OVERZEALOUS: Playing the game

Update: Overzealous is now available!

 

This post is adapted from an update I wrote for my current Kickstarter campaign.

Overzealous! Your cult has no chill. It's the upcoming solo game of cartoon zealot mayhem. In this post I'm giving an overview of the fervour-filled gameplay.

1. The game's start

To start, you’ll establish who you are as a god, what sort of world you are trying to enter, and what cult has started worshipping you. Most of these details are free-form, so you can create as full an introduction as you like or get right into the game.

For example, you might have fled a collapsing universe, finding that a secret society of malcontents at an observatory have learned your name from the stars. They call themselves The Exalted Circle Of The Infinite Spiral and are, at least initially, dedicated to summoning you.

2. The game's stats

Weeks pass within the world as you play. Each week, your cult may indoctrinate more people (as measured by a stat called Cultists). At the same time, their worship of you amasses more eldritch power for your arrival, which the game calls Imminence.

But this overzealous level of devotion has some downsides.

• Heretical ideas can spread in the cult (increasing Divergence, the amount the cult has drifted away from its purpose).
• The cultists can get more overexcited about bloodshed (increasing Fervour, the measure of zeal the cultists are experiencing).
• Ancient horrors can be drawn to the power being generated (increasing Monstrosity, the number of monsters hanging around being fed table scraps by your cultists).

3. The game's acts

As an outsider god, you are trapped behind the veil of the unreal. Your ability to reach into the world and meddle with things is limited. Each week you can attempt one action.

To win, you need to perform the Immanentising Ritual. This requires enough cultists and psychic potential built up (represented by the Cultists and Imminence stats).

Actions can change your stats, and may have side-effects. For example, you can send an avatar of yourself to admonish your straying cultists, greatly reducing Divergence but raising Fervour. Or you can expend a sliver of amassed power to snuff out some of the monsters hanging around the cult’s camp, substantially lowering Monstrosity at the cost of Imminence. Other actions solve problems, attract more followers, and so on.

The game has nine actions in total, intended to cover any number of situations, and the gameplay focuses on making good choices with them. If you need to, you can come up with your own action with an appropriate cost and consequence.

4. The cult's acts

Each week you’ll roll the dice to see what further trouble the cultists have got into on their own initiative.

If they have high Fervour, they could attack a nearby town, gamble on fights between their pet monsters, or start a holy war.

If they have high Divergence, they might sacrifice an unpopular cultist, merge with a sect of diabolists, or start raising the dead.

Events can affect your stats in various ways, or cause ongoing problems to develop.

You'll likely end up beset by long-term problems. Each week you’ll have a chance that a problem that the cult has unleashed takes its toll. For example, if the cult has a plague of cannibalism, you might get –1 Cultist and +1 Monstrosity when a cultist turns into a ghoul. If they are in the middle of a religious schism, you can get +1 Fervour and +1 Divergence as they passionately declare each other heretics.

It costs precious actions to resolve ongoing problems in your cult.

5. The cult's stats

You only need paper, a pen, and dice to play Overzealous. I’m including two downloadable printable extras to help, a stat tracker and a mini zine.

You can use the stat tracker to record changes from week to week, using a pencil, tokens, dice, chewing gum, or anything you can drop on the sheet. The book also includes a copy you can cut out or trace.

And in the spirit of the upcoming Zine Month, I’ve made a cute little palm-sized zine to accompany it, just for fun.

 

6. The end acts

Overzealous usually takes about half an hour to play, but you might take it more slowly to follow all the game book’s writing prompts. These have you record the events taking place and how you (as a fettered god) feel about your progress, and give room for creative embellishments.

If your negative stats creep up too fast, your cult can fall apart. If you manage to complete the Immanentising Ritual, though, you can enter reality, and win the game. How does the rest of history go? How do mortals react?

I hope you'll check out Overzealous on Kickstarter!

A simple treasure table system

Here's a classic problem: The characters find some treasure – let's say there are diadems, gilt-framed paintings, jade figurines, and various other art objects. The GM describes them so that the players can write them down. The objects may not be sold for many sessions, before which many other treasures will be acquired from various sources, including different modules and the GM's improvisation.

The characters shouldn't generally know how much the art objects are worth when they find them. That should be GM-facing information. On the other hand, the GM shouldn't have to remember where every item came from, or transcribe each one and then try to hunt for it on the big list when the characters eventually try to sell it.

The typical solution is usually to bite the bullet: give out sale values along with treasure, or make it a hassle for the GM. Or perhaps compromise by giving out an indication of a treasure's worth and then rolling randomly based on the indication at the time it is appraised or sold.

 

A better solution:

I'm proposing a system which I've never seen in a TTRPG before, but it's so obvious that I bet I'm reinventing the wheel. It's similar to how item values work in the video game Dwarf Fortress.

We express each treasure as a phrase containing {class, descriptors}, where class is a type of item with a baseline monetary value, and descriptors are adjectives with multiplicative value modifiers. These are on big lists that are privileged GM information.

So the GM has a list of item classes coupled with base values that looks something like

Amulet   2 gold

Beads    1 silver

Cutlery  5 silver

Diadem   20 gold

Ewer     12 gold

Figurine 4 gold 

...

Then there's a list of descriptors, or possibly separate lists of positive and negative descriptors, each with a fractional modifier. Perhaps

Antique     ×5

Cracked     ×3/4

Gold        ×12

Half-rotten ×1/4

Jade        ×2

Large       ×3 

Rusty       ×9/10

Shattered   ×1/20

...

The GM has these lists at their fingertips. They are lookup tables, but of course if you did have a nice number like 20 or 66 or 100 entries, they could pull double duty as dice tables for treasure generation.

Illustration by Zed Nope

 

How do we use the tables?

A zillion sessions ago, the GM let the players know that they found an antique gold diadem and a large cracked jade figurine.

Perhaps they were described more fully (what does the figurine depict?) originally, but the GM made sure to communicate which were the key words, so that's what the players wrote down. The players weren't told the value, just the description.

Now time has come to sell these art objects. The GM doesn't need to remember anything about the treasure – where in the world it was found; what published adventure it came from or whether it was rolled or improvised; what rough-and-ready valuation the characters were given by a passing tinker.

The GM only has to do a couple of table lookups.

Diadem: Base price of 20 gold pieces. Antique: ×5. Gold: ×12. Actual value: 1200 gp. 

Figurine: Base price of 4 gold pieces. Large: ×3. Cracked: ×3/4. Jade: ×2. Actual value: 18 gp.

And that's all you need. The lookups are trivially easy; they're in alphabetical order and should fit on one piece of paper. The maths ain't hard.

 

Joseph Gandy (1771-1843)

 

The benefits:

There are seriously so many.

1. Hidden information stays hidden.

Players don't get information on value which should be secret. If they've found something made of 'ebonshell' and they've heard in passing that ebonshell is valuable, the word is a descriptor on the table and the players won't find out if that means "buy another round" or "buy a castle" until they seek out a valuation in-world.

