One of the things I have done when running Primeval 2D6 is to get rid of the more abstract notion of hit points, number of hits, etc. in favor of a more descriptive form of injuries.
This has coincided with my attempt to move all of my old school-styled gaming away from discussions of numbers and mechanics, and instead towards a discussion of the fiction as much as possible.
Now hit points are good for D&D’s abstraction level – a topic I often repeat. Combat isn’t the main focus, individual strikes and particular injuries are not the default interest of the system, so the abstraction performs its purpose. You also get a nice combination of effects – hit points are not only a collection of your stamina, luck, and health, but it also partially represents your fighting abilities. A well trained fighter may lose hit points while blocking a variety of blows, and is able to continue doing so because of their ability, expressed by their hit point pool increasing with level.
Nice features aside, I do sometimes see large buckets of points loosening the fictional impact of combat, and often there is a fatigue trying to figure out what each successful damage roll represents once characters start easily surviving a few. I also feel on shaky ground when trying to judge that characters have taken significant long-term injuries: the hit point system acts as an agreement, so jumping to dismemberment feels dissonant when combined with the abstract nature.
I have used and played about every form of wounding system under the sun – separated health from stamina, discrete wound categories, flesh/grit, cumulative wounds at 0hp, etc. but recently I have decided to opt for the less is more approach – almost all of the wounds in Primeval 2D6 games have been ruled on the fly within the context that they have occurred.
Each instance will be a little different, but here is generally how it comes up in game. Whenever a character engages in combat, or has any other kind of a conflict where they may be injured I try to let the player know about this risk. Sometimes it is obvious, like a dire wolf leaping and snapping its jaws at the character, other times it is implied – the usual hints at a blade trap hidden in a tomb.
I’ll then figure out what aspects the character has to reduce this risk. The dire wolf may potentially tear the arm off of a failed roll in one circumstance, but maybe how the character is defending themselves, or the armor that they wear will reduce the potential wound down.
We’ll do the usual roll-off, and if the character fails then I ask them to write down the wound on their sheet. Sometimes this is super specific, other times its more nebulous – the character knows they took a blow but they don’t know just how bad it is yet. This may allow me to think up an injury with due time, or I will reserve another roll after the fact when they are checking on it to see just how severe it became.
I often think of wounds in three categories, but I try not to formalize this. There are light wounds that can probably be bandaged up or “walked off” with time, there are moderate wounds that should have someone attend to with significant forms of rest, and there are severe wounds which pose a threat to the character’s life and if they survive will probably affect them for the rest of their days. Then there is obviously a mortal wound category beyond this.
I don’t formalize this because I still want to leave wounds somewhat nebulous and up to discretion. The last thing I want to do is thoroughly determine if a blow from a club is a light or significant and come up with a subsystem that can be gamed through to alleviate it. I want us to be open to playing out these effects at the table, and have them resolve or degrade as the fiction demands.
Often characters who are wounded will suffer the risk of death whenever they make additional rolls, but much like the above – I do not want to say that this is always the case, its just a framework of thinking I use because it feels right to me, and often seems to coincide with fictional threats. But it is not something I am going to codify.
For monsters I follow pretty much a similar formula for characters. If a creature is such that in D&D I would have allocated a lot of hit points to them, I will instead referee conflicts such that the chance of injury to the creature is particularly low. For example, a dragon could be put down with a strike or two from a hefty weapon, but its armor and size is such that it will have a very small chance of risking injury most of the time. The fun is then allowing the characters to discover the means to deal with their foe, rather than allowing a whittling down of hit points.
Sometimes I will cheat and just outright give certain creatures more “wounds” so to speak, so I admit I am a bit of a hypocrite, but like I said above hits can be a useful abstraction, and I’ll use every tool in my toolbox when appropriate.
Let me know what you think of this method, and how you like handling injuries and the like in your games. Thank you for reading!
I have been moving in the same direction in my own games lately (especially 2400), and I really like it. I did add one rule to make me feel less like a cheater when it comes to some opponents having more “wounds,” and it’s basically a variant of the old “sundering shields” house rule: You can declare one of your “defenses” broken to avoid the consequences of a hit. For PCs, this is the extent of the armor rules. For their opponents, however, you can be pretty loose with what counts as a “defense.” You might need to break a hole in the target’s armor, hobble them so they can’t move so fast, AND disable the item that makes them hard to see, and THEN you can actually hurt them. Takes a little more work because you’re basically naming each hit point individually, but it’s something I’d only do for opponents who are a Big Deal.
