Building things from scratch: Design Principles.

[RandomCasualty]

1094003600[/unixtime]]
Yep. That's why the Wolf Man can fvck up Dracula's shit. That's what we are going for, total simplicity and a working format that is easy to understand and meshes seamlessly with the magic system.

Well, you are going to run into complications, like that you're better off punching a vampire than hitting him with a sword, when you probably want the sword to do more damage, and the punch to do almost nothing, since you can decapitate a vampire and kill it, but punching it basically just stuns it. But punching and stakes do the same kind of damage (life) so you can actually fully kill a vampire by putting your fist into its heart? That's pretty weird.

And then how do you handle werewolves aversion to silver? Is silver going to be a special damage type too? What about unholy creatures being damaged by holy energy?

I just don't see this working on a macro scale wtihout introducing a damage type for everything.

As for simple and easy to understand, the system is a pain in the ass to create anything. You can't even create a creature resistant to normal physical attacks, because all your physical stuff is mixed with your magical stuff. IN other words you can't be resistant to an arrow without also being resistant to a lightning bolt, or whatever. And if you make it vulnerable to positive energy, it's also vulnerable to people punching it. I mean you dont' allow any systems to fine tune it, beacuse everything is clumped together in an illogical system. Punching something is somehow connected with wood which is connected with positive energy spells. And there's no logical connection from the point of view of the monster builder, you have no way to actually create the monster you want to create.

I want a werewolf to be vulnerable to silver, and that's it. I want a vampire to be vulnerable to a wooden stake, but resistant to some guy punching him or hitting him in the head with a quarterstaff. But you really can't do that... and you have to tie a bunch of resistances together that you may or may not want, because there's no logical connections. A weapon that tries to kill people by skewering their internal organs, isn't a peircing weapon or a weapon that does physical damage. It could be anything based on the material that it's made of... So if I want a guy to have resistance to peircing weapons, as I'd want for sometihng like a skeleton, I can't do it without making him resistant to positive energy, bludgeoning weapons and all sorts of other crap I don't want to.

This isn't simple, I can't even design simple stereotypical monsters under your system.

[Username17]

Well, you are going to run into complications, like that you're better off punching a vampire than hitting him with a sword, when you probably want the sword to do more damage, and the punch to do almost nothing, since you can decapitate a vampire and kill it, but punching it basically just stuns it.

What complications? Kung Fu is totally supposed to school vampires, just watch any of the Mr. Vampire movies. If you are going to have martial artist characters at all, and I intend to, they are supposed to do pretty well against vampires with their fists.

In summation, the following things kick Dracula's ass:

* Garlic
* The Wolfman
* Mustard Seeds
* Wooden Weapons
* Shaolin Masters
* Stcky Rice
* Sacred Power
* Running Water

Except for "running water" (a limitation that does not exist in all source material and can be dropped without anyone throwing a hizzy), they are all life effects. Every single one of them, so it works out very simply and easily. If you find some other thing that happens to be a life effect and you are wondering why it hurts Dracula under this system - just don't worry about. The list of stuff that works on Vampires is pretty random, and extremely variable from culture to culture, so if you find something weird that happens to work on vampires because it happens to be a life effect, you can jolly well take comfort in the idea that maybe since these people live in a world with vampires and magic and stuff that maybe they've figured out a few anti-vampire tricks that you haven't.

As to switching to unarmed combat against a vampire on your own look out - I can't really suggest that unless you're a Shao-lin Master. Most people are considered "non-proficient" with their own fists (unarmed proficiency being fairly difficult to get), so they'll open themselves to danger if they attack people who are proficient with whatever weapons they happen to have. If you are a Shao-lin MAster, however, then kicking ass for the lord is what you are supposed to do when confronted with the undead so I don't have a problem with it.

And then how do you handle werewolves aversion to silver? Is silver going to be a special damage type too?

Silver is "Water" so Werewolves are by definition also vulnerable to Acid.

What about unholy creatures being damaged by holy energy?

Well, since we don't actually have alignments, unholy creatures are a little more complicated than that. But a Cowardice Demon or Domination Demon would be vulnerable to Fire, whether it was sacred fire or not.

I just don't see this working on a macro scale wtihout introducing a damage type for everything.