Prior valuations stay consistent, too. If the GM allows a skill check for valuation, they can look up the true value, give an approximation (or a false answer if the check fails), and then completely forget they've given out that information whether or not the players go on to sell the item.

2. Descriptions correlate nicely with values.

Assuming you have a good set of tables, you're buying extra verisimilitude. The "cloudy garnet ring" you find in one dungeon and the "dull garnet necklace" you find two dungeons later have similar values, both are vastly less valuable than the "hundred-faceted ruby amulet", and that's exactly what players will expect.

Things that would otherwise 'just' be flavour start to matter more to the players. We can only take so much stuff back with us. Is the one-of-a-kind altarpiece cracked or just chipped? What's our best guess about how that compares to this sack of obsolete silver coins? Speaking of which,

3. There are learning opportunities.

We're all big fans of rewarding player skill, right? With this system, attentive players can begin to infer what words matter most for treasure values. This reflects the learning their characters would be doing.

On the other hand, the tables are

4. Easily reset.

If you want to start fresh in a new universe, or with new characters, or change GMs, it's trivially easy to just cross out a bunch of values for base items and modifiers and write in slightly different ones.

Players no longer know what to expect but the whole thing stays internally consistent, because you only tweaked the values. For the same reason, it's

5. Easily customisable.

Let's say you decided in this world, jade has mystic properties which make it worth more than gold. Cool, change ×2 to ×15 in the table and you're done. Any treasure you've already put out there is immediately converted.

If you're using treasure from a publication, when you go to convert an item you'll notice that it's described as "jade", check "jade" in the table, be reminded of your modification, and decide whether this particular thing is massively more valuable or whether you'll keep the value and change the material.

It's easy, because in general, this whole system is

6. Compatible with published treasures.

It's not much effort to start with treasures described by value and work backwards to create the descriptive {class, descriptors} phrase.

Suppose an adventure says "the bag contains three opals worth 300 gp each". What does that convert to? Well, you start by finding the "opal" class base value (or maybe "gemstone" is a class and "opal" is a descriptor), then flick around looking for more descriptors that will get you to 300 gp.

Maybe huge + dazzling + round + opal = 300 gp? Perfect. You've acquired more information about what the treasure is actually like. Or maybe it doesn't fit that they're "huge" so you try a few other descriptors and find that small + flawless + fashionable + opal = 320 gp? Close enough.

7. Simple calculations.

It's easy to price something up. We can put both decimals and fractions in the tables, so that people who are less proficient at mental maths can use a calculator. It wouldn't be hard to make a spreadsheet or online tool that calculates values very quickly.

8. Adaptive.

This single framework should work for most systems and settings. Only the tables will need to change.

Once published, individual GMs could hack further as they pleased. Have as many or few base object classes and modifiers as you want. It's easy to simplify or expand, because

9. You can hang stuff off the system. 

Let's say a character comes from a clothier background, and makes alterations to a "silk sash". Now it's a "tailored silk sash" and its value changes accordingly. A fighter is able to repair the "ragged rusted mail hauberk" enough that she can wear it, and now it's a "patched mail hauberk".

Want to get more out of jewellery and gemstones? Have a subsystem for inset jewels, which might add to or multiply an item's value.

Want to get into meticulous detail regarding some setting-specific fine arts? Add a whole extra table of modifiers referring to specific artists and times and trends and students and suspected forgeries.

Want collectors to be interested in specific things? Express that as custom modifiers. The antiquarian pays ×7 instead of ×5 for the "antique" descriptor. The archivist ignores penalties from the keywords "old" or "repaired" on books. The vizier only wants jewellery in good condition, so will pay double for any items without any negative modifiers, half otherwise.

Have item valuation and haggling skill systems? This framework just establishes the ground truth / base price, so those should sit neatly on top without you having to lift a finger.

10. No tracking.

It really bears repeating that the GM doesn't need to track any extra information, or resort to improvisation when they can't find the item they gave out months ago.

Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874)

So there's my idea! Do something cool with it. I've added "make a whole little book for this stuff and possible extensions" to the ideas pile.

'Reasons for reactions' to improve random encounters

You don't want your encounters, especially random encounters, to be susceptible to is-this-a-combat-or-do-we-ignore-it thinking.

Plenty has already been written about giving encounters extra contextual details (where are the creatures, what are they doing, what are they hiding, etc).

But it's also important to give the encountered characters the appearance of agency by varying their reactions. The orcs don't always attack on sight. The halflings don't always ask you to join them in a meal.

So how do they feel about you?

Different games go to different lengths with this.

🟩🟩✅ Varied reactions: The rules randomly modify how aggressively a particular set of encountered creatures react, in some way. Most games do this.

🟩✅✅ Default reactions: The rules specify a creature's or group's default reaction (friendly, suspicious, wary, indifferent, curious, issues challenges, hostile, fearful, neutral...), and modify this with a dice roll.

✅✅✅ Motivated reactions: The rules provide plausible reasons for encountered creatures deviating from the default reaction (in case the GM struggles to tie it all together).

That last approach, motivated reactions, is a very useful tool but few games do it. So here are some appropriate options you can roll or pick.

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually friendly:

1. unusual individual/leader
2. need a favour
3. recently sated
4. intimidated and trying not to show it
   
5. hiding a secret
   
6. smell food on the party
7. recent festival, harvest, windfall, or celebration
   
8. hoping to steal / other deceit
9. feeling secure after recent victory
   
10. party is a reminder of old friend(s)
    

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually hostile:

1. on high alert after recent attack
   
2. mistaken identity
3. resource-starved and desperate
4. rabid or maddened
5. hiding a secret
6. already in bad mood
   
7. subject to tyrannical orders
8. party inadvertently breaking taboo/custom
   
9. fear of reprisals from a greater threat
10. bandits, soldiers, hated nemeses sighted in area
    

"The minotaur is trying not to disturb a spider's web by moving, and settles for glaring at you balefully."

It's infamously difficult to get across motivations, secrets, and motivations at the table, so signal the reasons as clearly as you can to the players. Your encounters will have more verisimilitude, be more engaging, and be easier to improvise.

Upon training your character's replacement

I was thinking about the value of a long time scale for fantasy TTRPG adventures, and how it actually ties in neatly with many aspects of old-school style of play:

• Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
• Delves and expeditions
• A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
• Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
• Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
• Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
• A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury

Let's say you implement seasonal play, as in e.g. http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-long-haul-time-and-distance-in-d.html. The PCs have a meagre initial home base. They have some local adventures and make some coin. Enough that they can plan a modest expedition, one that will take months. They come home and spend their wealth, advancing their characters, improving their base, and acquiring the resources for a big expedition, one that will take seasons to complete.

Now let's build on this basis, by adding some game elements to do with character advancement, followers, and character replacement, and see what other common rules might be tweaked.

