One thing I’ve been thinking about why I love dungeon world is how it solves the problem of Hitpoint Mountain in two ways.
One, being fiction centered, diseases and poisons can’t be solved with rest or health potion. Debilities are cleared, but not scurvy or the plague.
Two, even in combat, if you get fried by a dragon, or stepped on by a giant, your probably dead. More subtly, bleeding out and imbedded arrow points, as well as infection, are slow and insidious killers.
I’ll be honest, most of the time I don’t even have the players track hitpoints for themselves, we just deal with wounds thematically, and they suffer enough penalties that they need to stop and heal before they can continue. Hitpoints on monsters are candy. Hitpoints on players are a crutch. Nobody likes counting damage points on themselves, it’s more interesting to know how you’re hurt and why than by how many blips and chits.
One of the easy ways we track it is a house rule called the trauma stack. If you get hit, roll a 6 sided die. 1-4 is a minor wound, 5-6 is major. Write the number down (or check a box or whatever). Next time you roll trauma, do the same thing, but that last hit is escalated (so if you rolled a 4 and took a minor wound, next time you roll a 4 it’s a major wound). If you reroll on a major wound, it’s a critical wound and you’re out of the fight until you can receive medical attention.
Anyway, I know there’s a thousand and one ways to track wounds in PbtA systems (the Apocalypse clock being similar), but this sped up gameplay for us and made players care more about why they were hurt than how many shmeckles they had left.
Lemmo Pew That is really neat. I love alternate ways to track health thematically rather than mathematically.
Gerard Snow and I know it’s not for everybody, some people game for the numbers. I game to play action-make-believe with rules. So it works for my goals.
Gerard Snow, Lemmo Pew sounds quite similar to the Fate Core Stress Track and Consequence Slots.
Robert Jacobs I’m sure I cribbed it from one of the dozens of indie games or PbtA hacks I’ve played. Maybe even HeroQuest or something, who knows.
Lemmo Pew cool. I’m all for more abstract, impactful approaches to consequences/harm. I like it. I mentioned Fate Core in case you weren’t aware of the similarities and were looking for more good stuff to use.
Lemmo Pew I just posted about an alternative to HP and would love to get your opinion.
Zen Ferno I don’t have much advice to give. My design approach is to make the game more fun for the specified audience, and it doesn’t always translate objectively. I say play it, if it’s fun, go with it; if it’s not, find out why.