How do you folks feel about health levels?

[Thinker]

Health levels in RPG's are a replacement for hit points. Their implementation can vary, but essentially boils down to this:

• Health levels explicitly represent character health
• Every character has a static number of health levels that can be harmed by suffering wounds
• In most systems, a character cannot increase their number of health levels (though, exceptions exist like Exalted)
• Taking damage normally only deals one health-level worth of harm
• Health levels are typically a sliding scale of harm that the character takes with worsening effects, for example:
  
  • Take 1 level of harm and the character loses the ability to critically succeed
  • Take 2 levels of harm and the character is slowed, moving only at half-speed
  • Take 3 levels of harm and the character suffers a penalty to all dice rolls
  • Take 4 levels of harm makes the character no longer able to fully succeed on any dice rolls
  • Take 5 levels of harm and the character is disabled, requiring assistance to do anything
  • Take 6 levels of harm and the character is dying
  
  
• Some systems take into account the severity of the wound that the character takes being cut by a battle axe might immediately be a level-3 harm while being stabbed by a dagger would only be a level-1 harm
• Avoiding harm is reliant on active defenses (rolling Reflex saves, parry/block mechanics, etc.), passive defenses (armor, natural armor, etc.)
• Sample systems that use health levels: White Wolf (Exalted, Werewolf, etc.), Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark

So, what do people think of health-levels as an alternative to HP?

[Thrawn4]

Big fan of it. Injuries matter, combat does not take ages and damage calculation is streamlined.

[Man_Over_Game]

I'd be fine with it, except for the amount of lookup it'd create. With each level having its own changes, it'd slow down the game to reference different health levels for every character on the battlefield, and remember those changes.

So I think it'd be fine, if it was implemented in a singular way that scaled. For example, every Health Level reduces your movement, saving throws, and attacks by that level. At 5 levels, you're dying. Simple and easy to track. That way, when someone says they're at Damage Level 4, you know exactly what that means without having to look up a table.

[Tinkerer]

I'm pretty neutral. I've often found that it doesn't speed things up quite as much as one would think (due to active defenses) and depending on the system things can get a little wonky with the numbers. Additionally if your character is holding something up their sleeve for if combat goes pear shaped you had better make sure that it's not something which requires a roll to activate because those wound penalties get nasty.

But when you balance that out against the issues inherent in an HP based system I could honestly go either way. Slightly favouring a wound system over HP. Although several of the points in your initial post seem inaccurate to me (I've found that most systems allow more than one health level in each attack, health levels are not explicitly character health, you can normally get at least one additional level of health etc... at least with WoD, Savage Worlds, and a few others I have checked out) that could just be differences in which RPG's we've checked out.

[Mechalich]

[*]Taking damage normally only deals one health-level worth of harm

This is rarely the case in such systems, certainly it doesn't apply to White-Wolf's storyteller system, in which it is quite possible, in fact almost trivially easy, to lose all of you health levels to a single attack.

Also, it's important to separate the idea of large or small pools of HP or Health Levels from the concept of wound penalties, as they have different effects. Having a large number or a small number where your HP is recorded is mostly an aesthetic choice. If I have 1000 HP and the average attack does 100 damage or if I have ten health levels and the average attack deal one level of damage I still die after getting hit ten times. Having a lower absolute number does have certain aspects - in Exalted 'ping damage' or hitting with a lot of attacks that did only one damage max was a significant factor in gameplay - but for the most part it's just a math problem.

Wound penalties, which inhibit character performance as damage increases, are much more complex in their overall impact.

[Grod_The_Giant]

They don't always function like you're describing. Exalted, for example, really uses them more like hit points, just with a penalty for being over a certain damage threshold. In general, though, health levels have their own disadvantages, particularly the "doom spiral"--once you start to taking damage, you get worse at combat, so you take more damage, so you get even worse...

My preference is for a combination of plot-armor-HP and physical-injury-track. Fate and STaRS both use such a system-- you can take a few hits with no more ill effect than tiring yourself out a bit, but if you overflow that margin something seriously bad happens to you.

[Man_Over_Game]

They don't always function like you're describing. Exalted, for example, really uses them more like hit points, just with a penalty for being over a certain damage threshold. In general, though, health levels have their own disadvantages, particularly the "doom spiral"--once you start to taking damage, you get worse at combat, so you take more damage, so you get even worse...

My preference is for a combination of plot-armor-HP and physical-injury-track. Fate and STaRS both use such a system-- you can take a few hits with no more ill effect than tiring yourself out a bit, but if you overflow that margin something seriously bad happens to you.

I was worried about the "Doom Spiral" aspect myself but, as long as the developer is aware of it, that doesn't have to be a bad thing. A Barbarian-type, for example, could gain some kind of primal power at higher damage levels as he progresses into deeper and deeper rage and insanity. A Warrior-type, who's constantly trying to find a challenge, might have a set of skills that he only uses when his life is on the line. A Necromancer-type could channel his pressing mortality into powers of undeath, effectively becoming a lich, temporarily, after hitting a certain threshold.

There are ways of making a Doom Spiral a good thing in a system, as long as you plan around it.

