Ah yes, the age-old problem. One interesting older game, not fantasy, that I loved was BattleTech. Your Mech has armor points, and once that armor's gone, internal damage occurs, leading to all sorts of disastrous consequences. Sure they're machines, but the principle still applies. More recently, I saw a video by Roleplay Cafe, where he discusses abstract hp in a system where combat is not abstract, along these lines, but not exactly eliminating hp. I'll check out your next video too and see where this is going. It's a discussion worth having, and new ideas are always welcome imo.
"Armor" or "ability to avoid damage" breaking first and then leading to "real damage" that has consequences on your combat ability seems like a great idea. One of the problems imo is that 5e and most other systems try to balance being as basic as possible and but also retain players who want 'more' from combat, so stuff like bloodied or multiple stages that added complexity got cut I like in TTRPGs that you can die to random mobs, so 'randomly' getting wounded or suffering significant damage and not being able to contribute as effectively adds stakes and therefore increases my enjoyment, but most people don't like consequences and play for very different reasons.
@@icarusshoda One of my earliest experiences in D&D was my own character's death.The ranger and I were scouting while the others set up camp. I was up a tree when he came face to face with a green dragon he just *had* to take down, not knowing how low on hp I was. The dragon breathed, and I dropped out of the tree dead at his feet. He killed the dragon, but then he spent a lot of money to have me resurrected. And I lost a point of Con, because that was the rule. You don't get those profound experiences if no one ever really dies. Also, we all got a good laugh out of it, and I was not traumatized for life because my imaginary friend pretend-died.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Rolemaster. So many damage types, so many ways to suffer terrible injuries, and a very restrictive magical healing system. We didn't play much because we found it so deadly, and I consider it almost too realistic in that respect. For example, I missed the session where the party got tpk'd by a random encounter with *badgers* -- and those guys were D&D vets. People think old school D&D was deadly, but they must have never played Rolemaster.
I've recently released my own TTRPG called GRIT Fantasy RPG. It still has an attrition-based setup but gets around this issue of hit point power-bloat. I simply capped the health points (called GRIT) at 10. Characters can never exceed that. Most monsters have 5-10 points with more powerful ones having 15-40 (40 is the maximum). There is also no level system. Improvement comes in the form of loot (much like ICRPG from Runehammer Games) and none of the items increase health. Mind you, this is a rules-light game deigned for one-shots and short arcs. It is not meant to replace D&D or games like it.
@@gnomebotstudios awesome, congrats on the launch of your game! Keeping HP (or its equivalent) very low definitely helps avoid that grindy issue and makes fights feel tense and deadly!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thank you! Making a game is challenging as I'm sure you know first hand. Low HP certainly does keep things from getting out if hand and makes combat risky. I think this can open up exploration for alternative solutions. Good luck with your game, I'll be following along!
My favorite system is Blade of the Iron Throne, which has more or less non-attrition combat. Simplifying it down, you have a pool of dice for combat that you partition between offense and defense, and you're trying to get more successes on your offense roll than their defense roll (and vice versa). You then consult a table based on where you aimed, what you attacked with, and by how much you succeeded to determine the pain, bloodloss, and other effects of the attack (sometimes being instant death). Bloodloss can cause you to pass out and pain reduces the size of your combat pool, limiting your options as you take blows. It's a bit complicated and inelegant, but I love how dynamic it makes fights. I'm taking inspiration from it for my own system, albeit pared down in complexities -- most people understandably don't want to consult tables after every successful attack in combat, even if it usually only takes one or two hits to kill/incapacitate.
@@Twisted_Logic hey, complicated and inelegant is fine by me! I have a soft spot in my heart for daring, but not always totally successful designs like that. The old Deadlands magic system with its poker hands is super cool, but slows the game down so much haha!
I feel like your terminology is off here. If you like D&D at low levels but dislike high levels, your problem isn't with hit points so much as it's with swinginess or variance, that is the chance that the range of potential damage your effects can do. In low level D&D, you can go from no damage, to an instant-death critical hit. Even a regular blow could roll max damage and drop someone. In High level D&D, even a critical is guaranteed to be survivable. The mechanic is still the same: do X amount of damage and subtract it from HP. There's just a lot more variance at low levels. Hit points just grows faster than damage does, to the point that D&D makes up for it by giving out more attacks. This in turn leads to the game feeling more grindy, because you reach a point it takes more than one blow to matter. Similarly the example with healing in D&D is just a matter of how healing rules work. In older versions of D&D, getting healed from negative didn't mean you were automatically back in the fight. Having hit points in no way forces you to have that whack-a-mole style combat because of healing. You can simply rule that once you're at 0 or negative you're out of the battle. The real attrition aspect of D&D isn't so much in combat itself, as it is in the adventuring day. D&D is based off of fighting multiple combats in a day and suffering depletion of resources. You take damage or use a spell, that choice persists next combat. A lot of the game is actually managing your resources so you have some left for the climactic battle. Not all games have that concept of running out of spells or abilities. This also leads to attrition based design, where you put in "filler" encounters encounters solely to wear the PCs down, because you want them going into the final fight beat up.
Ok, but what did he get wrong exactly? I'm not seeing the contradiction here. It seems like you're just explaining the same thing that he was explaining, but in different words.
Sorry for the delayed response! DnD is ostensibly balanced around the 6-8 encounters per day, but I can probably count on one hand the number of GMs that have run it that way in 24 years of D&D. That many encounters in a day results in bland, uninspired, random goblin fights and such. Things with no real stakes other than to complete the fight and move on. So yes, that helps whittle down party resources over time, but it is very rarely how anyone actually plays the game, simply because... It's just not very fun or interesting to do so. Your mileage may vary!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames That's just because most DMs makes time go way too fast. My main campaign nowadays I have began 6 years ago, we played about 90 games, and in game, only 2 months have passed. Every day is multiple sessions. But I admit that my ultra slow rythm is something I've never seen anywhere else.
Love me some Savage Worlds. 0-3 Wounds, death spiral, very possible to one hit KO at any level but also plenty of ways to protect yourself from going down
@@scottlurker991 Death Spirals are the biggest challenge we've encountered with wound/injury-based systems. It's a careful balance between tension and frustration!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames That's for sure. That was my biggest issue with Conan 2d20, once you get hit for any kind of wound penalty, you essentially became a liability to the group. Savage Worlds wound penalties aren't crippling like that fortunately, partly because the exploding dice means you always have a chance.
i think the desire to give players a sense of progsresion is a big factor in exposing the flaws you discussed about hp-based combat. it's also definitely more significant in dnd or games wehre you control 1 character. where you control a party, and individual members get knocked down, the "game changes" more often for sure. interested to learn about your new system.
In Nimble (a TTRPG) you still have hit points, but you don’t go down when at 0 hit points. Instead you start dying, take a wound, have fewer actions per turn, and risk hurting yourself more if you keep fighting. Also, the solo bosses get different abilities when they are bloodied (half hp) and when they’re making their last stand (zero hp).
When designing my own RPG, I had the same core sentiment--though it was specifically anti-hp, rather than addressing a concern about attrition. To me, combat represents the fundamental failure state of interaction (not necessarily on the players' part; more often on the part of the bad guys who made the choices that made them bad guys in the first place), and at that point, it's attrition no matter how you look at it. Killing members of the enemy's cohort ~is~ attrition, with or without hit points. You are breaking down your opponents' ability to continue doing whatever they're doing, piece by piece. That said, it was a long-lasting and entertaining conundrum for me (ultimately for my extremely non-D&D game, the short version is that damage directly injures your base ability stats), so I am interested to see what you come up with!
@@xaosbob I feel you. The game we're working on is explicitly action-horror, so has violence and conflict assumed as part of the intended gameplay experience. However, I think more games need to really ask themselves what they're actually about, ya know? If an RPG isn't explicitly about violence, then wearing that proudly is great. I like when more story/exploration/narrative games use what you're describing - that combat represents a failure state of the other pillars of gameplay, rather than the assumed approach. Cheers!
This is one of several reasons I prefer Whitewolf-style systems. Penalties for being injured, or even location-based damage so that attacking an enemy's sword arm will make that arm less effective or potentially unusable.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Try any of the World Of Darkness systems, especially the ones involving more "human" characters (Hunters, mage, etc). Without careful planning, character death is *super* easy to have happen, especially since a game like Hunters asks "what happens when everyday humans fight horrible monsters?" (The smart answer is often big guns with long scopes and to start shooting from far away and hope the monster is dead before it gets to you!) Taking down one monster might involve the entire party setting traps to slow it down/injure it, a couple of players grappling the monster at once (almost everything in WoD is stronger than a base human) and then someone trying to stake/shoot/etc the monster before it breaks free. If a second monster hears the commotion and joins the fray, the party gets scared really quick. There are moments of cool of course (a high level human is still squishy, but they can deal absurd levels of damage! Especially as they collect magic equipment and such) and there are other player types like werewolves and vampires that are very physically capable, but at that point the enemies you face are of a higher caliber. In general combat in World of Darkness is 3 or 4 rounds tops, and getting hurt has serious negative consequences in combat, and for base humans, can take a long time in game to recover from. Even if a character gets magically healed, the pain of having a limb torn off messes with their mind and leaves the character with some type of permanent disability. The Story Telling systems in general are underappreciated now days (they almost equaled D&D in popularity in the 90s), the ST systems focus a lot on cinematic tellings of what is happening vs having rules for everything. The other thing about WoD, is that the expected end game is death of madness. There are no happy endings. The Hunters manual all but starts out saying that a TPK is the expected end of a campaign. The goal is to go down fighting as bravely as possible. That sort of changes the tenor of the game from "Oh no my character died!" to "That was an awesome death for the ages!" Another system that I really like is Eclipse Phase, which technically has a HP based system, but combat is so short, and death so common, that you don't have the problems of drawn out combat that D&D has. Sure, a high level Eclipse Phase party is solving bigger issues and taking on bigger enemies. If a player has outfitted themselves with 4 extra cyber-arms that have Gatling lasers on them, whatever those lasers point at is going to die very quickly. But anything big enough to need that kind of firepower to take down is likely equally deadly. Eclipse Phase has a cool respawn mechanic where the player can upload their mind to a new body when an old one dies, and that allows for a lot of the lethality and IMHO more realistic levels of combat damage and health. There is of course a price to pay (and no one wants to lose their super cool upgraded body), but a TPK isn't the end of the campaign. This also means enemies can keep coming back again and again, which is super cool narratively, and stopping the baddies means that more than physical force is necessary. you can always play a werewolf or something else that is super strong, but at that point the enemies you face are of a higher caliber.
@@devlinbentley8193 I'm loosely familiar with World of Darkness, but I've never heard of Eclipse Phase! Yet another game I need to track down and read! 🤠
Though, I've seen Exalted described as "attrition-based rocket tag". Once perfects come online, you have a pool of D&D-style hit points that happen to be called "motes", and by that point anything that gets through has a decent chance of taking you from OK to Dead.
I ditched using an HP systems for my own RPG over a decade ago. I don't use something as involved as what you have created though. I used to make "crunchy" mechanics like that but my philosophy on RPG's has changed since those days. I discovered there is a sweet spot between "hard" rules systems and ""soft" rules systems. What my table currently uses allows for the right amount of freedom in playing while still allowing for stuff like tactical combat and character builds. The combat is quick, intuitive and dangerous enough to mess you up without usually killing you. It also doesn't require a ton of different rules governing different situations even though it's a skill based game. Game design is tricky like that, Its taken me 28 years of making RPG's to get my game to the point its at now. I have mad respect for what you are doing, it is not easy.
I’ve recently taken up the goal of making an RPG in that sweet spot for use in my local gaming group, but it’s been slow going. I don’t have anywhere near 28 years of making RPG’s (as I am only 28 lol) I am very interested in reading about your game system if it is posted somewhere online. It sounds like most, if not all, of my design goals line up with yours
20th level D&D means swingy battles that take hours if they are to he challenging, and if you try to make them faster then you're drastically increasing the odds of a TPK.
Agreed - I've never had a good tier3 experience in D&D, unfortunately. The sweet spot for me is levels 1-10; everything after that just doesn't seem to work well.
Interesting pionts! I hadn't thought about HP in terms pf 'Attribition Based Combat' before and was actually concerned that my homebrew combat system was too random and deadly. But your comments have made me feel much better about the way I handle combat damage in my own game. The characters do have a Wound Pool which is basicalt a hangover from the HP concept, but it's directly linked to the characters attributes (e.g. Strength, Toughness and Willpower) and is basically a measure of how much trauma the character can tolerate before they collapse, and of course it doesn't increase with LEVELING like it does in D&D. the only way to increase a characters wounds is to become stronger, tougher or more mentally resilient which isn't that easy. Most characters are lucky if they can survive three blows, and many get taken out simply by one heavy blow, especially if its landed on their head which has the lowest wound pool and is therefore the most sensitive. We also use 'Critical Hits' and 'Critical Funbles' which means that something extra-ordinary has happened during the fight. Which adds an extra level of risk to every attack. So, combats tend to be quite short and unpredictable and most players are focussed primarily on not getting hit at all, by blocks, dodges and parries, or alternatively if you must get hit to makesure the damage is mitigated by armour. Helmets and skullcaps are particularly popular for the reasons already mentioned.
@@MrDidz I dig it! There are so many potential solutions, I'm glad to hear about more of them! Damage as stats is cool, as it gives the players a feeling of being worn down, growing weaker, from continual battle.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames that's how it works in Forbidden Lands. Great system overall. I'm not in love with its magic system, but all of the core systems are great. And even the magic system is still better than the magic system in DND.
Check out Crown and Skull by Rune Hammer. Technically you are still taking hits until you can't, but those are inflicted against your skills and equipment. Your shield fighting or running are crossed out? Now your defense is lacking or you just lost the option of running away from this fight. It's only on the players' side though. Monsters are still HP bags in terms of taking damage.
Forbidden Lands and Vaesen are like that too. Big Monsters and Vaesen are still HP bags, but, in Forbidden Lands, things like common undead aren't considered to be Monsters in game terms. So, zombies and skeletons take ability damage when they get hit, just like PCs and regular NPCs do. In contrast, true Monsters in Forbidden Lands are supposed to be comparatively rare and powerful, and, when they do show up, they're supposed to be extra weird and scary, which is why, for one thing, damage doesn't make them weaker (until they reach 0 HP), unlike with humans and elves and zombies and most other creatures. Monsters also have 6 signature attacks each, which is also cool. I'm actually working on my own game which is based on Free League's d6 dice pool engine as seen in games like Forbidden Lands and Vaesen. It's such a better system than in DND or any other d20 game that I'm aware of. In summary: Dice pools forever. Death to the d20
I on the process of combining both a atrition system with a wound system, meaning that if enemies get a suficient number of wounds they could die before hitting 0 HP, with boss enemies only dying if they have a numeber of wounds. Each wound would go into a body part and if some acumulate you get dismembered (but you gotta be reaaly vigorous to do that). For final most things in the system have a cap of HP at 100 - 120 (my table is "high level" and the guy with most HP has 93), with some not using HP and just having wounds (some bosses or special enemies). Obs: i do use a Damage reduction system more than things like AC too
Part of what prevents the whole "heal fighter for 1 hp" factor is Massive Damage. Of course, it varies with level and class, but the risk of taking massive damage (and dying instantly) increases a lot if you are very low on HP. Like you said, there is HP inflation, which supposedly controls this, but... Anyway, I agree with you. I still like numbers, but I prefer to keep it low, and add a layer of contextual wound on top of it. I really dislike how in D&D you can have 1 hp and be totally fine. I understand it's all an abstraction, but...
In AD&D, if you take more than half your hit points in damage from a single blow/cause, you save vs. death or die. Some DMs applied that to half your CURRENT hit points. If you have 100 hit points, but are down to 15, and take 8 points of damage, you have to save vs. death or expire.
Sadly, I've never played AD&D or the original box set, but I've heard it was much more deadly! The OSR movement is trying to bring that back, from what I understand.
And with older AD&D, whilst fighting with either full hit points or 1 hit point has the same effect, once a character fell below zero HP and was then revived, the character would still be in a coma for 1-6 turns and thereafter require a weeks full rest.
@@mikegiamalva321 Old school D&D was an entirely different beast. It was assumed that the dungeons would chew up your characters and spit 'em out a mangled mess. You'd control multiple characters into the dungeon in the hopes of maybe a few party members makin' it out alive! I see the appeal, but it's definitely not for me :)
I've had some nice work arounds to reduce the attrition based system in dnd 5e, 1. Every time a player hits 0 HP they incur an injury which can reduce their max HP, and limit their actions. When they repair that injury using medicine or spells they gain HP based off their character class. 2. Max HP is capped at 100 regardless of character class. (traditionally tougher classes just increase their HP much more after repairing injuries than the squishier ones.) 3. Long rests still require the characters to roll hit-dice to recover hp. 4. The party only recovers hit-dice when they complete an objective.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames We're only about 8 sessions along since I introduced the max HP cap and only recovering hit-dice on objective completion. It's working so far even with some of the PCs at level 20. I just discovered your channel today, and I love it! I've been trying for the past two years or so to just modify D&D's systems to make battles feel both engaging, and frightening to the point where the players question "is this the best way forward?"
It sounds like what you’re looking for is the Cypher system, popularized by Numenera and more recently Old Gods of Appalachia. Cypher is a DnD-style hero ttrpg, but with only three attributes: Might, Speed, and Intellect. You have “pools” of these attributes and can draw from your pools to increase your d20 rolls during the session. But those pools (again, your strength, your dexterity, and your int/wis combined) are also your HP-run out of those pools and you die. The other great mechanic is player-focused rolls: every roll is done by the players, including DM rolls. You scale everything based off of tiers 1-10, which represent d20 rolls x 3: tier 1 means players have to roll 3 or better, tier 2 means 6 or better, etc. That means that at tier 7 (21), players effectively CANNOT meet the roll. But… they can draw from their pools using effort to reduce the tier of the roll. Other players can assist to reduce the tier; cyphers (one-time use magic items) can also reduce the tier cost. Skills and abilities the player gains can also reduce the tier to roll. So combining the elements means you can potentially roll well on a technically impossible roll through a series of interactive mechanics. Very elegant!
I love the cypher system too. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time teaching the logic of the game to my players, who are so used to "classical" rpgs like D&D, that they have a hard time wrapping their heads around the cypher-system mechanic. It took me a while in the beginning too, when I started running Numenera. I loved the world, but it took me a while to get the hang of the system. Most of my players have yet to make that mental leap. But I will keep trying.
@@andreawille4162 It took my group a hot minute to really grasp it, too. What helped us is we started with a Super Hero setting, rather than classic fantasy. That helped us divorce ourselves from the traditional way of playing D&D and embrace the oddness that is Cypher :D I will say, though, it will always be strange to not roll dice as the GM!
GURPS is great about avoiding that ridiculously unrealistic hit point system. Sort of. I mean, it does use HP, but different parts of the body have different percentages of your HP, and damage to those regions have different effects. This can range from momentary stunning that reduces your next attack chance, to a crippled limb or extremity, to knockdown, to unconsciousness, to death. You can also add the weakening effects of partial injuries that take a while to kick in, and bleeding to further weaken you and potentially drain you to death. When your total HP are low enough, you can’t defend or move as well. When you drop below zero, you fight to stay conscious each second. Drop low enough and you risk dying. That may sound like a lot, but all rules are optional and can be made as simple or complex as desired. The end result is a HP system that doesn’t FEEL like a HP system, because almost every hit HURTS. Parry, block, dodge and armor are your friends.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I’m guessing you mean you have, not you haven’t. ;-) It may surprise you to learn that GURPS hasn’t changed in 20 years! I first played it back in the 80s with version 2, when it had a lot of technical problems. They nailed it down with 4th edition (although it could do with some better organization). But despite no further edition in 20 years, they STILL keep coming out with new world books and additional rules. Some really good stuff available for pretty much any genre. It even works well in Foundry, if you’re into that. Cheers.
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Hi! I faced the same pains some years ago, and then found Savage Worlds (SW), which solved that pain. The wounds really matter in SW and affect your efficacy in battle directly.
