Health with multiple methods to reduce

[spongeknight]

So, one of the big problems in DnD 3.5 is that casters and martials were essentially playing a different game when it came down to fighting monsters. I'm pretty sure everyone here agrees that martials should get more powers and whatever to compete with casters in terms of versatility and real power, so I won't get into that. However, there is another way in which the two types differ significantly, and that's how they defeat enemies in direct combat. Wizards target saves and lay down effects that end combat, and martials stab hit points off monster until they fall down.

Those goals are usually not synergistic and result in a competition between people who should be working together. The wizard doesn't give a shit how many hit points a babau has left when he hits it with a dominate monster, and the fighter doesn't really give a shit what the wizard's failed spell would have done while he's charging a purple worm for 500 damage.

So- one of the things I thought would be cool is to have Hit Points represent more than just physical health, but also other things that people not swinging a sword would also care about. Many successful and well crafted games separate abilities into physical, mental, and social, so let's go with that. So now our Hit Points will represent physical health, mental health, motivation, bravery, and overall willingness to keep fighting. In that way you can reduce a monster's HP to zero by talking at them until they give up (like a bard or beguiler or rogue would want to do) or crush their mental health until they curl up on the floor and start crying (like a psion or wizard would want to do), while the fighter and barbarian stab a few times to hurry the process up.

In addition, instead of saves that don't interact with the HP system at all, make it so that saves just do interact with HP. I've seen it thrown around that saves should have tiers of effects, so have one tier that happens automatically and another tier that happens if your opponent has half health or less, for example. Or have stacking save penalties as you get injured. Or something.

Any thoughts? Also, before Frank gets in here let's assume there is no charm magic in this theoretical system so no one throws around a "rape simulator" accusation.

[Josh_Kablack]

A simple fix is to have all save-or-lose spells have HP threshholds like the various Power Words or to tie things to the 4e Bloodied condition. So for example a "Hold Monster" could be set to something like

• "Restrain one opponent with 20 or fewer Hit Points" or
• "Restrain one opponent with fewer than 5 Hit Points per caster level" or
• or"Restrain one Bloodied opponent" depending whether you wanted it to

Depending on whether you want to set things up so that a given spell level auto-win against lower level opposition, becomes less useful as the level of opponents increases, or always requires targets to be softened up first.


You could go slightly further and set effects up as Blashphemy or Color Spray type charts with the effects based on the remaining HP of the target. In such an arrangement, Hold Monster would work something like this:


The target takes 1 point of Fatigue damage per caster level and then suffers ill effects based on its remaining Hit Points:

• Target has less than 20 HP per caster level: Target is Dazed, losing their next Move action.
• Target has less than 10 HP per caster level: Target is Slowed, losing all Move actions.
• Target has less than 5 HP per caster level: Target is Paralyzed and may take no actions.

And here's a link to an old thread with a discussion of something similar, but perhaps more elaborate:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53063& ... c&start=24

[PhoneLobster]

Now, even as someone who has pretty much gone with HP damage instead of Save or Dies with his own mechanics the first important thing to note is...

Wizards target saves and lay down effects that end combat, and martials stab hit points off monster until they fall down.

Isn't automatically a bad thing at all. Save Or Dies get somewhat unfair amounts of hate for not entirely good reasons. There isn't anything automatically wrong with a set up where a wizard might drop a major target in one action if a fighter almost certainly can drop the same target in several actions. If the numbers were right it would be OK.

Similarly having them be non-synergistic is also not automatically bad. Having one character type that needs to keep investing in the same targets, but another that is free to switch targets every turn, also, not automatically bad.

Now, these things can be and often are bad, frequently the fighter just doesn't put out enough damage reliably enough to make the trade off worth it, it's possible that the miss chance required on wizard save or dies to make them appropriate to your mechanics would just be too much to make them feel anything but frustrating, and if you did the wrong things with separate damage tracks (and in the end, at a high level of abstraction, HP/SoD is separate damage tracks) you end up needing to bring specialized single damage track parties to the table in order to be effective.

But in the end most people just hate save or dies because when an SoD successfully hits THEIR personal character it feels really bad.

Maybe they just need some better SoD damage mitigation of some form.

I've seen it thrown around that saves should have tiers of effects, so have one tier that happens automatically and another tier that happens if your opponent has half health or less, for example. Or have stacking save penalties as you get injured. Or something.

Don't do that for anything other than "that one weird spell/class/feat/item that does that".

Any thoughts? Also, before Frank gets in here let's assume there is no charm magic in this theoretical system so no one throws around a "rape simulator" accusation.

