On the Interpretation of the Meaning of Hit Points

[Morandir]

I was just reading the fascinating discussion between aldarron and snorri in the Blackmoor forum about Arneson's early combat systems, and a thought struck me that might shed some light on how to interpret what is happening in OD&D's "alternative" combat system with regard to what exactly hit points can mean, and how a minute-long combat round can make more sense.

The inspiration is Arneson's use of the abbreviation "HTK" for Hit Points, which I assume to mean "Hits to Kill." This got me thinking: in Chainmail, you roll dice to determine "hits," not wounds. We see this terminology used again in Vol. 1's "Dice for the Accumulation of Hits."

Now, a common interpretation of the alternative combat system is that the attack roll determines whether or not you've actually struck your opponent, and the damage roll determines the extent of the damage - 1 point is a (relatively) minor wound, while 6 points is a real bleeder. This causes problems with the idea of a one-minute combat round, especially with the use of archery: is the archer only capable of firing one arrow per minute? It seems rather slow (and introduces the problem of how exactly to count ammunition used), and subsequent versions of the game have dealt with this problem by drastically reducing the length of a combat round.

This interpretation is supported by the explanatory text below the Alternative Combat System attack matrix, which says "All attacks which score hits do 1-6 points damage unless otherwise noted." This idea, of d20 roll = single attack and damage roll = wounds dealt, became the norm, despite the contradiction with the notion that the attack roll is supposed to abstract a full minute's worth of fighting.

I offer, then, an alternative interpretation. The d20 roll does not represent a single attack; rather, it represents all the many attacks you make in that round, the feints, thrusts, lunges and parries that are a part of melee. This in itself is in line with the idea of abstracted combat, and is a common interpretation of the attack roll. However, what if the damage roll does not represent the extent of the wound, or a combination of wounds and fatigue and luck and all that, but rather the total number of times you have been hit?

Interpreted this way, the minute-long combat round makes more sense. Rolling 3 damage is actually rolling 3 "hits;" in other words, in a minute's worth of fighting, you struck your opponent 3 times. This gives added information to the referee for narrating the combat, and provides a solution to the ammunition problem - simply mark off a number of arrows equal to the damage you dealt. It also explains rolling more dice for the damage of larger monsters (such as Giants): rolling 3d6 damage means that, in a sense, each blow from that giant's club is as damaging as 3 blows from a normal man.

So there's my crazy idea, borne out of the madness that comes to a graduate student during finals week.

Discuss.

Mor

[deodanth]

I read it the same way 1d6 could mean between 1 and 6 individual hits on the combatant during a one-minute melee turn.

However, this does not make Greyhawk's polyhedral Hit Dice and damage variants in any way less rational nor desirable to me.

I have also noticed Judges Guild and other non-TSR publishers use the acronym "HTK" -- do you think all of them derived this term from Arneson's work?

[ragnorakk]

I do like the idea with missile weapon ammunition very much.

[aldarron]

Well, heck if that doesn't make a lot of sense. I bet you're right that at least Arneson was thinking of it the way you've described it. Have an exalt! Very interesting what happens when you actually read the books literaly. "Hits" to kill fits right in with Chainmail hit terminology too. The only problem I see comes in with high level characters armed with a bow or cross bow if you stick with the 1 arrow/bolt per pip, as you would soon get more shots than ought to be possible in a minute, but that can be mitigated by a DM ruleing easily enough, like our superhero is able to shoot two or more arrows at once and each does the equivalent of 3 normal hits or whatever. An interesting effect of this interpretation is that if our superhero is down to one or two arrows, he wouldn't get all his dice worth of damage.

[jmccann]

The problem w/ using the damage as the number of arrows fired is it does not account for misses. And what about a hit on an arm v. one in the heart? Both one hit? Really?

[waysoftheearth]

The way I read it, I thought the original post was in support of an abstract combat system.

A "serious hit to the lower abdomen", and a "moderate hit to the left elbow", simply become "two hits". At this level of abstraction we don't need to concern ourselves with hits to the heart, or anywhere else. That aside, who is to say that a 1 hp hit is not serious to a 1st level PC with 2 hp?

