Hit Point Hate

ANY UPDATES ARE AT THE BOTTOM (THERE ARE NOW TWO!)

Taylor Lane, a pretentious pronouner who oddly leaves his improper pronouns out of his bio and just assumes you'll somehow know specifically how you are expected to reinforce his delusions (don't worry, he'll correct you), doesn't like hit points for reasons that are as undefined as he would like you to believe his gender is.

I made the mistake of assuming he was initiating or even interested in a discussion, asking some very simple questions, and while waiting for him to fail to respond noticed that he had shilled a few things to someone else more...accepting of his disingenuous narrative. A pair of PDFs that, in Taylor's opinion, would provide viable alternatives to the tried-and-true (and ubiquitous) hit point mechanic that has weathered the decades.

Given that the free one—DiceDream 2nd Edition—is a disjointed, derivative dumpster fire that largely consists of mechanics lifted from other games and chaotically mashed together, there's no way in hell I'm going to pay even the pittance of a dollar to bear witness to yet more ill-conceived incompetence. I've almost got a review for DD2E done (spoiler alert: it's about as bad as Troika, albeit for different reasons), but this post is just a response to Taylor's nonversation.

"Almost every..."

I asked Taylor in which games would hit points by his metrics be considered "good", and days later still haven't received a response.

Personally, what makes a hit point system bad—from a narrative sense, anyway—is a combination of how they are defined, and how other mechanics interact with them, such as damage and—more importantly—recovery.

I think hit points have always been ill-defined as a combination of varying, sometimes unrelated factors: injury, fatigue, luck, combat prowess, etc, but then healing magic can top you off regardless. Also the fact that hit points in older editions recovered quite slowly. Both of those imply that it's pure injury, but then you have 5th Edition's full-heal-on-a-nap.

The solution is to simply redefine and, perhaps, modify them. In Dungeons & Delvers you have two hit point pools: Wound Points and Vitality Points.

Wound Points are your "meat points". They recover slowly and can be restored via magic and mending potions. Vitality Points on the other hand better represent fatigue, combat experience, perhaps luck: they recover quickly, and can be restored by vigor potions, as well as some magical effects like the cleric's Invigorating Word and bard Songs (and I think fighters have a Second Wind type ability).

In addition, some attacks only work when you suffer Wound Point damage. For example, if a giant spider bites you, it can only envenom you if you suffer WP damage as part of the attack. An ogre trying to club you can only knock you on your ass if he deals WP damage: otherwise the attack doesn't sufficiently connect.

It's still abstract, though less so than traditional D&D, and resolves a number of issues I had with hit points.

While hit points might lack an intrinsic tactical depth—Taylor doesn't explain what he means—they can inform your strategies and actions; regardless of hit point values, smart players will just do whatever they can to attain and maintain an edge, maximize harm against the enemy, and mitigate harm to themselves.

But, if for whatever reason you find yourself losing (ie, hit points are getting low) you can run away. Or fall back, resort to ranged attacks. Force other characters to the frontline if you're particularly desperate. Maybe you use some spells and/or items that you were hoping to save (especially the limited-or-one-use stuff), down some potions to enhance yourself in some way.

If you were already low on hit points, you might try other methods to avoid conflict, make sacrifices you otherwise wouldn't in order to stay alive.

Of course any lack of tactical depth doesn't make hit points "bad". They do what they were intended to do, and do so quickly and easily with only a bit of narrative fuss. At worst it means they aren't as potentially as interesting as Taylor thinks they ought to be.

Would adding whatever he considers to be tactical depth make them more interesting? More useful? Cause players to be more careful, in case losing a set amount imposed penalties or debilitating conditions? Would it overcomplicate the game, demanding more effort with inadequate payoff? 

Who knows, because Taylor provides no examples, and his free alternative is worse.

No explanation of what he means by "broader play", but your character's life being on the line sounds like a good enough motivation.

The scenario he proposes to support his claim is pretty bizarre: 30 goblins, 10th-level party, and healing in "some form is available". He doesn't specify how much healing, the state of the characters, how many there are, the environment, or even what edition is at play (which would determine how much healing is available, what it does, goblin HP, damage, etc).

A fight against four fully capable 10th-level characters? Goblins clumped together? I suppose it would be boring, as a wizard or cleric in any edition could just drop an area effect attack and obliterate them. Is that all that's in the area/dungeon? Is this how the GM typically does things? Nothing wrong with an easy encounter, but if this is standard fare then, yeah, that'll get boring pretty quick.

Are they in a cave, and the party managed to bottleneck the goblins? Well, if all the goblins are doing is marching forward and getting cut down one or two at a time, then unless there's some sort of surprise in store—like, say, an ogre coming to help, dragon waking up, and/or a goblin shaman with powerful magic—that could be fairly boring, too.

But then, if the players were smart and maneuvered the goblins into such a situation, good on them (but bad on the DM if they are just mindlessly marching towards the slaughter without good reason).

Now, if the goblins are emerging from crevices and tunnels from the walls, bombarding the party with their own brand of explosives and poisoned arrows, with what goblins consider to be warriors swarming afterwards to overwhelm survivors, pulling them to the ground, disarming and binding them before hauling them off to a sinister fate?

