Hit points verses fatigue help

[Lameth]

So in gurps hit points are based off of ST and fatigue off of health. Has anyone ever adjusted this or move it around? I have a player that thinks hit points and fatigue should both be based off a persons health, with the the logic that both things are based on health of the person. While I have another player that thinks hit points should be off health, and fatigue off strength.

Thoughts? What have you done different ?

[Dalzig]

Do your players come with a background in other RPGs? HP in a game like D&D is often described as more than injury. Luck, morale, energy, divine protection... usually just about anything except actually getting injured.

GURPS HP is straight up you are now bruised, broken, and/or have lost blood. It is usually a literal interpretation of how many holes can be poked in you before you die.

I don't really see HP being based off of HT. Think of a marathon runner. Fit but thin. Lowish ST but high HT. They just don't have the meat on their bones to really sustain major amounts of injury. When they do, they tend to spring back fast thanks to their fitness.

[cdru]

Basing HP on HT wouldn't make sense with many animals. A rabbit is easier to kill than a human and more vulnerable to poison, but this doesn't mean that rabbits have low stamina and disease resistance. Elephants are really hard to kill or poison, but this doesn't mean that they are practically immune to fatigue and sickness

GURPS HP indicates mass, and high strength usually means high mass. HP loss is straight physical damage and isn't related to skill, luck, energy and other things

[Celjabba]

In 3e , it was ST - fp and HT - hp. (with the reverse a common houserule and an official alternative in Compendium I)
4e switched those:
ST = mass = hp
HT = fitness = fp

Basing hp on HT make some sense but also have a double effect regarding injuries: low HT is double bad; high HT is double good.
And you need split HT rules for small and huge creatures. (unless you want all rat dying of sickness within a day, while near-immortal 500 years old elephants swim in lake Anthrax).
Since most creatures get more hp and more st as they get bigger, linking the 2 stats avoided split stats in most cases.

Basing fp on ST had a lot of small consequences:
-it make some build difficult (like the above marathon runner),
-small critters couldn't run across a field without passing out from exhaustion.
A t-rex would only need to stop halfway to Asia. Likewise, this was solved with split stats.
-all 3e mages were bodybuilder, (if not centaur).

Edit : Gollum said it better.

[Gollum]

In the third edition of GURPS, Hit points were based on HT and fatigue points were based on ST. So, a strong man was very resistant to fatigue while an healthy man was very resistant to wounds.

Of course, they were also advantages and disadvantages to fine tune things so that you can have a strong but not resistant to fatigue man and vice versa...

Then, an optional rule proposed to change that and to base Hit Points on ST and Fatigue points on HT. I don't know if it was its first publication, but that optional rule appeared in GURPS Compendium (written by Sean Punch, allias Kromm).

The main goal of this rule was to correct the problem of little and big creatures.

Take, for instance, the comparison between a rat and an elephant. A healthy rat, and an old and sickly elephant*. The rat is very small. One sword strike will probably cut it in half and kill it, while the elephant is very big, and one sword strike will only wound it, and just a bit. Thus, the elephant is supposed to have much more hit points than the rat. But the very healthy rat as a high HT (let's say 14) while the elephant, sickly, has a low HT (let's say only 8). So the rat has a much higher HT than the elephant, and before taking appropriate advantages and disadvantages, the rat has much more hit points.

In the third edition, things like that were corrected with a slash ("/").

Our elephant would have had HT 8/50 while our rat would have had HT 14/2. The first number, before the slash, gave the HT score, to roll against, and the second one, the hit points.

Besides, our rat is very healthy and so, it is supposed to be able to do a lot of things before becoming fatigued (walking, swimming and running during hours, being able to miss a lot of hours of sleep). Our elephant, to the contrary, is supposed to be sickly and to be fatigued very fast. But here again, our rat has a very low ST (let's say 2), while our elephant has a very high ST (around 300**).

Here again, things were corrected with a slash. Our sickly elephant would have had ST 300/8 while our rat would have had ST 2/14.

That makes things not really easy to use. Almost every creatures with a size different from humans (and a lot of human characters too!), had two number for their ST and HT ... Which is why the optional Compendium's rule became the official rule in the fourth edition.

And it makes sense: muscles take place and a very strong guy, like Conan the Barbarian, has necessarily a huge bulk; he will resist a lot of blows before falling down. While a thin and feeble guy will fall down with only one or two good punches to the stomach ...

Edit
Celjabba wrote his post at the same time as I posted mine. Sorry for the repetitions.

_____

* This example is mine. But I think it is very clear.
** In the third edition, the ST didn't yet follow a quadratic curve.

[Lameth]

That all makes sense

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Lameth

So in gurps hit points are based off of ST and fatigue off of health. Has anyone ever adjusted this or move it around? I have a player that thinks hit points and fatigue should both be based off a persons health, with the the logic that both things are based on health of the person. While I have another player that thinks hit points should be off health, and fatigue off strength.

Thoughts? What have you done different ?

Originally hit points were based on Health, and fatigue off strength, but there's a reason why they changed it. Weight lifters do not make the best long distance runners, and it helped make superstrong characters more worthwhile if they could take a punch as well as deliver one.

[Flyndaran]

Except that health almost always coincides with endurance, and strength with bulk and resistance to penetrative damage. (The most common use of Hit Points is violent combat after all.)

IQ is a massive everything mental stat. I understand the hassle if you follow the rule that buying down sub-traits takes up Disadvantage "space".

[Gef]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

Yeah, it doesn't seem right that you can buy-up FP/HP/Will/Perc without it counting against disadvantage limits, but you can't buy it down...

I'd prefer to get around that by buying it using a limitations system, like IQ +1 (no Will -25% no Perception -25%) and that way it costs you 10 points to buy up the IQ without having to take 10 points of disadvantages to keep Perc/Will the same.

Come to think of it... doing that is probably better than buying Magery once you have the Magery required to cast all spells...

IQ +1 (Per -1 for -5%, Will -1 for -5%) for 18 points isn't much of a bargain.

IQ +4 (Per -4 for -20%, Will -4 for -20%) for 48 looks better for certain concepts, like that mage, but you're basically paying a 20% surcharge for end-running the rules.

IQ +5 (Per -5 for -20% but capped at net discount 20 points, likewise for Will) is needlessly shafting yourself, paying for that 5th level of IQ at full price without getting the Per or Will with it.

The mechanic that applies is "Temporary" Disadvantage: Whenever you use the +4 IQ, you get -4 Per and -4 Will along with it.

[Stormcrow]

If you—the GM—don't like lowered derived traits counting against the disadvantage limit, declare that they don't. I promise not to tell the Game Police.