I’ve seen so many videos and forum posts complaining about HP and it’s grind or called a “battle of paper cuts” and it makes no sense that my character can fall off a mountain and walk away, or get hit in the face with a fireball and dust themselves off or get bashed in the face from a dragon tail and shrug it off... only to be killed by say a rat bite at low hit points.
So why isn’t anyone using this Vitality rule? Click the link above to view the rule on the UA webpage. I’ve actually tweaked it a bit to use at our table, we think it makes total sense and scales better with more powerful monsters.
Update: Our version is as follows...
Vitality is viewed as an amount of critical damage blows the creature or character can absorb before death. Vitality = 1+ the CON modifier. A CON modifier of a minus or 0 would mean 1 blow or really instant death.
If damage > CON stat in a single attack, spell effect, falling or explosion, this results in lose of 1 Vitality for every qualifying set of damage above.
We just use some heart or skulls tokens at the table to represent Vitality. We don’t use the ruling to have to recalculate to max HP as Vitality changes.
So this alleviates the HP grind, yeah you can chip away at that Dragon’s HP but if you can land a series of critical damage blows then it’s going down a lot faster, speeding up the combat encounter and making the narrative much more cinematic and exciting. It also scales with the difficulty of the monsters. Doesn’t use any additional stats that aren’t already on the character sheet or in the monster manual. It only takes a split second to see if the damage rolled is over the monsters CON to cause critical damage too.
Example: a mimic has 58 HP but a CON 12 (+1), so if you land a hit with more than 12 damage in a single blow, the mimic loses a vitality, and it could survive 2 such mighty blows.
Example: an ancient black dragon has 367 HP but a CON 27 (+7), so you’d still need a blow to deliver over 27 damage to inflict critical damage and it could survive 8 such blows before it went down.
Same as the UA Vitality rule, critical hits still double the vitality loss so 2 points for each mighty blow received and they still cause double damage.
I think the reason nobody uses it is because they don't know about it due to how old it is. (It came out in 2015)
Personally, I don't use it because there's no way to implement it into D&D Beyond
Those are a couple of good points I guess. However, we still use it at our table, it gives players a way to speed up combat and cinematically finish off monsters a lot quicker so combat encounters don’t just drag on whilst they chip away at hit points.
In DnD hit points are not your health. They are your health, luck, ability to dodge out of the way and even divine protection all rolled into one arbitrary characteristic. Untill your HP drops below 50% you suffer no real damage, it just represents you tiring, straining your muscles on dodges and parries and losing your daily dose of whatever supernatural protection you may have as priest/warlock/paladin etc. In DnD comissair executing deserters for running away may as well heal HP for the rest of his troops, because encouragement and will to fight is part of the dozen of factors that make the vague abstraction of HP.
In the systems where your HP are your actuall psysical health, like WoD or 40k RPG you don't really have dozens of hit-points as you level up. Most times you stay at the same health pool from low level to high, you just get more ways to avoid being hit, nullify or reduce damage or heal in-combat.
It made an extra level of complexity to the game. While the math is easy, having to recalculate the HP total every time the vitality dropped was seen as too annoying and easy to mess up that we decided against it. Using electronic tools would be easy for it - spreadsheet that did everything for you. Some players cannot do that or want to use something larger than a phone at the tabletop. A number of players in my group no longer have laptops or tablets because their phones are the expense. And a surprisingly large number of people really like character sheets.
My primary issue with this is that it favors certain types of classes/builds much more than others. A rogue and a greataxe barbarian are going to be able to down a dragon much faster than a TWF fighter and a monk could despite roughly equal damage dished out. If that seems "right" to you, then I'd recommend consideration of some additional houserules to give other benefits to the "I make several quick blows" archetypes because they deserve to be effective too. Sure, it seems silly to be killed by one rat bite. But rats are rarely alone and a swarm of rats all tearing into you could certainly be as deadly as an orc with a big axe. I dunno, I'm ok with the hp mechanic I guess.
As a DM it seems awfully easy to just one-shot a back-liner, and the way it's written compounds this by giving the guys that die in one hit the lowest damage thresholds for that critical hit. If you have 10 CON you will die at some point. It only takes two not-that-big hits to do it. Or a single crit. Could happen fairly often by level 5. And it only goes up from there - average monster damage continues to scale until it eclipses all but the most CON-focused builds. And increasing that CON mod is rare and comes at the expense of basically being good at your class.
"OK now they will see the consequences of having a low CON!" But the real consequence is just imposing additional restrictions on character builds that limits what they can do because they're terrified of having low CON. After a few adventures you no longer have a bookish elf wizard or a crafty kobold rogue - you just have a party of beefcakes.
I take your point about class differences and favouring some builds over others, but wouldn’t that just be the case anyway, a monk class with several smaller damage attacks isn’t going to cause critical damage, however a barbarian sticking a great axe in a monster’s facehole will probably do just that. But that’s what we consider when choosing which classes to play. The monk is going to try and wittle down that dragon’s HP, causing fatigue and maybe exhaustion, whereas the nature of the barbarian is he wants to deal those big blows and fell this beast as quickly as possible.
your initial complaint doesn't make the most sense in my opinion, you're at low hit points because your guts are hanging out and you're an inch from death. the rat doesn't kill you on its own, bleeding to death or whatever injuries you have kills you because you're now at 0. imo, your system is just another proxy for what the HP system represents. instead of 100 HP to whittle down, your system now has 8 crit points to whittle down. same thing just different name and different numbers.
