Revisting alternatives to Hit Points.

 I wrote this post 16 years ago...

Alternatives for Hit Points

...and while I've been in and out of the loop for a bit, I've encountered a couple of options, and have designed a few games that have adopted the ideas of other designers. 

Penalty Traits

Penalty traits are oe of the most common alternatives. If a character takes a hit, physically, socially or magically,they often have to accept some kind of penalty condition until they find a way to overcoime the condition they've been afflicted with. Sometimes I've seen traits applied in combination with hit points, where it's either:

A) You take a penalty trait that impacts your ability as well as suffering hit point damage (this often occurs on a critical hit).

or

B) You take a debilitating penalty trait or you accept the loss of hit points (player's choice, or maybe it's a system choice determined by rolling on a table). Usually the loss of hit points is preferable, but if the character is out of hit points to spend, then they either take the debilitating effect of die.

I'm sure I've mentioned systems like this over the years... if I haven't I should have.

Old School Hit Dice 

The systems I've really enjoywed over the last 12 moiths has been the DURF mechanism of having characters take damage from hits, then needing toi roll over the damage take with the character's hit dice. 

A character has taken 5 damage, they've got 3 hit dice. They need to roll a 6 or better with 3 dice to stay alive. Pretty easy.

Later, the same character has taken 10 damage, they take a further 4 from a hit and now have to roll a 15 or higher on those three dice. Much harder.

Te beauty here is that there's a far more dynamic range of potentially being taken out of the game, even from a meta-perspective...Especially from a meta perspective. 

With 2 hit dice, anything more than 1 damage has a chance of taking a character out, until they reach the point of 12 damage, when they are simply gone.  

With 3 hit dice, anything more than 2 damage has a chance to take a character out, and at 18 it's game over.

 

Every time I've played this system, it adds a strategic elements that straddles diegetic and non-diegetic play. After the first hit, characters generally don't know which of the next hits is going to be the one that takes them down. They don't look against their remaining hit points to determine that they'll be safe with the next couple of hits... they look at their current damage, and say "that next hit might kill me, even though I could theoretically take two or three more (if I'm lucky)". I guess it's a bit like working out the percentages on a d4 damage weapon versus a d8 damage weapon, but played from a different angle, and the experience feels quite varied from the usual ticking countdown of health.

 It also increase the variability of combat length, anyone could die with any decent hit. Combat is bloodier and more dangerous... which certainly works for specific types of genre emulation.