OSR Idea: Random Backgrounds as Consolation Prizes

TL;DR: Have several tables of backgrounds; characters with low ability scores roll on better tables.

Rolling for stats

Sometimes it can feel like the OSR has a love-hate relationship with the 3d6 down-the-line method of generating ability scores. Lamentations of the Flame Princess allows swapping one pair of scores, which I think is great - sometimes you just want to play a fighter. It also lets you reroll everything if the sum of ability modifiers is negative. 41% of B/X characters have a negative total modifier. In other words, in LotFP, after you've rolled up scores, marked the modifiers, and added them all up, 4 out of 10 times you have to do it all again. (Well, you don't have to - it's entirely optional - but why wouldn't you?)

Stars Without Number, in lieu of swapping scores, allows you to replace one score with 14 (+2). That seems more reasonable - it ensures that whatever kind of character you want to play, there will be at least one thing you're not entirely terrible at. It's also self-limiting - if you already rolled kickass scores across the board, bumping one to 14 isn't going to make as much difference. (SWN also shrinks the modifier range from ±3 to ±2, which seems like a good idea.) There's also the option of taking an array (14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7) instead of rolling.

But somehow, these methods - particularly the "total do-over 41% of the time" one - seem a bit like admitting defeat. Why do we roll scores again?

Because we like the variation in characters - that jolt to the imagination that something completely human-planned cannot deliver. Also, because it's much faster than having everyone minmax which number to place where. This is a game about interacting with a world, not about deckbuilding. Roll roll roll, pick a class, go. Discover who your character is during play - don't agonize over it in the pre-game.

Maybe there's something we can hack up to keep the straightforwardness of rolling scores (no do-overs) while softening the blow of crappy ones?

Random backgrounds

Backgrounds can help give flavour to characters that can otherwise feel a bit like blank pawns, and act as a seed for roleplay. A background can be tied to a (pre-adventuring) profession, and have minor mechanical bonuses: some extra starting items, a skill increase, or perhaps a "mini-feat".

The problem with entirely random backgrounds is that the more backgrounds you write, the more difficult they are to make roughly equivalent in power. Vice versa, if you follow a restrictive formula such as "all backgrounds get +1 to one skill", you're both going to run out of suitable ideas, and will be unable to fit many setting-appropriate backgrounds to this mould.

And if you don't make them strictly equal? What if one background gets +1 to CON modifier while another can... tell when it's about to rain? It isn't game-breaking in itself, but can feel a bit unfair - even more so if the characters that rolled awesome scores also happen to land on the best backgrounds. Meanwhile, the poor sod with a -5 total modifier gets to be Background: Dirt Farmer. (Or a mudlark, which is a child that scavenges among the mud and gets pelted with coins and laughed at as they dive into the mud to catch them.)

Consolation Prizes

Here's an idea for a solution: tie background table rolls to ability scores, but give them an inverse relationship - the worse your scores, the better backgrounds you can roll, as way of a consolation prize. Now the designer no longer needs to balance backgrounds by making them all equally good - they're freed to deliberately design a power continuum, and it will be offset by ability scores. Now even players who rolled terribly can look forward to playing their new character.

(As a guideline to designing these backgrounds, they should never affect ability scores or ability modifiers. Those have already been rolled for, so a "Background: Strongman - +2 to Strength score" does not make sense; it's redundant. However, a mini-feat that affects a secondary stat is totally fine: for example, shepherds can get a +1 to attacks with slings.)

