Ascending Damage & Dicing With Death

The rule

You no longer have hit points. You have a Wounds tally - the higher it goes, the more badly you've been hurt. You start at 0 Wounds. Whenever you are hit by an attack, you suffer 1 Wound. (This replaces HP damage. Damage sources that would deal multiple dice of damage deal one Wound per die of damage.)

You have a Maximum Wounds number from your class table (modified by CON - note that there are no negative ability modifiers, as per this previous post, so Max Wounds is always at least 1). If your Wounds exceeds your Maximum Wounds, you must Dice With Death: roll a d20. If the result is below your current Wounds, you die. However, if the result is above your Constitution score, you fall unconscious for 1 hour.

While above your Maximum Wounds, you must Dice With Death again each time you take further Wounds. Additionally, you have -2 to attack rolls and AC.

The rationale

Dying and initiative seem to be the two topics that I re-tread over and over, no matter the system I’m playing. I recently realized that “Health” as the number of hits to kill a PC from my earlier post (which replaces rolled damage) would pair perfectly with an ascending damage system. That is, one where you tally up the damage you’ve taken on your character sheet, instead of subtracting from your hit points tally.

In the regular D&D system of HP and damage rolls, there is uncertainty at first, followed by certainty: first, you take variable amounts of damage, but once you’re at 0 HP, you’re dead (or unconscious or whatever it may be). The mechanics move from dynamic to static as play progresses. On the other hand, this proposed system of static damage (1 Wound per die) makes things… well, static and predictable at first. But Dicing With Death makes the next phase dynamic and uncertain. It flips the script of the adventure around, as it were: the uncertainty of rolling is moved to the later, higher stakes part of the game. As the adventure progresses and resources dwindle, uncertainty goes up. And, thematically, that makes sense, right?

(By the way, there exists a third system that differs from both the “dynamic to static” and “static to dynamic” systems. It’s the “static to static” system where a hit is a hit and death is death. Such a system was used in the very early days of the proto-D&D game which was based on Chainmail. Characters simply had “hits to kill” - so instead of having two hit dice, you could take precisely two hits, and then you were dead. For example: "Ogres are killed when they have taken an accumulation of six missile or melee hits in normal combat". As mentioned in the previous post, these “hits” were only later expanded into the more incremental system of hit point rolls and damage rolls, when players complained about dying too quickly. And that’s where hit dice get their name.)

I have always been fascinated by mechanics that add uncertainty at the point of (near-)death. Uncertainty means tension. However, damage rolls are not tense, because they’re routine and average out in the long run. They’re only tense when you’re very low - if you have 6 HP, then the trap’s 2d6 damage roll is the difference between life and death. But up until you get to that threat range, the damage rolls don’t matter, and you might as well just take the average result every time.

"Death spiral" systems, i.e. ones where your fighting capability falls linearly as you take damage, are bad for a different reason. They remove uncertainty up front: whoever gets hit first has probably lost, and the result of a fight is decided and obvious from the beginning..

Essentially, what I have done is extended the relative space of play where a single roll decides the fate of a player character. However, I haven’t made things more lethal overall. In fact, I’ve given players slightly more resources - first they lose their health, and then they get complications, while still having a chance to survive. You could perhaps call it a safety cushion, but the important thing is that the risk is real (unlike, say, 5th edition’s death saves which make it virtually impossible to die). At the same time, I’ve given players more rope to hang themselves with (which is always more fun). In an HP damage system, getting knocked out can be sudden (and double damage critical hits exacerbate the problem), but after it happens there’s nothing players can do about it that. But here, if they’re badly wounded and dicing with death, they always have the option to keep fighting and exploring. If they don’t want to retreat, it’s their own choice.

Compatibility & benefits

D&D with static and ascending damage might look very different to the D&D you know. However, it should be reiterated that this is all entirely compatible with existing materials and modules. When you play a module and it says you take 3d6 damage, you instead take three Wounds. The majority of the time there’s no maths involved in conversion - in fact there’s less maths than when playing normally.

Apart from cutting down on maths and redundant rolling, the Wounds tally system also has a logistical benefit. Character sheets get worn down more from erasing than they do from writing on them. When you play with descending HP, you have to erase a number and write a new one every time you take a hit. When you check a box each time you take a Wound (unlike HP, the maximum number of Wounds is small enough to reasonably be represented as checkboxes on the sheet), you only need to use an eraser when you get healed. And healing is a less frequent occurrence than taking damage. Therefore, you're saving trees by playing this way!

Optional rules

Though these reduce the elegance of the system, I may add them later to tweak the lethality once I see how it works out in playtesting. As always, everything is just theorycrafting so far, unless otherwise stated.

