Wizards HATE Her! How to Play D&D for Free, Part 4: Combat
Combat is a key concern of playing a D&D because that's part of what we expect the game to entail. It's whatever. I do feel like if you're focusing on a lethal sneaking-around game, you don't need anything complicated because the point is that if you're put yourself at risk of death then you're likely already screwed. Like, just make that a save-versus-being-impaled-by-a-pointy-stick (not really my preference). Nevertheless, there's something to be said for ensuring some continuity with D&D combat rules to be able to plug in monsters et cetera without much issue. Plenty of people also just like combat, so, you know. It doesn't take much to make everyone happy, especially when people tend to be familiar with whittling hit points as the predominant way of killing each other. Let's talk about it.
Weapons and Armor in D&D
I have written so, so much about mathematical differences between many variations of the typical D&D schemas for combat. I don’t even like combat as much as I like math. Read about the effects of static versus variable to-hit (attack) and damage rates [1], about how to-hit rolls increase character longevity [2], and about a one-roll method for D&D combat with the typical factors (armor class and hit points) [3] [4]. You’re basically dealing with the issue of prolonging characters’ lives in combat, either by increasing how much shit they can take (via hit points) or decreasing the probability that they will take any shit at all (via to-hit rolls, typically based on types of armor). To make a system that is scalable between goblins and dragons and everything in between, you need to decide whether numbers get bigger or probabilities get smaller, in order that stronger opponents are formally more powerful. All this has been discussed before and I don’t plan on deviating much from existing solutions for our purposes here, which is to derive a simple D&D from cultural knowledge and personal intuition. So, let’s take a new approach for this blog: what are the implications of these various components within our imagination of the game logic, or of combat as a component of the D&D game in general?
Hit Points
Hit points are an insurance to prevent player characters from having to die. There is the story about how when playing Blackmoor, one of the players rage-quit the game because their character was immediately killed by a troll under a bridge. Arneson’s solution was to introduce hit points so that characters could take a beating before they finally died, which also turned the longevity of those characters in combat into a sort of resource management game. That being said, it is important to acknowledge that hit points, in theory, are antithetical to the lethal play style supposed by later players of early D&D. Gygax says in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide that the purpose of hit points is precisely to avoid death: “Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely!” I’m, obviously, not a fan of Gygax, but it’s funny that this was published in 1979 and not in 2022. It’s a good thing to keep in mind, both in why hit points are used and also in what expectations you have about character death while playing a D&D. Do you need them? Well, I like characters that are less likely to die.
Hit points are also an abstraction. The abstraction is one about which no one agrees upon what exactly it is abstracting, which is kind of funny. Gygax says in the AD&D Player’s Handbook that hit points “represent how much damage (actual or sustained) a character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors." He then compares the hit points of a level 10 fighter to the hit points of four warhorses. For Gygax, thus, “the majority of hit points are symbolic” for experienced human beings whereas they tend to represent physical sustainability for large creatures like warhorses and dragons and others. This is a difference of reality which hit points abstract, in order to make all these things easier to handle.
Some later rulesets have formalized the difference between “flesh” (‘physical’ hit points) and “grit” (‘symbolic’ hit points), with the former being much harder to recover than the latter [5]. I don’t think it necessarily has to be formalized, as much as the difference itself being recognized as a justification for why heroic human beings can hold their own ground against massive monsters—if this is indeed a desirable aspect of the fiction. Besides, I think designating what proportion of hit points are ‘physical’ or ‘symbolic’ is inflexible besides introducing additional complexity. It usually works that “grit” is lost before “flesh”, except in rare instances where “flesh” is lost because of a severe wound (perhaps the result of a “critical hit”). This runs the risk of complicating what could be treated as a simple thing, having to introduce additional steps in order to account for the additional resource pool. It also formalizes a difference which, for hit points alone, is wholly interpretive insofar as it is abstracted.
Hit points can be notorious for how many numbers you have to track, and how large they often can be. However, we don’t need to despair. The original Dungeons & Dragons had a very limited range of both hit points and armor class compared to even its most immediate successors in the Greyhawk supplement and in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. A red dragon has, on average, just 35 hit points, and it has an armor class such that a level 1 fighter hits it 15% of the time (though at level 10, this becomes 60% of the time). The math is not bad at all! Combat here actually seems, compared to later editions, as “fast and furious” (?!) as Arneson and Gygax say it is.
