healing and heroism: an Elenssar free thread

[Username17]

"Realistic" healing is almost the exact opposite of what people want if there is to be a heroic story arc. Tony Montana isn't an especially unrealistic or implausible event, but it's bad for sustainability of games.

You don't want people to keep fighting on sheer inertia until they fall down of their wounds and bleed to death or be laid up for months - that sucks. The goal is to have people wind down so that they can't fight but still be alive to get away and get back into the action soon. Like after the next scene or two they should be on their feet again.

Honestly, the 4e power system can come in handy here. If people ran out of decent offense long before they actually died and were able to get back into the fray just by waiting for the next cartoon wipe - that would be ideal. The goal as I understand it is not to make people fear injuries they receive in battle, but to get people to fear failure without crippling the game.

-Username17

[baduin]

In that case. let's try again.

We have two main goals:

1) Disabled heroes should be able to move, but unable to seriously attack. Disabled opponents should die without a need to cut their throats.

2) Heroes can suffer penalties in lesser fights. Those penalties are fairly mild, but they cannot be wiped out during the adventure, so they must either fight the Big Boss with them or retreat and lose, without dying.

ad 1) This is simple. There is no combat healing. The healing magic is divided into fast (requires about 1 minute, and removes normal wounds, disabled condition etc), and complex (removed critical wounds, only after the adventure- requires a long, complicated ritual, very big focuses etc).

When disabled, you can move normally, but receive very big penalties to all attacks. You also die in 10 rounds unless stabilized. Stabilizing someone requires about 1 round. Only heroes can stabilize, normal opponents cannot. Heroes can usually stabilize themselves.

ad 2) When disabled you receive a critical wound. Critical wounds do not cause any numerical penalties to attacks, but either make you unable to perform one of your attacks (eg your index finger is cut off; you cannot shoot bow), or cause some other penalty - eg when moving at full speed you suffer damage, or you are deaf etc. My intention is making fighting with critical wounds possible but risky - those attacks you still have will work, but in some situations you will be unable to act.

Removing critical wounds requires complex healing - as I said, it is a big, slow and expensive ritual. Using it means you effectively lost the adventure.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'm sure the chase system ties in here somewhere...

[Username17]

All this dying and shit is totally counterproductive.

The entire point is to reduce lethality. Enemies should be getting away alive as well, otherwise the game finds itself losing as much verisimilitude as 4e D&D.

-Username17

[baduin]

That's even easier. Simply remove that bit about dying in 10 rounds.

[Bigode]

Also, it removed meaningful difference between stories of cutthroats and people who actually took prisoners.

[name_here]

It's also REALLY important that chasing down retreating people is not too easy, otherwise you die when you try running.

[Username17]

It's also REALLY important that chasing down retreating people is not too easy, otherwise you die when you try running.

Part of that can be handled on the setting level. That is, if you spend most of your time invading enemy power nodes so that enemies who followed you off into the wilds would be subjecting themselves to significant danger they often just wouldn't do it.

Also you can expand on the idea of running being incompatible with attacking like it is in D&D to straight up give some lasting offense penalties if you sprint. Thus it would be that the people most willing to activate their bestest movement rates would be those who had no intention of fighting at the end of it - which essentially would mean that people who had suffered severe wound penalties and wouldn't be good at attacking anyway would be moving faster than effective belligerents.

-Username17

[Psychic Robot]

Alright, fucksluts, you need to lay off Elennsar. You clearly don't share his viewpoint of how fantasy RPGs should be played. I'm getting really sick of the strawman bullshit I'm seeing on these boards. Essentially, if you disagree with what the mob says, you're a fucking idiot and your opinion is stretched and exaggerated until it doesn't even resemble what it originally was.

Elennsar wants injuries that hamper a character's performance. He doesn't want a "Gygaxian string of bodies" (or whatever the fuck someone said). He doesn't want characters to fail all their rolls because they got hit in combat. He doesn't want mechanical benefits for heroism because he thinks that heroism is something that should be fucking role-played, not something where you stick a carrot in front of the donkey's nose to get it to do something. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

You guys don't want that kind of game? Fine. Then go ahead and do something else. But, for fuck's sake, learn to fail less.