Character advancement

Character advancement has a cost in looted wealth (e.g., at 1 gp = 1 xp or whatever works with your game rules). Up to half of looted wealth can be used for training; the rest is available for improving the characters' lives and pursuing their goals in other ways.

The requirement that xp must be from looted wealth (e.g. dungeon treasure) ties it back in to the idea that the characters are getting something out of their experiences on delves and expeditions, and also prevents advancement based on capitalism; it feels gamey, but not TOO gamey.

Looted wealth is used to pay for training, tutors, study materials, and so on. Early on, these things are readily available. At higher levels, they might have to be sought out in the world, as it gets harder to find more advanced texts, teachers more skilled than your character, and so on.

Character advancement therefore represents costly, high-intensity learning and study (with an undertone of the character having gone out and had perilous experiences, resulting in both the necessary wealth and the motivation to excel in the training). Advancement takes a long time; let's say a season per level. You could have a more fine-grained system with an increasing time requirement, though.

Followers and character replacement

From say level 2 or 3, players can acquire a number of followers. In D&D-likes, we might say they have followers up to one third of their Charisma score. In those games that already have fleshed-out follower mechanics, you'll need to call them something else or combine the systems.

Followers are just characters like any other, starting at level 1, created with the same character creation rules. They are distinguished from hirelings and other NPCs by an understanding at the table that they are essentially backup PCs; in particular, they won't ever betray the PCs, and they won't be killed 'off-screen' unless the players decided to send them into danger.

Players can invest looted wealth in their followers to advance them, exactly as for their primary PC. This has the same training costs and time and so on. A PC's followers can advance to 1 level lower than the PC and no further.

In-world, followers are squires, apprentices, butlers, bodyguards, family members, and so on. Some of a PC's followers might be their own apprentices (if the same class). But the wizard could retain a loyal housecarl, or the barbarian might have adopted a witch. And some of a PC's followers might be apprentices of other PCs.

The crucial detail for all of this: A player's next character will be drawn from their pool of followers. 

If a player's character is safe back home, the player may choose to retire that character, taking all its wealth and social connections and so on with it. If they choose retirement, the player can have some decent portion of the character's experience transferred directly to their followers, including their new character. Let's say, 50% of earned experience, with no more than 20% allocated to any one follower, and no advancement further than the level of the retiring character. Importantly, the old character then becomes a tool of the GM and is kept out of the way, not a free resource for the remaining PCs to hit up at any time.

But if a player's character dies, the player either takes on a new character at starting level or chooses a candidate from their followers.

Tweaking the rules

This framework works best when the cost of character advancement increases drastically with ever level (as in most editions of D&D). That way, a PC isn't terribly disadvantaged by diverting a split of their wealth/xp to maintain a small coterie of backups.

The GM may need to tweak the total size of wealth awards, and/or give a small bonus to any xp allocated to followers (so that it doesn't feel like the current character is losing out). There should be a balance; players should feel a tension between the risk of investing in their PC and the surety of investing in their followers (in case their PC dies).

Different play groups can organise things differently. One player could pick another's follower as a replacement if they agree, and possibly if a bonus/weregild is paid to compensate. Players could trade followers. A group might decide to divert some initial split of their loot into a set of replacement characters, then treat them as a communal resource.

Followers are also a resource in themselves, providing spells and character abilities and so on, giving additional incentive to invest in them. However, in a world where returning from death is cheap and easy, players won't feel as compelled to 'waste' xp on maintaining a pool of followers. The GM might need to make resurrection spells cost additional wealth/xp, or improve the rate of return on follower advancement, to balance it out.

This system would be easily adapted to a playstyle where everyone plays multiple characters at the same time.

What are the benefits?

So going back to that initial list of old-school play elements...

- Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
- Delves and expeditions
This framework, being predicated on plundered gold-for-xp, puts the focus squarely on treasure-hunting. Having a long time frame and big expeditions also helps emphasise the sheer amount of wealth in the adventure location: it's worthwhile planning a trek across the sea, continent, or world for.

- A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
- Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
This framework achieves these while offering the players a lot of important choices. The long time frame with seasonal expeditions means that there are regular opportunities for the characters to advance via lengthy training without the pace of adventures precluding it, and without the game devolving into fine-grained in-world scheduling puzzles.

- Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
Having increasingly huge amount of treasure in more distant and difficult-to-get to dungeons, alongside increasing wealth costs for levelling up, also helps with game world investment. PCs can do social climbing, come up with their own megaprojects, invest in capital, build fortresses, improve their communities, and so on, with the half of their looted treasure that they can't use for character advancement.

Having an expedition 'off season' (winter) creates room to breathe, and for PCs to get entangled in whatever the player finds compelling: planning, hiring, selling treasure, magic item creation, wheeling and dealing, starting a family, capital investment, politicking, dealing with long-term campaign events, and so on.

- Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
Expedition-based play encourages use of hirelings, and managing a coterie of followers ties in well with managing hirelings and paves the way to realm-based play. Travelling for a long time to an adventure location necessitates retaining staff or paying friends back home to tend to the character's other, broader concerns while the character is off adventuring.

- A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury
Not everyone cares about verisimilitude, but for those of us who do, the long time scale and the group of followers together permit a GM to tweak rules and powers towards needing long-term recovery. A character who gets injured has the time required to heal up before the next expedition. When a character is knocked out of a delve due to injury, their player isn't sidelined for a session or two; they have followers with them who can go in instead. Or they can attempt the risky proposition of having their PC continue while seriously injured, knowing they have the backstop of having levelled followers back home if 'injured' turns into 'dead' as a result.

...And finally, as the Against The Wicked City article noted, players will have a chance to actually update the age written on their character sheet.

On edge cases and magic

There's an innate design tension which RPG magic systems must contend with.

Magic must be more powerful than enacting the equivalent effect by mundane means, otherwise it's not fun and not fantastic. But if it's powerful and its uses are limitless (or at least non-rate-limited), then you become committed to an exceptionally high-magic setting.

If it takes ten seconds to give yourself a magical boon which lasts for ten minutes, the default player behaviour and the reasonable in-world behaviour will be to cast the spell every ten minutes... Unless they have a specific reason not to. That's almost always 'resource management'. In almost ever fantasy TTRPG, magic (whether spells, items, rituals, innate powers, etc) will be powerful and limited, i.e., a valuable resource; something to be conserved for when it will matter. Therefore, players will want to know the exact effect of some magic they might use, so that they can make an informed choice.

And this creates a design tension. How predictable to players is the magic their characters are harnessing?

The predictability predicament

Assuming you want magic to be able to do a huge range of things (it's magic), to get breadth of coverage, you either end up with these huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects and parameters (almost certainly player-facing), or you have a fuzzy system where the GM instantiates vague wordings at runtime (possibly via what amounts to negotiation with the player). These game design choices have different costs in terms of usability and satisfaction.

