[MUD-Dev] Alternative Hit Point Systems?

[Travis Casey]

Saturday, July 27, 2002, 4:39:18 PM, Jack Britt wrote:

> I'm trying to find alternatives to the AD&D-style of hit points
> but I'm not having much luck. Couldn't find anything on google,
> and can't seem to come up with anything on the mud-dev archives
> (although this is probably due to my inability to do a decent
> search.)

> I was wondering if anyone had any ideas or concepts for a
> different way of doing hit points?

Lots.  Let's start off, though, by talking for a minute about what
the AD&D style of hit points is -- there's a few common
misunderstandings about them.

AD&D hit points combine two main things: the ability to take damage,
and the ability to avoid or minimize damage taken.  This latter is
the main part of why hit points go up with levels -- a 6th-level
fighter can't physically take as much damage as a dozen normal
people -- he's just so much better at dodging, parrying, etc. that
he/she can take *attacks* (not actual *damage*, but *attacks*) that
would kill the twelve of them before dropping.

This is why none of the core D&D rules include parrying or other
rules for defensive actions, except to represent "total defense" --
our 6th-level AD&D fighter is assumed to be parrying, dodging,
rolling with blows, etc., but all that is factored into his/her hit
points.

This also explains the differences in hit points gained per level by
different classes.  Warrior-types get the most, because they learn
the most about how to survive a fight.  Wizards, who are supposed to
be the worst fighters, get the least.  (Note that better hit die
types go hand-in-hand with having a better rate of improving to-hit
scores in AD&D.)

Secondly, AD&D hit points are generalized and abstract.  You take
five points of damage -- you don't take a hit to a leg, a broken
bone, or any other form of specific injury -- just a loss of points.


So... there's two basic ways to depart from AD&D's style: divide up
"hit points" into multiple things, and go towards more detailed
injuries instead of the "points" abstraction.  However, there are a
lot of specific ways to go about doing those things.  Here's a few,
used by different games:

  1.  Divide up "hit points" into multiple pools of points.

    WotC's Star Wars RPG is an example of this; instead of having
    just "hit points", the game has "wound points", which represent
    actual physical injury, and "vitality points", which represent
    one's ability to avoid real damage.  Most damage comes out of
    vitality points; once those are gone, characters start taking
    wound points.  A few types of attacks can only do vitality, and
    there are ways in which an attack can bypass vitality and go
    straight to wounds (e.g., a critical hit).  Wound points are
    fixed; vitality points go up with levels.

    Palladium divides things up into hit points and structural
    damage capacity, as someone else mentioned in another post.
    Same basic idea as SW's wound points and vitality points,
    although Palladium did it before SW.

    Both Lands of Adventure and Villains & Vigilantes divide things
    up as well.  LoA has "life points" and "body points" -- "life
    points" represent vital damage (e.g., organ damage), while "body
    points" represent flesh wounds.  Body points depend on how much
    a character or creature weighs, so elephants, for example, can
    take a lot more of them than humans.  V&V has "hit points" which
    perform both those functions.  Both of these, however, have
    fatigue points, and in both, a character can choose to take some
    of the damage from a hit as fatigue -- representing effort put
    forth in making an extraordinary defense or dodge.  Fatigue
    recovers more quickly than real damage...  but fatigue is also
    useful for other things, such as making extra effort in an
    attack.

    Lastly, several games have "luck points" of some form.  These
    can often be spent either to reduce or eliminate damage from an
    attack, and can also usually be spent to "be lucky" in other
    ways as well.

  2.  Represent defensive ability with skills.

    Many RPGs have some form of defensive skill.  Runequest is the
    oldest I know of off-hand.  Such systems usually give characters
    two or more actions per round -- with two, a character can
    either attack twice, defend one and attack once, or defend
    twice.  Using these skills makes it less likely that the
    character gets hurt, effectively increasing hit points.

    Rolemaster does things a little bit differently -- it lets you
    divide up your skill with a weapon between attack and defense
    each round.  So, someone with a Sword skill of 65 using a sword
    can split those 65 points however they want between attack and
    defense.

  3.  Use wound levels, with nonlinear "adding".

    In many games, a character who takes a 5-point wound and then a
    6-point wound isn't necessarily as bad off as someone who's
    taken a single 11-point wound.  Instead of just adding damage
    points up against a "hit point" total, different strategies can
    be employed:

      - Worst one counts.  In this sort of system, the worst wound
      you've taken is the only one that matters, as far as your
      fighting condition goes.  Generally such games also impose
      penalties for fighting while wounded, so that while a 5-point
      wound taken when you already have a 5-point wound doesn't make
      you any worse off, an attack that would have given you a
      5-point wound when you were fresh in the fight might give you
      a worse wound when you're already wounded.

      - "Bumping" methods.

       In this sort of system, a character generally has only a few
       wound levels -- maybe a dozen or so.  If you're unwounded and
       take a hit, you take whatever wound level it gives.  If
       you're already wounded, and you take a hit that's less than
       the wound you've got, it just "bumps you up" one level.  If
       you take a hit that's worse than what you've already got, you
       go up to that level.)

    There are a lot of other ways to work things... for another
    example, see below when I talk about Chill.

  4.  Use specific wound areas.

    Several RPGs use hit locations -- every hit is assigned to a
    body part.  In such systems, damage to a specific body part may
    have specific affects -- e.g., if your leg has been badly hurt,
    you may have a chance of falling down each round, and move
    around more slowly.  If your arm has been hit, you might have a
    chance of dropping something held in that hand, and have have a
    penalty to strength using that arm.  If the head is hit, you
    have have a chance of being knocked out.  And so on.

    In a traditional hit point system, each body part will be
    assigned a number of hit points it can take before it's injured,
    and possibly higher numbers at which it's badly injured and/or
    destroyed.  Another possibility is to use wound levels with body
    parts, as in #3.  #5 presents another possibility.

  5.  Use wound effects instead of hit points.

    Some of the more modern games don't have hit points at all;
    instead, each time you're hit, there's a chance of some effects
    happening immediately (e.g., knockout, stun, killed, bone
    broken, etc.), and you may get penalties applied to further
    actions, depending on the wound.  This is often combined with
    #4, so that penalties and possible immediate effects depend on
    where you were hit.

Some systems combine two or more of these; I've mentioned a couple
of examples already, but here's a specific one that I find
interesting -- the old Mayfair game, Chill.

Chill had both wound levels (scratch, light, heavy, critical,
mortal, if I remember right) and a sort of hit point total, called
shock points.  All attacks did shock points; some attacks would also
do a wound.

The character sheet had an area for recording wounds, with two boxes
beside each wound level except mortal.  When your character took a
wound, you checked off an appropriate box.  If both boxes on that
level were checked off, you "bumped up" to the next level -- thus,
if you already had taken two light wounds, a third one would count
as heavy.  If you had a mortal wound and took a second one, your
character was dead.

When a character reached zero shock points left, that character
would either fall unconscious, or die.  Which they'd do depended on
their wound status -- if they had a mortal wound, they'd die.

Critical and mortal wounds both "bled" -- that is, the character
would lose shock points each round for several rounds, unless they
got first aid.  And also, wounds of "light" or worse had action
penalties associated with them, so someone running around with a
heavy wound would find it harder to do things.

  (Note that all this is from memory, so I may have some things
  wrong here; however, the overall picture should be right.)


--
Travis Casey
efindel at earthlink.net


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