Silly, Hit Points, That's Not What Mountains Are For
I love Dungeons & Dragons.
I hate Dungeons & Dragons.
Hit-point mountains in the current version of D&D are one thing I have trouble with. Why should anything, even a monster, have more than thirty (30) hit points?
Before you roll your eyes and dismiss me as an OSR bro looking to convert you, let’s think about hit points (HP) differently.
Hit points, no matter the ways they are dealt with, are supposed to be a resource pool that a player manages, with help from their character sheets and their referees (or insert appropriate title here).
Hit points also offer a finite timer, showing the players they can and will die if certain conditions are met within the game space.
However, when hit points rise above a certain threshold, they have the opposite effect they intend: Players become less and less worried about consequences that would normally lead to tactical and creative decisions. In essence, characters become bullet sponges or tanks or god-like beings murdering as they go.
A skilled referee (insert appropriate title here) can rachet up the tension, offering harder and nastier consequences for choosing to commit violence. However, the poorly designed hit-point system in D&D makes this a challenging task, especially for newer, inexperienced referees.
What do I suggest we adopt instead?
This requires a bit of anecdote from my days of studying classical and Biblical Greek. I remember reading a passage where the death of a character was extended out in true epic poetry fashion: The dude was speared in a vital area of his body. As a gallant Trojan hero, he kept upright and delivered a speech, before succumbing to his wounds, in a very Greek and valiant fashion.
What the hell does this have to do with TTRPGs?
Why can’t we make hit points, death, health, and player agency more exciting?
In other words, why can’t we explore ways to make lower hit points more exciting? Why can’t we drop them to thirty (30) or lower, but offer what I will refer to as layers and clocks into the mix?
I first came across clocks in Forged in the Dark games, and elsewhere. However, my take is a bit different: Clocks add time crunches. For example, a baddie has a three (3) for their clock. This might mean the referee says, “You have three (3) attempts to defeat this dude or something truly horrifying is going to happen.” What happens after three (3) attempts to defeat this baddie? Maybe the sky opens up, with a portal to another hellish dimension, spilling forth a horde of unrelenting, hungry, and maddening creatures. Or, maybe the bad guy is a double agent, who has managed to hijack an important security system, which will do XYZ by the end of the third attempt to pacify them.
Clocks add pressure. Hit points do not. Make the baddie have thirty (30) hit points, but failing to whittle down the HP leads to disaster or catastrophic events.
Clocks can be used for other forms of encounters. Your character might be given a clock telling them they need to move quickly and safely to a secure hiding place before the winds change, giving them away to a hungry zombie horde.
Layers are another component I’ve discovered from playing far too many video games. The baddie’s HP hits zero, but this baddie has an Ace up their sleeve: Their corpse becomes a deadly encounter itself by transforming into a deadly accurate and hard-to-kill cyborg, controlled by an alien intelligence (sound familiar?).
During Layer One, players are battling what they assume to be the bad dude in their true form. However, as the baddie’s smoldering corpse convulses, terror fills the hearts of players, who thought they had done a good job of vanquishing their foe. They thought rest and recuperation were next, only to find the baddie, true to form, had something else to fight players with.
The Layer Two baddie, while deadly, has (maybe) half or a quarter of the hit points. If properly countered, the baddie can be destroyed. However, our players were hoping to lick their wounds, grab a pint at the local pub, and put this all behind them.
Sounds cheesy, but it makes for one helluva memorable experience. Who wouldn’t love encounters like these?
The problem with hit points is that they have become a safety blanket of sorts. For player safety reasons, I understand this: Player character death is traumatic, but it doesn’t have to be. Why not make it epic? Why not add in a speech? Maybe they survive through deus ex machina?
Death doesn’t have to be boring or finite either.
Player character death can be replaced with other conditions, too. Fallout and Elder Scrolls sometimes have this where some NPCs are knocked out or incapacitated rather than killed. The same design concept can be brought forth here.
There is no need for hit-point mountains. Keep the mountains for exploring and other cool TTRPG stuff. Hit points don’t need to be high for PCs or NPCs. They can be adjusted to meet the needs of the story, while being supplemented with clocks and layers.
Layers can be used for PCs. These might be the ability to take a few extra hits when HP hits zero—kinda like Sean Bean’s character, Boromir, who is struck with multiple arrows by Uruk-hai shock troops. However, he goes down swinging, blowing his horn, to the very end.
We play these games to have fun, to play as epic (cool) characters, and to engage with amazing stories and their worlds or universes: Now’s the time to level some mountains and do some epic shit!
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