It has a damage type for everything. Every single thing has a damage type and it works pretty well. 14 damage types is well and truly plenty to do everything you want to do.

You can't even create a creature resistant to normal physical attacks, because all your physical stuff is mixed with your magical stuff.

Sure you could. You just give it a high physical defense and low mental defenses and low elemental resistances. Boom, done. What's the problem? Just giving a creature a high strength and a low charisma would do that fine.

I mean you dont' allow any systems to fine tune it, beacuse everything is clumped together in an illogical system.

No, it is a logical, easy to understand system that doesn't have a bunch of stupid exceptions for everything. Everything is comprehensible, and anything you happen to do follows the pattern of the rest of the magical system. Whenever anyone casts a spell or performs a new bizzare feat, it follows the patterns set down by the rest of the rules. Nothing requires its own special stupid legacy mechanic.

want a vampire to be vulnerable to a wooden stake, but resistant to some guy punching him or hitting him in the head with a quarterstaff.

What the hell for? What does the game gain by having a bunch of bizzare arbitrary exceptions for a bunch of little things? The game doesn't even have a hit location system, why should it have some kind of messed up rules for deciding whether you are swinging or thrusting your stick at someone? That kind of special mechanics leads to all kinds of crap. This kind of thinking is why the Vampire is technically unkillable in 3rd edition D&D. This kind of thinking is why noone could actually tell you how dual wielding crossbows was supposed to work in any version of D&D ever.

Whatever vulnerabilities you happen to choose for your magical creatures are totally arbitrary, because those creatures don't really exist to have checkable vulnerabilities. I have chosen a list of vulnerabilities which is easy to adjudicate in game. No longer do you have to have discussions about whether Mithril is enough like Silver to qualify or any of that crap. Your weapons simply say what kind of damage they inflict and creatures say what kind of damage they resist and it doesn't take any legacy mechanics or ad hoccing to resolve.

It's simple. It works. And most important of all - it's extensible. The "magic logic" of things is explained at the front end, so you can always tell how a new thing would fit into the rest of the whole. When you get a new blast type it is subsumed into one of the previously existing categories and there is not a constant list of shennanigans of people coming up with new weapons that need to be defended against.

The game works better when you know ahead of time what all the attack and defense forms are. Secret attack forms makes the game go the way of Iclandic Law, and that's horse shit.

-Username17

[Joy_Division]

How would regeneration be handled in this system?

Are you partial to keeping track of the sources of physical damage or do you think it would be better to make regeneration recover a certain amount of physical damage per round and give severe resistance penalties to certain weaknesses.

Trolls would then have to be low charisma moderate strength, with low fire and water resistances.

I suppose this elimates the need for differentiating between regeneration and fast healing.

[RandomCasualty]

1094051558[/unixtime]]
What the hell for? What does the game gain by having a bunch of bizzare arbitrary exceptions for a bunch of little things? The game doesn't even have a hit location system, why should it have some kind of messed up rules for deciding whether you are swinging or thrusting your stick at someone?

Because certain things should only be damaged by certain weapon types. For instance, you want skeletons to be resistant to arrows. You want plant like creatures to be resistant to bludgeoning weapons and possibly peircing too. Certain weapons are designed to hurt creatures in different ways. If you have no internal organs, a weapon designed to peirce those organs won't do a heck of a lot.

A vampire isn't even particularly damaged by wood, it has to be a wooden stake through the heart. You hit him with a chair leg in a barfight and he's as resilient against it as ever. Only peircing wooden weapons seem to really have effect against vampires.

Whatever vulnerabilities you happen to choose for your magical creatures are totally arbitrary, because those creatures don't really exist to have checkable vulnerabilities. I have chosen a list of vulnerabilities which is easy to adjudicate in game. No longer do you have to have discussions about whether Mithril is enough like Silver to qualify or any of that crap. Your weapons simply say what kind of damage they inflict and creatures say what kind of damage they resist and it doesn't take any legacy mechanics or ad hoccing to resolve.

Well, they are arbitrary true, but they also fit your vision of the creature. I really don't see a vampire being afraid of a martial artist for the most part. The creature can shrug off bullets, hits by bludgeoning weapons, yet it can't beat a simple fist?

Also I want skeletons to be resistant to peircing weapons. they have no internal organs, I don't want archers to kill them easily.

