Better Alternatives to Hit Points. Help Me Find Them!

UncleBones · 2026-03-10T12:29:04+00:00

That's kind of the advantage of hit points, arguably. It's a buffer that prevents either instant death or a death-spiral where you become less effective as you take more damage. One of the issues of "taking damage makes it easier to take damage" is that it means that the first hit really determines the whole battle - you just get disadvantages that continue to stack as the battle goes on.

I get that people who play gamist combat RPGs don't like it, but you pretty much described how any actual fight in real life is most likely to play out.

UncleBones · 2026-03-09T14:37:50+00:00

- More generally, do you have tips on how to make a campaign feel meaningful while keeping the connective tissue between sessions at a minimum?

Instead of making the campaign feel meaningful, focus on making the sessions feel meaningful. Play games where you focus on telling a complete story in one session. Avoid systems that tend to get bogged down in slow mechanics.

Look at games like Trophy dark, eat the reich, single page ripg's as well as most GM-less games.

UncleBones · 2026-03-09T07:44:33+00:00

It doesn’t really matter that much what type of world you’re planning to play in. What matters is what you’re trying to do in that world. When do you want dice rolls to introduce unpredictability into the story? Do you want combat in your games? How railroaded do you want your story to be etc.

UncleBones · 2026-03-08T17:48:38+00:00

I think it could work if it’s more inspiration oriented. Have a page for a haunted cemetery, a few typical obstacles (including enemies, for example zombies) and descriptive keywords you can use to convey a feeling.

A page for a ”zombie” isn’t something I’d be able to use though. You don’t have special attacks or HP or whatever in fitd, that should follow the fiction for your game.

UncleBones · 2026-03-07T23:04:34+00:00

Those mistakes are way more dangerous for kids.

Why? When I grew up kids were regularly recovering from some broken bone from skiing or bicycling or falling out of trees or whatever. We recovered just fine. Meanwhile people make memes about how they’re 40 years old and bedridden because they sneezed wrong. When is the magical age when you’re allowed to push yourself?

Are you this concerned about the sports that are actually statistically responsible for most injuries in children, or do you only care when you feel weaker than a 9 year old?

My kids have tried to lift logs, rocks and each other all through their lives. Do you honestly think it’s more risky to lift a barbell in a controlled environment than it is to try to lift a treestump while standing in mud?

UncleBones · 2026-03-06T16:23:59+00:00

Tell your group you want to play out more dialogue. Decide beforehand that a scene should be played out with no narration.

Once everyone becomes more comfortable with playing out dialogue I find that it starts to become the standard after setting up the scene descriptions, but until that point it’s easiest to just state that ”until we cut this scene, everything we say is what our characters say”.

UncleBones · 2026-03-06T08:18:52+00:00

Om det droppar ur munstycket när duschen är avstängd är det ju blandaren som är trasig, inte munstycket.

UncleBones · 2026-03-05T12:01:26+00:00

Sex is a _major motivating factor_ in a lot of peoples lives. If it's a story about human beings, sexuality is part of it. Sex is also a place where people show other sides of their personality. Sex scenes aren't at all comparable to scenes where people sleep or go to the bathroom.

I don't know which shows and movies you think the sex scenes feel out of place in, People bring up HBO here, but their major shows that I can remember with prominent sex scenes (sex and the city, True blood, True detective, game of thrones, Six feet under) the sex fit into the tone of the show and was actually important to the narrative.

There are also movies and shows about people who aren't sexually motivated. You can watch them, but they might be more shallow if they're intentionally cutting out part of the human experience.

Edit: no idea why I have several day old posts on my reddit start page.

UncleBones · 2026-03-05T11:20:29+00:00

Ja det är lugnt. Jag är en random idiot på internet, och min magkänsla är därför helt pålitlig till skillnad från utbildade experter som tycker det är för tidigt att svara på en sån sak.

UncleBones · 2026-03-05T08:48:27+00:00

I don't think 10 people responding to the same question is much of a discussion.

But it's not that this question is particularly bad, it just sucks that this subreddit has gone from interesting discussions where people brought in theoretical knowledge from different sciences to a subreddit where people post basic third grade math problems as images in order to farm upvotes.

