WickedThought

Did I get hit or didn’t I?

When Dave Arneson first introduced hit points and armor class into D&D, the system was based on another game: a naval combat game. Armor class represented the difficulty of piercing the hull and hit points represented the real damage inflicted.

Well, that works fine for naval combat—and possibly even for armored knights—but when we’re dealing with a wide variety of characters—armored and otherwise—the system begins to crumble. Let me show you what I mean.

Armor class represents how hard it is for opponents to land a solid, damaging blow on you. If someone fails to beat your armor class, that failed roll represents a near miss, a glancing blow, an inconsequential flesh wound, a good hit reflected by armor or a dandy dodge. That’s armor class.

When your armor class fails, your hit points go down. Now, unless your hit points reach zero, the hit you took doesn’t really cause any kind of real damage. A loss of hit points represents a near miss, a glancing blow, an inconsequential flesh wound, a good hit reflected by armor or a dandy dodge. That’s your hit points.

… wait a second.

If these two systems sound redundant, it’s because they are. Ported over from a naval game, they don’t make sense when you apply them to human beings. Armor doesn’t prevent you from taking damage: it prevents you from taking more damage. Anyone who’s taken a real hit in armor knows this. Flak jackets are a good modern example. Yes, they stop the bullet (most of the time), but you’ve still got a serious injury that hurts like getting kicked in the chest by Bruce Lee. It hurts. And that’s injury.

I guess that’s my biggest problem with armor class/hit points. They don’t hurt. When it comes to the injured character in question, there’s really no difference between 1 hit point and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 hit points. Granted, a knife can take out the character with 1 hit point, but then again, with the right kind of bonuses, a knife can take out the other fellow, too. But not without some serious bonuses and not before that other fellow makes enough saving throws to fill a bag of holding.

Like I said, with hit points, you don’t feel the hurt. Now, most game systems address this by throwing death spirals into the works. Yeah, I’ve been guilty of this myself (see Legend of the Five Rings), but you should have seen the original system I wanted for L5R… in fact, why don’t I just show it to you.

The original version of wounds/injury in L5R was rather complicated, I admit, but I feel it more accurately represented the samurai literature we were trying to emulate. A lot of folks around the office were highly dubious of the system, claiming it would turn people off right away. I was in my punk rock phase and I really didn’t care if “the fans” liked it or hated it. “They’ll change it anyway!” I said, because that’s what I did with game systems I wrote. I just changed what I didn’t like. But the AEG folks made me change things around and we got the system that ended up in the first edition book. A system I did not like, but I compromised. Had I not compromised, you would have seen something I felt was much more in tune with movies like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Heaven and Earth.

To be brief, in the original system, if you got hit with a katana, you died.

Actually, that’s not brief at all. That was the system. I had an out: if you spend a Void Point, you don’t die, but you lose a limb. Your opponent picks. (Head doesn’t count.)

That was the system. It reflected the literature and made sword fighting something you only did if you really had to. It discouraged violence. It made you consider every duel you accepted. And it put you four feet away from death every second of your life. Just like Musashi wrote.

Yeah, the guys at AEG didn’t like that, so we went with the other system.

But that system really put on the hurt. You felt every hit. If you got hit by a katana, your character was out of it. He needed healing. (I also tried to put the kibosh on magical healing, but the veto came down on that, too.) Unfortunately, death spiral systems—like the one in L5R—make my buddy Matt cringe. For good reason, too.

Now, for those not in the know, a “death spiral” is a wound system that slowly applies penalties to a character’s actions based on his level of injury. The more hurt you get, the more penalties you accrue.

Matt and I were talking about hit points and why I hate them. He explained to me that he didn’t like spirals because “just when I need to be heroic, I can’t.” His point was both valid and strong—assuming we’re talking about a heroic game. That conversation stuck to my brain like a fly in amber, buzzing around my game designer brain. When it came time to design the Houses violence system, I found a way to whack it.

In Houses, instead of your injuries deducting dice from your pool, your injuries give your enemies additional dice. In other words, your injuries do not penalize your own actions, they benefit your opponent’s actions. Also, in order to take advantage of that bonus, your opponent has to spend Style Points: the engine of the game that make all other mechanics works. The opposite of a death spiral. (I don’t have a name for it yet. I’m awful at naming things like game systems. “Roll & Keep” was the best I could come up with for L5R/7th Sea.)

So, keeping with the theme of the last few santa vaca episodes, I put myself to the task of making a new system that keeps as many of the terms as possible. Something I feel fits better while still fitting in the main system.

In this case, let’s keep armor class. I think the term is a bit misleading—it actually has less to do with armor than “defense”—but, like I said, we’re trying an experiment here. Armor class works exactly the same way it did before: this is how hard it is to hit you. Not a glancing blow, not an inconsequential flesh wound. Did the other guy hit you or didn’t he?

If you beat someone’s armor class, you scored a hit. If you don’t beat the armor class, you don’t.

Now, if you do get hit, you get hurt. Specifically, you get disabled. You know, when you have zero hit points disabled? Yeah, that kind of disabled.

Disabled… unless you spend a hit point.

Now, a hit point in this context means deducting one point from one of your saving throws: your fort save, reflex save and will save. Now, saving throws are no longer saving throws. That is, you don’t roll dice for them. You spend them, like points. So, instead of saving throw, we’re just using the term save. Your fort save, reflex save, will save.

Use the appropriate save for the appropriate injury. You wanna tough out the hit? Spend a fort save. Want to dodge it? Spend a reflex save. Want to overcome the pain? Spend a will save. The rules already qualify what you can save against, so there you have that.

To be clear, a “hit point” is now a point form any of  your “saves.” A hit point is any point you spend from one of your saves.

Now, if you don’t have any points to spend or you don’t want to spend them, you become disabled by a successful hit. That means you start the countdown to negative ten. You have ten rounds to get treatment. If you have a negative save, you start at that number instead of at one. For example, if you get hit with something you could have used for your reflex save and your reflex save is -1, you start at -1 rather than zero.

I’m sure this muddles up all kinds of mechanics… but I’d fix those in playtesting anyway.