The Problem with HP

 Hit points have always existed and, I assume, will always continue to exist in tabletop RPGs. HP were there from the very beginning: they already existed in 1974, when the revolutionary Dungeons & Dragons was released, which at the time described itself quite succinctly (ahem) as “Rules for fantastic Medieval Wargames playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” Even before RPGs knew they would be called “roleplaying games,” hit points were already there. The basic idea is quite simple and effective: your character has a numerical value that abstractly estimates how much damage they can take before being forced to wear a wooden overcoat. After all, it’s essential to know this in a “wargame campaign,” where much of the tension comes from seeing which side loses its fighting force first.

However, if you think about it more deeply, the way we generally use hit points in RPGs is a bit strange: if a character has 53 hit points, it barely matters whether they are at 22 or 42. In this kind of game, the path from full life to death is like walking down a dark, foggy corridor with a light at the end: no details, no information, and only one direction to move towards. HP are, in general, a completely abstract way of representing something that, both in real life and fiction, should have a huge and very noticeable impact. In the classic D&D way of counting hit points, we effectively have only two states: alive or dead. One moment your character is alive, “doing just fine, thanks,” and the next they simply die. As people say: “the only hit point that really matters is the last one.” Characters with numerical hit points in an RPG are like patients suffering from a symptomless disease. It’s as if D&D forces all characters to die of sudden death.

A Brief Aside: “Hit Points,” “Meat Points,” or “Health Points”?

You’ve probably wondered (or seen someone wonder): “Wait, how did my character get hit by three sword blows and survive?! That’s not realistic!” There’s a widely known argument that we tend to interpret hit points incorrectly: many D&D-style rulebooks say HP don’t measure literal wounds or sword strikes, but rather an abstract representation of luck, resilience, and/or willpower. In practice, however, that’s not what I usually see at most tables: “The goblin hits you. He slices open your belly with his scimitar, dealing 5 damage.”

The point here, however, is not to evaluate the realism of hit points. Regardless of the narrative justification, HP as a game mechanic meant to produce enjoyment (fun, tension, etc.) needs more refinement to achieve that goal and stop being just a simple math operation made between dice rolls. In other words, how can we make HP actually mean something in play, rather than just being abstract numbers?

A Highly Contagious Disease

Ever since hit points appeared in games, they’ve spread uncontrollably. Numerical HP are everywhere, not just in TTRPGs. Like other sacred cows of the hobby (I’m looking at you, “ability scores”!), HP are one of those things we apply without asking why. We’ve naturalized them as intrinsic to conflict-based games and can no longer think outside the box. For example: are numerical HP really the best solution for a game where characters can reach 100 HP or more? Does combat become more or less dynamic when we’re at 40 out of 67 HP? Does this mechanic bring any positive impact to the game?

Let’s consider card games for a brief moment: Magic: The Gathering, a deservedly acclaimed game, is built around the concept of HP. In Magic, your goal is to reduce your opponent’s life total to zero while preventing yours from reaching zero. As in D&D-style games, Life totals indicate how close a participant is to elimination. Good Magic players, however, learn to ignore that psychological pressure. “The only HP that matters is the last one,” remember? It doesn’t matter whether you end the game with 20 or 1 HP. In fact, it’s common for Magic players to treat HP as a resource: trading life for more spells, removing threats, and so on.

And here’s the problem: D&D and similar RPGs, in most cases, do not treat HP as resources, nor as anything beyond abstract markers. In D&D, HP do not make the game more dramatic or interesting. On the contrary: a warrior who loses 12 of their 57 HP keeps fighting as if nothing happened. I would even argue that HP belong in the same design category as detailed encumbrance measured in real-world units: tracking how much a mug or helmet weighs in kilograms is tedious. That’s the same with HP. The only reason we pay attention to HP instead of ignoring them is because they are tied to the dreaded phrase: “you are dead.”

How to Fix Hit Points

As common as abstract numerical HP are, we can still do interesting things with them. There is still redemption for this mechanic, and many games have made simple adjustments that result in incredibly dramatic and fun gameplay. We’ve already gotten rid of tedious encumbrance (hello, Black Hack and Mausritter!), and now it feels like it’s time to do the same with HP. Fortunately, I am not alone on this battlefield, and others before me have already taken on the task of confronting hit points. The To Be Resolved blog offers a particularly interesting categorization between “Inheritors,” “Rejectors,” and “Synthesizers,” dividing tabletop RPG systems into those that build upon hit points, those that abolish the mechanic altogether, and those that occupy a middle ground. It’s well worth checking out.

