When 5th Edition came out I was impressed. Bounded accuracy fixed one of my big issues with D&D, the ridiculous escalating numbers. I really like D&D magic schools, the planes, the incredible menagerie of monsters. I also like the fast nature of it.

However, it took a step back with Hit Points for me. I feel like characters are now cartoon-ish. I like some grit in my injury rules. I don't like video-game-esque combat churning. I find it odd (and seriously immersion breaking) that people can combat after combat without any effect to their bodies.

I created a couple optional rules for 5e you can see here --> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_lJhbSwBglnWVctajViTkgyaU0

I didn't get to kick the tires on the Injury Rules like I wanted to. Reading them again, I feel like this would put some grit back into the injury system for me. HP would be more like endurance, avoidance, etc. It would model the endurance rules, so not too crunchy, but enough to make getting injured a real concern.

My recent foray back into GURPS has helped me understand how little I use of most crunch. Mostly, I really dig GURPS injury and affliction system but could do without all the skills or the modifiers. I use the cinematic options like Monster Hunters now, so I can tune it to be lighter, but character creation still takes some hand-holding. Also, with my philanthropic endeavors in my local gaming community, supporting the popular game helps local game stores. There are simply more people playing D&D than other games. If I run some D&D at the local cons, the local stores, etc. I'm likely to have a bunch of eager participants itching for a game.

Finally, I still dream of being a publisher. Now with the SRD out, there's no more worries that D&D 5e is going to be hoarded by WOTC with byzantine rules. :-D There is so much in D&D to like for me except this one nagging issue.

So. Help me change my mind on Injury and HP in D&D. How do you bring the "grit" in your D&D games? Are there other optional rules you've seen for HP? (Yes, I've read the stuff in the DMG for 5e, seemed too abrupt for my tastes). Am I just being too picky?

I appreciate your time,

Subscribing because I too want a good answer for this. D&D HP turns me right off the game at about 30 HP. I feel it gets too carried away, and the newer editions are so ridiculous.

I'm not sure how to make somebody like hit points, any more than I know how to get my kids to like broccoli. (Have you tried putting cheese sauce on your hit points?)

Instead, I'd look at it from one level up - given that D&D seems to have a bunch of attributes (in the system, in its popularity) that make it useful to you, how important is it that you don't like hit points? Literally, so what?  Can you play D&D, have a good time, hating hit points all the while but not paying it that much attention?

You got every right to be picky. If something isn't working for you, it's not working for you. The strength of Hit Point mechanic is that it is so familiar to most people that what should be jarring turns into habit till you don't even notice anymore. If you still notice it then the mechanic has failed you in its primary role.

In play I would suggest is not to dress up with descriptions each hit (where the blow lands, how much blood spurts etc). Keep it fast, dry and abstract until the very last blow. If someone falls below zero hits, then you can go to down with the gory details. That is particularly true if when guns come into play. There are only some many times people can get hit in shoulder.

Personally I prefer Hit Point systems where the Hit Points are just transitory damage that automatically are wiped clean after a short rest but where if you are taken out then the serious consequences kick in, possible with roll on critical table or in a more free-form way as in Fate. For a D&D derived version of this kind of approach you could do worse than checking out Owl Hoot Trail.

You're being picky.

It's just a fucking number. We use numbers because they are a fast way to gauge probabilities and tabulate consequences. Wounds generally settle down to adding two things in Hit Points: spiral of suck penalties, and flavor of the month scars. Then wound systems either add these mid-battle (WoD, AEG roll/keep, etc.) or post-battle (the rest).

Often I find wound systems in actual play to be anchors-around-the-ankles so battles play more like rocket tag, and the equivalent of rolling on the NPC Adjective table for "inspiring, gritty combat descriptions." (I'm good at description, and rocket tag gets old fast, so I have little use for the mechanic in pretty much every game I've ever played that had it.)

So, now that I got that out of the way, what specifically do you want to accomplish from this conversation? Do you want the lethality grit or do you want the narrative flair? Because I can tell you that a far better way to achieve lethality grit inherent in old D&D is to work within its Hit Point paradigm and cull the excess HP bloat WotC has been hell bent on glomming on. Pursuing the anchor-of-suck solution forgets that the rest of D&D HP paradigm is not built around that conceit (not that I found "wounds" added much to play anyway).

So why not use rules from an earlier edition governing hit points and combat damage?

