Let's Talk About Meat Points
If you have played a tabletop RPG or just about any video game, you are probably familiar with the concept of Hit Points, or HP. HP as a concept comes from tabletop war gaming, where HP roughly correlated to the number of individual atoms within a squad, or platoon, or unit; each atomic member of that squad died in a single hit. When tabletop role playing emerged from the wargame medium, player characters corresponded to “hero” characters in wargames who were harder to kill than their nameless comrades. Heroes could have 2-3 hit points, which meant that they could shrug off at least one wound incompatible with human life.
We are now 50 years past this decision to conceptualize TRPG player characters as Dynasty Warriors-style heroes wading through cannon fodder on the battlefield, so I want to look at how some of the games that I know and love inherit, reject, or synthesize the idea of counting physical, mental, or spiritual damage. At its most zoomed-out, HP in all its forms is primarily a pacing mechanism and the way a game implements it informs how it should be played.
Inheritors
An uncountable number of tabletop games and video games have said, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” to the idea of PCs having some number of hit points. HP abstractly corresponds to the number of incoming attacks that a character can receive before they are knocked unconscious and/or perish. My first interaction with this model is from playing Pokemon since I could read, so I have a deeply ingrained appreciation for the HP bar as a visual approximation of how much fight my blorbo has left in it. This model is effective because it gives the designers multiple degrees of freedom to tweak through the life cycle of a game:
• Maximum number of Hit Points provides an immediate comparison of the toughness of different types of characters, both players and NPCs
• Damage ranges of individual attacks/actions (as well as number of attacks in a turn) provide a measure of relative lethality of a combatant. As a corollary, modifiers on damage like resistances and weaknesses provide an additional axis of interacting with the fiction of the universe with a built-in numerical scale
• Resource cost for recovery. Whether it takes time, money, magic, or otherwise, the designer can modulate how much stuff characters can do in a day, a week, or an adventure
In short, this classic form that I think of as “the HP Bar” approach is a versatile abstraction. I think it works beautifully at a gameplay level but I think that on its own it is very weak at the role play level. What I mean by that is that without extra narrative structure, I personally do not know what it looks or feels like to be at 50% of my maximum HP. I think it probably feels like the cold that I had earlier in the summer after visiting my brother’s family with three kids under the age of 7.
Some editions of Dungeons and Dragons help with this by introducing benchmarks like Bloodied and Death’s Door. The implication here is that when your ass is 50% kicked, you’ve drawn serious blood, and when your ass is 75% kicked you look ready to die. This is useful! But it’s also a weird abstraction in the fiction without even more narrative or mechanical structure built in. It’s just a little jarring when a character has the same fighting strength at full HP than they do at, say 25% HP, but typically that is handled through parallel subsystems like PCs expending resources and NPCs expending limited-use abilities or gaining access to different actions as they take damage.
I’m sort of circling around the point that I actually want to make, which is that if your system has an HP bar, how do you represent Injury. What is the difference between getting hit by a hammer for 3d8 damage and getting your arm broken? If you have a separate injury track, then what does your HP represent? This sort of opens up the wider question of what hits and misses mean, or what the difference between armor and dodging is, which is probably a separate blog post. But if you want to have a combat system between two competent combatants, your system should have something to say about what these things mean in-fiction. I think the rejectors and synthesizers have sharpened the point on this more than most of the inheritors have, but I’m interested in hearing what people have to say.
The delta between Hit Points and Injury is also useful for showing, not telling, whether a game is intended to be heroic or subsistence-oriented. Protagonists in action movies might be covered in dirt and blood, but they’re just getting started. Protagonists in horror movies don’t survive to the end without some broken bones and open wounds. On the topic of horror, an HP-Bar system is more likely to handle mental damage and stress as just another thing ticking down your hit points. What does it mean that your bard’s Vicious Mockery killed the enemy? I guess it was such a great insult that the goblin’s head exploded. Shrug.