Armor Class & Abstraction
From Chainmail to the “alternative combat system” which has since become the foundational ruleset for encounters in D&D, the game has always had the birthmarks of an abstract mass combat system retrofitted onto one-on-one combat. One example of resultant inconsistency is the treatment of missiles: as Daniel Collins from Delta’s D&D Hotspot points out, the great accuracy of ranged weapons in D&D makes sense if you were to have dozens or even hundreds of archers firing at masses of soldiers; it makes much less sense for a single archer firing at a single target [6]. Armor class poses a similar dilemma, as usually treated. Formally, armor class determines the baseline likelihood that one character will successfully attack another character and thereby deal damage to the latter. Associating better armor with avoiding damage (as opposed to reducing damage) makes sense on a mass scale when it is accepted as an abstraction of defense factors in combat. It makes less sense on an individual scale, where failed attacks are narrated often as misses or deflections. Such narrations treat the characters as active participants in the fray rather than passive recipients of hits, but they contradict the supposed reason for the attack’s failure: the armor blocks the hit.
There are two common solutions to this contradiction, each biased towards one side of it: either you make ‘armor’ more ‘realistic’ by giving it a formal function that is not reducing the to-hit likelihood (such as hit point damage reduction), or you give the to-hit likelihood a different imagined conceit (such as ‘evasion’ or a more broadly encompassing ‘resilience’). None of these solutions, including the original, can be separated from how they are experienced in practice: often people rework armor not because the popular treatment is inconsistent between its formal logic and imagined fiction, but because having to roll two dice is finicky (and rolling a successful attack only to deal low damage on the second roll is disappointing). There are any number of reasons to want to deviate from the original armor class system, and any number of factors has been considered in inventing new solutions.
However, as with hit points, you run the risk of overcomplicating things when you transition from a simple, abstract system to one which accounts for factors not previously considered. You also run the risk of giving everyone too much homework, having to remember how one particular thing works in this darn-fangled new ruleset. The riskiest outcome, perhaps for combat specifically, is retaining the notion that combat is a distinct mode of activity (i.e. game) from the overarching activity. On one hand, a system specific for combat allows you to handle issues specific to combat; on the other hand, by virtue of setting combat apart as a distinct subsystem of play, you turn it into something much less malleable and with less applicability outside of itself. Is formalizing a distinct mode of play desirable, especially one that is often regarded as a failure-state rather than an aim of the game itself? Besides a contradiction between abstraction and reality, we find here a contradiction between the purported telos of D&D and its vestigial war (mini)game.
Thus, before continuing to discuss an improvised version of combat rules in D&D, it is essential to recognize that combat itself is a situation which can be improvised rather than formalized. Still, our goal here is to learn how best to improvise situations based on knowledge we have inherited from our own practice and that of others.
Modeling Character Longevity
You can skip this part if you've read the previous entries or just aren't a fan of math; here is just a summary of how I have modeled character longevity in combat. First, we will consider the system by abstracting random factors as variables. Instead of hit points, we will consider hit dice; instead of points of damage, we will consider damage rolls holistically. A participant in combat has a number n of hit dice h, which is depleted by d upon a successful attack. The term h / d is how many hits it takes to eliminate a single h; this is then multiplied by n. The longevity of a participant, barring other factors, is therefore n × h / d; that is, how many hits it takes to successfully defeat the participant.
In typical D&D, the terms h and d are random. They are both d6 in the original Dungeons & Dragons, meaning that on average one successful hit will deplete one hit die; the randomness serves just to introduce some uncertainty. In later publications, following the lead of the Greyhawk supplement, characters (including monsters) tend to have d8 hit points, whereas damage dice are themselves variable and tend to be around d6. This means that, on average, a single hit depletes slightly less than one hit die, represented by the restraint h / d > 1.
Armor class introduces the chance that an attack will fail and not deal any damage at all. We will represent the likelihood of being hit as a. Our formula for longevity becomes n × h / (a × d); that is, we divide our longevity at a 100% success rate by the likelihood that an attack will succeed at all. A participant who is hit 50% of the time has a statistical longevity twice as great than a participant who is hit 100% of the time; likewise, a character who is hit 25% of the time has four times the longevity.
In previous posts, I have represented the effect of armor class through "virtual hit points", which equals n × h / a, as opposed to hit points which are just n × h. Virtual hit points represent the number of actual hit points which would be necessary to give a participant who is hit 100% of the time the same longevity as the participant who is hit at the rate of a. For example, a character who is hit at a rate of 50% lasts twice as long as a character who is hit 100% of the time, and so it is as if they had double the hit points. However, these "hit points" are not actual but virtual; they are not depleted, but they represent an equivalent obstacle. Virtual hit points are useful to compare systems with to-hit rolls versus systems without to-hit rolls.
Anyway, the complete longevity (L) formula is:
L = n × h / (a × d)
Not every individual factor from every version of D&D or every retroclone has been considered here, but these are enough to make comparisons between different schemas of combat in the way that I have previously discussed. Each factor is one which can be modified to represent differences between characters or types thereof. The following aspects can be compared using the above formula, at least as a guide:
- To-hit rolls and damage rolls.
- To-hit rolls, no damage rolls.
- Damage rolls, no to-hit rolls.
