I think the Hitpoints concept as we use them today, looks a bit obsolete.

Look: after a healthy pc/npc has received a very strong blow that has left him ot her with a single hitpoint, the pc/npc is still allowed to act as if he received no damage at all. No pain, no shock, no chance for a blood loss - nothing. And only below 0 wounds certain realistic effects begin to manifest.

Consequently, I have thought about one crazy idea: what if the Hitpoints are thrown away (i.e. everyone has 0 wounds from the start), and the incoming damage is reduced only by armour and toughness (low degree of Critical Damage is not that deadly, after all)?

I know this kind of approach totally throws away the system balance into a window, but what are your thoughts? Is this totally crazy?

There are actually several RPGs that use this approach. Each and every hit you recieve will cause damage.

However, those RPGs are built from the ground up bearing in mind the deadly combat. These games are also mostly investigation/horror games.

I agree that the hit point system in DH is silly but removing the wounds isn´t the solution to the problem. In this system such a tweak would simply leave a trail of dead characters. Which may very well be exactly what you are looking for .

After playing RPGs where one-hit kills are common and you have learned to fear a simple kitchen knife DH is a welcome break.

I suppose the hit point system make a game more "epic" in the sense that you can take alot more damage before you fall, it´s all in the tone the game wish to convey. DH is at it´s heart an epic combat game with a little investigation thrown in, why else would we have entire books filled with combat related stuff?

I was always a fan of the VP/WP system seen in Spycraft and d20 Star Wars.

egalor said:

I'll ask the same question that always springs to mind with such suggestions - how do you deal with large, resilient creatures in such a system?

Consider that a normal human being has approximately 10 wounds starting, while a Space Marine typically has twice that... and a Hive Tyrant has over a hundred and fifty wounds.

Remove wounds, and suddenly, the difference between men and the monsters that prey upon them gets much, much smaller.

One suggestion I've made (though never used, as I like the current level of lethality in the 40kRP rules) frequently is limiting how many wounds can be 'spent' to reduce a damaging hit to a value equal to the creature's Toughness Bonus, instead of having TB contribute to damage reduction - so if a TB3 human with 12 wounds in Guard Flak is hit for 8 damage, the armour takes 4 of the damage, and he spends 3 wounds to reduce the hit to a Critical Hit of 1, leaving him with 9 wounds left for later attacks.

I believe that the "Wounds" in DH are not exactly wounds per se, but rather meant to be grazing shots that result in minimal actual damage to the body. You know, such as a bullet flying past one's cheeck, the character suffering a stinging hit and it bleeds a little, but aside from that nothing happens. Not exactly realistic, but it fits to how things work in movies and novels, so it's good enough for a game.

This is also somewhat similar to the idea of a certain pool of "luck" that other systems use, and I believe that the Vitality points from the aforementioned Star Wars saga edition works like this, too. In short, a character's hitpoints do not represent actual body harm but rather a finite amount of luck that keeps serious injury at bay ... until this pool is depleted and things start to get ugly.

With this in mind, I think the system works well enough, although I would agree that there is a weird gap between what feels like "nothing happened" and "omg my character is a cripple!" - I guess what I mean is that I would be interested in ideas about extending critical damage in a way that would allow characters to easier accumulate minor semi-persistent injuries such as broken arms without having them die in the next round. Because that's not realistic either.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I think a major flaw with this system is that, whilst the Hive Tyranid has many more Wounds than the poor Guardsmen opposing him, he still can only take 10 Critical hits. Essentially making him not break a sweat at all for the majority of the battle and then "suddenly" falling apart in one or two rounds.

Wouldn't it be better to have a Hive Tyrant, say, loose a leg much earlier in the fight, but still remain a threat for half a dozen rounds or more? Way more epic, imho.

I tend to think of Hit points in the same way I look at health in movies like Die Hard. Our hero takes a beating. I mean through out every one of those movies Bruce Willis is shot at, stabbed, dropped from planes, car crashes, the list goes on. And it isn't until the very very end of the movie when the evil german or computer geek is bested that he finally sucumbs to his wounds. He shot himself in the shoulder in the last movie after all and was still walking!

I think Hit Points in general is moddled to look like that. Now I personally like the WP/VP system. But that's just me.

Minor point but the VP/WP was in Star Wars D20 not the current (but discontinued) Saga edition.