Tiers

To divide generated characters into tiers, we need a mathematical benchmark to estimate their intrinsic value. One possible (albeit naive) benchmark is to simply sum up all the character' ability modifiers. When six stats are generated by 3d6 each, their ability modifiers per B/X summed up have a normal distribution with the average at +0 total modifier:

The possible results can be divided into an arbitrary number of bins of manageable probability, such as:

Total Modifier	%
-4 or lower	5.8	Tier 5
-3 to -2	19.1	Tier 4
-1 to +0	34.1	Tier 3
+1 to +2	28.1	Tier 2
+3 or higher	12.9	Tier 1

We can give each bin a tier. The higher the ability score total, the "better" the character inherently is. (In actuality, not all abilities are of equal worth, and their worth does not scale identically with modifier or score. For example, in my game, each point of Strength score gives you an item slot and each point of Constitution score makes you less likely to lose consciousness, whereas with Intelligence only the modifier matters. The benchmark I'm using here ignores such considerations. You could also look at highest scores, lowest scores, or whatever. If your game is one of those weird roll-under-stat ones with no modifiers, maybe use sum-of-all-scores as the benchmark.)

So 5.8% of randomly generated characters will have very bad scores, putting them into Tier 5, and so on. Now, we can write a different table of backgrounds for each tier of character, with intrinsically "worse" characters rolling on cooler, weirder, and more powerful background tables.

Tier 1:

These characters have great scores - they don't need an impactful background. They are the unskilled professions as well as those skilled professions whose craft has little to no impact on the game: porters, farmers (dirt or otherwise), bakers, coopers, chandlers, calculators, mudlarks... even for their bonus starting items, the best these people can hope for is a single tool (with no immediately obvious use in the dungeon) and a bag of turnips.

Tier 2:

The professions that have a small game impact, mostly during downtime. For example, blacksmiths could make their own armour for half price. These are unlikely to come up very often, but are not utterly useless, either. They could be skills that any character can learn in your game, given enough investment. You could also put backgrounds that have no skills but very good starting items into this tier. Some may have dungeon-applicable tools.

• Noble: No skills or mini-feats. Starts with 200 gp and a bottle of fine wine.
• Blacksmith: During downtime, can craft armour, melee weapons, and other metal items. Material cost is half of the item's listed price. Work takes one week per 10 gp of listed price. Starts with a hammer and a bar of iron. Anvil sold separately.
• Bowyer: As Blacksmith, but can craft bows, crossbows and ammunition.
• Miner: Count as two people for excavations (three if you're a Dwarf). Starts with a pickaxe and a lodestone.
• Masons: +1 Architecture. Starts with a sledgehammer.
• Scribe: +1 Languages. Starts with  parchments, quills, and ink.

Tier 3:

These are professions whose skills have a clear impact on the game - for example, anything that boosts lockpicking/Tinker, Bushcraft or Search. Situationally useful (not just during downtime) mini-feats may also be placed into this tier. Often, these are combined with useful tools.

• Actor: +1 to reaction rolls with humanoids. Starts with a mask and makeup.
• Officer: +1 to follower morale. Starts with ceremonial rapier.
• Falconer: Has a trained falcon that follows commands. Starts with a falcon and a mail glove.
• Barber-surgeon: +1 Medicine. Starts with razor and leather strap.
• Brawler: Improvised weapons count as regular weapons.
• Bounty hunter: +1 Bushcraft. Starts with a hound and rope.
• Bear-leader: +1 to reaction rolls with beasts. Starts with rope and animal feed.

Tier 4:

Backgrounds with mini-feats that give a boost to combat capability or survivability. Rare and expensive tools may be given as starting items. For example:

• Shepherd: +1 to hit with slings. Starts with a cane and a bag of wool.
• Poisonmaker: +1 to saves vs. Poison. Starts with 4 vials of poison.
• Diviner: Can cast detect magic once per day. Starts with crystal ball and deck of cards.
• Occultist: Can cast summon once per day (as Caster Level 0). Starts with curved dagger and black candles.
• Lumberjack: +1 to hit with axes. Guess what starting equipment.
• Acrobat: Fall damage is reduced by 20'.

Tier 5:

Go wild here. These characters have crap scores, so give them something surprising. Something that makes a big impact on the way the character plays. Got a class that's a bit more gonzo than the others (like the Skeleton Adventurer or Half-Troll) that you're not sure is entirely balanced and don't want players to be able to pick freely? Stick it here. "You're a skeleton in a hooded cloak, that's your background."

