Replacing Hitpoints

craft
#1

It’s 2022 … a long time after the first RPG came out and was played in masses. The concept of Hitpoints is more than 40 years old and I think we should come up with a new, improved version of it.
Not inventing the wheel, I got the following integrated and tested once:

Instead of Hitpoints, a Character has Wound conditions. The first Heart enables the following conditions:

  • 2x Minor cuts & bruises
  • 1x Injury (broken bones & deep cuts)
  • 1x Severe Injury (open fractures, arterial cut, bleeding from many wounds, dislocated joints, etc)
  • 1x Mortal Wound (arterial bleeding, ripped open guts, nearly severed limb, etc)

The last one is the 0 HP condition, where you roll the Death timer.

Now, since we all like to roll for Effect (Damage), let’s settle on the following:

  • a roll of 1-3 Damage consists of Minor Cuts & Bruises; one of the two boxes is ticked off.
  • a roll of 4-7 Damage is an Injury; that box get’s ticked off.
  • a roll of 8 Damage is a Severe Injury; tick off that box.
  • a roll of 12+ Damage is a Mortal Wound; roll the Death timer and tick off that box.

If you ever need to tick off a box that has already been ticked, you will have to go to the next level of Injury and tick that box instead. Injuries get worse if you get beaten up more and more.

Even if you already have an Injury or higher ticked off, the two Minor Cuts & Bruises are still available in case a weak hit strikes home.

You do not heed to ‘step through’ the tick boxes - if the Damage is high enough (12 Effect), you are dead.

More Hearts: each additional Heart adds an Injury tick box to the character, so a character with 3 Hearts has 2 Minor Cuts & Bruises boxes, 2 Injury boxes, 1 Severe Injury and 1 Mortal Wound tick box.

Bookkeeping: More simple than you think: just create an Index card with 5 tick boxes per enemy and also draw the (number of Hearts-1) next to it. The five boxes indicate the normal tick boxes all characters have and the Hearts can be crossed/filled out for each additional Injury condition the enemy receives.

Goal of this: The system above allows for heroic battles, while still feeling vulnerable but also giving the characters a chance to stay in combat for a while. An instant kill is very rare, but possible if an enemy does Ultimate Damage and rolls a 12.
It also keeps the characters wary, as even with more Hearts, the Instant Kill option is a real possibility. This allows for two things:

  • Enemies with multiple Hearts can be killed in one mighty strike
  • Hitpoint inflation is not a big problem
  • combat stays fast and deadly even at higher levels
Double Hearts
#2

Injury systems can be great!

If you want to compare your hack to other possibly similar systems:

  • I think FATE’s stress / consequence system is pretty elegant.
  • Mouseguard / Torchbearer use a consequences system.
  • Burning Wheel uses a complicated injury system with grades of wounds and rules for fatal blows.
  • Into the Odd has my favorite system that mixes HP with a “wound” system that is fast and intuitive (but still uses HP).

I think part of the enduring quality of hit points is that they’re fast and simple to adjudicate at the table. They make fine sense to me as long as you accept that they’re an abstraction or game mechanic.

While not a flaw per se and definitely a YMMV thing, a damage-threshold-for-injury hack for ICRPG does create a system where you roll one number for damage and convert that number into an injury result. If I take 7 damage, I might need to consult a table to see if it’s just an injury or if it’s a a severe injury, and so on. To my mind, most other systems in ICRPG work where the stat or number works on its face without needing to convert anything.

Couple of questions:

  • Why two minor cuts & bruises boxes? Have you tested with just one box?

  • Have you tried it with fewer injury categories? Like just Cuts & Bruises, Injury, and Mortal Wound?

  • How exactly does getting extra hearts factor into this? If I understand it: first extra heart gives me an extra cuts and bruises, my second gives me an extra injury, my third extra heart gives me an extra severe injury and so on. Is that right?

#3

I think you would be better off keeping Hit Points and reversing the responsability of counting injuries: the game or GM should be in charge of creating damage tresholds for monsters. Both to speed up play and to customize everything, plus I think that it would fit well with the Monster A.I. show in this video.

Create a new Heart

A monster has a Stun Attack. Whenever that attack hit, fill a Stun Heart on the target (or create one if he had none). Once a Stun Heart is filled, the target is Stunned for a timer or until the Stun Heart is empty. This is an example with a condition, but it would work just as well with a Rip Limb Heart.