[Username17]

I agree that making an Elennsar-free thread is immature, but he does have a habit of derailing threads. Indeed, he attempted to derail this thread by starting an argument in it, not about any particular issues related to the topic at hand but about whether he should post in the thread.

While an interesting philosophical argument to be sure, discussing whether or not you should post your viewpoint in a thread is by definition not on-topic for the thread you are discussing. It's meta-topic, and it doesn't even belong on this section of the board - it goes on MSIMS.

So while I am not happy with the methods, I do understand the desire to have a thread about making the game function without killing player characters repeatedly before getting to the end of the campaign - and not having that conversation derailed by a separate discussion about whether or not players should be taking actions that have a noticeable chance of killing their characters.

-Username17

[Talisman]

I am posting here solely to state that I agree with P_R on this one. While I don't agree with all off Elennsar's opinions, and I acknowledge that he has a tendancy to go off on tangets - holy jumping shit, people! He's a hell of a lot more civil - and comprehensible - than some.

If you have to resort to hate-filled feces-flinging, you have failed to communicate. I don't care whether you have the One True Solution to Everything; if the way you convey it is through bile-laden hatred and venom, you're no better than a malfunctioning toilet.

[Grek]

I'm not getting into the Elennsar thing.

In that case. let's try again.

We have two main goals:

1) Disabled heroes should be able to move, but unable to seriously attack. Disabled opponents should die without a need to cut their throats.

2) Heroes can suffer penalties in lesser fights. Those penalties are fairly mild, but they cannot be wiped out during the adventure, so they must either fight the Big Boss with them or retreat and lose, without dying.

Split health into hit points and hit boxes.* You have 10 hit boxes and X hit points. If you get hit and have more than zero hit points, you loose hit points. If you have zero hit points, you loose a hit box. Lost hit points are restored after fights, lost hit boxes are restored only after the adventure is over.

Hit boxes can be used during combat to reroll dice, sort of like an edge point, or to heal some hit points or to run away extremely fast when you are losing or some other valuable use for them that seems approprate to the game. Used hit boxes are restored after a fight, just like hit points. If you loose 1 hit box, you only have 9 left to use for all the rest of the fights that adventure. Walking into the BBEG's room with only 3 hit boxes is not a good idea.

Mooks do not get hit boxes. When random goblin number 276 runs out of hit points, it dies. Recurring characters and the BBEG do get hit boxes, which work exactly like a PC's.

*These names suck and could be changed to whatever.

[baduin]

Gratulations! You invented Conviction from True20.

Unfortunately, Frank Trollman doesn't like it.

[virgil]

*shrug* Already made my statement on the current Elennsar mess.

The statement of name_here in regards to the importance of being able to run without dying reminds me of something. The presence of closet trolls encourage the presence of confined spaces, making the dangerous areas the overly canopied woods, the dungeons, and other popular adventuring spots rather than the open fields where they die otherwise; I preferred the mechanical option of hordes > solo, which would make the same areas dangerous because of the bottleneck effect while keeping the PCs from being able to pwn armies.

Doesn't help the sequential fight sequence for lethality though. Are we looking at a 'mod' for D&D, or a philosophical underpinning for future games we design?

[Kaelik]

@Frank:

I think the best solution to the running problem is saying that for example, the run action (or a different version) has penalties to attack (and to casting?) instead of to defense (like current run). But even then you still need to make sure enemy movement rates are balanced with players (looking at you dragons) or that there isn't one guy in the party who moves 20ft, so as long as the enemies can move 30ft that guy is always going to be ganked.

If we are talking about actual D&D, I'd say standardization of movement + changing the run action to apply no penalties to defense, gratuitous penalties to attack next round/next spell cast but removing straight line limits.

Secondly, I like Shadowrun. For Shadowrun. I don't think the game of D&D needs to be more like Shadowrun. Occasional retreats would be nice. But making it all about in and out accomplish the objective stealthily/quickly or you have a horde on your hands really doesn't fit D&D.

@PR/Talisman

1) Elennsar clearly wants people to die, don't bother claiming he doesn't. He's made that pretty clear.

2) ckafrica made it very clear that he wants to discuss how to make healing work without discussing what a game with people dieing all the time is about. That means Elennsar is out. If Elennsar was even remotely capable of understanding something like that, and discussing healing in the terms that other people want instead of telling us we are all wrong and players need to die, this thread would never have existed in the first place.

