LotFP & OSR ~ Hit Points, Hit Dice, Weapon Damage, & Healing

great video man!!!

HackMaster 5th uses healing and hit points incredibly literally. Every hit you take hurts your character mechanically to some metric and eats up a number of hit points and the wound heals in a factor of ((x/2)*(1+x)) where x = the damage taken in a single hit, and each hit is recorded separately and heals separately, therefore each wound will do 1 day's worth of healing each day. I do prefer standard OSR damage, the way I like to think about it is that your character's luck runs out at half damage and they start losing enough competence to the point where damage is considered literal and the character starts being injured until being taken down and a lethal hit takes someone out by doing something like decapitating the person or getting their skull bashed in or, in the case of bleeding out, taking a leg off or piercing the heart or something that makes them bleed out. That way healing spells can be taken more literally at low health, and at high health it's merely just the bumps, bruises and scrapes that don't effect the character horribly being healed. There are other damage systems out there that are pretty good as well though, like in the case of Savage Worlds characters take wounds that give a -1 per wound to all actions and can be attempted to be healed once per medic within an hour of taking the damage, before having to wait 5 days and trying to make a Vigor roll to heal, or in the case of FATE you take wounds in the form of literal interpretations of luck and skill running out until taking consequences which last until important story points.

Cure light wounds makes much more sense if you consider it to be inspiring characters to regain their mojo.

And systems where after you lose your hit points every hit becomes a described critical make more sense as well. Hit points represent Mojo, and critical‘s represent actual wounds.

I used to love you blog. But then, something happened and it became on longer viewable. It would start, and then freeze up. Today I clicked on this and it did it again.

By not having HP = Direct Health, instead of "Magic Potions" of Healing, you could have the character take 5 & down a flagon of wine or ale. Maybe the fantasy version of an energy drink & that is what "Heals" their HP. This really works in a Low PC Magic setting.

d10 weapons damage started with BX. 2-handed swords, for example.

I find the Myfarog system handle's all these situations well. It's a lot to manage for a new player or GM. But once you've been playing for a bit all the variables are handled by the tables and modifiers and it makes for very intense situations.

Just getting into this system.
So I’ve got an enemy thats doing HD 3 HP 15 SPEED 130
MORALE 10
Attack: Longbow plus5 to hit d6hp,
Can anyone give me a run down of these please? What does HD do?
What does plus5 to hit effect?

Where is the link to the combat narration video?

Maybe a stretch but one way you could reconcile healing effects and HP with the "combat mojo" idea, is you could maybe say each hit scored is an injury, but only a minor one--just a flesh wound, if you will--that doesn't amount to significant impairment, but it's something your character feels, something they're aware of, something that reminds them of each recent brush with death. And as those continue to mount, they start to weigh on them both physically and psychologically, until they finally catch up with the character. In turn, healing magic fixes the small wounds and "soothes the spirit", alleviating the growing awareness of the character's own mortality. And this also plays well with healing taking a significant amount of time to happen naturally as well, with the time being needed to, of course heal the small wounds, and for the character to get their head back on straight, and steel themselves to walk the line at the edge of life and death once again.

This is super helpful! Couldn’t for the life of my figure out the difference between hp and hd!