And you run into this shit designing creatures all the time. While you can just pick the one you want the creature to be vulnerable to and say "to hell with the consequences", sometimes you really don't want your creature picking up a huge list of vulnerabilities just because you wanted it to be weak against a certain thing.

I suppose I'll have to see what your big list of damage types consists of, but you're bound to have lots of weird complications just based on the concept alone. It seems like it's going to be very difficult to create the creature you want to create because of some of the restrictions on your system. Because sometimes you want stuff like peircing, bludgeoning or whatever to enter the equation. Sometimes like with a rakshasha you want a blessed crossbow bolt to do something special. Not everything fits neatly within the box.

The game works better when you know ahead of time what all the attack and defense forms are. Secret attack forms makes the game go the way of Iclandic Law, and that's horse shit.

Well not always. Sometimes it's cool to have a creature that is seemingly unkillable until you discover its weakness. Having a system of static attack and defense merely means players just consult thier golf bag of weapons and try to find a weakness.

Secret stuff only becomes shitty when it's in the hands of the PCs, because not all monsters are going to have that.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

On a tangent, the running water restriction does indeed appear in source material. One of the means of disposing of a vampire involved, in addtion to other things, weighting down the body and dropping it in the river. However, it's also said that you can prevent a vampire from coming back and kicking your ass by burying him at a crossroads, and neither of them say that this does any damage to them, instead just holding them in check. You probably don't need to worry too much about it.

-Desdan

[User3]

For instance, you want skeletons to be resistant to arrows. You want plant like creatures to be resistant to bludgeoning weapons and possibly peircing too.

Why would I want that? Seriously, why would I want that? If I'm willing to accept that an arrow is non-specifically lethal to a human, why wouldn't I be willing to accept that it's non-specifically lethal to a skeleton?

"Skeletons" aren't held together by any real biology, so why would it necessarily be resistant or vulnerable to a pointy projectile? At what point does that fall under common sense? Saying that you have to break them to kill them is just as arbitrary as saying that you have to get something inside their eye sockets to shut off the magic.

Skeletons don't even touch themselves particularly, it's just some floating bones. Any particular resistances they do and do not have are based on absolutely nothing but your imagination.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1094065722[/unixtime]]
Why would I want that? Seriously, why would I want that? If I'm willing to accept that an arrow is non-specifically lethal to a human, why wouldn't I be willing to accept that it's non-specifically lethal to a skeleton?

Because sometimes you might. A plant for instance should be more resistant to bludgeon and piercing perhaps. After all you use a machete to cut a way through the jungle, not a club or a spear.

As for skeletons, it makes sense to me at least that pericing weapons wouldn't hurt them... but that's not the point.


The point is that you can't represent such creatures at all.

And there are plenty of other reasons beyond creatures for this mechanic. For instance, if there's a rope hanging holding a bucket you don't want some guy to "cut" it with a club. You may not want a guy to be able to take down a stone wall easily with a spear, or whatever.

From a game design point of view, weapon type resistances are a counter to the weapon specialist. if a guy only knows how to use bows well, then he's in trouble against something with peircing resistance.

Further it adds variety to the game. Having elemental/material damage types may be ok from a mechanics point of view, but the problem is that a lot of the times these really won't be immediately logical and it's just a matter of guesswork or knowing the monster manual to know what elements defeat what monsters. And that isn't all that fun.

The problem with saying "there's no realism in this game, a skeleton has no biology" and so on is that your players really can't count on anything. Things don't act as they'd expect them to act, they act within some totally arbitrary sense without any logic behind it, and so when they meet something new they're going to go through their golf bag of weapons and spells, one at a time, until they find something that works and once they do, they know not only one, but all of the creature's weaknesses, because the damage types are linked. But it's going to be entirely random pretty much as to which one it is. And while that's ok some of the time, it gets kinda old the rest of the time.

The good thing with your game acting based on physics is that players by default understand that stuff. It makes sense that an arrow would pass harmlessly through the hollow interior of a skeleton, or just chip its rib slightly. Because that's how you see things happening. Once you dion't have that, everything is a crap shoot, there's no point for your players to think at all, they'll mindlessly cycle through damage types in a checklist until they find the right one. Any choice is as good as any other, because nothing has to make sense. I'd think it better to present a scenario where players are encouraged to think instead of just randomly trying stuff from a finite list until they finally find the right one. When you present creatures that are somewhat consistent with physics then your players have more fun interacting with them because they can make some assumptions based on the description of the creature as to what is going to work and what isn't.