Yeah, Savage Worlds is the kitchen sink of RPGs. Its combat dance is rather nice and fixes the issue your talking about, if you see it as an issue (some do not). The problem with Savage Worlds is it is a short term game. It is not meant for grand adventures that span years of game play to complete. Savage Worlds burns out in about 8 months max at weekly game play for a campaign. Too short for a lot of world building and exploration.
@@TheCastleKeeper that always a tricky thing to balance - the length of an expected campaign. I will say, 8 months of weekly games is about 32 sessions - that's pretty epic, but not the multi-year saga some other systems support. I'm finding more and more as time goes on that I don't have the stamina for such epic narratives anymore - I want to try new things after about 8-12 months. (Which is a me problem haha)
I agree with a lot of your points, which is why I also changed things around this concept for my game. Although, I didn't go for a completely new approach, I kept HP and simply changed other mechanics that ultimately affect it. For example: -HP is generally low. Each level a character rolls for HP, but there are no modifiers, just raw roll (single digits for a while). -Defense is generally low. -Damage scales up with level. -There's no "downed" mechanic. Alive or dead. So generally deadly, much more than for example 5e, and even more deadly than some OSR games I've played. Fights typically last 1-2 rounds and every hit can have dramatic consequences. Anyways, that's how I approached it, among other details. Looking forward to hearing your approach in the next video.
Thanks! That's an interesting approach, as it retains the feeling that low-level D&D has while still having hit points. I like when the individual actions and behaviors of the players and enemies feel like they have consequence - rather than depleting arbitrary "bars". Would love to hear more about your system!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames That's the feeling I wanted to retain and I think scaling damage is a critical factor, in my case, for players can go to areas of their level and still get down in one to two hits, while still downing an enemy in one to two hits. And getting a level or two away, tips the scales greatly in favor of the higher leveled side. Thanks, happy to discuss any time. I would also like to learn more about your system. I looked it up on DriveThruRPG, but could not find it. Perhaps you could point me to where it is available?
Sadly, I don't have any documents ready for download quite yet. I'm in the process of finalizing the quick start rules PDF, but that won't be ready for another few weeks I think. The game has been in development for a few years and is finally in the late stages of development :)
Obligitory references: Harnmaster, Runequest and The Riddle of Steel. I'd also heard (but not been able to confirm) the historical note that hitpoints originate in naval wargames where they were used to track the durability of ships rather than people. The abstraction makes much more sense when you're dealing with 20+ ships per player trying to resolve a fleet action, than when four of the five people at the table have single entity or maybe two, to track.
Mutants & Masterminds, at least the DC adventures version anyway, has a non-HP based damage system very similar to Smash Bros that I found to be quite fun. Whenever an attacker successfully hits their target, rather than rolling a damage die the target makes a saving throw against a DC of the damage total + 15. If this save is failed, the target gets a cumulative -1 penalty to checks and saving throws if not conditions like being dazed or staggered. The target is K.O. when they roll less than the damage total on their saving throw, which obv accumulating more -1s will increase the likelihood of.
@@HoplooWare I love Mutants and Masterminds, though it's been over 10 years since I played it! I've forgotten so many of the rules and systems, it's worth tracking down my old copy!
City of Mist is supposed to avoid this by encouraging the players and GM to change the scene with each passage of the Spotlight. i.e. you're encouraged to do something different every "turn" (Spotlights try to avoid the repetition). Panic at the Dojo avoids this by just keeping combat consistently engaging with its token management. If I remember right, your inventory items serve as your hit points in Mausritter, which drop when hit.
crown and skull is my favorite alternative to hitpoints, interestingly it calls its damage system "attrition" but what is damaged is the pcs skills and gear rather than an arbitrary pool of hit points. this leads to a game that feels very gritty, and forces players to get more creative as they are slowly wittled away. all this while still giving a great medium fantasy vibe where players can be super powerful, they just arent powerful in the way a 5e/pf/etc character is, because they need to think more about their actions
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames of course, ive been running it since the game came out and its by far my favorite system, and the attrition system isnt even close to the coolest part!
Try causing ability damage every time a hit does max damage. So, you swing a longsword at an opponent, and if you roll a 10 on damage, you cause a random ability to go down by 1 point. This could mean hideous scar reducing Charisma, a cut tendon lowering Dexterity, or a severe concussion causing your Intelligence to go down. With ability checks being so important in D&D, injuries like these can really hamper a character, possibly forcing the character to change tactics or flee a fight.
That would make doing ability damage more likely with a dagger than a long sword... 25% for d4, 10% for a d10. Maybe instead any damage over half your Constitution or 4+your con modifier.
Ability damage is something that D&D has moved away from because it essentially forces you to rewrite your character sheet constantly. It's a good idea mechanically, just very messy and annoying to actually run.
@DistortedSemance I think only games that have ability damage as a core part of the structure (like Cypher) can get away with it. It's tough to add that in to a system that wasn't built to accommodate it.
Another TTRPG designer has the same feelings you had and tried to fix it in a game called Minimus. While the combat rules are few in words they address this cheese grater effect (slowly whittling away monster HP). This is done by having damage result in a penalty to your attacks making it accelerate towards a slippery slope
Omg, I hate health sponginess!!! Btw, old Vampire the Masquerade editions had a nice system where each hitpoint lost would give progressively stronger penalties. Also, GURPS has a nice way of making combat feel deadly.
The story telling systems in general, both old and new WoD, are good for fast and deadly combat. I don't think I ever saw combat go on for more than 3 or 4 rounds, even at high levels.
Really appreciate this discussion! I’m working on a non-numerical system of health for a game right now, and this provided a lot of good, thought-provoking insights about how to implement something more impactful for players in combat!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thanks! The game I’m working on right now is called Doctors & Demons; it’s a rules-light modern fantasy game. I actually originally released it in 2021, but it’s getting picked up for print so I’m refining a few of the core rules (and layout) now that I have a few more years of game design under my belt.
The probably with injury based system is that it sends parties into death spirals. They were already behind, and accumulating more negatives through injuries only puts them more behind. Also, it sounds like a lot of your gripes are solved by Pathfinder 2e. Damage scales with weapon runes. Crits and crit fails are on +10 and -10 of target as well as 20 and 1. A high-level monster crit can almost kill a player. Attacking isn't always the best action. Supportive combat actions are great because of the crit system. Also, you can only be healed up from unconscious 4 times before perma death.
Death spirals are absolutely a concern with injury systems. It all hinges on how debilitating (both short-term and long-term) those injuries are. It's such an interesting discussion and one with so much detail, it's hard to cover it in a video of me talkin' to my camera haha 🤠 PF2e, to me, still feels like it's of the same kind as D&D. PF2e's underlying mathematics are far superior to those of D&D, and so its attrition combat feels better (you have way more control and options n PFF2), but I feel that it's still of the same, I guess "breed" as D&D if that makes sense. Anyway, thanks again for checking out the video and responding! It means a lot for folks to watch and comment like this, as there are so many folks out there makin' YT videos, it's a competitive space!!
I've played various games where HP is static, it doesn't go up with level and is more a maths tool for what causes wounds, like half HP to an arm it's horribly broken, 1/5 to the brain you die, or systems where HP is a trauma track where damage is causing increasing medical complications and risk of death or passing out.
Yeah! There are myriad ways to tackle that design challenge. I don't believe there's one correct answer out there for every game, but I think every game should ask themselves that question, ya know? "Is this game's design goals best served by Hit Points?" Appreciate the comment! 🤠
I’m okay with attrition based combat as long as the math is easy. For all I love 4e, the amount of numbers is just unfun after a point. Smaller of everything is better. Some time looking back bc at older versions of D&D, where you were never expected to keep playing after 9th level, offers a little perspective, as the numbers for everything were smaller than what happened when the expected level started at where the end game was for the older one.
Some systems just scale damage well so that on level encounters always have a similar fragility level as lower level play. Other systems use HP thresholds for Save or Suck effects. IE... once a player or monster is at x hp or below a hold spell can now work. Others punish getting knocked to 0 hp with wounds to counteract the yo yo healing. Older DnD did attrition HP better. Capping upper HP limits. Dragons BW damage was based on their current HP at points. Etc. Game development odten adds new problems when they fix old ones.
I play Stre Trek Adventures, and one thing I liked about Space combat was these are big ships taking a lot of firepower, and they slowly weaken. As you get hit, you take breeches to a random system. There are 6 systems, and you can take a number of breech in each system depending on the size of your ship. And each hit max can do 1-2 breeches at a time. But each breech makes using that same subsystem more difficult and less effective. Eventually, you get to the point where you have to do the calculus of continuing this fight, or making a run for it, as you slowly go into a death spiral. IDK, I'm a nerd and this is a niche system. but I do like how that plays out.
@TalesFromElsewhereGames To be quite honest, targeting specific limbs not only makes more sense, but it's just more fun. It reminds me of the oldschool Vorpal Blades from _AD&D._ Chipping away at an opponent's hit points just doesn't compare with declaring that, *_"You just severed its arm with so much force that the arm flies across the melee and smacks his bandit leader boss' face with its limp bloody palm!"_*
1 Go back and look at Runequest (which has other combat issues on scaling, but not this) 2 DMs need to KILL characters - when the fighter on 1 hp goes down, the next attack causes more death save fails, and if a bunch of creatures concentrate, they will kill PCs and change combat tempo a lot (this is something I rarely see). Also, if falling unconscious gives a level of exhaustion, then combat effectiveness will tumble down 3 While attrition based combat can be dull, a lot of that revolves around how the DM designs combats
I was toying with the idea of having dice pools that shrunk as characters took different types of damage. I also play a lot of savage worlds, where characters have bennies they can spend to do things like reroll or to try and avaoid damage, and once those are gone, the wounds and their penalties start to stack up. The thing to be wary of is you don't want effectiveness to drop such that it just slows to a crawl as both sides start missing more or doing less damage as they take would penalties I loved the bloodied idea as some monsters got cool abilities unlocked when they got bloodied. Fighting games go the other route and give characters super moves that they can unlock near the end of battle to bring it to a conclusion. So now my question is how to best allow the battle to change while maintaining some semblance of belivability without slowing things to a crawl.
I agree with this so much. The padded sumo fights of modern D&D are very dull. The rockect launcher tag of 3rd edition also had it's own problems but the yo-yo that results at zero has those problems as well. I do like that HP are very fast to resolve at the table though. One compromise I've landed on is having very low HP for PCs (like Shadowdark for example) but not having reaching zero be out of the fight for PCs. Instead it's an injury roll which puts your character at risk of penalties, longer lasting injuries or death. After the injury roll you can recover hp back to full. So it acts as a pacing mechanism. This is sort of what lots of modern games want when you look at short rests and other quick recovery mechanisms. But it keeps things easy to track, and moves some of the actual attrition to a more controlled level of abstraction.
A DM I know was trying to develop a system where skill (dexterity or training) and power (strength or athletics) determines success. I think he was trying to somehow emulate the Arkham fighting style in turn base. He's also a fan of Spider-Man 2. Where Peter and Miles's health is represented by how torn their costumes are. It's similar to a system Final Fantasy Adventure on Gameboy had. Where your sword and armor had hit points.
Building on the example of low-level fights - swap out one BIG BOI for multiple smaller bois. Consider: What makes chess chess? Every piece can be ‘killed’ by every other piece (in one turn) and yet vast variety and depth emerge because each piece’s ‘move-set’ is distinct and a single ‘kill’ may alter the geography, pacing and range of the ‘encounter’ drastically… … for me, this is what makes low-lvl DnD combat ‘better’ too. PCs and NPCs are both numerous, with limited yet effective move pools, so each move counts and damage dealt has repercussions for the entire party.
YOUR COMPLAINTS 1. Wounded fighters are as effective as fresh ones. This is exacerbated by healing and DM fudging. 2. Additional undifferentiated wounds are uninteresting. 3. Level advancement results in higher HP, making things worse, including too-long fights. YOUR PREFERENCES 1. Wounds diminish combat effectiveness. 2. Fewer wounds for kills. 3. Static proportions between damage and HP. MY THOUGHTS Don't let dissatisfying physical modeling dictate design scope. Instead, begin with play results in mind. Keeping track of increased ineffectiveness is likely bad design. And the increased overhead may further slow combat. It's fine to expeditiously kill scary monsters, but against heroes, lethality simply undermines fun.
In defense of attritional combat systems, they lend themselves well to simulating immediate physical contests. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about two knights locked in single combat, two gunslingers engaging in a duel at high noon, a nonlethal bar fight, a pitched medieval battle or two giant space fleets flinging antimatter bombs at each other and glassing planets; opposing sides start at full strength and as a fight goes on they expand resources (in the most general sense) and unless the rate of the replenishment of those resources is not greater than the rate at which they are being spent, they will get weaker and their possibility space will shrink unless they find a novel/nonstandard ways of utilizing the resources they still have. I'm trying to imagine systems which are not based on the attritional paradigm and what type of conflicts they could simulate, but I'm mostly drawing a blank. So far I've got: - Attritional systems (as described above), - Escalatory systems, it's basically a version of an attritional system but instead of starting at full strength and only being able to replenish your resources, you start with little resources and get to not only replenish but also expand the available pool of resources. Of course, the fight has to end somehow, so after the initial phase, where resources of both sides grow, there either comes an attritional phase where resources of at least one side of the conflict start diminishing under pressure from other players until they run out, and that player loses the contest or the escalatory phase continues until one of the players hits a threshold which wins him a contest. That style of conflict seems to lend itself to simulating longer lasting or economic conflicts instead of single battles. That's why it's adopted by RTS games with their base building and resource extraction, board games of eurogame type, where each player tries to create an engine that nets them the most victory points and whoever has the most victory points after a certain number of turns or reaches a point threshold wins. Weirdly enough, it also does fit the stereotypical superhero/shonen anime fights where it seems to be a given that opponents get stronger as the fight progresses. - Static system, as opposed to attritional and escalatory systems (which could be collectively dubbed the "Dynamic systems") are systems where the pool of available resources remains mostly static. Of course the conflict has to be resolved somehow, so there has to be some resource that has to be depleted to show us who is victorious. It can be a simple hit point counter or something more abstract like victory points but, aside from that resource, no other resources are being spent. That's the model adopted by some fighting games where your only resource is a health bar but, the moveset available to your fighter remains independent of how full it is. I've never seen it done, but it seems that this style of system would lend itself nicely to simulating a verbal conflict like a debate. In the debate the dynamic resource is how much you yourself (or your audience) have been convinced by your opponent but, you can craft whatever arguments you want, only limited by information you have access to and you can even combo them off of each other. Circling back to the flaws of the D&D style attritional system, I remember that an interesting solution has been presented in the Banner Saga series of video games. It's basically a turn base tactical squad game, but each opponent has two pools of health: an armor pool which isn't relevant to the discussion, and a strength pool, which serves as both a health bar and maximum damage. If at full strength you could deal up to 8 points of damage, then at 50% of strength you can deal up to 4 points of damage and at 0 strength you die. Unfortunately, that systems doesn't really interact with anything else, like for example movement. Either way, this approach led to some really fun encounters when at the start of the fight the player is mowing opponents left and right and is more capable of employing high risk/high reward strategies and gradually becomes more cautious and conservative as the fight goes on. A well-balanced, difficult fight often ends up with two initially powerful characters, exhausted and barely standing, slugging it out in a way that seems both brutal and somewhat pathetic, as they become more and more exhausted. Personally I would like to see a system in which all combat actions (moving, attacking, using special abilities, etc) have an associated action cost which gets subtracted from your action points pool (like in classic Fallout games) which you replenish every turn, merged with the banner saga system where your action pool is equivalent to your hit points and any damage ultimately reduces how much stuff you can do during your turn until you are completely incapacitated.
Agreed, and watching this I have some ideas. In my home game of PF 1st, we roll dmg at the end of the round rather than after hits are confirmed, so that initiative plays less of a roll in combat compared to positioning and smart play. Now, you can't just shoot the Giant down if he can charge into melee, you have to DENY him access while also burning him down. Also, with no knowledge of how much dmg anyone is taking till round is over, players have to think more critically about how they commit to a fight, and whether retreat or changes in plans are needed. It also makes combat manuevers like trip & sunder more useful, as thier effects are now immediate and actionable vs. Dmg which is on a delay, if I attack this guy he will still get to attack me back before the round is over, but if I trip him, he's in a worse position, and I can either move away and force him to waste his turn gettting up, or I can press and force him to fight from a disadventageous posiiton or provoke an Attack of Opportunity to stand. Also, all those moments make parley and desecalation more of an option, since Combat Manuevers are now stronger ways to disable combatants, and the uncertainty is much higher round to round, which forces all parties to decide it's time to retreat or bargain much earlier. One of the other things you may want to look into that I'm thinking of is instead of Hp, using the HD as your marker. Whenever dmg is rolled, PC rolls their HD, if they roll equal to or less than the total amount of damage they have taken that day, minus any healing, they go down. This lets players never be totally safe, and forces you to make strategic decisions about combat, while also making investments in abilities like toughness and barbarian rage better and more of an attrition investment for a playstyle.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Oh yeah, I started in 3.5 and though I love combat, I hate how very quickly the combat is this ugly grinding affair no matter what you do, and how that tends to flatten gameplay through action efficiency & dmg optimization, & how doing so tends to leave everyone feeling like they can't do enough damage to keep pace, while also feeling cheated if they get burned down too fast. This is even more frustrating in games like D&D where you also have a lot of noncombat classes people LIKE TO PLAY, who then get sucked into combat that is largely uninteresting to them, but don't have viable options to end it that aren't combat. So, what I've done is try to make it more deadly & more uncertain, because those 2 things in combination make the game move faster AND encourage descalating play via diplomacy, stealth, etc. because the cost of combat can be so high, but it's still very fun. I also recommend Skirmisher's bonebreaker rules, those helped a lot as well here, since it gave martials more ability to counteract casters.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames It's on Drivethru for pathfinder 1st. I think they did conversions to other systems, but I can't vouch for them in the same way I can that edition. It was written by a GM and General Practice doctor as a way to try to model real conditions in that system.
Dang, I never looked at it that way before, you made some really interesting points. Looking forward to hearing what your take on a different system is going to be!
I love attrition based combat. That way you can have fights in all stages of excitement. You can have a normal difficult fight, a hard and exciting fight, an easy fight to come down and show the player how far he has come against enemies that once were hard, etc.
Y'see, I don't think that's unique to attrition-based fights. Challenge, growth, and difficulty can be achieved without necessarily resorting to HP trading, ya know? There are other ways to see that you've grown apart from simply dealing slightly more hit point damage per swing.
One Option you might want to look at ist the old Hârnmaster RPG. There each hit you get is an idividual wound, which penalizes all your future rolls, so eventually you are just too beaten up and exhausted to keep on fighting. In Hârnmaster, you rarely die directly in the fight itself (unless your enemy puts you out of your misery). You can catch a bleeding wound but, most likely, you die a few days later from an infection (Hârnmaster is a low magic world, where magical healing is not readily available). Since each wound is dealt with and healed indivdually, a lot of small wounds will heal much faster, than a single big one, even though the sum of the damage may be much higher in the former case. And without readily available magical healing, the characters will act much more careful with regard to risks they are taking. Yes we would probably be able to defeat that brigand armed with a crossbow. But if he manages to hit one of us with that, the probably severe wound that can result from a crossbow-hit will force us do rest in a (very expensive) inn for a few days while the wound hopefully heals without catching an infection (camping in the wild will increase the chance of infection an decrease the rate of healing, so that is not a good option). So maybe just pay the brigand a few pennies "toll" and keep going. If you are looking for a very "realistic" low fantasy system with a brutally harsh but also very interesting combat system, Hârnmaster might be for you.
That sounds really interesting! I'd heard of Harnmaster, but never picked up a copy. I'll have to give it a go! I also prefer low-magic, low/no-healing games. If magical healing just removes the wound/damage, then the fight hasn't grown more interesting, it's just taken longer!