[Tinkerer]

There are ways of making a Doom Spiral a good thing in a system, as long as you plan around it.

I've found this to be an extraordinarily rare circumstance and one of the big things preventing me from being stalwartly in the Wound System camp. I've tried the Anti-Doom Spiral (Doom Ladder?) before and things get a little weird from both a fluff and crunch standpoint.

[Kyutaru]

I hate health levels.

They create a momentum in combat that encourages the dominant side to continue to be dominant. The Banner Saga has this state where healthy individuals can hang back and wait for the enemy to be softened up then rush in and one-shot clear all wounded adversaries without the enemy being strong enough to harm them back. Area of Effect spells, which D&D is known for in particular, devastate games that use health levels because it becomes much simpler to cripple an entire group of foes.

See health levels as a built in debuff system. Instead of casting spells to debuff the enemy, you cast damage. The damage comes with a free debuff. Damage becomes overpowered, healing becomes the core of any team, and fireballs lay waste to armies.

Warhammer's Age of Sigmar has built-in mixes of these. Strong creatures have health ranges that cause them to grow weaker over time while weak soldiers just die the first time 1-2 times they get shot. The result is that attrition for squads works by losing men while attrition for monsters works by losing health.

[Man_Over_Game]

I guess that's the next impending question: Do we want a positive feedback loop (the more you win, the more you win. AKA Strategy Games), or do we want a negative feedback loop (the more you win, the more you lose. AKA Mario Kart)?

I'm actually a big fan of negative feedback loops, as they promote the underdog heavily, and causes battles to be much more chaotic. The catch is with negative feedback loops is that anyone can win, and anyone can lose. They're designed to allow loses to be winners, and they're a good solution for PVP games, but maybe not TTRPGs. You're expected to survive in a TTRPG, and while a negative feedback loop might be exciting, it definitely means that someone who keeps winning might not always do so.

Positive feedback loops reward the victor, so the combat is often decided before the fight even starts. Tactical advantages, numbers, all go towards someone's chances of winning, and so it might not come down to who rolls better, or how anyone can adapt. The battle was decided before initiative was rolled, and some people don't like that.

This is frustrating, because real-life uses a positive feedback loop, and we like to have our TTRPGs reflect some parts of real life.

It kinda makes sense why DnD doesn't use that feature, to allow victory to be allowed to either side. However, rather than having no feedback, I'm of the opinion that a system should have both. Bosses, for example, often become more lethal the more health they're missing, why can't players? As in, everyone's primary stats get lower as they take damage, but every class/monster has features that activate upon hitting low HP. It promotes risk and dramatics, without always making everything more lethal.

[Psyren]

I'm in a Werewolf campaign at the moment so I'm familiar with this. Some pros and cons:

Pros:

Spoiler

Show

- More narrative 'realism': For those who have... issues with the abstract nature of HP (*side-eyes other HP thread*), health levels are more cleanly mappable to states of injury or seriousness of attacks.

- More 'grit': There generally tend to be far fewer health levels than HP (by necessity, nobody wants 20 or more of these things) and you don't usually get more of them as you level. This keeps even relatively mundane combat dangerous. Werewolf includes a soaking mechanic to help you deal with most muggle opponents, but all it takes is a bit of silver or other source of aggravated damage to keep the difficulty up. Depending on the type of campaign you want to run this may be more of a con, since getting taken down by a lucky mook never feels particularly heroic.

- Easy injuries: You don't have to do any math to figure out injuries or effects tied to HP thresholds, because your health IS the thresholds. Other things like crits are also easy to figure out, e.g. a crit deals 2 levels instead of 1, no need to fiddle with multipliers or threat ranges etc.

Cons:

Spoiler

Show

- Swingy combat: As mentioned, fewer measurements means much less room for error. A few (un)lucky hits and you'll be needing a new character sheet.

- Combat spirals: These systems tend to tie negative effects to each lower threshold that then stack or scale. This can make comebacks or recoveries very hard to pull off, which feels particularly bad if you got put in that situation/incurred the first few negatives due to bad luck or misunderstanding rather than skill.

- Limits campaign/combat types: The nice thing about HP is that it's so flexible - you can make a game, a session, or even a specific encounter more gritty or heroic just by tweaking the damage from each hit relative to the party's HP, and then change it dynamically on the fly. Your party can take on an army of mooks that barely scratch them one minute for more of a heroic feel, and then be forced to flee for their lives from a rampaging dragon the next, followed by creeping through a scary crypt with their healing deplre, all by adjusting how much damage per round they'll take if they don't otherwise act.

- Lack of Divisibility: the abstract nature of HP means you can marry or divorce them from all kinds of rider effects without having to redesign your thresholds. Want someone who is healthy but poisoned or fatigued? Wounded but enraged and focused by adrenaline, then gets wounded some more? HP is flexible enough that you can layer on as many of those states as you want, or simply go with the default of "1 HP left means no loss in effectiveness" if you want.