[User3]

I try to keep out of Frank's design forums, but...

Vampires can easily be played using straight regeneration rules and immunity to death effects, with the extra rule that “leaving the weapon in” is damage that can’t be regenerated(and only piercing weapons can be left in the body in fatal areas). You don’t even have to assume that the vampire is a walking corpse that doesn’t breath or eat or have vital anatomical parts; they might just regenerate, making people assume that the vampire can survive having it lungs filled with arrows because its dead, and they don’t ever understand the possibility of regeneration (and some kind of pain resistance). I mean, the vampire always pulls out the arrow, right? Sure, he’s mocking the hero with his hardcore-ness, but he might also have a practical reason for doing that.

So peasants and poor guys will “leave in” wooden short spear-type things because forged metal weapons are expensive and nailing a creature of the night is cool and everything, but not so cool that you’re going to let the thing keep your grandfather’s sword from the war.

Burying in it a crossroads could mean that when it finally digs its way out in five years, it has three choices of roads to follow back to a village when it exacts bloody revenge.

Dropping it in a river with stones is as good of a prison as a peasant can create during the winter when the ground is frozen solid and there aren't any caves nearby.

[Username17]

The problem with saying "there's no realism in this game, a skeleton has no biology" and so on is that your players really can't count on anything.

No. The problem with coming up with unique mechanics for every damn thing is what makes it so that people can't count on anything. It's what makes the Tendriridiculous be immune to axes and fire because it's a plant. That kind of thing.

As long as things have a unified "magic logic" for the magic in the game, then the players can count on things. They can actually reason stuff out. The can figure out that the cruelty demon exists from a lack of empathy and is vulnerable to water attacks - because the magic in the game makes some fvcking sense.

Otherwise you just try some shit at total random until you die or something works. I mean, why the hell is the giant plant monster healed by electricity? Why is another one only damaged by thrown rocks (not thrown spears)? When the players finally "figure it out" they haven't figured anything - they just went through the golf bag until they hit jackpot before the monster killed them all.

For a puzzle monster to mean anything, the "puzzle" has to be based on some kind of consistent logic. It doesn't have to be grounded in real physics, but it does have to be grounded in a consistent set of rules which governs the suspenion of disbelief you are asking your players to perform.

Requiring a warhammer instead of a pick doesn't make any sense at all, because those two weapons are practically indistinguishable (one comes to a very narrow tip, and the other comes to a narrow tip that is sharpened). The "bludgeoning/piercing" distinction is not grounded in logic, and basing monster resistances around it is retardarific.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1094083413[/unixtime]]
As long as things have a unified "magic logic" for the magic in the game, then the players can count on things. They can actually reason stuff out. The can figure out that the cruelty demon exists from a lack of empathy and is vulnerable to water attacks - because the magic in the game makes some fvcking sense.

Yes, assuming someone else can understand it aside from you.

I see no connection between silver and water, or some of the other correlations you'll undoubtably make. Nor are you going to really know that lack of empathy makes you water vulnerable either, empathy is a quality of living things, so why not life instead? And the fact that silver weapons, and acid (both with water traits said earlier) are going to hurt fire elementals is very strange.

Assuming your magic logic actually works out, sure it can work... but right now, I'm willing to bet most people won't immediately jump to any conclusions based on it because it's so alien and complex. Somehow lack of empathy makes you weak versus water. I mean unless you basically spell this stuff out directly somewhere, nobody is going to make that leap of reasoning.

Whereas everyone can pretty much guess that axes and swords should be better against a treant than arrows and clubs. I don't need any prior explanation to do that because it's pretty logical and obvious.

Otherwise you just try some shit at total random until you die or something works. I mean, why the hell is the giant plant monster healed by electricity? Why is another one only damaged by thrown rocks (not thrown spears)? When the players finally "figure it out" they haven't figured anything - they just went through the golf bag until they hit jackpot before the monster killed them all.

