The many Wonders of Abstract Hit Pointism/Hit Points in Film

This last week, out of the blue, the group got a new female player (I’ll call her “J”). She’s in her early 20’s, very cute, and often entertainingly energetic in a way younger gamer grrls often are. Session-wise, a rarin’ to go and get on with the game type attitude I wish the long time players would have more of. After playing with pretty much the exact same folk for a handful of years now, it was sort of a refreshing sea breeze for me. Now, don’t claim I am sexist, because last year Big Ben had an old gamer buddy visiting in town and he joined one of our KOTOR sessions, and I loved the energy a new player brought to the group even then (OK, but maybe a little less then).

I guess I could write an entire post about “J,” and her first game with us, but what I wanted to get around to was the fact that her first game with us was my classic Runequest game. Now, “J” is a 3rd edition D&D player. No, really, she is young but has the type of “this or that crazy thing happened to my character in a game” war stories us older guys usually joke about. But like I said, she was a goer, and dove right into a game she had never even heard of before.

What probably stood out in her mind as the biggest difference between RQ and D&D was the whole hit point thing. Sure Runequest has hit points similar to D&D. But whereas in D&D you go up significantly in HP as you level, in RQ there are no levels, and your hit points will remain constant. Worse, each body part has a fraction of the full hit points. If an arm or leg takes enough damage, it will be destroyed. Same for head and torso. So bottom line you have a fair chance to be killed or crippled outright from a blow by even the most unskilled warrior if they got past your defenses.

Now here’s D&D with that famously abstract hit point system. Two guys the same size and mass could have insanely different hit points. Like, farmer boy has 2, and 10th level fighter boy has 90. The disparity is seen most when cross referenced with small bladed weapons that do a D4 or a D6 in damage. The farmer’s son is going to probably go down in one hit, while the fighter laughs as, several hits later, he is still floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee in the fight.

This was merrily explained in early D&D as a combo meal of realities. Lots of the HP is luck. When somebody attacks you and hits (lets not get into the luck part of getting hit or not in an attack in the first place), the first furtive points they ding you down are mostly the “luck of the gods,” or the Irish, or whatever. You are “using up” some of that divine protection as you go. OK, the next veil beyond that abstraction is one of exhaustion. Here, some of the hit points are related to combat fatigue. You duck this blow here, backflip over another blow there. You are using up some of your combat “chutzpa” here. Yeah, like me you probably think that is a pretty small percentage. So after those first two abstractions, we get to what is real. The meaty flesh. Eventually you are out of luck and stamina for the fight, and now it is your flesh getting seriously blasted. The fighter with 90 HP is down to around 25 points or less when we start seeing real blood. The next blow could put the big guy down for the count.

Here’s a quick comment from an online forum on this very subject:

characters go from 'mortally wounded' to capable of fighting again within a week, but then the stronger and tougher they are, the longer it takes them to make a full recovery

Yeah, another weakness in the system is that more potent PC’s take longer to heal than lesser HP folk when they are taken down to low numbers. But again, really, a lot of that is luck and combat savvy building back up.
I've always looked at it sort of cinematically, which I think is actually perfect for old school D&D. I like the combo of luck, survival instincts, and good old meaty frame to explain the many "wonders" of abstract hit pointism. And you see this in action films.

Indy Jones tends to take a beating that would have most other people in traction at least. When he came out of the Temple of Doom and before the fight on the bridge, he had taken dozens of punches (most to the face), fought off a bunch of guys with spears, got hit by rocks, burned by a torch, and sliced with a dagger. Then proceeded to dodge arrows and fight a big Alistair Crowley looking guy on a broken bridge. He comes out of it laughing and dancing and getting jiggy with that Willy chick in the end. No worries. And what about Stallone characters? In First Blood Rambo gets roughed up and dry shaved by “The Man,” gets shot, falls from 100’ onto rocks, gets exploded by a rocket launcher, attacked by rats, and goes on to blow up a town and machine gun a fat sheriff. Never mind what he goes through in Rambo 2, or Rocky 4 for that matter.

What those dudes all have in common are survival friendly hit point totals. Probably in the 80 range. In the abstract sense, you even see Cap’n Kirk and his fellow upper management friends’ dance around godlike beings and energy aliens, while lesser hit point dudes in red shirts get vaporized in all sorts of horrible ways. There are heavy luck factors making up those hit points.

Sure, you can look at the more mortal, sectioned hit points of a game like Runequest as a sort of more realistic cinematic type thing (like in 300, or a Scorseses film), but nothing lends itself to “how the hell did he live through all that shit” Hollywood heroics like good old massive D&D hit points.