Critical Failures: When you Dice With Death, if you roll exactly your current number of Wounds, you suffer an additional Wound from internal bleeding (and must, therefore, Dice With Death again).

Adrenaline Spike: One exploration turn after any combat or chase in which you have Diced With Death, your adrenaline runs out; you must Dice With Death one more time, unless you have been healed down to your Max Wounds or below.

Static damage & different weapons

• Daggers have a -2 penalty to hit against defenders armed with long weapons. (That means things like swords, spears and polearms.) This does not apply to unaware targets or those who are otherwise unable to defend themselves. 
• Two-handed weapons and crossbows are Devastating. On a natural 20, they deal an additional Wound. Other weapons don't get to do that. 
• Unarmed strikes and improvised weapons (torches, thrown rocks, etc.) only deal damage on a successful Open Doors roll (2+STR in 6).
• Fighters get some other neat bonuses to make up for losing the bigger damage dice - more details on that in a later post.
• Leader monsters and monsters in modules listed with maximum HP may be counted as one HD higher (take 1 Wound more to kill than normal). For example, if a den of goblins (HD 1 = 1 Wound) is lead by a chieftain with 8 HP, then count the chieftain as HD 2 when determining Wounds to kill it.

Bonus: Other potential uses for “roll-between” mechanics

 Notice how when you Dice With Death(tm), you're trying to roll above one target number but below another? Just spitballing, but:

• When you hit with a two-handed axe, if the attack roll is below or equal to your Strength score, you sever a limb.
• When you hit while dual-wielding light weapons, if the attack roll is below or equal to your Dexterity score on your attack roll, you deal double damage.
• When you are parrying with a lighter weapon, if the opponent’s attack roll misses but is above your Strength score, your weapon is flung from your grasp. Otherwise, if the attack roll is below or equal to your Dexterity score, you get a free counterattack.

D&D Without Damage Dice

A contest on G+ to come up with a new way to speed up combat in D&D caught my interest, two responses in particular.

The first was Cavegirl’s one roll fights. It reminds me of the War Machine mechanic from Rules Cyclopedia, and really drives home the idea that battle is a risky proposition that you should not undertake without heavily stacking the odds first. Personally, if I were to hack it, I might turn it into two rolls instead. Players could see the result of the first roll, and then get a chance to affect their fates with spells and such, or simply run away. Then, winning two rolls would mean an overwhelming victory, winning only one roll a victory at a cost, and losing both rolls an escape-or-die situation.

The second interesting idea in the thread was replacing HP with HD, that is, you can take a number of hits equal to your number of hit dice. One hit from any weapon is... one hit. There would be no damage rolls, which certainly should speed up the game and reduce calculations and bookkeeping... I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea. So I grabbed my trusty spreadsheets and tried to hash it out in detail.

Note that this is not playtested yet, just theorycrafting so far. I would quite like to playtest this at some point if I can iron out some of the issues, but that may require additional hacking of ability scores.

Working out the number of hits

First, let’s look at how many hits a PC can take under current rules (using the gold standard of B/X). On average, a 1st level Fighter, having d8 HP can take 1.29 hits from a d6 weapon before going down. Magic-Users can take 0.71 hits, and clerics 1 hit. These averages increase linearly by level.

Here’s how many d6 hits a B/X character can take on average under the default rules, rounded up.

Level	MU d6s	CLE d6s	FTR d6s
1	1	1	2
2	2	2	3
3	3	3	4
4	3	4	6
5	4	5	7
6	5	6	8
7	5	7	9
8	6	8	11
9	7	9	12
10	8	10	13
11	8	11	15
12	9	12	16
13	10	13	17
14	10	14	18

So that is the rough guide we should look at when designing this new damage-roll-less system, in order to approximate the same level of PC survivability. Throughout this article, I will refer to these new survivability points as Health, to avoid confusion with the normal Hit Points. Instead of damage, attacks will deal Wounds. Taking one Wound is the same as losing one Health. A d6 of old HP damage translates to one Wound in the new system.

So why are we looking at d6 damage? d8 damage, after all, is quite common for a one-handed weapon of war - there’s not much reason for a Fighter to use a handaxe instead of a battleaxe. But remember that variable weapon damage is an optional rule in B/X. We are looking at the d6 because that’s how much damage all weapons originally did. As for monster damage, looking quickly through the list, the d6 seems to be most common die, although there are a lot of d8s (and “as weapon”) too.

We are faced with a choice of two options for this new system. Either we base player Health off the d6, which is in line with non-variable weapon damage. This makes monsters die more easily (29% more), since we’re pretending they used a d6 hit die before when in actuality it was a d8 (well, at least after variable weapon damage was introduced - before that it was a d6). The other option is to base everything off the d8, which makes everyone about equal in relation to B/X, but greatly boosts d4 weapons and smaller. Perhaps we should err in favour of the players here.

