealt to say "this is how I kept that from putting a nasty hole in me." If an opponent rolls a successful hit of two "shifts" (points) on the character, they can check a two-point Stress box (if it's available!) and narrate how and why the sword stroke did NOT murder them. Maybe they stumble backwards out of the way, or blocked with their own weapon. The Stress box is now used and unavailable, so it really has  taken a toll and brought them closer to their end, but more in terms of resources used. It's fatigue, and the brain getting a little closer to its limit of things it can handle. They spent some Hero's Luck.

What Fate has that D&D doesn't quite is Consequences - they are like Stress boxes, but they don't just come back after the scene is over; they require some healing. They also mean actual mechanical advantages for the enemy that put them there, and literal Narrative Truths that affect the story going forward. If the characters takes another two point "hit" now that their two-point Stress box is used, they might have to take a Mild Consequence to absorb it, and that means they have to name it. 

Twisted Ankle, they might call it, saying they stumbled out of the way of the sword stroke JUST in time, but hurt their foot when they did. That Twisted Ankle is part of the story now until it heals.

How is it different from D&D? Pretty much only in that they have a better mechanism for handling accumulating injuries. D&D only has Stress. Points come off until there are no more points. The only one that matters is the last one - but the narration still makes more sense if you make every hit point a description of how you didn't take a fatal blade through the throat. As your total gets lower and the possible damage in one hit gets closer and closer to eclipsing what remains, start describing each interaction as more and more desperate...a successful evasion by smaller and smaller margins. 

Ok, yes, when you're standing in a hallway and the dragon breathes a sixty foot cone of flame to twenty feet past you, it's a little harder, but be creative. Your game will benefit from it. You dived to the floor as far to the side as you could, and the heat and loss of oxygen in the hallways were blinding and devastating...but the cone is the area where it was hot, and you got spray of flaming droplets igniting your hair and clothes. It doesn't have to mean your flesh is melting off your bones unless it killed you.

Other games use different approaches. Old World of Darkness games tracked "Health Level" and assigned a modifier to your actions based on how bad you were hurt. Everyone got the same series of consecutive labels representing how wounded you were, but your ability to resist damage might be better or worse. Shadowrun had an explicit ten-box track, and you got a -1 modifier on all skills for every three boxes filled, and at all ten you were dead, and they also resisted damage according to character stats. 

Cortex Prime is one of the few systems I've seen that by default doesn't use some sort of point system for Health, because Cam Banks built the game around an absolutely wonderful dice fetish. Yes, there are "Mods" that can add it back in, but by default the entire system of health and injury is just the creative application of Complications. You get hurt, you get a Complication, which is dice the GM and NPCs can use against you. When they get bad enough, you're done. What does it mean? You get to say. 

I think that's genius. He doesn't bother even pretending to say what your Health is, because THAT ISN'T THE POINT!! No one cares how healthy you are... What matters is that you are impaired. Your ability to act in the scenes the GM puts you in is hindered, and when that hindrance reaches a certain critical point you are overwhelmed, and you succumb. 

It doesn't mean you die. It means you are out of the action and don't have a say anymore. It's narrative.

That's another thing Fate got right, and another thing D&D really could have done better. They did try to model "unarmed damage" as nonlethal, but that was a sad attempt. (Maybe 5e did it better; I'll wait for someone to tell me.)

This is a model we followed in OneRPG and LevelOneRPG; Harm is just an accumulating modifier that probably applies narrative Truths until the character is overwhelmed...but it's still numbers, because these systems use numbers. That's ok as long as you understand what they represent.

Or...if you don't care. The truth is that some people like the whole slug-it-out video game play style, and that's their business. If their table agrees that's what they prefer, or even what they want to do just for a particular game, then it's no one's place to tell them they are doing it wrong.

I just want to make sure they realize there is another option. ;o]