I don't find D&D creatures to be that much of a crap shoot. There are some ridiculous resistances granted, but it sounds like your system is going to be much more of a guessing game, because your damage types are completely arbitrary.

For a puzzle monster to mean anything, the "puzzle" has to be based on some kind of consistent logic. It doesn't have to be grounded in real physics, but it does have to be grounded in a consistent set of rules which governs the suspenion of disbelief you are asking your players to perform.

Right, but more often than not, physics enters the equation when you are talking about melee weapons which are nothing more than force delivery systems.

Requiring a warhammer instead of a pick doesn't make any sense at all, because those two weapons are practically indistinguishable (one comes to a very narrow tip, and the other comes to a narrow tip that is sharpened). The "bludgeoning/piercing" distinction is not grounded in logic, and basing monster resistances around it is retardarific.

Well who is to say the warhammer has a narrow tip? The picture in the PHB certainly doesn't. Perhaps some warhammers were made that way... but in either case you're still talking about a flat bludgeoning head as opposed to a peircing one.

Sure, you've got some fringe cases, but that's no reason to eliminate bludgeoning weapons entirely... I mean I could say stuff about your rules like "what element would a half silver, half steel alloy weapon be?" or "Is a blast of steam a water effect or a fire effect?"

You're always going to run into edge cases no matter what you do. And it's actually a lot easier to run into edge cases when your weapon types are determined by metal type, because metals can be combined. So you could create some nightmarish blend of metals, which could contain parts from every element.

[rapanui]

While I agree with some of RCs criticisms, I think what makes Frank's system useful is that it will be inherently simple to balance. By making so many things streamlined, calculating the relative power of creatures and PCs should in theory be a snap.

BTW Frank, did you get some inspiration for linking weapon materials to damage types from the Sword of Mana game for the GBA?

[Joy_Division]

1094068869[/unixtime]]
The good thing with your game acting based on physics is that players by default understand that stuff. It makes sense that an arrow would pass harmlessly through the hollow interior of a skeleton, or just chip its rib slightly. Because that's how you see things happening.

D&D only follows any sort of "physics" insofar as you can use your imagination to reconcile your personal mental picture of the game with your own common sense. You're not looking for the game to have any sort of logic, you're looking for the game to have common sense. Your common sense specifically. To say that physics is the common ground that all RPG gamers have to build a comparative experience is completely hilarious. No seriously .

The only major disagreements I've seen in all my years of gaming (other than minor rules squabbles) came up because players and the DM have different amounts of knowledge about how "the world actually works." Seriously the DM says "A happens" and then a player interjects and says "It wouldn't actually but carry on." This happens all the time not because the players are assholes , but because most people don't know how the real fucking world that they live in every day works. They just have a common sense that guides them based on past experiences and a few ad hoc assumptions about how the world works.

Take your own example, you want to split weapons into bludgeoning and piercing because that matters for skeletons in your mind. Personally I've never seen why of all the ranged weapons I could pick up a sling would be the best of them to attack a skeleton. It should be worse than or at least as bad as an arrow. Meanwhile why if a longsword can take of someone's arm off when it has flesh on it does it do less damage when that same person lacks flesh. There is no sense there. Any time that matters the DM ad-hoc's it anyways, I've never seen a dm rule that you couldn't cut a rope with a dagger because it's a piercing weapon and it would be hard to do that with a spear.

Any system that has an internal consistancy has LOGIC. Even if it makes no god damned sense to you based on what you know. If all the groundwork is laid out it can make sense to you though once you learn it. Since writing up exactly the way this magic logic works is the easiest way to build monsters and characters with it you do that. Then everyone is on the level and everything makes sense.

[Username17]

BTW Frank, did you get some inspiration for linking weapon materials to damage types from the Sword of Mana game for the GBA?

The what in the what now? No, I haven't played that game or seen it played. I've been working on something similar for a while - setting up a finite list of damage types that could work for everything. The thing that pushed me over the edge to just make the magical and physical damage types the same was probably George R. R. Martin's Storm of Swords. In it the ice wraiths are immune to just about everything except fire, and obsidian which also causes them to melt. It was a very well written piece of the book, and resonates strongly with many systems of sympathetic magic from Earth's past.

Any system that has an internal consistancy has LOGIC. Even if it makes no god damned sense to you based on what you know.