I wondered about misses too. One option might be to roll a d6 regardless of whether a hit is scored or not, the d6 indicates the number of arrows expended. Unfortunately this tends to imply that all missiles fired in a round either hit or miss. It seems much more likely that some would hit and others would miss. However, we could (possibly?) account for this variability by assuming that some spent missiles can be recovered and reused.

Another option is to stop accounting for arrows altogether, and simply say you have run out of arrows when you roll a "1" on your to hit die.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work so neatly for thrown missiles such as hand-axes and spears.

[aldarron]

<shrug> how to count misses isn't especially well accounted for in the usual system either, it all really depends on how you you houserule it. Its easy enough to treat projectiles differently from melee hits. Magic damage is a bit different also, but that's pretty much true no matter how you think of hits.

[Brunomac]

I just found it easier to turn the combat round into a 6 second thing. Still not realistic, but I found the one minute round just plain hard to deal with (it was one of the first things I house ruled as a kid), and something obviously created by people who have never actually been in a real fight of any kind.

[Deleted]

Dec 21, 2009 17:01:48 GMT -6 Brunomac said:

I just found it easier to turn the combat round into a 6 second thing.

That's the cool thing about OD&D, the system practically begs to be tinkered with and adjusted, and doing so will not break the game.

Still not realistic, but I found the one minute round just plain hard to deal with (it was one of the first things I house ruled as a kid), and something obviously created by people who have never actually been in a real fight of any kind.

You're making a hasty generalization about the fellows who played and contributed to the early editions of the game. The fighting or combat experience of Gygax, Arneson, and various early testers of D&D cannot reasonably be gleaned from the timing of a combat round in the game rules.

The one minute round was a gaming mechanic, nothing more. It grew from OD&D's wargaming roots, and was probably not a conscious decision but more of an assumption that gained momentum because nobody ever thought to change it. I saw similar craziness when business offices went from pencil and paper bookkeeping to computer bookkeeping in the late 70's. People did a lot of unnecessary things because they were used to certain steps in a procedure and nobody ever challenged the extra work.

D&D combat was never intended to be a strict simulation of man-to-man combat. Combat is abstract in the game and Gygax and others involved in the game were always quick to point that out.

[eris]

Dec 21, 2009 17:01:48 GMT -6 Brunomac said:

I just found it easier to turn the combat round into a 6 second thing. Still not realistic, but I found the one minute round just plain hard to deal with (it was one of the first things I house ruled as a kid), and something obviously created by people who have never actually been in a real fight of any kind.

Yeah, in the first game I ran for my friends the one-minute round disappeared in a chorus of complaints. None of us thought it made sense, so I also immediately went to 6 second rounds (or maybe it was 10 second rounds, can't remember). Everybody agreed that made more sense. Of course, I started tinkering with all the combat rules almost immedately, so our games back then were soon D&D in name only.

OTOH, the concept of "Hits to Kill" sounds a lot like the sort of thing we have seen later in a number of systems where the PC doesn't have "HP", he has "Wounds." Westend's D6 comes to mind, but that's only one of many such systems.

[delta]

Dec 21, 2009 17:01:48 GMT -6 Brunomac said:

I just found it easier to turn the combat round into a 6 second thing. Still not realistic, but I found the one minute round just plain hard to deal with (it was one of the first things I house ruled as a kid), and something obviously created by people who have never actually been in a real fight of any kind.

I've been writing about this on my blog recently. The problem isn't that 1 turn = 1 minute was a mistake. My contention is that Gygax just didn't think about it at all when switching from old Chainmail to D&D.

