Defining Hit Points

Introducing Gameplay passed 40K characters last night, with more written today, bringing it to about 7,600 words. Not bad for three and a half days work. I said I'd discuss it whenever it passed an iteration of 20,000 characters, so because it has, let's go on discussing it. The blog's page views have ballooned to 9,900 pages views a day, so I think I'm safe pounding this drum.

My best work yesterday is, I think, this:

As a fabrication, the character is breakable; it can be killed. Situations can arise in game where the character can fall, be buried alive, be trampled by a runaway horse, drown... and, naturally, be killed by an enemy employing weapons. To capture the character's fragility, not only do we need a measurement that compares the character to other beings in the setting, but also one that allows the player to identify the same character at their best and also at a state of near death. As this is a game, the best method of doing this is to assign a number that states the character's "full health" versus the character is a state of "near death." That number is described as the character's hit points.

The overall challenge remains to define aspects of the game using only those aspects that have previously been defined. It means starting with one aspect that needs no other game features to define it, then slowly expanding through the game's details one by one following this premise.  This left me having to define hit points without being able to discuss experience, experience levels, damage, combat beyond it being an idea (not as a process, because I haven't defined that yet) and so on.

Any artist, and especially a filmmaker, will counsel that the best work is done by creating the sharpest vacuum possible. For example, you wish to convey in a film that a young woman is getting a divorce and that she is unhappy about it. Right off, you refuse to incoporate dialogue — that would be too easy. Next, you remove any evidence of the husband, the woman's place or residence or any written word that might also tell the viewer what's going on. You impose a scene where the woman is alone. You disallow any music or background noise other than neutral. Now, with these constraints, tell the audience the message.

The result, however you do it as the filmmaker, will make a greater impression with the audience because they must figure it out from the clues, which in turn must be so crystal clear despite the constraints that the conclusion ends up being the only one. I'm attempting the same ideal. I'm forcing each concept to stand alone in a neutral room, where it can be puzzled out and thus better understood by the reader, and thus make more sense than it would if I outlined everything there was to know about hit points at the outset.

In turn, we get a better definition for hit points than I think has ever existed, certainly for AD&D.  But then, that bar wasn't very high.

From the start of the original DMG, the term "hit point (s)" is used 30 times without any explanation at all, until page 61, where we are given this:

"As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them. While this is not true with respect to most monsters, it is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Lest some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away compaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, ond the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents."

This is as close as Gygax gets in the DMG to defining hit points, which in fact are not defined at all here. Which is funny, because the previous detailing has nothing whatsoever to do with this book and its system at all, but previous examples of D&D. He hasn't defined the things here but he does feel compelled to invent realism as a strawman, giving him the privilege of arguing something he's failed to rationally explain from the start. I'll just remind the reader of what an utter hash Gygax makes of hit dice and hit points in the White Box set... the entire subject was obviously an issue for the man.

Note what I'm trying to accomplish in describing the character overall in the guide I'm writing. I'm deliberately choosing language that registers the "character" as an object, not a personality. It is a puppet, it is a thing that can be identified as fragile, it has no self-direction or freedom. It is a "device" the player uses in order to play the game. It is a game piece.

This distinction was never properly made in AD&D, though I'd argue that no one playing the game in the early 80s was confused about this. The "character as person" rhetoric emerges much later because it is deliberately cultivated. Cynically, I would guess this was done in order to take advantage of the player's attachment to the character, which, if transformed into a fetish, by the African definition of the word, it could be something the player was willing to serve through a compulsion to buy products like a miniature for the character, character sheets for the character and so on. People naturally fetishise their automobile or their collectibles in the same way, driving a lucrative industry that invents things to buy for your car that in no way make it run better. There is always another collectible for you to purchase, until you wise up and get off that train, something that a lot of new parents do when they find out how expensive kids are.

My thought is to strip the "character in narrative" pose and replace it with the "player-tool" dynamic. Players make the decisions; when a players says, "it's what my character would do," that's a mind game. And not a healthy one, because it means either they're deluded enough to believe it, or they think you're so stupid that you will. Players like this? Toss them. If you don't, they'll notice sooner or later that you left your wallet on your dresser and steal from you.

Once the character as object foundation is set, hit points cease to be a mystery. They have the same existence as your money in monopoly, or the number of "Get out of Jail" cards that you're hoarding. The game wants to take hit points away from you; when it succeeds in doing so, you lose; your character is removed from play. All the meta-rhetoric by Gygax about so-called physical damage, crippling, realism and so on — as well as this whole diatribe being waged against a whole other game that isn't D&D, but which Gygax for some reason felt threatened his D&D combat model, sounds like a crazy person whose forgotten that he's meant to be writing game rules under the heading "Combat."

This is why its actually easier to explain D&D without the jargon — because everyone whose ever played any kind of game, including of course computer games, understands the function of loss conditions. We play until the lost conditions are met. Once you lose this many lives, that's it... either reload from the last save place or restart the game. Not a mystery in any sense of the word.

Might be interesting, don't you think? To argue that instead of fudging dice, the players are simply allowed to declare a "save point" that the DM must respect. Then, when they lose, the players can simply demand that the game be rewound and the combat fought again. In this culture, with video games, makes more sense than fudging.

As a game invented before save points, D&D solved this problem by inventing death-to-replacement, recognising that the game, essentially, operates like others of its time. Accept the game's end when it comes and start again... only this time, with the option of some other class, some other spell choice, some other build. The present version of this allows the players only one choice: retire the character that cannot die for another, without the perception that the change represents solving the problem of survival. All characters cannot die. Therefore, the only thing left is the skin they exist in.