You can populate this tier with backgrounds that are plot hooks in themselves, or unique things that can only be rolled once.. Hell, put some superpowers here. "Dragonsoul: once per day, you can use a breath weapon that deals [Lvl]d6 damage." The stuff that a WotC game would let anyone pick willy-nilly, spoiling the mystique: those descended from the lines of elementals or gods! The insect-folk from two towns over! Soulless people who are invisible to the undead! Werewolves! Wielders of a runesword that grows stronger with every soul it eats! Weird mutants! Their low stats will mean they might not survive that long anyway. And hey, awesomely powerful individuals being physically weak is very swords & sorcery.

Comparing Dyson's d6 Thief and LotFP's Specialist

TL;DR: give LotFP Specialists 8 skill points to invest, not 4.

The celebrated Dyson Logos has a post on thieves that's nearly a decade old now. In the post he takes the B/X Thief skill table, which was given as percentile rolls, and converts them to their d6 (X-in-6 chance) equivalents.

(There was very little reason to present Thief skills as percentile rolls in the first place. All of them were in 5% increments, bar Climb Sheer Surfaces which ranges from 87% to 99%, and Hear Noise, which was given as an X-in-6 chance. Why, TSR?)

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, famously, also uses the d6 for skills. They give all characters a 1-in-6 base chance at succeeding, and allow Specialists (Thieves) to invest 4 skill points in any of them, and a further 2 points on each level up.

Converting Dyson to LotFP

So what would Dyson's numbers look like in LotFP? In the table below I've taken his numbers, changed the skill names to their LotFP equivalents, and removed Hear Noise. I've also merged Pick Locks with Find or Remove Traps, and Move Silently with Hide in Shadows, always choosing the higher odds of the two merged skills. Sneak Attack is a skill in LotFP, but originally was a class feature fixed at 2x, so I've set that at 2. The new LotFP skills not based on Thief features are omitted. Finally, we tally up the total "skill points" in this converted-Dyson system, and compare that number to the skill points from LotFP's Specialist class table.
 
Dyson conversion vs. LotFP

Level	Tinker	Sleight of Hand	Stealth	Climb	Sneak Attack	Total skill points	LotFP Specialist skill points
1	1	1	1	5	2	5	4
2	1	1	1	5	2	5	6
3	1	2	2	5	2	7	8
4	2	2	2	5	2	8	10
5	2	2	2	5	2	8	12
6	3	3	3	5	2	11	14
7	3	3	3	5	2	11	16
8	4	4	4	5	2	14	18
9	4	4	4	5	2	14	20
10	5	5	5	6	2	18	22
11	5	5	5	6	2	18	24
12	6	6	6	6	2	21	26
13	6	7	6	6	2	22	28
14	6	7	6	6	2	22	30

Dyson agrees with most people that the starting values are much too low. In the post he also presents a conversion to 2d6, and a houseruled version of it to boost the skills. (The houserule even includes choosing one "favoured" skill - could this post be present in LotFP's DNA?) Here, I won't be looking at the 2d6 tables. Instead, let's find out how the d6/LotFP skill conversion of the (famously stingy) B/X table compares to the LotFP ruleset. Starting from a base value of 1, the above table has 4 points invested into Climb, and 1 into Sneak Attack. That makes for a total of 5 skill points - more than the 4 that LotFP grants to first level Specialists.

The two rightmost columns of the table show that the B/X Thief is overtaken by the Specialist in skill points at 2nd level. To be fair to LotFP, though, we did chose the higher of two skills when merging them, instead of taking their average. It may also be argued that the LotFP Specialist's bump to a d6 hit die, and the ability to choose which skills to improve, offsets this loss in skill points.

A Little Boost

If, then, we agree with Dyson and others that these numbers need a boost, particularly at low levels, what would it look like under LotFP rules? Since all classes have skills at 1-in-6 in LotFP, the smallest reasonable buff we can give the Thief/Specialist is to start all Thief skills at 2-in-6 instead of 1.