Waaay more interesting, and has fuck all to do with hit points and hit point mechanics. It's because of this that I can infer Taylor is dishonest, uninteresting, and incompetent. Whatever games he might run are boring because he sucks at running the game, and mistakenly believes that it's the fault of the mechanics, and if they were different people would somehow enjoy his games.

Or he's a narcissist that thinks he's a game designer because he took mechanics from other games and just mashed them together, and came up with a hit point-esque mechanic that is somehow worse than the usual fare (which I'll describe in a bit).

"We know", implying that it's an objective truth. That whether a fight is entertaining or boring depends entirely on the mechanics used to determine your character's general state of being able to act. As if a "boring" fight would be exciting if your hit points could be employed tactically, whatever that means.

Again, I think this is projection on Taylor's part: he is boring (which would explain his need to pretend to be neither a man nor woman), and he lacks the skill and talent to entertain. It's not his fault, but hit points! So buy his incomplete hipster trash game, which has hit points, but they are renamed and make even less sense.

Yep, he said it. Check out the Twitter thread for yourself. He actually thinks adding and subtracting at best double-digit numbers from another likely-also-double-digest number involves a "huge amount of math". How pathetically retarded do you have to be to make this claim, that addition and subtraction is a "huge amount of math".

It's not algebra. It doesn't involve operator precedence. It's just addition and subtraction. My preteen kids have no problem tracking what are effectively two hit point pools (Wound Points and Vitality Points), in a system that employs armor-as-Damage Resistance and weapons and abilities that mitigate or ignore Damage Resistance.

Even better? Some things only affect Wound Points, others only Vitality Points. But no, do tell me how a single point pool with no DR or any other complications is a huuuge amount of math. I had stoner friends in my teens that had no trouble doing this shit, even while high (though they could never remember any of the Warhammer 40,000 rules).

Also, I've never lost track of hit points, and never known anyone that has, because we use this revolutionary set of tools called pencil and paper. You just write a number on it that represents your current hit point value, and then when you take damage or recover any, you just write a new number down, or erase the old one and replace it with the new one.

You can also do this on the exact same device that you used to produce your insipid tweets. There might even be an app for that explicit purpose.

No, we aren't still arguing. The book tells you what they represent. Beyond healing magic always being able to restore lost hit points it's incredibly easy to understand, and I just have to point out that Taylor doesn't bother to state what the "three common answers" are, and explain how they don't answer the question very well.

As with everyone else, he just says something, doesn't support it, and either hopes or assumes everyone will simply agree for some reason.

Nothing was concluded. Taylor made several unsupported claims and admitted that he's too retarded to perform basic math or write notes. What's even more hilarious is that for all his drivel about how "objectively" bad hit points are, his pitch is even worse.

In Taylor's incomplete hipster trash game, you have Exhaustion, which oddly represents both fatigue and injury. It starts at 0, and you die at 21+ points. You generally suffer 1-4 damage at a time, heal some during resting, and heal all of it, immediately, upon exiting a dungeon.

Here's all of the "rules" pertaining to Exhaustion:

PDF is free, so you can see for yourself, but that's all you get in one column of a landscape page. There isn't even any creative commons art eating up the vast white space underneath.

Now, the only other way to gain Exhaustion is entirely random: the GM rolls a "Time Die" whenever he feels like it, or every time you make an ability check, regardless of how much time passed between the last time the die was rolled. The Time Die starts at a d4, and "steps up" depending on what you roll. Here's that table:

When the die steps up you gain 1 Exhaustion, and it doesn't matter what you're doing (or if you're doing anything at all), how long the task takes, how hard you've been pushing yourself, when the last time the die stepped up, or even your Constitution score/modifier. And remember: at 21+ Exhaustion you immediately die.

This means that, at 20 Exhaustion, if you stop to let the rogue spend a minute picking a lock? Everyone could die simultaneously. You also die faster if you're carrying heavy stuff, because that's how it works in real life, right? You don't let go of the object because you just can't carry it anymore, stop to rest because you literally cannot go on.

No, you die.

Every time, and you cannot be resuscitated. 

But, if you can make it to the surface? The moment you step out of the dungeon's entrance you go from whatever to 0. Suddenly, magically, immediately all damage vanishes, and you're fully refreshed, ready to turn around and go right back in, with no problems whatsoever.

And this happens every time, with no limits. So you could go in, fight some stuff, get a bunch of Exhaustion, but then walk out to fully recover and then walk right back in.

All that absurdity aside, where's the tactical depth? Taylor's got issues with—among many other things—hit points, so why not develop a system that addresses them? In DD2E combat is so abstract that position, area of effect, and targeting doesn't matter: you just try and bullshit as many +1's as you can, roll two dice, compare the results, randomly roll events that you have absolutely no control over, and repeat.

You can't do anything to shield your friends. Retreat so someone can avoid getting hit. Hang back and pepper enemies with ranged weapons from a safe distance. You can feasibly set traps, but all it does is give you +1 to your general combat die. You also can't focus on a specific enemy, not that it matters a whole lot because even having magical powers just gives them +1 on their combat die against yours.