Thanks for the comment!
I play with a lot of ruined armor as well, it comes from a place of announcing threats and letting the players know just how dangerous something may be, as well as heightening the drama.
I really like this series of articles. Stripping away the mechanics of the game lets people engage more with the game world and less with the mechanics.
However, I’m trying to wrap my head around how I would actually do this. These are the questions that keep coming up for me:
1. A bandit with a dagger successfully stabs the PC in the gut; this could range anywhere from a fatal wound to a wound that bleeds but leaves the PC standing and able to run away (with difficulty). How do you decide the severity of a hit without any numbers?
2. What do you do if a PC racks up a few minor injuries?
3. How do you keep track of all of these non-numerical injuries?
I think you’re really onto something, I just want to understand it!
Hi, thanks for the comment!
For your questions there are no concrete answers, and the reason is that this kind of play strives to play worlds and not rules. So its going to be entirely dependent on the kind of game you’re playing, the situation, and how the characters are addressing these threats.
For #1, let’s assume the bandit is some low-level scoundrel, they have a nasty blade, and the character is some competent (but not overly heroic adventurer).
How was the bandit coming at the character and how was the character reacting to that description? Do they have any things that might help them defend against this dagger?
So a successful hit could be something like the bandit grappling the characters shield out of their grip, or it could be them slashing through a bit of armor, or it may even be a deep puncture – it depends on the fiction and probably on the result of the roll, up to Ref’s discretion. If whatever the means to determine the hit was particularly beneficial for the enemy, the player probably took a pretty bad wound.
I usually don’t play with death being the result of a single roll, so I’ll often opt for injury before putting fatalities on the table.
As for racking up minor injuries – I don’t typically like playing with too many cumulative injuries. So anytime the character is involved in risk with an existing injury, they’re probably going to risk either making their existing injury worse or suffering a more severe injury, or death is on the line.
For keeping track of them I just have the player write them down on their sheet. So if a character gets clubbed to the face they probably write down something like “broken jaw”, or getting stabbed by a spear will be something like “spear to the gut”, they then go away as is appropriate within the fiction. I find players often end up liking to play out these injuries, whereas they feel upset when a large number of hit points are erased from their character sheet.
Hopefully this helps – I think my play report of my FKR system has at least two occurrences of character injury, one getting attacked by a hyena and another getting their hand chopped right off. Let me know what you think!
Okay, that helps a lot!
So the emphasis is on risk, and how it changes relative to the player’s approach and the injuries which have come before. If a PC is prepared and healthy, the risk of death is practically zero; they may get a minor injury or a more serious one if really unlucky. Once they have a minor injury, the risk includes a serious injury and possibly death if unlucky. If they have a major injury already, death is a reasonable risk. This almost sounds like a system with 3HP and anything that’s meaningfully risky deals 1-2 points of damage, but by allowing for fictional positioning to change the risk, you have a little more discretion over how things actually play out.
“I find players often end up liking to play out these injuries, whereas they feel upset when a large number of hit points are erased from their character sheet.” Hmm, yeah, that makes sense. It’s a lot easier to role-play “broken jaw” than “7/16 HP”, and it sucks to watch numbers drain away. I also don’t like constantly adding and removing numbers from a character sheet. Writing “gouged eye” and later erasing it to write “cool eye patch” is far more fun and flavorful!
Thanks for explaining further. Fictional positioning is a sensible concept on paper but a mysterious concept in practice, so seeing how different folks handle it is super useful!
I just stumbled onto this series of posts by way of RPG Pub. I have to say I find they are really, really resonating with me. Please keep em coming!
One thing thing I like to do is set the stakes before the dice start rolling, which is a cue I take from HeroQuest. If a PC starts with a narration that says they’re going to kill their opponent, I declare that with the stakes set, if they fail then the player character also risks mortal injury. We can then re-negotiate the stakes if the player doesn’t like that, and will only roll when there’s agreement about just what’s at stake. They may, for example, restate that instead they want to stagger their opponent and create an opening for the rest of the party to perform their actions. I might reply that the opponent wishes to disarm the player, which would give said opponent advantage on the next turn. When we agree, we roll the dice and narrate the results.