Eidolon has an interesting take on this. It has a fairly PBTA style combat system, except the health system for players and enemies is intended to reflect fights from anime like Jojo's bizarre adventure. On the players' side, that just means every player has 4 hp, except they're labeled - Fresh, Winded, Battered, and Desperate - and each additional point of damage has to come from a source that would actually move a shonen hero to the next state, so just getting punched in the face once will get you to Winded, but if you're at Desperate one punch won't just kill you outright. On the enemy side is where it gets really interesting - they call it the Crash system, essentially the enemy comes at you with some kind of trick, you only damage (or Crash) them when you come up with a counter to that trick, and each time they're Crashed they start a new phase of the fight with a new trick. Boss phases as HP essentially.
The Walking Dead has a neat system. Each character has 3 wounds that they can take, and each wound gives a dice penalty. Woinds are taken and can heal easily, but when the character hits 3 wounds they roll on an injury table with results that can be trivial, disabling, or life threatening. When you take an injury, all your wound levels are restored, but you need proper medical attention and time to heal the injury. Also, proper medical care may not he available, and if the injury goes untreated for a certain time, it becomes permanent or can even worsen.
@TalesFromElsewhereGames I genuinely love it, even though I dislike the show. The TTRPG tries to take the best from OSR style map crawl and emergent narrative play and marry it to character-driven narrative play and does the best job of merging the two styles I've seen.
Actually working on a system where trying to do traditional attrition combat is a very quick way to get a chatacter into retirement. There's HP, but there's also injuries to track. Injuries are caused by damaging effects, and are tied to weapon move sets, which are random tables that use the damage die. So choosing a weapon is less about big numbers and more about how one wants to hurt things: ax for chopping limbs, mace for cracking armor and skulls, spears for bypassing armor, or swords for trying to get a little bit of everything? So, having more HP means you stay conscious longer, but staying conscious longer means staying a threat, and most things respond to threats by injuring them, and you get injured every time you're hit. So, you got to ask yourself: if you got 40+ max HP, and you got something that can get HP back, but every time you get hit theres a good chance of losing your other eye, your last three fingers, or your only leg being broken, is it worth it to say you got enough HP to finish the fight? Or should you just play dead on the next hit, wait for the enemy to go away, and limp back home and come back?
Decision trees used to be more dynamic in older editions of TTRPGs since they had resource tracking for dungeon delving, and the like. As TTRPG culture changed in the 2000s this shift to long combat due to homogenized combat, and ease of recuperation. The OSR was an earlier answer to some of these complaints, and people in the wider TTRPG community - especially after spending more time in the games - have started to gravitate toward playstyles that add challenge back into the game. ~ Adam
@@TheIoPC Good insights. At my D&D 5e table, the DM started introducing OSR subsystems little by little. Kinda funny - why not just play OSR at that point, I tell him!
I know I'm late to comment, but I've found that damage to ability scores is a fairly good way to handle this. Why didn't you go with ability score damage?
So ability score damage does make combat deadlier, but it also makes the fight less interesting as it goes on. Ability Score damage means everyone gets worse at what they do; they are slightly less accurate, they deal slightly less damage, they are slightly less likely to make that saving throw, etc. But that didn't really make the fight more dynamic or interesting, did it? In fact, having the players take ability score damage will slow the fight down, as they are less likely to defeat their enemies from a numerical standpoint. It can work okay in games like Cypher, where your ability Pools are also your hit points. Getting hurt means you have less resources to use your abilities. But tellingly, it's an asymmetrical system - the enemies don't use those pools at all! Anyway, long-winded response to a good question! I appreciate it - I think this subject is super interesting and there isn't one true fix 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thanks! I wasn't sure if I should expect a response at all, but you were fast! I've done *quite a bit* of work on my own RPG, but it really hasn't come together. I was thinking along the lines of Ability scores taking damage, and being resource pools as well... I found that my players got confused, and often did not apply the on-the-fly changes to resource pools :( In any case, I've seen your video on injuries, and I think it's an idea more than good enough to steal. Were there any other systems you tested for health? I've found far fewer than I expected.
@@kylelind6239 I'm super active in my YT comments, I love discussing systems like this. Originally, TFE used a mixed-HP system where you had a quickly refreshing "Stamina" and an underlying, slower to recovery "Vitality". It was an improvement over traditional HP, but it didn't quite evoke what I wanted. If you wanna ever chat game design (outside of YT comments), feel free to join the TFE Discord! We talk shop a lot in there, not just about my game but about the community's projects too. (Link is on my YT home page)
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I'll definately check in there! (I'm terrible with keeping up online, i appologize in advance) I think it's hillarious I did the same thing with Stamina and Vitality! Different names, but was similarly scrapped almost immediately. Given your Injuries system, I imaginge armor, cover, etc will be very important. Do you plan on doing a video on that in the future? (or have it covered somewhere already?)
@@kylelind6239 I don't think I have one talking about armor and cover yet, but there is an "Example of Play" video that goes through one player turn to show the game in action. I should do a follow-up video to the Injury video where I go into more nitty-gritty details about the system, though! 🤠
We're in the process of playing a French Pen and Paper game known as In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas (Urban Fantasy, dual-faced game, you either play a team of demons (INS) or a team of angels (MV)). The combat system still has some accounting as it's an injury-based system, but it doesn't use attrition hitpoints per se so, marginally better? As you've said it doesn't necessarily completely rule out the issue. You don't roll for damages per se, but for a success margin, to which your weapon's power is added (a literal force multiplier). Then this number is compared to the target's injury level (the sum of its strength stat and agility stat to obtain the baseline). Each injury threshold is a multiple of the baseline. In my case I'm a rather squishy demon who manipulates time and energy, and I'm about as strong as a regular human, and even below average in terms of agility (yeah, I'm a bookworm 😊). My character has its light injury level at 3, serious injury at 6, fatal wound at 9, and sudden "death" at 12. Any attack passing the light injury threshold will wound my character where the attack has been dealt (obviously the DM is at liberty to choose where anything is aimed and where it lands, so it's quite useful). This adds a malus to my rolls depending on where I'm wounded and what I'm doing. Obviously if I'm right handed and trying to shoot with a handgun after being injured on my good hand, it'll make things interesting 😅. Each injury inflicted is systematically an open wound that has to be closed to avoid hemorrhaging further at each round, and each combat round lasts 1 second (it involves two steps, because the player doesn't necessarily know the seriousness of their injuries, step 1 is assessing the damage done to the human body we possess, step 2 is closing the wound and letting our supernatural healing do the rest). This means even if I can shoulder the increased difficulty imposed on my actions by the injuries, and keep rolling successfully, I won't be able to ignore my wounds for long and I'll have to choose between treating them, or bleeding out and have my body falling unconscious like a punk (I can try a saving throw to regain consciousness, because even when the body is KO, the demon isn't, or I can act spiritually). Last but not least, each injury accumulates fatigue according to its seriousness, and fatigue can only be reduced by resting, 1 point per hour for humans, 1 per minute for angels, demons (avatars reduce all fatigue in a minute). At 0, a supernatural being is stunned (his body ceases to respond), at -5 it's knocked out. If an angel or demon falls one more threshold under sudden "death", the dead human body they've been possessing gets destroyed (it bursts in flames in a satisfactory "pop", leaving nothing behind), and they go back to Hell or Heaven... to face the consequences of their failure. 😈 (it can take anywhere between 6 months to millennia to come back, or never. So you better create a new character 😅).
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Here's the Wikipedia article in english for further details. Obviously I simplified bits and pieces. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Nomine_Satanis/Magna_Veritas
You're absolutely right, there are sooooo many systems and approaches to this. In no particular order, from memory: D&D (3.0, 3.5, 4, 5, 5.5); Apac/Savage Worlds; Cyberpunk 2020 (the old 90s version); M&M; Cypher (supers); Gamma World; Blades in the Dark; GURPS. Haven't played 'em, but have read up on Mork Borg, Crown & Skull, Mothership, Dread, Mouseritter, The Good Society. I know I'm forgetting some as I sit here, been playin' ttrpgs since 2000, and have dabbled in lots of stuff during that time. What's so amazing about this hobby is the sheer VOLUME of games out there. More than I have time to dig into, alas! Any good ones you'd recommend for researching attrition/health systems? Thanks for watching/commenting! 🤠
@TalesFromElsewhereGames right now Mythic has my attention for gritty, dangerous and most importantly role play friendly combat. Thanks for answering! I found a lot to agree with in your assessment of D&D.
So what if you scaled the damage output to be more or less the same at every level, so that you get that feeling of tension at every level rather than 1st through 5th? Like in DnD, the longsword always does a base of 1d8, which might be impactful at low levels, but that damage never really scales.. right? So in my system I'm developing, the weapons themselves get more powerful at higher levels with randomly generated prefixes and suffixes added to them which increase their stats. So at 1st-level, you can find a "rusty longsword," but at higher levels you find "iron longswords," and "steel longswords," and then a "mithril longsword," which cause damage commensurate to the encounter level, so the combat always FEELS like it's low level even though the character may be 6th level... hope that makes sense ^^; And I have level requirements for higher-level gear, so even if a low-level character finds a higher-tiered weapon in random treasure, he will take a penalty to his attack roll if he tries to use it. Because higher-tiered weapons can one-shot lower-level monsters, since they do 4d8 rather than 1d8..
That is absolutely one way to approach it! 🤠 The reverse of that I've seen is to not really scale HP and damage as characters progress, but instead to give them more abilities. (horizontal progression) Allowing outgoing damage to keep pace with monster HP scaling should definitely help keep the combat moving and avoid long slogs!
I don't remember exactly, because I've read this about 3 years ago(so, srry abd please correct me if i say any nonsense stuff), but Cyberpunk 2020 has an interesting health mechanic, it has one "big hit bar" (or maybe 3, I don't remember), every damage you take, sometimes more than one, makes you mark one square of that bar. If you reach a certain region of that bar, it means your current health condition is getting worse and you gain some negative conditions and or have to roll to see if you keep awake and or to see if you die.
Interestingly, some of my own game design inspiration for TFE came from the oldest versions of Cyberpunk! I just really enjoyed the system - even if I ended up scrapping a lot of my original designs based on it :)
Definitely agree that combat feels best when every action progresses the narrative of the fight, but I tend to be of the opinion that a system of decreasing capabilities like you've described, while it feels true to human experience, practically introduces more "nothing happens" turns, without usually presenting any particularly interesting choices. Personally, I prefer escalation systems in hit point based gameplay, where things get quicker and deadlier as the fight goes on; that introduces conflicting pressures to change the landscape of the fight as much as possible before enemies are at full effectiveness, and to save your own strongest abilities for when you are at full effectiveness. The conditions/wounds system in Vaesen is really interesting too, where each setback gives you new roleplaying prompts and choices to make.
After my current Curse of Strahd campaign is over, I was planning on switching to Savage Worlds which has the tactical options I like without the slog of hit points. I’ll check out your game though.
Personally, i live the FFG Legend of the Five Rings damage system... most hits do Endurance damage which works like his points... represents knicks, fatigue. When you're out of Endurance every hit is resolved on the critical tablr... your defenses has collapsed. And some attacks can bypass your Endurancr and go straight to the critical table [which is a smaller and more streamlined version of thr rather large table from FFG Star Wars games]
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I prefer the variant of Genesys used on L5R to Star Wars and the generic Genesys rulebook. Only two types of proprietary dice [which I despise in general] in L5R instead of six types of dice in SW/Genesys. Six is way too many moving parts to interpret the result, especially when you're rolling multiple of each type.
Check out Runehammer's "Crown and Skull", the attrition is in terms of skills and gear- some say this creates a death spiral, however there is no opportunity attack for disengaging
@@darrinpio6188 ability score drain is an interesting solution that I've seen a few games use. Do you find it creates a death spiral situation? Does it feel pretty good to use?
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I love reading rules and settings. With that said, my experience with Forbidden Lands has been minimal. i.e. Playing a one-shot when we do not have enough players for our ongoing campaign. With that said, FL is definitely deadly. However, reaching zero with one of your ability scores does not kill you. You suffer a critical injury - some of which are lethal.
I feel that this is only an issue in post 3rd edition D&D. BX and it's retroclones resolve this with low HP values and fast combats. I find this emphasizes more narrative combat where I can improvise things like limb damage without needing to follow a formalized system that will generally just slow my flow down. This assumes you are not setting out to make a strategic combat based system, though.
An idea: Characters don't get stronger by having their numbers go up; instead, they become stronger by gaining access to new defense types and tools for bypassing them. It's still possible to overcome a defense by attrition, but having to do this is treated as a failure state.
A like-minded individual! I totally agree - much of the scaling issues in D&D come from numerical bloat. In TFE, characters grow more interesting, gaining new features and special abilities over time, but their core numbers do not inflate. They're still just a person, flesh and blood. It's not a game that'd capture an epic, god-slaying, heroic fantasy, but that's okay with us :)
MERP / Rolemaster addressed this in the early '80s, as another commenter mentioned. Hit points are still used as a way to measure the health of a combatant, but simple, linear attrition is seldom the reason a character (or NPC) drops out of a combat. Critical hits can cause bleeding (hits per round), stunning effects that reduce the character's combat effectiveness, broken bones, severed limbs, unconsciousness, or outright death. Being reduced to 0 HP renders a character unconscious. If the character is also bleeding heavily they will eventually be reduced to their constitution stat below 0 which is lethal. For XP and practical purposes, eliminating a combatant through whatever means is sufficient. Generally speaking, major healing in MERP/RM is impractical during combat, so the phenomenon of being repeatedly propped back up at the ragged edge of consciousness isn't so much of an issue. Optionally, characters who have lost most of their HP can suffer general minuses to all their activities, including combat rolls, and certain critical results will specify e.g., -25 (on a D100 roll-high system). This way, hit points and damage still play a role in an intuitive way, but everyone understands that combat is potentially deadly for _everyone_ involved. This also addresses one of the problems of D&D where low level characters have practically no chance at all to defeat high level characters (or high HD monsters) in combat. There's no such thing as a lucky strike. Bard the Bowman simply could not defeat Smaug, under any circumstances in D&D, unless he was a very high level character indeed. The Black Arrow would have no chance to find that missing scale. But in the MERP/RM system (and Against the Darkmaster) there is a _chance_, however slim, that the low level character will land a fatal blow, even against a powerful monster or NPC. In some versions of the critical hit tables, rolls of 66 and 100 are usually fatal, or at least debilitating. This increases the sense of tension in combat, and it gives more choices to the players (as does the option of converting some of your offensive bonus (OB) to defensive bonus and 'parrying'). If you know there's a _chance_ that your next blow could defeat your opponent outright, you have to factor that into your decision to fight or flee, and how much, if any, of your attack you will allocate to defending yourself.
Hah yeah, I'm using the more broad definition of Attrition here, rather than the specific term from C&S. C&S is an interesting case study - it's an elegant solution to that design challenge, indeed!
Interesting. I will think about it and try to incorporate some alternatives to my DND game. Some ways I found as a DM to avoid at least the boring-monster-HP side was that I'd let the enemy change behaviour or environmental things might happen. After all just because the monster statblock doesn't tell you anything about this kind of thing it doesn't mean that you can not be creative - that's at least DM's lever to fix this. But I can imagine that a non-existing decision tree as a player can quickly lead to bored players..
@@AsdasdAsdasd-xq1nr Absolutely, the DM always had the power to spice things up! The intention with my game is to provide more interesting decision trees for the players as part of the core resolution system, before layering on top special abilities, terrain hazards, monsters, and so forth.
There have been several solutions to this problem over the years. Just keep hit points low, instead of a die just use constitution modifier when leveling. Another solution is to spread hit points. Say you have a fighter and roll a 8 then each body part has 8hp, when you take damage, it affects that body part. Along the same lines you can just have modifiers as you take damage. For instance, if you have 12hp and drop to 3/4 you suffer a -1 to hit, -5ft of movement, stunned, dazed, etc whatever you want to make it. go down to 50% you take a bigger hit to your abilities or have to make a save to stay in the fight. Lose 75% then save or pass out or further reduction. I have not seen your other video, so I apologize if this has already been suggested, I just noticed the time stamp.
@@jamesrizza2640 Always appreciate the recommendations and feedback! It's an interesting challenge, and one with many solutions along a spectrums of simplicity/crunch and narrative/simulation. I think different games can answer the question differently, ya know? BitD has its own, Crown & Skull another, Fate and Cypher yet another! TFE has it's own as well, which may not be the best answer out there, but I think it serves the design goals of the system pretty well! (It's talked about in later videos on the channel). Appreciate you checking out the video! I know there are a million YT channels out there, so it means a lot that you decided to give one of mine a watch!! 🤠
Traveller. In DnD Terms your Str, Des, and Con values are your hit points. As you take wounds their values are reduced and with them their modifiers. Con is reduced first, all damage within con is considered light damage, then it overflows into Dex usuallu. Everything within this is moderate damage for healing etc then into Str. All within this is serious damage and much harder to heal. Simple, quick, never any bloat.
Not sure how common it is, but I've definitely seen that happen a few times over the years and heard others mention that strategy. Your experiences may vary! 🤠
A fix for yo-yo health at zero is allowing negative hitpoints. Then healing is best while they are still alive to prevent them from going down, instead of risking not having enough healing to pay the debt when they are down
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I haven't playtest it in TTRPG, but you can see the pattern elsewhere. Contrast the vegetable stew stamina exploit in Skyrim with negative stamina locking you out of the ability to do stuff (including dodge) in Elden Ring
I do like how PF2e handles the issue of repeatedly dropping to 0 hit points. Definitely helps mitigate that aspect. PF2e's combat engine, overall, has much more sound underlying math than D&D 5/5.5e. I don't really agree that it solves that scaling attrition issue, though. Let me unpack what I mean (as someone who has a lot of respect for PF2e!!) What PF2e does right is give the players the ability to stay "competitive" with the scaling of HP of their enemies. It's an optimizers dream! But I consider it still the definition of attrition-based play, in that it is simply the mass-exchange of those numbers, and PF2e combat is the definition of arithmetically burdensome on the players at the table. (again, this is a feature, not a bug! And I am a fan of PF2e) What I think PF2e did was LEAN INTO the attrition-based combat. It didn't try to "solve" the issues, but rather just built a very clean version of that structure and elevated the core aspects of it to a very complex and, of course, engaging level for those that enjoy it. Anyway, that was pretty rambling haha. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you in full, just exploring the topic and the nuance. Appreciate you checking out the video and taking the time to comment!! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I agree with the points you brought, and I totally agree, it didn't tried to go away from an attrition system, but built upon it to make it tense and intresting, and as such adressing (imo) most of the issue attrition based combat have. If I can elaborate a tiny bit, I'll say that the +10/-10 system and the major importance of buff/debuff was how the developpers managed to make an attrition base combat system not being "boring until it reach zero" (which is a criticism I totally agree with for most system). By making critical hit so powerfull and devastating on both side, they reinforced the importance of choice that does something else than depleting hit points by making the choice that hinder something else than hitpoint being more meaningfull (basically they tried really hard to prove the "the best condition is dead" false). Indeed, the cost of it is, math complexity (the game is already more complex than most other) which is a clear downside. Each solutions to a problem in game design have downsides. ( usually I become extremely skeptic if someone try to tell me a solution have no downside :) ) Sadly I just discovered the channel so never read Tales from Elsewhere, but I'll be sure to put it on my list of system to read.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Totally agree in the idea. it doesn't try to go away from attrition based combat, but try to make attrition interesting and tactical. at the end both the critical (+10/-10) system (which lean toward making thing dead really fast against weak creature) and the fact conditions take a huge place in combat against a few powerfull creature tend to make choice that doesn't impact the combat be the exception rather than the norm, players are encouraged to impact the combat in many way that have immediat effect rather than just looking at the HP bar depletion alone. it totally lean all in toward trying to prove wrong the "the best condition is dead" thing, while keeping the metric of HP the same familiar thing people are used to.
@@VentsongeGaming Yep yep, we're totally in alignment here. One of the frustrating limitations of UA-cam is that when I make these videos, what I say is "locked in time", and I can't as easily have these back-and-forth discussions on the subject with the viewers, so I'm always glad to engage down here in the comments.! Appreciate the responses, cheers friend! 🤠
I'm a bit confused here. Aren't all systems where something changes during combat (be it hit points or some sort of a wound/condition) essentially attrition systems? As in, you fight until you run out of resources. The different variations are just flavours of the same theme. The only alternative I can see is a binary alive/dead system.