Pretty sure there is some fall back position complaining about lack of irrelevant and really terrible randomized reaction rolls or something.

No wait, it's almost certainly realizmz, the fall back position will be realizmz, how dare you let bard demoralizing deal HP damage or defeat because realizmz. That will then turn into an increasingly insane argument where HP suddenly have only ever and CAN only ever represent actual physical wounds. For reasons. Realizmz ones.

[ishy]

So if I understand correctly, the idea is to remove all spells and hand spell casters different flavoured bows, did I get that right?

It sounds boring tbh.

[PhoneLobster]

So if I understand correctly, the idea is to remove all spells and hand spell casters different flavoured bows, did I get that right?

At the level of abstraction required to ignore what I'm pretty sure spongeknight still has to differentiate them they basically already ARE bows before his changes anyway.

They take combat actions. You roll a thing. Depending on however many successes you need because of whatever damage track the spell is on you eventually deal a defeat state.

Spells are basically bows that sometimes shoot explosions or enough damage to one shot is pretty much pure status quo.

[spongeknight]

So if I understand correctly, the idea is to remove all spells and hand spell casters different flavoured bows, did I get that right?

It sounds boring tbh.

You don't understand correctly. The problem being outlined is that there is absolutely zero overlap between "shaving HP off with attacks" and "Save or Die effects." The proposed solutions are to let HP represent more than just physical wounds so that other character concepts can deal HP damage, and to tie spell effects to HP so it's more difficult to drop people without hitting them a few times but lower tier effects still hinder them. This has everyone playing cooperatively- if you hit someone in the face you make SoD effects more likely to work, and throwing out SoD effects will at least give the monster a minor penalty that will make it easier to stab them. Everyone's contributing in ways that matter against the monster instead of having two different ways to defeat a monster that don't overlap and pretending it's a valid choice to pursue both options in the same party.

So everyone has bows and spells.

[Username17]

So if I understand correctly, the idea is to remove all spells and hand spell casters different flavoured bows, did I get that right?

It sounds boring tbh.

You don't understand correctly. The problem being outlined is that there is absolutely zero overlap between "shaving HP off with attacks" and "Save or Die effects." The proposed solutions are to let HP represent more than just physical wounds so that other character concepts can deal HP damage, and to tie spell effects to HP so it's more difficult to drop people without hitting them a few times but lower tier effects still hinder them. This has everyone playing cooperatively- if you hit someone in the face you make SoD effects more likely to work, and throwing out SoD effects will at least give the monster a minor penalty that will make it easier to stab them. Everyone's contributing in ways that matter against the monster instead of having two different ways to defeat a monster that don't overlap and pretending it's a valid choice to pursue both options in the same party.

So everyone has bows and spells.

First of all, that is just giving all the wizards differently flavored bows. And you're quite up front about having to get rid of a bunch of the cool and iconic spells to do even that.

Secondly, you know how no one gives an actual shit that guns don't "stack" with mind control in Vampire or turning people to stone in Shadowrun? That's because if characters are reasonably competent at eliminating targets, the lack of stacking isn't even an issue. The entire problem you have a bug up your ass about is that if you want to have people team up to grind away hit points on a giant Final Fantasy style boss, then obviously everyone has to grind away hit points. That's tautology. Also, it's meaningless because grinding away hit points like you were playing Final Fantasy is in fact extremely dull in table top.

So you're proposal is to make the game more boring in order to support a more boring type of play. Congratulations, you just invented 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Welcome to 2008.

-Username17

[Wiseman]

If there's going to be a bloodied condition tied to making effects work, then there needs to be a level cutoff as well. So like you don't have to bloody people x levels lower than you, so that 15 level characters can just mass control commoners without having to beat each one of them down first.

[Zaranthan]

Secondly, you know how no one gives an actual shit that guns don't "stack" with mind control in Vampire or turning people to stone in Shadowrun? That's because if characters are reasonably competent at eliminating targets, the lack of stacking isn't even an issue.

So, let me try my hand at this. The best system is to have a short condition track, maybe ten HP average. The fighters can deal around 6-8 damage per turn, so while they won't one-shot anything, almost nothing can withstand two turns of dedicated beatdown. The mages toss effects that can immediately remove red dots from the battlefield, but don't always work.

The problem here is that being on the receiving end of such powers is really shitty when you're the protagonist and the other guy is Mook #17. So, you give the PCs a plot armor resource to cheat death. Then you give the named enemies plot armor, too, so they stand out from the seventeen mooks you just mowed down.

Am I missing something here? Because the last time someone asked about adapting SR4 to D&D adventuring, you called him a moron.