Most big, popular fantasy TTRPGs like D&D go with the huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects option. This arguably results in greater player agency, in the sense of being able to make good and meaningful decisions about resource allocation, but it constrains magic to the big official list (and if it's not exceptionally well-designed, you end up with weird codified corner cases and interactions). You also need to know the system really well to be effective as a player or a GM. Finally, there's a risk that presenting in exhaustive detail what is possible strongly implies that anything else isn't possible. You get cases like D&D 5e, where many destructive spells officially don't damage objects because a small subset of them specify that they do.

The fuzzy system option is attractive because it makes magic more 'mysterious' and wild, and thus fantastical. But it can be hard for a GM, especially one who isn't already operating in a "rulings not rules" tradition. But it can also be hard for players to come to terms with, unless either (a) it's the case in-world that a mage never knows exactly what they're going to get when they do some magic (which is flavourful, but risks a poor play experience), or (b) the GM and player together determine what happens when the magic is used. The latter might sound good (an opportunity for collaborative buy-in) or bad ('Mother May I' gameplay). Some GMs are surprised to find that many players hate 'collaborative storytelling exercises' spilling over into their roleplaying games. Either way, it doesn't actually resolve the tension: it's still in the player's best interests to stop and discuss the possible magical effect before they can make an informed choice whether to use their magic.

Variants of the fuzzy system where e.g. the GM has to follow certain rules to come up with a power-level-appropriate instantiation of a spell at run-time are close to being the worst of both worlds: mechanically fiddly but without giving a player enough information to make decisions with, and you just end up building that minutely-detailed canonical list slowly over time.

Resolving the tension

I consider this an open problem. As I've suggested before, I think the best practises are to

• Pick a path and stick with it, rather than mixing up how rigid and predictable the magic system is in different use-cases within the same game; and
• Have an extremely strong, well-thought out metaphysics which either underpins the mechanical design for the minutely-detailed lists option or informs what 'should be the case' for the fuzzy system option.

Food for thought

Here are some questions your magic system must be robust enough to answer, consistently:

If you turn flour to silver dust and mix it into acid, changing it to silver nitrate and creating heat, what happens to the silver nitrate if the spell wears off? What happens to the heat? If the compound is left over, can you reduce it to get silver? Does the resulting silver still count as being magical?

If you turn a pile of stones into loaves of bread and spend a week eating them, what happens to your tissue, the partially-digested bread, and the waste, if the magic ends? Do you die instantly? Does the energy you got from eating disappear?

If you turn a stone into a cat, and that cat eats and sweats and breathes makes waste, then the magic is dispelled, what happens to the bits of world (food and air and water) that got incorporated into the cat's body? Are they in the stone? Do they turn to stone? Can they be turned back? What happens to the cat's sweat and waste and loose hairs and skin particles out in the world? Do they turn to stone? What if the cat was a kitten, and it grew much bigger and older before the spell ended?

Or if the original subject was a mouse rather than a stone, what happens to the cells that changed in its body? Was there a 'mapping' from one mouse cell to multiple cat cells, so that injuries and shed cells and replaced cells carry back over? Do microbial diseases carry back over? Does cancer?

Are all your answers consistent so far?

What happens if you turn someone into a statue and snap their arm off? What about if you turn someone into steel and then temper or anneal the metal? Or take a mould of their body, turn them into ice, melt them, and then refreeze the water in the mould?

What about if you turn a piece of metal into a piece of wood and burn it inside a big tank of air? Does the carbon dioxide turn into a metal oxide? In general, if you heat something up while it's magically transformed and then turn it back, is it still hot? What if you turned something really small into something really big and then it just got slightly warm by soaking up a million times more sunlight than the tiny thing would have?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse and it eats a bucket of oats, what happens to the oats if it turns back? Does it matter whether they've been digested?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse inside a mouse-sized terrarium that a mouse couldn't possibly break but a horse easily could, does the spell work? Does the answer change if the terrarium is nearly horse-sized? What about if you try it on a mouse that's inside a crack in solid rock? Is this meaningfully different from trapping a mouse under a piece of heavy cloth and then expanding it to the size of a horse?

If you cast a spell on a subject, then another one that seems to have the inverse effect (flesh to rock then rock to flesh), do you get back the exact original? If so, why? If not, what happens if only the first spell ends or is dispelled? What if you cast the first spell, then make some orthogonal change to the subject, then cast the second?

What in-universe mechanism decides whether an object counts as meeting the targeting requirements of a spell? Does a spell that works on chairs work on a one-legged stool if the caster doesn't think a one-legged stool is a chair?

Do any of the answers to these questions change depending on whether it's a temporary effect, a dispelled permanent effect, a magically reversed effect, an intrinsic ability of a magical creature, the effect of an item, etc?

Narration and creative control of the world: A cautionary follow-up

The other day I talked about the advice that 'the extremely unlikely success or failure of an action means something about the world must be different'. I gave some reasons why this can make things harder for the GM and less satisfying for the players. I emphasized how important it is for the GM to be careful with the 'world-state' (the body of information about the fictional environment).

Van Winkle's article which prompted my writing also touched on a related issue with either the GM or a player establishing new facts about the world-state:

What if a player says, after landing a blow, "My character slashes the orc's forehead, causing blood to pour down his face"? Sounds cool, right? So you, the GM, nod your head and continue the excitement. But then the next round the player says, "Hey, shouldn't the orc attack me with some penalty because there's blood in his eyes?"

Van Winkle endorses a solution to this from ktrey: The GM should say "Let's see what happens when the orc attacks you. If he misses, we can say that the blood in his eyes played a part in his failure".

But this advice boils down to: ignore what has actually been established to be true in the game world. We could rephrase it as "the GM/player can establish something that definitely changed in the world but treat it as not actually having changed unless future dice rolls support it having changed". There's a strange implication that the GM can and ought to say "actually, this fact about the world can't have consequences", because the rules (mere tools the GM uses to interact with the world-state) are somehow more important than the underlying validity of the world-state!

I think it's fair to say this is contrary to the GM's fundamental role. Nothing that the GM (or player, in this case, where a player has been handed creative control) establishes about the world should be mere paper-thin "set dressing" which looks nice but which the characters can poke a finger through. Once something is established as true, it becomes usable by any PCs or NPCs or natural forces. Any knock-on effects must actually happen.

The combat example is a minor one, but even it has repercussions. What if the game has a spell that works on bleeding creatures? What penalties does the orc have? Can it benefit from attacks of opportunity / combat advantage / mechanic X? What about if it wasn't an orc, but a creature has corrosive blood, or a gaze attack? How long does it take to clean blood out of your eyes, for bleeding to stop, for the wound to heal?

Just take a more systematic approach

This pitfall isn't hard to avoid.

To begin with, the GM should keep careful track of their game's world-state. They should understand how the game's systems work and what the outcomes of those systems mean for the world-state.

They should only narrate beyond the extent of those outcomes with care, especially in situations like combat when PC life is on the line and players will feel cheated, not just disappointed, if a new piece of the world's reality gets established and then its consequences immediately ignored.

