What would an OSR-style game look like without hit points (or wounds, or stress, or ruin, or any other similarly abstract resource)? What about without stats? I’ve been thinking about these questions because abstract ideas like hit points or stats are difficult to interact with within the fiction. And focusing on interacting with the fiction, rather than the numbers on your character sheet, is often cited as a component of OSR-style play.

What does it mean to interact with having 3 out of 10 hit points remaining? Or to interact with a Strength of 15? There’s a translation that has to occur to figure out what that is in the fiction. It’s not a terribly difficult translation, but it’s there nonetheless. So for this thought experiment, let’s assume we want to directly interact with fictional characteristics like “an arrow embedded in your shoulder” or “rippling with muscles”, while at the same time having clear mechanical effects for these characteristics. And we want to do it OSR-style, however ill-defined that may be. What might that look like?

We can look to the way games like Blades in the Dark and Thirsty Sword Lesbians use conditions to get one piece of the puzzle. Conditions are generally descriptions of bad things you are suffering from like “shot in the leg,” “drunk,” or “embarrassed”. Sometimes, like Harm in BitD, they are freeform, other times, like Conditions in TSL, they are a specific list. They also have some sort of mechanical effect, in addition to their narrative effects. Giving you a minus to your rolls, reducing the magnitude of your effects, reducing the size of your dice pool, etc.

What about no stats? Again, lots of great examples here, such as “Roll with the Questions” from Pasión de las Pasiones, or skills from Trophy (as just one of many examples of games that use a list of descriptive words as your skills).

But what about that impossible to define OSR vibe? One of the things I really enjoy in an OSR game is the fear, the sweat (my new favorite term), that comes whenever the dice get rolled. I love the way damage works in games descended from Into the Odd. In particular, I love the way Critical Damage works, where when you take damage to your Strength score, you have to make a Strength Saving Throw, or suffer Critical Damage (which knocks you out of the fight, and is fatal if not tended to by your allies). Even a minor blow, a single point of strength damage, can take you out if you’re unlucky! Getting hurt is always risky and always scary. That feels very OSR to me. As an aside, the other thing I like about Critical Damage is that it’s high consequence, but usually doesn’t mean instant death as long as your allies are able to tend to your wounds before you expire.

Can I just squish Conditions and Critical Damage together and get everything I love about the Into the Odd Critical Damage roll without needing HP or a Strength score? I think yes! Here is a sketch of how this might work for a game I’m working on.

Conditions

Conditions are negative, ongoing effects like “shot in the leg,” “drunk,” “panicked,” etc. Conditions persist until they are removed by narrative means, such as receiving medical attention for a physical injury or finding a safe place to have someone help to calm you down if you are panicking.

Conditions impose -1d6 to dice rolls (note: this is from a d6 dice pool game, but this can be easily adjusted to whatever dice system your game uses) when they would impede the action you are performing. (If a condition would make the action impossible, you simply can’t do it.)

Typically, characters receive conditions as a result of rolling dice, but the GM may also assign conditions when it makes sense in the narrative.

Critical Damage

When you receive a new condition, roll a d6. If you roll equal to or under your number of conditions, you suffer Critical Damage.

Critical Damage is an amplified effect of the triggering condition that takes you out of action until you receive help. A physical injury might knock you out and leave you bleeding. Fear might cause you to flee in an uncontrolled panic. Embarrassment might result in you being completely unable to engage in the current social situation.

If you are not tended to within an hour or so, the Critical Damage becomes catastrophic. With a physical injury, this typically results in the character’s death, but other types of Critical Damage could result in your character fleeing forever, giving up the adventuring life and getting a real job, or otherwise being retired from play.

The GM may choose not to require a Critical Damage roll when a character receives a condition if it doesn’t make sense narratively: for example, a condition that came on slowly, or a condition where it doesn’t make sense for the condition to have a risk of knocking the character out of action.

GM Tip: keep a notecard with a list of each character’s current conditions.

Variations on Critical Damage

For a slightly more resilient characters, you can change the roll to “If you roll equal to or under your number of conditions, you suffer Critical Damage.” This means that the first condition you receive can’t trigger Critical Damage.

For a system that allows your characters to grow more resilient over time, or some characters to be more resilient than others, you can compare the number of Conditions to some other aspect of the character. For example, the game I’m working on has another characteristic called Cores, and the Critical Damage roll looks like this:

“When you receive a new Condition, if your number of Conditions exceeds your number of Cores, roll a d6. If you roll equal to or under the amount by which your number of conditions exceeds your number of cores, you suffer Critical Damage.”

The language gets a little clunky, but so far it’s felt good to have characters that have a clearer idea of who they are (by having more Cores) more likely to be able to find the will to power through their injuries rather than collapse.

Sparked my curiosity