Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Playing with Death and Dismemberment” from 2008 by Trollsmyth.
Next week we’ll discuss “Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” from 2008 by Matt Finch. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
This is really interesting to me as someone who is pretty new to RPGs, started with 5e and branched out into the OSR shortly afterwards.
I have been drawn to Into the Odd and the like because I love the abstraction of HP as Hit Protection rather than meat points. I’ve never been drawn to death at 0hp since there’s some dissonance between a 1hp character being fully capable in all regards and being flat out dead at 0hp.
It’s awesome to see traces of these ideas forming over the years and how it has shaped the games that I love today.
I love this blog club, I haven’t been active in the discussions but I am really enjoying reading some of these for the first time and reading the input from all of you as well.
One aspect which drew me to OSR systems was the lethality at 0hp after enduring the non-immersive fiction of jack-in-the-box 5e death saves, so I remember being skeptical of this blog post when I came across it a few years ago. But I still eventually came round to sharings its viewpoint on HP and the unsatisfactory way it represents the fiction as understood by most gamers.
I still didn’t like its solution; I preferred not to have to reference a table to understand what a roll means. I’m more inclined to the roll itself tell you all you need to know, like Cairn’s further damage going to STR.
My own current preference, using OSE, is for a character going to 0hp or below to make a save vs death, since this is the first potentially fatal wound. Success means they survive, but any excess damage from the blow fills up their inventory slots. They’re still active (I also dislike too many scenarios which decree a player has to sit idly while everyone else continues to have fun around them) and can decide whether to risk fighting on, but there’s a definite impact on their effectiveness. Think Boromir and the breaking of the Horn of Gondor. There’s a character who chose to fight on and managed a few more saves vs death.
What struck me more than the blog post’s solution was its introduction, and its observation on how players generally interpreted the combat rules. I don’t know the full history of D&D and its sources / influences but do recall that its AC system was based off a naval warfare game, and I wonder how much further it influenced the rest of the combat system hit points and single strikes per round. To me those far better represent relatively immobile ships blasting away at each other (yes, they’re moving, but they’re not dodging shots so much as weathering them), still largely operational until they start sinking, rather than the desperate whirling melees of adventurers and monsters by torchlight.
I could ramble on quite a bit longer about how I feel most OSR systems’ combat mechanics still lead GMs and players down the ‘I stab you, you stab me’ road, but that wouldn’t be strictly relevant to this blog club post.
I found this blog post and its offshoots very helpful in getting me to move on from the ‘optimal fighting fitness at 1hp, dead at 0hp’ mindset, even if I didn’t take its own solution on board.
I like Death & Dismemberment tables. They provide an opportunity for characters to possibly survive otherwise lethal injury, often with lasting consequences for the damage their characters suffer (admittedly not so much on this table).
In fiction I like the grizzled retired adventurer archetype. While their adventuring days are behind them their mark remains as scars or terrible injuries. The former fighter who opened a tavern tells the tale of how he lost his leg to the bear that is now a rug in front of the fire place.
Basically, I want tables that provide more grist for the stories players tell about their characters. Do the players retire their characters from a particularly serious injury? That’s not that different from outright losing them though perhaps more flavorful. At least now they also might be able to move into the background to add to the setting as an NPC. Or does the event motivate the rest of the party to seek a legendary hermit healer to restore the ranger’s sight?
That said, I haven’t found a table that I actually like and use. My ideal would probably take into account hit location and damage type. I’ve also encountered tables that track the severity of an injury to how much damage a character has taken below 0 (as a modifier on the roll).
I never used to like death and dismemberment style tables, but recently started using something similar.
The blog post talking about changing the way people think of hit points wasn’t an aspect I had seriously considered.
That said, as presented, I still prefer a system that focuses more on player choice, as I tend to see more as a focus in modern gaming. My own system was based off of death in Wildsea where players have to decide to die. I let PCs eho hit 0 HP accept a permanent injury roll to regain some HP and keep going, shifting even more control to the player.
I will have to consider if there are ways I can tweak my setup to help reinforce the division between HP and injury, as I think this blog post was entirely correct that this sort of setup can help with that.
I’ve currently been trialling a system where death is at zero, but you get a wound any time you take a big hit - more than a third your max HP.
I have a wound table to fall back on to help the GM, but I’ve also got a lot of mileage when prepping to just writing down one or two wounds that each monster tends to inflict. E.g. salamander inflicts Serious Burns, golem inflicts Broken Bone, etc. I then have a very simple d6 table to give a quick location (1 head, 2 torso, 3 right arm, 4 right leg, 5 left arm, 6 left leg).
You can only heal wounds during downtime (1 week+ in safety).
With this system I give the players higher starting HP.