Theory

Dying from the 1 HP Dragon

How does life and death work in this game without hit points?

It's all life, death, and taxes.

If you've read The 1 HP Dragon, you know enemies in my game have exactly one hit point, which means if you manage to get through their defenses, you kill them. It makes combat quick and lethal for npcs, but what about the players?

Others have talked at length about this, so before I tell you about life and death in my drafts, Whisker Kings and Troubleshoot, let me pay my taxes and share what others have said.

The Problem with HP by Three Witches RPG. This is a survey of different subsystems. It's nowhere close to complete—that would be impossible, but what an endeavor all the same. Conveniently, it doesn't include the one I'm sharing today.

HP-Less System - 'Staking' by The Nothic's Eye. This was an influential blogpost for me. In addition to flattening conventional hit points and not replacing it with health trackers, spirals, and other bric-a-brac, it plugs "health" into thematic things like food, comfort, and community.

Let's Talk about Meat Points by To Be Resolved. This is another survey of different systems with a focus on how some games reject or embrace the conventional idea behind hit points. It also calls out a number of common alternatives, like wounds, tracks, and timers.

There are also a countless number of games that have influenced me. Here's the quick list of game influences:

Trophy Gold/Dark. The push-your-luck mechanic where death becomes increasingly more likely is exactly what my system does with a few tweaks.
Mothership. There's this incredible mechanic in Mothership where a character's fate is decided by a 1d6 under a cup. When someone checks on their downed teammate, the cup is lifted to see the final result.
Outgunned. This action game has an elegant and punchy death mechanic modeled after Russian Roulette. Roll 1d6, if the result isn't a one, you cheat death, but have to add another "bullet" and increase your odds for next time. My system borrows this mechanic without the health-like grit system.

Death by a 1 HP Dragon.

In Whisker Kings and Troubleshoot, characters have a thing called Doom. There's no such thing as death by a thousand cuts in these games. Every swing of a letter opener or blast from a raygun can kill.

Introducing the character's doom.

In Whisker Kings and Troubleshoot, players roll for their actions when there's a risk of escalation or bodily harm. It's a slightly broader trigger compared to games like Into the Odd and Cairn. Doom is a consequence of a failed roll—a replacement for conditions, attribute, or hit point loss.

When a character's action risks escalation or doom, players roll. I won't get into the specifics of Whisker Kings or Troubleshoot's mechanics. All you need to know is that the result is pass/fail. If their action "fails" that means the player character gets what's coming to them—escalation or doom.

Escalation is what most hazards impose—a loss of player agency by either worsening the situation, burning resources, or creating new challenges. In classic fantasy, this is getting disarmed, cowed, or pinned by a dragon.
Doom is what escalation turns into and what dangerous foes always threaten players with. If a player fails their action roll, and the result is doom, they make a doom roll. In classic fantasy, this is getting slashed or torched by a dragon.

The doom roll is pretty simple. Roll 1d6. A doom roll equal to or lower than the character's doom score downs them. Which means they're probably dead. If they roll above their doom score, they survive but suffer escalation.

Doom always starts at 1. It can never go below 1. The max doom a PC can accumulate is 5. That means they always have a small chance of dying or a small chance of living. Every time they survive a doom roll, their score increases by 1.

Let's look at the simple math of the Doom Die:

Doom Score	Odds
1	1-in-6 or 16.57%
2	2-in-6 or 33.33%
3	3-in-6 or 50.00%
4	4-in-6 or 66.66%
5	5-in-6 or 83.33%

As you can see, it's easy math. The more they survive the less likely they'll survive again. Even at just one doom, 16% is still high enough to make every threat meaningful. It also means that death is never entirely certain. There's always a chance the player character will cheat death.

What does it mean to be downed?

Getting downed means a character is out of action. They're lying there, unconscious, maimed, or dead. Once that happens, the player makes a final roll under a cup. No one can check the results of the roll unless another character comes to their aid, everyone is downed, or one day passes.

This mechanic is ripped straight from Mothership by Sean McCoy and Tuesday Knight Games. It's a very thematic mechanic and I'm stealing it. Sean won't mind.

