What if, instead of using hit points to represent damage taken, we used hit points as a currency that one spends to avoid being hit? In other words, your character gets "hit" by a longsword and takes 7 damage. You have 9 hp left, so you spend 7 of them to say you weren't stabbed. When you run out of hp, you can no longer buy off hits and so are stabbed or otherwise killed.

Does anyone interpret hit points this way?

It's an interesting take on it. I've seen other takes that were similar, but viewed HP as a combination of damage taken and the ability to avoid damage (dodging, parrying, etc...)

I think you could confuse *some* players by using HP in this way as opposed to the more concrete "you took damage" view, but in the end, it's all the same, right? At 0 HP the character is down.

This could help DMs visualize and present a more dramatic combat scenario (as opposed to "he hit you, you take 7 Pts of damage," you could have, "he thrusts his sword toward you, and you spin at the last second, your blade whipping up, perilously close to your own face, knocking his aside. That's 7 points.") But I bet you'll still have a player who says, "If he didn't actually hit me, why do I have to pay the HP?"

what if you called them "save points"?

Since the days of the Paladin who fell off a 200' cliff, got up, dusted himself off, and attacked the goblin horde (this was an actual example in an old, old Dragon magazine issue), I've interpreted hit points as "luck" or "the smile of Fate" or somesuch. Funny thing is, this ends up making hit points a fairly decent depiction of actual injury in battle.

There was a study done on how being injured affects soldiers on the field. Turns out, you've got a fairly set spectrum: "Not at all" "Impaired" "Incapacitated" "Dead, dead, dead". Furthermore, of those, "Impaired" (ie, the ability to act, but with notable restrictions) was the narrowest of the zones.

And those map pretty well to 3.x's "Positive HP, 0 HP, Negative HP, Death" scale.

It might actually make more sense if "hit points" were very small values. A range of, say, 3-8 hit points (to pull numbers out of nowhere.) That implies that they're a limited currency; that taking other steps to avoid getting attacked would be preferable; and that actually getting hit is a Very Bad Thing. Getting hit imposes temporary or long-term penalties of varying severity, perhaps, up to and including "dead, dead, dead" (thanks for that, Freemage.) I'm thinking of the Critical Damage tables in the WH40K tabletop RPGs here. You'd want to avoid that table as much as possible, unless there's some other mechanic or reason you could "take the hit". Maybe armor, shields, etc. reduce the severity of the hit you take?

All of this essentially turns HP into a "dodge pool", but that's not a bad thing.

Actually, thinking about it... this is very much what Anima Prime does. Everyone has a very small number of wounds, but you're only incapacitated when those reach 0. Your defense score is the primary obstacle in the way of getting hurt. However, you can't just choose not to spend those.

Using HP as currency to avoid damage makes a great deal of sense for systems with a critical existence failure. Systems where you are just as a effective at 100% HP as you are at 1% HP. If they players are happy with that, then it is fin one its own. However, if the players demand a better sense of realism, there could be tiered levels of the dodge pool. For example, the players have 10 HP at full condition, and being reduced to 0 instead of killing them, makes them wounded. This would open up a smaller pool of 8 HP and give a minor penalty to performance. Rinse and repeat of characters going to smaller and smaller HP pools until they are dead.

Saragon, I was thinking of D&D when I posted the question. The idea wasn't that the game would change at all technically, but that the flavor of combat could be a little more realistic in tone. Players can't choose not to spend the HP when they get hit, it's just that they aren't actually hit (or hit substantially) until the blow that puts them at 0 or fewer HP.

That said, feel free to extrapolate for use in other systems and situations. I was just clarifying my initial thought.

See, that's just it--the studies of real, live combat indicate that most often, "critical existence failure" is what exists. You either get put down (either dead or incapacitated) or you don't. So there's no need for a highly gradiated system of increasing penalties--turns out, those are the unrealistic ones.

(Also, when applied to d20 Modern, for instance, it increases some of the other reality aspects to treat hp as 'fate' or 'luck'. That means that most bullets miss--which turns out, again, to be far more realistic than someone getting 'winged' ten times before finally catching the bullet that brings them down. I've posted in other threads that "realistic" firefights should entail missing about 98% of the time, or so--the amount of ammunition used in suppression fire, total misses and so on is HUGE comparison to the number of bullets that actually encounter flesh.)

While I agree with the study on the side of people using assault rifles to kill each other, I think you might get a different range if you did a study with hand to hand damage or less modern weapons against armored targets.

Also generally the games I have played that use a larger injury range tend to have assault rifles in the "yes you have 5 different forms of injured but you're still dead if you actually get hit by a burst from one of these" category.

It's an interesting idea, but how would this affect healing spells and other curative abilities of characters? Healing a wound is quite easy to visualise and imagine, helping the character to role-play the scene. But what would a Cure Light Wounds spell do under this system?