You know what really grinds my gears? The widely accepted Game-ism of the “hitpoint.” The hitpoint was designed as a simple mechanism for how much damage a character could take before dying. In simple terms, if you have 10 hitpoints, and take 10 points of damage – leaving 0 hitpoints left – you die. Another example is, in the original Super Mario Bros., Mario starts with one hitpoint, but if he gets a super mushroom, he now has two hitpoints. Maybe Mario is not the best example as I’m shoe-horning a new-ish game into a an old concept.
Dungeons & Dragons has been around for more than 30 years and is the source, if not the primary inspiration, for much of modern computer and video game design. As Uncle Ben would say, “With great power comes great responsibility.” With D&D, comes the hitpoint. Fighter type characters have more of them than spellcasters. This makes sense that someone trained in combat is better at taking a hit than an old man in a robe who reads all day. As characters level up – tiers or plateaus of skill and ability – they gain hitpoints, meaning that as their experience broadens, deepens, et cetera, they become even better at taking hits. Of course, over time, my warrior is going to have 100 hitpoints while your wizard will still have 25. This might be fine if your typical monster only hit for 5 damage, but in reality, as your characters advance, so do the type of monster you face. No longer do these characters face rats and little goblins, but huge dragons and even the gods themselves. The hitpoints become relatively meaningless to lower-level creatures, and really, it becomes a question of economics. Let’s shift gears.
Let’s say a loaf of bread costs $10. “That’s expensive bread,” you say, but who cares? It’s an arbitrary number for an arbitrary item. Let’s say you take home $10 for every hour of work you do. This means it takes you one hour to pay for a loaf of bread. The bread may seem expensive to you now, but how much did bread cost 50 years ago? For the sake of argument, $2. That seems cheaper, but how much did you make in an hour? One dollar, so in reality, that bread costs 2 hours 50 years ago versus the 1 hour it takes you today. The dollar may have inflated, but your hour earns you more dollars, so the bread is actually cheaper than it was 50 years ago.
So why not do away with dollars and just use units of time? This very quickly degrades into dollars again, but let’s break it down. For your eight-hour day, you get 8 chips. If we were a communist society, everybody would get 8 chips regardless of they were a janitor or a surgeon, but we’re not. For their work day, surgeons actually end up getting 80 chips, with gradations across the board from fluffer to CEO. We’re right back to where we started with different types of work being valued differently.
Now why did I tell you all that and what does it have to do with the hitpoint? Warriors (surgeons) are much better at taking damage (buying things) than other adventures (professions). Hitpoints are simply another resource, like money, except if you go broke, you die. The problems with scale apply in both scenarios too. At low levels, the 7-11 store clerk and the pre-law student have trouble buying bread at $10 at 1 chip. At higher levels, the 7-11 shift manager is better at buying bread because he now gets 20 chips in a day, but the legal aide gets 40 chips a day, so he’s still more able to buy that bread.
The exact same goes for hitpoints. This inflation is like providing adequate subdivisions so we can still keep track of rat bites, but if we have enough of them we can survive dragons’ breath. From an economics perspective we can’t really get rid of the hitpoint. Economics is the lesbian step-sister of sociology though, what can we do with reality thrown in?
“Strongest man in world do push-ups – one finger! One bullet, all over!”
My friends in High school worked in a Chinese restaurant for a Chinese immigrant and they asked him why he didn’t learn martial arts, and that was his response. In a world of one-hit kills, what good do hitpoints serve? You can’t give that bullet a damage value other than 100%. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 hitpoints or 1000, you will be dead. One thing that hitpoints don’t keep track of is vital areas. It isn’t specified where a hit takes place, just simply that you got hit. Think of Street Fighter when Ryu’s life-bar – hitpoint meter – is at 1%. He is perfectly capable of performing every move in his repertoire, but as soon as he so much as stubs his toe, he screams bloody murder and falls unconscious.
There is a solution for all this though. We can model every aspect of the body, and make sure we keep track of healing rates, and if a hit will cause a bruise, if this cut or that cut will cause blood-loss faster, and make sure we have a completely realistic experience, but to what end? Counterstrike players may like it, but it only serves to make a game more complex, and thus potentially un-fun. For now, let’s stick with the hitpoint as some sort of life-force in a jar; it’s simpler that way. I’ll keep thinking about this though, maybe I can come up with a partial solution. I know game systems like Fallout and 4th Edition of D&D are trying, and that’s admirable.
Broken Puck!
