Hit Points Are Dumb.

Hit Points are old and outmoded. Everyone says so on Reddit. We have so many more modern and sophisticated ways of making combat meaningful and dramatic now, ways that enable the players to take Narrative Control. I agree.

For instance, I had an idea recently, where if the GM says something like "the bandit stabs you in the heart; you're dead", the player can take narrative control and, if they can give a good reason why it doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen. So I might say "we're fighting on uneven terrain, so when he takes a swing at me, he slips on rubble and it throws his aim off". It doesn't have to be any one particular thing. And then I hand the GM a glass bead or some token that represents what I call the Locus of Narrative Combat, or LNC for short. You don't want to be able to do this indefinitely, so you only have a few. You'd get them back at some point, similar to the way FATE has the concept of a "refresh rate", so they're not gone forever. And over time, you'd get more beads to represent how much closer to his or her Heroic Destiny your character is.

Now, sometimes when someone attacks you, it's could be anything from a superficial cut on the side of your arm to slashing your throat. So we'd have some mechanism of determining a variable amount of LNCs I would need to protect myself; maybe only one for a scratch, but maybe as many as four for a really good shot. And it's more realistic if a sword had more opportunities to stab or bash or cut me when he attacks; the GM might even give it a narrative flair and say that, because he got my weapon in a bind, my enemy was able to punch or kick me for a few points when he wasn't able to before. So we might have to give up anywhere from one to eight LNCs to stop that.

You don't actually have to hand over the glass beads or poker chips, of course. That's simply a convenience. If you wanted to do it the hard way, you could keep track of your LNCs on your character sheet somewhere. If you lost five, for instance, you could just subtract five from whatever your current number is. But that's math, and you shouldn't have to be good at math, or have a desire ever to improve your real-life skills, to have fun in a Narrative Game. So you can just use a big pile of beads for convenience.

The only problem is, Locus of Narrative Combat is a mouthful, and even LNCs is a lot to say over and over again. I thought of calling them your Fate Tally, but for some reason that sounded bad. Calling them Destiny Dots was too alliterative, and implied that you could spend them for other things, and I didn't want them to be just an automatic Success button. So I'm stuck with the term Locus of Narrative Combat, because there's really no better term I can think of for Points that protect your character when they get Hit.

But yeah, Hit Points are dumb.

cheers,
Adam

Thoughts on Multi-Classing

As I've mentioned before, I'm not fond of 3e-style "I'm a wizard, but I'm going to be a monk for this level" style class-switching. But I do think there should be room for some kind of multiclassing. If the character classes really represent years of training and study, then, how are we to model that in the game? (Presuming we aren't simply using the 1e AD&D rules.)

I like two options: one, a character can start out with two classes, representing an extraordinary background; I would require such a character to have at least 13 in the prime attributes of each class. Two, characters can gain another class later on, but I would limit it to one every 4 levels past first, and the player has to pre-declare what their character is studying to become.

In any case, once the character has multiple classes, experience must be split between them.

Since I like to start 1st-level characters with max hit points, the question becomes, which die to use? If you're a "nice" GM (and I try not to be, but who am I kidding?), you might give the best of the two. But you could also roll one die for each class, and use the *lower* result as the die type. In other words, suppose you have a Fighter/Magic-User. Roll a d4 and a d10 (depending on which version of the game you're playing, of course). Whichever die is the lowest, you use that as the basis of h.p., although you may max it at first level if you choose. So if you rolled a 3 on the d4 and a 2 on the d10, you'd start out with 10 h.p. But with a roll of 3 on the d4 and, say, 6 on the d10, you start out with M-U hit points. The rationale behind this is, the less combat-oriented one of your classes is, the less likely your character would be to have learned the skill of mitigating damage.

In this way, players can eventually free themselves from the supposed restrictions that class-based gaming imposes, without too much power imbalance as a result.

cheers,
Adam

Abstractions

If combat is broken off, the fleeing party must accept an attack without any return on his part, the attacker adding +2 on his die roll for hit probability, and the armor class of the fleeing party can not include a shield. (J. Eric Holmes on what would later become known as the Attack of Opportunity, Dungeons & Dragons, p.21)

One of the common criticisms of OD&D is that the combat system isn't realistic, and the common rejoinder to that is that D&D combat is abstract.

That's a perfectly good reply, too, in my opinion, and it reflects D&D's roots in earlier games like Chainmail and other wargames. In those, pieces often represented units of 100 men or more, and the attack/damage resolution was necessarily an abstraction, due to the aggregate nature of the unit. D&D simply evolved from that perfectly adequate system by dividing 100 men by 100, giving us the abstractions of Armor Class and Hit Points.

Nonetheless, there is abstract and there is Abstract. We don't talk about Triangle units hitting Squares and knocking off three points from the Blue Column; it's swords and axes hitting goblins and manticores and knocking their h.p. down. And dividing up an aggregation to derive the individual suffers from the "average family" problem, where every household has 2.73 children. So even in the early days, there was some desire to add a little bit of verisimilitude to combat, as evinced by the quote above.

Of course, combat was never the sole activity in the game, nor even the central one, despite what some might say, so it makes sense that it be dealt with on a level that reflects how much time and effort it should occupy. But weighed against this is the reality that in combat, more than any part of the game except maybe traps, your character can go down due to a bad die roll, and that giving the players more fiddly bits to twiddle can give them a feeling of control and fairness even when their hero meets an untimely end.

I mention all of this because I like Armor Class and Hit Points for the abstractions they are, but for me, the right level of detail is a moving target, and I sometimes find myself wanting more. I'm not thrilled by how complicated the rules have become on that score, however. I prefer my tactical flash to be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Something like this is a good start; a collection of easy-to-state and easy-to-adjudicate rules. Although I don't agree with all of them, this kind of thinking seems more elegant than all of the cumulative bonuses and multiple attack feats of later editions. So I'll be asking about this kind of thing in the future, and offering some suggestions of my own from time to time. I hope you'll find them useful.

cheers,
Adam