Are hit points meat? Does the answer to that question even matter? Hit points are an old mechanic, ported into RPGs at the beginning from wargames, where they made the assessment of unit health more granular than ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. D&D took the concept and applied it to player-characters and monsters alike, and from there it became profoundly common. Measuring damage taken and time until expiration is one of those things where the simplest approach is often the most fun, even if it’s hardly the most realistic.

Hit points as a mechanic are not a monolith. Not even D&D still uses the original mechanic where you have a number and when it’s reduced to zero, you’re dead. Death saves, critical wounds, damage thresholds and any other number of modifiers to the hit point schema make the act of bleeding out after being stabbed a lot more complex than it necessarily has to be, but sometimes more fun, too. Of course, a lot of the relationship that a game has to how its characters get shot and die has to do with genre.

Whether or not it was intended this way originally, a lot of the implied mode of a combat in D&D is one that’s fairly drawn out with a lot of give and take between sides before one side is ultimately defeated. This perception is where the argument about ‘are hit points meat’ came from, because assuming hit points merely represent physical damage mean that D&D combats kind of just look like two groups whaling on each other constantly. By claiming a degree of abstraction, the mind’s eye perception of this sort of combat can be a lot broader and to the participants look a lot cooler. What ends up being more important, though, is that hit points are supposed to act as a resource to be managed during the combat. In D&D they create a timer, a feedback mechanism to let the player know if they’re going to be able to succeed. It’s one reason why games where you don’t know your opponents’ hit point totals play out very differently from ones where you do.

When roleplaying games approached a more modern era (and by that I mean genres with guns in them), hit points were treated a bit differently, and this has a lot to do with a different set of genre implications. For the most part, in action movies, westerns, and yes, real life, when you get shot with a bullet to the center of your body, you probably won’t survive. At the very least, you aren’t going to stay standing and continue what you were doing before. Now, as long as the swordplay and the gunplay weren’t in the same game, this mismatch wasn’t necessarily a problem. Boot Hill had no issue being profoundly lethal and still being considered influential in the RPG pantheon. However, if you wanted to create a lethal and/or gun-centric RPG, you would necessarily be treating the lowly hit point in a very different way than if you wanted to create a trad RPG like D&D with multi-turn combats that hinged on strategy and resource management.

There is nowhere better to look at how hit points influence genre than cyberpunk. Cyberpunk 2020 was famously lethal, using a static hit point track, stun rolls for every hit, and weapon damage values that meant that any NPC with a gun had a chance to kill even an experienced player character. While Cyberpunk 2020 wasn’t for everyone it was for a certain kind of player that appreciated the unforgiving but sensible rules. When Cyberpunk returned with a fourth edition, Cyberpunk Red, the game was balanced much more tightly and designed around a more D&D-like approach to hit points and damage management. 2020 fans bemoaned this ‘loss of lethality’ and in many cases did not transition to the new edition. However, with its more approachable combat rules, Cyberpunk Red has become immensely popular.

Regardless of their different approaches, both Red and 2020 are designed around the conceit that a character’s attributes are fairly static. Short of buying cyberware, there is no way to increase your hit point total midgame (and in 2020 no way at all, buying cyberware could only increase your ‘body type modifier’, which was a flat damage reduction value you got from your Body score). The D&D approach to hit points uses each ‘level up’ as a chance to give more hit points, making characters more and more difficult to hurt in any appreciable way. This construct works well for fantasy, especially heroic fantasy, where characters are seen as heroes slowly but surely ascending in their world until they have nearly godlike power. In cyberpunk, it doesn’t seem to fit as well, at least not on the surface. That’s what makes Cities Without Number rather interesting.

Cities Without Number is a game by Kevin Crawford, in the same series as Stars Without Number, Worlds Without Number, and the recently released post-apocalyptic Ashes Without Number. Cities Without Number is, like the other games in the series, based on a d20 system, roughly aligned with D&D 3e in terms of its mechanical choices, and it includes level-driven expanding hit point totals just like every other d20/D&D-based game. Cities Without Number, though, is a cyberpunk game. It’s the second such cyberpunk game I’ve read, the first being Carbon 2185, which was much more 5e-based and saw its hit point totals expand like a 5e character would, one of the things I couldn’t rationalize in my head when looking at the system. Cities Without Number, though, is a bit more constrained; as I said in my comparison of Worlds Without Number and 5e, the hit point totals for characters are much lower, increasing character vulnerability significantly compared to modern D&D or Pathfinder. Still, though, a 10th level character is palpably more capable and harder to hurt than a first level character.