Next, we’ll explore how different RPG systems have tried to quantify character death, whether by refining, replacing, or doing away entirely with hit points and equivalent mechanics.

Note: what follows is not an exhaustive list, and something really cool has certainly been left out. Feel free to share your favorite method in the comments. Who knows, maybe we can make a more complete version in the future.

Smelling Blood – The “Bloodied” Condition

In the fourth edition of D&D, any creature at half or fewer of its maximum HP was considered “Bloodied.” Many character and monster abilities interacted with this state. For example, the “Gnoll Marauder” gains extra attacks when there are bloodied characters nearby, and the “Goblin Skullcleaver,” when bloodied, enters a blind rage that doubles its damage output. It’s a simple rule that accomplishes a lot with very little, and shows that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to give HP some nuance.

 

 

The Third Eye – The Game Master

“The GM is the players’ eyes and ears.” Of course, if the GM is the one painting the scene and its surroundings, if they describe the behavior of NPCs and everything else, that means the players’ perception is built through a secondary lens, filtered by the GM’s descriptions. It’s quite a mystical process, if you think about it: the player doesn’t look at things directly, but consults something external to themselves to obtain information about reality. The level of detail in an RPG world, therefore, depends greatly on the GM’s descriptive style.

When I run D&D, I usually hide enemy HP, preferring a narrative description of the opponent’s fictional state. Instead of saying “your arrow dealt 6 damage and the bandit now has 2 HP,” I prefer something like: “you fire an arrow into the bandit’s stomach. You notice his smug smile vanish instantly. He turns pale, staggering, looking like he’s about to faint.” It’s an old narrative technique: it conveys information indirectly while also making it more engaging.

A curious case reported in The Elusive Shift recounts that, in the early days of the game in the 1970s, many campaigns even valued players’ ignorance of the rules. For these groups (most of them followers of the freekriegsspiel mindset), the rules existed only to guide the GM and players interacted only with the fiction. Making HP a hidden piece of information turns the game into something far more mysterious and tense: if you don’t know your own character’s exact HP, you would certainly think twice before fighting goblins or jumping across a pit.

This approach, much more common in the early days of RPGs, is practically extinct today. But I often find myself wondering: what is it like to play a game where players don’t have access to the information on their own character sheet? What if, to know your exact HP, you had to pay for the services of a cleric or something like that? This approach certainly doesn’t solve any of my initial issues with HP as a mechanic, but it’s intriguing enough to sustain at least a few sessions of play. If you’ve had any experience with this, please reach out. I’d love to hear more!

Death Lurks Around Every Corner – Quantum Hit Points

What if, instead of hiding the entire game system from players, we applied this veil of uncertainty only to hit points? What if randomness didn’t exist only in the damage roll, but also in your total HP? This is precisely the approach discussed in a post on the Save vs. Total Party Kill blog. Here’s an excerpt:

When your character is healthy and unhurt, you don’t have a Hit Point total, just your Hit Dice. When you get attacked, hit, wounded, or otherwise in danger of dying, roll your Hit Dice. Keep the best result. That’s your HP total, from which you subtract the damage taken. So, a character only has an HP total when they are wounded. [...] Some people in my game call this “quantum hit points”. Getting hit is always scary—you never really know how many hit points you have!

The DURF system does something similar. In that game, weapon damage is fixed (daggers deal 3 wounds, swords deal 4 wounds, and so on). Its rulebook (which is only 12 pages long!) states the following: “Each time a creature takes Wounds, it rolls its Hit Dice. If the result is less than or equal to the Wounds it has accumulated, the creature dies.” I really like this solution because it doesn’t require any major gymnastics to adapt to your D&D table. It’s simple, effective, and very tense… all that by changing when randomness enters the combat procedure!

Fighting ‘till the End – Save or Faint

In Mutants & Masterminds, a superhero game, there are no hit points, and death in combat is (by design) nearly impossible. After all, it would be completely anticlimactic for a group of minions to take down a Superman-like hero. Instead, a character’s physical integrity is protected through several stages: first, the character may attempt to avoid the attack by making a Defense check. If they fail to defend themselves, they must make a Resistance check to avoid the effect of the attack (usually taking Damage or negative conditions). In this context, damage essentially means cumulative penalties to future Resistance checks, unless the damage is very high or accumulates significantly. Even so, even when a character is hit multiple times, the target must first receive the Incapacitated condition, and only then, if they take further damage, receive the “At death’s door” condition and actually have a chance of dying.