History is like this: (1) Original Chainmail historical mass rules had a scale of 1:20 figures, 1" = 10 yards, 1 turn = 1 minute. That makes a lot of sense in that context. (2) Gygax then developed Chainmail man-to-man combat, jousting, and fantasy suppplement, which were entirely lacking any specified scale whatsoever. (3) Then D&D was written, which just directly copied the 1 combat turn = 1 minute scale (no longer making sense) and also just changed the word "yards" to "feet" (which also doesn't make sense for 1:1 scale miniatures). This makes miniature use nonsensical, but for his purpose this was fine, because he stopped using miniatures as soon as he switched from Chainmail to D&D.

deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2009/12/no-scale-in-man-to-man-combat.html
deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2009/12/gygax-on-miniatures-in-d.html

[jjarvis]

Not sure if Arneson saw HP in such a manner. He did in fact introduce hit locations into his game at one point with each location being able to suffer a specific amount of damage based on total HP. In the introduction to FFC he mentions he once used fixed HP scores 0-100, hit locations and a saving throw to avoid actually suffering damage; I have no idea how long he ran with such a mix or how rigorously it was enforced of course. It does indicate to me however that an adventure running about with 60 HP and able to suffer 10 to to his head was in line with the traditional ablative notion of hit point damage and not meant to indicate one could be hit in the head 9 times before succumbing on the 10th blow.

To me the nomenclature of HTK makes it very clear that's how much damage it takes to kill a target.

[harami2000]

Dec 25, 2009 14:37:56 GMT -6 delta said:

History is like this:
(1) Original Chainmail historical mass rules had a scale of 1:20 figures, 1" = 10 yards, 1 turn = 1 minute. That makes a lot of sense in that context.
(2) Gygax then developed Chainmail man-to-man combat, jousting, and fantasy suppplement, which were entirely lacking any specified scale whatsoever.

What date are those "Original Chainmail historical mass rules" in this context?

[aldarron]

Dec 25, 2009 21:50:39 GMT -6 jjarvis said:

Not sure if Arneson saw HP in such a manner. He did in fact introduce hit locations into his game at one point with each location being able to suffer a specific amount of damage based on total HP. In the introduction to FFC he mentions he once used fixed HP scores 0-100, hit locations and a saving throw to avoid actually suffering damage; I have no idea how long he ran with such a mix or how rigorously it was enforced of course. It does indicate to me however that an adventure running about with 60 HP and able to suffer 10 to to his head was in line with the traditional ablative notion of hit point damage and not meant to indicate one could be hit in the head 9 times before succumbing on the 10th blow.

To me the nomenclature of HTK makes it very clear that's how much damage it takes to kill a target.

Good points. I think that hp were always a flexible nomenclature, so an Ogre dealing 30 points of damage in one hit might be said to have inflicted damage like thirty blows or strikes from a normal man. In other words it could be read as an actual number of strikes in some cases or as a rough equivalent to a number of strikes. Useful, as Morandir mentions for describing the effects of individual combats. One image that came to my mind when reading the original post was that of Sauron in the LOTR movie, swinging his mace and decimating whole ranks of men with one blow.

[delta]

Dec 26, 2009 2:56:19 GMT -6 harami2000 said:

Dec 25, 2009 14:37:56 GMT -6 delta said:

History is like this:
(1) Original Chainmail historical mass rules had a scale of 1:20 figures, 1" = 10 yards, 1 turn = 1 minute. That makes a lot of sense in that context.
(2) Gygax then developed Chainmail man-to-man combat, jousting, and fantasy suppplement, which were entirely lacking any specified scale whatsoever.

What date are those "Original Chainmail historical mass rules" in this context?

Circa 1970, as seen in The Domeday Book newsletter (pre-Chainmail publication).

www.acaeum.com/library/domesday.html

From Best of Dragon Volume 1, in an article by Gygax: "The medieval rules, Chainmail (Gygax and Perren) were published in Domesday Book prior to publication by Guidon Games. Of course they were in a less developed state, and were only for 1:20 figure scale. Between the time they appeared in Domesday Book and the Guidon edition, I revised and expanded the rules for 1:20 and added 1:1 scale games, jousting and fantasy."

[harami2000]

Dec 26, 2009 13:15:17 GMT -6 delta said:

Circa 1970, as seen in The Domeday Book newsletter (pre-Chainmail publication).

www.acaeum.com/library/domesday.html

Cool; thanks, but y'needed to make that clear since there were no "Original Chainmail historical mass rules" at that point - i.e. just those Perren & Gygax (sic) LGTSA rules rather than anything called "Chainmail".
Gary's own quote "The medieval rules, Chainmail (Gygax and Perren) were published in Domesday Book prior to publication by Guidon Games..." is unfortunately confusing in that regard.