The range of results changes depending on the game, but most of the results are exactly what you'd expect: dead, extinguished, expired, gone.

Here's the latest version for Whisker Kings:

Death Roll	Results
1	Dead. They are gone.
2	Dying. Last words can be spoken.
3	Failing. Unconcious. Roll again tomorrow.
4	Fading. Stumbling. Dead in 1d4 watches.
5	Maimed. Stumbling. Replace a detail in Winter.
6	Scarred. Modify one detail in Winter.

As you can tell, it's still possible to survive a doom roll, and do so in dramatic fashion. I wanted all of the tropes in fiction—dying, last words, staggering away with a mortal wound, or waking up barely alive a day later.

What's important about this system is that it stretches out the process giving players a sliver of hope with every roll and reveal. It's quick but not so quick that characters feel like fruit flies. In some games, that would be counter to the play style, but I want players to grow attached to their characters almost as much as their characters in games like D&D, even if they can die at a moment's notice.

Recovery from the 1 HP Dragon.

This is where my two games diverge. Whisker Kings is a kind of historical epic where mice, rats, and frogs build up a community over generations. That game has a yearly cycle where characters go on adventures in the Spring, Summer, and Fall for food and resources before returning home and licking their wounds.

In Troubleshoot, adventuring is more episodic with player characters recovering on their ship between adventures. In that game, the story is whatever is being played that week—you're probably not thinking about what happened last month.

The commonality between the two playtests is that recovery requires thematic resources. In Whisker Kings, characters need food and shelter so they don't starve in the Winter or die from the elements. It's the entire reason they go on adventures—to pilfer cheese from cellars (mega-dungeons), create a trade route for acorns, or build a new home in a forge or overturned Model T. In Troubleshoot, characters need credits to pay for power, fuel, rent, and oxygen. They freelance across the galaxy, collecting pay from corporations, governments, and trade unions.

How do you lower your doom score?

During downtime, with sufficient resources, players roll 1d6. They can never go below 1 doom score—if they did, they'd have 2 hit points and we can't have that!

If they roll under the doom score, they remove all but one doom.
If they roll over the doom score, they lower doom by one.

How do the two systems diverge further?

Whisker Kings has aging, so after three years of adventuring, characters start to decline. They can no longer lower their doom score and instead have to roll doom to see if they die of old age. Theoretically, they can live a long time, but every year their odds of surviving decrease until eventually their odds of dying are 5-in-6. In contrast, Troubleshoot does not have aging mechanics, so recovery is the same every time until eventually something gets 'em.

Variations of the Doom Roll

Once death is theoretically one bad die roll away, I noticed there were countless permutations to play with. The following are just a few examples:

Growing Doom. In this variation, you roll a number of dice equal to your doom score. So long as none of the dice result in 1, you live to fight another day (but increase your score by 1, as usual).

Why I like it: Players love rolling a fistful of dice, and this system makes the growing sense of doom especially tangible. Despite that feeling of escalation, the likelihood of dying increases gradually with six dice posing just 66.51%.

Why I'm not using it: In my current playtests, rolling more dice is always a good thing—I like giving players a reliable expectation like that to fall back on. This sub-system would introduce an instance where the opposite is true.

Shrinking Hope. Think of this as the exact opposite of growing doom. You start with six dice and every time you survive the doom roll, you roll with one fewer die. So long as your roll produces a success, you live.

Why I like it: You can modify the odds by deciding what "success" is. It can be a single number, a range of numbers, or a combine value. It also has good symmetry with systems where rolling lots of dice = good.

Why I'm not using it: Those dice look a lot like hit points with extra steps, and I'm determined to have my game meet different arbitrary standards for "no-hp."

Thoughts on dying without HP.

The third part in this long and impromptu series will be my current iteration of combat. Hopefully with a basic markdown file that lays out Whisker Kings and Troubleshoot for others to bash their head against.

It took me two years of playtests to share this update, so don't expect it anytime soon. Until then, I'd love to hear from everyone else what they're doing with alternative combat systems. As you can see, my system's pretty straightforward, and not all that new, and I like it that way, but I want to see other clever ideas.

If you want to read other thoughts in this same vein, check out my links below. Until then, I'll keep exploring.