Remove the hit points. Remove the armor number. Remove the damage roll. Make the whole thing about “solving” the dragon. And finally, joust that windmill.
Not exactly a published game, but a series of posts by Clayton Notestine around almost a platonic ideal of a game, where dragons have “one hp”1 in the sense of being a series of puzzles where victory is a single hit when solved.
Player death is a little more complex, and the area that catches my interest as it’s similar to Trophy’s Doom, and thus to mine - and paired elegantly with some other interesting mechanics2. Similar to my sensibilities, it’s very anti-hitpoint.
Doom triggers3 here on failed rolls4, not as part of a roll directly and is a single d6.
- If above the Doom Track, raise the track as things escalate.
- If equal or below5, they are “downed”.
This is a pretty simple rising scale - each time it ticks up, the next blow is much more dangerous (an even ~17%). Downing isn’t conclusively death, though, but is resolved with a secret roll6 that is only revealed to everyone after someone is able to come to help them, with a small second chance of fighting another day7.
To heal Doom, the game has just a single roll: under means go back to 1, over means lower by 1. This feels a little awkward - I know there’s a tension of not having low rolls sometimes be good and sometimes bad, but it means the higher their doom, the more likely they fully recover?
Two other potential takes on the same concept are noted:
- Rolling dice equal to the doom score, with any 1’s being downed; similar to Alien’s Stress mechanic. This reframing could be interesting for me - the slow burn (and allowance for a track that easily goes above 6, where the risk rate is still just over half, which lets us be more granular with things that can raise base doom like age) works and I could use the difference between dice colors to avoid the issue he found with it - that it meant some systems liked rolling more dice and some liked rolling fewer, which was confusing and inelegant.
- Rolling dice equal to 6 - the doom score. This one appeals less to me, as it’s mostly a way to get the “more dice equals better” framing back.
Footnotes
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A reference to a famous discussion of Dungeon World and a 16 hp dragon. ↩
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From Mothership and Outgunned. ↩
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Using terminology closer to my uses - though it also is a mix for Doubt as well. ↩
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And ones that are risky (no Doubt-like mechanic which raises danger but isn’t itself deadly), at least not from my understanding of it. I could think of maybe adding it as (greater means nothing, equal or below raises - where fatigue is more dangerous as you start to slip, but largely not too risky). ↩
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Harsher because it includes the equals, but means there’s no single safe blow. He also keeps the character from being in complete doomed state by having the track only go up to 5 - you can always roll a 6 and get out of it. ↩
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Rolled under a cup - taken from Mothership as a way to raise the dread. ↩
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Or to have just enough time to say their last words, or have a serious injury, or so on. This tension and release - that highlights in the release the dramatic tropes of death - is an excellent element for a game about death, though in our more heroic genre it might be combined with a “last stand” mechanic or some results replaced with bouncing back (maybe even tied to Passions), à la Darkest Dungeon (“not this one - not today”). ↩