Hit points do the job adequately. They could stand to be tweaked a bit, but are otherwise incredibly simple and straightforward, which is great for a game perspective, especially when you have multiple characters and creatures that need to be tracked simultaneously. The only thing objectively bad is Taylor's pathetic attempt to fix what isn't really broken.

HERE'S THE UPDATES

Jacob Blaustein linked this post to reddit and Taylor got around to noticing it:

I'm not "into" gender--that's merely projection on Taylor's part--I'm just not into reinforcing delusion. But, as mentioned at the top I responded to his tweets directly. He refused to respond. I even waited several days in case he was, I don't know, "too busy" writing other insipid tweets, or engaging in what he considers to be game design.

I don't believe that Taylor has an issue with not being alerted to this post immediately. Well, not because he ever had any intention--or ability--to explain how, say, simple subtraction is a "huge amount of math" (though I am still willing to entertain an actual conversation), but because he couldn't milk it for attention and sympathy sooner.

Or, perhaps it's like how Cam Banks tweeted out some lies a few days ago in order to get attention for his Kickstarter, Taylor was hoping to get more eyes on his game jam. In any case, I suppose when I finish reviewing his incomplete trash game I'll be sure to let him know right away.

According to Pundit, a single blog post means that the subject is apparently living in your head rent-free. What does at least two mean, then? What about videos? I don't think Pundit honestly believes this, as people, including him, will do response posts and videos all the time. He's just disingenuously demonstrating token support, letting Taylor know that he's got his back, as Taylor's particular brand of mental illness currently has use.

And the emotionally frail moron opens with a false dichotomy. Neither are true, but I'm not sure if he knows this. I'm not sure if Taylor is being disingenuous because he knows it's easy to dupe other emotionally frail morons into at least pretending to pity him (and he craves the attention and support), or if he honestly cannot fathom a world where he is disliked due to his personality, so just chalks it up to a dislike of "queers".

Probably a mix of both, but I think he is being disingenuous when he suggests that one of the two unsupported possibilities is that I'm always angry and don't like queer people--implying that it's one big blob, when in fact there's an incredible amount of nuance underneath that umbrella--and that I cannot be angry all the time or dislike queers. No, it must be both, because somehow one arbitrarily confirms the other.

He then commits one final fallacy by stating that it's unclear, but you could clear it up by reading the first five posts (guessing he just didn't) and seeing if they're all angry, implying that if they are all angry (they aren't), that the only conclusion one could draw (solely because he says so) is that I must be both angry and hate queers, since it was either that or Taylor was just queer "on my dash", whatever the fuck that means.

This is partly because in Taylor's warped mind, he intentionally conflates dislike or disagreement with hatred and anger. This is necessary for him, because then whenever he says something stupid and gets flak for it, he can claim that someone is just being angry or hateful (even if they are merely disagreeing with him), and use that as an excuse to dismiss what they are saying (as if he could provide any sort of counter), if he even bothers to interact with them at all.

Anyway, should get that Dice Dream review up in the next day or two.

ANOTHER UPDATE (12/22/2022)

Nearly a year later, Taylor Lane is still a butthurt, mentally ill, attention-starved narcissist:

He doesn't provide a link because he's lying: pronouns are mentioned in the first sentence, and way later I make a comment about him being so boring that he has to pretend to be neither male nor female. He also pretends that it was "funny", despite still obsessing over it. It's not the only way that he lies to himself in an effort to cope with his miserable existence.

Pundit is still disingenuously defending his purse puppy investment:

This is the sort of behavior I expect from emotionally frail woke retards. I remember reviewing Inverse World and people ignored the mountain of more noteworthy issues and kept focusing on the part where I brought up the page dimensions and the absurd amount of margin space. Anything to avoid confronting actual issues, like Taylor's retarded take on hit points or his vapidware trash game.

And I don't know how to make it any clearer: Taylor is a pronouner. He is mentally ill in that he thinks he is neither gender, and so wants you to refer to him using them/they, which is grammatically incorrect. He doesn't mention this in his bio (he used to pretend to be agender, but that's gone). If you refer to him as, well, him, or he, he will attempt to "correct" you.

So, to address Pundit's intentionally misleading "points":

1. Taylor is an alphabet person (so long as he still believes he is neither gender).

2. Nothing in my post had anything to do with Taylor being "cool" with the OSR.

3. Nothing in my post described Taylor's behavior as a "trick".

As with Pundit pretending that a single post is "living in someone's head rent-free" (which I find funny because Taylor still thinks about this post, nearly a year later), Taylor refers to a detailed analysis of his points as a "tantrum" in a dishonest effort to discredit it.

Of course, an attention-starved narcissist would be up for an entire conversation about his mental illness. A lot easier on the ego than addressing your retarded takes on hit points, or your hilariously bad vapidware trash game.

This blog is not private, as anyone can see it. Taylor didn't post a link because he knew that, again, if people saw it would immediately know he was lying.