So, we have all weapons dealing 1 Wound on a hit, and monsters having Health equal to number of HD. The straightforward way to work out player health would be to use that d6 table above straight. Essentially, players would have 1 Health per d6 (3.5) hit points, rounded up. Fighters would start with 2 Health, while Clerics and Magic-Users would start with 1 Health.

However, looking at only averages results in a very poor fit for low levels. While it works out to the same results on a high number of repetitions, at low levels repetitions are low and you’re cheating players out of a lot of chances to survive. For example, when taking a hit from a d6 weapon, a 1st level cleric (d6 HP) has a 42% chance of surviving. Even a Magic-User has a 25% chance of surviving, while the Fighter has 56%. Generally, you have slightly worse than even odds to survive a weapon with a damage die equal to your hit die at 1st level (because a tied roll still brings you to zero). See the chart below.



Apparently, the original reason for the creation of the granular hit point system in Arneson's games in lieu of the "one hit = one kill" system from Chainmail is that players didn't like it when their characters died too suddenly:

"It meant that players had a chance to live longer and do more. ... They didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow."

(So, it might be that we're moving backwards with this experiment and there are very good reasons damage rolls are standard... but let's ignore all that for now.)

The simplest solution to the “level 1 problem” would be to have all classes start at their Health values of level 2. They would then not gain an additional Health at 2nd level, but follow the progression according to the above table thereon.

However, since we will have to make a whole new Health table anyway, this is a good opportunity to tweak the progression. We can use an entirely new equation, unshackled from the idea of one die size and one die per level. This way, we know where our numbers are coming from, and we’re not just blindly reimplementing artifacts that arose from the restrictions of the original system (i.e. the shapes of dice that were available to the original designers) while compounding them with new restrictions. And gaining 2nd level is the first time players get to experience leveling up, so it should feel like something! So, here’s an alternate progression you can use, based on a linear factor multiplied by level.

Alternate progression

Health = 1+YxLvl, rounded up. Y factor: M-Us 0.55, Clerics 0.82, Fighters 1.12. These progressions follow the original progressions the closest at mid-levels. They start out better at low levels, and fall off at high levels.

Level	M-U Health 1+0.55xLvl	CLE Health 1+0.82xLvl	FTR Health 1+1.12xLvl
1	2	2	3
2	3	3	4
3	3	4	5
4	4	5	6
5	4	6	7
6	5	6	8
7	5	7	9
8	6	8	10
9	6	9	11
10	7	10	13
11	8	11	14
12	8	11	15
13	9	12	16
14	9	13	17

Comparing survivability with the old HP system

Fighter:

Cleric:
 
Magic-User:


I think it looks quite good. A bit more survivability at low levels is not a terrible thing, in my opinion. Some interesting artifacts: Magic-Users do not gain any Health on levels 3, 5, 7 and 9, when they gain powerful new spell levels. Between levels 5 and 6, which is when Clerics suddenly gain two new spell levels in B/X (though not in Labyrinth Lord), they do not gain any Health. There is also a remarkable resemblance to the hit dice progression from the OD&D (before the Greyhawk supplement), where every class (and monstes) had a d6 hit die but gained them at different rates - Fighting-Men gained a die per level, Clerics gained one on almost every level, and Magic-Users gained one every other level.

Constitution modifiers

Now that we have our Health progression, we simply need to modify by Constitution. We can say that each +4 HP from Constitution (round up) is about equivalent to one additional hit die (and, consequently, Health). Thus, a +1 modifier should grant an additional Health every 4 levels, a +2 grants an additional Health every two levels, and so on. A +2 modifier should grant an additional Health every two out of three levels. This means that for a max level Cleric the gain from Constitution is actually slightly lower than the original HP system (1.77x vs. 1.86x). Once again, this formula improves things for players at low levels but makes it slightly tougher at high levels.

	Constitution Modifier / Health Adjustment
Lvl	-3	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3
1	-1	-1	-1	+0	+1	+1	+1
2	-2	-1	-1	+0	+1	+1	+2
3	-3	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3
4	-3	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3
5	-4	-3	-2	+0	+2	+3	+4
6	-5	-3	-2	+0	+2	+3	+5
7	-6	-4	-2	+0	+2	+4	+6
8	-6	-4	-2	+0	+2	+4	+6
9	-7	-5	-3	+0	+3	+5	+7
10	-8	-5	-3	+0	+3	+5	+8
11	-9	-6	-3	+0	+3	+6	+9
12	-9	-6	-3	+0	+3	+6	+9
13	-10	-7	-4	+0	+4	+7	+10
14	-11	-7	-4	+0	+4	+7	+11

The downside is that on each level up, players will have to reference both their class’s Health chart and the Constitution Health adjustment chart and sum the values. Then, because they progress at different rates, it is actually possible for them to lose Health on level up with a -1 or -2 modifier. That's obviously a huge flaw in these steps. So there needs to be some stipulation that your maximum Health can never decrease on level up. It gets rather messy and inelegant.

