As I've been reading through Daggerheart's core rulebooks, I've made note of a lot of ways in which the game pulls the rug out from under some of the assumptions underlying typical TTRPGs, but I wanted to walk through some of the implications of one of the more fascinating ideas within it: that the damage you take is not the same as the hit points you lose.
(As a note, Daggerheart uses the terms "Marking" and "Clearing" to talk about certain values going up and down. In 5E, your max HP might be, say, 10, and your current HP drops as you take damage. In Daggerheart, if you have 6 HP, you Mark each point as you lose it, and if you are healed, you can "clear" those points. Essentially, marking any of these things is like losing it temporarily, but always reminding you what its maximum is supposed to be.)
To explain (and I'm going to refer to D&D 5E terms as a point of comparison):
Your character has an Evasion score, which is actually more or less exactly the same as AC in D&D - it's the number that an attack roll has to hit or exceed to deal damage to you.
Next, in a somewhat familiar format, if an attacker rolls a hit, they then roll their damage.
Here's where it gets a little different:
Each character has two thresholds - a Major Damage Threshold and a Severe Damage Threshold. Let's say I have a Major Threshold of 10, and a Sever Threshold of 20. Damage below that first threshold is Minor Damage. If it's 10-19, we're talking Major Damage. And if it's 20 or above, it's Severe damage.
And each of those is worth a certain number of hit points: Minor damage "marks" 1 HP, Major marks 2, and Severe marks 3.
A 1st level character might start off with 6 HP (I don't have the book in front of me right now, so I could be slightly off on that). Thus, if they took Severe damage twice, they'd be in danger of dying (using some different death mechanics that I won't get into here). They could also be thus imperiled by taking Major Damage 3 times, or Minor Damage 6 times, so some combination.
A character's class and the armor they're wearing can alter the thresholds - obviously, the higher your thresholds, the more punishment you can take.
On top of this, your Armor determines (or at least helps determine - I'll need to return to that part of the chapter) your "Armor Score," which gives you a certain number of times you can choose to have the armor you're wearing absorb the blow somewhat, downgrading Severe damage to Major, Major to Minor, and Minor to nothing at all - but "marked" armor slots need to be repaired during a rest to clear them.
Still, I think the really profound implication here is that the actual number of hit points that can be marked in a single instance of damage are capped (though there is an optional rule for a further threshold that would mark 4 HP).
This has major implications:
First off, it allows HP to remain relatively small and manageable. While your character does have the option to increase their max HP as their level goes up, the more granular way to improve your survivability is to instead increase those damage thresholds.
The math here might be a little more complex than I want to be doing after midnight, but I could even imagine a system where you never actually get more Hit Points, and instead your damage thresholds just go up.
But I don't think it actually scales as consistently as you might expect: Let's say I have a monster who consistently does 12 and then 21 damage. If my thresholds are 10 and 20, that means that in a turn, I'm going to lose 5 hit points if they both hit. If both thresholds go up by 5, to 15 and 25, that gets reduced to 3 hit points. If my thresholds go up another 5, to 20 and 30, that's actually still 3 HP marked.
While I think the damage isn't going to be as consistent as that, and probably with greater variation in damage, these incremental threshold increases will have a more noticeable impact, it does mean that the exact relationship between these factors will require a little more complex math.
The second implication is that there's a cap on how much of a creature's HP can be lost in a single act.
And that's actually potentially huge.
In D&D, players are encouraged to optimize their characters to be able to pump out as much damage as possible. I did some napkin math on a great-weapon-master rebuild of my old Eldritch Knight using the 2024 rules update, and found that if he had a +1 Greatsword, he could put out close to 90 damage on average against a target with an AC of 20 (not consistently - he'd need to action surge, but without burning any resources, he could get around 40, and potentially a little more if the monster moves after he hits them with Booming Blade, which they might be inclined to do after he uses the Push mastery on them).
But here, once you cross the Severe threshold for an enemy, it seems that's the end of it - no further need to lay on the damage.
It does actually solve a problem many a DM/GM has faced: my cool boss monster got slaughtered in a single round. If a big scary monster has 12 HP in Daggerheart, that means that in absolute best case scenario, the party is going to have to land 4 hits on them, and probably more if the damage thresholds are high (which seems likely for a boss monster).
Similarly, a player character is not going to be dropped by a single attack or spell, it would seem.
Daggerheart's combat system is less structured than in 5E - indeed, the entire game is built around (what I at least assume is intended to be) a smooth back-and-forth between the PCs and the GM, but I wonder if the relative complexity of this system for resolving damage might actually help rein things in to ensure that fights are always going to feel significant but also surmountable.
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