Alternate Hit Point Systems (or, Various Ways to Make Crits Stop Being Fun)

There’s a quiet assumption in 3rd Edition and its related systems that hit potions don’t actually keep track of damage. Getting cut by a sword is normally quite severe if not fatal, and gunshots and firealls aren’t any better. Rather, hit points represent fatigue, luck, training, or any number of things that allow you to survive in combat long after your armor has failed you.

I think Ultimate Combat put it best, or at least put it in the way that’s the most fun to read:

Hit points are an abstraction. When a fighter gains a level, his body does not suddenly become more resistant to damage. A sword’s strike does not suddenly do proportionately less damage. Rather, hit points suggest that the fighter has undergone more training, and while he may have improved his ability to deal with wounds to a small degree, the hit points gained at higher levels reflect less his capacity for physical punishment and more his skill at avoiding hits, his ability to dodge and twist and turn. Each loss of hit points, in this case, suggests that he is becoming progressively less nimble over the course of combat—in other words, that the decreasing hit points are a marker for his overall endurance and condition. It’s not quite as satisfying, however, to roll a critical hit and then tell a player that his opponent ducked out of the way, but that the sword’s slash made the enemy a little less lucky.

To bridge this gap, Wizards released a few options hit points variants as part of Unearthed Arcana (the fourth Core Rulebook). We could debate their merits as to how they represent the real world or change the balance of play, but that’s boring. Also, I’ve done too many posts lately on numbers. Instead I want to look at how fun they are, because that’s the point of the game and, ostensibly, the point of this blog.

There are four systems, three in 3.5’s Unearthed Arcana and one in Pathfinder’s Ultimate Combat. In the examples below, assume “character” means “PC, NPC, or monster”.

Injury

In Brief: When you take damage, make a Fortitude save, DC 15 + (damage / 5). If you fail, you take a -1 on subsequent injury saves. If you fail by 10 or more, you’re disabled, just like being at 0 hit points. Healing reduces the penalty to saves.

What it Means: Unless a characters has a high Fortitude save, every hit is a chance to be knocked nearly unconscious. Small damage values whittle away at your saves, increasing the chance of failure. Big damage values have a better chance to knock you out, but if you succeed you can shrug them off completely.

Who Loves It: Characters with high Fortitude saves or who make tons of attacks; players who love to gamble.

Who Hates It: Characters with low Fortitude saves; the unlucky.

Effect at the Table: Miserable. It puts almost every character at a risk of immediate, unpredictable failure and increases the chances that they’ll be knocked out before they can even take an action. It makes high-Fortitude characters completely immune to sufficiently small damage values (unless you rule that a natural 1 always fails by 10 or more, in which case every hit is a 5% chance to knock someone out). It gives every character a chance to completely ignore any attack by any other character, regardless of how much damage it deals; even a critical hit can be shrugged off, making it not much of a critical hit at all. Finally, it significantly increases the amount of rolling at the table, which slows the game and makes results less dependent on player choices and more dependent on happenstance.

Vitality and Wound Points

In Brief: Hit points are called “vitality points”, and are the same except you don’t add your Constitution modifier. You also have “wound points”, equal to your Con score. If you run out of vitality points or suffer a critical hit, deduct the damage from your wound points instead. At 0 wound points, make a Fortitude save to avoid going unconscious. Monsters have a similar system but are slightly different.

What it Means: Critical hits are a lot more significant, even critical hits that only do one point of damage. Fights are more lethal and thus faster, but because you recover one vitality point per level per hour, recovery between fights is also faster.

Who Loves It: Characters with a high chance to crit (by rule, a high crit multiplier is converted to a high crit range); monsters

Who Hates It: Characters with low Constitution scores; players

Effect at the Table: Cinema. Players have lower hit point totals while monsters, especially large monsters, actually have higher hit point totals, which puts the odds more against the players. Any hit is a chance to incapacitate an opponent, but it’s more based on the damage dealt rather than an extra saving throw after the fact. Critical hits also become a viable strategy against opponents with high damage reduction. Vitality points, and thus survival, are based more on your class (the choices you make) than your Con score (how you’re born), and it puts an emphasis on weapon-users rather than mages, giving non-magical classes a better chance to participate at high levels.