Use a treshold

Use a simple rule like:“Roll 6 + on your Effort die” or give a simple number of Effort that must be dealt in a single turn to impose a condition or an injury.

Called shots and saving throws

Called shots are harder to make and so can easily justify dealing damage and/or causing some manner of injury to a target. I say or 'cause a player might have the intent of causing an injury rather than drop the targets HPs… and in some cases that might be impossible or hard to do, for good or ill depending on the situation.

Some peeps like that some things just work differently. Saving throws give those people that feeling. So, some injuries being “gated” behind saving throws could be your way of doing it, perhaps after losing a certain amount of HPs or being at a minimal amount of HPs. Either or both! :man_shrugging:

Critical Hit

On a critical hit, the attacker gets to impose an appropriate injury. It’s simple and you can even provide a table to the players. A normal attack, in this case it means:“An attack that is not a called shot”, could simply take away a victim’s breath momentarily, while called shots could cause more debilitating injuries.

Flexibility

This is why HP are superior, you can do pretty much anything with it, 2022 or not. You can do one or all of the above and still figure out more to do IMO. Making it a “seven points with tiers of injuries” is still Hit Points, just called something else with a mechanical cherry on top.

God speid o7

#4

So i used this little tracker in my modern-world game as a better way to track, basically fill a box per hit, the boxes that “hold up” the box in the section above it are filled in when they are both filled. For example. Two minor wounds- would fill 1 nasty wound. two nasty would fill one brutal. filling all of ANY row, results in a KO, or complication (depending on your style)

The only reason i used this was because there weren’t any “healing” abilities, they only passed through time while not in combat, items could expedite the process of healing. If i’m being honest, it became more of a hassle to track than a benefit narratively.

Snipsnip

#5

WOUNDS

While this method does not wholly replace Hit Points it could be used on its own, maybe just 3 wounds max, each providing a -1 penalty cumulatively. similar to Savage Worlds system. Here is how I use it at my table:

Wounds are semi-permanent and/or difficult to recover from… laceration to the bone from a dragon claw, major burn from fire, frostbite, broken leg from a fall, etc. are tracked as WOUNDS in my home games.

WOUNDS: Each wound costs 1 HP from Max HP. In addition to the HP dmg that caused the wound. Wounds have to be healed either thru Magic, Loot, Ability, or Time. Zero Max HP means you only have the HP left until you die or you heal your wounds.

Game On!

#6

With respect I don’t see how this is any easier than counting HP, you’re still rolling for damage and counting number of wounds / consequences.

Hits not Hit Points

If you want to get rid of hit points, then I’d think about “hits” not hit points, so a 3 :heart: monster takes 3 hits to down, but their AC/Defence is a threshold, you need to roll enough damage to beat the threshold to be able to damage the monster. This system is much easier to track, than counting HP.

#7

I saw a similar idea in another thread. A level 1 monster has 1 Heart with a threshold of 1 and a target of 11. A level 2 monster has 2 hearts with a threshold of 2 and a target of 12 (or just use local target). Hearts function like hits and are marked off in their entirety if the threshold is reached. My group and I are planning to try it the next time we play to see how it feels.

#8

Hits not Hit Points

Professor Dungeon Master over at Dungeon Craft has an excellent video about this!

#9

I like the suggestions here, and I like hearing that others are puzzling with the simplicity of health/HP vs. the binary nature of (Steven Wright voice), “You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re dead,” without anything in between.

One system I’ve enjoyed, and one I’m using for inspiration in our ICRPG games, is the knocked out -> roll on injuries table that Mordheim uses (page 88 of this pdf). When I first read that system, I thought it wouldn’t work. And then during a portion of my life I played a lot of games of Mordheim. The injury system felt good to use throughout our campaign. Sometimes I’d lose a hero, but the majority of time I wouldn’t, and neither would anyone else. Given the alternative, the wound felt like a relief, just another challenge to compensate for. The wounds themselves gave flavor to our characters. Some of our warbands ended up with glass cannons due to overall success of the warband coupled with compound wounds on some of their heroes. As the campaign progressed, the wounds gave all of us something we could exploit no matter the power level of the opposition.

#12

This is my reply, too. If counting damage, no progress is made.
A hit is a hit is a hit. The question stops being about adding damage dice and becomes ‘how can i hit this thing?’