[spongeknight]

First of all, that is just giving all the wizards differently flavored bows. And you're quite up front about having to get rid of a bunch of the cool and iconic spells to do even that.

Well, you're completely fucking wrong there. I have no idea where you saw in any part of my post getting rid of a bunch of spells, because I did not propose that in the slightest.

Secondly, you know how no one gives an actual shit that guns don't "stack" with mind control in Vampire or turning people to stone in Shadowrun? That's because if characters are reasonably competent at eliminating targets, the lack of stacking isn't even an issue. The entire problem you have a bug up your ass about is that if you want to have people team up to grind away hit points on a giant Final Fantasy style boss, then obviously everyone has to grind away hit points. That's tautology. Also, it's meaningless because grinding away hit points like you were playing Final Fantasy is in fact extremely dull in table top.

So you're proposal is to make the game more boring in order to support a more boring type of play. Congratulations, you just invented 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Welcome to 2008.

-Username17

Uh.

In addition, instead of saves that don't interact with the HP system at all, make it so that saves just do interact with HP. I've seen it thrown around that saves should have tiers of effects, so have one tier that happens automatically and another tier that happens if your opponent has half health or less, for example. Or have stacking save penalties as you get injured. Or something.

So my proposal was that everyone could attack hit points to reduce saves on enemies to make encounter-ending powers work, and what you got from that was "remove everything interesting from the game and only kill people with HP damage final destination." What the fuck? I have no idea where you're coming from here.

[OgreBattle]

There's an olde thread on TGD where Frank talks about a system where swords and magic both do hitpoint damage so stabbing and petrification rays both contribute along the same track in finishing off tough foes:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=39645

Different attacks can cause different kinds of wounds, which will do something totally different looing when they are incapacitating.
But they are all resolved in the same fashion with the same two dice, and 10 wounds is still incapacitating, regardless of kind or source.

So how does this work in practice?
A swordsman is facing off against a woman with snakes for hair and a deadly gaze, the Swordsman has a stat line of Strength: 7, Agility: 8, Moxy 6, Elan 7. The swordsman is using a 19 damage weapon and wearing 8 points of armor against earth effects. The medusa, on the other hand, is attempting to transform the swordsman into a statue with her gaze attack, and using an ability that does a base of 22 points of damage, and has only 5 points of void armor. Her stat line is Strength: 6, Agility: 6, Moxy 8, Elan 8. Ignoring, for the moment, skills and circumstances, we have a situation in which:

When the swordsman attacks the medusa, he rolls a d20 and adds 8 (his agility), attempting to hit the medusa (which he does on a 14, 8 + her agility). If he gets a minimal hit (which he does on a 14 or 15), she suffers 26 damage (19 for the weapon, 7 for the strength, and +0 for the to-hit roll). On a maximum hit (where he gets a 28), she'll take 7 extra damage for a total of 33. In either case, she now rolls a d20 and adds 11 (her strength plus void armor), attempting to equal the damage to successfully soak all the wounds. If she fails, she takes 1 wound for every 2 points she misses the damage DC on her soak roll (round wounds up). So if the swordsman rolls a natural 20 on his attack roll and the medusa rolls a natural one on her soak roll, she takes 11 wounds and crumples to the floor - she's down, but not actually dead.

When the medusa attacks the swordsman, she rolls a d20 and adds 8 (her moxy), and is looking for a 14 (8 + the swordsman's moxy). Once again, she scores a minimal hit on a 14 or 15, and a maximum hit on a 28. However, her attack is inflicting 30 to 37 damage (22 + her Elan of 8, with up to 7 additional damage coming in from the to-hit roll), and then the swordsman has to soak - which he does with a d20 + 15 (his Earth armor of 8 plus his Elan of 7). Again, a 20 on the attack roll and a 1 on the soak roll would incapacitate the poor swordsman.

Here's a fairly long discussion here on having D&D spells use a 4e style Bloodied condition to trigger their "Die/Suck" effects. This sets up a situation where Fighters wear down big monsters for wizards to lay down a finishing blow:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53193& ... sc&start=0
(I think this is the first thread to get into heated Rape Magic arguments tho')

I figure the simplest thing is to have spells tied to a bloodied condition, but also have it where if you're much higher level than your target they count as bloodied even when at full health so a high level wizard can just put a room full of orc raiders to sleep.

Inversely, to set up situations where wizards temporarily stun the dragon to give the fighter an opening to stab it through the heart, you can have conditions like "flat footed" "entangled" "stunned" and so on be automatic critical hits or coup de grace's for fighters.

