First off, quick and colorful announcement / plug for What the Hell!?! Con, coming up this very weekend. Their preliminary schedule lives and breathes here.
As of this writing, I have been irresponsible about getting my planned Blades in the Dark one-shot game on that schedule, but it is still happening. Maximum of 6 players — first-come, first serve.
I Despise Hit Points
This is a deeply held game-philosophical opinion, which has nothing to do with my latest character Cap Doffer getting knocked on his ass and being out of play for a full week of game time (as required by the Old School Essentials system), when each turn-tracking session is taking approximately four or five game-hours.
I get that they are simple, and convenient for game purposes. I get that they promote that heroic ideal of continuing to function (often with no penalties at all) while your character is wounded. The scientist in me just rebels. On both ends, actually. There are plenty of wounds that could prevent active combat but not render you automatically unconscious and completely useless.
Different systems have tried to deal with this in different ways. Warhammer and Rolemaster had critical injury tables you could roll on. Warhammer’s were more poetically descriptive; Rolemaster’s were more extensive, more specialized to wound types, and written in a clipped clinical style. Ars Magica had rough bands of penalties to all activities
Hurt -0
Light Wounds -1
Medium Wounds -3
Heavy Wounds -5
Incapacitated
and a recovery table that made healing its own probabilistic mini-game rather than just “1 hit point per day of natural healing.”
And that was if you were convalescing at your home base, which they called your covenant. Healing “in the field” was even more fraught:
If you are Incapacitated, the story is grim . . . Each day at sunrise and sunset you must make a stress {Stamina] roll to see if you have died or recovered a wound level . . . A 0 or less indicates that you have died. A roll of 9+ means you are at “Heavy Wounds.” A roll of 1 to 8 indicates that your condition has worsened slightly, and all subsequent rolls are made at -1, cumulative . . . [emphasis mine]
Harsh.
Phoenix Command took this further, to the level of modern medicine, where even an otherwise instant-kill critical might be treatable in a trauma center, if you could get to one in time, or if you were wearing power armor with built-in medical capabilities, as in their Living Steel setting.
One of my favorite solutions was in the card game Middle-Earth: the Wizards, which I spent several hours playing with my kid this past Xmas holiday. Those characters have a Prowess score for offense, which they roll against an opponent. If they roll higher than the opponent’s prowess, they win, no problem. If they roll lower, they’re Wounded, and must make a Body check or die immediately. Being Wounded is only a -2 penalty to prowess, but they can’t untap, and since most actions require tapping, that means they can’t do much of anything useful until they are healed.
Healing is difficult; it can only happen with some card-based intervention like Healing Herbs or by visiting one of the four Haven sites like Rivendell or Lorien. In a card game, where each player is controlling multiple characters in a party, not inhabiting a single character who needs to be doing something every round in order to be “fair” and keep the player engaged, that’s a pretty good compromise. It works well in actual play situations.
Blue Eye Samurai vs Capcom’s Onimusha
I hate narratively convenient combat even more than I hate hit points. By “narratively convenient,” I mean that wounds only matter when the author wants them to, when they fit the narrative arc. Reality is nothing if not inconvenient. George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series comes closer than most, in that he regularly kills off named characters (PCs, in role-playing terms) in a permanent way. He signals this early on, in the first few chapters of the first book, by unjustly beheading Sansa’s dire wolf Lady. But it’s clearly and cleanly unjust. It’s bloody but not messy or confused for us, the readers, in a moral sense. There’s plenty of ambiguous morality and unfair consequences later on, but it’s never arbitrary or random, the way reality so often seems to be.
I was impressed by the beautiful animation and the literary sophistication of the dialogue in Blue Eye Samurai. Where Onimusha is in most ways a well-done but typical anime, full of infodumps that talk down to the viewers (“Are you saying that . . . ?”), the characters in BES more often use context and gesture to convey meaning. They use vocal inflection to display sarcasm way more often. Only the main character in Onimusha, clearly based on the real-life actor Toshiro Mifune, down to the way he holds his arms inside his kimono for warmth, reaching up through the front rather than the sleeves to scratch his chin-stubble, is rendered in that level of detail.
What drives me crazy about action media in general is how often the hero gets scratched or cut in minor ways that are stitched up with a dramatic / comedic hiss from the hero but have no actual consequences. I’m sorry, having a blade driven through your ankle (as in BES) is not just going to slow you down for a few steps until you find your rhythm again. That limp is going to get worse if you walk on it, not better. Minor injuries to the arms and legs, such as those suffered by professional athletes (the best real-world analogue for action heroes) heal in days, weeks, or months, not minutes. This is extremely inconvenient for action heroes, and so the vast majority of media simply ignores this fact.
Major wounds to the torso, where the vital organs are, heal even more slowly, assuming they don’t get infected1. Good news for historical or fantasy heroes, the 20th century’s tradition of exploratory surgery after stabbings appears to have been unnecessary much of the time. Still, convenient injuries without infection or involvement of vital organs are rare.
Penetrating abdominal trauma is seen in many countries. The most common cause is a stab or gunshot. The most common organs injured are the small bowel (50%), large bowel (40%), liver (30%), and intra-abdominal vascular (25%).
Arithmetic shows that those add up to 145%, meaning that a substantial amount of the time, more than one of those is hit by the same injury.
Mizu, the cross-dressing protagonist of Blue Eye Samurai, is stabbed in the gut at least twice that I remember, to the point of losing consciousness (after the fight is over, or course) from pain and blood loss, and is back on her feet within a couple of days both times. The second time (or maybe third?) she also has her ribs broken, after being recently shot in the shoulder, and still beats the villain into submission.
And don’t even get me started on knocking people out. My beloved superhero comics, including a really fun little Batman movie called Soul of the Dragon, which I re-watched with my kid over the holiday, are especially guilty of this. I admit this freely. But pulp-derived genre fiction is no better. From an online reprint of Poul Anderson’s classic essay “On Thud and Blunder”:
In fantasy, heroes get knocked out, awaken after a while as if from a nap, and plunge right back into action. The truth is, a mild concussion is disabling for periods ranging from hours to days, and as for a severe one, the consequences are not pleasant to watch.
He was not kidding, though even with all the attention paid to concussions in sports over the past decade, there’s still a lot we don’t understand.
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