- Nonstandard health states: Because you have to define each threshold and what happens there, it limits your design space to go outside that framework. Things like temp HP/buffers, bleeding (including bleeding out) require additional design and tracking. Instead of "you lose 5hp per round" for instance, you might have "if you bleed for 3 rounds you go down a threshold" which is a bit easier to lose track of.

- Mappability to other games: This is perhaps the #1 reason to use HP; they've been around in RPGs for years, including video games. This is especially true if you have players who are newer to tabletop, by using HP you're using something they're likely familiar with from elsewhere and that's one less thing they have to keep track of.

Given that I have more cons my own conclusion (that I prefer HP) should be apparent but health thresholds aren't bad, they work well in several systems.

[Zhorn]

I like these types of mechanics in computer based games, where you can have an automated system track when they are applied/removed and what effects are active.
Tabletop, I'm less of a fan. Not in the intent, still like the concept behind them, just the hassle of tracking.
HP has its limitations, and some times you just have to leave your realm-world-logic-brain at the door when you sit down for a game, but that is more beneficial in the long run. Simple mechanics that are easy to track keep the game moving forward.

If they could be built into a VTT for running a game, I'm all on board.

[Thinker]

Big fan of it. Injuries matter, combat does not take ages and damage calculation is streamlined.

That's my general feeling as well.

I'd be fine with it, except for the amount of lookup it'd create. With each level having its own changes, it'd slow down the game to reference different health levels for every character on the battlefield, and remember those changes.

So I think it'd be fine, if it was implemented in a singular way that scaled. For example, every Health Level reduces your movement, saving throws, and attacks by that level. At 5 levels, you're dying. Simple and easy to track. That way, when someone says they're at Damage Level 4, you know exactly what that means without having to look up a table.

I haven't found an increase in number of lookups with games that use such a system. Normally, it's written on the character sheet where you mark off your health levels. Above was an attempt to generalize some of the ways that health levels work - their actual implementation vary widely so some games do the -1 for each health level system.

I'm pretty neutral. I've often found that it doesn't speed things up quite as much as one would think (due to active defenses) and depending on the system things can get a little wonky with the numbers. Additionally if your character is holding something up their sleeve for if combat goes pear shaped you had better make sure that it's not something which requires a roll to activate because those wound penalties get nasty.

But when you balance that out against the issues inherent in an HP based system I could honestly go either way. Slightly favouring a wound system over HP. Although several of the points in your initial post seem inaccurate to me (I've found that most systems allow more than one health level in each attack, health levels are not explicitly character health, you can normally get at least one additional level of health etc... at least with WoD, Savage Worlds, and a few others I have checked out) that could just be differences in which RPG's we've checked out.

There are a lot of systems and their implementations of health levels certainly vary. I find that they work well when the fights are supposed to be fast - 2 or 3 rounds for most. Active defenses can slow things back down (and I don't think that all health-level systems have them, but all of the ones I have played do), but I find that it provides more agency to the players for what they're actually doing in the fight and allows me as the GM to describe what happens better and create more tactical scenarios. For example, if the player wants to dodge behind a tractor trailer to avoid gunfire, that's more interesting than rolling against AC and also changes the environment enough that enemies and allies may have to alter their tactics.

It's been a while since I've played WoD (over a decade now) so I was working from memory and I wasn't sure if Savage Worlds was more like Health Levels or Hit Points. Thinking it through more, I think that you're right. Even in the games I've been playing more recently, a punch to the face might only be a -1 wound while a bomb blast could send you straight to dying, which is functionally the same as taking multiple health levels.

This is rarely the case in such systems, certainly it doesn't apply to White-Wolf's storyteller system, in which it is quite possible, in fact almost trivially easy, to lose all of you health levels to a single attack.

Also, it's important to separate the idea of large or small pools of HP or Health Levels from the concept of wound penalties, as they have different effects. Having a large number or a small number where your HP is recorded is mostly an aesthetic choice. If I have 1000 HP and the average attack does 100 damage or if I have ten health levels and the average attack deal one level of damage I still die after getting hit ten times. Having a lower absolute number does have certain aspects - in Exalted 'ping damage' or hitting with a lot of attacks that did only one damage max was a significant factor in gameplay - but for the most part it's just a math problem.

Wound penalties, which inhibit character performance as damage increases, are much more complex in their overall impact.

You're right that there's little difference proportionally in those damages. Though, with a smaller range available, you make lesser foes more dangerous.

They don't always function like you're describing. Exalted, for example, really uses them more like hit points, just with a penalty for being over a certain damage threshold. In general, though, health levels have their own disadvantages, particularly the "doom spiral"--once you start to taking damage, you get worse at combat, so you take more damage, so you get even worse...

My preference is for a combination of plot-armor-HP and physical-injury-track. Fate and STaRS both use such a system-- you can take a few hits with no more ill effect than tiring yourself out a bit, but if you overflow that margin something seriously bad happens to you.

I agree that this won't match every health level system because there are so many levels of it. Fate does do it well and I'm a fan of that system as well - many systems seem to give a few "no penalty" health levels if they're trying to emulate heroic types. I'm not familiar with STaRS though.