While I think there are very good reasons that Cyberpunk in all of its editions has stayed with static hit points, I’ve softened a bit on them being a prerequisite. For one thing, we are not playing literary cyberpunk, and even if Cyberpunk approaches many of the thematic elements of the genre it’s not telling a story in the same way that a book is. Even in Technoir, which is much more directly inspired by the hardboiled underpinnings of cyberpunk, there is no demand for characters to end up right back where they started, even though that’s practically the most common ending in a hardboiled/noir story (including Neuromancer, mind you). In fact, it could be argued that having the expanding hit point total and adding a personal development layer onto the expected arms race of more and better armor and guns can make sticking the thematic landing of being unable to effect change in the society you’re trapped in that much more poignant and bleak. If you want a story where you actually defeat a megacorporation that’s fine, but arguably it’s not cyberpunk. Anyways.

Instead of getting distracted by literary/RPG alignments (which are poor in most genres that aren’t directly using RPGs as source material), let’s talk about the feel of cyberpunk games and what players have come to expect considering lethality. Cyberpunk and Shadowrun were the two games which cemented the notion of cyberpunk as an RPG genre, and over the years Shadowrun became notably more over-the-top while Cyberpunk became…also notably more over-the-top, while still holding the title of ‘grounded’ if only because it was in comparison to Shadowrun. And hey, if you wanted to use Cities Without Number to run something in the vein of Shadowrun, I think it would work pretty well. But let’s look at how Cities Without Number compares to the two most popular editions of Cyberpunk, and think a bit about what ‘lethality’ means when you’re trying to run a game.

When I wrote Cyberpunk Chimera I developed a baseline statistical event to talk about lethality: A character gets hit with a round from an assault rifle (in Cities Without Number I use a comparable weapon, the combat rifle). By assuming an average number of hit points and average damage result, you can compare how two games treat this event and use that as a starting point to discuss this notion of character lethality. Since Cities Without Number has characters gain more hit points each level, I made a little graph:

‘Hits to kill’ measures how many hits from an assault rifle it takes to bring an average character to zero hit points, or, considering the slightly different definitions in Cyberpunk 2020, to the point where they start making death saves. Cyberpunk 2020 is at the bottom here, and one average hit from an assault rifle could straight-up kill an unarmored character with an average body score. Cyberpunk Red has a much larger hit point pool but the same damage rating for an assault rifle, so now it takes more than 2 shots to kill someone with an assault rifle. This statistic, by the way, is one of the main things being complained about when a 2020 fan says Red ‘isn’t lethal enough’. I do agree that taking two assault rifle rounds to the center of mass without dying is profoundly unrealistic, but arguing realism in a game where you can have your brain implanted in a cyborg body and train your fists to do more damage than a handgun seems odd. Anyway. Cities Without Number is interesting here because it crosses that Cyberpunk 2020 line between level 1 and 2. That means that a starting Cities Without Number character is more vulnerable than a starting Cyberpunk 2020 character. However, by level 5 the Cities Without Number character is significantly more durable than characters from either Cyberpunk edition.

This comparison is rather academic; no one in any of these three games is going to have a character run around unarmored if they can help it. Given that, I made a different comparison, this time having each character wear the best armor from the game that granted no encumbrance penalties. That’s the ‘light armor jacket’ from Cyberpunk 2020, the ‘light armorjack’ from Cyberpunk Red, and the ‘street leathers’ from Cities Without Number. The results are quite a bit different:

This one was much more difficult to calculate. First of all, Cities Without Number uses Armor Class, so I applied a hit probability reduction as well as the Damage Soak as ‘temporary hit points’ like described in the rules. Second, both Cyberpunk editions use ablating armor, so I had to calculate the values one hit at a time. Interestingly Cyberpunk 2020 has a more durable character here than Red, and it mostly has to do with the higher stopping power of the Cyberpunk 2020 armor. Cyberpunk 2020 also has the Body Type Modifier, so an average attack will do minimum damage (one point) until the armor has ablated by two points of stopping power. It turns out as you go up in armor quality this gap increases, which may be one reason that Cyberpunk 2020 characters were often stereotyped as walking tanks. The opposite is true too, though, and both higher damage and armor piercing weapons can wreck a 2020 character so long as they penetrate armor.