Eactly. And since when it comes to magic you "know" absolutely nothing because magic isn't real, then the only important thing is having internal consistency. There's no external consistency to even have.

I see no connection between silver and water

And yet you see a connection between silver and hurting werewolves, right? There are many cultures that have legends of shapeshifters in them, and the vulnerabilities those shapeshifters have is very different in different cultures. In many of them, shapeshifters are vulnerable to iron (which represents modernity in a lot of stories).

But in some of them, shapeshifters are harmed by silver. Why are they harmed by silver? Because they are governed by the moon almost universally in the same stories. The moon is associated with the sea for rather obvious reasons, and both the moon and the sea are described as "silvery". Thus, the silver and the moon are associated with the ocean and the lunar-governed lycanthrope is itself damaged by silver.

The only reason a werewolf would ever be harmed by silver is because of silver/moon association magic-logic. And if you don't see a similar moon/ocean association to make magic logic out of you just aren't thinking like a 4th century animist.

---

The bottom line is that I honestly don't give a crap whether you can understand why some of the associations are set up. It doesn't bother me a bit. There are tens of thousands of years of Earth history upon which to draw magical theories from, so it is essentially impossible to include all of it into any kind of cohesive structure. So I have to pick and choose out of the magical stories from the past.

I could have "vampires" be tools left out in the rain which take vengeance for their misuse by feasting upon the blood of living. There's real precedant for that. I'm not going to, but the fact that there's real stories that would back up that interpretation, I think, amply shows the simply impossibility of conforming everything to the way everyone thinks magic should work. If one group of people think that vampires are blood drinking humans, and another think that vampires are blood drinking hand drills - there's just no possibility of a meeting of the minds here.

So you arbitrarily set up some system. Make it consistent, and then tell everyone what it is up front while they make their characters or before. Leaving some things unsaid and then acting like the PCs can somehow "figure it out" because it makes sense to you based on your own personal bedtime stories is insane.

--

Well who is to say the warhammer has a narrow tip?

Because a "warhammer" is a real object. Unlike "werewolves" which do not exist, warhammers do. They look like this:

or this:


So if you say "warhammer" that has a real meaning, it means one of those weapons. It doesn't mean a sledge hammer (which is a form of "maul"). If you say "ent" that doesn't have real meaning, and you can have it do whatever you want.

I mean, the D&D ent is vulnerable to fire. Seriously, what the hell? Trees burn, yes, but so do people. When a tree catches on fire it doesn't die - which makes it vastly more resistant to flames than any animal. Trees get wiped out by forest fires not because they are vulnerable to flames, but because they can't move. It takes much more time in much higher heat to kill a tree with fires than it would you or me. So from a "logic" standpoint, shouldn't ents be extremely fire resistant?

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1094130667[/unixtime]]
I could have "vampires" be tools left out in the rain which take vengeance for their misuse by feasting upon the blood of living. There's real precedant for that. I'm not going to, but the fact that there's real stories that would back up that interpretation, I think, amply shows the simply impossibility of conforming everything to the way everyone thinks magic should work. If one group of people think that vampires are blood drinking humans, and another think that vampires are blood drinking hand drills - there's just no possibility of a meeting of the minds here.

I don't think I can continue on in this topic for a while, as I'm too busy cracking up at the thought of a "blood drinking hand drill". I'm too busy imagining a trailer for some new vampire movie called "Night of the bloodsucking tools".

I think this is a good point to end the discussion on damage types anyway, as I really dont' want to clutter the thread up with just arguments over one specific part of a big revision.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Frank does have a point. It's better to have a system that is not "realistic" but is internally consistant logic-wise than it is to have a game that aspires to reality through individually arbitrary decisions. This way, even if you don't get the logic yourself, once you figure out the system everything else becomes easy to deal with.

-Desdan

[rapanui]

A quick question:

"The biggest change here is that the amount of damage needed to kill someone altogether is three times the amount needed to simply drop them. That's important, because there isn't any Raise Dead. People are incapacitated but revivable with medicine for a long damn time."

That is very balanced and makes sense from a coherent storyline perspective, but how will you justify someone who is incapacitated getting stabbed repeatedly in the throat by someone else (aka Coup de Grace)? Can you kill a peasant with one blow of your sword?

