The problem with hit points is that one tends to use them without thinking, because "that's how damage works". Battle scars are memorable in ways that hit points can't be. When my character is sliced in the face and loses his left eye, that shakes up gameplay, but it also tells a story. One valuable lesson you can take from both Dwarf Fortress and Liberal Crime Squad is that permanent debilitating damage to characters is extremely good at telling emergent stories. And when the enemy does cripple one of your good people, they're more likely to not be dead outright, and you'll be able to use your other characters to get them off the scene and return to base to get them patched up. Liberal Crime Squad uses a combination - it has a very lethal combat system where one good hit to the head or chest can kill instantly, but with a squad of up to six people and the ability to train your people to be more evasive than your enemies, it's possible to still become very strong with a low probability of serious damage to your people. The first is to try to improve the survivability of the main character somehow, whether it's by giving them extra chances (maybe side hit point pools that have to be expended before a status effect is incurred), giving them resets, or even immunity to certain debilitating effects. I see two obvious ways to try to take the good of this damage system without making the game extremely hard. It can latch onto you and start tearing you apart, and soon you're passing out from pain before you can stagger to safety. The main problem is obvious if you play a weak adventurer, however: you're susceptible to the same negative feedback loop that the wolf is. Running at a wolf and swinging your mace only to have its left leg fly ten meters into a tree and it starts staggering around bleeding to death *is* fun. In action, combat is much more exciting than a system in which the player manages hit points. But on top of it is a complex system of body organs that can be punctured, limbs that can be severed, teeth that can be knocked out, eyes that can be gouged, and so on. I have a pretty good guess how it works, because I've maintained Liberal Crime Squad, a previous game by bay12games, and in LCS blood is basically a hidden hit point mechanic. I say "mostly" because behind the scenes it has "blood", and when the creature runs out of blood it dies. I have no problem with trying something different with combat design but trying to call out hit points as the fundamental problem with current game systems is the wrong way to go about it.ĭwarf Fortress's adventure mode is a nice sample of a complex combat system that mostly avoids hit points. Instead, Craig is using hit points as a straw man to address more fundamental problems around combat design and grind. Having hit points as a resource to manage is a strength, not a weakness, and even a card based game system such as Magic: The Gathering uses them to model damage. I guess as a roguelike designer, I'm used to random damage, which seems to be the crux of his problem with them. I don't see anything compelling in Craig's argument against hit points. The alternatives suffer from over complexity and design weaknesses such as negative feedback loops (See my original article for further discussion.) But, like these other examples, hit points are the best mechanism that we currently have to solve a difficult design problem: in this instance to represent the process of damage. Hit points are one of those 'trendy whipping boys' of game concepts, like character classes and cut scenes that periodically are trotted out as an example of bad game design. Shortly after I argued for hitpoints as the best way to represent damage because they makes the game shorter, Craig Perko of ProjectPerko has argued strongly against them because they make the game longer.