The Cities Without Number trendline is really interesting, though. With ‘street leathers’ only giving +3 AC and the system having Damage Soak on a per-scene rather than per-hit basis, characters are incredibly vulnerable, all the way out to level 7. There are some caveats here, though. For one thing, encumbrance in Cities Without Number is simply not as big of a deal as it is in Cyberpunk, where the encumbrance rating of armor directly penalizes Reflexes, the attribute that ranged combat is keyed off of. For Cities Without Number, encumbrance only sets a limit to how many items you can carry or ready based on your Strength score. Knowing this, it may make more sense that a baseline character would go for Armored Clothing (ranged AC +6 instead of +3, Damage Soak 5 instead of 3), where as long as you didn’t roll completely terribly on your Strength, you’d still be able to carry a reasonable weapon. Even with that change, though, it creates a pathway where Cities Without Number characters are more vulnerable than Cyberpunk characters at early levels, and less so at higher levels.

It goes without saying this is a very simple comparison. Beyond the wide range of armor and weapons available, character choices aimed towards combat readiness can drastically change survivability from the baselines here. The Solo role ability in Cyberpunk Red can provide damage reduction, the ‘Hard to Kill’ Edge in Cities Without Number increases your HP by over 50% over an average value, and no combat-focused player worth their salt is actually going to put an average value in Dexterity (Cities Without Number) or Reflexes (Cyberpunk) if they can help it. Still, the basic story is there: Characters in Cities Without Number will become more survivable than their Cyberpunk equivalents, even without significant gear investment.

Is this a problem? Well, it depends. I’ve been playing in a long-running (over 30 sessions now) Cyberpunk Red game, and it’s clear that advancement is happening and survivability is improving, even if hit point expansion isn’t the reason. What I’d want to see is that the hit point expansion in Cities Without Number is appropriately bounded, that the difference from level 1 to max level isn’t as large as it is in D&D. The other major thing is whether more of the advancement is going to come from gear and, just from an initial look, Cities Without Number accomplishes that handily. The weapons list is significantly longer than in Red (though not as wild as 2020 got) and the cyberware is crazy too. We’re talking healing factors, subdermal armor, strength enhancements, all the necessary ingredients to turn into an inhuman murder-borg. As far as bounding, though, let’s see what some of this gear can do. A level 10 character in Cities Without Number is going to on average have 35 hit points, though most combat-facing characters will have more. On a damage point basis, there aren’t any weapons that can one-shot a level ten character, even assuming they have no Damage Soak from armor. That doesn’t feel great; I’d prefer a rocket launcher that can one-shot most characters, though to be fair Cyberpunk Red also has that problem and doesn’t have expanding HP pools to blame it on. There is another mechanic, though, which much like the headshot rules in Cyberpunk 2020 does seem tailor-made to explain those perfect, vicious attacks. Each weapon in Cities Without Number has a Trauma Die. A player rolls the Trauma Die for every attack, and if the value on the die exceeds the victim’s Trauma Target (typically 6, though modified by Edges and Armor), then the damage of the attack is multiplied by the weapon’s Trauma Rating. So though a rocket launcher doesn’t one-shot a level 10 character as written, a Traumatic Hit with a rocket launcher has an average damage value that will do just that, to say nothing of rolling even higher. And honestly, I like that. I’ll have to play more Cities Without Number to know if I enjoy how things play out at a visceral level, but there seems to be potential for a balance of progression and a sense of improvement while still leaving the door open for things to feel dangerous.

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The difference between Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red made fans painfully aware of the fact that hit points are a genre mechanic that needs to be aligned with the desired feel of the game. I was perhaps not aware that D&D-style expanding hit point pools aren’t necessarily a disqualifying property of that mechanic for gritty or high-danger gaming genres. After doing a bit of math and comparing Kevin Crawford’s system with another game besides D&D itself, I’m feeling like Cities Without Number (and Ashes Without Number) could have a chance at doing their genres well, at least in the confines of a traditional RPG campaign. As these genres aren’t necessarily always a good fit with d20 mechanical assumptions, I’m not ready to call this an unqualified recommendation. Rather, my analysis helped me reconsider assumptions I was making, and potentially put Cities Without Number closer to the top of my to-run pile to gather more data. All I need now is a setting conceit to make use of all of those great sandbox tools.

Header art from Cities Without Number. Games assessed in this article are all available at DriveThruRPG.

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