We always really liked the VP/WP system but Saga did away with it, but they did introduce the very cool concept of damage threshold alongside the standard HP mechanic.

Star Wars is meant to be a more heroic sci fi setting though so HPs work fairly well...rumour has it your favourite game design company is snapped up the Star Wars license.

Anyway I quite like the DH rules as is and i don't think wounds represent being hit properly.

An easier solution to the OP problem is to keep the hp system. But give the pc's a penalty (say 5% or 10%) for each time someone is successful in hurting him. The penalty lasts until he or she gets treated.

Example: Crazy Ivan is hit twice by an autogun. The first dealing 1 wound the other bullet 4 wounds. He is now at 5 wounds from being critically wounded. Since he is hit twice he now has a penalty of -20% to everything he is trying to do thanks to the hurt, bloodloss etc. Lucky for him there is a medicae in the team who manages to stop the bleeding and give him an asperine for the pain.

What I tend to do in situations where a prolonged fire fight isn't the tone I wish to convey is that at certain markers people must make Toughness Tests to see if they take Fatigue from injury or not. If a character loses TB wounds from a single blow, they make a Toughness test (modified in increments starting at +10 and going down by 10 each time depending on how many tests they've already made) and if said test is failed, they gain 1 point of Fatigue.

Further, how I used Fatigue in my games, if you suffer full Fatigue, you don't fall unconcious, but are just immobile and "defeated". I.e. you are near useless after that point.

egalor said:

We do something similiar and it works rather well. Every hit that causes wounds after deducting TB and AP causes a corresponding critical of half the amount (i.e. hit for 10 damage with TB3 and AP3 causes 6 wounds and the critical of 3 from the respective location). This encourages goup dynamics a lot. For example PCs covering a colleague who just got a hit leaving him at maybe only half actions next round or a round stunned. This way PCs more often duck into cover if hit as well, so that they can take breath for a round or two.

Otherwise it is sometimes ridiculous (as you mentioned) and bland how there is no effect even though you were reduced to 10% of your HP in a single attack.

My PCs recently encountered a Space Marine and a gunfight broke out. The first round of semi-auto fire of the SM stroke the Psyker onto both legs and broke one of them, so that he crumbled to the ground (with 0 wounds remaining besides). In the ensuing combat the Arbitrators torso armour was blown away (due to such a crit effect) and in the end was knocked out as the SM dropped a grenade at his feet (while in melee with the Guardsman and the Arbitrator). The Arbitrator still had 2 wounds remaining, but accumulated enough Fatigue to lose consciousness.

With normal rules the Psyker would have walked away smiling after being hit by two mass-reactive bolts to the legs, as he had not suffered a critical under the normal rules.

We had to change the rules further than this to keep it sort of balanced though:

You can acquire twice your TB of Fatigue points before losing consciousness and get the -10 only after acquiring your TB in Fatigue points.

Healing is a little easier, as every single wounding hit is considered a single injury and can be healed independently of each other (an injury up to twice your TB is considered lightly wounded (as per healing rules) and any injury above is considered heavily wounded (as per the rules). Thus losing 3 times 3 wounds subsequently is faster to heal than losing 9 wounds at once from a single source.

Unnatural Toughness x2 halves the critical effect once more (x3 a third time and so on).

True criticals (beneath 0 wounds) do not stack with each other, but always start at 0 again so to speak. So it is sometimes hard to bring down a really tough opponent with weak attacks.

It needs a lot of bookkeeping though (and can slow down combat a little, at least greater ones) and this might be the greatest drawback so far. This is one of the reasons I often use mook rules for "normal" oppenents in greater numbers. One of the players keeps track of all the PCs injuried in a table though and another one is responsible for the crit table and reading aloud from it. This helps a lot and makes it rather smooth with experience.

There's always the exalted/White Wolf system you could draw on for inspiration

lose 25% of your hit points -10% to all rolls

lose 50% of your hit points -20% to all rolls

lose 75% of your hit points -30% to all rolls

losee 100% and it's -40% to all rolls

or do it in steps of -5% if that seems a bit harsh

this usually triggers my standard rant about 'reality vs playability'. The easy example: in reality is you're heavily wounded your in bed for at least a month if not 3. If you simply strain a wrong muscle you can spend up to 3 months before you recover from that. Very realistic, not really fun to play with.

