We’ve all gone to the movies and enjoyed those bloodbath fight scenes in Conan the Barbarian, or more recently the decapitations and amputations in Braveheart or Rob Roy. People like seeing realistic combats, not the silly Star Trek mock combats, or G.I. Joe battles in which the bad guys happen to eject out of their exploding planes or avoid point blank laser blasts. So why are role-playing games different?

Dungeons & Dragons is to blame for this. The combat was streamlined, cut back so that it loosely simulated the results (i.e. death or survival) without any of the gory details or complications (like disembowelment, slowly bleeding out, loss of limbs, head trauma, etc.). Hit points were developed to chart one’s injuries, but these abstract points really mean little when you can negate them with a healing spell or potion. Even the high-level spell Regeneration meant very little when you rarely lost a limb to an attack (unless you happened upon an enemy wielding a vorpal weapon). All those old stories about adventurous pirates with peg-legs, hook-hands, and eye patches would never exist in a D&D world. That “cripple” in the corner would get “better” with enough healing potions or clerical help. Even death meant little to most D&D players since, beyond a certain level, you could be brought back with simply the casting of a spell. Let’s face it, a fall from as little as 5 feet can break a bone, a fall from 50 feet should be fatal, and being bitten or gored by a dragon should mean the end of your character!

Not all games were like this. A fantasy variant developed by N. Robin Crossby (creator of the Harn campaign setting) included very realistic combat and results of hits. The results of this were needlessly complicated charts, numerous conditions that players had to manage and keep track of round to round, and combats were very brief (you usually were either killed outright or wounded so grievously that you could not go on). The Harnmaster system was very realistic and bloody, but it didn’t make for a very good game, especially since you could die from a single stab, thus ending your character’s life and your fun for the evening. Due to this, most adventurers would avoid fighting like the plague - running from anything other than the easiest encounters. In essence, their heroic characters were reduced to normal human beings afraid for their very lives… as it should be!

Other games, such as West End Games’ Star Wars or White Wolf’s Vampire: the Masquerade, used systems of tracking wounds, not health. A single shot with a laser or bite on the neck might drop you to wounded, another hit would bring you to severely wounded, another to incapacitated, etc. until your character died or was helped in some way (bacta treatments, blood sharing, etc.) . Each wound level had its own drawbacks, penalties, or circumstances. A lot of games adopted this style, but players found that mortality rates of very experienced characters were about the same as those of beginning characters. The only difference was that they were hit less often and may have been able to “soak” damage better using abilities or skills.

Combat, even in much later systems, is still very arbitrary. Specific actions in combat are restrained and kept under control, limited in some fashion, and left completely up to chance for the most part. Extremely skilled combatants still fail, and inept combatants can still triumph, simply from the toss of a few dice. Fatigue has little bearing on combats - you never “wear out” your opponent. Sure, you could say that D&D’s hit points represented more than simply physical stamina and health, adding in luck, skill, experience, etc. That was part of the charm of that increase in hit points for each level. But what did it mean to the monsters?

Armor Class was supposed to be a measure of how tough an opponent is to hit. Hit locations with different AC values, developed for such creatures as the beholder, ankheg, and remorhaz, added unnecessary complexity to the system unintentionally. If the monsters had different AC values, how about the characters, or other NPCs. Allowing random shots to the head (believe it or not, AD&D 1st edition allowed 1 shot in 6 to be a head shot for intelligent creatures) could seriously affect the combat if that d6 got stuck in a “1″ rut all night. Later versions of the game instituted the “called shot” which allowed someone to make an attack against a specific body part like a hand to disarm, a leg to trip, or an eye to blind. It’s fine to let the players do this to monsters, but few players were gracious enough to accept such treatment themselves.

Runequest had an interesting little system based on hit points, but these were spread across the surface of the body. Each portion also had its own defense rating so you always wanted to make sure you had more than just a breastplate on for your suit of plate mail! I had little experience with this system, but it did seem overly complex and tedious to perform calculations during combat. A few other games also used this breakdown - Rolemaster, for example. But then again, sneezing was a dangerous activity for a character since you could burst a blood vessel in your brain and die… (hey, it was on one of the charts….I swear!).

Super-hero genres usually relied on some form of Stamina rank or number which was used as hit points of a sort. Some of the hero games lumped all the physical stats together to get a Health score from which combat damage was subtracted. I never liked this for hero games, since the finality of death was always so rare in the genre. I think that the more generic “wound level” health track makes more sense in heroic role-play. Direct stat comparison was a good way to explain how some characters folded like a house of cards, while others withstood the best “Sunday punches.” But, then again, it wouldn’t be a game unless some skill and chance existed. No one likes a foregone conclusion (no matter what genre you’re talking about).

Now, 3rd edition D&D maintained the hit point structure; in fact they built on it by allowing no maximum to a creature’s Constitution score (beyond stacking rules). In essence, a creature (or character) with enough Hit Dice, Constitution, and magical boosts could have well over 500 hp! Then again, after seeing what a raging 12th level barbarian is capable of dishing out in a single round of combat, they need that many! Curiously, though, combat has become more tactical and precise in placement, number of attacks, method of attacking, and movement. This combat precision, matched with the outdated ambiguity of “hit points,” leads me to agree with MetalJim’s prognostication that D&D 4.0 might go the route of Star Wars d20 and change what hit points are and how they operate, if not eliminating them altogether and going the wound-level route. It may not be a bad move! Blasphemous, perhaps, but definitely warranted. Does anyone have a better way of representing wounds without making a game less than entertaining to play? If you’re not playing in a campaign or game system where healing is so common or widely available, how would you handle damage?