Reserve Points

In Brief: Hit points work just like normal. A character also gain an equal amount of reserve points. When a character takes damage, their reserve points are converted to hit points at the rate of one per minute.

What it Means: Players heal faster from lethal damage, to a point. No change occurs to battles.

Who Loves It: Players. All of them, actually.

Who Hates It: DMs used to the standard fights-per-day and Challenge Rating suggestions; timekeepers.

Effect at the Table: Freedom. It gives players a chance to last longer in a day without resorting to magical healing, which gives them the ability to do more in a day. It also reduces the stress on the healer and lets them spend their spells on something interesting rather than pumping cures into allies. But it doesn’t give players unlimited resources or let them bungle into fight after fight without downtime. A DM can use this to give the players more fights (since over the course of a day they essentially have double hit points) or harder fights (since the healer doesn’t have to save their big guns for healing during a long day). The biggest problem is that it requires the DM to decide exactly how many minutes have passed between fights, the sort of minutia that normally only matters to the wizard with his ten-minutes-per-level buffs.

Wounds and Vigor

In Brief: Determine vigor points and wound points just like the “Vitality and Wound Points” system, above, except wound points are doubled. Crits and negative energy damage can damage wound points directly. Losing half of your wound points makes you staggered, and healing can heal either vitality or wound points.

What it Means: A critical hit is almost guaranteed to stagger a character–an NPC on average is staggered by five wound points’ worth of damage, and even epic PCs are staggered after fifteen points.. Fights are more lethal and thus faster, and without magical healing a character may have to rest for many days before they are back in fighting shape even if their vitality points are full.

Who Loves It: Characters with a high chance to crit.

Who Hates It: Players and DMs who like long days or hard fights.

Effect at the Table: Downtime. Since healing can only apply to vitality points or wound points, it takes more healing to get a character back to full, and since a character with even a single missing wound point is unable to take actions without harming themselves, healing is more necessary. This leads to shorter days, both because the healer runs out of spells faster and because a player is more likely to be unable to continue once the healing is gone. It does have the same cinematic quality around crits as the previous Vitality system, but leverages it with the non-cinematic days of hospitalization and bed rest that follow.

I’m clearly a biggest fan of the Reserve Points system, and I think a big part of this is because it’s the same as the normal system. It’s quietly more powerful over a day but not much more powerful in a specific fight, and it doesn’t require a complete overhaul around the mindset of hit points. It does, however, have the same problem as the original hit point system, in that it’s still a vague abstraction of how hit points relate to character damage.

And you know, I’m okay with this. Just like how SimCity would be trash if growth happened in real-time (or if it required an Internet connection, zing!) and Mario games would be failures if the cartridge wiped itself every time you died, tabletop gaming isn’t at its best when it tries to perfectly mimic the real world. It’s at its best when everybody at the table is having fun, even when that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

In fact, I tend to go the opposite route: every hit is an actual hit. It means that if a character is hit a few times with a sword, that character is actually hit a few times with a sword. D&D is kind of built like this already; it doesn’t make sense that a dragon vulnerable to fire takes extra damage throwing their back out from avoiding a scorching ray, so I say it hits. I feel it makes the characters seem more heroic, taking all this damage and fighting on, though that may be my shounen anime influences seeping in. Besides, 4th Edition is built like this somewhat explicitly. At least half of the powers don’t work if the intention is that a hit actually misses but makes the target feel sad.

I can understand a DM who looks at the hit point system and sees room for improvement. I’m just not sure that overhauling the system is the way to solve it (and I’m absolutely certain that the Injury system is the wrong way to do anything).