That's totally fair! However, let me unpack a bit how I see them differing: The more you move away from "traditional" attrition systems (hit points, as an example), the more narratively interesting you can make each exchange, such that it's less about slowly whittling down an arbitrary meter, and more about making each of those exchanges exciting. For example, if an attack deals 10 damage out of 40 hit points, you've lost a pretty big chunk of your health. Ouch! But nothing else changes in a standard attrition-based system. The way to resolve the fight is to get those remaining 30 points. Now, let's say instead you take one Bleeding Injury to your leg, and you can have at most 4 injuries before dying. So that's also 25% of your "Max health" as it were. However, that injury comes packaged with narrative/mechanical consequence - you're bleedin' out from the leg, and maybe you can't walk on it! That presents a new challenge; the scene has changed, and the players must now adapt. The key different is about making the progression of the fight not feel like you need to deplete the enemy's resource to 0 to win, particularly in a system (like TFE's) where you can "skip ahead" on the injury severities to instantly kill some folks. (A single bullet to the head of a bandit is likely to kill 'em straight out!) It's about making those exchanges and turns more visceral, rather than purely numerical. It's a gradient in that design space, from "pure" hit points all the way to abstracted wounds. This is a really interesting and meaty subject, and one that can be hard to truly unpack in a single YT video, or in the comments! Haha I really appreciate that you took the time to check out the video and post a comment. There are a million UA-camrs out there, so it means a lot that you stopped by my small neck of the woods for a spell! 🤠
Just a couple minutes into the video but this makes me think of magic the gathering. It feels weird and unflavorful how many broken strategies and cards have involved spending all your life except your last one like a currency. It’s part of getting better as a player: realizing the only life point that matters is your last. It’s obviously not a bad system and kind of unavoidable, as you can push almost any game system to its limit to the point of “almost losing” for max advantage.
Oh that's a very interesting observation. "The only life point that matters is the last one" is a very common saying in MTG! And I agree, that that's not necessarily a knock against MTG 🤠
@@lancearmada I've played such systems, actually! Modiphius 2d20 works like that, if memory serves. I played Achtung! Cthulhu, and it used that style. I think it works okay and is definitely better than nothing! It's worth noting that a lot of what I'm talking about is personal preference :) so even though I consider that implementation to not be quite enough to solve the problem, it's still not bad!
I don't really think you described attrition, it you seemed like you were describing chutes and ladders. Rolling dice and adding up points till you do or do not reach 100 might be boring, but losing resources as a fight progresses isn't necessarily. Chess, for example, isn't boring. It actually sounded like you *liked* attrition, and what you don't like is keeping track of something that doesn't seem to matter that much. Acid and rust breaking swords and armor can dramatically change a combat encounter. Isolating a player is a kind of, ultimate attrition on a party, whether you do it by, dropping them to zero, or teleporting them away, or sucking them down a pit, or trapping them in a web, or being locked in a cage of force, really all you're doing is reducing the force the party can bring to bear as the fight escalates. If you want a fight to be interesting, things need to change, and attrition is one of the best ways to make that happen.
Appreciate the feedback! My pretty loose use of the term "attrition" has come back to bite me a few times! 😭 The main point I'd like to make is that each turn in an RPG should feel like demonstrable progress has been made, that interesting things are happening that are more than pure abstraction, that they have consequences and are the result of tactical choices. I really do appreciate your detailed and well reasoned response!
One positive- one negative: Negative: Lord of the Rings (by Decipher) had a 6 tier system of damage. The more damage, the more minuses to your future rolls. Realistic, yes, but you rarely felt like you were at 100%. You nearly always has some de-buff applied to your character which was miserable. Positive: 13th Age RPG increases the number of damage dice by your level. (1st level fighter's long sword does 1d8 damage, at level 6 it does 6d8 damage) This maintained the feel of the first level tension of one hit could still kill you. They also have a Escalation die where you get better at combat the longer it goes. The notion I wrestled with was: These systems are not realistic. But after consideration...I don't want realistic. I want cinematic, ridiculous, over-the-top, superhero action. If you've seen armored MMA, you know these REAL battles are won just making a guy fall to the ground once. Forget rules for accurate combat, encumbrance, and other rules design to make the game more real. I want my players to feel like unreal superheroes.
That is totally valid! The feeling of heroic, badass adventure naturally lends itself toward Hit Point (or similar) systems. Ain't nothin' wrong with that! 🤠
Attrition really isn't as bad as the adv/disadv mechanic in D&D. At the beginning it seems brilliant, but this mechanic takes away from team play so much. Once you have advantage, nothing else other characters do will help you gain "more" advantage. And removing adv is extremely easy. For example, if you have an enemy prone, blinded and grappled you just gain adv, and if the enemy just casts darkness then all those things you did really don't mean anything. Secondly, movement is either everything in D&D or nothing. Either your movement is like 50 and no melee creature can catch you or its 30 and everyone can catch you. You dash, they dash, you dash, they dash.. blah. PF2e solves both of these problems (though with more complexitiy) using movement as part of your action set and having conditions that can stack on each other to make your actions accumulate on your enemy (or yourself).
Adv/Disadv is a mixed bag for me. I appreciate the expediency of it - it takes less time to calculate your total to-hit/damage on a turn. But like you say, it takes away from interesting mechanical interplay with the team. The big issue in D&D 5e is that there are often so few REAL tactical choices to make during your turn. I already have Advantage, so decision tree complete! In TFE, we have a simple adv/disadv system for attack accuracy. Like 5e, it doesn't stack. However, we kept that simple because we wanted the more interesting, tactical play to not come from numerical stacking, but rather coordinated assaults and synergies. With the Injury system (discussed in the next video), the players can coordinate to dismantle the offensive and defensive capabilities of an enemy, taking out key offensive limbs, distracting them while another comes in for the kill, and so forth. In the end, a game system needs to decide where they'd like their decision trees and player-burden to lie. Anyway, that was a rant! Thanks so much for your insightful response!!
Howdy. Here's another Peter who's building his RPG system from scratch and questioning established roleplaying traditions. I focus mainly on the narrative approach in my design efforts. Thusly I think, if something does not have an impact on the story (or the character), it's also not noteworthy in your game sessions. If you are hit with an attack IRL, the kinetic impact confronts you with real consequences, ranging from temporary handicaps, to crippling trauma. Gamists always bring the argument, that it is much too complex to run a wound system in a RPG, but describing the lesion and acting on your injury is more captivating in combat narration, than micromanaging your HP meter, IMO. Not wanting to spill all my beans here, but I'm absolutely looking forward to see your alternative to attrition-based combat in TfE. All the best for your journey, Pete. It's always nice to see innovative mechanics and novel takes on stagnant rules in our favorite hobby.
@@PjotrFrank I totally agree with your points above. If the actions that the character is performing don't have immediate narrative consequences, then the "video game" starts to emerge. I'm excited to share my design! The goal was to remain within the "trad" space of crunchy combat while embracing a more narrative injury system. Video should be out next week!
One possible issue to look out for is adding too much complexity with every single hit. First one thing to manage, then another thing to manage, then three things to manage! However, for the "boredom" aspect also consider looking at MCDM's "Draw Steel" where they give you a "powering up" ability that you do more damage as the combat goes on, making things more dramatic (and probably a bit swingy to add interest as the flow of battle goes back and forth, but it would speed it to end of combat.) By powering up instead of weakening things it will make combat speed up rather than slow down. At least that's the concept. I like the idea of the new unlocked abilities at every 25% though as even just having more options, preferably deadlier, riskier options would feel more exciting in the same way the powering up over time would. So be careful of your new system to ensure it doesn't slow down the pacing as it continues. Good luck with your game! :D
@@mrpiratedancer4rrr thanks for the advice! So far, the game actually plays faster than other traditional, combat focused TTRPGs, mainly because the decision tree is shifted into the core system, rather than layering a lot of additional features on top. So the game asks more of the player with its core rules, but then doesn't also require the player to review 10+ spell options, ability options, class features, and so forth on top of that. Another way to put it is that the players focus more on the enemy and what their behavior and threats look like, rather than reviewing their own sheet. It's a shift, but one that has paid off in the tests!
I'm not really against attrition-based systems when we don't go into the HP bloat territory like in 5E. I like small Hit Protection Pools in Into the Odd and its offspring An alternative that you made me think of that I have yet to actually play is Crown and Skull where skills and loot are the parts that protect your small HP pool and that's interesting I also like smaller wounds systems as in SWADE or EZD6
I dislike death-spiral systems far more than I dislike attrition based systems. I would love an option that doesn't have either. Right now I am playing a game with no levels or advancement, maybe that's the fix?
@@panjakrejn2887 Death spirals are definitely an issue with wound systems. TFE's feels pretty good, based on long form playtests. It also uses horizontal, rather than vertical progression - your character doesn't advance numerically, instead just gaining new options and abilities without any strict "levels".
I'm going to offer a counter argument for what makes attrition combat so 'sticky' in the design of the most popular TTRPGs. Basically, as players level up, as you mentioned they are gaining more skills and features of their class. Well, those features would seem pretty meaningless if players weren't able to consistently use them because every BBG they fight after a long rest goes down with a quick focus fire of the whole team's A-tier abilities. It also wouldn't feel very good if those abilities missed more often than they landed (such as trying to balance abilities by lowering their effective hit chances). Basically, these fights get longer because a player's 'kit' has gotten bigger. Multiply that across a whole party and you're going to have a pretty long fight against a pretty durable dragon to squeeze every last spell slot out of your sorcerer. Now, do I think that there's a solution to this that doesn't entirely eliminate the power creep available to higher level characters, possibly, but probably not. One potential way of doing this is making the attrition happen over a longer period. So, for instance, players don't get back all their spell slots after a long rest. This would fundamentally change the game however, but if characters were in a constant state of 'running low on resources', then they're naturally gonna save as much of their best stuff for a real baddie. And in that case, they have less kit to burn through for the encounter. What this would mean is that the definition of a long rest (where they would be fully back to normal) is on the scale of weeks, not hours. It would have the added benefit of making downtime activities more prominent. Granted, for this to work for a class like wizards, cantrips need to be able to do a lot more heavy lifting, which I think they do for the most part in dnd5e. but pf1e cantrips would need an overhaul to be able to be relied upon as a 'standard' attack in higher level encounters.
@@roccoruscitti910 Thanks for the detailed and well reasoned response! I don't really disagree with anything you've said here, and I think it's an interesting and complex subject. The idea of power growth is an interesting one. What's so odd to me is that, at low levels, the TTK (time to kill) for the enemies you face is very low; only a few hits takes down most everything. As you grow in power, your numbers go up...but so do the enemies'. In fact, as you say, their durability starts to out scale your offense in some senses. This means that the TTK goes up as you get stronger. It's a strange feeling; taking longer to defeat a level-appropriate enemy the stronger you become. Just some food for thought 🤔 Anyway, that was a bit rambly on my part. Thanks for watching the video! Means a lot, as YT is full of content about TTRPGs and I'm honored that you took time out of your day to not only watch the video, but provide a good response!
Good points, but it's always weird to me when people talk about D&D like its way of doing things is common. Other games tend to have a fixed, low number of hit points that may or may not cause wound conditions when lost, but almost always make for more deadly combat than D&D. D&D controls the vast majority of the market, but its mechanics are an outlier.
@@Frivolitility I definitely agree with you, and you've hit the nail on the head as to why I framed the discussion around D&D 😁 I think it's important to try to introduce folks to other approaches to TTRPGs, as there's a wealth of variety!
Level 1-4 combat is largely dull for players. One swing or one low level spell that they might miss. Meanwhile being taken down by a party of cr 1/8 goblins feels lousy for players. The problem at higher levels is monsters, at least in wotc published adventures are too weak, they lack any sort of defense against cheesy player spells and abilities.
HP (along with Vancian magic) drove me away from D&D back in the BECMI days. I think my favourite combat system right now is probably Fate but I also like Savage Worlds.
I don't necessarily disagree with your points but when I think of 'attrition-based combat' I think of the fact that damage and usage of resources carries over from fight to fight until a rest. This sounds more like criticism of health bloat and how to counter the effects or avoid it.
That's probably a more precise use of terminology, I agree! The art of presenting this information to the public via UA-cam is new to me, so I'm glad you got my point even though my use of language was a bit...loose :)
Clearly you've mainly played 5th ed D&D. You said something like "At like in 5th ed D&D, a first level Wizard would have less than 10 hit points". I have nev actually played 5th ed. All previous editions up to 3.5 ed rolled just a D4 and added the te Constitution bonus. That is 7 or less points.OSR almost always does that. Why not just add the character's Strength to their Constitution score to calculate HP? Don't increase HP per level unless a character's attributes increase, and you can keep a lid on that.
I'd say most of my game time was in 3.5 ed; I started with the release of 3rd edition way back in 2000ish. I've definitely played a lot of 5e since its launch, that's for sure! Y'know, I thought a lot about how much HP to say the Wizard will start with in this video. Probably thought for far too long about it! Do I use 5e's d6 hit die plus the (normal) Con score of 14 (+2 bonus) and say 8 or less? Do I go with 3rd edition era, with their d4? What about the funky Dwarf Wizards in 5e that stack Con super high? In the end, I just said less than 10, which is factually true, if non committal in its details! But I agree - keeping the HP scaling under control in a game is a great way to combat that feeling of hit point attrition, and the OSR community has overall nailed it. OSR games also do a good job with the other part of attrition - gear! You can't delve into the dungeon forever, 'cuz you're supplies just won't last!
Pathfinder 2e really doesn't feel like it suffers from the same problems and has elegantly solved most all of these issues. Don't look at pure numbers, but give it a try, especially high level play. Teamwork results in maintaining a 3-4 round combat and each round is just as exciting as the last.
@@mkklassicmk3895 Unless everyone drops in one hit, you're using "hit points" in some capacity. Sure you can give it other names, but it's some expendable resource you pay (wounds, stress, luck points, whatever) to take a hit that would otherwise drop you and keep going. Which is basically the same mechanic with a different name and maybe a bit of spin on it, like an ongoing wound penalty. I don't think people have a problem with hit points in general, so much as grindy combats where it takes too many hits to drop someone. But that's not really a feature of HP, so much as it is the fact that damage doesn't keep up with hp.
@@taragnor That is a semantic argument. You could call any system a Hit Point system. However, it means something particular in RPG's, it doesn't simply mean "any system where you live through being hit more than once." My games system allows you to take more than a single hit but doesn't function or look anything like a hit point system. The main issue with an HP system is not that damage doesn't scale. The problem is that they are too abstract and cause the player to optimize their actions to focus on doing the most damage.
@@mkklassicmk3895 Not necessarily. It's not just surviving multiple hits, it's spending a currency (or deducting from a pool of points) to survive hits. Back in the day of wargaming (D&D's roots) when a unit got hit, it was dead. So then people got the idea to have a tougher unit, like a dragon. And with it the idea that a dragon or giant could take more hits than a regular pikeman. And thus the concept of hit points (sometimes called hits-to-kill) was born. The damage mechanic came later as a natural consequence to deal with hit point bloat. As for optimizing damage, of course. Generally every combat system is going to involve the player trying to make themselves better at killing opponents. That is after all the purpose of combat. Hit point systems actually tend to lead to the opposite effect sometimes, where often it creates a situation where the best options are to try to find a way to avoid hit points altogether. It's why the save-or-die mechanic was a thing in D&D.
@@taragnor When I said they optimize for damage, I meant that while in combat they will only do the thing that deals the most damage. There are lots of games that that use a numeric system to track how hurt you are but aren't really HP systems. A Hit Point system does involve a pool of points but it also has the additional features of rolling for damage. You can't really "fix" them by making the HP low because you still have a problem with widely varying damage. So no matter how you work it you end up having to "interpret" how much damage the die says is being done. Which is the just the nature of a Hit Point system.
FATE has a great system of conditions. And Blades in the dark has a system where you get complications rather than tracking hit points.
Wildsea and crown and skull your skills and equipment are your hit points
@@scottgozdzialski6478
If I remember right, your inventory items are also your hitpoints in Mausritter, which you'll drop when hit
Ah yes, the age-old problem. One interesting older game, not fantasy, that I loved was BattleTech. Your Mech has armor points, and once that armor's gone, internal damage occurs, leading to all sorts of disastrous consequences. Sure they're machines, but the principle still applies. More recently, I saw a video by Roleplay Cafe, where he discusses abstract hp in a system where combat is not abstract, along these lines, but not exactly eliminating hp. I'll check out your next video too and see where this is going. It's a discussion worth having, and new ideas are always welcome imo.
"Armor" or "ability to avoid damage" breaking first and then leading to "real damage" that has consequences on your combat ability seems like a great idea.
One of the problems imo is that 5e and most other systems try to balance being as basic as possible and but also retain players who want 'more' from combat, so stuff like bloodied or multiple stages that added complexity got cut
I like in TTRPGs that you can die to random mobs, so 'randomly' getting wounded or suffering significant damage and not being able to contribute as effectively adds stakes and therefore increases my enjoyment, but most people don't like consequences and play for very different reasons.
@@icarusshoda One of my earliest experiences in D&D was my own character's death.The ranger and I were scouting while the others set up camp. I was up a tree when he came face to face with a green dragon he just *had* to take down, not knowing how low on hp I was. The dragon breathed, and I dropped out of the tree dead at his feet. He killed the dragon, but then he spent a lot of money to have me resurrected. And I lost a point of Con, because that was the rule. You don't get those profound experiences if no one ever really dies. Also, we all got a good laugh out of it, and I was not traumatized for life because my imaginary friend pretend-died.
@MemphiStig Love it!
I also like when there's a real threat of death and dismemberment in TTRPGs. It makes fights matter more, makes the tension more palpable!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Rolemaster. So many damage types, so many ways to suffer terrible injuries, and a very restrictive magical healing system. We didn't play much because we found it so deadly, and I consider it almost too realistic in that respect. For example, I missed the session where the party got tpk'd by a random encounter with *badgers* -- and those guys were D&D vets. People think old school D&D was deadly, but they must have never played Rolemaster.
I've recently released my own TTRPG called GRIT Fantasy RPG. It still has an attrition-based setup but gets around this issue of hit point power-bloat. I simply capped the health points (called GRIT) at 10. Characters can never exceed that. Most monsters have 5-10 points with more powerful ones having 15-40 (40 is the maximum). There is also no level system. Improvement comes in the form of loot (much like ICRPG from Runehammer Games) and none of the items increase health. Mind you, this is a rules-light game deigned for one-shots and short arcs. It is not meant to replace D&D or games like it.
@@gnomebotstudios awesome, congrats on the launch of your game! Keeping HP (or its equivalent) very low definitely helps avoid that grindy issue and makes fights feel tense and deadly!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thank you! Making a game is challenging as I'm sure you know first hand. Low HP certainly does keep things from getting out if hand and makes combat risky. I think this can open up exploration for alternative solutions. Good luck with your game, I'll be following along!
My favorite system is Blade of the Iron Throne, which has more or less non-attrition combat. Simplifying it down, you have a pool of dice for combat that you partition between offense and defense, and you're trying to get more successes on your offense roll than their defense roll (and vice versa). You then consult a table based on where you aimed, what you attacked with, and by how much you succeeded to determine the pain, bloodloss, and other effects of the attack (sometimes being instant death). Bloodloss can cause you to pass out and pain reduces the size of your combat pool, limiting your options as you take blows.
It's a bit complicated and inelegant, but I love how dynamic it makes fights. I'm taking inspiration from it for my own system, albeit pared down in complexities -- most people understandably don't want to consult tables after every successful attack in combat, even if it usually only takes one or two hits to kill/incapacitate.
@@Twisted_Logic hey, complicated and inelegant is fine by me! I have a soft spot in my heart for daring, but not always totally successful designs like that.
The old Deadlands magic system with its poker hands is super cool, but slows the game down so much haha!
I feel like your terminology is off here. If you like D&D at low levels but dislike high levels, your problem isn't with hit points so much as it's with swinginess or variance, that is the chance that the range of potential damage your effects can do. In low level D&D, you can go from no damage, to an instant-death critical hit. Even a regular blow could roll max damage and drop someone.