They should be extremely cautious in allowing player involvement in settling what's true in the world (beyond what the rules of the system allow).

For example, in a game that has hit points, the GM must understand what hit points are, what they represent in the world, and how systems interact with them. In some games, if a creature is knocked down to 5 hit points, you can narrate them being stabbed through the thigh. In some (most, frankly), you can only narrate the near-miss, the ensuing exhaustion, the draining of luck, etc. Being stabbed through the thigh, once established, is something that actually happened in the world. If the unfortunate victim is a baseline human and the world is anything like ours, then there are consequences: the victim almost certainly falls down, they may pass out from pain, they may bleed out slowly or in a matter of seconds, and their ability to attack, defend, climb a rope, and so on is drastically reduced. Is that a ton of extra GM work and possible interactions with parts of the rule set? Yes. Is it absolutely necessary? Yes. This is why games with hit points usually don't make them meat points.

But understanding the game's systems means it's easy to narrate. You know that a sword through the thigh is a grievous wound, so you know if the rules say a creature isn't mechanically penalised by injury, then you can't narrate any non-lethal attack as a stabbing. You know that kind of wound can't be slept off, so you know if the rules say a creature can get all their hit points back overnight, then when a creature is knocked to 0 hit points you can't say they were stabbed. In fact, in such a system, you can never narrate any wounds unless the creature also died – unless (a) you are just playing the game for laughs or (b) there's something in your world's metaphysics that makes wounds of all kinds short of death close overnight, with all the ensuing consequences to society.

All of this applies to the example with the orc getting blood in his eyes, of course. There the possible solutions are:

1. Don't let players narrate their attacks and don't ever say anything about the world that isn't true and therefore supported by game mechanics, or
2. Change to a system which actually mechanically supports whatever a player establishes as true about the world via the creative control they have been given, or
3. Switch to free-form role-playing or storytelling.

If you study your game system and can't help but conclude that hit points are neither meat points nor luck points but also both those things, then it's only a matter of time until you have to contend with this issue. There is no solution other than fixing the game system or changing to one that's coherent. Even if you try to sidestep by deliberately narrating combat really vaguely, eventually a player will notice "I suffered wounds so terrible that I failed all but the final saving throw against instant death, and now it is ten hours later and those wounds have literally disappeared without any magic or miracle involved".

Finding a conclusion in all this

Ultimately this is part of a broader point: narrating an action's outcome isn't just a fun little bit of flavour, like it would be if you were telling a story. It's a major part of the role-playing game loop. If a player isn't treating the GM's description of the world as something their character can really interact with, then they might as well not be playing at all! The human interactivity, the "role-playing" part of a role-playing game, is the only advantage it has over other forms of media!

I think it's difficult to create a good role-playing game with collaborative story-telling elements because of issues like these. Role-playing is all about seeing what's in the game-world around your character and treating it as a real situation. When an RPG has story-telling elements, a player has to be both reactive/interactive (role-playing) and creative/declarative (story-telling): the same human brain making semi-godlike decisions about what is true in a world is also trying to make reasonable decisions on behalf of one person with certain goals and traits within that world. Disentangling those roles is difficult. It can cause unpleasant cognitive dissonance.

Think about the consequences before giving players additional creative control in a role-playing game.

"Why Not To Play This Way" – An unlikely success or failure means you learn something new

I'd like to push back on something.

For a very long time – and most recently in an article by Tom Van Winkle last month – lots of GMs and RPG writers have recommended that when a player character's attempt at a task results in a very unlikely success or failure, it should be treated as 'discovering something new about' (i.e., changing the GM's mental model of) the game world.

When the task resolution mechanic reports a surprising success, the task was actually much easier than it seemed (for some reason that the GM comes up with). A surprising failure likewise means something in the world made the task much more difficult.

The lichvanwinkle article aptly sums the idea up as 'The "failure" [or success] with the dice gives an opportunity to define the world in ways that are not just about the character.'

(I like pretty much all of Van Winkle's writing; this is just one of those cases where you nod along appreciatively in silence for years and then only bother to pipe up when you disagree.)

To extend two of his examples:

Surprisingly, the accomplished locksmith fails to pick the simple lock on the store. So...

•  The lock mechanism must be broken, rusted solid, or jammed shut
•  The lock does open, but it turns out the door is stuck or barred
•  As the locksmith is just starting, she hears guards approaching, so can't complete the covert work

Surprisingly, the puny wizard manages to bend the metal bars in the prison window. So...

•  The metal bars are rusted completely through, and give way.
•  The bars were only an illusion all along!
•  The bars are solid, but the wizard finds the stone is old and degraded – he can just chip it away and pull the bars out.

(Note that the probability and mechanic for the unexpected success or failure doesn't matter. It could be 'natural 1 = automatic failure' or 'exploding dice leads to preposterous successes' or 'disregarding the rules, this particular GM always tweaks the Target Number so any PC can always succeed or fail'.)

Now, I usually like the idea of 'overloading' dice with extra meaning. Reducing the number of dice rolls is almost always a great design goal.

So why not here?

This is one of those ideas that's really mostly innocuous, but is so widespread that I want to push back on it for fear that it will become the status quo. "An unlikely dice result changes what's in the world" is definitely not a panacea solution, and you may find that it can create some problems of its own.

And what it boils down is that overloading the action-resolution dice in this particular way thwarts a really fundamental, really effective TTRPG loop:

(i) The GM determines, by whatever means, what is true in the world: its world-state.
(ii) Whenever a player character's passive senses would tell them something remotely meaningful about the world-state, the GM gives the player that information.
(iii) A player can have their PC investigate (interact with) their environment to get further information about the world-state.
(iv) The difficulty of a task is determined entirely by the world-state (including as it does all PCs and NPCs, secrets and fixtures, physics and metaphysical forces, gods and demons, self-inserts and metanarrative powers, etc).
(v) Players can estimate the difficulty of a task by how much they have learned via (ii) and (iii); they can attempt to reduce risk by doing more of (iii) and the GM can make the game require less back-and-forth by doing more of (ii).
(vi) Players have a single 'game action': declare their intention to attempt some task which they describe.
(vii) When a player uses their game action, the GM: first checks whether anything should happen before or simultaneously by consulting the world-state and/or the other players, then checks they and the player are envisaging the same thing with regard to the player action, then considers difficulty via (iv), then (only if the task could either succeed or fail) determines which game mechanics to use to resolve it, then resolves it, then narrates the attempt and its outcome via (ii).

Notice how many of those steps are disrupted if the action-resolution dice can make a retroactive change to the world!

An idea in conflict with TTRPG best practises

More specifically, the idea that 'unlikely dice results change the world' conflicts with six important bits of TTRPG advice which are ubiquitous in modern discourse:

1. Don't make the characters do anything the player didn't try (outside of minor, obvious, safe, unstated things; always assume a character is competent). An 'unlikely dice result' should not change what a character was doing.

