Toned down hit point scaling (Stars Without Number)

[foL]

I really kinda hate the linear hit point progression that a lot of RPG's have. Characters can go from having haemophilia to becoming Wile. E. Coyote in a matter of a few sessions. I'll be GM'ing a Stars Without Number campaign soon, (hopefully) and I had this idea for the hit point progression:

At level 1, you roll one hit die to determine your hit points, a d10 (rather than a D6).
Whatever you roll, the roll is never treated as being below a 4. Every time you level up, you gain an additional hit die. However, each hit die you gain is one size smaller than the previous one. At level 6, you stop gaining hit dice altogether.

So it looks something like this:

Lv. 1: d10
Lv. 2: d10, d8
Lv. 3: d10, d8, d6
Lv. 4: d10, d8, d6, d4
Lv. 5: d10, d8, d6, d4, d2

Whenever you gain a level, you may roll your hit points again, using all of your current hit dice. If you roll a lower number than your current hit points, then you may roll again, and use the higher of the two results (rather than automatically gaining a single hit point).
Warriors will also stop gaining bonus hit points at pevel 6.


Thoughts?

(please ask for clarification if I haven't explained it adequately)

[LibraryOgre]

I think your idea would work, but consider how it would apply to NPCs and monsters, too.

***

An option from Hackmaster:

You roll new hit dice only at odd levels. At even levels, you reroll your most recent Hit Die.

So, let's go with a human fighter with a 10 Constitution. He starts with 10 HP (medium creature) plus 10 HP (equal to his constitution) plus 1d10, so 21-30 HP.

At second level, he gets to reroll that first HD, and keep the better of his two rolls, or five, since that's half a hit die.

Level 3, he gets a new HD, so another 1-10 HP.

Level 4, he rerolls that HD.

If one of his HD rolls at an odd level is maximum, he instead gets 10 fractional points added to his constitution at the even level.

[Mutazoia]

Also keep in mind that if you tweek the HP scaling, you may to have to tweek the combat mechanics as well. A lot of RPG's assume that the higher level characters will be more Wiley-ish, and ramp up damage to compensate. (I should probably point out that the Wiley-ishness of PC's is a fairly "modern" trend in RPGs, as they tend to rate "level appropriate" encounters below the PC's actual level, in a sense, stacking the odds in the players favor, combat wise.)

[Florian]

Thoughts?

Remember what HP actually represent: "Fighting Spirit", morale and such, the ability to keep on going. What they are not is physical toughness and such, but they're generally represented this way nowadays.

Generally speaking, you run into a problem when you don't have a clear and direct conversation about what HP means in the game. Use the "Hostage Situation" as an example: Both, a bullet to the head or getting your throat slit with a (vibro-)knife are death sentences, regardless of HP. In respect to an "in combat" situation, "to hit" rolls and "saves" are an abstraction.

[Mutazoia]

Remember what HP actually represent: "Fighting Spirit", morale and such, the ability to keep on going. What they are not is physical toughness and such, but they're generally represented this way nowadays.

Generally speaking, you run into a problem when you don't have a clear and direct conversation about what HP means in the game. Use the "Hostage Situation" as an example: Both, a bullet to the head or getting your throat slit with a (vibro-)knife are death sentences, regardless of HP. In respect to an "in combat" situation, "to hit" rolls and "saves" are an abstraction.

I've always viewed HP progression as the character getting better at combat...getting steadily better at turning the blade, making what would have been a deep slash into a shallow cut. It's never really been just packing on more meat to shield the squishy bits.

The again, HP is a concept from D&D, when the max level for a character was 10....you didn't have to worry about getting insane amounts of HP...the campaign ended long before that. It was only after TSR (and later WOTC) started tacking on extra levels beyond 10, that things started to get out of hand, and PC's started to channel their inner Wiley Coyote.

[LibraryOgre]

I've always viewed HP progression as the character getting better at combat...getting steadily better at turning the blade, making what would have been a deep slash into a shallow cut. It's never really been just packing on more meat to shield the squishy bits.

The again, HP is a concept from D&D, when the max level for a character was 10....you didn't have to worry about getting insane amounts of HP...the campaign ended long before that. It was only after TSR (and later WOTC) started tacking on extra levels beyond 10, that things started to get out of hand, and PC's started to channel their inner Wiley Coyote.

Even in AD&D, when you exceeded 9th or 10th level, chances are you stopped getting your HD and your Con bonus... you got a flat amount per level.

[Knaight]

Remember what HP actually represent: "Fighting Spirit", morale and such, the ability to keep on going. What they are not is physical toughness and such, but they're generally represented this way nowadays.

From the beginning there have been aspects of physical toughness in terms of what HP meant with how the rest of the system interacted with it, from healing spells to big monsters having more HP due to being brawnier to poisons working on HP loss.

It was never a particularly coherent mechanic in terms of representing game fiction, and trying to pin it down in any direction (including just physical toughness) will run up against something somewhere that breaks the model.

