Can you salvage the D&D rules? The problem with hit points per level

D&D is defined by rules that don’t make story sense when they are pressed. Those who say it’s a just game, and not a story engine, are not being fully honest. They love the story, too. Otherwise they’d play chess or something like that. They wouldn’t imagine fighting dragons. Story sense is important for all D&D players, just in different ways.

No new edition can fix the fundamental problems in the D&D rules without making the game unrecognizable. Better just to abandon D&D and use other game systems. That’s my conclusion as I play the Fifth Edition with my family and as I watch my son develop his own D&D game for his age-mates.

D&D is well-developed, beautifully produced, effectively marketed, and, in the Fifth Edition, full of class-specific bells and whistles that help players to customize their characters with little powers. Kids love that.

Unfortunately, D&D has many ineffective rules that have endured while other game systems developed more effective models for dealing with the same problems.

I think it all comes down to the hit point rules in D&D, especially D&D’s hit points per level. Advanced characters can take an unbelievable beating. Emphasis on unbelievable.

Why should an experienced fighter have ten times the hit points of an ordinary person, so that he can withstand damaging physical forces like dragon’s breath while ordinary people are burnt to a crisp? Did experience make his body so tough that it doesn’t burn?

It is an old objection. It’s so old that there is a standard answer to this challenge. It’s in the D&D books themselves. Hit points, they say, don’t really represent bodily endurance under a beating by a band of orcs, but a sort of heroic ability to avoid injury, or to take a blow as merely a scratch or a bruise whereas the other ordinary guy gets smashed directly on the head.

It takes only a little thought to see how this explanation doesn’t work in many situations. Not at all.

Suppose a character falls from a great height, taking 1D6 damage for every 10 feet fallen. Why does a veteran easily walk away from a fall like that while a young warrior goes splat?

Well, maybe characters like that are “epic” in their ability to fall such distances and survive. I’m not sure whether OSR-style players, who claim not to want epic style, would give that answer. If they do, it shows that they love a good story in their game.

Your character and her hireling trigger a trap that pours acid all over them. They both take fifteen points of damage. When your character takes only fifteen hit points of damage out of 30, it hurts, but she’s far from dead, and her armor is miraculously intact, but her hireling dissolves into a hissing pile of gore and bones. Her high level and correspondingly high hit points mean that the same amount of acid barely hurts her. Why? Did she dodge a deluge of acid that soaked her and her buddy, who was standing right next to her? Or did her high level grant her relative immunity to acid burns?

Your character has seventy hit points and is hit by an arrow unawares. He loses four hit points. The arrow barely hurt your character, even though he was definitely hit, according to the dice. Another character standing nearby has four hit points. A second arrow strikes that second person for four damage and he starts to die with zero hit points remaining. Your character didn’t know the arrow was coming, so his hit points don’t represent the ability to avoid harm. Why can he get hit by ten arrows unawares and laugh it off while the other guy dies with one arrow? Okay—never mind that. Now a cleric comes over and casts a healing spell on each character struck by an arrow. The cleric uses the same healing spell on each one. The character with the maximum of four hit points is completely healed by the healing spell, going from critical condition to perfect health. The one with seventy hit points takes hardly any benefit from the healing spell by comparison.

So, you argue that hit points are a storytelling abstraction. Never mind the successful roll to hit. Are you saying it didn’t really hit? Are high hit points just credit to live longer? Maybe the narrative interpretation of the arrow strike on the seventy-hit-point character is that it was actually a miss, in story terms, no matter what the dice say. The hit points just mean that the heroic ability to avoid injury took a hit, not the character’s body. If that is so, then what on earth is the healing spell doing to help this character? If no hit occurred, why is there any need to heal hit points? Is the healing spell merely soothing the character’s ego after a near miss? Is the healing spell repairing his ability to avoid harm?

These problems illustrate just a few out of countless issues with the hit-point-per-level system.

Some D&D faithful respond, at this point, that it’s just game rules! They’re not meant to be realistic, because it’s just a fantasy game.

My answer to that is that the rules are supposed to simulate some kind of story sense. D&D has been around for close to a half century and nobody has fixed this! Most other games solved this from the beginning, starting back in the ‘70s, at the beginning of the hobby. There are countless other game systems that don’t have these problems, including plenty of “old-school” games. Look at Tunnels & Trolls (where CON is hit points), any Basic Roleplaying game like Runequest (where hit points are the average of CON and SIZ), the Fantasy Trip (where hit points equal Strength), Advanced Fighting Fantasy (where the Stamina score is basically nothing other than hit points, but does not get so inflated), and early games of the next generation, like GURPS (where Health is hit points). All these other games and plenty of others avoided this problem completely while managing to keep combat and hazards interesting and workable for countless players.

I cannot think of any other popular role-playing game in which hit points work as they do in D&D (unless they are just the innumerable D&D clones). The more I think about it, the more it appears that what makes D&D rules distinct is just the way hit points develop.

Yet the one area in which Fifth Edition players feel a crying need for house rules is in healing hit points. The rules allow them to return with astonishing rapidity, making injury unmeaningful, along the lines that I was just discussing.

What’s wrong with D&D, then, that nobody can fix this, after so many decades? The problem is that if you change the hit point rules in D&D, you have to change a lot of other stuff. You have to change all the stats of monsters, damage done by traps and spells, the powers of magic items, and all the rest. I think you have to change the core of D&D itself: armor rules, the meaning of character levels, and more.

D&D’s mechanics all orbit the core feature of hit points per level. Hit dice. Almost everything boils down to damage, recovery from damage, and threats scaled by level. Levels of dungeon, hit dice, Challenge Ratings. The six core character stats do almost nothing by comparison.

It may be that D&D fans just like their game to have this highly nonsensical feature. Maybe gaining hit points, and then more hit points, and then more, is just fun. Players like to level up and prepare for new, more powerful challenges. More levels, meaner monsters, more treasure, more magic items, deeper in the dungeon, more powerful. The power trip is appealing. It is like winning the game.

Or it could be that some D&D players just believe that D&D is the best game, because it is the original game, so you can’t change it! That would be sacrilege.

I think that they are almost right, in an unintended way. Changing the hit point system would mean changing so many other features of the game that it would no longer be D&D. It would evolve into something I’d like more.

Either way, all this explains why I would rather play with just about any other ruleset.

What do you think? Are the rules of D&D differentiated from other games ultimately just by hit points per level?