I was worried about the "Doom Spiral" aspect myself but, as long as the developer is aware of it, that doesn't have to be a bad thing. A Barbarian-type, for example, could gain some kind of primal power at higher damage levels as he progresses into deeper and deeper rage and insanity. A Warrior-type, who's constantly trying to find a challenge, might have a set of skills that he only uses when his life is on the line. A Necromancer-type could channel his pressing mortality into powers of undeath, effectively becoming a lich, temporarily, after hitting a certain threshold.

There are ways of making a Doom Spiral a good thing in a system, as long as you plan around it.

You can certainly add effects to the Doom Spiral. I think that also gives some freedom to archetypes - you might make skirmishers who are extra effective while healthy, which encourages them to leave a fight early and also heavy fighters who might either gain access to additional abilities while lower on health or not suffer as many penalties. Otherwise, I see the Doom Spiral as a feature - if you're winning the fight, your enemies are more inclined to give up and either flee or surrender.

I hate health levels.

They create a momentum in combat that encourages the dominant side to continue to be dominant. The Banner Saga has this state where healthy individuals can hang back and wait for the enemy to be softened up then rush in and one-shot clear all wounded adversaries without the enemy being strong enough to harm them back. Area of Effect spells, which D&D is known for in particular, devastate games that use health levels because it becomes much simpler to cripple an entire group of foes.

See health levels as a built in debuff system. Instead of casting spells to debuff the enemy, you cast damage. The damage comes with a free debuff. Damage becomes overpowered, healing becomes the core of any team, and fireballs lay waste to armies.

Warhammer's Age of Sigmar has built-in mixes of these. Strong creatures have health ranges that cause them to grow weaker over time while weak soldiers just die the first time 1-2 times they get shot. The result is that attrition for squads works by losing men while attrition for monsters works by losing health.

I prefer the side that is winning to continue winning, barring bad luck, worse tactics, or a change in the circumstances on the ground (reinforcements, change in weather, etc.). If you're losing a fight, you can disengage or surrender. Your descriptions of reserve forces and artillery sound like they match real-world strategy, which is a good thing in my mind. There's still room for debuffs in games with health-levels - they'll just be different from the effects taken from wounds.

I guess that's the next impending question: Do we want a positive feedback loop (the more you win, the more you win. AKA Strategy Games), or do we want a negative feedback loop (the more you win, the more you lose. AKA Mario Kart)?

I'm actually a big fan of negative feedback loops, as they promote the underdog heavily, and causes battles to be much more chaotic. The catch is with negative feedback loops is that anyone can win, and anyone can lose. They're designed to allow loses to be winners, and they're a good solution for PVP games, but maybe not TTRPGs. You're expected to survive in a TTRPG, and while a negative feedback loop might be exciting, it definitely means that someone who keeps winning might not always do so.

Positive feedback loops reward the victor, so the combat is often decided before the fight even starts. Tactical advantages, numbers, all go towards someone's chances of winning, and so it might not come down to who rolls better, or how anyone can adapt. The battle was decided before initiative was rolled, and some people don't like that.

This is frustrating, because real-life uses a positive feedback loop, and we like to have our TTRPGs reflect some parts of real life.

It kinda makes sense why DnD doesn't use that feature, to allow victory to be allowed to either side. However, rather than having no feedback, I'm of the opinion that a system should have both. Bosses, for example, often become more lethal the more health they're missing, why can't players? As in, everyone's primary stats get lower as they take damage, but every class/monster has features that activate upon hitting low HP. It promotes risk and dramatics, without always making everything more lethal.

I think that a positive feedback loop would be interesting as a character's niche, rather than for everyone. Or maybe just the party because the game is about a bunch of mutants who get stronger as they get beat up (as one aspect of their mutations). It could work, but I prefer the doom spiral as the norm.

I'm in a Werewolf campaign at the moment so I'm familiar with this. Some pros and cons:

Pros:

Spoiler

Show

- More narrative 'realism': For those who have... issues with the abstract nature of HP (*side-eyes other HP thread*), health levels are more cleanly mappable to states of injury or seriousness of attacks.

- More 'grit': There generally tend to be far fewer health levels than HP (by necessity, nobody wants 20 or more of these things) and you don't usually get more of them as you level. This keeps even relatively mundane combat dangerous. Werewolf includes a soaking mechanic to help you deal with most muggle opponents, but all it takes is a bit of silver or other source of aggravated damage to keep the difficulty up. Depending on the type of campaign you want to run this may be more of a con, since getting taken down by a lucky mook never feels particularly heroic.

- Easy injuries: You don't have to do any math to figure out injuries or effects tied to HP thresholds, because your health IS the thresholds. Other things like crits are also easy to figure out, e.g. a crit deals 2 levels instead of 1, no need to fiddle with multipliers or threat ranges etc.

Cons:

Spoiler

Show

- Swingy combat: As mentioned, fewer measurements means much less room for error. A few (un)lucky hits and you'll be needing a new character sheet.

- Combat spirals: These systems tend to tie negative effects to each lower threshold that then stack or scale. This can make comebacks or recoveries very hard to pull off, which feels particularly bad if you got put in that situation/incurred the first few negatives due to bad luck or misunderstanding rather than skill.

