Core D&D part 1

I've never been much a fan of the cruftiness that came along with D&D, even from the beginning; there were too many superfluous bits that handled similar situations with sometimes wildly different mechanics. Of course, one of the virtues of our game is its extreme modularity, as many parts of it are almost cordoned off from each other, allowing people to nip, tuck, pluck, place, and bolt on a myriad of options without upsetting the core game too much. There's something to be said, however, about having that core game be super small and wound tight, so without further ado, ill see if i cant suss out exactly where that beating heart lies.

The 'core mechanics' of DnD are generally agreed to be the 6 attributes, hitpoints, armor class, hit dice, levels, classes, experience points, gold, saves, to-hit bonus, and to a lesser extent alignment. When looking at how the game usually is played (at least, in the OSR-style hobo rags-to- treasured riches), the majority of the rules tend to focus on the parts where PCs have the most to lose, namely combat and exploration. In our core loop, the rules are there to simplify the complex situations of combat et al into a relatively straightforward, abstract scenario; two sides face off, their skills are tested, the results are subtracted from hitpoints, and play continue until one side turns tail and skidaddles.

Hit points, then, without getting into the old 'its luck/skill/close misses/etc' bugbear, is a measure of how long any character can stay in a fight. I quite like this, as its a very straightforward measurement that even young ones will understand: high number safe and good, low number dangerous and bad. Looking at the rest of the mechanics, many of them tend to be variations on that theme: AC measures ability to dodge/soak a hit, to-hit bonus makes things easier to hit, hit dice express how many hit points something has, etc. All this leads me to believe that most of the core mechanics can be folded into hit points without too much of a fuss mechanics-wise.

At first glance, hit dice is an easy one to chop out, as it's basically just bundles of hitpoints that, depending on rules and DMs, are rolled for randomization at the start of the game or for every combat session. AC is a bit tougher, since its one of the primary ways of differentiating character classes and is usually the one that gets modified by the equipment characters are using. If I'm treating damage as 'negative' hit points, then the to-hit bonus could be folded into damage, though that has the same issues that AC had, since its also tied to class and class advancement.

Interestingly enough, the more things I try to excise, the more and more interconnected the core of D&D shows itself to be. I still agree with the point that D&D is modular, but the internal balance of the rules seem to rely on to-hit bonuses, character classes, armor classes, saves being present, which i guess makes sense; that is, after all, the fulcrum(s) that the game was built around. Still, as my pappy used to say, no golden calf shall go unslaughtered; with a heavy heart,  i must carve the fat out and replace it with a new system centered around our favored hit-points.

In the next post, I'll go into how important class is to how D&D handles combat and what needs to change in order to get things firmly connected to hitpoints.