HP sucks. Here’s something better.
Before I say one word more here, I should point out that I am explicitly talking about tabletop RPGs here. Tracking HP is totally fine for console RPGs, tabletop war games, fighting games, etc. etc. When you’re playing a real mathy game or tracking things all over, fine. But for tabletop RPGs, it kinda sucks. In practice you get stuff like the “rocket tag” of D&D 3.x where you frequently just chop right through a monster before it gets to act (or vice versa), or a long slog of whittling something down, or the occasional Shadowrun thing which helps the pacing but makes things kinda samey. So let’s full on drop it.
What do we really want out of combat in a tabletop RPG, most of the time? We have a villain or a cool monster we want to give a chance to chew on some scenery. We want to give the PCs a chance to do cool stuff informed by all the stuff they have written on their sheet. We also want some tactical decision making/random clever plans on the table. We probably want to keep things quick and snappy enough that we aren’t here focused on just this one scene for a whole session or more. We want to spice things up by rolling some dice with stakes that matter. We probably don’t wanna go killing PCs. That’s a lot of assumptions I’m making, but that’s where I’m coming from with this... orphaned mechanic I personally can’t think of a situation I’ll likely use it unless somehow I get tapped to reinvent the wheel for like, 7th or 8th edition D&D a decade from now or something. Especially since I’m using D&D as a jumping off point here.
Let’s literally just slot this in where HP goes in D&D, for now, for argument’s sake. We roll a d20, we compare a bunch of math, and we either get a hit, a crit, or a miss. Now we want to roll some more dice to see how hurt something gets. Let’s make this a roll on a chart though, see how this plays out.
As I’m using D&D as a test case, let’s go all maximalist. Every monster has a chart for when that monster takes damage and when that monster damages a player.
We just hit a monster. We have a big range of numbers. The highest number on the chart is “the monster dies.” The next few below that mess the monster up in cool creative ways. You’re like hacking heads off a hydra or taking the arms off a shambling corpse or shoving something down a dragon’s throat or whatever. Stuff that’s fun to visualize and screws with the monster’s ability to fight back. Below that big splashy dramatic range, we have some results that describe some really solid hits that aren’t permanent disfiguring game changers, but they leave big dramatic scars and and give you bonuses on future damage table rolls. In the mid-range of the table, these are big bonuses tied to sending things reeling and setting it up to maybe get that killing blow next. Then the lowest end of the table the monster is kinda no-selling the attack so the bonuses to future damage rolls are like +1 or +2 BUT those bonuses apply for the rest of the combat.
So something like this:
11 or less- A solid blow across the chest. +1 on all future damage rolls.
12-15- Serious injury to the leg, +2 to all future damage rolls.
16-18- Knocked to the ground, +5 to all damage rolls until the end of your next turn.
19-20- Hack off a bit: Disable the next of these attacks each result, A B C D.
21-24- Some real gruesome thing, depends what tone we want for this game.
25+ Boom dead monster.
Now I’m pulling these numbers out fairly arbitrarily because I don’t want to fully design a whole game here, but for argument’s sake, let’s say our big tough fighter is rolling 2d6+str for damage here. The character who’s less fighty is doing like, 1d8+str and we maybe have a 3d4 sort of character or a big ol’ wild swinging d20 or something in the mix. And str for the record is like, a bonus of realistically 0-5 or so. And crits do something. Double dice or a flat bonus or maxed roll, whatever.
The way this math’s out, we are DEFINITELY not taking this thing down in the first round. Nobody should be capable of straight up rolling a 25. If we’ve got some real min-maxed characters and some fantastic rolls, we might knock the monster to the floor right away and do some real serious damage to it right off the bat between a couple people. If we don’t we’re going to spend a couple rounds with people being incapable of rolling over a 15, but that’s OK. Low rolls shift the whole range over. You have a mix of heavy hitters and ligh hitters, and they all have their own roll to play. Half the party just gets in there stabbing this monster in the back and hacking its legs to get it all winded, someone smacks it real hard to set up for a big splashy victory, then maybe the next person to act pulls that off, or they just hurt it real bad, it recovers a little, we keep whittling down for another round and try again. If you’re landing hits, you’re making a clear contribution. If you’re landing big hits, they’re splashy, modest, they’re practical.
We also have a damage chart for what the monster does when connecting. Here we want a lot less emphasis on stacking damage bonuses over time, but still probably a little of that. We probably don’t want full on death or tearing arms off on the table, and we can roll any Cool Monster Abilities right in here. Fighting a werewolf? OK, if it gets a high result on its damage roll, you totally got bit, you’re a werewolf now, deal with it. You’ve got your partially sucked out souls, your nasty poisons you need to go look for cures for, with more mundane monsters just your really distinctive facial scars you’re stuck with for the rest of your life. Lower damage rolls are like, sending you flying back to the wall or knocking stuff out of your hands or other things that are temporary setbacks and might change how you act the next round basically. We want the heroes to win.
If you want something like different classes rolling different dice for HP, or a constitution stat, OK, monsters have bonuses/penalties to their damage rolls accordingly. +10 on damage rolls to the squishy wizard, he’s getting all messed up. Big badass barbarian, she’s gonna shrug off everything and just get knocked around a lot.
This scales nicely too! PCs fight something that’s kind of out of their league, or that they should be curb-stomping? Want an extra elite miniboss monster? Just modify the damage rolls by the difference in their level vs. the monster’s CR. Fight’s inherently that much shorter or longer and more/less dramatic. Easy peasy.
You might notice though that as we aren’t really tracking long term damage, healing doesn’t really work in this system. That is a feature not a bug. Having the one person who just casts a heal spell on whoever got hurt last tends to really not be very fun for the healer. You can still have healing as a thing for more dramatic injuries and poisoning and curses and such after the fight, but, yeah no basic HP restore spell. System doesn’t need it. Have fun actually playing your character. Want a monster that regenerates though? That’s still easy to do. Every round they either regain use of some attack that got disabled or drop that stacking damage bonus back down some. Simple.
And again, this isn’t a system I’m personally super keen to implement because... either it’s an optional rule where I have to work out the damage math curves on some existing game play with numbers, and write charts for scores of different monsters, rework some character options, find a fix for how like, I had a Pathfinder character once who hit for like 2d4+512 damage on a good day, etc. OR I design and balance out a super crunchy maximalist new game from scratch and I frankly have too many other big projects on my plate right now. But, here, play with the idea. Try and maybe shoehorn it into your next game. Gimme feedback. Full on implement it and credit me for the idea. Whatever.