Setting superhero idiosyncrasies aside, this “pass a test to keep fighting” framework can be very useful in dramatic games, creating room for those incredible, shounen-anime-worthy moments where people shout, “OMG! He refuses to die!”

The Death Spiral – Wound Levels

Other TTRPGs followed the same logic as numerical hit points, but gave it a more realistic twist. A true simulationist fever that especially affected games of the 1990s. Systems like Vampire: The Masquerade, Legend of the Five Rings, the CODA system from The Lord of the Rings, among others, implemented “Levels” of hit points that represent the increasing degradation of a character’s condition; instead of just “dead” and “alive,” your character could now be “lightly wounded” or “gravely injured.” At first glance, this is an excellent idea that brings significant narrative gains: my character took an axe blow that destroyed their shoulder. Ouch! No one could wield a sword properly with a wrecked shoulder like that! Of course it makes sense that I take a -3 penalty on all my rolls! The more injured you are, the less capable you are of fighting. It makes sense! Very cool!

Well… sort of. As much as this approach brings nuance and narrative richness, the idea of punishing a character twice (losing precious HP and also losing part of their ability to fight) causes characters who are already losing to fall even further behind. Just saying the words “death spiral” near someone who has used these systems is enough to trigger their PTSD. Did you lose initiative and take a critical hit in the very first round of combat? Well, looks like you’ll have to deal with that -4 on your sheet! Good luck! (if you hadn’t quite grasped what “death spiral” meant yet, I imagine it’s clear now!)

A Small Death Spiral

Game design is hard. The solution that seems cooler or more realistic is not always the best in terms of gameplay. Fortunately, there are people out there who seem born to do this. In this case, I’m talking about Chris McDowall and the wonderful game Into the Odd. The following idea isn’t exactly new, it was already present in the classic Traveller: instead of having a separate stat to track wounds, damage is dealt directly to an ability score. Each hit reduces a relevant stat. For example: a sword strike reduces your Strength and may kill you; an electric shock reduces your Dexterity and may paralyze you; if something is truly traumatic, psychologically speaking, it reduces your Will, and your character is Lost when that attribute reaches zero.

“But Felipe! Isn’t that just the ‘death spiral’ again?” In a way, yes. But Into the Odd sidesteps part of the problem by completely removing attack rolls: in this system, whenever a character attacks in combat, they simply deal their weapon’s damage automatically. In other words, even if your Strength decreases, it does not affect your chances of hitting your opponent. And the same goes for enemies… making any encounter with mere goblins and giant rats potentially your last steps through the world of the living. In this kind of game, as people often say, “combat is a fail state”: you entered that fight to lose (HP), so you’d better have a plan to end it quickly.

Life is harsh in games with a death spiral. And if that’s what you want in your game, you’ve just discovered one of the greatest secrets of tabletop RPGs: getting screwed can be incredibly fun. Death spiral-style games tend to focus heavily on exploration, since much of their appeal lies in making life difficult in the wilderness, whether by making encumbrance, rations, and torches mechanically relevant and engaging, or by making your character’s injuries something that truly impacts their future actions. Other games that use similar approaches include Mutant: Year Zero and Forbidden Lands.

“Attack Every Part of the Character Sheet”

In 2013, Arnold Kemp made a blog post that popularized the idea that dangers in tabletop RPGs should not threaten only a character’s HP, but every other relevant part of their sheet, including attributes, inventory, and even XP and levels (as in the dreaded older editions of D&D, where incorporeal undead could drain character levels!).

Yikes… (excerpt from the Monster Manual, AD&D 1e, p. 100)

Many games embrace this approach to representing danger. Here are a few:

Your Backpack Is Your Life – Inventory Slots as HP

Speaking of encumbrance… have you heard the word of Equipment Slots today? Every opportunity is a good opportunity to evangelize about creative ways to track what a character is carrying! Personally, I think HP and encumbrance are two of the most problematic mechanics in D&D design. So why not solve both at once?

