QuoteHas anyone ever played this way? It sounds like a great idea, except for piling more book-keeping on the DM.

When I first picked up D&D at age 12, we had to teach ourselves and, by accident, initially played sort of similarly. The referee had ALL game mechanism-related info behind the screen and rolled ALL of the dice behind the screen. I think the players only kept a list of their possessions (sword, rope, etc). Quickly ditched it. Felt too much like story time for us. We needed the outcomes grounded in numerical transparency to feel any sense of agency.

Site ate my reply... what was I saying?

Quote from: Chainsaw;1124687When I first picked up D&D at age 12, we had to teach ourselves and, by accident, initially played sort of similarly. The referee had ALL game mechanism-related info behind the screen and rolled ALL of the dice behind the screen. I think the players only kept a list of their possessions (sword, rope, etc). Quickly ditched it. Felt too much like story time for us. We needed the outcomes grounded in numerical transparency to feel any sense of agency.

Well that goes a lot further than players not knowing HP. You still know you're an Xth-level fighter with a to-hit bonus and a certain weapon and AC. The player may well even know roughly the stats of an orc. The player still has to make a calculation before sending their PC charging in. They just have to do so under greater uncertainty, which I'm hoping - for some players, not all judging by this thread - would increase the excitement and engagement.

Quote from: Bren;1124534They would also know when they are tired, both physically and emotionally so I think some way of conveying how tired they are before they take physical damage is needed.

You'd want to try different things, but the problem I can see with this is that you will either get dragged back down into textual analysis of the DM's exact words, or the table will evolve a system where certain phrases tally with certain %s of HP remaining, and then you're halfway back to players knowing HP. Sure a PC might know roughly how tired or stressed they felt, but there is luck, plot immunity etc. moving around as well so that the PC wouldn't know how many hit points they had left.

Anyway here is a Gygax quotation taken from the Tales to Astound blog, for what it's worth (the quotation, not the blog; the blog is great)

"Dave and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the "rules" found in DandD. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, DandD will have become staid and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don't believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another. DandD is supposed to offer a challenge to the imagination and to do so in many ways. Perhaps the most important is in regard to what the probabilities of a given situation are. If players know what all of the monster parameters are, what can be expected in a given situation, exactly what will happen to them if they perform thus and so, most of the charm of the game is gone. Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do not know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive". Now, for example, if I made a proclamation from on high which suited Mr. Johnstone, it would certainly be quite unacceptable to hundreds or even thousands of other players. My answer is, and has always been, if you don't like the way I do it, change the bloody rules to suit yourself and your players. DandD enthusiasts are far too individualistic and imaginative a bunch to be in agreement, and I certainly refuse to play god for them - except as a referee in my own campaign where they jolly well better toe the mark."

Gary Gygax, published in Alarums and Excursions 2, July 1975

Quote from: Marchand;1124694Well that goes a lot further than players not knowing HP.

Right, that's why I tried to differentiate it by saying "sort of similarly." I totally failed! LoL!

Quote from: Marchand;1124694You still know you're an Xth-level fighter with a to-hit bonus and a certain weapon and AC. The player may well even know roughly the stats of an orc. The player still has to make a calculation before sending their PC charging in. They just have to do so under greater uncertainty, which I'm hoping - for some players, not all judging by this thread - would increase the excitement and engagement.

Yeah, give it a shot. I don't think it would add more than it takes away for my games, but maybe would do so for yours.

Quote from: Marchand;1124694You'd want to try different things, but the problem I can see with this is that you will either get dragged back down into textual analysis of the DM's exact words, or the table will evolve a system where certain phrases tally with certain %s of HP remaining, and then you're halfway back to players knowing HP. Sure a PC might know roughly how tired or stressed they felt, but there is luck, plot immunity etc. moving around as well so that the PC wouldn't know how many hit points they had left.

They don't have to know a number. But knowing nothing about your level of exhaustion until the moment the axe actually hits you in the leg doesn't make sense to me.

You could do what others have mentioned and divide things into different states, say four states like
   Strong – at least 75% of HP.
Tiring – at least 50% of HP.
Fatigued – at least 25% of HP.
Exhausted – less than 25% of HP.

Assuming HP are at least in the 2-digit range, four broad categories allows for a lot of uncertainty about exactly how tired the character is. If you are also secretly rerolling hit points each (adventure, session, game-day, etc.) there seems to be plenty of uncertainty without the oddity of the character having no idea whether he is a little tired or completely exhausted.

Presumably the player is tracking how many times the character was hit, without knowing the damage rolled or inflicted those three d10 damage hits might have done 1+ 2+1= 4 points of damage or 9+10+ 9=28 points of damage. That seems like the sort of distinction that a person out to be able to determine. To me it would be very immersion breaking for the character  to say "Wow, after all that fighting, I'm probably exhausted right now. Though maybe I'm really not very tired at all. I just can't tell which."

As a separate point, you mentioned using HP=Consitution as "meat."I like that sort of separation in inflating hit point systems like D&D Among other reasons, because separating allows certain attacks to directly damage the meat part of the hit points. If we call those two things BODY and STAMINA then we'd apply the 4 categories above to the Stamina total not to the total of BODY+STAMINA.[/QUOTE]