- Static hit points.
- Static damage.
You might find it useful!
Solution 1: Compatible Combat
Combat in D&D can be reduced as follows, in order to retain the most compatibility with official materials (if it is desired to use them) and also with popular notions of what D&D entails. Characters have random hit points determined by rolling dice. Each attack subtracts a random amount of hit points. However, an attack only succeeds at a certain likelihood based on the defender's armor, if they are wearing any. Let's do the usual d20 roll, where you meet or exceed the number below:
This is so typical it's boring to read, but that's the point. You already know how it works. You don't need to read it in a book at this point unless this is your first time here. Maybe you would use a different dice schema, like you're using descending armor class (THAC0) or using roll-under instead of roll-over. So what? Could you not have improvised that on your own?
The most variation between different versions of D&D that use armor class, regardless of how the roll is done exactly, is between which factors modify the roll in the end. The original D&D only modifies combat rolls categorically, based on what type of character you are (fighter, mage, cleric, or monster). Only in Greyhawk and in later publications would ability scores factor into combat capabilities at all. Finally, in Fifth Edition, attack rolls would only be modified by ability bonuses and individual character proficiencies (even if determined by class), rather than being modified by character class. The method you might choose is basically a matter of preference. I think my friends, at this point, are used to ability bonuses, and so I would be inclined towards a classless schema for combat, except maybe also modified by character experience (add your level if you have a relevant combat skill?).
Hit Points
However, here I want to offer a 'fix' for hit points. You might find that characters in typical D&D start off with very low hit points, only d6 or d8. This means that they are, often, one successful attack away from dying. As discussed above, this has been treated as an 'intentional' feature of 'old-school' style play when indeed the function of hit points, as originally conceived, was to make character death less likely. Into the Odd gives players an extra cushion by treating "H.P." instead as "hit protection", which can be lost without issue since it simply prevents characters from depleting their strength score instead. Errant has characters start off with a number of hit points equal to their strength score, which is ~10 hit points; if I'm not mistaken, this number does not increase except by increasing your strength score, and so it stays at a moderate but relatively static amount. Neither system has attack rolls, so characters receive damage automatically; armor either subtracts from damage lost, or it is used by players to actively and intentionally block attacks altogether (becoming itself a resource pool).
These solutions work well, but if you wanted something simpler and more compatible, you might just consider giving everyone an extra hit die [7]. This means starting characters will have 2-12 hit points, and at a bell curve, rather than 1-6. This extra cushion makes a big difference, even if it becomes less significant in higher levels. You could even identify the extra hit die as 'flesh', and all the other hit dice as 'grit', if you really wanted that distinction. You could give monsters the same benefit; the only thing is that you might treat monsters with less than 1 hit die as if they were 0 hit dice, so that now they have only the one extra hit die (and now they can deal regular damage 1-6, instead of 1-3 as per the original D&D).
Anything else I can think of (variable weapon damage, critical successes, etc.) are all things that, I think, can be easily improvised if you wanted them.
Monster Interface
My friend Ava Islam pointed out to me a while ago that monsters don't need the same rules as do player characters when they can be made a lot simpler. I do feel like the tendency to move away from this is a result of player interfaces themselves becoming a lot more complex, and so you run into the issue you would with a hypothetical super-complex FKR game where now the game master has to wrangle a handful of complex character records with unique abilities et cetera. I don't think it's as much of an issue when you're playing the original D&D and every character's capabilities are indicated by type or class, so everything is already simple. Nevertheless, if we're using abilities as a heuristic crutch for player actions, it's worth deciding upfront that monsters don't need that.
Monsters in the original D&D only really have three variables relevant to combat: hit dice, armor class, and movement speed. When considering the formal functions of hit dice and armor class, i.e. capacity to take hits versus capability to avoid hits, you can see that these two values actually encompass a lot of flexibility. You can make things hard to hit but squishy, or things that are easy to hit but take a beating. Following the original D&D again, there are only really 8 possible armor class values, and monsters with even just 8 hit dice are considered basically legendary. That's 64 combinations, right there.
Besides, I don't know, I need to emphasize that I don't think combat is very compelling and so I think it's better to focus on monsters (i.e. non-player characters, really) with interesting interactions and desires? Things that animate them in the game-world, and maybe which also offer alternative ways of dealing with them if they are obstacles? It's not too much to ask.
Solution 2: Improvised Combat
The above solution is still improvised, but it is derived from popular notions and cultural knowledge of what D&D is. We take for granted hit points, armor class, and all that stuff which does not have a basis in the main activity of old or new D&D (if you consider how Fifth Edition is played, rather than how it is written). What if we didn't want that baggage? You want violence to be violence? Combat as war, not combat as sport? You're not going to want to keep track of bruises and cuts. Sprains and broken bones, maybe. Death? Absolutely.