This is no different. First of, you are interpreting the wounds and critical wrong (at least from your point of view).

Lets say I have a saw and you have an arm. If I start sawing through your arm it does not immediately fall of:
1. first I have to cut through cloth/armour
2. upperskin, hurts like hell but heals in a day
3. innerskin, hurts even more, heals in a week
4. muscle, by this time you'll prolly pass out if your lucky, heals after surgery in 1-6 months depending how far I got
5. bones... this is the part where you start loosing a limb..
6. the rest.
7. lost limb

now if your very tough (say a lot of muscle, thick bones, thick skin) it will take me more time to get through, this is reflected in your T value.
A crit-hit kicks in between 4 and 5 and 7 == death (in DH rules, even though you don't necessarily die from loosing a limb).

Getting through the skin and starting dealing crit hits is something that happens rather quickly. You could say an arm has 1 or 2 'wounds' and then you get to the crit table. same for leg maybe 2-3 wounds, body 3-4 and head, 1-2. If you add these you'll get 10 wounds for a standard human: 1 lArm, 1 rArm, 2 lLeg, 2 rLeg, 3 body and 1 head. After that you have another '8 to 10' wounds of critical damage before it falls off. This is represented by the critical table. So in reality you don't have 10 wounds but 11,11 (arms),12,12 (legs),14 (body) and 11 (head) where < 10 means crit hit and 0 on any means death.
This however would require you to keep track of EVERY SINGLE BODY PART of EVERY PC OR NPC in case of a tyranid this would add up to 10 parts. Good luck!!

To simplify 2 assumptions have been made
1. all superficial wounds are totalled (which interestingly ends up to be roughly 10 points) with the assumptions that all body parts are hit randomly
2. if they're gone then the only damage that is left must be critical, so after you loose your 10 wounds you get critical damage.

this rulesystem looks very practical to me and doesn't at all lack that much of reality.

egalor said:

I don't think you should feel restrained to the system as printed if something about it pisses you off. I don't necessarily agree with your position, but I respect your right to your own opinion.

If you want to go this route, I think an easier system would be, as someone else said, to divide the HP pool into segments and apply a cumulative penalty for each full segment lost. I'd break it up into 10% chunks, personally, but you could just as easily do 20% chunks or 25% chunks. The players will need to note what 10/20/25% of their total hit points are somewhere on their sheet, and every time they lose that many, a penalty ensues. Maybe if they lose 25% all at once, they lose an arm or something (I would go for "crippled" over "severed" personally, but it's your call.)

As I said above, I don't necessarily agree with your position, but I think it can be done. If you and your group would have more fun that way, then I think it should be done, at your table anyway. The thing to keep in mind is that by increasing the deadliness of combat, you increase the horror aspects of the 41st millennium and decrease the hihg-flying combat aspects. This isn't out of theme for 40k (the universe IS a dark and scary place) it's just going to take your game in a less immediately-violent direction. Don't expect your players to run into every combat guns blazing if they know a good one or two shots from the enemy could flat out kill them. Your players will adapt to this house rule by being cautious, taking cover, maybe even avoiding combat whenever possible.

They won't go toe to toe with the Hive Tyrant, instead they'll spend the better part of two sessions lobbying Holy Terra for permission to use Exterminatus on the planet. This is the sort of paranoia such a hosue rule will breed, trust me, I've seen it myself (not with DH, but with other systems that use a similarly deadly combat mechanic.) It WILL slow the game down, make it darker and scarier. If your planned story consists of fight after fight with some travel in between, be prepared for your players to buck the system.

That's not to say your idea is wrong, it's just that different game mechanics lend themselves to different atmospheres. Make sure the mechanics you use will work for the kind of story you want to tell. Hit Point systems are not realistic, you're absolutley right about that. (They can be justified, but they aren't realistic.) HP systems lend themselves to action-oriented games, precisely because the system does not punish characters too much for taking damage. It's useful for stories where the heroes get thrown to the ground by an exploding ball of fire as they try to escape at the last second. Deadly wound mechanics (like WoD) lend themselves more to slow games where characters take time to learn about threats and to bargain, if possible, in not combative ways. They lend themselves to suspense rather than action, because action gets punished if it isn't well planned out in advance.