That new Arcade Smell

I’m sure that like me you occasionally catch the whiff of some smell that takes you back to some bygone era. Maybe something reminds you of a favorite dish you loved as a kid, or perhaps you detect the scent of some perfume or incense that reminds you of a teenage girlfriends bedroom. Such a little thing can take you right back there, and it is sometimes profound.

Today when I came back to the office after a lunch break, I hit the small room in the parking basement to catch the elevator. I’ve been down there a million times, and it is usually pretty odorless, unless one of the asshole chain smokers from the internet company on the 2nd floor had just passed through after a ciggy break.

But today I got hit by a smell as soon as I entered, and as I waited the 30 seconds or so for the elevator, I realized that this odor was exactly like the one I remember from arcades in the 80’s and early 90’s. I don’t know if it was new carpet, or just some kind of cleaning that creates it, but this just popped memories into my brain that was decades old.

Man, arcades. As a teen and in my early 20’s, my friends and I spent a lot of time in them. Often one of us would be playing Berzerk or Pacman, and the others crowded around would start singing some song from our then favorite film, the Heavy Metal movie. There you were trying to navigate around enemies coming at you from all directions, while your ears were assaulted by Cheap Trick – “don’t be afraid to drive the nail in the wood, or drink the bottle it ta-tastes so goo-ood. You go the distance, you never thought that you could…”

In later teen years we would go more often with girlfriends, but that was never quite the experience you had with your pals. With your gal you had to play Burger Time or Q-Bert or some other lameass game (OK, I kind of liked them). Hell, when you were with the girl you didn’t even skateboard to the place. You fucking drove there. Talk about the end of childhood.

I don’t really remember that last true arcade I regularly went to. I think sometime in the early 90’s there was one near Century City, but that was the last classic, carpeted arcade I remember. Oh, I’m sure Disneyland or some other place I never go in adulthood might have something similar, but I doubt it. I’m thinking about the common, carpeted, arcades that were one big room in a building that was formerly probably a furniture store or some such.

In the late 90’s during one unemployed summer, I’d give myself a 5 dollar limit and cruise down to the Santa Monica pier arcade (pictured above). It sure wasn’t carpeted, and it smelled more like Santa Monica bay (a fishy, tar smell at that time – it’s less polluted nowadays) mixed with hobo power B.O. But it was my last regularly visited arcade. It’s still there, but the pier is just too touristy now. I played a ton of House of the Dead that summer. I loved that game, and I was no fan of stand up shooters. Too bad Uwe Boll fucked up the movie version, which should have been a no-brainer (agents in suits blasting their way into an undead hell house. What’s so hard about that?).

My last game there was probably around 2001 or so. I stopped in and House of the Dead was gone. So I poured a few quarters into the current Street Fighter game. Eventually some Mexican dude came out of nowhere, dropped a quarter in, and proceeded to beat my unskilled warriors ass up and down the screen. I don’t know the protocol on “join in” games, but I was kind of irked. I was new to the game, and wanted practice. I think I said something derogatory, along the lines of “chupa mi pinche verga cabron,” and just walked away, leaving poor Guile or whoever to be helplessly massacred by Juan-Carlos. In retrospect, I should have tried to get some tips from the guy for my trouble. But I guess at that point I missed my 80’s arcade fun, with old teenage pal “Doc” Winslow shouting a Blue Oyster Cult song into the side of my head while I tried to operate Dirk The Daring.

Now, I love my consoles. I’m really digging Fallout 3, and so far have finished the game, but am still exploring via the Broken Steel DLC. But no arcade smell at home. Just the acrid smell emanating from a nearby empty beer bottle, and the whiff of shame for spending way too much time alone with that game.

“Reach out and take it

Reach out and ta-ta-ta take it

Reach out and take it, aw yeah!”

“The Player Character in the Backpack” or “Dumbass ways to explain a PC absence”

For those of us with a regular gaming group, one of our common problems is a player having to miss a session. What are you going to do? We have lives outside gaming unfortunately what with jobs, family, and non-gaming friends (Superlotto tonight – c’mon lucky numbers make me a full time gamer) taking up our time.

When we were kids, we didn’t really worry too much about why Varn the Vicarious was suddenly not present in the dungeon when we continued an ongoing crawl. Back then our go-to fix for this was teleportation. You teleported out of the dungeon. When you returned you teleported back. Sometimes this even happens in the middle of a session. Sometimes we said they teleported back to town. Sometimes to just outside the dungeon with the pack animals. Sometimes we didn’t even say where the hell they fucked-off to, and what power or entity caused them to do so. Needless to say at 14 we did not really give a rat’s patoot why this happened, because we were too busy busting Gnoll heads and getting poisoned by treasure chests. We did not care about verisimilitude. We didn’t even know what that was.