In High level D&D, even a critical is guaranteed to be survivable. The mechanic is still the same: do X amount of damage and subtract it from HP. There's just a lot more variance at low levels. Hit points just grows faster than damage does, to the point that D&D makes up for it by giving out more attacks. This in turn leads to the game feeling more grindy, because you reach a point it takes more than one blow to matter.
Similarly the example with healing in D&D is just a matter of how healing rules work. In older versions of D&D, getting healed from negative didn't mean you were automatically back in the fight. Having hit points in no way forces you to have that whack-a-mole style combat because of healing. You can simply rule that once you're at 0 or negative you're out of the battle.
The real attrition aspect of D&D isn't so much in combat itself, as it is in the adventuring day. D&D is based off of fighting multiple combats in a day and suffering depletion of resources. You take damage or use a spell, that choice persists next combat. A lot of the game is actually managing your resources so you have some left for the climactic battle. Not all games have that concept of running out of spells or abilities. This also leads to attrition based design, where you put in "filler" encounters encounters solely to wear the PCs down, because you want them going into the final fight beat up.
Ok, but what did he get wrong exactly? I'm not seeing the contradiction here. It seems like you're just explaining the same thing that he was explaining, but in different words.
Sorry for the delayed response! DnD is ostensibly balanced around the 6-8 encounters per day, but I can probably count on one hand the number of GMs that have run it that way in 24 years of D&D. That many encounters in a day results in bland, uninspired, random goblin fights and such. Things with no real stakes other than to complete the fight and move on.
So yes, that helps whittle down party resources over time, but it is very rarely how anyone actually plays the game, simply because... It's just not very fun or interesting to do so.
Your mileage may vary!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames That's just because most DMs makes time go way too fast. My main campaign nowadays I have began 6 years ago, we played about 90 games, and in game, only 2 months have passed. Every day is multiple sessions. But I admit that my ultra slow rythm is something I've never seen anywhere else.
@@shanz7758 That is a rarity, indeed!
@@shanz7758 Would hate to play in your game.
Love me some Savage Worlds. 0-3 Wounds, death spiral, very possible to one hit KO at any level but also plenty of ways to protect yourself from going down
Savage Worlds make you feel the danger of combat!
Savage Worlds is such an excellent system. The wounds approach is great, although it can lead to a death spiral, but that's part of the risk.
@@scottlurker991 Death Spirals are the biggest challenge we've encountered with wound/injury-based systems. It's a careful balance between tension and frustration!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames That's for sure. That was my biggest issue with Conan 2d20, once you get hit for any kind of wound penalty, you essentially became a liability to the group. Savage Worlds wound penalties aren't crippling like that fortunately, partly because the exploding dice means you always have a chance.
@@taragnor Yeeeep! Couldn't agree more!
i think the desire to give players a sense of progsresion is a big factor in exposing the flaws you discussed about hp-based combat. it's also definitely more significant in dnd or games wehre you control 1 character. where you control a party, and individual members get knocked down, the "game changes" more often for sure. interested to learn about your new system.
@@maxclark5496 that's an excellent point!
In Nimble (a TTRPG) you still have hit points, but you don’t go down when at 0 hit points. Instead you start dying, take a wound, have fewer actions per turn, and risk hurting yourself more if you keep fighting.
Also, the solo bosses get different abilities when they are bloodied (half hp) and when they’re making their last stand (zero hp).
@@chasarch6706 NIMBLE does so many things right, while still firmly staying within the realm of D&D. It's an impressive feat! 🤠
When designing my own RPG, I had the same core sentiment--though it was specifically anti-hp, rather than addressing a concern about attrition. To me, combat represents the fundamental failure state of interaction (not necessarily on the players' part; more often on the part of the bad guys who made the choices that made them bad guys in the first place), and at that point, it's attrition no matter how you look at it. Killing members of the enemy's cohort ~is~ attrition, with or without hit points. You are breaking down your opponents' ability to continue doing whatever they're doing, piece by piece.
That said, it was a long-lasting and entertaining conundrum for me (ultimately for my extremely non-D&D game, the short version is that damage directly injures your base ability stats), so I am interested to see what you come up with!
@@xaosbob I feel you. The game we're working on is explicitly action-horror, so has violence and conflict assumed as part of the intended gameplay experience.
However, I think more games need to really ask themselves what they're actually about, ya know? If an RPG isn't explicitly about violence, then wearing that proudly is great.
I like when more story/exploration/narrative games use what you're describing - that combat represents a failure state of the other pillars of gameplay, rather than the assumed approach. Cheers!
This is one of several reasons I prefer Whitewolf-style systems. Penalties for being injured, or even location-based damage so that attacking an enemy's sword arm will make that arm less effective or potentially unusable.
I've never played Whitewolf, but I've heard of it! I love the grittier games, where there are real consequences to fights!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Try any of the World Of Darkness systems, especially the ones involving more "human" characters (Hunters, mage, etc). Without careful planning, character death is *super* easy to have happen, especially since a game like Hunters asks "what happens when everyday humans fight horrible monsters?" (The smart answer is often big guns with long scopes and to start shooting from far away and hope the monster is dead before it gets to you!) Taking down one monster might involve the entire party setting traps to slow it down/injure it, a couple of players grappling the monster at once (almost everything in WoD is stronger than a base human) and then someone trying to stake/shoot/etc the monster before it breaks free. If a second monster hears the commotion and joins the fray, the party gets scared really quick. There are moments of cool of course (a high level human is still squishy, but they can deal absurd levels of damage! Especially as they collect magic equipment and such) and there are other player types like werewolves and vampires that are very physically capable, but at that point the enemies you face are of a higher caliber.
In general combat in World of Darkness is 3 or 4 rounds tops, and getting hurt has serious negative consequences in combat, and for base humans, can take a long time in game to recover from. Even if a character gets magically healed, the pain of having a limb torn off messes with their mind and leaves the character with some type of permanent disability. The Story Telling systems in general are underappreciated now days (they almost equaled D&D in popularity in the 90s), the ST systems focus a lot on cinematic tellings of what is happening vs having rules for everything. The other thing about WoD, is that the expected end game is death of madness. There are no happy endings. The Hunters manual all but starts out saying that a TPK is the expected end of a campaign. The goal is to go down fighting as bravely as possible. That sort of changes the tenor of the game from "Oh no my character died!" to "That was an awesome death for the ages!"
Another system that I really like is Eclipse Phase, which technically has a HP based system, but combat is so short, and death so common, that you don't have the problems of drawn out combat that D&D has. Sure, a high level Eclipse Phase party is solving bigger issues and taking on bigger enemies. If a player has outfitted themselves with 4 extra cyber-arms that have Gatling lasers on them, whatever those lasers point at is going to die very quickly. But anything big enough to need that kind of firepower to take down is likely equally deadly. Eclipse Phase has a cool respawn mechanic where the player can upload their mind to a new body when an old one dies, and that allows for a lot of the lethality and IMHO more realistic levels of combat damage and health. There is of course a price to pay (and no one wants to lose their super cool upgraded body), but a TPK isn't the end of the campaign. This also means enemies can keep coming back again and again, which is super cool narratively, and stopping the baddies means that more than physical force is necessary. you can always play a werewolf or something else that is super strong, but at that point the enemies you face are of a higher caliber.
@@devlinbentley8193 I'm loosely familiar with World of Darkness, but I've never heard of Eclipse Phase! Yet another game I need to track down and read! 🤠
Though, I've seen Exalted described as "attrition-based rocket tag". Once perfects come online, you have a pool of D&D-style hit points that happen to be called "motes", and by that point anything that gets through has a decent chance of taking you from OK to Dead.
I ditched using an HP systems for my own RPG over a decade ago. I don't use something as involved as what you have created though. I used to make "crunchy" mechanics like that but my philosophy on RPG's has changed since those days. I discovered there is a sweet spot between "hard" rules systems and ""soft" rules systems. What my table currently uses allows for the right amount of freedom in playing while still allowing for stuff like tactical combat and character builds. The combat is quick, intuitive and dangerous enough to mess you up without usually killing you. It also doesn't require a ton of different rules governing different situations even though it's a skill based game. Game design is tricky like that, Its taken me 28 years of making RPG's to get my game to the point its at now. I have mad respect for what you are doing, it is not easy.
@@mkklassicmk3895 thanks for the words of encouragement!
I’ve recently taken up the goal of making an RPG in that sweet spot for use in my local gaming group, but it’s been slow going. I don’t have anywhere near 28 years of making RPG’s (as I am only 28 lol)
I am very interested in reading about your game system if it is posted somewhere online. It sounds like most, if not all, of my design goals line up with yours
@@psychone8064 I have never considered posting it online. I am not sure where one would even post such a thing.
@@mkklassicmk3895 I would also be interested in reading about your system! Maybe you could post it on a Google drive or something?
Maybe a Google drive or Reddit? I'm really interested in seeing what you cooked up in all those years
20th level D&D means swingy battles that take hours if they are to he challenging, and if you try to make them faster then you're drastically increasing the odds of a TPK.
Agreed - I've never had a good tier3 experience in D&D, unfortunately. The sweet spot for me is levels 1-10; everything after that just doesn't seem to work well.
Interesting pionts! I hadn't thought about HP in terms pf 'Attribition Based Combat' before and was actually concerned that my homebrew combat system was too random and deadly. But your comments have made me feel much better about the way I handle combat damage in my own game. The characters do have a Wound Pool which is basicalt a hangover from the HP concept, but it's directly linked to the characters attributes (e.g. Strength, Toughness and Willpower) and is basically a measure of how much trauma the character can tolerate before they collapse, and of course it doesn't increase with LEVELING like it does in D&D. the only way to increase a characters wounds is to become stronger, tougher or more mentally resilient which isn't that easy. Most characters are lucky if they can survive three blows, and many get taken out simply by one heavy blow, especially if its landed on their head which has the lowest wound pool and is therefore the most sensitive. We also use 'Critical Hits' and 'Critical Funbles' which means that something extra-ordinary has happened during the fight. Which adds an extra level of risk to every attack. So, combats tend to be quite short and unpredictable and most players are focussed primarily on not getting hit at all, by blocks, dodges and parries, or alternatively if you must get hit to makesure the damage is mitigated by armour. Helmets and skullcaps are particularly popular for the reasons already mentioned.
@@MrDidz I dig it! There are so many potential solutions, I'm glad to hear about more of them!
Damage as stats is cool, as it gives the players a feeling of being worn down, growing weaker, from continual battle.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames that's how it works in Forbidden Lands. Great system overall. I'm not in love with its magic system, but all of the core systems are great. And even the magic system is still better than the magic system in DND.
Check out Crown and Skull by Rune Hammer. Technically you are still taking hits until you can't, but those are inflicted against your skills and equipment. Your shield fighting or running are crossed out? Now your defense is lacking or you just lost the option of running away from this fight.
It's only on the players' side though. Monsters are still HP bags in terms of taking damage.
@@NRMRKL That does sound cool! I'll check it out!
It’s an approach that’s been in so,o for a long time. It’s still just a progression countdown where you lose stuff rather than a meta currency.
@@kevoreilly6557 I personally haven't seen it before. Where did you see it the first time?
Forbidden Lands and Vaesen are like that too. Big Monsters and Vaesen are still HP bags, but, in Forbidden Lands, things like common undead aren't considered to be Monsters in game terms. So, zombies and skeletons take ability damage when they get hit, just like PCs and regular NPCs do. In contrast, true Monsters in Forbidden Lands are supposed to be comparatively rare and powerful, and, when they do show up, they're supposed to be extra weird and scary, which is why, for one thing, damage doesn't make them weaker (until they reach 0 HP), unlike with humans and elves and zombies and most other creatures. Monsters also have 6 signature attacks each, which is also cool.
I'm actually working on my own game which is based on Free League's d6 dice pool engine as seen in games like Forbidden Lands and Vaesen. It's such a better system than in DND or any other d20 game that I'm aware of.
In summary:
Dice pools forever.
Death to the d20
@@mikegiamalva321 That asymmetrical design is interesting, with Monsters using different systems than the other characters!
I on the process of combining both a atrition system with a wound system, meaning that if enemies get a suficient number of wounds they could die before hitting 0 HP, with boss enemies only dying if they have a numeber of wounds. Each wound would go into a body part and if some acumulate you get dismembered (but you gotta be reaaly vigorous to do that). For final most things in the system have a cap of HP at 100 - 120 (my table is "high level" and the guy with most HP has 93), with some not using HP and just having wounds (some bosses or special enemies).
Obs: i do use a Damage reduction system more than things like AC too
Sounds cool!
Part of what prevents the whole "heal fighter for 1 hp" factor is Massive Damage. Of course, it varies with level and class, but the risk of taking massive damage (and dying instantly) increases a lot if you are very low on HP. Like you said, there is HP inflation, which supposedly controls this, but...
Anyway, I agree with you. I still like numbers, but I prefer to keep it low, and add a layer of contextual wound on top of it. I really dislike how in D&D you can have 1 hp and be totally fine. I understand it's all an abstraction, but...
I feel you. Massive Damage was supposed to help alleviate the issue, but the math doesn't add up :)
In AD&D, if you take more than half your hit points in damage from a single blow/cause, you save vs. death or die. Some DMs applied that to half your CURRENT hit points. If you have 100 hit points, but are down to 15, and take 8 points of damage, you have to save vs. death or expire.
It was a very different scenario with older versions of D&D. eg. A dragon's breath weapon damage was based on the hit points it had.
Sadly, I've never played AD&D or the original box set, but I've heard it was much more deadly! The OSR movement is trying to bring that back, from what I understand.
And with older AD&D, whilst fighting with either full hit points or 1 hit point has the same effect, once a character fell below zero HP and was then revived, the character would still be in a coma for 1-6 turns and thereafter require a weeks full rest.
But if monsters' damage output is always directly tied to their HP, is that really a good thing? I don't see why it would be
@@SAC2116 that sounds like a horrible rule for player engagement. Who wants to be unable to play the game for a whole in-game week?
@@mikegiamalva321 Old school D&D was an entirely different beast. It was assumed that the dungeons would chew up your characters and spit 'em out a mangled mess.
You'd control multiple characters into the dungeon in the hopes of maybe a few party members makin' it out alive!
I see the appeal, but it's definitely not for me :)
I've had some nice work arounds to reduce the attrition based system in dnd 5e,
1. Every time a player hits 0 HP they incur an injury which can reduce their max HP, and limit their actions. When they repair that injury using medicine or spells they gain HP based off their character class.
2. Max HP is capped at 100 regardless of character class. (traditionally tougher classes just increase their HP much more after repairing injuries than the squishier ones.)
3. Long rests still require the characters to roll hit-dice to recover hp.
4. The party only recovers hit-dice when they complete an objective.
Ah that's cool, sort of going for a "gritty recovery" approach to D&D. Has that worked pretty well in long-form campaigns?
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames We're only about 8 sessions along since I introduced the max HP cap and only recovering hit-dice on objective completion. It's working so far even with some of the PCs at level 20.
I just discovered your channel today, and I love it! I've been trying for the past two years or so to just modify D&D's systems to make battles feel both engaging, and frightening to the point where the players question "is this the best way forward?"
@s.hitman I'm so glad you stumbled upon the channel! I'd love to hear how the HP changes pan out, so keep us posted! 🤠
It sounds like what you’re looking for is the Cypher system, popularized by Numenera and more recently Old Gods of Appalachia. Cypher is a DnD-style hero ttrpg, but with only three attributes: Might, Speed, and Intellect. You have “pools” of these attributes and can draw from your pools to increase your d20 rolls during the session. But those pools (again, your strength, your dexterity, and your int/wis combined) are also your HP-run out of those pools and you die.
The other great mechanic is player-focused rolls: every roll is done by the players, including DM rolls. You scale everything based off of tiers 1-10, which represent d20 rolls x 3: tier 1 means players have to roll 3 or better, tier 2 means 6 or better, etc. That means that at tier 7 (21), players effectively CANNOT meet the roll. But… they can draw from their pools using effort to reduce the tier of the roll. Other players can assist to reduce the tier; cyphers (one-time use magic items) can also reduce the tier cost. Skills and abilities the player gains can also reduce the tier to roll. So combining the elements means you can potentially roll well on a technically impossible roll through a series of interactive mechanics. Very elegant!
I do love the Cypher system! Though I've run it for a Super Hero campaign, which worked very well.
I did miss rolling dice as the GM, though :)
I love the cypher system too. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time teaching the logic of the game to my players, who are so used to "classical" rpgs like D&D, that they have a hard time wrapping their heads around the cypher-system mechanic. It took me a while in the beginning too, when I started running Numenera. I loved the world, but it took me a while to get the hang of the system. Most of my players have yet to make that mental leap. But I will keep trying.
@@andreawille4162 It took my group a hot minute to really grasp it, too. What helped us is we started with a Super Hero setting, rather than classic fantasy. That helped us divorce ourselves from the traditional way of playing D&D and embrace the oddness that is Cypher :D
I will say, though, it will always be strange to not roll dice as the GM!
GURPS is great about avoiding that ridiculously unrealistic hit point system. Sort of. I mean, it does use HP, but different parts of the body have different percentages of your HP, and damage to those regions have different effects. This can range from momentary stunning that reduces your next attack chance, to a crippled limb or extremity, to knockdown, to unconsciousness, to death. You can also add the weakening effects of partial injuries that take a while to kick in, and bleeding to further weaken you and potentially drain you to death. When your total HP are low enough, you can’t defend or move as well. When you drop below zero, you fight to stay conscious each second. Drop low enough and you risk dying.
That may sound like a lot, but all rules are optional and can be made as simple or complex as desired.
The end result is a HP system that doesn’t FEEL like a HP system, because almost every hit HURTS. Parry, block, dodge and armor are your friends.
@@Antitheist I haven't fond memories of GURPS from like, 15 years ago! It was the first non-D&D system I tried!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I’m guessing you mean you have, not you haven’t. ;-)
It may surprise you to learn that GURPS hasn’t changed in 20 years! I first played it back in the 80s with version 2, when it had a lot of technical problems. They nailed it down with 4th edition (although it could do with some better organization). But despite no further edition in 20 years, they STILL keep coming out with new world books and additional rules. Some really good stuff available for pretty much any genre. It even works well in Foundry, if you’re into that.
Cheers.
Hi! I faced the same pains some years ago, and then found Savage Worlds (SW), which solved that pain. The wounds really matter in SW and affect your efficacy in battle directly.
Hello! I think Savage Worlds has some solid designs!
Yeah, Savage Worlds is the kitchen sink of RPGs. Its combat dance is rather nice and fixes the issue your talking about, if you see it as an issue (some do not). The problem with Savage Worlds is it is a short term game. It is not meant for grand adventures that span years of game play to complete. Savage Worlds burns out in about 8 months max at weekly game play for a campaign. Too short for a lot of world building and exploration.
@@TheCastleKeeper that always a tricky thing to balance - the length of an expected campaign.
I will say, 8 months of weekly games is about 32 sessions - that's pretty epic, but not the multi-year saga some other systems support.
I'm finding more and more as time goes on that I don't have the stamina for such epic narratives anymore - I want to try new things after about 8-12 months. (Which is a me problem haha)
I agree with a lot of your points, which is why I also changed things around this concept for my game. Although, I didn't go for a completely new approach, I kept HP and simply changed other mechanics that ultimately affect it. For example:
-HP is generally low. Each level a character rolls for HP, but there are no modifiers, just raw roll (single digits for a while).
-Defense is generally low.
-Damage scales up with level.
-There's no "downed" mechanic. Alive or dead.
So generally deadly, much more than for example 5e, and even more deadly than some OSR games I've played. Fights typically last 1-2 rounds and every hit can have dramatic consequences.
Anyways, that's how I approached it, among other details. Looking forward to hearing your approach in the next video.
Thanks! That's an interesting approach, as it retains the feeling that low-level D&D has while still having hit points.