Just some food for thought.

Kael said:

HERESY!

As I recall the D20 Star Wars system (EPIC fail, by the way!) had "Vitality Points" (AKA hit points) and then if you suffered a critical hit or ran out of VP then you suffered damage from your "Wound Points" (AKA the "other" hit points). Run out of WP and die.... Then they had Jedi spending VP to fuel their Force abilities! So your champion of the Light Side channels the Force (a sort of spiritual/life energy aura produced by all life) and slowly KILLS HIMSELF in so doing! Yes, that is right, you burn your VP (hit points) to do anything, a severely demented game mechanic that reeks strongly of the Dark Side. Then there is the whole level-based class system, BAB, Saving Throws.... BORING space combat... "Roll to hit the Tie Fighter, it has AC17, bang! It takes 12 damage" (Yawn!). The Saga edition replaced the spend VP mechanic with an adventure and scene destroying D&D 4th Ed version: You can use your Force abilities X times per day and then you are done! "Sorry, you have felt a disturbance three times and lifted a droid, you are done for the rest of the game!"

There is a REASON Lucas pulled the SW licence from Wizards despite the fact that he owns controlling stock interest in the company!

If FFG ever adopts such game mechanics that will be the last book they ever sell me.

If you are really desperate for such tedious bookkeeping though you could browse eBay for a copy of Phoenix Command. After you spend an hour figuring out exactly which veins, arteries and muscles are hit by that one bullet (out of 7!) that just hit you I promise that the idea of hit points followed by critical damage will seem very sexy to you. The idea is to have a fast-moving game of dark investigators punctuated by burts of dramatic, over-the-top violence, so having characters take a few "glancing" hits followed by a catastrophic loss of half their intestines seems to be a reasonably adequate compromise.

One of the perks of the current DH/RT/DW wounds/criticals system is that it can definately convey a sense of magnitude to encounters (something that the Warhammer 40K universe definately requires!). My group consists of a bunch of tough and skilled Throne Agents (Ascension-level game) that can laugh off mobs of cultists and other rabble. Recently they tangled with a bunch of traitor Chaos Marines and the bastards took a SERIOUS beating to put down! Furthermore, one or two hits on an Inquisition agent usually had them coughing up a Fate Point or rolling around in a pool of their own blood. Ditching the Wounds stat in this case would have made the enemy just another batch of mooks with nice gear, something that would have been detrimental to the feel and setting of the game. Just putting ONE Terminator down felt like a real accomplishment! Likewise, if a Hive Tyrant goes into criticals on the first wounding hit then does it really deserve it's name?

I have to fully concur with Lynata before me. I've never thought of HP as actual damage, but "movie damage". Hits that are stopped by flak armour, but bruise the ribs. Close calls. Scratches. You use up hit points/health/wounds/whatever-you-call-them to represent the character NOT getting truly damaged. And then, at some point, luck runs out.

This maybe doesn't jive 1:1 with text as written, but allows the critical element in ANY fantasy/sci-fi setting...the suspension of disbelief. If I can believe the psyker can make fire with his brain, I can believe that the bolter shell just "clipped" the hero.

Wounds in DH aren't the same as HP in D&D. 0 wounds in DH is much more like 50% hp in D&D. At that point you are starting to take serious damage. You just have to shift your mindset.

If you really want to cut out wounds entirely, you should use criticals more like WFRP 1e/2e. They don't stack, each fresh hit has a critical effect from 0. Of course, WFRP had a chart you rolled on, so a 6 point critical might do slightly different things each time.

I am surprised to hear that DH is not leathal enough, and that even harsher penalties need to be applied to players.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

wolph42 said:

Snowtiger said:

Agent.0.Fortune said:

Okay, it seems you have convinced me. Really, a Hive Tyrant getting an immediate Critical - sucks.

So, I will regard HPs as a sort of "expendable armour points", rather than actual wounds.

And no, I'm not interested in using other systems than DH, thanks for proposing them.

Thanquol (i.e. " thank you all ")!

One suggestion (ripped from the House Rules forum) - is to basically have "Wounds taken" as lookup on the Critical Hitpoint table.

Ex: You get hit by a gun-shot doing 9 in damage, with 2 AP and 3 Toughness, you end up with loosing 4 wounds and also get the effect of a "level 4 critical".