Constitution is the biggest obstacle I currently see to the new system. All this gives me half a mind to just get rid of the -3/+3 modifier range and have them go from -2/+2. Abilities shouldn’t matter overmuch, after all. Alternatively, one could have reduced Health gains from Constitution (and penalties which never overtake Health progression) and make Constitution important for other things, like dying/bleeding out.

Monsters and spells

Monsters will have one Health per HD. Thus a PC hitting a goblin or skeleton always kills it, no damage roll required. Functionally, this makes them similar to the famous Minions from 4th edition. Monsters with a plus on their HD will be treated as one HD higher for purposes of Health.

All sources of damage do one Wound for each damage die (d4 to d12). Each +4 counts as one additional die. For example, a trap that does 4+2d4 damage will deal three Wounds, and an attack that does 1d10+1 damage will deal one Wound. Spells which do half damage on a successful save will only do half Wounds. For example, a fireball spell has 8 damage dice so it will do 8 Wounds on a failed save, or 4 Wounds on a successful save.

The one exception is when halving the damage dice (e.g. due to resistances) would leave half a damage die, or when an attack would deal damage in an odd number of d3s. These are called “half-dice”. A half-die will have a 50% chance of doing no Wounds and a 50% of doing one Wound. For example, an attack that dealt 3d3 damage will now deal one Wound, and have a 50% chance of dealing a second Wound. Or, you hit a creature with a torch for 1d4 fire damage, which would usually be 1 Wound, but if the creature is resistant to fire, you only have 50% odds of dealing a Wound on a successful hit. On-hit effects are still applied regardless of damage. For example, a ghoul’s claw is d3+paralysis, so the paralysis is applied on every hit, even though damage is only applied 50% of the time.

(Also, to prevent everyone just using torches as weapons instead of swords, you may want to give them a reduced damage chance too, or say they’re only an effective weapon vs. specific enemies such as trolls and mummies).

Weapons

What about two-handed weapons? Differentiating them will be dealt entirely with Fighter abilities. When using shields, Fighters can sunder them to negate damage. When using two-handed melee weapons, Fighters can attack again each time they score a kill. Greatweapons might also be allowed to overcome the slashing/piercing resistance of skeletons due to their large mass. Additionally, Fighters will deal an additional Wound on a natural 20.

All this leaves crossbows in a somewhat strange position - they shoot more slowly but deal the same damage as everything else. I may reinstate the armor piercing from LotFP there. Crossbows will fire every other round and pierce 2 AC for light crossbows or 4 AC heavy crossbows.

Unarmed fighting: If an attack roll with an unarmed strike succeeds, players need to roll to see if it deals a Wound. Since unarmed strikes had a d2 damage die before, their odds of dealing a Wound are now 2 in 6, plus 1 in 6 for each point of Strength modifier. Perceptive players will notice that this is the same chance as Open Doors rolls in B/X - perhaps we can rename Open Doors to “Smash” and use it for both. We could even use this chance for improvised weapons (e.g. torches) and treat them the same as unarmed strikes.

To Recap

• Health will replace HP. Player characters gain Health according to new class tables. Monsters will have one Health per HD, plus one Health if they have any pluses on their HD.
• Damage is not rolled, instead damage sources will deal one Wound per die of damage, plus one Wound for every 4 fixed damage. 
• d3 damage sources and odd dice halved due to resistance will have a 3-in-6 chance of dealing one Wound. 
• Open Doors chance equals the chance to deal damage on a hit using an unarmed strike or improvised weapon.
• Effects that refer to the target’s Hit Dice (such as Sleep) will use levels instead when the target is a PC.

Advantages:

• No rolling monster HP.
• Less tracking/HP maths on the fly - Health values are in the single digits for most of the game. 
• No rolling damage. 
• Fewer dice required (players only need d20 and d6). 
• Increased survivability at level 1. (YMMV whether this is a good thing.) 
• Doesn’t break compatibility with existing material.

Disadvantages:

• Less granular damage modifications: STR, magic weapons…
• Smaller design space for abilities. 
• Some players may find less rolling less fun. 
• Things become more static and predictable. It’s easier for players to tell when they should retreat. Players usually want to retreat when they have 1 HP, but feel like they have a decent chance at 4 HP.
• Applying Constitution modifiers becomes more complex.