Dealing With Harm as Fiction, Eliminating HP:

Dealing With Harm as Fiction, Eliminating HP:

Dealing With Harm as Fiction, Eliminating HP:

So I’m GMing for the first time in a while tomorrow. I’ve always disliked hit-point harm (both in terms of what PCs deal and what they take). I feel that HP pulls me out of the fiction and as an improv-reliant GM, I don’t like having to stop and generate stats for enemies. I like to keep the ball rolling. To that end, I found this really cool Apocalypse World hack (linked) that I’d like to use, but I wanted to pick the tavern’s brain about it.

First, do you think I’ll run into trouble using it? What kind? How would you solve?

Second, this hack addresses harm that PCs take, but what about harm they deal? Should I just use the same system to roll for my monsters? Should I write equivalent player-facing rules about dealing damage?

And then there’s the question of the CON stat. This hack accounts for the disparate builds of characters by allowing the GM to determine which of the three harm rules is triggered (what only threatens a scratch to a fighter might threaten death to a thief). So should I just drop the CON stat altogether? I guess we’d still need it if someone’s poisoned or something…

Finally, any thoughts on healing?

Thanks guys!

http://ihousenews.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/63408904/Apocalypse%20harm.pdf

20 thoughts on “Dealing With Harm as Fiction, Eliminating HP:”

  1. Oh man, the three harm moves! These are great, but if you want this, then dw may no longer be the game you want. As you move away from emulating d&d, dw is less appealing.

    Maybe consider trying a different hack altogether?

  2. I agree with William Nichols​ that if you don’t want to emulate D&D, other hacks might work better with some simple recoloring.

    Fallen Empires might work well, I’m running a fantasy game using it now.

  3. Ditching HP and rolling damage is totally possible. These variant harm moves from AW are also pretty great. You could bring in the new combat moves from AW2E in terms of the players doing damage, but that means replacing Hack N Slash, Defend, and Volley, probably. Which is a fair amount of work. It might be easier to keep them and just create a AW countdown-clock for enemy damage, with different numbers of “slices” for different levels of toughness. And then mark off an appropriate number of segments depending on the kind of fictional damage that PCs do, rather than rolling damage. Like, if you skewer a goblin with a pike, they’re probably dead but could make 1 more action before perishing. But if you just slash the goblin’s arm you mark 1 segment of harm. And basic goblins have 3 segments while major enemies have up to 8 or something. That kind of thing.

  5. Thanks Jeremy Strandberg  !  I like the idea of using HP as a depletable roll bonus — allows us to keep HP and Constitution important. I think I’d put it on top of those AW rules — I like how colorful they are. (instead rolling +armor, roll +designated amount of hp.)

    that just leaves the issue of PCs dealing damage. I like J. Walton  ‘s suggestion of checking off progress but William Nichols   and  Aaron Griffin   are right. So many player moves involve things like rolling an extra d4 of damage, i think any hack is going to have to continue to incorporate damage dice somehow.

    but I’d still love to get rid of monster hit points. i can’t imagine there is, but has anyone heard of/though of other ways to use damage dice? they seem by definition to link to monster hp.

    as far as the suggestion that i try another hack, i know you’re right, but i generally love dw (particularly the playfulness of third party playbooks) and feel very comfortable with it so am loathe to switch. but absolutely acknowledged, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to try to hack a hack this way.

  6. Here’s a harm hack I’m playing with for my WIP high magic fantasy hack: incorporating the usage dice concept from The Black Hack for stamina. When you take a hit, you roll your stamina die minus harm suffered, and on a 1-2 the die size goes down.

    Dunno how this will work in extended play but in one session it worked okay. It adds a bit of random chance to hits but keeps harm sort of in the 2-5 big hit range.

  7. What about a PC Deal Damage move (adapted from the AW harm moves) where PCs roll 1d6+Damage Die? Thus a Fighter would be more likely to cause serious harm, a Wizard less likely to cause serious harm, and damage die modifiers would continue to matter…

    something like

    When you deal a beating or a nasty scratch, roll 1d6+Damage

    -On a 10+, You don’t know your own strength. Choose one from pain. The GM chooses two more from pain or one from serious shit.

    -On a 7-9, your attack stings. You choose one from pain and the GM will choose another.

    -On a miss, all it did was get their attention. Now you’re in a spot.

  9. Hi there! Nice to see my hacks are getting some attention.

    I agree that the AW version of the move is not well-suited to DW. If you want a grittier, less “gamey” dungeon fantasy game, you’re better off starting with World of Dungeons, or otherwise designing your own hack.