If you think that's a bit harsh, you can always up the values of all armor with some values (add 2/3/4 etc). Or you can do half the wounds taken => critical table entry (so loosing 4 wounds => level 2 critical).

It depends just on how "realistic" you want things.

This is a recurring discussion, and after having given this a lot of thought, I have concluded the best thing is to leave the rules alone.

Change one little thing, and you find out you just nerfed some talent, or broke some other mechanic.

Moserns suggestion about giving instant crits to all damaging hits sounds nice, but also means that there is very little benefit in having a great number of wounds (you may survive many smaller hits, but a one-time hit causing 8+ wounds is likely to kill you regardless if you have 8 or 28 wounds). It also means that Crack shot becomes the same as Mighty Shot, even though it usually costs less, since all hits are now critical hits.

Impact weapons also deal Fatigue on low-level crits, which means all hits that deal 1-3pts of damage will now Fatigue and/or stun your target. Fatigue gives the target -10 penalty on all rolls, making him much less useful in a fight, even if he just took a weak, glancing blow. It also makes talents such as Takedown pretty nerfed.

It also means that a Psyker is highly unlikely to survive his own usage of Holocaust, and that any hit from Incinerate is likely to cause instant death.

Sure, you could fix all these side-effects by making further rulings and changes, but in the end it's just too much work for not enough reward. Better to choose another system altogether. You don't know that further publications won't interfere with your now-perfect house-rule mess either. Example: the new Faith-powers in Blood of Martyrs.

mosern said:

Honestly? With a considerable degree of probability, I want to have an average unarmoured human:

- to be killed by a gunshot to his forehead from the point-blank range;

- to start bleeding after a gunshot/laceration.

Seems quite realistic, and not too difficult to implement.

However, let's face it: without heavy modifications, DH and other similar systems do not allow it (although they do have a lot of other advantages that I prefer them for, over the other systems).

egalor said:

Well, the problem you and Mosern have is that the combat system in DH is abstract by design. A hitroll of 01 does not mean "a perfect headshot, right between the eyes", it just meant that the attack somehow causes damage in the head-region. If some wounds are lost, but no critical is scored, then that roll was not a "gunshot to his forehead". It might graze the helmet, it might ricochet of something or cause wooden splinters from the wall he is hiding behind to hit his face. Anything that causes some pain, but no serious damage. The creative challenge, and fun, is coming up with cool narrative descriptions. Or you could just forget about it and move on if that's not your idea of fun

The Execution scenario where you point the gun at someones forhead, and pull the trigger while they stand still, does not require a to-hit roll (test is only needed in a scenario where the target is trying to avoid being hit), and does double damage (helpless target). It will most likely be lethal.

Just as a Standard Attack is not "one swing with my sword" and a person with lightning attack does not swing his sword 3x faster than the other fighter. It's all abstract. The round is filled with swordplay, attacks and counters, and a lot of footwork. The Attack Action is an abstraction, resolving how well you were able to create and exploit openings in your opponents defence. After all, taking the Defensive Stance Action does not mean you stand still and do not wave your sword about! You just wave it about in a very defensive way

If you by "realistic" mean "not abstract" you're in for a world of hurt trying to remodel the DH rules.

Yeah, yeah, I know you're right, it's all about abstractness in DH.

And I have managed to happily live with it, but sometimes I'm pretty much shocked when a frag grenade (2d10) explodes under my feet causing _no_ damage ; or a score of 1d10+3 hits over a static (but not helpless) target at a point blank causes _no_ damage ; or a knife (is that 1d5 + SB?) put into a vital organ of a sleeping target is not even enough to cause at least a level 1 Critical hit (when in real life even a child could do this), etc. -- you get the point.

Apologies for whining out there, but it's a given fact that the majority of hitpoint-based systems are not lethal enough, at least to my taste.

Whine away, I share your pain. But have learned to live with it

We've spent quite some time messing with house rules to "fix" this, going all the way back to WRFP v1, but now I just forget about it. In cases of sleeping victims, I don't roll. It's a no brainer. For people who sit on top of a bomb as it detonates, I don't roll.

In most other circumstances, I'll accept the odd moment of Naked Dwarf syndrome as a price worth paying for the fun given by Movie Damage (I really liked this term).