[Username17]

but how will you justify someone who is incapacitated getting stabbed repeatedly in the throat by someone else (aka Coup de Grace)?

Well, damage just plain accumulates until you die, it might take you a few jabs, but your damage bonus is going way up while they are lying there without a quickness bonus to defense - so your whole to-hit roll is effectively going into power attack whether you like it or not.

Can you kill a peasant with one blow of your sword?

Yes and no. Mostly no. While if your opponent fails against the damage DC of your strike by sixty they turn into a fine red mist and have their character sheet torn in half, it's a whole lot easier to simply drop someone. Smack someone hard enough that they can't make the willpower check to move, and they crumple up and stay crumpled - indefinately. If noone comes and rescues them after the battle, that's the end of that.

People take a minimum of five minutes to become "dead" when they've simply been cut up real bad. So since there's magical healing, it is quite likely that the peasant you stab in the heart can be saved by PC paramedics (unless you cut their head off while they are busily lying there or something).

Vampires can easily be played using straight regeneration rules and immunity to death effects, with the extra rule that “leaving the weapon in” is damage that can’t be regenerated(and only piercing weapons can be left in the body in fatal areas).

That's "cool" but not "practical", unfortunately. There's just no way that you can codify when and why you can "leave in" a musket ball but not a sling bullet or whatever. It's like hit locations but you have to deal with the concept of exit wounds and internal hemoraging - it's just not a starter.

Unfortunately, D&D regeneration really doesn't work very well at all. In D&D you get no closer to killing a troll when you use a flaming sword than if you use a cold sword. Old D&D Firebrands (where the entire sword simply "was fire", making it more like the system I'm talking about) would go a way towards fixing the problem, but it still doesn't address the fact that if anyone on your side isn't using a firebrand there is no reason for anyone on your side to use one.

D&D regeneration happens at the same rate regardless of how much non-regeneratable damage you have taken - and since you're out of the fight when the damage total goes to your hit point total it just doesn't make any difference.

---

D&D regeneration is a bad model, and I see no reason to use it. Actually, the model I like best is one of limited damage resistance. That is, you "regenerate" the first two damage levels off of any attack at the end of the round (or whatever). So if you hit the troll a bunch of times with toothpicks he'll fall over - but then they'll all pop out at the end of the round and he'll be good as new. But if you hit him with a bazooka he'll look all dead, and then he'll crawl his way back at you.

Regeneration, then, would be represented as #/^ where # represents a fixed number of boxes, and ^ represents a time frame. Trolls still regenerate fire damage, but presumably they have much lower fire resistance so they end up taking as much damage as if they hadn't had regeneration (it's actually a little worse, since they temporarily suffer some larger penalties).

---

Long term rapid healing can just be handled like regular healing abilities. Only it affects yourself.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

As for the healing thing, if it takes 5 minutes to die and you have no raise dead, I wouldn't have fast combat healing either. This would be to discourage people from CdGing (or the equivalent) people who are dying and on the ground. If you've got fast combat healing then you're always going to want to nuke the guy who has fallen so he can't get back up again. So I'd say healing a guy who is down should probably take you some arbitrarily long amount of time, like 10 rounds or more.

[Lago_AM3P]

Even though this is completely arbitrary, I think that status effects other than death should take an opponent out of the combat easier.

There is a cubic asston of status effects in the game, but they rarely get used.

You might see people getting petrified and nauseated more often if it was easier to take someone out of the combat like this than killing them. That's what made Beowulf in Final Fantasy Tactics extremely effective.

[User3]

Most status effects would look better as various forms of ability damage.

So a Flesh to Stone might do "cursed" Dex damage(which requires an appropriate anti-curse counter spell), and if it drops you to Dex 0 you can't move and become petrified.

Basically, there's no reason why a Shaken, thrice Symbol-ed of Pain, dazzled, Str. poisoned, blinded, and cursed guy should have to keep track of all those effects so that he can still act, but he has so many penalties that he doesn't want to act, aside from the Scooby-doo like absurdity of having small children hit him with sticks because has more penalties than a Str 1 creature.

Just taking ability damage until you drop seems fine to me, with the effects of <stat> 0 being different for each stat.