I like when the individual actions and behaviors of the players and enemies feel like they have consequence - rather than depleting arbitrary "bars". Would love to hear more about your system!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames That's the feeling I wanted to retain and I think scaling damage is a critical factor, in my case, for players can go to areas of their level and still get down in one to two hits, while still downing an enemy in one to two hits. And getting a level or two away, tips the scales greatly in favor of the higher leveled side.
Thanks, happy to discuss any time. I would also like to learn more about your system. I looked it up on DriveThruRPG, but could not find it. Perhaps you could point me to where it is available?
Sadly, I don't have any documents ready for download quite yet. I'm in the process of finalizing the quick start rules PDF, but that won't be ready for another few weeks I think. The game has been in development for a few years and is finally in the late stages of development :)
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames In the grand scheme of things, a few weeks is just around the corner. Looking forward to reading it.
Obligitory references: Harnmaster, Runequest and The Riddle of Steel.
I'd also heard (but not been able to confirm) the historical note that hitpoints originate in naval wargames where they were used to track the durability of ships rather than people. The abstraction makes much more sense when you're dealing with 20+ ships per player trying to resolve a fleet action, than when four of the five people at the table have single entity or maybe two, to track.
@@gagrin1565 That would make more sense! Thanks for the comment! 🤠
Mutants & Masterminds, at least the DC adventures version anyway, has a non-HP based damage system very similar to Smash Bros that I found to be quite fun. Whenever an attacker successfully hits their target, rather than rolling a damage die the target makes a saving throw against a DC of the damage total + 15. If this save is failed, the target gets a cumulative -1 penalty to checks and saving throws if not conditions like being dazed or staggered. The target is K.O. when they roll less than the damage total on their saving throw, which obv accumulating more -1s will increase the likelihood of.
@@HoplooWare I love Mutants and Masterminds, though it's been over 10 years since I played it! I've forgotten so many of the rules and systems, it's worth tracking down my old copy!
Hit locations? Wounds? Special effects? HP as damage reduction per area?
@@CantRIP9389 Yeah! All those things definitely help out! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Mythras and upcoming The Broken Empire ;)
@@CantRIP9389 Broken Empires looks so interesting! Love the direction it's going with its Sim-Lite concept.
City of Mist is supposed to avoid this by encouraging the players and GM to change the scene with each passage of the Spotlight. i.e. you're encouraged to do something different every "turn" (Spotlights try to avoid the repetition).
Panic at the Dojo avoids this by just keeping combat consistently engaging with its token management.
If I remember right, your inventory items serve as your hit points in Mausritter, which drop when hit.
All good recommendations, thanks! 🤠
I haven't read Panic at the Dojo yet, it's on the list!
@TalesFromElsewhereGames
It very recently received a "Patch'd Up" version update that also includes a new character progression system
crown and skull is my favorite alternative to hitpoints, interestingly it calls its damage system "attrition" but what is damaged is the pcs skills and gear rather than an arbitrary pool of hit points. this leads to a game that feels very gritty, and forces players to get more creative as they are slowly wittled away. all this while still giving a great medium fantasy vibe where players can be super powerful, they just arent powerful in the way a 5e/pf/etc character is, because they need to think more about their actions
I'm seeing Crown and Skull recommended frequently, I've definitely started checking it out. What a cool system! Thanks for the req!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames of course, ive been running it since the game came out and its by far my favorite system, and the attrition system isnt even close to the coolest part!
Try causing ability damage every time a hit does max damage. So, you swing a longsword at an opponent, and if you roll a 10 on damage, you cause a random ability to go down by 1 point. This could mean hideous scar reducing Charisma, a cut tendon lowering Dexterity, or a severe concussion causing your Intelligence to go down. With ability checks being so important in D&D, injuries like these can really hamper a character, possibly forcing the character to change tactics or flee a fight.
@@zednumar6917 that's an interesting solution I've not encountered!
That would make doing ability damage more likely with a dagger than a long sword... 25% for d4, 10% for a d10.
Maybe instead any damage over half your Constitution or 4+your con modifier.
Ability damage is something that D&D has moved away from because it essentially forces you to rewrite your character sheet constantly. It's a good idea mechanically, just very messy and annoying to actually run.
@DistortedSemance I think only games that have ability damage as a core part of the structure (like Cypher) can get away with it. It's tough to add that in to a system that wasn't built to accommodate it.
I'm going to recommend this to my nephew.
Thanks! Anyone who is a fan of westerns and/or horror is definitely the target audience :)
Another TTRPG designer has the same feelings you had and tried to fix it in a game called Minimus. While the combat rules are few in words they address this cheese grater effect (slowly whittling away monster HP). This is done by having damage result in a penalty to your attacks making it accelerate towards a slippery slope
Interesting, I'm not familiar with Minimus - I'll have to check it out! Thanks for the feedback :D
It's an extremely common sentiment. I think most DND players get bored with DND combat, or at least most of the DND players I know
Omg, I hate health sponginess!!! Btw, old Vampire the Masquerade editions had a nice system where each hitpoint lost would give progressively stronger penalties. Also, GURPS has a nice way of making combat feel deadly.
It does. GURPS has a series of defenses which, if bypassed, can wipe a character out instantly.
The story telling systems in general, both old and new WoD, are good for fast and deadly combat. I don't think I ever saw combat go on for more than 3 or 4 rounds, even at high levels.
Really appreciate this discussion!
I’m working on a non-numerical system of health for a game right now, and this provided a lot of good, thought-provoking insights about how to implement something more impactful for players in combat!
So glad to hear it! Good luck on your game, would love to hear more about it when you can share details!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thanks! The game I’m working on right now is called Doctors & Demons; it’s a rules-light modern fantasy game.
I actually originally released it in 2021, but it’s getting picked up for print so I’m refining a few of the core rules (and layout) now that I have a few more years of game design under my belt.
@@kelleroleary9367 That's awesome!
The probably with injury based system is that it sends parties into death spirals. They were already behind, and accumulating more negatives through injuries only puts them more behind.
Also, it sounds like a lot of your gripes are solved by Pathfinder 2e. Damage scales with weapon runes. Crits and crit fails are on +10 and -10 of target as well as 20 and 1. A high-level monster crit can almost kill a player. Attacking isn't always the best action. Supportive combat actions are great because of the crit system. Also, you can only be healed up from unconscious 4 times before perma death.
Death spirals are absolutely a concern with injury systems. It all hinges on how debilitating (both short-term and long-term) those injuries are.
It's such an interesting discussion and one with so much detail, it's hard to cover it in a video of me talkin' to my camera haha 🤠
PF2e, to me, still feels like it's of the same kind as D&D. PF2e's underlying mathematics are far superior to those of D&D, and so its attrition combat feels better (you have way more control and options n PFF2), but I feel that it's still of the same, I guess "breed" as D&D if that makes sense.
Anyway, thanks again for checking out the video and responding! It means a lot for folks to watch and comment like this, as there are so many folks out there makin' YT videos, it's a competitive space!!
I've played various games where HP is static, it doesn't go up with level and is more a maths tool for what causes wounds, like half HP to an arm it's horribly broken, 1/5 to the brain you die, or systems where HP is a trauma track where damage is causing increasing medical complications and risk of death or passing out.
Yeah! There are myriad ways to tackle that design challenge. I don't believe there's one correct answer out there for every game, but I think every game should ask themselves that question, ya know? "Is this game's design goals best served by Hit Points?"
Appreciate the comment! 🤠
I’m okay with attrition based combat as long as the math is easy. For all I love 4e, the amount of numbers is just unfun after a point. Smaller of everything is better. Some time looking back bc at older versions of D&D, where you were never expected to keep playing after 9th level, offers a little perspective, as the numbers for everything were smaller than what happened when the expected level started at where the end game was for the older one.
A very good point! A bit contributor to the "modern" issue with HP is the sheer bloat of it; the numbers just go up too high 🤠
okay, diving into your backlog now. Subbed.
Awesome, thanks so much for your interest!
Some systems just scale damage well so that on level encounters always have a similar fragility level as lower level play.
Other systems use HP thresholds for Save or Suck effects. IE... once a player or monster is at x hp or below a hold spell can now work.
Others punish getting knocked to 0 hp with wounds to counteract the yo yo healing.
Older DnD did attrition HP better. Capping upper HP limits. Dragons BW damage was based on their current HP at points. Etc.
Game development odten adds new problems when they fix old ones.
Good examples! I seem to recall that PF2e gives exhaustion or somethin' whenever you're reduced to zero hit points, as an example.
I play Stre Trek Adventures, and one thing I liked about Space combat was these are big ships taking a lot of firepower, and they slowly weaken. As you get hit, you take breeches to a random system. There are 6 systems, and you can take a number of breech in each system depending on the size of your ship. And each hit max can do 1-2 breeches at a time. But each breech makes using that same subsystem more difficult and less effective. Eventually, you get to the point where you have to do the calculus of continuing this fight, or making a run for it, as you slowly go into a death spiral.
IDK, I'm a nerd and this is a niche system. but I do like how that plays out.
That sounds super cool! I love Star Trek, but haven't played Star Trek Adventures. Favorite captain? Mine is Picard by a mile.
*_"Tis' but a scratch!"_*
💪🗡
*The Black Knight*
Peak cinema. My wife and I rewatch it a few times every year!
Unironically, it's probably why I love limb-targeting rules in ttrpgs haha! 🤠
@TalesFromElsewhereGames To be quite honest, targeting specific limbs not only makes more sense, but it's just more fun. It reminds me of the oldschool Vorpal Blades from _AD&D._ Chipping away at an opponent's hit points just doesn't compare with declaring that, *_"You just severed its arm with so much force that the arm flies across the melee and smacks his bandit leader boss' face with its limp bloody palm!"_*
@@Kreln1221 Heck yes! Exaaactly! 🤠
1 Go back and look at Runequest (which has other combat issues on scaling, but not this)
2 DMs need to KILL characters - when the fighter on 1 hp goes down, the next attack causes more death save fails, and if a bunch of creatures concentrate, they will kill PCs and change combat tempo a lot (this is something I rarely see). Also, if falling unconscious gives a level of exhaustion, then combat effectiveness will tumble down
3 While attrition based combat can be dull, a lot of that revolves around how the DM designs combats
I was toying with the idea of having dice pools that shrunk as characters took different types of damage. I also play a lot of savage worlds, where characters have bennies they can spend to do things like reroll or to try and avaoid damage, and once those are gone, the wounds and their penalties start to stack up. The thing to be wary of is you don't want effectiveness to drop such that it just slows to a crawl as both sides start missing more or doing less damage as they take would penalties I loved the bloodied idea as some monsters got cool abilities unlocked when they got bloodied. Fighting games go the other route and give characters super moves that they can unlock near the end of battle to bring it to a conclusion. So now my question is how to best allow the battle to change while maintaining some semblance of belivability without slowing things to a crawl.
100%; that "death spiral" can feel really, really bad. It's one of the dangers of wound-based systems, and is certainly a design challenge!
I agree with this so much. The padded sumo fights of modern D&D are very dull. The rockect launcher tag of 3rd edition also had it's own problems but the yo-yo that results at zero has those problems as well.
I do like that HP are very fast to resolve at the table though. One compromise I've landed on is having very low HP for PCs (like Shadowdark for example) but not having reaching zero be out of the fight for PCs. Instead it's an injury roll which puts your character at risk of penalties, longer lasting injuries or death. After the injury roll you can recover hp back to full. So it acts as a pacing mechanism.
This is sort of what lots of modern games want when you look at short rests and other quick recovery mechanisms. But it keeps things easy to track, and moves some of the actual attrition to a more controlled level of abstraction.
What about the Runequest style of tracking damage, both taken and doled out?
@@Soccer67 Definitely seen Runequest mentioned here, it's about time I read up on it! Thanks for the recommendations!
A DM I know was trying to develop a system where skill (dexterity or training) and power (strength or athletics) determines success.
I think he was trying to somehow emulate the Arkham fighting style in turn base.
He's also a fan of Spider-Man 2. Where Peter and Miles's health is represented by how torn their costumes are. It's similar to a system Final Fantasy Adventure on Gameboy had. Where your sword and armor had hit points.
Gear/armor based health is an interesting take!
Building on the example of low-level fights - swap out one BIG BOI for multiple smaller bois.
Consider: What makes chess chess?
Every piece can be ‘killed’ by every other piece (in one turn) and yet vast variety and depth emerge because each piece’s ‘move-set’ is distinct and a single ‘kill’ may alter the geography, pacing and range of the ‘encounter’ drastically…
… for me, this is what makes low-lvl DnD combat ‘better’ too. PCs and NPCs are both numerous, with limited yet effective move pools, so each move counts and damage dealt has repercussions for the entire party.
I like that analogy a lot, and you make a good point. Every move matters, every move has consequence!
YOUR COMPLAINTS
1. Wounded fighters are as effective as fresh ones. This is exacerbated by healing and DM fudging.
2. Additional undifferentiated wounds are uninteresting.
3. Level advancement results in higher HP, making things worse, including too-long fights.
YOUR PREFERENCES
1. Wounds diminish combat effectiveness.
2. Fewer wounds for kills.
3. Static proportions between damage and HP.
MY THOUGHTS
Don't let dissatisfying physical modeling dictate design scope. Instead, begin with play results in mind.
Keeping track of increased ineffectiveness is likely bad design. And the increased overhead may further slow combat.
It's fine to expeditiously kill scary monsters, but against heroes, lethality simply undermines fun.
In defense of attritional combat systems, they lend themselves well to simulating immediate physical contests. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about two knights locked in single combat, two gunslingers engaging in a duel at high noon, a nonlethal bar fight, a pitched medieval battle or two giant space fleets flinging antimatter bombs at each other and glassing planets; opposing sides start at full strength and as a fight goes on they expand resources (in the most general sense) and unless the rate of the replenishment of those resources is not greater than the rate at which they are being spent, they will get weaker and their possibility space will shrink unless they find a novel/nonstandard ways of utilizing the resources they still have.
I'm trying to imagine systems which are not based on the attritional paradigm and what type of conflicts they could simulate, but I'm mostly drawing a blank. So far I've got:
- Attritional systems (as described above),
- Escalatory systems, it's basically a version of an attritional system but instead of starting at full strength and only being able to replenish your resources, you start with little resources and get to not only replenish but also expand the available pool of resources. Of course, the fight has to end somehow, so after the initial phase, where resources of both sides grow, there either comes an attritional phase where resources of at least one side of the conflict start diminishing under pressure from other players until they run out, and that player loses the contest or the escalatory phase continues until one of the players hits a threshold which wins him a contest. That style of conflict seems to lend itself to simulating longer lasting or economic conflicts instead of single battles. That's why it's adopted by RTS games with their base building and resource extraction, board games of eurogame type, where each player tries to create an engine that nets them the most victory points and whoever has the most victory points after a certain number of turns or reaches a point threshold wins. Weirdly enough, it also does fit the stereotypical superhero/shonen anime fights where it seems to be a given that opponents get stronger as the fight progresses.
- Static system, as opposed to attritional and escalatory systems (which could be collectively dubbed the "Dynamic systems") are systems where the pool of available resources remains mostly static. Of course the conflict has to be resolved somehow, so there has to be some resource that has to be depleted to show us who is victorious. It can be a simple hit point counter or something more abstract like victory points but, aside from that resource, no other resources are being spent. That's the model adopted by some fighting games where your only resource is a health bar but, the moveset available to your fighter remains independent of how full it is. I've never seen it done, but it seems that this style of system would lend itself nicely to simulating a verbal conflict like a debate. In the debate the dynamic resource is how much you yourself (or your audience) have been convinced by your opponent but, you can craft whatever arguments you want, only limited by information you have access to and you can even combo them off of each other.
Circling back to the flaws of the D&D style attritional system, I remember that an interesting solution has been presented in the Banner Saga series of video games. It's basically a turn base tactical squad game, but each opponent has two pools of health: an armor pool which isn't relevant to the discussion, and a strength pool, which serves as both a health bar and maximum damage. If at full strength you could deal up to 8 points of damage, then at 50% of strength you can deal up to 4 points of damage and at 0 strength you die. Unfortunately, that systems doesn't really interact with anything else, like for example movement. Either way, this approach led to some really fun encounters when at the start of the fight the player is mowing opponents left and right and is more capable of employing high risk/high reward strategies and gradually becomes more cautious and conservative as the fight goes on. A well-balanced, difficult fight often ends up with two initially powerful characters, exhausted and barely standing, slugging it out in a way that seems both brutal and somewhat pathetic, as they become more and more exhausted.
Personally I would like to see a system in which all combat actions (moving, attacking, using special abilities, etc) have an associated action cost which gets subtracted from your action points pool (like in classic Fallout games) which you replenish every turn, merged with the banner saga system where your action pool is equivalent to your hit points and any damage ultimately reduces how much stuff you can do during your turn until you are completely incapacitated.
I really appreciate this detailed, thorough response! It'll take me a minute to digest, much to chew on!
Agreed, and watching this I have some ideas. In my home game of PF 1st, we roll dmg at the end of the round rather than after hits are confirmed, so that initiative plays less of a roll in combat compared to positioning and smart play. Now, you can't just shoot the Giant down if he can charge into melee, you have to DENY him access while also burning him down. Also, with no knowledge of how much dmg anyone is taking till round is over, players have to think more critically about how they commit to a fight, and whether retreat or changes in plans are needed. It also makes combat manuevers like trip & sunder more useful, as thier effects are now immediate and actionable vs. Dmg which is on a delay, if I attack this guy he will still get to attack me back before the round is over, but if I trip him, he's in a worse position, and I can either move away and force him to waste his turn gettting up, or I can press and force him to fight from a disadventageous posiiton or provoke an Attack of Opportunity to stand. Also, all those moments make parley and desecalation more of an option, since Combat Manuevers are now stronger ways to disable combatants, and the uncertainty is much higher round to round, which forces all parties to decide it's time to retreat or bargain much earlier.
One of the other things you may want to look into that I'm thinking of is instead of Hp, using the HD as your marker. Whenever dmg is rolled, PC rolls their HD, if they roll equal to or less than the total amount of damage they have taken that day, minus any healing, they go down. This lets players never be totally safe, and forces you to make strategic decisions about combat, while also making investments in abilities like toughness and barbarian rage better and more of an attrition investment for a playstyle.
Thanks for the detailed response! I've not seen the recommendation to inflict HP damage at the end of a round before, that's an interesting take!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Oh yeah, I started in 3.5 and though I love combat, I hate how very quickly the combat is this ugly grinding affair no matter what you do, and how that tends to flatten gameplay through action efficiency & dmg optimization, & how doing so tends to leave everyone feeling like they can't do enough damage to keep pace, while also feeling cheated if they get burned down too fast. This is even more frustrating in games like D&D where you also have a lot of noncombat classes people LIKE TO PLAY, who then get sucked into combat that is largely uninteresting to them, but don't have viable options to end it that aren't combat.
So, what I've done is try to make it more deadly & more uncertain, because those 2 things in combination make the game move faster AND encourage descalating play via diplomacy, stealth, etc. because the cost of combat can be so high, but it's still very fun.
I also recommend Skirmisher's bonebreaker rules, those helped a lot as well here, since it gave martials more ability to counteract casters.
@@supinearcanum Thanks for the recommendations! I haven't read skirmisher's bonebreaker, I'll have to track it down!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames It's on Drivethru for pathfinder 1st. I think they did conversions to other systems, but I can't vouch for them in the same way I can that edition. It was written by a GM and General Practice doctor as a way to try to model real conditions in that system.
Great video! I can't wait for more.
Appreciate it!
Dang, I never looked at it that way before, you made some really interesting points. Looking forward to hearing what your take on a different system is going to be!
I love attrition based combat. That way you can have fights in all stages of excitement. You can have a normal difficult fight, a hard and exciting fight, an easy fight to come down and show the player how far he has come against enemies that once were hard, etc.
Y'see, I don't think that's unique to attrition-based fights.
Challenge, growth, and difficulty can be achieved without necessarily resorting to HP trading, ya know? There are other ways to see that you've grown apart from simply dealing slightly more hit point damage per swing.