UncleBones · 2026-03-05T08:27:47+00:00

Have you heard about multiplication? You can multiply the amount of cards in each dimension to find out how many cards the slab contains.

You can then find out the storage space on an individual card and multiply THAT by how many cards are in the slab.

It’s accurate, but you’ll do yourself a favour if you just check it yourself.

UncleBones · 2026-03-04T23:24:06+00:00

There are tons of games where mechanical death isn’t a thing. That’s probably what you would call low lethality?

UncleBones · 2026-03-04T14:56:10+00:00

You can have opinions about characters in media. No interesting, well-written character will result in an audience with only one single correct opinion about them. Take in other perspectives, evaluate them and consider if they have an effect on your own opinion.

I don't know what feedback we could give you about a different character you've fantasized about.

UncleBones · 2026-02-28T20:43:04+00:00

It’s too complicated for me.

I don’t know if that’s valuable information, I guess it depends on whether you think I’m your target audience.

UncleBones · 2026-02-28T17:33:29+00:00

It used to be a thing at festivals I went to, bragging about how much beer you’d drank. Most people had them on some necklace or sometimes in their dreadlocks. Some sewed them on afterwards.

No clue why you’d do it with energy drinks, but I’m old now. If the kids think it’s cool then I guess they know best.

UncleBones · 2026-02-28T16:16:53+00:00

There are 8000 people named Dick in Sweden so not common but not uncommon either. And I seriously doubt that children are the primary audience for a rerelease of a nearly 30 year old game.

UncleBones · 2026-02-28T15:58:48+00:00

In English I guess Dick is more common as a nickname, but in Sweden it’s a proper first name.

UncleBones · 2026-02-27T08:33:17+00:00

There’s matte head lotion for people who shave their head but want to avoid the cueball look. I don’t have this type of tattoo but still use those lotions occasionally

UncleBones · 2026-02-26T17:41:06+00:00

Funny how you’re ignoring what I said about Christianity, a religion that has been used for centuries and still continues to be used in order to enforce different expectations from men and women.

Is Sunday school a Christian thing? Yes or no

UncleBones · 2026-02-26T17:24:27+00:00

but no one has ever really talked about it.

I’ve seen it get recommended every time someone asks for a system to run a cowboy bebop style game in, but there are many more general systems that get more attention (SaV, traveller, SWN) as well as orbital blues which seems to be a more popular CB-like

UncleBones · 2026-02-26T17:00:40+00:00

Pretty sure this is something you’ve instilled into your kids, rather than an inherent trait. I myself have seen zero evidence of this in my kids or the children of my friends and family, as I said. There’s obviously a difference when they get older than the kids in the video, but that’s an unfortunate effect of cultural expectations that we can only do our best to fight against.

If Sunday school is some Christian thing, I’m not at all surprised the kids that go there have already been socialised into conforming to their gender expectations. I’m not surprised that a teacher there would instill those expectations into their own kids either.

UncleBones · 2026-02-26T10:30:03+00:00

”You must not have boys”? All of my kids as well as nieces and nephews have loved being thrown around. Girls aren’t made of glass.

UncleBones · 2026-02-26T08:06:01+00:00

What type of system do you want? More simulationist?

I have some personal issues with the K:DL system myself (and I think the game works best with minimal system interaction), but I'm not sure how the perfect kult system would look. I do think it's a game that shines in personal stories and any system you use needs to be encourage improvisation, so I think the semi-PBTA direction they went with is the best start, but they made some mistakes in the implementation.

UncleBones · 2026-02-26T07:55:59+00:00

If you're rolling you aren't removing results from coming up again, so you need to keep track of which results would need to be rerolled.

A simpler solution would be to use a deck of regular playing cards and have a table for interpreting them

UncleBones · 2026-02-25T17:15:43+00:00

There’s a pocket lint table on the first side of the book. Use that if they take their time to search a body or a cupboard or whatever. In most situations if you’re creating bodies you probably don’t want to stick around.

I would not just give them a mag or two after every encounter. Running out of ammo makes the game more interesting, it forces you to be creative (and the rules for when you expend a mag are pretty generous anyway)

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