- Limits campaign/combat types: The nice thing about HP is that it's so flexible - you can make a game, a session, or even a specific encounter more gritty or heroic just by tweaking the damage from each hit relative to the party's HP, and then change it dynamically on the fly. Your party can take on an army of mooks that barely scratch them one minute for more of a heroic feel, and then be forced to flee for their lives from a rampaging dragon the next, followed by creeping through a scary crypt with their healing deplre, all by adjusting how much damage per round they'll take if they don't otherwise act.

- Lack of Divisibility: the abstract nature of HP means you can marry or divorce them from all kinds of rider effects without having to redesign your thresholds. Want someone who is healthy but poisoned or fatigued? Wounded but enraged and focused by adrenaline, then gets wounded some more? HP is flexible enough that you can layer on as many of those states as you want, or simply go with the default of "1 HP left means no loss in effectiveness" if you want.

- Nonstandard health states: Because you have to define each threshold and what happens there, it limits your design space to go outside that framework. Things like temp HP/buffers, bleeding (including bleeding out) require additional design and tracking. Instead of "you lose 5hp per round" for instance, you might have "if you bleed for 3 rounds you go down a threshold" which is a bit easier to lose track of.

- Mappability to other games: This is perhaps the #1 reason to use HP; they've been around in RPGs for years, including video games. This is especially true if you have players who are newer to tabletop, by using HP you're using something they're likely familiar with from elsewhere and that's one less thing they have to keep track of.

Given that I have more cons my own conclusion (that I prefer HP) should be apparent but health thresholds aren't bad, they work well in several systems.

While I agree with your pros, I disagree with some of your cons.

Swingy combat - I see this as a feature. Don't take fights for things that aren't worth putting your life on the line.
Combat spirals - I also like this. It ties into your pros of grit and narrative realism.
Limits campaign/combat types - I don't think that it does. You move your tweaking to the character's defenses, rather than their raw health. It becomes more about avoiding or mitigating harm, rather than soaking it. It also encourages players to think about ways they can reduce harm in a narrative sense - do I want to stand out in the open and fire at them or do I want to fire from cover behind those crates?
Lack of Divisibility - You can have effects that directly target things besides health levels. A poison might temporarily reduce strength while fatigue reduces stamina. You don't have to tie those effects to taking damage.
Nonstandard health states - Instead of "Temp HP", you could instead do something like, "Expend to totally negate one wound". I don't see much difference in remembering to lose 5 HP per round and lose 1 health level in 3 rounds, but your mileage may vary. But, that doesn't seem like that interesting of an effect. I'd probably do something like, setting up a status clock and, depending on the system is either measuring rounds or character failures, and when it is full, the character drops to dying. Builds tension and allows the party time to do something about the effect - bandaging, healing magic, whatever.
Mappability to other games - While this is certainly a benefit of HP, I don't know that health levels are such a difficult concept to grasp that they're a barrier to people playing an RPG. It certainly wasn't the hardest part of learning to play Exalted or Fate or Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark.

I would also add another pro to your list:
Ability to map specific wounds to a lost health level - In Blades in the Dark, you write-in what your wound is on the line with the health-level. This supports thinking about recovery methods. You don't treat a gunshot wound the same as you do an electric shock.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I agree that this won't match every health level system because there are so many levels of it. Fate does do it well and I'm a fan of that system as well - many systems seem to give a few "no penalty" health levels if they're trying to emulate heroic types. I'm not familiar with STaRS though.

It's the rules-light system I published.

Swingy combat - I see this as a feature. Don't take fights for things that aren't worth putting your life on the line.
Combat spirals - I also like this. It ties into your pros of grit and narrative realism.
Limits campaign/combat types - I don't think that it does. You move your tweaking to the character's defenses, rather than their raw health. It becomes more about avoiding or mitigating harm, rather than soaking it. It also encourages players to think about ways they can reduce harm in a narrative sense - do I want to stand out in the open and fire at them or do I want to fire from cover behind those crates?

This is somewhat self-contradictory, I think. Health levels work well for gritty games where combat is supposed to be risky, but they're less well suited to genres where combat is supposed to be commonplace-- superheroes, D&D-style fantasy, etc. Increasing defense generally isn't a very satisfying solution, because "I miss, you miss, I miss, you hit and I'm dead" isn't terribly fun. Inflicting HP damage feels like you're accomplishing something and progressing towards a goal, even if the net result (trading blows with no ill effect until someone falls over) is the same.

[PhoenixPhyre]

This is somewhat self-contradictory, I think. Health levels work well for gritty games where combat is supposed to be risky, but they're less well suited to genres where combat is supposed to be commonplace-- superheroes, D&D-style fantasy, etc. Increasing defense generally isn't a very satisfying solution, because "I miss, you miss, I miss, you hit and I'm dead" isn't terribly fun. Inflicting HP damage feels like you're accomplishing something and progressing towards a goal, even if the net result (trading blows with no ill effect until someone falls over) is the same.

I agree completely here.

