The Hits Damage System

What do you do when you’ve spent the weekend writing a detailed sandbox adventure set in a tangled swamp and culminating in a dungeon crawl through the ruins of a High Court of Law, but then on Wednesday, sick as a dog, you drive twenty minutes to get to the game, take out all your books, dice and miniatures and realize that you’ve left all those printed pages filled with the descriptions, stats, hidden traps & treasures, plus the rules you worked out for doing karaoke with witches, sitting in your work bag back home?

The answer is Trolls. You make them fight Trolls.

Along with my notes, I’d also forgotten to bring any pad of paper, without which I am utterly useless as a DM, and had to repurposed the back of a couple of blank character sheets. They were fighting trolls because the regenerating bastards take a long time to kill, but which also means a lot of adding and subtracting on my part as the DM. With not a lot of paper or patience for that, I decided to try something that has been percolating for the past few weeks now. And I think it worked really well.

The Hits Damage System
For use with Dungeons and Dragon (editions, -5) or any other game system that uses a numerical “Hit Point” damage game mechanic.

As characters gain levels, the damage rolls get larger and some people aren’t great at on-the-spot math. Nothing can kill the flow of combat faster than frequent pauses while the DM is mentally subtracting 18 from 73 plus another 7 off in bonus damage. The Hits System is just a shortcut for the DM to handle these large numbers.

This system doesn’t require learning any new rules or doing any math on the player’s part. Nothing changes for them and their damage is handled normally. This is strictly for the DM’s use when tracking how much damage the DM controlled monsters/opponents have taken.

How it Works
Divide the monster’s Hit Points by 10 [For the purposes of rounding off: 11-15 = 1, 16-20=2). For every 10 hit points, give them one “O”. Any monster/opponent with 10 or less Hit point always gets one full O.

Example, The average 5e Troll has 84 hit points. They get 8 “Os”, OOOOOOOO.

I use circles are used because they are quick and easy to draw. Useful when dealing with healing and regenerations - instead of erasing or crossing out, you just add new circles.

Now, whenever a player character hits a monster for 1-6 points of damage, colour in just half of the circle. If they hit for 7-12 points of damage, you colour in the whole circle, and so on…

When all the circles are coloured in, the monster/opponent is dead/incapacitated.

I’ve only run this once with a pair of regenerating trolls, but I’m going to keep using it in my game and see how it responds in other situations. 

Note: I make no claim that this system is a brand new idea. I'm sure similar damage systems exist, either in other homebrew hacks or in non-D&D rule-sets.