The situation we're supposed to imagine is that we're being accosted by 2d6 goblins with pointy sticks, or one fire-breathing dragon. One goblin probably has no chance of anything; you could just trip it or dodge really quickly. Two goblins cornering you is like, okay, more of a problem. What do they want to do? If they want to kill you, fat chance but it's there; maybe there's like a 10% chance of that happening. They're more likely just trying to harass you with the threat of killing you, but they know the chance is too low to really hold it against you (even if it's too high for you to want to take it). If this is the situation you're in, you probably put yourself in it. This is what you risked. Likewise, if you risked going toe to toe with a dragon, whatever happens is on you. You should come up with a reason for why you don't die. Flip a coin otherwise.
That, to me, is how I imagine a violent encounter to actually be consequential and lethal. There is so much vestigial pomp around D&D combat under the presupposition that it's lethal but, if that's the case, then why is it so complicated? It's not even the point of the game. Again, I don't mind hit points and all that because we're all used to it, and I myself don't care for super lethal high-stakes situations; having a character that lives is nice. I do feel like, though, if your stated goal is to simulate realistic lethality then you don't need all the extra bits you take for granted. What do you really want?
Combat Procedure
Did you think that was it? You forgot an important part! By procedure, I mean (as before) an order of operations. This was something I discussed at length in my post on proceduralism, specifically about different combat procedures across various editions of Dungeons & Dragons [8]. Historically, the factors that determine the order of things is action effort and character speed. Chainmail has participants execute orders according to type: first everyone moves their figures, then everyone fires artillery, then everyone shoots missiles, then everyone does melee. The order within individual phases depends on a die roll at the beginning of the round. These staggered phases are something lost from D&D as early as (it seems) the 1981 D&D Basic edition. However, they add a lot of interest and strategy without much additional oversight.
Errant does something similar, except it merely distinguishes between "acting quickly" (one action) or "acting slowly" (two actions). Initiative is determined each round. The winning side acts quickly first, then the losing side acts quickly. Then, the winning side acts slowly first, then the losing side acts slowly. Some other ruleset, I forget which, simply has players decide if they want to move quickly or slowly, with monsters always moving after quick actors and before slow actors; no initiative required. Either way works depending on how much you want randomness to be a factor, and if you don't mind that actions are done as a group rather than by individuals.
For individual initiative, which has become the norm since Third Edition, there's any number of ways to simplify it or spice it up if you don't like how it is. Let's say it's typically d20 plus your dexterity modifier, unless you're wearing medium or heavy armor (that'd make sense, right?). In Fifth Edition, you usually determine initiative at the start of the encounter and then you loop through each actor until the encounter ends. You could instead reroll initiative at the start of each round, so it keeps changing; on the flip side, you can use "passive initiative" for monsters or player characters or both to speed things up by keeping the same value across all rounds and encounters. You could even turn initiative into an 'ability check', where you have to roll to act against a monster before they can act against you.
I bring this up because it's so often pure operations of combat that are considered (how to attack or how to do this or that), rather than the structure of the activity itself.
Conclusion
I think this is the last thing I'll write on the topic of improvised DIY D&D for a while. Nice to get that all out of the way! At some point, I'd like to make a little printable booklet of these simpler rules with lots of tables for character traits etc., but that's its own project (and I don't see a point in doing it if I'm not going to use it soon). Thank y'all for following this, and I hope it's both offered a new perspective on what constitutes D&D and also offered helpful bits for playing your own way! :)
Throughout these posts, I often cite my good friend Ava Islam and her own rulebook Errant [9]. Right now, she is raising funds for gender-confirming surgery which is both very costly and, during recovery, debilitating. Please read her story and consider supporting her as she prepares to undergo a new chapter of her life (link). Thank you!
[1] https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2021/08/comparisons-of-combat-rules-in-tabletop.html
[2] https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2021/11/effects-of-armor-class-on-character.html
[3] https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2022/03/d-without-to-hit-rolls.html
[4] https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2022/03/d-without-to-hit-rolls-addendum.html
[5] After working on my list of keystone posts (link), I realized that this was invented by Last Gasp (link).
[6] https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/01/bow-ballistics-and-scale.html
[7] This idea came to me by looking at how Pokemon characters increase their hit points. Suppose that a Pokemon gains h hit points per major advancement (increases per individual level seem insignificant, but ~10 hit points per every ~5 levels is more significant). You might expect a Pokemon at "major advancement 1" to have h hit points, and 2h hit points at advancement 2, and 3h at 3, and so on. However, the Pokemon at each level has an additional h hit points. I'll publish this if anyone is interested? Or, it might factor into something else later.
[8] https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2022/05/theoretical-practical-proceduralism.html
[9] Available in its ashcan state here (link), but you can also preorder the proper rulebook here (link).
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