One other thing I don't like about health levels (or low-and-static HP) is that it doesn't let me throw lots of damage dice. And throwing big piles of damage dice is fun, both for me and for the players. Knowing that you can take it when the DM pulls out a big handful of dice feels powerful. Watching your fireball obliterate (enough so that even save-for-half doesn't help) a whole squad of mooks, getting that big crit and rolling 6d6 (2d6 from a greatsword + 1d6 from a fancy weapon), smiting someone for all the dice feels fun.

5e D&D has a "wound track", except they call it exhaustion. And exhaustion levels are crippling. The first one gives disadvantage to ability checks (so you're basically useless out of combat). The second adds in a halving of speed, the third adds disadvantage to everything else (attacks and saves), the fourth reduces your HP maximum by half, the 5th reduces your speed to 0, and the 6th is death. A long rest (which resets most other things) only reduces exhaustion by 1 level. The only spells that remove it are level 5+ (so level 9 characters), and that one only removes one level. Avoiding exhaustion is a big deal, and a necessary choice. There's a subclass that, when you activate your big ability, gives you a level of exhaustion. And it's one of the least used subclasses because of that.

[Thinker]

It's the rules-light system I published.

Cool. I'll check it out when I have time. Always happy to read through new systems.

This is somewhat self-contradictory, I think. Health levels work well for gritty games where combat is supposed to be risky, but they're less well suited to genres where combat is supposed to be commonplace-- superheroes, D&D-style fantasy, etc. Increasing defense generally isn't a very satisfying solution, because "I miss, you miss, I miss, you hit and I'm dead" isn't terribly fun. Inflicting HP damage feels like you're accomplishing something and progressing towards a goal, even if the net result (trading blows with no ill effect until someone falls over) is the same.

I agree that the ideal scenario is for less-combat focused games than D&D, but the negative that was listed is that you can raise a character's HP to make them tougher, but there's no corresponding way to do so with health levels. I disagree with that. For example, Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy have single-use effects that recharge between missions that can be used to negate a wound. They also allow a character to basically save against damage, but they take an amount of stress instead that corresponds to how well they rolled. Other options might include allowing armor to reduce damage by X Levels or your pool of no-penalty health levels. I think there are enough levers to pull for health-level systems to still make tough characters. I wouldn't want to play a game where everyone uses all of those options all of the time because it would get repetitive (for instance a fight of attack, damage, attack, miss, attack, damage). But, if you wanted to have the option for characters to be tougher, that option is there without using HP.

I agree completely here.

One other thing I don't like about health levels (or low-and-static HP) is that it doesn't let me throw lots of damage dice. And throwing big piles of damage dice is fun, both for me and for the players. Knowing that you can take it when the DM pulls out a big handful of dice feels powerful. Watching your fireball obliterate (enough so that even save-for-half doesn't help) a whole squad of mooks, getting that big crit and rolling 6d6 (2d6 from a greatsword + 1d6 from a fancy weapon), smiting someone for all the dice feels fun.

For the last couple of years, my group has been playing games where we roll 2d6 +modifier with static damage values for each character/weapon. We've had moments where players have destroyed armies and moments where they struggled against terrible odds. Some of my players have said that they have no interest in going back to games with tons of dice. I know that's only anecdotal and your experience may well be different. It does sound like health levels aren't for you and that's fine. I'm glad you have found the games that you like to play.

5e D&D has a "wound track", except they call it exhaustion. And exhaustion levels are crippling. The first one gives disadvantage to ability checks (so you're basically useless out of combat). The second adds in a halving of speed, the third adds disadvantage to everything else (attacks and saves), the fourth reduces your HP maximum by half, the 5th reduces your speed to 0, and the 6th is death. A long rest (which resets most other things) only reduces exhaustion by 1 level. The only spells that remove it are level 5+ (so level 9 characters), and that one only removes one level. Avoiding exhaustion is a big deal, and a necessary choice. There's a subclass that, when you activate your big ability, gives you a level of exhaustion. And it's one of the least used subclasses because of that.

I haven't played or read through 5e's rules. I lost interest in DnD at 4e and haven't felt the need to read 5e, though I have heard good things about it overall. The wound track does sound interesting, but your description makes it sound like they didn't really build around the idea very much or they didn't understand how bad it would be to suffer such a penalty.

[Morty]

The two Storyteller systems I'm familiar with, Chronicles of Darkness and Exalted 3E, are both rather less death spirally than what's being described here. In CofD, it takes several lost health levels before you take wound penalties. In Exalted, you need to trade withering attacks before you gather enough initiative to attack an enemy's health levels. Of course, CofD combat is still pretty quick and brutal, especially for mortals, whereas Exalted focuses on kung-fu action scenes, even for mortals.

[PhoenixPhyre]

For the last couple of years, my group has been playing games where we roll 2d6 +modifier with static damage values for each character/weapon. We've had moments where players have destroyed armies and moments where they struggled against terrible odds. Some of my players have said that they have no interest in going back to games with tons of dice. I know that's only anecdotal and your experience may well be different. It does sound like health levels aren't for you and that's fine. I'm glad you have found the games that you like to play.

