Hit points, IMO, are a primitive game mechanic. I personally prefer systems where wounds exist in stages... i.e., the PC is Bruised, Wounded, whatever. If a PC has lost half his hit points, you wouldn't expect him to be 100% in combat. Savage Worlds and WoD both have a combat system like this.

Falling damage should be calculated differently from standard combat damage and should at least make some attempt to model physics.

So how come you annoit with oil after some battles and on some mornings but not some others? Sure you could say the magic only takes effect sometimes and not others, but then what does that say about the God's of this world that they dole out luck in such a way? Regardless that change in mechanic will actually change the fluff of the world. Not necessarily a bad thing, but definitively a thing and not what the original idea seemed to intend

You could reframe hit points as stamina rather than fate or luck. A character might not know that he's run out of luck, but he can tell when he's bruised and beaten and needs to call it a day. A cure light wounds spell would put him back in fighting shape.

You do so just about always, even if no spell is being cast. It's an in character ritual, and the only case where it isn't going to be done is where there's a time issue, and anointing with oils (or whatever else, I'd imagine it varies by god) takes second precedence to flight.

As for gods being incredibly inconsistent about doling out magic, well, they're fickle. See: All real world mythology. Plus, if a character turned out not to need much in the way of luck, and had everything well under control, are they really worth blessing thoroughly to make sure they don't get hurt? Clearly, they have everything under control for the time being.

The key is that the player is making decisions for the character that don't depend on known luck, while still interacting with known luck in a pseudo-metagame, pseudo-deity-control way.

That sounds more reasonable to me. I can get behind the Bruce Willis method no trouble at all. Hits bruise and burn and cut and bleed, and ruin his shirt, but he keeps on going to the end of the movie, looking and feeling like shit but still capable of whupping bad guy ass.

My group has always viewed hp as a pretty abstract thing when playing D&D. I seem to recall reading something back in our 2nd ed days that explicitly stated that hp was a severe abstraction meant to represent luck, skill, fatigue, divine favor, sheer stubborn toughness, and so on. So the characters weren't really exchanging and shrugging off axe blows, rather they were wearing each other down to the point where real contact would be made, and someone would die.

Granted this level of abstraction did kind of leave one puzzled as to what was happening in the game universe when someone was damaged by things like falls or fire.



We did something like this with a couple of house-ruled hp variants, when we were playing 2nd edition. The one I recall working out the best for us, was one in which we split hp into two separate numbers. Characters had hp (representing fatigue, morale, and defensive skill) and vp, or vitality points, representing the character's ability to soak up non-trivial trauma and injuries.

At level 1, characters would have vp equal to their constitution, and they would roll their first hit dice to determine initial hp. This made first level characters more robust, which was a bit of a mixed bag for our group, but we could live with it. As the characters leveled up, they would roll additional hit dice as normal, with the first point going to vp, and the remainder (if any) going to hp. Once a class reached a level where they stopped rolling additional hit dice, they stopped gaining vp, and all future points were assigned as additional hp.

Damage dealt from normal attacks was inflicted on hp, and when you hit 0 hp any additional damage suffered was inflicted on vp. At 0 vp the character was unconscious, and needed to have their wounds tended, and a successful con check to wake up, or magical healing sufficient to restore at least 1 vp. At -1 vp or less the character was dead.

Critical hits dealt half of their damage to hp, and the other half to vp. A successful backstab would deal a point of vp damage per multiplier point, and an additional point for each “maxed” dice. The rest was applied as hp damage. Magical healing worked in a similar way, with the first point of each dice being applied to vp, and an additional point applied for a maxed dice.

There were some other wrinkles, but that's more or less how it worked, if I recall correctly.

Yet, interestingly enough, hitpoints are still the dominant health system (Outside of the FPS, where supermagic-I'll-heal-if-I-hide-for-a-bit is the norm.) I think that's because it's a lot simpler than trying to determine injuries in stages. Ultimately, we're playing a game that's all about living out fantasies, and I think there are actually very few people who, as the timer on their life is ticking to a stop, want their very last actions to be totally ineffectual.

Consider the following scenario:

GM: "The ambusher's knife plunges into your back, dealing 40 points of damage. The enemy shieldwall keeps your companions from reaching you and the behemoths that are coming up on their sides threaten to cut off escape. What do you do?"

Player: "Well, I only have a few hitpoints left and I certainly am going to die... so I bravely rush the behemoth to my right and attempt to hinder its progress with a flurry of attacks."

GM: "Unfortunately, because the ambusher's attack has brought you to a state of being critically wounded and you take severe minuses to all actions. Instead of bravely attacking and distracting the behemoth you find yourself flopping on the hard ground like a gutted fish. The ambusher finishes you off. Too bad."

Yeah. Not fun. When I run games I always remember that the players like imagining themselves severely injured and at the brink of death all on their own because that sort of thing is fun. What ISN'T fun is not being prevented to do all the cool heroic things you are playing the game for. That's why I like hitpoints: They're simple and dramatic.

Wound systems can actually make that much more exciting. A character in Ars Magica can be killed outright by a heavy hit or take a large wound and then suffer a bunch of small ones as they fight their way through to the bitter end, bleeding from a thousand cuts and still having a possibility of making it one more round if their wounds don't make them succumb.