One Option you might want to look at ist the old Hârnmaster RPG. There each hit you get is an idividual wound, which penalizes all your future rolls, so eventually you are just too beaten up and exhausted to keep on fighting. In Hârnmaster, you rarely die directly in the fight itself (unless your enemy puts you out of your misery). You can catch a bleeding wound but, most likely, you die a few days later from an infection (Hârnmaster is a low magic world, where magical healing is not readily available). Since each wound is dealt with and healed indivdually, a lot of small wounds will heal much faster, than a single big one, even though the sum of the damage may be much higher in the former case. And without readily available magical healing, the characters will act much more careful with regard to risks they are taking. Yes we would probably be able to defeat that brigand armed with a crossbow. But if he manages to hit one of us with that, the probably severe wound that can result from a crossbow-hit will force us do rest in a (very expensive) inn for a few days while the wound hopefully heals without catching an infection (camping in the wild will increase the chance of infection an decrease the rate of healing, so that is not a good option). So maybe just pay the brigand a few pennies "toll" and keep going. If you are looking for a very "realistic" low fantasy system with a brutally harsh but also very interesting combat system, Hârnmaster might be for you.
That sounds really interesting! I'd heard of Harnmaster, but never picked up a copy. I'll have to give it a go!
I also prefer low-magic, low/no-healing games. If magical healing just removes the wound/damage, then the fight hasn't grown more interesting, it's just taken longer!
Eidolon has an interesting take on this. It has a fairly PBTA style combat system, except the health system for players and enemies is intended to reflect fights from anime like Jojo's bizarre adventure. On the players' side, that just means every player has 4 hp, except they're labeled - Fresh, Winded, Battered, and Desperate - and each additional point of damage has to come from a source that would actually move a shonen hero to the next state, so just getting punched in the face once will get you to Winded, but if you're at Desperate one punch won't just kill you outright. On the enemy side is where it gets really interesting - they call it the Crash system, essentially the enemy comes at you with some kind of trick, you only damage (or Crash) them when you come up with a counter to that trick, and each time they're Crashed they start a new phase of the fight with a new trick. Boss phases as HP essentially.
That's interesting! I'm not familiar with Eidolon, but I'm intrigued!
The Walking Dead has a neat system. Each character has 3 wounds that they can take, and each wound gives a dice penalty. Woinds are taken and can heal easily, but when the character hits 3 wounds they roll on an injury table with results that can be trivial, disabling, or life threatening. When you take an injury, all your wound levels are restored, but you need proper medical attention and time to heal the injury. Also, proper medical care may not he available, and if the injury goes untreated for a certain time, it becomes permanent or can even worsen.
Nice! I haven't tried the Walking Dead system, I'll have to look into it!
@TalesFromElsewhereGames I genuinely love it, even though I dislike the show. The TTRPG tries to take the best from OSR style map crawl and emergent narrative play and marry it to character-driven narrative play and does the best job of merging the two styles I've seen.
Actually working on a system where trying to do traditional attrition combat is a very quick way to get a chatacter into retirement. There's HP, but there's also injuries to track. Injuries are caused by damaging effects, and are tied to weapon move sets, which are random tables that use the damage die. So choosing a weapon is less about big numbers and more about how one wants to hurt things: ax for chopping limbs, mace for cracking armor and skulls, spears for bypassing armor, or swords for trying to get a little bit of everything?
So, having more HP means you stay conscious longer, but staying conscious longer means staying a threat, and most things respond to threats by injuring them, and you get injured every time you're hit.
So, you got to ask yourself: if you got 40+ max HP, and you got something that can get HP back, but every time you get hit theres a good chance of losing your other eye, your last three fingers, or your only leg being broken, is it worth it to say you got enough HP to finish the fight? Or should you just play dead on the next hit, wait for the enemy to go away, and limp back home and come back?
@@SpazaliciousChaos That sounds super cool!! 🤠
I dont really remember, but Xas Irkalla has something similar in terms of not rolling for damage
Decision trees used to be more dynamic in older editions of TTRPGs since they had resource tracking for dungeon delving, and the like. As TTRPG culture changed in the 2000s this shift to long combat due to homogenized combat, and ease of recuperation. The OSR was an earlier answer to some of these complaints, and people in the wider TTRPG community - especially after spending more time in the games - have started to gravitate toward playstyles that add challenge back into the game.
~ Adam
@@TheIoPC Good insights. At my D&D 5e table, the DM started introducing OSR subsystems little by little. Kinda funny - why not just play OSR at that point, I tell him!
I know I'm late to comment, but I've found that damage to ability scores is a fairly good way to handle this. Why didn't you go with ability score damage?
So ability score damage does make combat deadlier, but it also makes the fight less interesting as it goes on.
Ability Score damage means everyone gets worse at what they do; they are slightly less accurate, they deal slightly less damage, they are slightly less likely to make that saving throw, etc.
But that didn't really make the fight more dynamic or interesting, did it? In fact, having the players take ability score damage will slow the fight down, as they are less likely to defeat their enemies from a numerical standpoint.
It can work okay in games like Cypher, where your ability Pools are also your hit points. Getting hurt means you have less resources to use your abilities. But tellingly, it's an asymmetrical system - the enemies don't use those pools at all!
Anyway, long-winded response to a good question! I appreciate it - I think this subject is super interesting and there isn't one true fix 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thanks! I wasn't sure if I should expect a response at all, but you were fast!
I've done *quite a bit* of work on my own RPG, but it really hasn't come together. I was thinking along the lines of Ability scores taking damage, and being resource pools as well... I found that my players got confused, and often did not apply the on-the-fly changes to resource pools :(
In any case, I've seen your video on injuries, and I think it's an idea more than good enough to steal.
Were there any other systems you tested for health? I've found far fewer than I expected.
@@kylelind6239 I'm super active in my YT comments, I love discussing systems like this.
Originally, TFE used a mixed-HP system where you had a quickly refreshing "Stamina" and an underlying, slower to recovery "Vitality". It was an improvement over traditional HP, but it didn't quite evoke what I wanted.
If you wanna ever chat game design (outside of YT comments), feel free to join the TFE Discord! We talk shop a lot in there, not just about my game but about the community's projects too. (Link is on my YT home page)
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I'll definately check in there! (I'm terrible with keeping up online, i appologize in advance)
I think it's hillarious I did the same thing with Stamina and Vitality! Different names, but was similarly scrapped almost immediately.
Given your Injuries system, I imaginge armor, cover, etc will be very important. Do you plan on doing a video on that in the future? (or have it covered somewhere already?)
@@kylelind6239 I don't think I have one talking about armor and cover yet, but there is an "Example of Play" video that goes through one player turn to show the game in action.
I should do a follow-up video to the Injury video where I go into more nitty-gritty details about the system, though! 🤠
We're in the process of playing a French Pen and Paper game known as In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas (Urban Fantasy, dual-faced game, you either play a team of demons (INS) or a team of angels (MV)). The combat system still has some accounting as it's an injury-based system, but it doesn't use attrition hitpoints per se so, marginally better? As you've said it doesn't necessarily completely rule out the issue.
You don't roll for damages per se, but for a success margin, to which your weapon's power is added (a literal force multiplier). Then this number is compared to the target's injury level (the sum of its strength stat and agility stat to obtain the baseline).
Each injury threshold is a multiple of the baseline. In my case I'm a rather squishy demon who manipulates time and energy, and I'm about as strong as a regular human, and even below average in terms of agility (yeah, I'm a bookworm 😊). My character has its light injury level at 3, serious injury at 6, fatal wound at 9, and sudden "death" at 12.
Any attack passing the light injury threshold will wound my character where the attack has been dealt (obviously the DM is at liberty to choose where anything is aimed and where it lands, so it's quite useful). This adds a malus to my rolls depending on where I'm wounded and what I'm doing.
Obviously if I'm right handed and trying to shoot with a handgun after being injured on my good hand, it'll make things interesting 😅. Each injury inflicted is systematically an open wound that has to be closed to avoid hemorrhaging further at each round, and each combat round lasts 1 second (it involves two steps, because the player doesn't necessarily know the seriousness of their injuries, step 1 is assessing the damage done to the human body we possess, step 2 is closing the wound and letting our supernatural healing do the rest).
This means even if I can shoulder the increased difficulty imposed on my actions by the injuries, and keep rolling successfully, I won't be able to ignore my wounds for long and I'll have to choose between treating them, or bleeding out and have my body falling unconscious like a punk (I can try a saving throw to regain consciousness, because even when the body is KO, the demon isn't, or I can act spiritually).
Last but not least, each injury accumulates fatigue according to its seriousness, and fatigue can only be reduced by resting, 1 point per hour for humans, 1 per minute for angels, demons (avatars reduce all fatigue in a minute). At 0, a supernatural being is stunned (his body ceases to respond), at -5 it's knocked out.
If an angel or demon falls one more threshold under sudden "death", the dead human body they've been possessing gets destroyed (it bursts in flames in a satisfactory "pop", leaving nothing behind), and they go back to Hell or Heaven... to face the consequences of their failure. 😈 (it can take anywhere between 6 months to millennia to come back, or never. So you better create a new character 😅).
@@lucofparis4819 That sounds really cool!!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Here's the Wikipedia article in english for further details. Obviously I simplified bits and pieces. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Nomine_Satanis/Magna_Veritas
@@lucofparis4819 Cool, thanks!!
What other systems did you try? There are a lotnof options out there!
You're absolutely right, there are sooooo many systems and approaches to this. In no particular order, from memory:
D&D (3.0, 3.5, 4, 5, 5.5); Apac/Savage Worlds; Cyberpunk 2020 (the old 90s version); M&M; Cypher (supers); Gamma World; Blades in the Dark; GURPS. Haven't played 'em, but have read up on Mork Borg, Crown & Skull, Mothership, Dread, Mouseritter, The Good Society. I know I'm forgetting some as I sit here, been playin' ttrpgs since 2000, and have dabbled in lots of stuff during that time.
What's so amazing about this hobby is the sheer VOLUME of games out there. More than I have time to dig into, alas!
Any good ones you'd recommend for researching attrition/health systems? Thanks for watching/commenting! 🤠
@TalesFromElsewhereGames right now Mythic has my attention for gritty, dangerous and most importantly role play friendly combat. Thanks for answering! I found a lot to agree with in your assessment of D&D.
@@aaronabel4756 I'll have to track down Mythic! 🫡
So what if you scaled the damage output to be more or less the same at every level, so that you get that feeling of tension at every level rather than 1st through 5th? Like in DnD, the longsword always does a base of 1d8, which might be impactful at low levels, but that damage never really scales.. right?
So in my system I'm developing, the weapons themselves get more powerful at higher levels with randomly generated prefixes and suffixes added to them which increase their stats. So at 1st-level, you can find a "rusty longsword," but at higher levels you find "iron longswords," and "steel longswords," and then a "mithril longsword," which cause damage commensurate to the encounter level, so the combat always FEELS like it's low level even though the character may be 6th level... hope that makes sense ^^;
And I have level requirements for higher-level gear, so even if a low-level character finds a higher-tiered weapon in random treasure, he will take a penalty to his attack roll if he tries to use it. Because higher-tiered weapons can one-shot lower-level monsters, since they do 4d8 rather than 1d8..
That is absolutely one way to approach it! 🤠
The reverse of that I've seen is to not really scale HP and damage as characters progress, but instead to give them more abilities. (horizontal progression)
Allowing outgoing damage to keep pace with monster HP scaling should definitely help keep the combat moving and avoid long slogs!
Very informative! Can’t wait to play this
@@LetsGoDusen Thanks!
I don't remember exactly, because I've read this about 3 years ago(so, srry abd please correct me if i say any nonsense stuff), but Cyberpunk 2020 has an interesting health mechanic, it has one "big hit bar" (or maybe 3, I don't remember), every damage you take, sometimes more than one, makes you mark one square of that bar. If you reach a certain region of that bar, it means your current health condition is getting worse and you gain some negative conditions and or have to roll to see if you keep awake and or to see if you die.
Interestingly, some of my own game design inspiration for TFE came from the oldest versions of Cyberpunk! I just really enjoyed the system - even if I ended up scrapping a lot of my original designs based on it :)
Definitely agree that combat feels best when every action progresses the narrative of the fight, but I tend to be of the opinion that a system of decreasing capabilities like you've described, while it feels true to human experience, practically introduces more "nothing happens" turns, without usually presenting any particularly interesting choices. Personally, I prefer escalation systems in hit point based gameplay, where things get quicker and deadlier as the fight goes on; that introduces conflicting pressures to change the landscape of the fight as much as possible before enemies are at full effectiveness, and to save your own strongest abilities for when you are at full effectiveness.
The conditions/wounds system in Vaesen is really interesting too, where each setback gives you new roleplaying prompts and choices to make.
That's a very good perspective. The fight should grow MORE interesting as it progresses, rather than less interesting!
Interesting. I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I think I got to similar conclusions. Interested in the way this goes.
Appreciate it! Would love to hear your feedback!
After my current Curse of Strahd campaign is over, I was planning on switching to Savage Worlds which has the tactical options I like without the slog of hit points.
I’ll check out your game though.
Personally, i live the FFG Legend of the Five Rings damage system... most hits do Endurance damage which works like his points... represents knicks, fatigue. When you're out of Endurance every hit is resolved on the critical tablr... your defenses has collapsed. And some attacks can bypass your Endurancr and go straight to the critical table [which is a smaller and more streamlined version of thr rather large table from FFG Star Wars games]
@@weylins I have yet to play Legend of the Five Rings, but from all reports it sounds excellent!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I prefer the variant of Genesys used on L5R to Star Wars and the generic Genesys rulebook. Only two types of proprietary dice [which I despise in general] in L5R instead of six types of dice in SW/Genesys. Six is way too many moving parts to interpret the result, especially when you're rolling multiple of each type.
Check out Runehammer's "Crown and Skull", the attrition is in terms of skills and gear- some say this creates a death spiral, however there is no opportunity attack for disengaging
Interesting! I'll have to check that out!
Forbidden Lands doesn’t have HP. You lose ability scores.
@@darrinpio6188 ability score drain is an interesting solution that I've seen a few games use. Do you find it creates a death spiral situation? Does it feel pretty good to use?
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I love reading rules and settings. With that said, my experience with Forbidden Lands has been minimal. i.e. Playing a one-shot when we do not have enough players for our ongoing campaign. With that said, FL is definitely deadly. However, reaching zero with one of your ability scores does not kill you. You suffer a critical injury - some of which are lethal.
@@darrinpio6188 Yes, death in FL is random roll dependent on the Crit Chart, IIRC. So, nothing automatic there.
I feel that this is only an issue in post 3rd edition D&D. BX and it's retroclones resolve this with low HP values and fast combats. I find this emphasizes more narrative combat where I can improvise things like limb damage without needing to follow a formalized system that will generally just slow my flow down. This assumes you are not setting out to make a strategic combat based system, though.
@@maxburton22 it's been many years, but I do remember 3e being faster and more deadly, but I may have rose tinted glasses on!
An idea: Characters don't get stronger by having their numbers go up; instead, they become stronger by gaining access to new defense types and tools for bypassing them. It's still possible to overcome a defense by attrition, but having to do this is treated as a failure state.
A like-minded individual!
I totally agree - much of the scaling issues in D&D come from numerical bloat.
In TFE, characters grow more interesting, gaining new features and special abilities over time, but their core numbers do not inflate. They're still just a person, flesh and blood.
It's not a game that'd capture an epic, god-slaying, heroic fantasy, but that's okay with us :)
MERP / Rolemaster addressed this in the early '80s, as another commenter mentioned. Hit points are still used as a way to measure the health of a combatant, but simple, linear attrition is seldom the reason a character (or NPC) drops out of a combat. Critical hits can cause bleeding (hits per round), stunning effects that reduce the character's combat effectiveness, broken bones, severed limbs, unconsciousness, or outright death. Being reduced to 0 HP renders a character unconscious. If the character is also bleeding heavily they will eventually be reduced to their constitution stat below 0 which is lethal. For XP and practical purposes, eliminating a combatant through whatever means is sufficient.
Generally speaking, major healing in MERP/RM is impractical during combat, so the phenomenon of being repeatedly propped back up at the ragged edge of consciousness isn't so much of an issue. Optionally, characters who have lost most of their HP can suffer general minuses to all their activities, including combat rolls, and certain critical results will specify e.g., -25 (on a D100 roll-high system).
This way, hit points and damage still play a role in an intuitive way, but everyone understands that combat is potentially deadly for _everyone_ involved. This also addresses one of the problems of D&D where low level characters have practically no chance at all to defeat high level characters (or high HD monsters) in combat. There's no such thing as a lucky strike. Bard the Bowman simply could not defeat Smaug, under any circumstances in D&D, unless he was a very high level character indeed. The Black Arrow would have no chance to find that missing scale. But in the MERP/RM system (and Against the Darkmaster) there is a _chance_, however slim, that the low level character will land a fatal blow, even against a powerful monster or NPC. In some versions of the critical hit tables, rolls of 66 and 100 are usually fatal, or at least debilitating.
This increases the sense of tension in combat, and it gives more choices to the players (as does the option of converting some of your offensive bonus (OB) to defensive bonus and 'parrying'). If you know there's a _chance_ that your next blow could defeat your opponent outright, you have to factor that into your decision to fight or flee, and how much, if any, of your attack you will allocate to defending yourself.
@@joelavcoco very cool insights, thanks for the feedback!!
I was expecting to see Crown and Skull attrition here, not hitpoints… check out Wildsea and C&S for alternate mechanics
Hah yeah, I'm using the more broad definition of Attrition here, rather than the specific term from C&S.
C&S is an interesting case study - it's an elegant solution to that design challenge, indeed!
Interesting. I will think about it and try to incorporate some alternatives to my DND game. Some ways I found as a DM to avoid at least the boring-monster-HP side was that I'd let the enemy change behaviour or environmental things might happen. After all just because the monster statblock doesn't tell you anything about this kind of thing it doesn't mean that you can not be creative - that's at least DM's lever to fix this. But I can imagine that a non-existing decision tree as a player can quickly lead to bored players..
@@AsdasdAsdasd-xq1nr Absolutely, the DM always had the power to spice things up!
The intention with my game is to provide more interesting decision trees for the players as part of the core resolution system, before layering on top special abilities, terrain hazards, monsters, and so forth.
There have been several solutions to this problem over the years. Just keep hit points low, instead of a die just use constitution modifier when leveling. Another solution is to spread hit points. Say you have a fighter and roll a 8 then each body part has 8hp, when you take damage, it affects that body part. Along the same lines you can just have modifiers as you take damage. For instance, if you have 12hp and drop to 3/4 you suffer a -1 to hit, -5ft of movement, stunned, dazed, etc whatever you want to make it. go down to 50% you take a bigger hit to your abilities or have to make a save to stay in the fight. Lose 75% then save or pass out or further reduction. I have not seen your other video, so I apologize if this has already been suggested, I just noticed the time stamp.
@@jamesrizza2640 Always appreciate the recommendations and feedback!
It's an interesting challenge, and one with many solutions along a spectrums of simplicity/crunch and narrative/simulation.
I think different games can answer the question differently, ya know? BitD has its own, Crown & Skull another, Fate and Cypher yet another!
TFE has it's own as well, which may not be the best answer out there, but I think it serves the design goals of the system pretty well! (It's talked about in later videos on the channel).
Appreciate you checking out the video! I know there are a million YT channels out there, so it means a lot that you decided to give one of mine a watch!! 🤠
Traveller. In DnD Terms your Str, Des, and Con values are your hit points. As you take wounds their values are reduced and with them their modifiers. Con is reduced first, all damage within con is considered light damage, then it overflows into Dex usuallu. Everything within this is moderate damage for healing etc then into Str. All within this is serious damage and much harder to heal. Simple, quick, never any bloat.
@@feralfaith damage-as-stats is always an interesting solution!
But why does Dexterity automatically take damage before Strength?