@ In general:

I do find it hilarious that in a thread dedicated to discussing healing while avoiding the discussion of players dieing, literally the first post was Elennsar telling us all to go fuck ourselves because he is going to make every damn thread about whether or not PCs die and we aren't allowed to discuss anything else.

[Josh_Kablack]

Another option is to have "left the map" = "successfully retreated".

If a figure leaves the map, it has made it behind the cover of twisty passages, dense foliage, or the next sand dune and you can no longer target it in combat - instead you have to track via skill vs skill or some other chase-scene specific mini-game.

It's a bit gamist and can strain verisimilitude, but if you have a large enough table/battlemat it's at least a workable starting point independent of game system.

However, it does make the "shadowrun" mission where you have to stop the guards from getting away to sound the alarm and call for reinforcements a lot more difficult.

As to the off-topic issue raised by this thread: people acting like petulant pre-teens does not make me happy

[PhoneLobster]

He doesn't want mechanical benefits for heroism because he thinks that heroism is something that should be fucking role-played, not something where you stick a carrot in front of the donkey's nose to get it to do something.

So, to get this straight, the entirely acceptable defensible premise that we really should not make fun of at all or abuse as if it was insanely stupid is this...

In a game of heroic fantasy the rules should NOT reward actual actions that are heroic. Instead they should actively punish heroic actions or at the very least only reward OTHER kinds of actions.


On second thoughts that is insanely stupid! I abuse and make fun of it and insult all its proponents then sleep with or pimp out their mothers based on personal preference on a case by case basis.

Fortunately I am sure El... (damn I can't spell that elf fanboy style name) agrees that his position is entirely wrong, before defending it rabidly then tearing it apart again and then casually pretending he never mentioned it.

I'd be more sympathetic if he WAS just a dissenter, but he can't even ever seem to agree with (or just make sense in context with) himself. It's really easy to derail a thread when you can maintain the entire debate in any direction you want single handedly contradicting yourself post after post.

[IGTN]

The burden of keeping this thread Elennsar-free is on you, poster. Stop derailing the thread to discuss his opinions.

Anyway, for making retreats more useful, an idea I've been toying with:
Everyone (everyone cool) has a few ultimate moves. Using an ultimate takes time, but you can do other combat actions, albeit restricted (but not penalized. The elementalist causing an earthquake might not be able to throw lightning bolts while he does it, but his petrifying and rock-shaping spells work just fine; alternately, he just only makes progress when he uses earth magic). Once you use an ultimate, you can't use any other ultimates that encounter. You may also be afflicted with a negative status condition.

When you use an ultimate, you may draw power from your willing allies. If you do that, your ultimate gets significantly stronger (almost to the point of adding an additional ultimate for each person augmenting). After power is drawn from you, you can't use ultimates or have more power drawn from you for the rest of the encounter, and you can't have power drawn after you use one. If ultimates afflict their users with status effects, then augmenters take the same hit.

Essentially, what this means is that each side can only throw one ultimate per battle, since the optimum thing is to have one guy (maybe two) charge his laser and everyone else keep their tactical flexibility, then everyone dumps their augments on whoever's laser charges first.

So then a battle is about two sides trying to slow down the other side's laser charging and protect themselves, then one side gets an ultimate off. Once the dust settles, one side runs or surrenders (or, if made entirely out of mooks, is completely obliterated). If your ultimate doesn't win the battle for you, you run, or surrender if cornered, because their laser is almost charged; if you eat an earthquake, it either breaks your ranks or it doesn't, and, if it doesn't, now you have a shot with your super-move, so your enemies run.

[JonSetanta]

I agree that making an Elennsar-free thread is immature, but he does have a habit of derailing threads. Indeed, he attempted to derail this thread by starting an argument in it, not about any particular issues related to the topic at hand but about whether he should post in the thread.

It started badly. For fuck's sake look at the thread title.

Who would think he WON'T jump in?

It's like digging a big hole in beach sand, surrounded by little kids.
There is no 'chance' that they won't jump in. It's guaranteed.