Well, if that’s the direction you want to take, there’s no better game than Knave 2e. Here, the similarity to Into the Odd is pretty clear: players don’t have classic HP, but rather very low values of “hit protection.” In Knave, when your Hit Protection reaches zero, each point of excess damage begins to occupy an inventory slot, with a description appropriate to the damage taken (stabbed, burned, etc.). If there is an item in that slot when the character takes the wound, they are forced to drop it.

In a game where experience is measured by the amount of gold collected, this is an excellent mechanic that ties your character sheet together into a cohesive whole: XP depends on gold, gold depends on your inventory, and your inventory depends on your HP.

There is nothing better than a litte Tetris in my TTRPG!

Disabling Powers

 

There are fates far worse than death. Being forced to watch the collective defeat of your group of adventurers because a key part of your character has been disabled is certainly among them. Games that lean into this instead of using HP tend to be very successful at conveying the exhaustion, despair, and loss of hope that accompany a collapse in battle (and, of course, making players cry out in frustration).

Disabling powers works even better when the terrible choice of what the character loses is placed in the players’ hands. This is the case when a PC is hit in His Majesty The Worm: the player chooses what happens to their character, whether it’s reducing the condition of one of their armors, disabling one of their talents (up to a maximum of two), or taking conditions such as “Injured,” “Staggered,” or “At Death’s Door.” The beauty of this system is that the more Wounds a character takes, the fewer options remain available… and if things go badly enough, the “At Death’s Door” condition will eventually be marked.

Called Shots

And what about when a player wants to aim a blow at an enemy’s hand? In some systems, such as GURPS, Basic Roleplaying, and RuneQuest, this is a very specific action within the rules. This doesn’t change HP directly, but it interacts significantly with damage, so it’s worth mentioning here.

In GURPS 4e, there is a rule that works like this: each body part you target imposes an additional penalty on the attack roll to simulate the difficulty of aiming, but in return, a successful hit produces extra effects. For example, targeting the eyes requires a roll at a -9 penalty (!!), but if the character is using “impaling”, “piercing” or “tight-beam burning” weapons, and the attack deals over HP/10, the target becomes blind. Also, if it hits, the strike damages the brain without going through the additional 2 points of Damage Reduction provided by the skull (this may be the most GURPS sentence I’ve ever written in my life); targeting the neck imposes a -5 penalty, but if the attacker hits, damage is increased by 1.5× for crushing or corrosion damage and by 2× for cutting damage.

In earlier versions of the game, each body part limited the total damage it could take. For example, striking an enemy’s arm could make them drop their weapon, but would never cause them to lose more than 10% of their total HP, creating a tactical trade-off between dealing maximum damage and gaining a specific advantage.

If this level of granularity doesn’t give you a headache and instead seems like a good way to make attack math more interesting, then a more simulationist game might be for you. In my experience, however, adding mechanical hurdles to performing actions tends to have the opposite effect: a -9 penalty on an attack usually convinces the player that doing anything other than a standard attack is a bad idea.

"it's just a flesh wound"

Narrative Impact

What if, instead of “-8 HP,” the system said “you’re limping”? This is perhaps one of my favorite approaches, and many games have explored it in different ways. Here are some fun ways to do it:

Stress and Consequences

 

In Fate Core, there are two ways to absorb damage: by taking Stress and/or Consequences. Stress essentially works as a substitute for HP. When you are hit, you mark a “Stress box” equal to the damage taken, and if that box is already marked, you must mark a higher-value box. When the character can no longer mark a box, they are out of the conflict. However, before marking a stress box, the player can choose to take one or more Consequences (this is the fun part): Consequences represent the lasting narrative effect of that attack, and can be more or less severe depending on how much damage is absorbed. Every consequence is written as text, a short phrase or description that can be invoked during play as a relevant narrative aspect.

Here is an example taken from Fate itself:

Cynere is surrounded by three of the thugs [...], and they manage to land a 6-shift attack on her. So far, she has escaped unharmed in this fight and still has all of her stress boxes and consequences available.

She has two ways to take the hit. She could take a severe consequence, which would negate 6 stress. She could also take a moderate consequence (4 stress) and use her 2-point stress box.

She decides that it’s unlikely she’ll get hit that hard again, so she opts to take the severe consequence to keep her stress track open for smaller hits.

Amanda and Lily agree to call the severe consequence “Nearly Gutted.” Cynere takes a brutal slash from one of the thugs’ swords, gritting her teeth through the pain...