Is that normal because I've never heard or seen a DM just decided when a monster dies
Not sure how common it is, but I've definitely seen that happen a few times over the years and heard others mention that strategy. Your experiences may vary! 🤠
A fix for yo-yo health at zero is allowing negative hitpoints. Then healing is best while they are still alive to prevent them from going down, instead of risking not having enough healing to pay the debt when they are down
@@AndrewBrownK That's a clever solution! Have you tried that out in trad games like DnD to success? I may have to try that out myself!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I haven't playtest it in TTRPG, but you can see the pattern elsewhere. Contrast the vegetable stew stamina exploit in Skyrim with negative stamina locking you out of the ability to do stuff (including dodge) in Elden Ring
@@AndrewBrownK For sure, makes sense!
funny to see that most of the cons cited are adressed by PF2e while still using the easy to understand hit point
I do like how PF2e handles the issue of repeatedly dropping to 0 hit points. Definitely helps mitigate that aspect.
PF2e's combat engine, overall, has much more sound underlying math than D&D 5/5.5e. I don't really agree that it solves that scaling attrition issue, though. Let me unpack what I mean (as someone who has a lot of respect for PF2e!!)
What PF2e does right is give the players the ability to stay "competitive" with the scaling of HP of their enemies. It's an optimizers dream! But I consider it still the definition of attrition-based play, in that it is simply the mass-exchange of those numbers, and PF2e combat is the definition of arithmetically burdensome on the players at the table. (again, this is a feature, not a bug! And I am a fan of PF2e)
What I think PF2e did was LEAN INTO the attrition-based combat. It didn't try to "solve" the issues, but rather just built a very clean version of that structure and elevated the core aspects of it to a very complex and, of course, engaging level for those that enjoy it.
Anyway, that was pretty rambling haha. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you in full, just exploring the topic and the nuance. Appreciate you checking out the video and taking the time to comment!! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I agree with the points you brought, and I totally agree, it didn't tried to go away from an attrition system, but built upon it to make it tense and intresting, and as such adressing (imo) most of the issue attrition based combat have.
If I can elaborate a tiny bit, I'll say that the +10/-10 system and the major importance of buff/debuff was how the developpers managed to make an attrition base combat system not being "boring until it reach zero" (which is a criticism I totally agree with for most system).
By making critical hit so powerfull and devastating on both side, they reinforced the importance of choice that does something else than depleting hit points by making the choice that hinder something else than hitpoint being more meaningfull (basically they tried really hard to prove the "the best condition is dead" false). Indeed, the cost of it is, math complexity (the game is already more complex than most other) which is a clear downside. Each solutions to a problem in game design have downsides. ( usually I become extremely skeptic if someone try to tell me a solution have no downside :) )
Sadly I just discovered the channel so never read Tales from Elsewhere, but I'll be sure to put it on my list of system to read.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Totally agree in the idea. it doesn't try to go away from attrition based combat, but try to make attrition interesting and tactical.
at the end both the critical (+10/-10) system (which lean toward making thing dead really fast against weak creature) and the fact conditions take a huge place in combat against a few powerfull creature tend to make choice that doesn't impact the combat be the exception rather than the norm, players are encouraged to impact the combat in many way that have immediat effect rather than just looking at the HP bar depletion alone.
it totally lean all in toward trying to prove wrong the "the best condition is dead" thing, while keeping the metric of HP the same familiar thing people are used to.
@@VentsongeGaming Yep yep, we're totally in alignment here. One of the frustrating limitations of UA-cam is that when I make these videos, what I say is "locked in time", and I can't as easily have these back-and-forth discussions on the subject with the viewers, so I'm always glad to engage down here in the comments.!
Appreciate the responses, cheers friend! 🤠
HP is not really a fuel or a gradient, it's a binary.
If HP < 0 then you can keep fighting.
Agreed - the only hit point that matters is the last one. It's always felt odd to me for that reason!
I'm a bit confused here. Aren't all systems where something changes during combat (be it hit points or some sort of a wound/condition) essentially attrition systems? As in, you fight until you run out of resources. The different variations are just flavours of the same theme. The only alternative I can see is a binary alive/dead system.
That's totally fair! However, let me unpack a bit how I see them differing:
The more you move away from "traditional" attrition systems (hit points, as an example), the more narratively interesting you can make each exchange, such that it's less about slowly whittling down an arbitrary meter, and more about making each of those exchanges exciting.
For example, if an attack deals 10 damage out of 40 hit points, you've lost a pretty big chunk of your health. Ouch! But nothing else changes in a standard attrition-based system. The way to resolve the fight is to get those remaining 30 points.
Now, let's say instead you take one Bleeding Injury to your leg, and you can have at most 4 injuries before dying. So that's also 25% of your "Max health" as it were. However, that injury comes packaged with narrative/mechanical consequence - you're bleedin' out from the leg, and maybe you can't walk on it! That presents a new challenge; the scene has changed, and the players must now adapt.
The key different is about making the progression of the fight not feel like you need to deplete the enemy's resource to 0 to win, particularly in a system (like TFE's) where you can "skip ahead" on the injury severities to instantly kill some folks. (A single bullet to the head of a bandit is likely to kill 'em straight out!) It's about making those exchanges and turns more visceral, rather than purely numerical. It's a gradient in that design space, from "pure" hit points all the way to abstracted wounds.
This is a really interesting and meaty subject, and one that can be hard to truly unpack in a single YT video, or in the comments! Haha
I really appreciate that you took the time to check out the video and post a comment. There are a million UA-camrs out there, so it means a lot that you stopped by my small neck of the woods for a spell! 🤠
If you don't like attrition-based combat, you're really going to dislike the Ukraine War.
not the time nor the place
Just a couple minutes into the video but this makes me think of magic the gathering. It feels weird and unflavorful how many broken strategies and cards have involved spending all your life except your last one like a currency. It’s part of getting better as a player: realizing the only life point that matters is your last. It’s obviously not a bad system and kind of unavoidable, as you can push almost any game system to its limit to the point of “almost losing” for max advantage.
Oh that's a very interesting observation. "The only life point that matters is the last one" is a very common saying in MTG!
And I agree, that that's not necessarily a knock against MTG 🤠
What if instead of hp you had a number of hits you can take or maybe there were thresholds along your hp bar.
@@lancearmada I've played such systems, actually! Modiphius 2d20 works like that, if memory serves. I played Achtung! Cthulhu, and it used that style.
I think it works okay and is definitely better than nothing! It's worth noting that a lot of what I'm talking about is personal preference :) so even though I consider that implementation to not be quite enough to solve the problem, it's still not bad!
I don't really think you described attrition, it you seemed like you were describing chutes and ladders. Rolling dice and adding up points till you do or do not reach 100 might be boring, but losing resources as a fight progresses isn't necessarily. Chess, for example, isn't boring. It actually sounded like you *liked* attrition, and what you don't like is keeping track of something that doesn't seem to matter that much. Acid and rust breaking swords and armor can dramatically change a combat encounter. Isolating a player is a kind of, ultimate attrition on a party, whether you do it by, dropping them to zero, or teleporting them away, or sucking them down a pit, or trapping them in a web, or being locked in a cage of force, really all you're doing is reducing the force the party can bring to bear as the fight escalates. If you want a fight to be interesting, things need to change, and attrition is one of the best ways to make that happen.
Appreciate the feedback!
My pretty loose use of the term "attrition" has come back to bite me a few times! 😭
The main point I'd like to make is that each turn in an RPG should feel like demonstrable progress has been made, that interesting things are happening that are more than pure abstraction, that they have consequences and are the result of tactical choices.
I really do appreciate your detailed and well reasoned response!
One positive- one negative:
Negative:
Lord of the Rings (by Decipher) had a 6 tier system of damage. The more damage, the more minuses to your future rolls. Realistic, yes, but you rarely felt like you were at 100%. You nearly always has some de-buff applied to your character which was miserable.
Positive:
13th Age RPG increases the number of damage dice by your level. (1st level fighter's long sword does 1d8 damage, at level 6 it does 6d8 damage) This maintained the feel of the first level tension of one hit could still kill you. They also have a Escalation die where you get better at combat the longer it goes.
The notion I wrestled with was: These systems are not realistic. But after consideration...I don't want realistic. I want cinematic, ridiculous, over-the-top, superhero action. If you've seen armored MMA, you know these REAL battles are won just making a guy fall to the ground once. Forget rules for accurate combat, encumbrance, and other rules design to make the game more real. I want my players to feel like unreal superheroes.
That is totally valid! The feeling of heroic, badass adventure naturally lends itself toward Hit Point (or similar) systems. Ain't nothin' wrong with that! 🤠
Attrition really isn't as bad as the adv/disadv mechanic in D&D. At the beginning it seems brilliant, but this mechanic takes away from team play so much. Once you have advantage, nothing else other characters do will help you gain "more" advantage. And removing adv is extremely easy. For example, if you have an enemy prone, blinded and grappled you just gain adv, and if the enemy just casts darkness then all those things you did really don't mean anything. Secondly, movement is either everything in D&D or nothing. Either your movement is like 50 and no melee creature can catch you or its 30 and everyone can catch you. You dash, they dash, you dash, they dash.. blah.
PF2e solves both of these problems (though with more complexitiy) using movement as part of your action set and having conditions that can stack on each other to make your actions accumulate on your enemy (or yourself).
Adv/Disadv is a mixed bag for me. I appreciate the expediency of it - it takes less time to calculate your total to-hit/damage on a turn. But like you say, it takes away from interesting mechanical interplay with the team.
The big issue in D&D 5e is that there are often so few REAL tactical choices to make during your turn. I already have Advantage, so decision tree complete!
In TFE, we have a simple adv/disadv system for attack accuracy. Like 5e, it doesn't stack. However, we kept that simple because we wanted the more interesting, tactical play to not come from numerical stacking, but rather coordinated assaults and synergies.
With the Injury system (discussed in the next video), the players can coordinate to dismantle the offensive and defensive capabilities of an enemy, taking out key offensive limbs, distracting them while another comes in for the kill, and so forth.
In the end, a game system needs to decide where they'd like their decision trees and player-burden to lie.
Anyway, that was a rant! Thanks so much for your insightful response!!
Howdy. Here's another Peter who's building his RPG system from scratch and questioning established roleplaying traditions. I focus mainly on the narrative approach in my design efforts. Thusly I think, if something does not have an impact on the story (or the character), it's also not noteworthy in your game sessions. If you are hit with an attack IRL, the kinetic impact confronts you with real consequences, ranging from temporary handicaps, to crippling trauma. Gamists always bring the argument, that it is much too complex to run a wound system in a RPG, but describing the lesion and acting on your injury is more captivating in combat narration, than micromanaging your HP meter, IMO. Not wanting to spill all my beans here, but I'm absolutely looking forward to see your alternative to attrition-based combat in TfE. All the best for your journey, Pete. It's always nice to see innovative mechanics and novel takes on stagnant rules in our favorite hobby.
@@PjotrFrank I totally agree with your points above. If the actions that the character is performing don't have immediate narrative consequences, then the "video game" starts to emerge.
I'm excited to share my design! The goal was to remain within the "trad" space of crunchy combat while embracing a more narrative injury system. Video should be out next week!
One possible issue to look out for is adding too much complexity with every single hit. First one thing to manage, then another thing to manage, then three things to manage! However, for the "boredom" aspect also consider looking at MCDM's "Draw Steel" where they give you a "powering up" ability that you do more damage as the combat goes on, making things more dramatic (and probably a bit swingy to add interest as the flow of battle goes back and forth, but it would speed it to end of combat.) By powering up instead of weakening things it will make combat speed up rather than slow down. At least that's the concept. I like the idea of the new unlocked abilities at every 25% though as even just having more options, preferably deadlier, riskier options would feel more exciting in the same way the powering up over time would. So be careful of your new system to ensure it doesn't slow down the pacing as it continues. Good luck with your game! :D
@@mrpiratedancer4rrr thanks for the advice! So far, the game actually plays faster than other traditional, combat focused TTRPGs, mainly because the decision tree is shifted into the core system, rather than layering a lot of additional features on top.
So the game asks more of the player with its core rules, but then doesn't also require the player to review 10+ spell options, ability options, class features, and so forth on top of that.
Another way to put it is that the players focus more on the enemy and what their behavior and threats look like, rather than reviewing their own sheet. It's a shift, but one that has paid off in the tests!
It isn't much, but the bloodied mechanic is great.
Yeah! I think D&D 4e did a lot of things well that we can learn from :)
I'm not really against attrition-based systems when we don't go into the HP bloat territory like in 5E.
I like small Hit Protection Pools in Into the Odd and its offspring
An alternative that you made me think of that I have yet to actually play is Crown and Skull where skills and loot are the parts that protect your small HP pool and that's interesting
I also like smaller wounds systems as in SWADE or EZD6
I dislike death-spiral systems far more than I dislike attrition based systems. I would love an option that doesn't have either. Right now I am playing a game with no levels or advancement, maybe that's the fix?
@@panjakrejn2887 Death spirals are definitely an issue with wound systems. TFE's feels pretty good, based on long form playtests. It also uses horizontal, rather than vertical progression - your character doesn't advance numerically, instead just gaining new options and abilities without any strict "levels".
I'm going to offer a counter argument for what makes attrition combat so 'sticky' in the design of the most popular TTRPGs. Basically, as players level up, as you mentioned they are gaining more skills and features of their class. Well, those features would seem pretty meaningless if players weren't able to consistently use them because every BBG they fight after a long rest goes down with a quick focus fire of the whole team's A-tier abilities. It also wouldn't feel very good if those abilities missed more often than they landed (such as trying to balance abilities by lowering their effective hit chances). Basically, these fights get longer because a player's 'kit' has gotten bigger. Multiply that across a whole party and you're going to have a pretty long fight against a pretty durable dragon to squeeze every last spell slot out of your sorcerer.
Now, do I think that there's a solution to this that doesn't entirely eliminate the power creep available to higher level characters, possibly, but probably not. One potential way of doing this is making the attrition happen over a longer period. So, for instance, players don't get back all their spell slots after a long rest. This would fundamentally change the game however, but if characters were in a constant state of 'running low on resources', then they're naturally gonna save as much of their best stuff for a real baddie. And in that case, they have less kit to burn through for the encounter. What this would mean is that the definition of a long rest (where they would be fully back to normal) is on the scale of weeks, not hours. It would have the added benefit of making downtime activities more prominent.
Granted, for this to work for a class like wizards, cantrips need to be able to do a lot more heavy lifting, which I think they do for the most part in dnd5e. but pf1e cantrips would need an overhaul to be able to be relied upon as a 'standard' attack in higher level encounters.
@@roccoruscitti910 Thanks for the detailed and well reasoned response!
I don't really disagree with anything you've said here, and I think it's an interesting and complex subject.
The idea of power growth is an interesting one. What's so odd to me is that, at low levels, the TTK (time to kill) for the enemies you face is very low; only a few hits takes down most everything.
As you grow in power, your numbers go up...but so do the enemies'. In fact, as you say, their durability starts to out scale your offense in some senses. This means that the TTK goes up as you get stronger.
It's a strange feeling; taking longer to defeat a level-appropriate enemy the stronger you become. Just some food for thought 🤔
Anyway, that was a bit rambly on my part. Thanks for watching the video! Means a lot, as YT is full of content about TTRPGs and I'm honored that you took time out of your day to not only watch the video, but provide a good response!
absolutely agree
Thanks, and thanks for checking out the video! 🤠
Good points, but it's always weird to me when people talk about D&D like its way of doing things is common. Other games tend to have a fixed, low number of hit points that may or may not cause wound conditions when lost, but almost always make for more deadly combat than D&D. D&D controls the vast majority of the market, but its mechanics are an outlier.
@@Frivolitility I definitely agree with you, and you've hit the nail on the head as to why I framed the discussion around D&D 😁
I think it's important to try to introduce folks to other approaches to TTRPGs, as there's a wealth of variety!
Level 1-4 combat is largely dull for players. One swing or one low level spell that they might miss. Meanwhile being taken down by a party of cr 1/8 goblins feels lousy for players. The problem at higher levels is monsters, at least in wotc published adventures are too weak, they lack any sort of defense against cheesy player spells and abilities.
HP (along with Vancian magic) drove me away from D&D back in the BECMI days. I think my favourite combat system right now is probably Fate but I also like Savage Worlds.
I feel you. It's like a natural lifecyle of ttrpg players, isn't it? We start with D&D, then move on to more interesting, nuanced designs haha!
I don't necessarily disagree with your points but when I think of 'attrition-based combat' I think of the fact that damage and usage of resources carries over from fight to fight until a rest. This sounds more like criticism of health bloat and how to counter the effects or avoid it.
That's probably a more precise use of terminology, I agree!
The art of presenting this information to the public via UA-cam is new to me, so I'm glad you got my point even though my use of language was a bit...loose :)
Clearly you've mainly played 5th ed D&D. You said something like "At like in 5th ed D&D, a first level Wizard would have less than 10 hit points". I have nev actually played 5th ed. All previous editions up to 3.5 ed rolled just a D4 and added the te Constitution bonus. That is 7 or less points.OSR almost always does that. Why not just add the character's Strength to their Constitution score to calculate HP? Don't increase HP per level unless a character's attributes increase, and you can keep a lid on that.
I'd say most of my game time was in 3.5 ed; I started with the release of 3rd edition way back in 2000ish. I've definitely played a lot of 5e since its launch, that's for sure!
Y'know, I thought a lot about how much HP to say the Wizard will start with in this video. Probably thought for far too long about it!
Do I use 5e's d6 hit die plus the (normal) Con score of 14 (+2 bonus) and say 8 or less? Do I go with 3rd edition era, with their d4? What about the funky Dwarf Wizards in 5e that stack Con super high?
In the end, I just said less than 10, which is factually true, if non committal in its details!
But I agree - keeping the HP scaling under control in a game is a great way to combat that feeling of hit point attrition, and the OSR community has overall nailed it. OSR games also do a good job with the other part of attrition - gear! You can't delve into the dungeon forever, 'cuz you're supplies just won't last!
Pathfinder 2e really doesn't feel like it suffers from the same problems and has elegantly solved most all of these issues. Don't look at pure numbers, but give it a try, especially high level play. Teamwork results in maintaining a 3-4 round combat and each round is just as exciting as the last.
Pathfinder 2 is only marginally better than 5e when it comes to combat. If you are using a HP system then your combat is not good.
@@mkklassicmk3895 Unless everyone drops in one hit, you're using "hit points" in some capacity. Sure you can give it other names, but it's some expendable resource you pay (wounds, stress, luck points, whatever) to take a hit that would otherwise drop you and keep going. Which is basically the same mechanic with a different name and maybe a bit of spin on it, like an ongoing wound penalty.
I don't think people have a problem with hit points in general, so much as grindy combats where it takes too many hits to drop someone. But that's not really a feature of HP, so much as it is the fact that damage doesn't keep up with hp.
@@taragnor That is a semantic argument. You could call any system a Hit Point system. However, it means something particular in RPG's, it doesn't simply mean "any system where you live through being hit more than once." My games system allows you to take more than a single hit but doesn't function or look anything like a hit point system.
The main issue with an HP system is not that damage doesn't scale. The problem is that they are too abstract and cause the player to optimize their actions to focus on doing the most damage.
@@mkklassicmk3895 Not necessarily. It's not just surviving multiple hits, it's spending a currency (or deducting from a pool of points) to survive hits.
Back in the day of wargaming (D&D's roots) when a unit got hit, it was dead. So then people got the idea to have a tougher unit, like a dragon. And with it the idea that a dragon or giant could take more hits than a regular pikeman. And thus the concept of hit points (sometimes called hits-to-kill) was born.
The damage mechanic came later as a natural consequence to deal with hit point bloat.
As for optimizing damage, of course. Generally every combat system is going to involve the player trying to make themselves better at killing opponents. That is after all the purpose of combat.
Hit point systems actually tend to lead to the opposite effect sometimes, where often it creates a situation where the best options are to try to find a way to avoid hit points altogether. It's why the save-or-die mechanic was a thing in D&D.
@@taragnor When I said they optimize for damage, I meant that while in combat they will only do the thing that deals the most damage.
There are lots of games that that use a numeric system to track how hurt you are but aren't really HP systems. A Hit Point system does involve a pool of points but it also has the additional features of rolling for damage. You can't really "fix" them by making the HP low because you still have a problem with widely varying damage. So no matter how you work it you end up having to "interpret" how much damage the die says is being done. Which is the just the nature of a Hit Point system.