Alternative Rules - Wounds and Vitality

This article was first published at the Canned Blog titled D&D: Fordeler med Vitality and Wounds-systemet.
I haven’t written everything that’s relevant for introducing the system in this post, only the most important points. If you’d like to read the whole ruleset, I recommend you drop by The d20 System Resource Document and read through its contents.

Health Points

Background and Advantages

Nothing makes a player more scared when playing role playing games than the idea of the character’s death. In many games there are ways of reawakening the character to life, but it commonly is very expensive, and unless the caster has access to the strongest magics, the character is punished with a lower level, less experience points and in general will have to struggle to get back to the level one was at before the accident happened.
But all these are good things! It keeps the player sharp and not to power hungry, overeager or intrepid. There are as many systems for representing health as there are role playing systems – maybe even more – and in D&D the Hit Points (or Health Points) system is what matters. The system has many advantages: It’s easy to keep track of the status of the character, the system is internally coherent, and with a quick look one can get an idea of the character’s welfare; a higher hit point total means you’re better at avoiding attacks, so that an attack one as a low-level character wouldn’t have the time to respond to and thus would hit and do maximum relative damage, would at the higher levels only be a glancing hit; and in addition it represents you being hardened, so that one in general can take more. Gary Gygax explained it like this in AD&D 1e DMG page 82:

“It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place… Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage—as indicated by constitution bonuses—and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations… Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm—the sword thrust that would have run a 1^st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter’s exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment.”

Disadvantages with Health Points