    If you want to stick to DW, I think using regular HP for monsters is just fine – giving that kind of detail to monsters getting hurt seems like the wrong way to go. (Or, at least, make it a player-facing move.)

    I could see designing a new “hack-n-slash” move, which gives you options to choose off your own list of “attack moves”, which list things particular to your weapon and things particular to your class. (Options could include things like, “bypass armour”, or “disable a limb”.)

  10. Aaron A. It’s an OSR game, available on drivethrurpg and other places. Not something I’d ever personally run, but I like the usage die mechanic.

  12. Sub! I’m intetested in DW but hp’s and rolling damage are a turn-off. So far I’ve liked Uncharted World’s damage most: It has 5 severities of damage, from bruises to lethal. If you suffer a wound of given level second time, you mark the next free higher level instead.

  14. Totally hear you guys on it not making sense for DW buuuut just to be stubborn and give it a try, what do you think of the moves below? Adapted from those 3 AW harm moves.

    http://bit.ly/2a5BdV2

    Or perhaps, to follow, Antti Lusila and J. Walton s suggestions — it could be a series of standard progress boxes and say 3 standard enemy HP equivalencies (henchman, miniboss, boss). So (an arbitrary example) for every henchman, 4 damage is a scratch, 6 is a wound, 8 is…

  15. Sure, some thoughts:

    1. Are the “deal harm” moves supposed to be used instead of Hack and Slash? If so, they might need different triggers (or at least more clarity) – when do you get to trigger this move?

    2. I think it’s kind of odd that the attacking player gets to choose the options from the list. For instance, choosing that my opponent drops their sword and loses their footing is odd, in my mind, in how reliable it is.

    It also looks like it might be really hard to kill things… but I’d have to look more closely to be sure.

    3. The “suffer harm” moves are basically mine, right? If so, they work fine, except that they add a LOT of legwork to each time you get hit. If you’re playing a D&D-style combat, that might get overly tedious. You’d have to try it, but my guess is that it would slow down the game too much.

    It works great in AW, where injuries happen a few times a session, but I don’t think I’d want that level of detail if I’m getting hurt several times in one fight. There should be a better way to handle this, I think.

    4. I like the harm modifier instead of +dice for damage. That seems like a good way to go.

  16. Aaron Griffin​ in my mind your still having hp if you have “harm boxes” your just calling a different thing and maybe having less of ut.

    In that case just have less HP.

  18. Aaron A., a few observations/questions to think about:

    – If these are replacing H&S (rather than just the damage roll), what happens to Volley? The strike with lethal force move has very different outcomes than Volley does. Intentional?

    – If these are meant to replace the damage roll (with H&S and Volley still in place), you’re making attacks double-jeopardy. I risk a 7-9 or 6- result two times for every attack I make. Yikes.

    – What if I Defend and choose to deal damage equal to my level? How does that resolve?

    – You’re double-penalizing classes with low damage dice and low STR/DEX. A wizard with -1 Str and +0 Dex is going to be rolling -3 or -2 to attack, which is bloody suicide.

    – What does the wizard roll on magic missile or fireball? +2 and +4? Do they still roll to cast a spell? 

    – Where is armor in all this? Purely narrative, affecting whether I’m dealing a beating or striking with lethal force?

    – How do I beat someone into unconsciousness? If I’m dealing a beating, the most I can inflict is pain. There’s a “stunned” option on the pain list, but that’s either too good (I would always choose that on a 7+, cuz it puts the enemy out of the fight) or only temporary. And if it’s only temporary, the GM doesn’t have much guidance from the system to determine when and if they’re back in the game.

    – What effect does forceful and messy have in such a narrative system? Or are they gone?

  19. james day my suggestion doesn’t have harm boxes. It has a harm die that one reduces in size on a specific roll. If you model this with boxes you still need some randomization to determine if you tick off a box and it just gets more complex.

    Option 1: you have d8 stamina that reduces to d6 when it rolls 1-2 which reduces to d4 when it rolls 1-2 which kills you when it rolls 1-2.

    Option 2: you have 3 harm boxes, the first of which has a 25% chance of loss, the second a 33% chance, and the final box a 50% chance. You could perhaps model this with 2d6-harm lost, but it is still more to keep track of

  20. The immediate problem with this is that it turns a single Move into several. You’re trying to be more narrative but solving it with more dice rolling. I don’t think it achieves what you need.

    CON is still a useful stat to several classes and if you’re not using the Defend Move you’re missing out on some fun game-play.

    Would it not be better to expand on the conditions (weak/sick/etc.) in a manner similar to Mouse Guard? It keeps battle moves down to one dice roll and stops table chatter.

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