Your character is pinned down behind cover, surrounded by enemies who are opening fire on them! If you’re really lucky and the dice are on your side, you might escape this situation unscathed. More than likely though, you’re going be taking some damage! Over the years, with all the games I’ve been lucky enough to own and/or play, I’ve found two primary ways damage is tracked in role playing games; hit points and health levels.
Hit points are the oldest method of tracking damage in role playing games; Dungeons & Dragons was the first and there have been countless games that have done the same. It’s an abstract measure of your character’s physical health and wellbeing. This number is usually generated randomly and each point of damage taken is subtracted from your current condition.
Health levels are a little more abstract; the number of levels characters get can be standardized or may vary slightly depending on your character’s other traits. Tracking damage is usually done by figuring out how much of the incoming damage exceeds your defined threshold, with each factor beyond that threshold inflicting a level of damage. This type of damage tracking can be seen in games like World of Darkness or Savage Worlds.
Hit points give you a number that defines how healthy your character is, but in my experience there seems to be a tendency to ignore the narrative effects of any damage until you reach your last few points, with character’s bodies seemingly resembling a pincushion before they succumb to their wounds. On the flipside of this dilemma, there are characters with so many hit points that most of the challenges they face become inconsequential.
Then with health levels, it can sometimes seem like no matter how tough you get, you can still be taken down with one good attack, or with a lucky roll. Usually, each level is accompanied by some penalty to your rolls due to the pain and the damage suffered; this can make getting out of the trouble you’re in even harder compared to hit point games.
Over the years each system became less and less satisfying, though I must admit that I am still a little more partial to health levels just because of their narrative effects on the character as they continue to take damage. Even so, I find myself searching for systems with an alternative to either type of damage tracking. I can’t say that I have any ingenious idea for an alternative myself, and while I enjoy reading other systems and playing new games, my search has so far eluded me.
What systems for tracking damage do you enjoy? Have you come across any system that is either hit point or health level? What are they like and how do they compare to more traditional methods?
Alex Montoya
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I enjoy the FATE system of health, which is a little from both of these, and as is normal for the system, gives the player a lot more narrative control over the outcome.
Basically, in FATE you have Stress boxes instead of health, but they don’t represent a health track or HPs. Instead, each box represents a specific number of stress (i.e., damage) that it can absorb. The first box is 1 point, the second is 2 points, etc., and they reset after every scene.
You generally start character generation with two boxes, and get one to three extras if you take the proper skill training or stunts. When you get hit, you have to fill in one (and only one) box, whose value is equal to or higher than the damage you took. So if an attack deals 3 damage, you have to fill in your third stress box. If it’s already filled in and you have a fourth or fifth, you’ll fill in that higher box instead. If you can’t fill in a box to take the stress, you are Taken Out, and lose the encounter.
But that’s not all there is to it. If you are about to take too much stress to deal with, you can choose to take a Consequence to reduce the amount of stress until it does fit within your remaining boxes. For example, in the above example, if you take a Minor consequence, it soaks up 2 stress from the incoming attack. That leaves only one stress, so you can fill in your “1” box and survive the hit. The downside of that is you now have a minor consequence — which might be “bruised ribs” or “scratched-up forearms” or even, if it’s a social attack that stressed you, “embarrassed” or “infuriated”. (FATE runs on narrative phrases, so you pick an appropriate phrase, and then that can then cause you problems later on if being scratched up or embarrassed would reasonably cause you a problem in that situation.)
But you only have a limited number of Consequences you can take — one Minor, one Moderate, one Major, and one Severe. Each one is harder to cure and longer-lasting than the previous one, but sucks up more stress. A Minor consequence is easy to cure, and once cured, goes away at the end of your next scene. Moderate consequences last the next entire game session, Severe for your next entire adventure, and if you had to blow a Extreme consequence to suck up a whopping eight stress, you took the kind of injury that gets you hospitalized, and it never really goes away. You might eventually clear the consequence slot so you could take another severe consequence later, but it has a permanent impact on your character. You generally don’t take these unless the alternative is death.
But not every fight is to the death. And this is why I love FATE — you really only take injuries when you choose to take injuries. If you get into a bar brawl with a guy twice your size and he punches you for more stress than you have a box for, you can decide it’s not the kind of fight that’s worth taking consequences over and let him drop you. You won’t die from it or even be hurt, once you leave the scene. You might wake up in the dumpster out back, and the guy has left with the girl you were trying to hit on (as part of your brilliant scheme to pickpocket her cell phone), but you didn’t even get a black eye from it.
You could die if taken out, if you were, say, fighting a deadly assassin or being savaged by wolves, but the GM would let you know that ahead of time. Most of the time, a loss just means the bad guy gets to do whatever he wanted to. The GM gets to narrate what happens to you as a result of losing that conflict.
And there’s one more option; on your turn, you can decide to concede the fight. You lose, and the other guy gets to do what he wants to do (mostly), but you get narrative input into the whole thing. Instead of being left in the dumpster out back, you might stagger out just in time to get his license plate number. Or you concede after taking some consequences, and instead of being murdered, you get left for dead by the assassin, who has to flee because the city guards show up right then.