As we got older our role play become more sophisticated. Not that we became story tellers, but it suddenly mattered why your character was not present during important play. This is one reason I like to have a couple of campaigns of different genres going on. Sometimes a particular character just has to be there for one reason or another, and if you have other options you can wait for that scenario when the important character can be present. But in a pinch and the PC is not that needed, “personal business” fit the bill for why they are not there.

It works in fiction. Character come and go willy nilly. In The Hobbit and LOTR the wizard Gandalf seemed to make a career out of constantly fucking off on some personal errand, even when you needed him. It works especially good for mysterious types. Wizards, thieves, rangers, druids – these guys usually have their own agendas beyond the party. Even in the midst of level 4 of Deathtrap Dungeon, it is conceivable that these mystery men could come and go and not even feel the need to explain. Even a plain fighter can have an important side thing to do. Maybe a date with some red headed doxy he met at the 2nd level dwarf tavern.

“I must away for awhile, I shall return my comrades in arms!” they shout (or something less lame), as they flourish their cape into the air and march off into the darkness.
OK, it is not easy, and you of course still have to do a little shrugging and whatareyagonnado?-ing, but you do your best and move on.

But I was shocked recently to read a forum post about how to explain character absences. Seems a no-brainer. These guys all being adults (some quite old), I figured they had all probably evolved my “personal business” procedure when their players decided they would rather play Skyrim than get together for D&D. But to my shock and awe, people still seemed to use the childhood method of “he teleported out of the dungeon.”

Look, I know it’s all “beer and pretzels gaming” and all that, but I feel to avoid a board game mentality you need that role play and a little bit of gravitas. I mean, these guys even had “explanations” for the teleporting, like unlimited but limited (?) teleport scrolls, or it was a limited use ability the dungeon grants to you when needed (because shit, we all know dungeons are just like tough love soccer coaches who want you to succeed in the end). One guy even had the most unique reason for absence ever explained on this planet. The party had the ability to shrink a character down to an inch in height, paralyzed and invincible, so the party could shove that character of a missing player into a backpack and keep him safe as the crawl continues. Jeez. Even in a high magic world, that seems pretty Ronald McDonaldland to me. That breaking sound you hear is the shattering of any sense of disbelief.

No need for all that weirdo, gravitas-killing super magic to explain an absence. “Personal business” ain’t perfect, but at least it doesn’t sound like something my dumbass childhood self would use.

Does Gygax get too much credit?

I'm sure this has been discussed in the OSR plenty already, but I'm actually not all that well versed on the subect of Gygax and Arenson's contribution distribution. It sounds to me like, more or less, it is like a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby situation fron Marvel's Comics silver age. Jack did a lot of hard work on characters that would become billion dollar icons, but Stan was the "Funky Flashman" charismatic face of the company. Face front, true believers!

In this Cracked.com article, the Gygax and Arneson history gets a small, but biting, entry in an article about getting too much credit for things.Cracked is awesome in general, but seeing D&D make a significant appearance on one of the sites articles really got me jacked. Here's the meat of it if you don't feel like looking at it (although with lines like "...Gary was more like the weird uncle who lived in the garage and clogged the toilet" you might want to check it out). If this is all true, the Dave created everything I love about the game except the part about using dice.


Who Actually Deserves the Credit:


During a nerd side quest, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax had an epic random encounter when they chanced to meet at Gen Con in 1969. Gygax was working on something called Chainmail, which was a war simulator only a bit more complicated than the average board game. With Arneson's influence, Chainmail was adapted to include:

- Exploring dungeons

- Using a neutral judge/dungeon master

- Conversations with imaginary characters (NPCs) to develop the storyline

- Hit points

- Experience points

- The concept of role-playing an individual character rather than just rolling dice

So, basically, he put the "R" in RPG.

Runequest: Dragon’s Pass is so Passe

So far so good with my old school Dragon’s Pass Runequest campaign. I think the players are liking it, despite not everybody really investing a ton of interest in the setting (my fascination with Glorantha since childhood being my main reason for running this now) or the whole rune concepts. Only a couple of the characters have a god association at this point. I think that the main appeal so far is the down and dirty nature of the combat (one lucky hit can kill anybody) and it’s often visceral outcomes, and the fact that it is just such a different system than D&D. I’m glad it’s fun, although it is still a tad early to see if it will have the surprising wild popularity of my on-hiatus Star Wars KOTOR campaign. Of anything non-D&D I have done with this group, that seems to have had the most appeal to them, despite nobody in the group being overly fond of Star Wars. Even Big Ben has expressed interest in a SW campaign of his own (though sadly he seems to want to do it near the movie timeline).