Heck, while GURPS is being mentioned, I hated the BSIII ranged rules; they were just too fiddly and convoluted for my liking.  I thought the original rules worked just fine and remained quite playable, so I never stopped using them.

Quote from: Ravenswing;898544So why not use rules from an earlier edition governing hit points and combat damage?

Heck, while GURPS is being mentioned, I hated the BSIII ranged rules; they were just too fiddly and convoluted for my liking.  I thought the original rules worked just fine and remained quite playable, so I never stopped using them.

Part of the challenge is for the most part 5e does use the basics of old D&D's HP and combat damage. It's just that now they've baked more into the cake, as it were, and dressed the result with way more frosting to remain palatable to a younger taste (more sweet than sour, salty, or bitter). Bounded accuracy means a return, for the most part, to hordes and the occasional wimp's lucky shot being threats -- as Stormbringer would say, you're no longer always chasing orcs on the treadmill.

But the game is still surprisingly lethal, even with 'bouncy' death throes, surgey healing, and reset buttons every long rest. That's where the problem is, where it's baked into the cake. Take all of those things out at once and then you have to recalibrate lethality, as many, many race/class/type/feats/spells features trigger off of the above baked-in material as baseline. Not that large of a problem, but we all can get a bit lazy at the thought of extra work.

Again it gets back to the eternal creator's challenge of it's easier to add complexity to adjust to one's taste than remove complexity.

Quote from: trechriron;898522So. Help me change my mind on Injury and HP in D&D. How do you bring the "grit" in your D&D games? Are there other optional rules you've seen for HP? (Yes, I've read the stuff in the DMG for 5e, seemed too abrupt for my tastes). Am I just being too picky?

It boils down the fact that if somebody gets a successful hit on you and you die is not very fun. It worked well for a fantasy miniature wargame but not for a game meant to be played as a campaign stretching across multiple inter-related session.

Since then we had three major design for injury.

D&D hit points where armor reduces damage by making it hard to hit you for damage.
Runequest style where you hit, the target defends, armor reduces damage, and you still have hit point but way less.
Then system like Fate where damage is represented by a series of conditions, and armor is a penalty or a test to overcome for the damage roll. The conditions amount to a very low number of hit points with penalties starting at 1 to 3 "points/levels" of damage.

I used to be a big fan of the GURPS approach. Still am in many way. I love Harnmaster's way of handling injury which is like a conditional damage system on steriods. However outside of personal taste in the end I find what really matters is how long it takes to resolve combat, and how well can I translate what the players say they are doing as their character in combat.

I find that the design approach doesn't really matter when I look at it like this. For example GURPS and D&D 4e combat take roughly the same amount of time to complete. D&D 4e approach involves a big bag of hit points that goes up and down like a yo-yo. GURPS approach involves denying hits while maximizing the odds of you scoring a hit. Two completely different systems with two very different design but both result in combat taking the same amount of time with both possessing the same amount of tactical options to use during combat.

Having run several campaigns of GURPS, D&D 4e, D&D 5e, and OD&D, 5e combat flows like OD&D combat. So I handle the description and adjudication of damage much in the same way. I keep in mine that both OD&D and 5e are abstract combat system. That if you want detail and grittiness, you have to supply them in your description of what happens and in your rulings.

The key I do is look at the proportion of damage relative to the character's hit points. If you have a 10th level fighter with 80 hitpoints and a 1st level fighter at 8 hit points, I will describe a 4 point hit to the 1st level fighter the same way I describe a 40 point hit for a 10th level fighter. Both suffered an injury that took out half of their stamina/endurance/health/whatever. Now a 1 point hit for a 1st level fighter is much more severe than a 1 point hit than a 10th level fighter. Unlike Runequest, GURPS, and similar systems, not all points of damage are the same in D&D. It depends on the level of the character and their maximum hit point to say what is actually means.

Now there are a dozen other ways of handling what hit points mean and how it flavors the campaign. The way I outlined is what I adopted to keep the gritty feel I had in GURPS going when I ran the campaign in 5e/OD&D. I partially restored the one shot kill in my OD&D games by instituting a open ended critical rule. If you roll a natural 20, roll again. If you miss on the second roll you get to do max damage plus your normal damage roll. If you hit but didn't roll another natural 20, you get to score double max damage. However if you roll another nat 20 you repeat the above possibly getting 3X, 4X, and even one time 6x your max damage.