"Between the time they appeared in Domesday Book and the Guidon edition, I revised and expanded the rules for 1:20 and added 1:1 scale games, jousting and fantasy" is similar confusing since both 1:1 scale (man-to-man) and jousting were /also/ part of the wider "Original Chainmail historical mass rules" as published in The Domesday Book; the former not being Gary's - reprinted from unknown source with only a few comments added - and the latter apparently not Gary's either (printed uncredited).
The fantasy rules, however, were definitely a later addition and presumably the only part that Gary actually created himself? (I don't know if anyone actually asked him or Rob Kuntz to confirm that).

Regards,
David.

[delta]

Dec 26, 2009 19:23:52 GMT -6 harami2000 said:

The fantasy rules, however, were definitely a later addition and presumably the only part that Gary actually created himself? (I don't know if anyone actually asked him or Rob Kuntz to confirm that).

Gygax was quoted in several interviews as saying that Jeff Perren wrote the first 2 pages of historical mass rules (1:20), and that he (Gygax) wrote all of the rest of Chainmail.

www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/garygygax1.php
www.acaeum.com/library/domesday.html

[harami2000]

Which is the link I quoted above...

Dec 27, 2009 0:34:54 GMT -6 delta said:

Gygax was quoted in several interviews as saying that Jeff Perren wrote the first 2 pages of historical mass rules (1:20), and that he (Gygax) wrote all of the rest of Chainmail.

*nods* The writing of Chainmail 1e "as published" (with major re-working and highly unlikely that Jeff Perren's two pages remained intact), rather than what was actually in print previously.

www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/garygygax1.php
"And then I figured it would be a lot more fun to play man-to-man and make those weapons count"
*
Not as far as I can see, anyhow. Those were first published in DB#7 under Gary's name despite belonging to another, unknown individual. There is no claim of innovation at that time by Gary and his memory at a 30+ year remove had presumably fuzzed the actual origins?
Gary's "Medieval Conflict on Alternate World "Entropy"" game in DB#7 perhaps gives a useful, oblique indication as to his own "cutting edge" ideas at that date; play occurring on two levels, but those are map & minis (world & battle at 1:20 scale using LGTSA rules from DB#5) with no 1:1 play and proto-RPG elements constrained more along diplomatic RPing lines save that their own character needed to be on the field (treated more as "capture the flag" since the DB#5 rules have been presumed to be 1:20 only???).

If by "Original Chainmail historical mass rules" you are referring to
"Circa 1970, as seen in The Domeday Book newsletter (pre-Chainmail publication)", then the LGTSA rules (Jeff Perren & EGG, then revised) and prototype jousting and man-to-man rules are all under that heading. I don't know what is in those "Burnaby Medieval Rules" per DB#6 but Frank Mentzer appears to believe those also have input into Chainmail as published.

The LGTSA rules changes noted in DB#11 presumably lie outwith Chainmail as that's at least the second DB for 1971 and everything needed to be "in place" by March(?)/April 1971 for Chainmail 1e publication; otherwise that "I turned two pages of rules into about four" could've been read in this context in which case "And then I figured it would be a lot more fun to play man-to-man and make those weapons count" could actually have been read as the /incorporation/ of those other previous DB articles into what became Chainmail proper.

What Gary did to pull everything together into Chainmail and when that occurred is unclear but it appears to be nothing like as simple and linear as his quotes might indicate on those two links.

Anyhow; enough braindump/background - and as some may be of use in other contexts. Back onto topic now, apologies!

Cheers,
David.

[badger2305]

Generally speaking, to understand both Gygax and Arneson's approach to combat, you have to remember that both of them were coming at individual combat from the larger framework of miniatures wargaming. Thus, damage done to units was always abstract - trying to get specific was unnecessary and actually counter-productive. From discussions I had with Dave, he was quite aware that individual combat was messy and unpredictable, and trying to simulate every detail was something I think he wanted to avoid.