Anyway, I’m jazzed to finally be doing some classic Glorantha, and I can foresee running it for several more sessions before needing to get back on that Star Wars track. One of the interesting things I’ve found online is how many people have played RQ for decades almost non-stop. To many of these people, the thought of somebody doing the “old setting” in Dragons Pass seems almost quaint. They are like old warriors “Ah, I remember Dragons Pass and Prax from the days of my youth. Sometimes I long for those humble and basic places.” You see, they have long since moved beyond the very basic locations of Dragons Pass or Prax. They have had campaigns where the braving of Duck Tower and Snake Pipe Hollow are distant memories. Their adventures have taken them to Griffon Mountain and beyond deep into the Lunar Empire, and off across the sea to other continents. You see, while Dragons Pass is sort of a Scotland/Finland amalgam, and Prax Mesopotamian in nature, other parts of Glorantha that are akin to Pirate genre, Medieval England, Africa, and Asia have long since awaited exploring, and these old RQ fanatics have explored them all. I get bits and pieces of info from my communications online about these great campaigns, but just not enough.

Will I run enough Runequest to let my players explore beyond the basic setting? Who knows. But I did nab a pdf of Griffon Mountain today. That’ll get saved on a flash drive in the hopes that in a year or two, we’ll still have enough Runequest interest to move beyond the humble hills of DP and the arid plains of Prax.

Gringle & The Pawnshop Baboon Assault!

I’m not one of those DM’s who obsess on taking photos of the mini’s on the table during game night, and I have at least one player who will laugh at me for doing so, but it was necessary just this one time…



We were doing a Baboon (in RQ intelligent simians) assault on that famous Pawnshop in the village know far and wide for its apple orchards. Broker and Issaries Runelord Gringle hired the young characters to protect the shop while he and his duck assistant Quackjohn are away for the night. This gave players a nice tour of one of the most secretive houses in Sartar. They had full access as they awaited the baboon attack. Indeed they finally did, eventually breaking through the roof and into one of the first story storage rooms. In the upper part of the map you can see a couple of characters and four baboons tangled in the throes of mortal combat. Down below, in the little Issaries chapel next to the the kitchen, Terry’s character Rowan observes a big centaur breaking down the door from the kitchen, as a couple of little crested Dragonnewts rush into the room with bows at the ready. Who are these strange invaders and why are they attacking the shop at the same time as the baboons (no spoilers please)?



So anyway, we had to stop just as things were getting really interesting. We’ll continue next week. As you can see, the map is kind of a mess because I only had a couple of minutes to draw it out. Fake. I actually did it a week ahead of time, and it’s still kind of sloppy (although I don’t think the players minded). I just can’t draw a straight line. Before we got cleaned up for the night, I snapped this pic to help us place the minis and take up the combat from that moment in time next week.



I don’t mind saying so, but I think we are having some fun with Runequest.

Cup runneth over - but not Full

Look at that great action scene from Herioc Comics in the pic above. Isn't it just bugnuts amazing? A blonde babe in black leathers, standing in a T-Rex's mouth, smacking a gorilla in a space suit with a great white, as Ed Wood-looking flying saucers float about.

Reminds me so much of my old Champions campaigns. No, really. Dinosaur rampages during unusual great white shark migration as alien apes attack a major city. And hot super babes? Oh, you bet. Over the decades my female players would not always have beautiful characters in their D&D, but in Champions they were all Baywatch circa 1996. Ah, the good old days.

But shit, I'm running an old school Gloranthan Runequest campaign and a Call of Cthulhu campaign at the same time. I posted over the years about how I would really love to do these campaigns, and here I am now doing them. I have my players loving my currently hiatused KOTOR campaign, and they also often ask about their high level characters in my 1st ed. Ad&D campaign (been more than a year now I think for that). So why do I pine for Champions? Why do I wish I could run this crunchy system and my awesome futuristic comic books setting?

Because I am a gamer, and true gamers are never satisfied. There are so many games to run (including multiple settings and time periods over several game systems, such as CoC for Ancient Rome and Victorean London), I'll never get to them all. I know I should be happy with what I am having fun with at the moment, and I really do. But the daydreaming man, the daydreaming. It'll get you every time.

A little Chivalry and Sorcery, anyone?