Everything is Uncertain, Including Death (and Taxes)

“Quick, we must retreat!”

“Why? You look absolutely fine to me.”

“Yes, but the next the next sword blow will surely kill me.”

Or

“Have no fear, I will leap into the fray and hold them off, for I am fresh, so even if they all strike me I shall remain standing.”

Such are the caricatures of the abstraction of HP; combatants can take HP ‘damage’ without risk until they’re right down to the little numbers. These caricatures, and the implicit criticism, have some merit. Players do know that the Orc with a handaxe (1d6 damage) will not be able to kill their 8HP Fighter on this round. And they do know that their 6^th Level Fighter, whittled down to 3HP, is now in serious trouble, even if we can see no difference in his physical capabilities. 

Or rather, we think we can see no difference in his physical capabilities. The 5e Basic pdf says "The loss of hit points has no effect on a creature's capabilities until the creature drops to 0 hit points" (v0.2 p75). Of course I know why the rule book says this: we don't apply penalties to characters and creatures that have taken HP damage. But it is language like hinders and 'proper' understanding of the abstraction of HP and D&D combat - though as I note below the abstraction of HP is terminally undermined in newer editions. When the abstraction is understood, we can see that of course a loss of hit points does have an effect on a character or creature's capabilities. A PC with 3HP has far less ‘fighting ability’ than one with 30HP, even if their AC and THAC0 or BAB remain unchanged. Simply put, the 3HP Fighter will survive fewer rounds of combat than the 30HP.

But anyway, it is often difficult to grasp such abstraction, and the 'certainties' (see above) that it produces can sit uneasily with players and DMs. We might intellectually understand the abstract nature of D&D combat, but we often - instinctively - fall into making sense of these numbers (HD, HP, AC, ‘to hit’ rolls, etc.) as if they had a one-to-one correspondence with world.

So, let’s make things a little more uncertain, shall we?

Carcosa has PCs roll their HP at every encounter. You also have to roll to see what type of HD you have! Fun for a diversion, but the certainties in the two 'examples' above are not mitigated. Why not have the PCs roll their HD every time they are 'hit'?

Here’s how it would work:

Characters and creatures start with 0 'hit points' (HP). They have not yet been 'hit'. When a character or creature is 'hit', damage is rolled as normal, and this many hit points are added to their HP, which accumulate. A character or creature rolls their HD every time it adds points to their HP. So that 6^th Level Fighter would roll 6d8 (assuming no modifiers from CON), giving him somewhere between 6 and 48HP. It wouldn’t be quite as 'swingy' as that might look as the multiple dice produce a pronounced bell curve. If the total rolled is greater than the accumulated HP of damage, the character or creature can fight on. If the number roll is equal to or less than the accumulated HP, the character or creature is either dead or has suffered a serious wound.

Naturally, I need a good critical hit chart to generate the wounds and determine the chance of death. I am tempted by the extended critical hit charts from WHRP1e (found in the Character Pack, maybe one of the Apocrypha books) which have different charts for all kinds of weapons and sources of damage. ACKS’ ‘mortal wounds’ table might also be a suitable base. While I would want the procedure to be relatively simple, I'd also have to work out a simple set of modifiers to rolls on this chart. Presumably these would involve level, CON modifier, and perhaps the difference between accumulated HP and the last rolled HD total. And death? This would either be an automatic result on the far reaches of the chart, a consequence of a wound that is not treated or bound in time, or perhaps, to keep things simple, a Saving Throw (vs Death). For simplicities sake, most monsters and NPCs might die as soon as the HD roll is not greater than accumulated HP - this is a system about PCs, after all.

Or maybe the 'dice-drop' table I suggested ages ago... 

Whatever table I eventually use I've a feeling that it will have to be kind to the PCs. Or, at least, as kind as a critical hit/serious wound table can be. PCs are going to be more vulnerable using these rules. While 1st Level PCs will get killed/wounded by a single blow in this system and the traditional one, the real effect will be on PCs with around 3 or 4 HD. In the traditional system there is no chance that the first sword blow will drop them (especially with the kind of house rules that boost HP - max HP at 1st Level, re-rolling 1s, re-rolling all dice at each level, etc.), in this system some of those formerly 'insulated' PCs are going to fall in the first round of combat. But then, so are some of the monsters in the same HD range, which brings a much wider range of the bestiary into play much earlier on... along with larger treasures and greater XP rewards. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

But why do this?

Well, it gives me an excuse to use a critical hit chart. And do I love me a good critical hit chart. But it also means that even PCs (and monsters) of moderate to high level/HD are in an uncertain amount of danger once the daggers, axes, and swords are drawn. The cartoon criticism of D&D's accumulating HP is disarmed. Sure, higher level characters are far more likely to be able to fight for longer than low or zero level characters, but there will rarely be the guarantee that the next swipe of a sword will not do for them.