• The outcome of the action "I try to pick the lock" can't be "you were so overconfident that you tried to pick the simple lock without torsioning the keyway, so you failed". The player didn't attempt that and the character shouldn't be incompetent.
• Likewise the outcome of the action "I try to bend the prison bars" can't be "you chip away a bunch of what turns out to be ancient, crumbling stone and pull the bars out instead". We can easily imagine cases where the player would decide not to take the alternate option. (And if you stop and give them the "new information", they're now deciding based on information that was first created and then discovered by the outcome of a "use crowbar to bend metal bars" resolution mechanism which didn't do anything. Weird.)
• So this substantially constrains your options for retrofitting the world to an unlikely dice result.
  

2. Don't roll if the outcome doesn't matter. If the outcome of the roll is so surprising that it's incompatible with your vision of the world as GM, to the extent that you have to change your mental model of the world-state in order to keep it consistent, it means you should never have had the player roll in the first place! You should have just said "yes" or "no"! (If the game procedures told you to, it may also mean that those procedures are bad, but that's a different matter). If an expert lockpicker encounters a simple (functioning) lock, and has time and tools and use of her hands, then anything short of a lightning bolt from above means that she opens the lock. There should not be a flat 5% chance that she just "can't". This is true in the real world and in any game that has verisimilitude.

(Rambling aside: Breaking a pick or torsion tool in the lock is rare, at least for someone who knows how to use them. Even if you ascribe that fact to the wonders of modern metallurgy, older locks tend to have larger keyways, so older lockpicks can probably afford to be thicker to make up for it. And most importantly, note that snapping a tool in a lock will almost certainly not jam the lock, preventing it being opened; a competent locksmith will remove the piece and continue to work.)

3. Decide and envisage the world-state before you determine how to adjudicate an action. Whether you need to use any given rule, or involve dice mechanics at all, depends on what is currently true in the world.

• Just because there's a rule for "falling object damage" doesn't mean you use it if the PCs manage to make the moon fall onto their planet.
• Just because there's a rule for "whether an attack hits" doesn't mean you use it when a PC attacks a paralysed target in an otherwise empty room.

Knowing what's true in the world makes the GM's second-most important job (adjudicating action outcomes) very simple. If you were envisaging the lock as functioning, then don't roll: the locksmith cannot fail. If you were envisaging the lock as rusted solid, then don't roll: the locksmith cannot succeed. If you were envisaging the lock as being complex, or being simple but someone has lovingly filled it with honey, then work out an appropriate Target Number and go to the dice. The 'unlikely dice result changes the world' idea makes all this impossible.

4. Decide and envisage the world-state plus the outcome of an action before you describe an event or outcome. If you already know what's true in the world, and you're only letting dice have a say when success or failure are both possible, then you can go from outcome to description immediately.

If an unlikely dice result can change the world, this is more difficult: You have to leave space for things that even you, the GM, don't know about the world. When the dice give a surprising success or failure, you have to – on the fly – determine a change which is compatible with what the player characters already know and also what the consequences of that change will be and more specifically whether this 'breaks' anything else in the world-state or in the current scenario. And then you have to narrate the action outcome while incorporating how the player characters discover the newly-created information.

5. Players are given key information up front, can get as much descriptive detail as they ask for, and can find out more relevant information by interacting with their environment. But, whoops, now an unlikely dice result can change the world retroactively, so what info can be given out?

The GM's single most important job is providing concise, accurate, memorable, relevant descriptive narrative. You just can't do this if you have to worry about 'saving room for' corner cases. If the prison bars are strong, rust-free, corporeal, and set firmly in strong rock "unless in the future I need them not to be, if the weakling wizard rolls high enough to bend them", you have a big problem which grows bigger with every interaction the player characters have with the bars.

At some point, as more and more 'explanations' of the surprising dice result are ruled out by what the players know about the world, you're left with just two options, both unsatisfying.

1. A preposterous deus ex machina ("a sudden earthquake rocks the room just as Feebliander begins to push the bar! The wall caves in!"). Even if you try to disguise its extempore nature, you're likely to get the problem of "We immediately waste a bunch of time and resources investigating what has caused this very unexpected thing which we take to be a big clue about other parts of the game world."
2. A fake or fiat perception failure ("I know I said Feebliander thought the bars looked new and sturdy when he spent ten minutes studying them carefully, but as he applies the crowbar, he finds them to give way in a spray of rust.") Many game systems have perception mechanics, including ones that are meant to be passively or automatically applied, in which case as soon as you make surprising dice results retrospectively change the world, you've immediately failed in your job of correctly and impartially applying the rules, by either not invoking them or not taking into account information about the world.

6. Don't let the players think you don't know what's true in the world. This is more important than it sounds, especially for invested, smart, skilled players.

But suppose they notice that a lot of the time when they roll really high or really low, there's a bit of a pause and then the GM tells them their action fails or succeeds because of something they hadn't already known about the world. They're going to lose faith that the GM is thinking about their own world. They'll (accurately) regard that as a troubling sign. They'll start thinking things like "the GM can't have known the lock was completely rusted, because then what would be in the point in making me roll?"

More pragmatically, they're going to start checking for all the little factors – is the lock old, is it rusted, is it gummed or jammed or filled with honey, is the door stuck, is anyone else around – BEFORE attempting to pick the lock, and then what are you going to do when the expert locksmith rolls a 1?

Okay yes but

Most of the rationale for 'unlikely dice result changes the world' was that the GM wants to be surprised sometimes. That's valid, right?

Yes, of course.

• You might be worried about fairness ("otherwise I'm just deciding by fiat that the lock is in good working order").
• You might be aware of your own cognitive blind spots ("otherwise I'll just end up using the normal defaults – normal locks, sturdy bars, guards who can't be bribed, trees with enough branches to climb").
• You might be using a system that's simpler than you'd prefer ("Am I really meant to just make up all the Target Numbers?").
• You might want the PCs to encounter more variety than you're capable of providing ("I'm always thinking about the next encounter, so I never remember to have a more mundane task throw an unexpected boon or bane").

So how can you attain this without overloading the task resolution dice?

I think the answer is: take a more rigorous approach, using a dedicated dice roll. You could do it any number of different ways; the key is to identify early on that there's something with various possible states/aspects/nuances which could change task difficulties, and having identified it, quickly make a dice roll to see what's true in your world. Once you have determined the world-state, all the rest of the GM's job is exactly as easy as it ever was.

The solution

It's one of those things you can learn to do without a formal process, just as an instinctive part of the regular rolling-dice-for-no-apparent reason that you ought to be doing anyway to keep the players alert.

But if I had to encode it as a specific procedure, I'd say:

• Pay attention to cases where you start describing something with an obvious PC interaction, especially where you're likely going to have to later improvise that task's difficulty.
• In such cases, first envisage how the world probably is – the default state of the lock given who bought it and used it and when; the condition of the bars given whether this is a gaol in use or a crumbling ruin; the loyalty of the guards given who hired them to do what; etc.
• Then just roll a dice to see whether it's actually better or worse overall for the PCs, with a 1 being "version of the worst case that's still completely plausible" and a maximum roll being "version of the best case that's still completely plausible", the gradations between being easily decided on the fly. Worse cases make for harder Target Numbers for most approaches to most tasks, and so on. A "middle" result (either of the two numbers around the dice's average, which a GM should know) means "don't change what you first envisioned at all".

