Health and D&D: Part Two

The man on the left is about to suffer 1d6 damage.

Let me lay down some heresy real quick today. 

The problem with hit points isn't that weapons do too much damage, or that regular joes have too few hit points, or even that zero hit points shouldn't equal death because that's not how it works in the real world.

The problem with hit points is that they scale shittily. And here's how.

A level one dude, let's say a Fighting Man rolling a d8, has roughly four hit points. That's enough to take a good whack from a mace or a sword and go down. Much like warriors in real life, he's going to avoid letting his enemy strike a telling blow that will fell him. This man is cunning and clever enough to survive these trials and tribulations and acheives level two. Suddenly, the man has 8 hit points- twice as many as before. In a single level, he's doubled his hit points, and at level three, he gains another roughly 4 hit points, to a total of twelve. By the time he hits level four, a Fighting Man with average constitution and average luck will have managed to attain 16 hit points- he's four times as tough as he was before. His possible range of hit points is between 4 and 32.

That's kind of silly. 

It would be interesting if Fighting Men gained a small bonus to health, similar to the +3 bonus they gain instead of an additional hit die after a certain level- what if the first die were the only one rolled? What if all they ever got was the first hit die, and after that they gained a bonus to armor class, or a flat reduction in damage taken?

Hit points act like a sign, "You must be thiiiiis tough to enter!" And that's not cool. It honestly surprises me that in an old-school revolution where dungeon masters and players alike cry "Challenge the players, and not the characters!", that there would be hubbub about skill systems but none about leaning on stacks of hit points to deal with problems. I exaggerate, of course, but really- it means that certain challenges aren't doable unless you have passed certain in-game requirement.

You must be this tall to hug giraffes.

What if health and level were totally disconnected? What if you never got more health, but instead just gained your other class features? Would you have to continue to play cautiously even when just facing more "boring" foes like other humans, and goblins? Would monsters have to be redesigned and rethought so that a challenging fight consisted less of ever-increasing super powers and more so there's a reason that a stupid race of fat cannibals can exist? 

Would we ever have to make players go in a goblin warren ever again?

Health and D&D

Just a flesh wound?

Much greater bloggers than I (Alexis and JB from The Tao of D&D and B/X Blackrazor, respectively) have a minor disagreement (possibly) over how tough low level humans are, and what the possible ramifications are.

I talked it over with my buddy Tony, and we came to the same conclusion that Alexis did; humans are pretty tough to kill, overall, and not even your average firearm will kill a man in one hit. This is a fairly common fact, actually; firearms simply do not kill men frequently. They wound, disable, and stop. I heard a story once that the reason that the US military switched to 9mm bullets as opposed to the (unspecified) smaller calibre pistols they had used beforehand was that the 9mm bullet would stagger even the largest and most berserk of attackers, and drop them when hit in the center of mass.

And as for the common 5.56 round used in M16s and M4s, it has a similar purpose. It's common knowledge that older rifles had a significantly larger round to produce more stopping power and increase range, but many people question why we would use the smaller round when it has less killing power.

The answer, of course, is that we're not trying to kill the people. Which sounds silly, but we're really not. We're trying to disable them, so they quit fighting. The smaller round means that we can carry more ammunition on each and every soldier, so we can disable yet more enemies. It's beautiful. The fact that the rounds fragment and tumble is entirely irrelevant.

It makes intuitive sense that medieval warfare would be the exact same way. Combat is not to the death, but to the disable. If you've stabbed a man in the chest, as long as he no longer wishes to fight, it doesn't matter if he'll make it or if he bleeds out. You've defeated him, and now it's time to move on.

So I guess my position is somewhere in between. I don't see a problem with 1d4 hit points, when you consider that zero hit points doesn't mean death, it means disabled, and that a man can be brough back from near death with medicine, time, and a little luck. And I don't honestly see a problem with zero level humans having more hit points, although I've never particularly been a big fan of hit points as health. You can look at my house rules for wounds for a little bit on this. I've long been toying with the idea that only hit points at first level are actual "health" and that maybe you only get the one level of actual hit points and everything else just adds, I dunno, some sort of other toughness type thing and it's only a flesh wound until you get to actual health. It's what I was trying to do with a simple wound system, anyways.

But before I digress further, I have a busy day ahead of me- gotta look at some new houses (I'm moving!) and then go to class before they scratch me off the roster. I already paid, so I have to go sometimes.

This is an interesting enough topic to potentially get two parts.