Boosted Dyson conversion vs. LotFP

Level	Tinker	Sleight of Hand	Stealth	Climb	Sneak Attack	Total skill points	LotFP Specialist skill points
1	2	2	2	5	2	8	4
2	2	2	2	5	2	8	6
3	2	3	3	5	2	10	8
4	3	3	3	5	2	11	10
5	3	3	3	5	2	11	12
6	4	4	4	5	2	14	14
7	4	4	4	5	2	14	16
8	5	5	5	5	2	17	18
9	5	5	5	5	2	17	20
10	6	6	6	6	2	21	22
11	6	6	6	6	2	21	24
12	6	7	6	6	2	22	26
13	6	8	6	6	2	23	28
14	6	8	6	6	2	23	30

Now, the score at 1st level is a whopping 8 points to LotFP's 4. The Specialist only overtakes the Thief at 5th level. However, in my opinion, the levels below 5th are far more important to the game than the ones above it, so the LotFP skill point allocation seems lacking.
 
My conclusion is to keep LotFP Specialists otherwise as they are, but try giving them 8 skill points at 1st level instead of 4. (I won't limit the amount of skill points invested into any one skill, at least to start with. If there turns out to be a problem allowing one to max out one of their skills at 1st level, then we'll deal with that as it arises.)

Or, for a super simple rule: start Thieves at 2-in-6 for all skills (except Climb at 5-in-6), and increase this on levels divisible by three: to 3-in-6 at 3rd, 4-in-6 at 6th, and 5-in-6 at 9th level. Then, if playing beyond name level, bump everything to 6-in-6 at 10th.

Below is a comparison of the skill point equivalents of our various conversions with LotFP rules-as-written, as well as LotFP with a buff of 2 or 4 additional skill points at 1st level.

Comparison of skill point equivalent totals

Level	Dyson	Boosted Dyson	Dyson Boosted Smoothed	Super Simple	LotFP	LotFP+2	LotFP+4
1	5	8	8	8	4	6	8
2	5	8	9	8	6	8	10
3	7	10	10	11	8	10	12
4	8	11	11	11	10	12	14
5	8	11	12	11	12	14	16
6	11	14	14	14	14	16	18
7	11	14	16	14	16	18	20
8	14	17	17	14	18	20	22
9	14	17	18	17	20	22	24
10	18	21	21	21	22	24	26
11	18	21	21	21	24	26	28
12	21	22	22	21	26	28	30
13	22	23	23	21	28	30	32
14	22	23	23	21	30	32	34

I suggest you try out giving this higher number of skill points to Specialists/Thieves - whether your taste is to allow them to invest the points freely, or make a rigid progression resembling the B/X originals with Climb being far ahead of the others. See if that makes Thieves feel too overpowered and breaks the game - I doubt it will.

One caveat: starting Specialists with 8 points does mean that Thief skills are maxed out at 10th level, and only Sleight of Hand (which is modified by the target's level, and thus a base value higher than 6 still makes sense) increases beyond that. But that's only if you invest in Thief skills and nothing else; LotFP has other skills such as Architecture and Bushcraft to soak those points in. And honestly, I don't plan on playing beyond 10th level anyway.

Making the case for limited ability modifiers in OSR

D&D B/X is, I would wager, the most popular basis for OSR games. Therefore, B/X style ability modifiers are the most common. In case you didn't know, ability modifiers in B/X range from -3 to +3 and are determined like this:

Score	Mod
3	-3
4-5	-2
6-8	-1
9-12	+0
13-15	+1
16-17	+2
18	+3

Nice, unified and symmetric. Except of course when it's not - only positive modifiers affect languages known, and reaction adjustments from Charisma only go from -2 to +2, and ditto for initiative adjustments from Dexterity. But we'll get back to that.

While this is probably the smoothest system in any official edition - more unified than Original and Advanced D&D's jumble of adjustments, and less game-deciding than WotC D&D's gigantic -5 to +5 range, they're not the best choice for everything.

Negative modifiers can be problematic when you want to modify numbers that are naturally quite small. Rulesets will often include things like “you can hold your breath for a number of minutes equal to 1+CON”, which will then require special stipulations and minimums for negative modifiers.