Optional Rules: Vitality
I’ve seen so many videos and forum posts complaining about HP and it’s grind or called a “battle of paper cuts” and it makes no sense that my character can fall off a mountain and walk away, or get hit in the face with a fireball and dust themselves off or get bashed in the face from a dragon tail and shrug it off... only to be killed by say a rat bite at low hit points.
So why isn’t anyone using this Vitality rule? Click the link above to view the rule on the UA webpage. I’ve actually tweaked it a bit to use at our table, we think it makes total sense and scales better with more powerful monsters.
Update: Our version is as follows...
Vitality is viewed as an amount of critical damage blows the creature or character can absorb before death. Vitality = 1+ the CON modifier. A CON modifier of a minus or 0 would mean 1 blow or really instant death.
If damage > CON stat in a single attack, spell effect, falling or explosion, this results in lose of 1 Vitality for every qualifying set of damage above.
We just use some heart or skulls tokens at the table to represent Vitality. We don’t use the ruling to have to recalculate to max HP as Vitality changes.
So this alleviates the HP grind, yeah you can chip away at that Dragon’s HP but if you can land a series of critical damage blows then it’s going down a lot faster, speeding up the combat encounter and making the narrative much more cinematic and exciting. It also scales with the difficulty of the monsters. Doesn’t use any additional stats that aren’t already on the character sheet or in the monster manual. It only takes a split second to see if the damage rolled is over the monsters CON to cause critical damage too.
Example: a mimic has 58 HP but a CON 12 (+1), so if you land a hit with more than 12 damage in a single blow, the mimic loses a vitality, and it could survive 2 such mighty blows.
Example: an ancient black dragon has 367 HP but a CON 27 (+7), so you’d still need a blow to deliver over 27 damage to inflict critical damage and it could survive 8 such blows before it went down.
Same as the UA Vitality rule, critical hits still double the vitality loss so 2 points for each mighty blow received and they still cause double damage.
I think the reason nobody uses it is because they don't know about it due to how old it is. (It came out in 2015)
Personally, I don't use it because there's no way to implement it into D&D Beyond
Those are a couple of good points I guess. However, we still use it at our table, it gives players a way to speed up combat and cinematically finish off monsters a lot quicker so combat encounters don’t just drag on whilst they chip away at hit points.
In DnD hit points are not your health. They are your health, luck, ability to dodge out of the way and even divine protection all rolled into one arbitrary characteristic. Untill your HP drops below 50% you suffer no real damage, it just represents you tiring, straining your muscles on dodges and parries and losing your daily dose of whatever supernatural protection you may have as priest/warlock/paladin etc. In DnD comissair executing deserters for running away may as well heal HP for the rest of his troops, because encouragement and will to fight is part of the dozen of factors that make the vague abstraction of HP.
In the systems where your HP are your actuall psysical health, like WoD or 40k RPG you don't really have dozens of hit-points as you level up. Most times you stay at the same health pool from low level to high, you just get more ways to avoid being hit, nullify or reduce damage or heal in-combat.
It made an extra level of complexity to the game. While the math is easy, having to recalculate the HP total every time the vitality dropped was seen as too annoying and easy to mess up that we decided against it. Using electronic tools would be easy for it - spreadsheet that did everything for you. Some players cannot do that or want to use something larger than a phone at the tabletop. A number of players in my group no longer have laptops or tablets because their phones are the expense. And a surprisingly large number of people really like character sheets.
I’ve updated the original post to include our version of the rule.
My primary issue with this is that it favors certain types of classes/builds much more than others. A rogue and a greataxe barbarian are going to be able to down a dragon much faster than a TWF fighter and a monk could despite roughly equal damage dished out. If that seems "right" to you, then I'd recommend consideration of some additional houserules to give other benefits to the "I make several quick blows" archetypes because they deserve to be effective too. Sure, it seems silly to be killed by one rat bite. But rats are rarely alone and a swarm of rats all tearing into you could certainly be as deadly as an orc with a big axe. I dunno, I'm ok with the hp mechanic I guess.
As a DM it seems awfully easy to just one-shot a back-liner, and the way it's written compounds this by giving the guys that die in one hit the lowest damage thresholds for that critical hit. If you have 10 CON you will die at some point. It only takes two not-that-big hits to do it. Or a single crit. Could happen fairly often by level 5. And it only goes up from there - average monster damage continues to scale until it eclipses all but the most CON-focused builds. And increasing that CON mod is rare and comes at the expense of basically being good at your class.
"OK now they will see the consequences of having a low CON!" But the real consequence is just imposing additional restrictions on character builds that limits what they can do because they're terrified of having low CON. After a few adventures you no longer have a bookish elf wizard or a crafty kobold rogue - you just have a party of beefcakes.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I take your point about class differences and favouring some builds over others, but wouldn’t that just be the case anyway, a monk class with several smaller damage attacks isn’t going to cause critical damage, however a barbarian sticking a great axe in a monster’s facehole will probably do just that. But that’s what we consider when choosing which classes to play. The monk is going to try and wittle down that dragon’s HP, causing fatigue and maybe exhaustion, whereas the nature of the barbarian is he wants to deal those big blows and fell this beast as quickly as possible.
your initial complaint doesn't make the most sense in my opinion, you're at low hit points because your guts are hanging out and you're an inch from death. the rat doesn't kill you on its own, bleeding to death or whatever injuries you have kills you because you're now at 0. imo, your system is just another proxy for what the HP system represents. instead of 100 HP to whittle down, your system now has 8 crit points to whittle down. same thing just different name and different numbers.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
Needlessly complicated method of achieving the same goal.
Here's my take on Wounds:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/homebrew-house-rules/90101-wound-points-5e-more-realistic-damage