[Slipperychicken]

I really kinda hate the linear hit point progression that a lot of RPG's have. Characters can go from having haemophilia to becoming Wile. E. Coyote in a matter of a few sessions. I'll be GM'ing a Stars Without Number campaign soon, (hopefully) and I had this idea for the hit point progression:

Have you had a look at games where damage is based on hit-location and mostly doesn't scale? I like the way it's done in the BRP (Basic Roleplaying) family of games, like Mythras and Runequest. One Roll Engine games also have it.

You end up with some very sensible representations of physical harm there, with the deciding factors of fights heavily weighted toward things like fighting-skill, choices in combat, and equipment. People don't just face-tank, they actually need to protect their bodies to survive. And as a side-effect you have more fights ending with losers surrendering or being in an incapacitation/bleeding-out type state rather than being outright instantly dead, which allows a lot more depth to the aftermath of fights, including giving you some more options when the PCs lose. It's also abundantly clear why a character does or doesn't take damage; you know if the attacker simply didn't have proper technique, if the defender protected himself or dodged or his shield deflected it, if it was the armor which reduced the damage, and so on. It gets you the information which hit points do not give you (and which in some cases is more surprising or interesting than what you'd improvise in an hp-system), and it surprised me with how smoothly and quickly that sort of thing runs.

There are also some good damage systems which just don't scale hit-points, like the 'damage tracks' used by shadowrun and WoD. It's abstracted obviously, but people still end up needing a sensible amount of harm before dropping.

[Felhammer]

I really kinda hate the linear hit point progression that a lot of RPG's have. Characters can go from having haemophilia to becoming Wile. E. Coyote in a matter of a few sessions. I'll be GM'ing a Stars Without Number campaign soon, (hopefully) and I had this idea for the hit point progression:

At level 1, you roll one hit die to determine your hit points, a d10 (rather than a D6).
Whatever you roll, the roll is never treated as being below a 4. Every time you level up, you gain an additional hit die. However, each hit die you gain is one size smaller than the previous one. At level 6, you stop gaining hit dice altogether.

So it looks something like this:

Lv. 1: d10
Lv. 2: d10, d8
Lv. 3: d10, d8, d6
Lv. 4: d10, d8, d6, d4
Lv. 5: d10, d8, d6, d4, d2

Whenever you gain a level, you may roll your hit points again, using all of your current hit dice. If you roll a lower number than your current hit points, then you may roll again, and use the higher of the two results (rather than automatically gaining a single hit point).
Warriors will also stop gaining bonus hit points at pevel 6.


Thoughts?

(please ask for clarification if I haven't explained it adequately)

That system might be ok for Stars without Number. When I DMed it, I never really found my players had too many hit points but that was in 1st edition. I think the thing you should really ask yourself is - how many successful hits from a Laser Rifle (5.5 average damage) do you want a higher level PC to be hit by before dying. However many shots you think it justified should be set the average top end HP a PC will have for a 6+ level character.

[Knaight]

First things first - this HP growth is pretty much just D&D and very immediate derivatives. It's comparatively rare elsewhere. This firmly establishes it as a workable method, but damage is usually also calibrated (if not outright handled) differently, so SWN may or may not switch over well. Depends on how much Traveller it inherited, really, relative to D&D.


Whenever you gain a level, you may roll your hit points again, using all of your current hit dice. If you roll a lower number than your current hit points, then you may roll again, and use the higher of the two results (rather than automatically gaining a single hit point).
Warriors will also stop gaining bonus hit points at pevel 6.


Thoughts?

(please ask for clarification if I haven't explained it adequately)

I don't know SWN particularly well, but I do generally like the idea of these rerolls - it shortens the scale of randomness represented by a single HD roll, which is generally a good idea (at least if you're not in a system where the character is expected to die pretty soon anyways, and thus it's already shorter).

[Anonymouswizard]

First things first - this HP growth is pretty much just D&D and very immediate derivatives. It's comparatively rare elsewhere. This firmly establishes it as a workable method, but damage is usually also calibrated (if not outright handled) differently, so SWN may or may not switch over well. Depends on how much Traveller it inherited, really, relative to D&D.

A lot more D&D than Traveller. In terms of OGL based Space Opera games it's certainly one of the nicer ones, but there's still a lot of D&D.

For the record, IIRC (I'm AFB) hit points in SWN2e work as follows: all hit dice are d6s, and at each level you gain a hit die and roll all your HD, if the result is higher than your current hp it becomes your new hp, soldiers get a level-based increase in top of that.

On that note, I've come to like the Traveller and Vortex method of hp, that being that your Attributes substitute for it. It's a rather neat way to do a death spiral, and allows you to tweak the results of damage if a certain penalty makes more sense. I think you could houserule it into Stars Without Number without too much trouble, and it's what the current version of my homebrew system uses (the last two versions used the GURPS method of low static hp and increasing levels of bad as you go below zero, originally it was straight D&D style hp).