But more importantly than that, much more, it allows me to incorporate an aspect of ‘newer’ D&Ds from which I have always recoiled – easy HP recovery (or easy HP reduction, given what HP 'mean' in this system). As I've said, the abstraction of HP and D&D combat is often difficult to maintain in the imaginations of the DM and players. And players and DMs really do need to buy the abstract nature of HP and D&D combat in order to understand how the game effect of low HP = reduced overall fighting ability = a ‘wounded’ state. But for this abstraction to work, HP ‘healing’ has to be slow and/or difficult. If a PC can easily replenish their all HP, say with a ‘long rest’, the HP abstraction is terminally undermined. If a good night's sleep allows a PC to recover all their lost HP, then low HP very definitely does not = wounded, not even as an abstraction.

But at the same time I will concede that rapid HP recovery can improve some aspects of the experience of play. If PCs can recover their HP by taking a rest, swigging some brandy (see Crypts & Things), or hearing a rousing speech, then (of course) they can get a lot more adventuring done, especially during the first few levels of play. And these early levels are the key to a sustained campaign. So I'll be experimenting with this system in the next games that I run.

As a final point, easy HP recovery and no ‘real’ wounds means that PCs can fight all day, every day. This puts them on the 5e track – which given the 'XP per adventuring day per level' table in the DMG pdf I can safely caricature this as 'How to Hit Name Level in 30 Days, or Your Money Back!' I know that this meant to make players feel 'epic', but I can't imagine feeling less 'epic' than having my character, starting at 1st Level, is set to become a mighty lord in a matter of mere weeks of game time.

A very old school critical hit chart...

In real life, I've recently been reading a little about medical illustration. And I came across this brilliant image:

This is the 'Wound Man', an illustration by Hans von Gersdorff published in a 16th century manual for barber-surgeons on the treatment of battlefield injuries.

Now then. What I'm thinking is that something like this would make an excellent die-drop table, of the kind seen in Zak S' excellent Vornheim. Suitable for all manner of OSR games, but probably particularly suited to Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I'm imagining that, as with the supplemental critical hit tables for WFRP1e, there would be a different die-drop table for a different sources of injury, all graphically realised in gory faux-woodcut detail. In order to 'bulk' the supplement out to 16 pages (or whatever), there could be a few pages of similarly illustrated diseases, poisons, and 'advice' on healing. It would masquerade as a 'real' manual, complete with a pun-tastic 'German' name in the classic WFRP style.

Here's the front cover to von Gersdorff's manual. Now that has some serious Old School vibe!

But I can't draw, so someone else has to do it! And anyone who can draw probably wouldn't need me to supply the words. Especially the person that immediately sprang to mind when this idea popped into my head.

Adventurer, Crippled, Killed

This morning I bought the .pdf of Adventurer, Conqueror, King System. Mainly because I was interested in the fantasy economics that are designed to fit the assumptions of D&D (I've sent the players in our game to their post on 'The Demographics of Heroism') rather than model historical economics. But, on opening the 'book', one of the first things that I went to was the awesome, single page, Mortal Wounds table, right at the back. Oh, am I going to love inflicting everything from, 'Ghostly visions of lost companions flicker before your eyes as you awaken', to,'Your lips and tongue are severed or mangled (cannot speak, cast spells or use magic items involving speech, -4 to reaction rolls)' on the PCs in our game. It is a good middle ground between single table simplicity and the pages and pages of tables and detail in WFRP1e (with the Character Pack, at least) and Rolemaster.

The thing to remember with Death and Dismemberment tables and the like is that they actually make D&D less deadly - 0HP does not equal insta-death - but they make death much more colourful AND they explain why there might be people with permanent injuries in a world that would otherwise works on the principle of, 'he's fine, he's fine, he's fine, he's DEAD'.

At the moment, I'm only envisaging using ACKS for the economics, some of the ideas about ritual magic, and the mortal wounds table. I prefer LotFP for the core adventuring mechanics and simple, well defined classes. But you never know... it is another D&D-alike to add to my original books (AD&D1e/2e, BECMI/RC), my retro-clones (Labyrinth Lord being my go-to clone) and my simulacra (Crypts and Things, LotFP, and now ACKS). That's a lot of D&D, and lots of things to pick and choose from in there.  

And if we're speaking of copper coins, I really do like the ACKS Treasure Generator.

Nothing New Under the Sun

In our games of D&D (or whatever it is) I had been using the long trusted method of dealing with natural 20s and 1s in combat; double damage and a 'fumble' respectively. Of course, under this system a high-level fighter has exactly the same chance of scoring a critical hit as an clumsy child, and they both stand the same chance of dropping their swords. And it is more than a bit implausible to have even high-level fighters dropping their swords once every twenty combat rounds. In the past, we've played combats with these kinds of fumbles and have had swords flying all over the shop, bowstrings snapping like elastic bands, and sling stones scattering all over the slippery dungeon floors. Funny, for sure.

