Hamlet's Hit Points

See Your Stories Like Never Before

Hamlet's Hit Points presents a toolkit that helps make storytelling in any RPG easier and more fun by classifying story beats and letting you track their ups and downs from hope to fear and back.

Armed with these tools, you'll be equipped to lay compelling track for an emotional roller-coaster that will keep everyone at your game table involved, excited, riveted.

In these pages, you'll find definitions of nine critical story beats. You'll read about the relationships between those beats. You'll also find complete analyses of three stories you know already--Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No--to show you how the system works.

Written with roleplayers in mind, Hamlet's Hit Points is an indispensable tool for understanding stories, in games and everywhere else.

Writer and game designer Robin D. Laws is the eponymous force behind Robin's Laws Of Good Game Mastering, acclaimed as a seminal work on the running of tabletop roleplaying games. His practical design contributions to the field appear in such games as Feng Shui, The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game, HeroQuest, The Esoterrorists, and Skulduggery. D&D players know his work on various supplements, including sections of the Dungeon Master's Guide 2 for both the third and fourth editions of that game. His fiction chops can be seen in his six novels and various serials and short stories.