Pros:

• This is fast, simple, and easy to remember.
• If you forget to roll, or only remember after the characters have started fiddling around with things, it doesn't matter. You don't need to remember every time, only sometimes.
  
• You can pick up whichever dice is closest and use it.
• Your expectations about the world as the GM often hold true, and things only deviate from your expectations as far as you'll let them.
  
• When you 'discover' something new about the world, you get that information before you go to action resolution, available to give to any player who has their character investigate how hard various approaches to the task are going to be.
• You never get weird action results that are borderline- or outright-incompatible with the world you envisioned.

I think this better serves the overall purpose of "freedom in narrating the events in a fantasy game without hesitation or squabbling over rules and rulings. Let the dice serve your narration without requiring your narration to mess with the rules further."

Cons:

• That pesky extra dice roll...

d6 degrees of success with anything

Is the badger's burrow wide enough to squeeze down? Is the giant scorpion's flesh edible? Are the bars set in a stone weak enough to chip away? Will the dead tree's branch stand up to the dwarf's weight? Does the abandoned generator have any gas left in it?

You're a GM and need to determine some aspect of your world. Roll a d6. 1 is the worst plausible outcome for the characters, 6 is the best, and everything else is shades in between.

Why do this?

• It's quicker than any other rules-based approach
  
• It's helpful if you have trouble just snap deciding the answers to questions
• It's useful when something would affect the PCs, so you would be either 'handing them a win' or 'screwing them over' by fiat
• The dice can surprise you and challenge you
• When not everything has the most likely default answer, it can make a world feel more real
• There might be a rule for this situation (or one that can be adapted), but you don't remember where it is

The "crawling down the badger burrow" example:
1 - Looks barely wide enough to get down, but narrows partway through, so characters can get stuck upside down in the middle of a twisty dirt tube
2 - Isn't wide enough to squeeze through
3 - Is wide enough to squeeze down but requires a little digging around the bends
4,5 - Is wide enough for the smaller characters, but not the largest
6 - Is just large enough for everyone to get through

The "eating the giant scorpion meat" example:
1 - Is poisonous; incautious consumers suffer a minor ongoing poison effect
2 - Is mildly toxic; characters start throwing it up shortly after getting it down
3 - Is edible but tastes really bad
4,5 - Is fine to eat
6 - Is not merely edible, but delicious and keeps well

Etcetera.

The key understanding is that you don't even have to assign numbers and degrees of success before rolling. Just mentally frame - or speak out loud - your question. Then you roll, say, a 2. All you have to do is think, what's the second-worst answer to the question?

Advanced versions:

• Rarely, you'll have a question where the range of plausible outcomes are neutral with regard to the player characters. Just orient yourself on whatever axis you can find, and roll.
• Sometimes there will clearly be more possible axes than 'good' or 'bad'. Something could pose a high or low threat but offer a high or low reward, for example. Just use several dice, associating one colour with one axis.
• With a basic intuitive understanding of dice probabilities, you can determine the answers to questions about populations, off the cuff. Say you've randomly generated a group of 21 soldiers on the road. How many are in poor morale? Could really be any number of them: 1d20. How many are currently battle-ready? Probably most but not all of them: 1d8+10. How many are carrying bows? Let's guess it's likely to be about half: 2d10.
  

The hit point problem

...Or, what do HP actually represent (in traditional RPGs and their descendants)?

Dr Bret Devereaux's recent article on armour and RPGs, in talking about how armour actually works, reminded me about this argument. It's an argument that's older than the internet, an argument that's fundamentally pointless, an argument that's been rehashed thousands if not millions of times... so I thought I might as well get into it briefly.

Let's start here:

Hit points are a combination of actual physical constitution, skill at the avoidance of taking real physical damage, luck and/or magical or divine factors. [...] a near-miss, a slight wound, and a bit of luck used up, [...] more often than not a grazing blow, a mere light wound which would have been fatal (or nearly so) to a lesser mortal. If sufficient numbers of such wounds accrue to the character, however, stamina, skill, and luck will eventually run out, and an attack will strike home

- Gary Gygax, Dragon #24


It seems widely accepted, as well as being straight from the horse's mouth, that hit points are a mixture of a creature's capacity for and resilience against suffering injury ('meat points') and its chances, for various reasons, of avoiding serious injury in situations in which it might suffer serious injury ('grace points').

There's an implication that grace points are mostly 'used up' before meat points. And the obvious interpretation is that there's some (unspecified) ratio of grace to meat.

Unfortunately it's still impossible to arrive at a really self-consistent understanding of hit points in D&D-likes, whether you think HP is 0.1% meat and 99.9% grace, 99.9% meat and 0.1% grace, or anything in between.

HP must be almost entirely meat points, for the following reasons.

• 1 damage to a 100-HP creature has to entail actual physical harm because it can come with 'riders' like injecting poison from a poison-tipped dart. If the dart didn't pierce the flesh 'on hit', it wouldn't have been able to convey the poison. At the other end of the spectrum, 100 damage is enough to kill the creature (or nearly so, depending on edition), so that too must be actual physical harm.
• In trad games, higher Constitution improves HP (i.e., meat points). In comparison, Dexterity, Wisdom, and Intelligence (i.e., grace points) don't improve hit points at all, and neither do weapon/armour use skills and features (when they exist). If grace points made up a non-negligible proportion of hit points, having these attributes would affect HP total.
• Numerous game effects, spells, items, and so on have descriptors that equate even potentially quite small amounts of HP recovery with descriptions of physical wounds closing. I would guess an outright majority of supernatural healing effects involve physical injury in their description, with most of the others being ambivalent or lacking description, and very few indeed talking about restoring anything that seems like grace points.
• Plenty of damage in classic RPGs comes from sources that can't easily be mitigated (or can come from them in principle, for no special rules for when that happens). You character is stabbed while unconscious. Your character falls onto a field of spikes. Your character swims across an acid lake. Your character takes intermittent damage from rotting disease. The moisture is leached from your character's body by a horrid spell. In cases like these, half of the justification for 'grace points' can't be in play: the character isn't 'using skill to avoid harm', the damage isn't 'near-misses', and the character isn't just 'getting tired' or 'pushing their luck'. There are whole character archetypes unlikely to be protected by 'divine forces' or 'magical factors'.

Of course, it's also true that

HP has to be almost entirely grace points, for the following reasons.

