I’ve talked about how the game that has become CORE20 goes back to a first set of house rules I worked up more than ten years ago. But there’s actually one part of the CORE20 rules that goes back to twenty-four years earlier than that — critical points and defense points (written up in chapter 9 of the CORE20 Player’s Guide), which were a house rule set up for my AD&D games way back in the day.
“I Can Do This All Day…”
As it does for a lot of people, the abstract quality of D&D’s hit point system has long vexed me. I mean, it works fine for the most part. It’s not broken per se. But the idea of “Well, sometimes your hit points are actual physical damage to your body, and sometimes your hit points are luck, and sometimes your hit points are your ability to parry most of a blow away” always felt a bit weaselly to me. This is a less serious problem at lower levels, when the amount of damage characters can dish out and withstand is still relatively nuanced. But by the time a 10th-level barbarian can throw themself blindfolded off a 200-foot cliff and know that the fall has no chance of killing them, things start to feel iffy for me.
Way back in 1986, the idea came to me of breaking hit points out as two different numbers — critical points representing how many potentially mortal wounds your body can take, and hit points (I didn’t call them defense points then) representing your ability to avoid mortal wounds through training and skill. That original system was a bit more complicated than the CORE20 setup (because I was young, and because the one thing AD&D really needed was more complication). But the baseline idea of having one number representing your actual health and another number representing how good you were at rolling with attacks that would otherwise mess your health up started there.
Fast-forward a whole bunch of years, and in 2004, I dusted off critical points and hit points for my D&D 3.5e campaign. An updated take on those rules was inspired by my reading (and taking the useful improvement of using Constitution score as a baseline for critical points from) the vitality and wound points system in the 3.5e Unearthed Arcana supplement, with that setup itself sourced from the d20 Star Wars RPG. Then when one of my 3.5e campaigns became the initial test bed for CORE20 (or d20 CORE as the initial house rule experiments were called), critical points and defense points were ready to go.
Critical Thinking
The CORE20 hit point setup using critical points and defense points does a whole bunch of the things in the game, all by design. Chief among those is that it makes critical hits really freaking exciting when it’s the player characters hitting their enemies — and it makes critical hits really freaking scary when it’s the enemies critting the characters. Because a character will absolutely go down when their critical points drop to 0, even if they’ve got a ton of defense points remaining, the first critical hit in a combat encounter can throw everything into upheaval. Especially for non-martial characters who don’t have a ton of critical points or easy access to temporary hit points as a buffer, a character taking a critical hit can necessitate a huge change in tactics, as that character taking a second critical hit becomes a thing the whole party needs to worry about.
Another thing that critical points and defense points do is make starting characters and lower-tier enemies more robust than the standard that D&D has long applied to low-level characters and their foes. Because all creatures have critical points built on their baseline Constitution score, that’s an average 10 hit points for every starting character and every worldborn NPC, even before monster math and feat selection build that up. Creating a 4 hit point wizard in CORE20 is technically possible, but you’d have to seriously work at it. As a result, even starting characters not focused on standing at the center of combat each and every encounter have an excellent chance of surviving their starting adventures.
Monsters likewise get a hit point boost from their default critical points. As an example, consider the lowly stirge — a creature weighing in at a mighty 5 hit points from AD&D 1e through 3.5e, before budget cutbacks reduced them to 2 hit points for 5e. At 5 critical points and 10 defense points, the CORE20 stirge is relatively weak even for a tier 0 creature (because Tiny and smaller creatures gain only part of their Constitution score as critical points). But in a combat where a 9/5 hit point arcanist takes on a 5/10 hit point stirge, both have a damage buffer that can make the fight more interesting.
One of the things I’ve long observed and been often frustrated by is that lower-level combat encounters in D&D can too easily swing wide one way or the other if all of one side acts first in the initiative order. When the characters all go first, the six foes they’re facing are suddenly three foes before the enemy side gets to act, and the fight is a rout. If all the monsters go first, half the characters start the fight bloodied or one character starts out already down and dying, and the party’s planned tactics go out the window to prioritize healing. But by having just a little bit of a hit point buffer, those sorts of first-round “Whoops!” moments become less likely.
As well, another benefit of lower-tier characters and creatures in CORE20 being a bit more robust is that it gives players and GMs options for getting out combat when one side would normally just demolish the other. Using the stirge as an example, with 2 hit points in 5e, one successful attack against a stirge slurping on a character all but automatically ends with a dead stirge. But with the 5/10 hit point CORE20 stirge, the GM often has the option to say, “You smash the stirge soundly, making them decide to take their 3 remaining critical points and fly off.” Likewise, just as starting characters being one-shot by ogres is less of a thing in CORE20 than in D&D, starting characters one-shotting bandits and cultists becomes a touch less likely unless that’s something the characters are interested in doing. In games with players who don’t automatically want to kill every creature they meet, this can be a good thing.
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(Art by Eric Lofgren)
The CORE20 RPG System 