 

The Reverse Death Spiral – Dramatic Wounds

Within this space of “narrative wounds,” the TTRPG world is (fortunately) very well served. But I’d like to highlight another very useful approach for heroic games, found in 7th Sea by John Wick: the more wounded your character is, the stronger they become. It’s a clever inversion of the “death spiral” (which is fitting, since in this game the wound track is literally called the “death spiral.” Very clever, Mr. Wick!).

It works like this: when your character is hit, they mark boxes on the “death spiral” track equal to the damage taken. At certain points on the track, the character must mark spaces containing “stars,” representing that they have suffered a “dramatic wound.” As the character accumulates more dramatic wounds, they gain more benefits (bonuses to rolls, becoming more dangerous, etc.). However, each character can only withstand up to 3 dramatic wounds. If they receive a 4th, the character is not literally out of the fight, but enters a “helpless” state, where acting costs scarce resources and they are in real danger of dying at an enemy’s hands.

Be Quick or be dead! – Hit Points as Initiative

Remember when we talked about games where HP can be used as a resource? Exalted 3e does this in an extremely unique and fun way. Here’s an excerpt from the book itself:

Initiative is possibly the most important element of combat. It not only determines the order in which characters take their turns, but more importantly functions as an overall measure of the tempo of battle and a character’s confidence and advantage within the fight. A character with high Initiative controls the flow of combat, forcing opponents to respond to his tactics and assaults; a character with low Initiative is on the ropes, struggling desperately for an opening to turn the tide in his favor. Sudden reversals of fortune are not only possible but frequent, so it’s normal for a character’s Initiative rating to change from round to round. Gaining a high Initiative and using it well is the key to victory in Exalted.

Combat in Exalted 3e is quite complex, but let us focus on this: as in other systems, reducing an opponent’s HP to zero removes them from the fight. However, in Exalted 3e, damage can be used either to reduce an enemy’s Initiative (“Withering Attacks”) or their Health (“Decisive Attacks”). Withering attacks are those blows that push your opponent against a wall, make them stumble, and ultimately control the battle flow. When they hit, these attacks increase your Initiative by 1 and can even steal some Initiative from your opponent. This is dangerous because reaching zero Initiative puts a character into “Initiative Crash,” meaning they completely lose their damage mitigation, lose access to certain abilities, and cannot perform Decisive Attacks.

On the other hand, Decisive Attacks — those that truly represent plunging your sword into an enemy or attempting to behead them — are risky moves: regardless of the outcome, they reduce your Initiative. If you miss a Decisive Attack, you lose Initiative; if you hit, you deal damage to the enemy’s Health, but your Initiative resets to its base value of 3, losing the advantage built up over several rounds of Withering Attacks. In other words, combat in Exalted is like a deadly dance: characters compete for control over the rhythm of the fight, raising and lowering their Initiative until, eventually, the one who best controls the battlefield delivers the grand finale.

Just Lower HP values – The TL;DR Solution That Could’ve Been at the Beginning (but then there’d be no text!)

Yes. OSR games figured this out very quickly: if your character has few HP, that intermediate stage where HP don’t really mean anything disappears. The transition from “alive” to “dead” is usually just one or two hits away! This is precisely why many newer games in this tradition do not reward character levels with more HP, or at least try to heavily restrict that kind of progression.

I wonder whether this also solves another design issue in D&D-style games: the fact that dungeon exploration and combat simply lose their appeal at higher levels. In other words, if the fun of the game lies in low levels, where characters have few HP and can die to simple traps and sneaky goblins, why not preserve that dynamic at higher levels as well? Level-less games, incidentally, do this very well (play Cairn and see what you think).

Conclusion

When it comes to games, there is no definitive answer to the problems faced at the table. Why would it be any different with HP? It all depends on the style of the game and what kind of fun appeals to each group: players of Pathfinder and GURPS tend to have a higher tolerance for tracking details, while players of Knave and Old School Essentials prefer simpler rules or simply ruling on situations as they arise.

That said, it’s important to note that the statement “taste is subjective” does not invalidate a much more essential one: “bad game design is a real thing”. If you’re applying a rule that doesn’t fit your game’s style — or worse, if the system you’re using isn’t delivering an engaging play experience — it’s time to rethink the mechanics or even the system itself. Rules serve the players, not the other way around. It’s long past time to cure this habit.