So for fumbles, we've just adopted the rule of two - a natural 1 leads leaves the unlucky dungeon delver with one round -2 across the board penalty, to hit rolls, armour class, saving throws, and anything else that might pop up. So everyone over stretches themselves once every twenty combat rounds, but the more able characters are more able to cope with the effects.

As for critical hits, I've seen houserules that try to emulate the RuneQuest critical system, where higher skill=a broader window of scoring a critical on the attack roll. Most of these involve rolls a certain number over the target number being a critical success, i.e. the lower the THAC0, the better the chance of striking a critical. Those systems look too fiddly for D&D. So I took my guide from WFRP1e, which allows the d6 damage dice to 'explode', so long as a second roll against Weapon Skill is made, and decided that a natural 20 would prompt a second attack roll. In other words, a natural 20 might cause 'double damage', but only if the attacker is skilled enough to 'hit' again. Another natural 20 results in another attack roll, and so on. But the chances of a series of natural 20s are microscopically small. Sure, you might kill a dragon in one blow, but only once every century or so... 

And then I sat down yesterday with my Rules Cyclopedia, my AD&D1e PHB and DMG, and my AD&D2e PHB and DMG, all to try to work out what I'd make my D&D players pay as upkeep costs. I didn't want them scrabbling for coppers in vein of our WFRP1e games - this was meant to be D&D(ish), after all - but I didn't want the game to completely ignore these things. My AD&D2e DMG is a much travelled book - it was posted the Dominican Republic to me for my birthday in the early 1990s, came back across the Atlantic to sunny Scotland, and since then has followed me around the UK - so it is no surprise that several pages are loose. One of these loose pages described the optional critical hit systems. And one of these systems was the system described above.

Who'da thunk it?

Nothing original.    

Nothing to see here. Just the story of a gamer finding that everything he thought of had been first invented over twenty years ago. It is funny feeling like one of the designers of D&D Next, eh?

p.s. Tenkar's thoughts on Attacking the Darkness certainly bear thinking about as an alternative fumble system, mind. They seem original, but who knows what rules are hidden in my gaming cupboards?

Anti-Climactic Critical Hit!

Critical hit systems are a great way to add colour to combat and leave characters with wounds and scars from a source other that the fiat of a cruel GM. They can, though, kill off villains a little too quickly.

A few weeks ago, our WFRP game reached the climax of Shadows Over Bogenhafen. For all the praise that has been heaped on this scenario, it didn’t play out as well as I’d hoped. The players sent their characters round in circles, making little headway in uncovering the diabolic scheme of Johannes Teugen, and seemed to grow more and more frustrated with each session. They wanted adventure, but ‘every time we thought we were rich, it all went wrong’. Perhaps there was a mismatch between the expectations of the players (only one of the four could be described a properly familiar with WFRP, one had played it a couple of times, one had played D&D back in the day, and one had never played an RPG before) and the tone of WFRP 1e. And perhaps I’m just not that good at running an investigative, combat-light game for characters with few resources in world quite so grim.

Nevertheless, the party saved Bogenhafen. Despite everything, but with more than a little help from the ‘let-me-tell-you-what-is-happening-NPC’, they managed to secrete themselves inside the warehouse-cum-temple. With the party split, hiding either side of the room, I prohibited talking between the different groups – someone was going to have to declare an action.

They leapt to the ambush just before the human sacrifice was made. With surprise on his side, Stanley, the Elven Agitator, managed to loose an arrow at Johannes before his mind was wiped by Gideon’s magic. ‘Exploding’ 6s later, and Johannes is bleeding to death, an arrow in the groin. With Johannes down, with filthy brutish armed men and a woman leaping from the darkness, and with Gideon revealing his true, demonic form, the fight was immediately in the party’s favour. The ordinary cultists were screaming in terror, and the hired muscle waiting outside the warehouse were unwilling to assist a demon, even if they could pass their Cool tests, so the fight was 3 on 1. For all Gideon’s powers, the accumulation of attacks will produce enough d6 rolls for damage to take him down. A failed Cool test or two was all that stopped him being hacked to the ground in a single turn.

An anti-climax. But then, it was an anti-climax to me, as GM. None of the players (much less, the characters), had any idea of just what was at stake as they disrupted the ritual. For all they knew, they simply rescued a young woman and smashed a demonic cult.

Funnily enough, our experience appears to be very similar to the ‘playtest’ of this RPGnet review. Except, at the final moment, ALL the dice all fell right for the player-characters. Which suggests to me that, for all Shadows Over Bogenhafen’s undoubted qualities, it is very often played poorly by players and GMs.