• When a 100-HP creature takes 99 damage, this doesn't seem to involve any actual physical harm: in classic games being down to 1 HP has no immediate in-game consequence on the creature (notable exception: D&D 4e's bloodied condition, and even then the effect isn't "a massive reduction in all of the wounded creature's physical capabilities" like you would expect). Per rules, the creature doesn't fall over or involuntarily scream or pass out from pain or anything. (And sure, the game rules are an abstraction, but the same RPGs will have other subsystems that are vastly more fine-grained than the idea that if you put a sword through someone, it has major traumatic effects.) There is never any indication that the GM is expected to improvise these consequences, either.
• Martial characters get more hit points; they're the ones who are best able to avoid harm, because that is what all of their training is for. That harm avoidance is HP.
  
• Characters gain hit points with level, at a rate that is vastly higher than remotely plausible variance in a person's actual ability to survive wounds. You could maybe convince me that some exceptional person could have twice as many 'meat points' as average. Three, four, five times? No way.
• The same plausibility argument applies in general. A twelve-foot giant should weigh about 1500 lbs or 700 kg. If something like that swings an axe at you and it connects, the best you can hope for is that whatever gets lopped off is non-vital. Plenty of D&D-like games would model this attack hitting as something that can be slept off (depending on a damage roll, possibly). High-level characters might take dozens of such hits, depending on the game.

So we've immediately run into contradiction: some things in the game tell us that HP is almost all meat, and other things tell us that HP is almost all grace.

Side note

There's another reason we're unlikely to square the circle and find a self-consistent explanation in (most) HP-based games: Extreme injury.

Suppose 100 damage is just enough to kill some creature: It has 100 HP, or 90, or 90 and then flubs some rolls, or whatever. For this creature, 100 damage kills, so 99 damage is as close to a mortal wound as you can get. This amount of harm heals naturally, and perfectly, very fast, in almost every trad game I've ever seen. In modern editions, this near-mortal wound just goes away overnight! In contrast, I've personally had garden scratches that took a week to heal. Even in OD&D, the upper limit on healing is one month. That would be an optimistic timeframe for being discharged in a modern hospital after "a wound that very nearly killed you". That kind of wound would usually be the beginning of years of physical therapy, if not permanent disability.

COUNTERARGUMENT 1: We can concoct explanations for this, involving abstraction, and how much more survivable wounds are with modern medicine (or with fantasy magic), and how unfun it is to play out deadly infections or characters with degraded abilities, and how we don't want to require a player to play a character who's only definitely going to die rather than dead... sure. I've never heard one that's really comprehensive within the fiction, which is what I'm mostly concerned with.

COUNTERARGUMENT 2: Some games layer lingering injury frameworks, scar systems, etc, onto HP systems. This is fine, and sometimes works pretty well! I will note that in my experience they usually still don't go far enough to make for good simulation, and in particular these additional systems almost always still use a weird sped-up timeframe. I think they're also pretty rare on the whole, for traditional D&D-likes. I like em, though.

COUNTERARGUMENT 3: Some fantasy game worlds might be assumed to have low-level magical healing on tap everywhere, so a very slow trickle of hit points amounts to recovering your HP overnight (or 2d6/night or with one full day of bed rest or whatever). Sure, this works in principle. But I don't think many games come right out and say in their setting information that this is what's going on; it's hard to import into most worlds; it also precludes some genre features, like the existence of lingering injuries and old scars in the broad populace.

Finally, let's flip it around and consider actual practises at the table, where this matters. It's always been the case that certain rules get ignored or changed by swathes of gamers.

At the table, what GM ever describes a sword swing inflicting 10 damage as 'you nearly get hit' or 'they get a little tired jumping out of the way of the sword's arc' or 'fortunately for the ogre, your blade bounces off his belt buckle'? My impression is that this essentially never happens, in part because it makes a hit sound just like a miss, which is both confusing and a letdown.

What I do see, sometimes, is GMs being cautious and sometimes even vague about what is going on within the world – not really a sign that everything is as it should be in the game. They describe damage to enemies as flesh wounds (up until the moment it kills), and damage to characters as minor abrasions and bruises. They're careful not to imply any level of injury that would have actual game world impact (like impeding a creature's movement or making it leave a trail of blood) or later raise questions like 'you said I shattered his arm with that critical hit, how is he climbing the rope now?' or 'you said I was skewered by three arrows, how come I got better completely overnight?'

And likewise, I sometimes see GMs avoid describing the effects of magical healing as 'knitting together wounds', 'restoring all your blood', etc – and sometimes just not describe it at all – because that implies the character had been seriously wounded, and it somehow never feels like a character is badly wounded at the table, no matter how low their HP goes.

And in other cases, I see tables of players and GMs venture into absurdism, where HP loss is always a grisly wound described with relish; such wounds come and go entirely without any knock-on effects within the world, disappearing overnight.

Reconciliation

Is there a way around this without having to hack some extremely core game rules?

Solution 1: Embrace indeterminacy. Hit points don't really mean anything, and wounds are never described until the moment they are gone. If 50 lost hit points are immediately restored by a powerful healing spell then it may well have been a devastating wound (especially if the sufferer was 'dying' as per e.g. 5e rules), and the GM may feel free to describe it that way. But when a character suffers through an afternoon's adventure with 50 missing hit points and they get restored overnight, those ones were in retrospect obviously just a little fatigue (not enough to cause exhaustion), scratches and bruises (not enough to impede movement), and 'expended' luck or divine grace (whatever that means).

Solution 2: Play it straight. This fantasy world is different from our own because of its fantasy elements, and those fantasy elements officially include people's bodies operating utterly differently to how they do in our world. You can go from 'fifty-fifty chance of death' to 'top physical condition' overnight with no magical intervention because that's how it is in this universe. People of this world have no lingering injuries unless they were inflicted by one of the few extremely specific spells or powers that do that.

Solution 3: Beer and pretzels game. Just don't think about it.

Solution 4: It's meta. The game, in being played, produces a story of action in a heroic genre; all the bits of that story which don't make sense are because of (say) unreliable storytellers or other narrative tricks. At the moment it is happening at the table, nothing means anything; after the game, the resulting story is allowed to be inconsistent and impossible, because it's just a story. Yes, this undermines the very concept of roleplaying, so what?

Solution 5: It's stochastic. The lower a character's hit points – whether from injury or being fragile or low level – the more likely they are to die from the next attack. That's the only thing that 'HP' means. All attacks do little to no physical harm until the one that does: health and injury are a random walk on a line. More damaging attacks are both more likely to kill, and more likely to cause successive attacks to kill. And maimings, debilitating wounds, and true life-or-death situations cannot occur (presumably for one of the other four reasons above).

I don't think any of these solutions are very good. #1 is perhaps the most palatable, especially if it starts out hiding behind #3 as so seems more adequate once revealed.

Final thoughts

There's no good way to conclude because when it comes to 'what hit points mean' there's no conclusion to reach, no advice to give – hence the thousands or possibly millions of times something like this has been written or said before. These days I'm personally drawn to the idea of systems designed with something less abstract than hit points, as a way of making play experience more immersive, but, well, I think most players, most of the time, still like HP.