I see it with both my adult players and my teenagers. Peoples' eyes light up when you get to roll all the dice. But yes, it is certainly personal preference.

I haven't played or read through 5e's rules. I lost interest in DnD at 4e and haven't felt the need to read 5e, though I have heard good things about it overall. The wound track does sound interesting, but your description makes it sound like they didn't really build around the idea very much or they didn't understand how bad it would be to suffer such a penalty.

The big issue is that it's an ancillary track. There aren't many things that players can do to cause exhaustion--it's mainly for environmental effects (like lack of sleep/food/water, exploration in arctic environments, etc), but that makes things that interact with it especially brutal.

As a side note, death spirals are completely not my style for anything where combat is expected (and not expected to be brutal). If you lose one roll, even by sheer luck (all 1s on 10d6), you've lost the whole combat and are probably dead or maimed and certainly have failed at your goal. I don't do gritty. I do heroic. Real life is gritty enough--I don't like spending my recreational time with that.

[jjordan]

I prefer something like a hit point scale because it allows for greater flexibility in narrative game play.

[Lapak]

I like health levels / wound tracks; they tend to make combat feel more significant whether you win or lose while keeping things at the level of abstraction I prefer.

I think Ironclaw has a good example of one that balances grit and a doom spiral by making the penalties of being wounded have less of an impact on your immediate combat potential. The main malus is that you are more vulnerable to future harm - successful attacks against you are harder to soak. So you are just as dangerous to anyone fighting you while you are wounded, but you ARE easier to finish off.

The second penalty (Afraid) does affect your combat potential, but it is possible to remove or negate it and some character types actually gain new options while under it.

[Thinker]

The big issue is that it's an ancillary track. There aren't many things that players can do to cause exhaustion--it's mainly for environmental effects (like lack of sleep/food/water, exploration in arctic environments, etc), but that makes things that interact with it especially brutal.

I see. When I played DnD, we mostly hand-waved things like sleep, food, water, etc. anyway.

As a side note, death spirals are completely not my style for anything where combat is expected (and not expected to be brutal). If you lose one roll, even by sheer luck (all 1s on 10d6), you've lost the whole combat and are probably dead or maimed and certainly have failed at your goal. I don't do gritty. I do heroic. Real life is gritty enough--I don't like spending my recreational time with that.

I can respect preferring heroic gameplay. I think health levels can work for that, but it takes more effort than just throwing an HP pool at it. One roll won't necessarily lose a combat with health levels - characters are probably more proficient than most of the foes they're facing and are typically more tactical (even against a GM who is trying to cleverly position enemies, a group of players will often out-think the one GM).

I prefer something like a hit point scale because it allows for greater flexibility in narrative game play.

Could you elaborate on this? I am not sure I am clear on what you mean by a hit point scale.

I like health levels / wound tracks; they tend to make combat feel more significant whether you win or lose while keeping things at the level of abstraction I prefer.

I think Ironclaw has a good example of one that balances grit and a doom spiral by making the penalties of being wounded have less of an impact on your immediate combat potential. The main malus is that you are more vulnerable to future harm - successful attacks against you are harder to soak. So you are just as dangerous to anyone fighting you while you are wounded, but you ARE easier to finish off.

The second penalty (Afraid) does affect your combat potential, but it is possible to remove or negate it and some character types actually gain new options while under it.

I have heard good things about Ironclaw - that's the PbtA with options for GM-less gameplay, right? I haven't gotten a chance to read through it yet. That sounds like a good compromise between losing effectiveness and feeling useless. What does Afraid actually do in game-terms?

[Kaptin Keen]

Health levels are the one thing that works perfectly in Shadowrun. But it's not for every kind of game. It's incredibly good for the type of gritty game SR is, and it would be equally fine for Dark Heresy or any of the other 40k adaptions. But for D&D it would be awful.

Or ... so I feel. Might be worth testing before dismissing it out of hand.

[Lapak]

I have heard good things about Ironclaw - that's the PbtA with options for GM-less gameplay, right? I haven't gotten a chance to read through it yet.

No, that's something else - it's a game whose mechanical component is practically a laundry list of things I like:
- this health track
- a skill system that rewards specialization immediately but gives gradually diminishing returns to super-specialists
- a combat system that strikes a balance between 'main characters are badass' with 'a mob of lesser folks is a threat to anyone',
- a Renaisance/Early Modern type setting with feudalism giving way to new types of government and lots of social mobility, with the players as lower-to-middle-class folks ready to shake things up

With an Achilles' heel that makes it remarkably difficult to get a game going:

- it's an anthropomorphic/furry setting, with an anime-styled art scheme in the main book

That sounds like a good compromise between losing effectiveness and feeling useless. What does Afraid actually do in game-terms?

EDIT to add a response to this. Afraid prevents the character from attacking. But it can be removed by ending a turn out of line-of-sight of all hostiles, by another character using the Rally action to remove it, or by certain Gifts (which function sorta like D&D's martial maneuvers; one-shot until refreshed.) And some character races/classes get a buff to non-attacks when Afraid.

