Home » Ancient Posts » Hit Points as Spell Points and the 15 Minute Adventuring Day    
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AndreasDavour

Like Robert I've seen it in 4th ed. where it's supposed not to exist any longer. It's a mentality thing, but also a thing where the DM and players don't think outside the box of a M-U being a spellslinger only, and not a mystic and a scholar as well.

I do think using "Hit Points" work well for magic. In M20 everyone had the same dice for HP, so the fact that the Wizard uses it for spells made him just so much weaker in combat that it finely modelled the traditionally weak M-U. I like it.

David The Archmage

I like that idea of splitting body points and fatigue points. The implementation of spell casting was the only thing I disliked about M20.

Nick

Personally, I've always liked the idea of Fatigue vs Health, and I've tried to put it in most of the games I DM. It just makes sense.

Robert

Yes. In my experience, the 15-minute adventuring day is a player/group thing. Even though 4e promised to eliminate it, we still had it when my group tried 4e. Because, whenever we can, this group will take the time to always have full resources available. And we’ve been doing it long enough that we know how to blunt the various pressures that mechanics and DMs can bring to bear against it.

Anonymous

I've not played microlite, so my experiences are based more directly on the evolutionary DnD line. In my experience the 15 minute day is less about being risk adverse, and more about it being annoying to be out of spells and thus not really able to do what your class is all about.

And while the term wasn't used back in the day (begin a fairly recent coinage), the situation it describes is something I've seen crop up often enough in my game experiences… so I'll disagree with the implications about it being a system based thing, but agree that it is a style one.

Unknown

Great post. I recently converted to a similar system, based on the advice from Akratic Wizardry's house rules PDF. It's working out well.

I like your idea of renaming HP to be "Fatigue" to help players get over the mental block. I also like your idea of letting all characters use HP to boost things like attacks, damage, and saving throws. (Maybe expend HP to increase an attack/save by a max of 1 HP/level?)

I use CON instead of BODY points, and this concept only applies to PCs and major NPCs.

Timeshadows

Excellent arguments in favour. 🙂

Randall

I tried something like that for weapons the character wasn't strong enough to carry, but decided it was more work than it was worth for my games. However, I could add something like that as an optional rule to M75.

Aaron E. Steele

I like the idea of coverting hit points to fatigue points, with spells making you suffer fatigue.

I use a fatigue system for weapons that are too heavy for the PC; they can weild the weapons but they suffer fatigue each round that they do so.