Also, I have witnessed applying modifiers to dice rolls cause headaches to OSR hackers creating their own games using B/X as a starting point (often via Lamentations of the Flame Princess). ‘Esoteric Enterprises’ and other games by Emmy Allen use X-in-6 skills like LotFP, except ability modifiers are applied to skills - though they can never go below 0-in-6 (rolled as a 1-in-36 chance). Since skills start at 1-in-6, this means that a modifier of -3 or -2 is the same as -1, not to mention that a +3 is pretty massive. The WIP post-apoc game Ruinations by Brent Ault has gone through several iterations with its skill system, likewise attempting to include ability modifiers into skills, but trying to dampen their effect. At one iteration of the ruleset, skills were moved up to the d12, starting at 2-in-12, plus ability mods. Once again, anything below a -1 is not accounted for. The skill system was changed in a later version to a d100 where start skills at 20%, and have each point of modifier count for 5%, so a -3 modifier would give a 5% success rate. Which, you'll notice, is mathematically the same as a d20 roll with the modifiers applying in their usual way.

Basically, the d6 skill system is liked (by me and many others) for its chunkiness - adding a pip to a d6 feels much better than adding a handful of points to a d20 - but big modifiers and big chunks don't mix.

I'm going to suggest something to all hackers, tinkerers and homebrewers right now:

Ditch the negative ability modifiers from your game. Completely.

It's okay. Just because you're using B/X as your engine doesn't mean you NEED to have the same ability modifiers. It doesn't break compatibility. You still have the same scores, in the same range of 3-18, for when you take ability damage or whatever. You can still run Keep on the Borderlands even if there isn't some unlucky geezer running around with a -2 DEX. You still have HP, and XP, and AC. You can still use all the great TSR and OSR content out there exactly the same.

Then, squish down the modifier ceiling to one that you think won't break your maths too much.

Yes, it may be somewhat more fun for players to have wide variation in characters' abilities, and amusing to laugh at the one chump with a big negative modifier. But reducing modifiers to a range of, say, +0 to +2, opens up a lot more design space for a homebrewer. Never again will you have to worry about special stipulations when applying modifiers to a base number of 1.

(Btw, this pairs quite well with the static Health/Wounds mechanic I talked about in an earlier post - I'll just have CON modifier increase your starting Health at level 1, but more on that in a later post.)

As for precedents, there are already places where B/X et al. restrict adjustments from abilities to -2 to +2, like reactions, initiative, and XP adjustments - because a +3 would be far too large a modifier on a 2d6 roll, for example. Why not expand these limits to everything, thus truly unifying ability adjustments? A smaller range of ability modifiers that excludes negatives means doing less maths, a larger design space, and fewer special cases.

I propose the following modifiers, and will use them in my next game:

Score	Mod
3-12	+0
13-15	+1
16-18	+2

Essentially, it's the B/X range but with negatives completely removed, and +3 squished into +2. You still have some characters (21.3%) who are very good at a given thing, and a few (4.6%) who are exceptional at it. The rest (74.1%) are just average. And that's okay. Now, your base Bushcraft (or whatever) chance will be either 1-in-6, 2-in-6, or 3-in-6. No special stipulations.

By the way: in the oft-referenced late Gygaxian houserules for OD&D, abilities modify things by +1 or not at all. And they modify very few select things. Constitution of 15 or more gives +1 HP per HD, and so on. In discussions of these rules it is often pointed out that they were made for convention games, and therefore do not represent how Gygax ran the game at home. It is true that many of the changes there improve PC survivability - which makes sense when running a quick convention game. However, the streamlining and restricting the effect of abilities does not necessarily improve PC capability - and in fact set a lower ceiling for it than those in B/X and AD&D. I'm not going to say "if it's good enough for Gygax...", I'm just including it for completeness and to show that it's okay to do things differently to B/X - as long as compatibility is preserved. Compatibility must always be preserved.

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.