Your Hit Points Probably Started in a Naval Wargame

In the first fantasy wargames, one hit could kill you. Your character was a figure on a table, and a single bad roll took it off.

That is where Dave Arneson started. His Blackmoor campaign is the testing ground that Bell of Lost Souls credits as the soil Dungeons & Dragons grew from, and its fingerprints are still on the rulebook. Hit points are the clearest example. They are the rule that lets your fighter take a hit, shrug, and keep walking.

Here is the short version of how Blackmoor came together. According to Wikipedia’s account of Arneson’s career, he began running Braunstein games set in the medieval Barony of Blackmoor after David Wesely left for Army Reserves service in October 1970. By 1971 it had grown into its own game and its own world. Arneson was tired of his Napoleonic campaign and its rigid rules, and he leaned on Chainmail, the Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren rules published in spring 1971, for the fantasy material. He did not care for its Fantasy Combat table, so he built his own rules.

The fix is the part worth sitting with. DM David’s history of the rules notes that Chainmail had no hit points. One hit killed a creature, and only heroes, wizards, and dragons got a saving throw. Arneson let players save against any hit, but the characters still felt too fragile. So he reached for hit points and armor class, which he had used in an earlier Civil War naval game called Ironclads. By the account of original player Greg Svenson, the Blackmoor group also worked out new damage and hit point rules within about a month of play.

Now the caveat, because the history is messier than the tidy version. The same write-up says nobody has found the exact naval rules that inspired Arneson, and his handwritten Ironclads rules do not contain anything that looks like armor class. Game historian Jon Peterson points out that armor thickness and damage points showed up in several naval wargames before Chainmail. The term “armor class” itself appears to come from Chainmail‘s 1972 revisions. So “it came from a ship game” is a good lead, not a settled fact.

Blackmoor also gave the hobby the idea of going down into a dungeon in the first place, and the pieces a modern table would recognize: hit points, armor class, a character who grows over time. In February 1973, Arneson and Dave Megarry showed Blackmoor and the board game Dungeon! at Gygax’s home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Arneson refereed the first session there. Gygax started his own Greyhawk campaign and asked for a draft of Arneson’s rules. Guidon Games and Avalon Hill passed on the result. Tactical Studies Rules published Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, and the first run of 1,000 copies sold out within a year.

What does that mean for the people at the table? Every time a player argues about whether a character should survive a hit, they are arguing inside a rule that exists because players wanted their characters to last. That is not a small thing. Nearly every argument about lethality in the game since then is a version of the one Arneson’s group had first. Read the old rules if you ever get the chance, and if you want a current copy of the book that carries the idea forward, the 2024 Player’s Handbook is still in print.