I appreciate when an HP Bar system recontextualizes or renames their approach to HP. Draw Steel calls their meat points Stamina which, spoiler, I think is a useful word. In their words:
Your hero’s survivability is represented by your Stamina. Think of Stamina as a combination of a creature’s physical vitality and their overall energy for dodging and resisting incoming blows, spells, and other violence. It’s not that every instance of damage deals a bleeding wound to you, but that each one chips away at your ability to fight effectively. One attack might make you sweat as you leap back to avoid an arrow, while another might graze your elbow with a dagger nick, leaving a dull, distracting pain. Eventually, this draining of energy leaves you open for bigger blows that can truly harm your body—or possibly kill you
In addition to this recontextualization, they use the old concept of “Bloodied”, here Winded, as the demarcation where any other combatant would visually see that you are in bad shape. They also take it one step further by providing different ancestries and classes with features that interact with the Winded condition. This is a good use of the HP Bar in my opinion. Additionally, because they removed the "to-hit" roll, they made their heavy armor loadouts just give the player character more stamina. Speedy, artful dodger type characters just have more movement and abilities that simulated forced misses, the way nature intended.
In short, Inheritors of the HP tradition stick with it because it works and it’s translatable between systems. I think that if you use HP, even if gamers might let you get away with not explaining what it means in-fiction, you’re doing yourself a disservice not to consider how you interact with the concept.
Edit: I somehow posted this without crediting Sandy Pug Games's Ten Million HP Planet which is the only ethical use of HP in tabletop gaming.
Rejectors
I’m going to quickly talk about a few systems that I think do a great job of rejecting the concept of Hit Points. You can argue with me that they just take extra steps to do the same thing, and I will plug my ears and stick my tongue out at you.
His Majesty the Worm eschews the concept of a damage roll. If an attack with a weapon, or a monster’s attack with a natural weapon, is successful, it deals (typically) one Wound. Monsters have a traditional Health and Defense (each wound dealt ticks down against armor and health), but players do not have HP. Players must either choose to take Wounds against Conditions, Armor, or Talents. This very cleverly does two things. First, it takes the old OSR maxim of “attack every part of the character sheet” in a shockingly literal way: players have the choice of taking harm to their body, their inventory, or their capability as an adventurer. Second, it naturally marries the fiction of an incoming wound with the mechanics of the game. The first time a player is wounded, they probably mark Staggered; they now know that their character’s bell has been rung and that the next attack is going to probably hurt. The next incoming attack is either going to Notch some armor (potentially destroying it) or wound one of their Talents. If a thief is wounded so badly that they no longer have the ability to climb effectively, that is easy to role play! The discrete wound system provides an inherent structure to role play against and mechanically reinforces the themes of subsistence dungeon crawling. Additionally, mental damage is just its own category of condition that imposes a recovery tax. I could talk more about the meta-analysis of meat points in HMTW all day but hopefully I’ve made my point.
Triangle Agency similarly eschews traditional HP. Damage is dealt in integer units of “Harm”. 1 Harm is “Enough force to kill an average human” and 2+ Harm is “Worse”.
Injuries less than death, while they may be inconvenient, are not necessary to calculate. We assume you will be aware of broken bones, psychological traumas, and other discomforts without numerical assistance.
Harm then interacts with another novel subsystem in the game, Quality Assurances, which are not stats. Quality Assurances relate more to the beautiful resolution system of the game which really has to be seen to be believed. Suffice it to say, players can spend 1 Quality Assurance per incoming Harm to ignore the effects. If you are out of Quality Assurances, you die and must spend a metacurrency to be resurrected. Spending QAs to mitigate harm results in your character having a hard time affecting the world around them, so it accomplishes a similar outcome to HMTW: receiving damage is bad because it makes the game harder, not because when you are at 20% health, your bar turns red and starts beeping.
I have much less experience with more-strictly-narrative games like Powered By the Apocalypse games or Forged in the Dark, but my understanding is that they typically opt for a condition-based system. Scum & Villainy, the Firefly-esque Sci-Fi heist game has a slot-based Harm tracker that lets players keep track of anything from being embarrassed to being impaled. It then also has a stress system that plays into long-term narrative trauma. Systems like this are useful for, again, conveying in-fiction the effects that an adventure has on the characters. From what I understand, the new edition of Cypher is also moving toward a condition-based system of tracking harm which is probably good for the system and bad for the next chapter of this post.
