Taking Chainmail/OD&D one step further...

[thegreyelf]

Just occurred to me.

What about doing away with hit points for monsters in OD&D, if using Chainmail as a combat system? Let players keep them, with hits from monsters doing the standard 1d6 damage, giving players a slight edge.

But monsters? Instead of hit points, they simply have hits. An 8 HD monster, then, would take 8 hits to kill. Period.

Man, that'd speed up combat a lot...what do you guys think?

[snorri]

Not bad. It makes wuxia fighting easy and cut a lot of hp tracking.

[Finarvyn]

I ran a campaign like this over the summer, with mixed reviews from the players. Part of the problem was that I did it both ways -- for monsters and for the players.

It was nice for the monsters (I've done a "hit = kill" system for basic orcs for decades but hardly ever did it with larger critters) but the players didn't like it applied to them. For some reason, the notion that they might live though too many hits (a 5 HP character could survive 4 hits and die on the 5th if only 1's are rolled) was a huge bonus. Somehow it never seemed to occur to them that the reverse was also the case (a 3 HD character could have only 3 HP and could die on the first hit.)

Anyway, it does speed up combat a lot. I'll be interested to see if anyone else has tried this.

[thegreyelf]

Hm. Maybe I'll give it a shot in my Hyborian Age game this weekend.

[aldarron]

I suppose the law of averages would mean it should usually take 1 hit to remove 1 die of hp, so it should work out the same in that respect and would remove a step in combat, but as a player, I think one of the fun things about combat is rolling the die to see just how bacly you hurt the monster. Also, as a DM, I use those rolls to help me describe the combat, how bad or how minor a strike had been made. So, I'm not so keen on the idea.

[thegreyelf]

Well, what I'm thinking is that for any major monsters you'd still do dice of damage, but when using the Troop Type system, for example (which basically amounts to mook rules), you'd simply deal hits.

[Finarvyn]

That would work well. In the "old days" I used to fight out massive battles using RISK pieces as my miniatures. In that case I always defaulted to a hit=kill system so that I could keep track of all of the creatures on the board. My other trick was to put a d6 on the table and let the number of pips represent the number of hits it could take, so that an ogre (for example) starts with a 4 showing and I could reduce it as the ogre took hits.

The other thing I tried was doing "half kills" where I could orient the RISK pieces on side or on end and the two orientations represented whether the orc was at full strength or half strength. Essentially, I took the number of hit dice and doubled them but on a hit rolled a d6 to remove one or two half-dice of damage. It made battles a bit more interesting but also more complex. (My most fun battle was actually a Battlestar Galatica game where Vipers could take 2 hits each but Cylon Raiders 1 hit each.)

Anyway, I'm sure that there are many variations to this same basic theme....

[geordie]

I played a few sessions using the Abridged D&D rules and the HD=Hits worked just fine for us. The key factor being that fighters/heroes start off able to take 4 Hits so they start with an edge over Goblins and Orcs in 1-to-1 combat.

[snorri]

Nice version! The "start as a Hero" is a good idea.

I was thinking another idea : "When meleed by regular troops, and combat takes place on the non-Fantasy Combat Tables, four simultaneous kills must be scored against Heroes (or Anti-heroes) to eliminate them." Chainmail) could be read in a Hit Points OD&D frame as a damage reduction. Heroes only take suffer from damage above 4. Make them really nast foes. A variant within the leveling scale could be a damage reduction equal to their level - but with the d6 damage, a superhero fear only dragons. More interesting in varaible damage system.