For example, Wis 0 may mean that Will magic always works and you are catatonic and respond to anyone's commands, while Cha 0 might mean that you act as Confused, and Int 0 retains no memories and rolls for surprise each round.

[RandomCasualty]

As for LAGO's comment. The reason that status effects aren't often used is because the save DC is exactly the same as for a save or die, often lower in fact. So you've often got the choice to either curse the guy or kill him, at the same chance of effect or favoring the killing. And so the choice is obvious.

For curse magic to work it has to have a better success rate than save or die magic. If it isn't easier to blind the guy then you'll never bother blinding him when you can just petrify him or finger of death him instead.

Basically if it's something that outright takes someone out of the fight if he fails the save, the spell can't succeed very often, otherwise your other magical attacks, like curses become useless. For curse magic to be worthwhile the opponent needs to be able to take several hits.

K:

Normally I'm against ability damage, but in the case of Frank's system where you can treat ability damage like normal damage and that normal damage doesn't actually scale (since you've got a fixed amount of life), you could actually use ability damage without it being broken.

[Username17]

For curse magic to work it has to have a better success rate than save or die magic.

Or simply be Save or Die magic. The binary nature of many spell effects is not explicitly necessary for the world to continue turning. By making the Fatigue spells and the Sleep spells be the same spells (failing the save by more causes you to acrue more tiredness until you pass out), you no longer have the situation where the Fatigue Spells are shitty beyond belief.

If Curses build up to removing you from the combat, they become a lot more attractive, which is one of the things I am doing here. You slap people with Petrification effects and they sssslllllloooooooowwwwwwwww down until eventually they turn into a rock. That way people generally get to avoid the "well crap, I failed my initiative check, I'll try to participate in the next encounter..." syndrome so common to high level play in D&D. Furthermore, you get to actually give a damn about those status effects you are heaping on your enemy - it's actually going somewhere instead of not.

Normally I'm against ability damage, but in the case of Frank's system where you can treat ability damage like normal damage and that normal damage doesn't actually scale (since you've got a fixed amount of life), you could actually use ability damage without it being broken.

Indeed, ability damage scales in really dumb ways. In D&D, any time a squirrel becomes tired they are also paralyzed, because fatigue reduces your strength and so does being tiny or smaller. And that's just wrong.

The goal here is to have people accumulate fatigue penalties that incapacitate everyone at the same amount of fatigue. That way the tired squirrel and the tired manticore both do less damage and have less accuracy with their bites - but they can still both move until they are the same amount sleepy.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Could non-save or die spells be made more attractive/balanced that even if you succeeded your save, you had to do it by a certain amount otherwise you'd still be saddled with an effect?

Like if you cast a glitterdust on a group of orcs, the orcs that made their save by 1 or 2 over the DC are dazzled for the duration of the spell.

[Username17]

Could non-save or die spells be made more attractive/balanced that even if you succeeded your save, you had to do it by a certain amount otherwise you'd still be saddled with an effect?

I suppose. Of course, there's sstill no reason why things have to come in the various jank-ass discreet units that they come in for D&D. The thing where if you get Shaken a couple of times you start cowering, getting dazzled or sickened twice doesn't do anything, getting 12 or so points of ability damage leaves you incapacitated, and perhaps 34 hit points might leave you incapacitated as well... that's just unnecessarily confusing and doesn't make the game better.

The fact that fear damage scales wildly differently from hit point or even ability damage isn't good. The fact that "sickening" doesn't stack at all but "disease" or "poison" often does is retarded. If you're going to clean up the way attacks hurt people, there is no reason to not go all the way.

Consistent numbers of effect levels of different kinds of status effects taking you out, and a consistent method of determining number of status effect levels from an attack is a god damned necessity. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have that right now. D&D has had nearly forty years to come up with something along those lines and the fact that it's still got a legacy damage system for every single thing and a bunch of unique check-box style conditions is a disgrace.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1094309330[/unixtime]]
Like if you cast a glitterdust on a group of orcs, the orcs that made their save by 1 or 2 over the DC are dazzled for the duration of the spell.

Well, I'd think he'd want to do it like damage, where the amount you fail on your save/resist DC determines how screwed you are. Fail by only a small amount and you get dazzled, fail by more and you get blinded, and so on.