Thread by @eaton

Interesting little thread by @rodneylives, talking about ideas for a two-tiered HP system that tracks overall health and more serious wounds. The most familiar TTRPG for most people — D&D — has nothing like that, and while it's easy to follow the lack results in odd moments.

https://twitter.com/rodneylives/status/1344192707086966785

"Hit Points" in D&D (and many games it shaped) are a number representing how durable your character is, how much damage it can take before dying/passing out/being bumped out of combat/etc.

It's easy to explain, easy to learn, and easy to track. Early in many games, your HP is just a touch more (maybe even less) than some enemies can dish out in an attack. You have to be cautious, because a lucky hit could "one-shot" you.

As you progress, though, both your characters and enemies get larger and larger pools of HP. Only top-tier "boss monsters" have the capacity to one-shot, and both players and enemies have deep pools of HP that can easily withstand extended combat sessions before needing healing.

That's where the "Hit points as a big number" approach starts feeling awkward. Because mechanically, many games like that treat "you've been killed" as a binary: as long as your HP is positive, you're healthy and hale and fighting. Once it hits zero, you're down for the count.

In addition, the binary quality erases the distinction between, say, scratches and death blows. Having an anvil dropped on your head delivers the same damage as being punched ten times, or nibbled by ducks a hundred times.

In the D&D world the official answer is that HP doesn't represent your *health,* just an abstract idea of how able-to-fight you are. Your 100HP character isn't shrugging off nine knife wounds but dying from the tenth; they're DODGING the first nine, and the tenth finally lands.

The previous edition of D&D had a "bloodied" condition — basically, a flag that tripped when your HP dropped below half — but it was stripped away in the quest to streamline 5e. The result, as mentioned, is simple to explain but super weird if you look too close.

In contrast, my personal favorite system @EclipsePhase has the idea of "wounds." Your character's durability is a pool just like HP, but if you take too much damage in one blow, you take a "wound."

Wounds don't do any extra damage — but they're persistent, enduring even after you "heal up damage," and require extra time or medical care. In addition they're a drag on your skills, imposing a small but nontrivial penalty on all of your rolls until they're taken care of.

Because "wounds" are also an abstraction, they're not perfect: those hundred ducks can still nibble you to death without ever dealing a single wound, for example.

…But the result is that strategies like ambushes, hit-and-run, and shock-and-awe matter a lot more. Wound your opponents, and they're less effective at hitting back, even if they're still in fighting shape.

In EP, wounds are also cumulative: one imposes a –10 penalty to your rolls, two impose a –20 penalty, and so on. This eliminates the immersion-breaking "Pause in the middle of combat and eat a cheese wheel to heal up" approach to endurance we all loved to exploit in Skyrim.

Eclipse Phase also uses the same approach to track mental health — your character has a 'stress' pool, but can accumulate a 'trauma' if too much stress hits at once. It's not a perfect mechanic but the impact on gameplay is important.

Taking some time to rest up and relax can restore your stress pool to normal levels… but if you were traumatized you've gotta deal with that or it will impose an ongoing, cumulative penalty that makes everything else more difficult.

Obviously you can go overboard with systems like this: modeling *real mental health* and *actual physical condition* is a huge drag on gameplay if it's not hidden behind abstractions. But the ROI on a little extra complexity can be significant in games where you want more nuance.

In Eclipse Phase, for example: Combat favors long range ambushes and careful planning. A party member being wounded in combat may not incapacitate them, but it often requires changing plans mid-stream, because they're less effective at their role until you can treat them.

I played EP before I played D&D — I found it a lot simpler than I expected, not realizing that I started on a "crunchy" numbers-heavy system. But the flatness of the "Hit Points" abstraction left me confused.

"A dragon just vaporized my friend and traveling companion. Am I not traumatized? I ambushed the bandit and took him down to 1HP — why can he counter-attack so effectively?" etc etc.

After all that rambling, I'm intrigued to see how the system @rodneylives is brainstorming turns out. Adding a "wound-like" system, thinking through how it interacts with things like fatigue and armor, etc — can add a lot of nuance to a game for not-that-much complexity.

And — if you find these kinds of mechanics discussions interesting? You should absolutely follow him, and even check out his book. It's great reading. amazon.com/gp/product/B08…

You'll probably also get a lot out of @jaceaddax and @NomeDaBarbarian's feeds. They think about mechanics, play with different systems, and explain the "whys" of their ideas a lot. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.