Hit Locations in D&D

I was talking to James about the way different games handle armor in combat,¹ and he opined “Why doesn’t D&D have hit locations like other games?” And just like that, I had a topic for this week. Thanks, James!

Answer #1: It does!

When D&D was published in 1974, it was in the three LBBs². The next year, two supplements were published, Greyhawk and Blackmoor. The latter book contained Dave Arneson's hit location rules.

The system was bulky and unwieldy. It went something like this:

1. Roll “to hit.” If you don’t hit, your round is over.
2. Roll damage as normal.
3. Roll for hit location (d% roll on different charts based on the opponent’s body shape and the side you’re attacking from).
4. If you’re shorter than your opponent, add your weapon length to your height.
5. Cross reference your modified height and your opponent’s height on the “Weapon/Height Adjustment Matrix.”
6. Based on the matrix, you might³ need to modify the hit location that you rolled in step 3.
7. Assign the damage to the resulting body part.
8. If that part is out of hit points, it is crippled (or, if it’s the head or torso the opponent is dead).
9. Total the damage of all the body parts. If that exceeds the opponents hit point total, the opponent is dead.

Steps 1, 2, and 9 are a normal combat round. This hit location system adds the other 6 steps. As you can see, it’s a lot of work and will really slow down combats.

Probably because of this, or perhaps with the breakdown of relationships between Arneson and TSR, the system was dropped from all future releases.

Answer #2: It’s not Abstract Enough

I feel that hit locations really don’t make sense in D&D’s abstract system. As I’ve pointed out before, combat in original D&D is supposed to be a very abstract system. Each round represents 1 minute of action, not a single action by each combatant.

A real life example. In the Salido vs. Vargas boxing match, Orlando Salido threw 939 punches. That works out to about 26 punches per minute. His opponent, Francisco Vargas, threw 1,189 punches, or about 33 punches per minute. In both cases, about one-third of the punches landed. That means that on any given D&D combat round Vargas actually hit Salido 11 times.

The D&D damage roll is the abstraction of the total damage done by those 11 blows. But it’s silly to assign one hit location to all 11.

Final Thoughts

So that’s the real reason (in my mind) why there’s no hit locations in old-school D&D. Trying to assign a single injured part breaks the abstract nature of hit points and blows in the D&D combat system.

If I were to add one, I would make it a “below zero” thing. When a PC loses all of his hit points, rather than killing them, give them a crippling injury instead. The injury won’t heal naturally, but magical healing will take care of it.

Does that make sense? Do you think D&D needs a more concrete hit location table? How would you make it work without breaking the abstraction of the rest of the system?

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1. Guess what next week’s topic is going to be.↩

2. “Little Brown Books.” The first edition of Traveller also came in LBBs, but those were “Little Black Books.”↩

3. It might be that you have to convert a hit to be a miss instead. The rules are really unclear.↩