Thoughts about Hits in Diceless Combat

Audio

Y'all know I love Skörne and Any Planet is Earth cause they understand the underlying logic behind Hit Points and Attack Rolls and stuff. I've talked about it forever ago.

The other day Sam posted about Hits / Conditions dilemmas and it got me thinking a bit. I'm doing this old timey thing from fabled G+ days where I'm just juggling ideas and pinging other posts in the hopes of sparking more conversations about a game thing I like.

The reason I like Hits is that I run gritty games but I'm really soft: I like to run games as an impartial referee as much as I can, with worlds to explore and PCs as inhabitants rather than larger-than-life heroes. Yet if I'm running entirely diceless without hits, or if the game I'm running has a long, involved character generation, it is harder to not "protagonistify" the PCs, especially after a few sessions of seeing them do stuff. Pattern-seeking brain and all that.

So my ability to empathize with characters in the fiction is preventing me from running the game in a way that is most true to the GMing principles I want to keep to maintain a certain sense of verisimilitude, danger, and groundedness to the action, especially to violence.

Because of this, having an empirical (probably not the right word) measure of a character’s ability to withstand punishment before death means I can be very brutal in how I run my encounters without worrying about the lethality not being telegraphed enough.
I know that technically as long as you state the risks before a roll, you can get away with a pc being one dice away from death feeling fair (cf. 24XX, Kontextspiel d6), which is how I tend to roll most games. Dice though add an element of gambling that can make the game less about choices/consequences and more about invoking luck (or bad luck when one fails). Diceless violence also has a much more visceral feel and delicious flow that I regularly miss in more RNG-heavy procedures.

When I want Diceless and Gritty it’s harder to make it feel fair if I’m just describing a turn of combat and someone just goes from ok to injured or maimed or dead based on just the conversation, with no procedure buffer. It’s doable but it puts a lot more on the GM and can be pretty stressful for me.

Considering the above, Hits (and I mean Hits ala APIE/Skorne, though it applies to things like normal-type level OD&D, Classic Traveller's way of handling damage, Electric Bastionland etc) keep me in check by providing a neutral framework that isn't going to let pesky feelings about the characters get in the way. This way I can empathize and feel for the cool PCs that survive 3-4 sessions and start to become more real, AND have a an uncaring world in which they can have intense adventures in.