I don't like AD&D 1st, 2e or 3e much because you get into situation where you can't hit your target unless it is a natural 20. While possible to get in that situation with OD&D and 5e it is much less frequent. In OD&D the entire power curve is flat because everything is lower numbers. In 5e bounded accuracy achieved a similar flat power curve but with higher number which allowed for more tactical options.

Remember in GURPS high skill combat is mostly miss, miss, (continue for ten minutes), hit, and kill. So while the GURPS mechanics feel more realistic what they amounted is longer combat with more tactical detail that ate up more of your session. There nothing wrong with liking that but that is the consequence of GURPS' design.


What is missing is the possibility of the one-shot kill.  


So what about D&D 5e? Well in terms of how its combat flows it is very similar to classic D&D. Closer to OD&D than AD&D 1st. However it is deliberately designed with explicit tactical options. Nowhere near as many as GURPS or D&D 4e but more than classic ever had outlined in its rules. With Bounded Accuracy, the to-hit bonus and damage is scaled so these tactical options can exist but the combat will play out more or less like OD&D. You have more hit points than OD&D but stuff is doing more damage than in OD&D and so it amo

Quote from: Jason Coplen;898534Subscribing because I too want a good answer for this. D&D HP turns me right off the game at about 30 HP. I feel it gets too carried away, and the newer editions are so ridiculous.

Does anyone know if the Epic 6 rules work with 5E?  I found they radically changed the feel of 3.x and Pathfinder in a way that some players with these same complaints seemed to like.

Tongue in cheek suggestion: back in the 2E days we rebranded Hit Points "Plausibility Points".  They represented the suspension of belief the reader had in your character's exploits.  You could spend HPs one-for-one to increase To Hit, Damage and Saving Throw rolls.  When you ran out, the reader put the book down saying "oh, now that's just silly" and the author was obliged to kill your character off to maintain credibility.

Playing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc, I realised that I was fine with HP in those games, and probably wouldn't want it any other way.

I just transferred that thinking (or rather, the absence of it) to the tabletop.

Quote from: estar;898555It boils down the fact that if somebody gets a successful hit on you and you die is not very fun.

Not fun for you, maybe.
For myself, I find I cannot help but get annoyed by games were no PCs ever die... including my own. If we're not dying because of our great planning or because we never leave the tea shop, that's one thing... but seeking out and engaging in dangerous activities implies DANGER. I'm not convinced of the danger if I know it's very unlikely there will be any lasting consequences.
And NO, other things like being taken hostage or robbed to not take up the slack. Unless I'm playing some genre where death is firmly off the table (Toon?) then I am going to need to see some PC fatalities eventually.

Get RuneQuest6 + the Classic Fantasy supplement for RQ6 - http://ubiquitousrat.net/?p=3331

Quote from: estar;898555What is missing is the possibility of the one-shot kill.  

I've never been a fan or believer in one-shot-kills because they arent very realistic in any setting where combat rounds takes more than a second or two. I've seen systems with it and aside from Arnesons system. Havent been very fond of them so far.

But using Arnesons HP location system all of a sudden one shot kills become both a real thing even at higher levels, and a little more plausible as its a lucky hit that does it and you have to use some tactics to line up for the best chance.

As for HP and more gritty. Theres that other thread on HP to peruse too.

There is the "Gritty" optional system in the 5e DMG. Short rests are 8 hours long and long rests are 7 days long. Add in a need for a healers kit to stabalize or recover HP via resting and things drop closer to older D&D levels of recovery without impacting gameplay. Because sorry, no, you are not guaranteed any short rests.

If you dont want to use the options system then other solutions are to do things like remove healing dice from short rests and have natural healing at say the character die type + con mod per day.

etc.

Crit tables will give you a possibility for both long-term damage, and one shot kills. I like the Dungeon Crawl Classics tables, and am probably going to adapt them for 2nd ed.
Health state would emulate characters getting worn down by combat. say, -1 to AC/rolls at 50% or less health, and -3 to AC/rolls at 25% or less health. Both are fairly simple, don't muck up the pacing of combat too bad. (I found that crits happen infrequently enough so that my players were cool with it, and it makes crits more interesting than "double damage")
You do run the risk of "death spiral" but if you apply both rules to the monsters, then at least it's consistent.