Similarly, in Flying Circus (PBTA), incoming damage to your aircraft is handled in discrete chunks of Damage that affect the ability of your aircraft to stay airborne while also reducing its peak performance. While all of this is happening, you have to track how much it stresses out your pilot!
The common thread in Rejectors from what I see is that when you move away from the HP bar, it both requires and enables the system designer to convey the narrative effect of the stressful situations that combat situations should impart on characters. This typically requires an increased allocation of complexity to the character sheet and to the encounter subsystem, but it provides a more interesting structure for players to role play against.
Synthesizers
Let’s face it. There are a lot of benefits to an HP system. The greatest benefit is just that it’s recognizable if you already speak game language. So there are a couple of systems that I think have taken the recontextualization that Draw Steel provides (above) one additional step to try to more closely marry the mechanical bean-counting to the narrative and gameplay effects of being gored by a moose.
(First Edition) Cypher does not have static attributes. It has pools of resources that players can spend toward committing Effort against Tasks. The entire game is about a dialogue of resolving task difficulty, even in combat; over the course of the day, you are constantly burning resources to increase your odds of successfully achieving a task. In combat, damage is dealt to this same pool of resources, which means that if you’ve been moving heavy shit around all day and then get attacked by a bobcat, you have way less gas in the tank to absorb that hit. This makes narrative sense. The only thing that has bugged me about combat in Cypher is that all rolls are player facing, and so there’s a weird optimization problem of how many resources to spend on “Defense Tasks” vs how much incoming damage an attack will deal. Mage Hunter is a diceless system with the same weird optimization problem. I think the new Cypher will probably clear this up by mixing and matching conditions with resource pools. The point is, this accomplishes the simultaneous tasks of marrying the familiarity of an HP bar (even though you have three now) and the mechanically-reinforced role playing of managing your resources.
Into the Odd and its compatriots are another great synthesis. Characters have base attributes that are worn down over the course of the day/week/adventure. The wrinkle is that you roll saving throws against the current value of the attribute, so as your bar ticks down and starts blinking red, you also know that risky strength-based moves are going to be far less likely to succeed. The other part of the ItO formula is the additional attribute of “HP” (Hit Protection) or Guard; while your character still has Guard, they have not yet been actually struck by a blow. Eventually, however, players start taking damage to their STR or MGT and are at risk of being incapacitated or slain. The cute use of HP in ItO, Mausritter, and Electric Bastionland always tripped me up because it seemed like on average, a single hit would take out your “HP”, but then you have a second chunk of “HP”, as in hit points, in your strength stat. The switch in Mythic Bastionland to “Guard” made this completely click for me.
HP is a Land of Contrasts
If you can’t tell, I think all three approaches are good for different systems and tones, but it’s important to be intentional about what you’re trying to achieve. That’s been the thrust of, like, every post I’ve made though. I think it’s thematically more interesting when dealing with harm makes adventuring harder, because HP in all forms is a pacing mechanism. That said, if taking damage makes adventuring or fighting harder, it changes the tactical envelope of the game. If I want a predictable tactics-based game centered around setpiece encounters, I will probably opt for a classic HP bar! For my money, I enjoy running and playing games that tend toward Rejector or Synthesizer, and right now the playtest rules for our poker game are more in the Synthesizer camp.
Player characters have a pool of poker chips allocated to their four stats, collectively called their Reserves. During exploration, you will probably encounter stressful situations. If you want to expend effort to change the stakes of the task or you believe that the task would require your adrenaline to flow and blood to pump, then you can spend a Reserve. Reserves are also Anted for certain types of combat actions. When the outcome of a task is uncertain, players Save against their Base Stat + Remaining Reserve, so we have a similar attritive tempo to an ItO system. In combat, incoming damage is dealt to the player’s Reserves as a lump sum.
What do you think? Am I missing categories here? I’d love to do a Dwiz-style “summary of every HP method” but like 90% of all games would be DnD style HP Bars, maybe with a twist.