And it only prevents Attacking, not Counter-Attacking - Counter-Attack is a defensive choice you can use against melee attacks where you try to beat the incoming attacker's roll; win the contest and they get hurt instead of you.

An amusing side note: if someone overshoots the end of the health track they're not just killed but horrifically Overkilled, which makes all their allies Afraid.

[Florian]

Not that much of a fan, really. Health levels lead to death spirals (else you could stay with hp instead of modeling damage a bit finer), death spirals have damage carry an automatic debuff, but most importantly, they alter the flow of the game more towards fearing combat and relying heavily on first strikes and ambushes to kill them before they kill you.

I'm often playing Rogue Trader (WH40K) with its multiple layers of active and passive defenses (armor, personal force fields, being able to parry and dodge and so on) and characters are surprisingly tough for a while, but once the solid hits get to break thru the defenses, it´s more or less game over.

[jjordan]

I prefer something like a hit point scale because it allows for greater flexibility in narrative game play.

Could you elaborate on this? I am not sure I am clear on what you mean by a hit point scale.

A simple HP meter. E.G. You have 30 HP. I feel that this allows for the greatest flexibility. I can layer health levels on top of a HP system but can't easily do the opposite, for example.

[NichG]

My favorite model is to generally have a single successful hit be basically sufficient to disable or kill, but for characters to have ablative resources that they can use to force hits to be unsuccessful. That's narratively compatible with dangerous things being dangerous ('sure stab me in the eye with a dagger, it'll only do 1d4'), avoids death spirals, and makes defense into an active decision ('Do I dodge this hit, or let my armor deflect it? It looks like they put poison on their sword, so I'd better pay the extra to dodge completely').

The downside is that you have to more carefully design things to have some effect on a miss or have weak effects that aren't avoidable or the early stages of combat become very samey. Similarly, you have to justify why the strong effects should always be avoidable in the design fluff. That can be a bit constraining.

For exceptional cases where you e.g. don't want someone wearing plate to have to avoid a dagger, you might just say that e.g. everyone only has one health level, even a dagger does three damage, but DR is a thing.

[Morty]

My favorite model is to generally have a single successful hit be basically sufficient to disable or kill, but for characters to have ablative resources that they can use to force hits to be unsuccessful. That's narratively compatible with dangerous things being dangerous ('sure stab me in the eye with a dagger, it'll only do 1d4'), avoids death spirals, and makes defense into an active decision ('Do I dodge this hit, or let my armor deflect it? It looks like they put poison on their sword, so I'd better pay the extra to dodge completely').

The downside is that you have to more carefully design things to have some effect on a miss or have weak effects that aren't avoidable or the early stages of combat become very samey. Similarly, you have to justify why the strong effects should always be avoidable in the design fluff. That can be a bit constraining.

For exceptional cases where you e.g. don't want someone wearing plate to have to avoid a dagger, you might just say that e.g. everyone only has one health level, even a dagger does three damage, but DR is a thing.

Which systems use this kind of thing?

[kyoryu]

My favorite model...

Overall I’m pretty good with this. A lot of “realistic” systems don’t model a ton of things in real fights well - positioning, fatigue, blows that hit and may concuss but aren’t strong enough to “injure” etc.

And in a somewhat realistic system, almost any hit that actually causes injury is going to cause enough pain and shock to basically take someone out of the fight. So, this model does a pretty good job from my POV.

[NichG]

Which systems use this kind of thing?

Ones I've written for campaigns:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19w...-kmyX74Z0lJF_k
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rQ...3GlEWTWVQTBrye

It's also (loosely) applied in my current superhero campaign, where you engage in a bidding war over stakes defined by the powers you involve, but nothing actually 'lands' until the bidding war finishes (and after the bidding war finishes, that particular 'question' has been resolved for that encounter). E.g. if the Flash wins an overarching bid to dodge artillery fire from Mobile Fortress Frank, then Mobile Fortress Frank cannot ever hit the Flash with artillery fire in that scene no matter how many shots are fired; but if he loses, then he's mulch.

I don't happen to know of any professional ones that use this particular mechanism, but I also wouldn't be shocked if someone told me that it has been used somewhere.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ones I've written for campaigns:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19w...-kmyX74Z0lJF_k
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rQ...3GlEWTWVQTBrye

It's also (loosely) applied in my current superhero campaign, where you engage in a bidding war over stakes defined by the powers you involve, but nothing actually 'lands' until the bidding war finishes (and after the bidding war finishes, that particular 'question' has been resolved for that encounter). E.g. if the Flash wins an overarching bid to dodge artillery fire from Mobile Fortress Frank, then Mobile Fortress Frank cannot ever hit the Flash with artillery fire in that scene no matter how many shots are fired; but if he loses, then he's mulch.

I don't happen to know of any professional ones that use this particular mechanism, but I also wouldn't be shocked if someone told me that it has been used somewhere.

I'll have to take a look at those, as part of my unending quest to find a system that doesn't make me want to pull out my hair in frustration.

If I end up inspired by the ideas, would it offend you to see the basic concepts reused?