[Elennsar]

Thusly, announce that the topic is about low risk heroism, those not interested need not post, and focus on that topic with all the fervor you desire.

Bam. Mission accomplished. Goading and mocking not necessary.

In regards to the topic, the idea of "sprinting penalizes offense" sounds good.

Keeps the rate of "routers killed" low.

[Manxome]

Important question: under what circumstances should someone who runs not get away?

You want the PCs to occasionally realize they're not going to win and that retreating is a better idea. But you also presumably want to have some scenes in which various characters, whether PC or NPC, are unable to escape from their foes. As usual, there's really two opposed goals, and fulfilling either one of them is easy, but fulfilling both of them is hard.

Maybe you should brainstorm some possible scenes that you'd want to make sure the game supports, to get an idea of what the mechanics need to accomplish?

On the other hand, you might want to table that for another thread; it seems to me that the long-term wound mechanics and the running away mechanics can probably be mostly independent, as long as everyone's OK with the assumption that PCs will typically be able to retreat when they realize they're not going to win.

[Draco_Argentum]

I think it needs to be like the section in Max Payne where he is chasing Gognitti (mobster with a bullet in his guts). Firstly the chase goes for a couple maps and Gognitti is still jumping on trains and the like. Chase mechanics and no wound penalties to retreat is what I'm taking from that.

Then when you catch up with him he surrenders. Thats the important part that makes it possible to have a chase that ends. If you have to catch someone and kill them we've just put death off, not removed it.

[Username17]

Maybe you should brainstorm some possible scenes that you'd want to make sure the game supports, to get an idea of what the mechanics need to accomplish?

That's a good idea. Remember, D&D is pretty much locked into the idea that everyone in one group dies and possibly some people in the other group die as well, and then the victors loot corpses and use the gems to raise their own fallen from the dead. D&D has a casualty rate similar to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and like in that game you pretty much are supposed to get your army back for no reason.

So whatever it is that we're discussing here, it's not D&D. It's more like ironing down TNE goals.

So the question is what those design goals and methodologies actually are. Design goals I think are mostly to be dictated by scenes. For example:

• The guard cuffs the thief in the face, the thief runs away. The guard chases after him, the thief leaps over a cart and rushes into the crowd. The guard loses him, and we go on to the next scene.
  
  The hero has been stabbed, but so too has the enemy. He staggers through to a victory, but in the next fight he's still slightly wounded. The wounds affect him less in the next scene, but he still has some bruises or bandages or something to indicate that he doesn't heal like Daffy Duck or a 4e character.

Mechanically I think this should work something like this:

• A character who has achieved a sufficient lead in chase tests is "gone" and can't be caught without some sort of tracking. Thus, they are essentially uncatchable within the confines of this encounter.
• Wound effects should castrate you offense at least as much as your defense. And the offense reducing wound effects should come off through rest completely or almost completely.
• People should be able to see when their wound effects are accumulated enough that they are in serious danger of getting knocked out.

Setting wise I think it should work something like this:

• Ransom cultures should be assumed. Those who fall in battle while their allies run away should normally expect to be ransomed back to their home tribe rather than having their throat slit or whatever.
• Enemy forces should be assumed to have more resources available to them that are not physically present at any battle at the start of the battle, thus giving combats an essential time limit before running off sounds good to prevent things from bogging down.
• Enemy forces should be at a disadvantage when they sortie from their power sites, making the Dungeon Raid be quasi-sensible.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

D&D has some difficulties with ransoming people because losing your gear is often worse than death anyway (Unless you go to great lengths to make the game less gear-/loot-dependent).

[Naszir]

Some of the best parts of movies are the scenes where our heroes escape a situation that would have been deadly if they tried to hang around.

Indiana Jones movies seem to be based on this very premise. The thrill is the get away. Yeah, Indy may have taken some bumps and bruises but in the end he is able to get to the plane with the natives hot on his heels.

However, isn't this thread about healing and not how to make chase scenes better?

How about having some sort of wound threshold? If you take a certain amount of damage in one shot you take a wound.

Your first wound restricts your actions. If you have one wound you can no longer take a swift/minor action.

Your second wound hampers your overall movement. Your second wound reduces your speed by 10ft.

Your third wound incapacites your character.

All other non-wound damage goes away after an encounter is over.