I prefer the Stun/Body mix used by HERO/Champions to any Hit Point system.

It basically turns combat from "to the death" to "to the knockout".

Allow me to complicate this discussion...

When flesh is hit by a sword, dragon bite, 9mm bullet or plasma beam...what happens?

How much of that wound is fatigue vs. blood loss vs. meat loss?

How much resting time or medical skill rolls heals the fatigue vs. the blood vs. the meat of that wound?

Quote from: Spinachcat;842764Allow me to complicate this discussion...

When flesh is hit by a sword, dragon bite, 9mm bullet or plasma beam...what happens?

How much of that wound is fatigue vs. blood loss vs. meat loss?

How much resting time or medical skill rolls heals the fatigue vs. the blood vs. the meat of that wound?

Putting it so broadly makes the question so broad as to be meaningless.

After rediscovering crit tables via Dungeon Crawl Classics, I really like using them. It gives the simplicity of the hit point system, with the occasional crit giving a specific wound type and going into more detail.
I've thought of maybe just using crit results, and ditching hit points as an experiment, but never got around to it.

The longer I game, the more convinced I am that there's no really great alternative to hit points.

Quote from: Spinachcat;842764Allow me to complicate this discussion...

When flesh is hit by a sword, dragon bite, 9mm bullet or plasma beam...what happens?

How much of that wound is fatigue vs. blood loss vs. meat loss?

How much resting time or medical skill rolls heals the fatigue vs. the blood vs. the meat of that wound?

There are 2 ways to "explain" HP

i) The blow that kills a lesser man injures our hero based on the % of their HP it deals. So a blow of 3 damage to 6 HP blacksmith would be equivalent to a 20 point blow to a 40 HP knight.
A blow can be a mix of fatigue, blood, etc
If we followed this through to its logical conclusion Hits that do over a certain % of your HP in one blow should lead to some sort of "death spiral" and healing should be based on % of maximum HP (cure light wounds now recovers 20% of your max HP).

ii) The blow that kills a lesser man can be rolled by our hero in the way a boxer rolls with a punch, so it connects but does no real damage.
If we do this then HP are basically a combat skill that increases with level as you get better at rolling with blows.
If you follow this through logically then underneath HP you need some sort of Wound mechanic that counts the actual cuts and bruises and damage. thus we get a Wound/Stamina mechanism.... for me the best one of these was the one published in V&V 1st edition where HP / Power was the split and Power was also the battery for your other abilities.

The first of these options is a bugger to manage in actual play and leads to complex bookkeeping.
The second is simple to administer in it's most basic form..... ie  after you loose all your HP you have a small number of "wounds" akin to a normal 0 level human (1-6 ish) . You can then add nuance like a critical hit does 1 automatic wound, death spiral etc etc . This sytem works fine in D&D and means you don't need to make any changes at all

Funny, the longer I play, the more I'm persuaded in the opposite.

Quote from: RPGPundit;843975The longer I game, the more convinced I am that there's no really great alternative to hit points.

The Harnmaster method works very well. Treating injury as saving throws and conditions. With the conditions, for the most part, making your injury saves harder to make.

With that being said, GURPS uses hit points, D&D uses hit points, Traveller uses hit points. All of these are favorite of RPGs of mine. What I don't like are condition tracks aka Fudge/Fate/Savage Worlds etc. Sure they are different but what the amount too in play is a really small back of hit points. If I am going to that route I rather do it like GURPS.

Quote from: Spinachcat;842764When flesh is hit by a sword, dragon bite, 9mm bullet or plasma beam...what happens?

You need to make a injury related saving throw for example shock. And you have a condition imposed on you that will have an ongoing effect for example bloodloss. And it is likely that the condition will also make subsequent injury saves more difficult to achieve.

If the designers goes this route, the devil is in much detail you go. How many different types of saves you will need to know about. How many different types of conditions will you need to track.

In Harnmaster you write down every injury you take, and there is one ongoing condition (bloodloss) that is an optional rule. The rest is taken care by using a single page chart (it more of a graphic really) It works well. It is fast as anything I seen for a RPG with detailed combat.  But it is more work than just deducting some points from a total.

Quote from: estar;844003The Harnmaster method works very well. Treating injury as saving throws and conditions. With the conditions, for the most part, making your injury saves harder to make.

With that being said, GURPS uses hit points, D&D uses hit points, Traveller uses hit points.

Ahem, GURPS uses "wound points", because unlike D&D they represent actual injury. The only similarity to D&D is in the name.
And Traveller doesn't have HP, either, it has ability points.

Quote from: RPGPundit;843975The longer I game, the more convinced I am that there's no really great alternative to hit points.

I agree.

There might be some good alternatives, depending on personal taste, campagign style, etc... But no "great" ones, which is why most systems still use HP.

Like I mentioned in the other thread, a simple and cool alternative for D&D players that want to add more effects to HP loss, is to roll a d% whenever you lose, say, 20% of your HP at once (or in the same round, to favor fighters with multiple attacks), with a failure meaning some setback, maybe worse if you roll doubles.

This is inspired by the Perrin Conventions (1976)... So, yeah, nothing new to see here...

Quote from: Eric Diaz;844349I agree.

There might be some good alternatives, depending on personal taste, campagign style, etc... But no "great" ones, which is why most systems still use HP.

Like I mentioned in the other thread, a simple and cool alternative for D&D players that want to add more effects to HP loss, is to roll a d% whenever you lose, say, 20% of your HP at once (or in the same round, to favor fighters with multiple attacks), with a failure meaning some setback, maybe worse if you roll doubles.

This is inspired by the Perrin Conventions (1976)... So, yeah, nothing new to see here...

On 1st level, this rule means "whenever you lose 1-3 HP" for fighters, "whenever you lose 1-2 HP" for clerics and maybe thieves, and almost certainly "whenever you suffer HP damage" for Wizards;).

Quote from: AsenRG;844354On 1st level, this rule means "whenever you lose 1-3 HP" for fighters, "whenever you lose 1-2 HP" for clerics and maybe thieves, and almost certainly "whenever you suffer HP damage" for Wizards;).

Nobody said I was a merciful DM!

(joking aside, one of the things I like about this is that I wouldnt interrupt a spell if a wizard suffered less than, say, 10% of HP loss in around. and if youre using wound and whatnot you can be a bit more generous about intial HP, I guess...).

Quote from: Eric Diaz;844407Nobody said I was a merciful DM!

(joking aside, one of the things I like about this is that I wouldnt interrupt a spell if a wizard suffered less than, say, 10% of HP loss in around. and if youre using wound and whatnot you can be a bit more generous about intial HP, I guess...).

Well, the good thing is that NPCs would suffer the same fate, and most of them are 1HD in a typical setting:D!

Hit Points work fine as long as they don't increase with experience and have some method to distinguish fatigue or unconsciousness from killing. Hit Points in D&D are incredibly abstract and counterintuitive and seem to be misapprehended frequently to mean "how many hits I can take before dying."

Golden Heroes had two sets of HP called Hits to Kill and Hits to Coma, which worked pretty well except for the odd random generation that sometimes resulted in a hero very easy to kill but hard to knock out.

Traveller's method of subtracting points from attributes was pretty good.

DC Heroes' Body stat worked very well for me.

Champions had Stun and Body points separated and worked okay except for there being Endurance and Recovery and too many things for me to bother tracking.