[PhoneLobster]

I figure the simplest thing is to have spells tied to a bloodied condition

You know, I've never really liked the idea of bloodied being anything other than a matter of really niche importance to almost nobody.

If everyone needs bloodied to be thrown around in order to pull out their big impressive finishing moves... the implications are... problematic.

It's inflating combat time, and it is explicitly choosing to do so in order to give "more boring and explicitly weaker" actions an actual priority, extra time allocation and reason to exist.

Combat in most D&D style games doesn't need to be longer. And the last thing it needs added is more turns of "deal HP damage until you've done enough to have real options".

But even aside from that if bloodied has any real disadvantages in itself, like status effect penalties to attacks or defenses, once everyone relies on the state to achieve their finishing moves and stuff then that means that there is going to be a LOT of "you are desperately injured and bloodied to the point of near defeat!" fluff moments being thrown around on almost every character in almost every fight. Or certainly in far too many fights if the mechanic is at all functionally balanced.

No, not a fan of "bloodied" mechanics, and even less a fan of the choice of name for it too.

[Sigil]

As both a player and a GM, save or dies can be problematic. You can roll bad on your save and have your character die in the first round of combat through no real fault of your own, or have the boss monster you spent 30 minutes statting up for the adventure immediately killed. (I personally find encounters that last 1 round to be unsatisfying, and feel the sweet spot is usually 3 to 5 rounds, given that the fight at least has an interesting setup.) In either case its a poor ratio of time invested in preparation to actual play time. I think some form of SoD mitigation would be a good solution to it.

Something I'm pulling out of my ass on the spot, and may cause more problems than it solves, would be to require a character to be "bloodied" for a save or die to have full effect, and if they are "healthy" (or whatever you want to call non-bloodied) it instead deals damage equal to half max HP and has a serious rider effect. That would at least create incentive for spellcasters to either deal some conventional damage first, or select targets already weakened by other characters. Or just suck it up and expend extra high value resources in the form of a second save or die.

Edit: I'm also agreed that the term "bloodied" is awful and should be replaced with something better. "Weakened", "Vulnerable", "In a Bad Spot", fucking something.

[Orion]

It's really easy to add some stacking to D&D or a D&D-like game. Step 1: Everyone gets a penalty to saving throws based on their % of missing HP. Step 2 (optional): Save-or-Dies do some damage on a successful save. D&D even did that one with Finger of Death and Disintegrate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So my proposal was that everyone could attack hit points to reduce saves on enemies to make encounter-ending powers work, and what you got from that was "remove everything interesting from the game and only kill people with HP damage final destination." What the fuck? I have no idea where you're coming from here.

I ain't saying that the basic combat engine shouldn't be set up like that for many or even most, but if you want it to be like that for all spells then you are indeed going to have to carve out a huge chunk of the spells in 3E D&D like 4E D&D.

There's no room in a 'every status effect a player inflicts must be transparent with vanilla damage and vice versa' for plenty of iconic spells. Seriously, how is a spell like Deeper Darkness or Wall of Stone or Stone Shape or Minor Creation supposed to work in such a way that don't render them lameass 4E D&D-style self-parodies or lead you down the path of 'waaaah, the wizard used Reverse Gravity on the Frost Giant Jarl to totally invalidate my fighter's two rounds of full attacks' anyway?

[Lago PARANOIA]

The problem here is that being on the receiving end of such powers is really shitty when you're the protagonist and the other guy is Mook #17. So, you give the PCs a plot armor resource to cheat death. Then you give the named enemies plot armor, too, so they stand out from the seventeen mooks you just mowed down.

Frankly, you shouldn't give out plot armor as an explicit mechanic. It either fucks the math or the fourth wall. What you should do is make everyone play by more-or-less the same rules, have the PCs be a certain level, have mooks be level - (1d4) and Named Challenging Antagonists be level - (1d3 - 1).

However, since most people will balk at you showing the strings and saying that a 95% success rate will only happen if level 5 PCs face level 1 or 2 opposition with maybe a level 3 boss at the end of the campaign, it's your job as the game designer to do everything you can to hide the fact that the deck is stacked in favor of the player. 3E D&D uses plenty of tricks to do this -- NPCs get less wealth than PCs, they tend to be intentionally poorly min-maxed, monster advancement sucks goat anus, PCs are generally built with internal synergies in mind, Team NPC uses suboptimal tactics in a way that's not too obvious, etc.

[OgreBattle]

Seriously, how is a spell like Deeper Darkness or Wall of Stone or Stone Shape or Minor Creation supposed to work in such a way that don't render them lameass 4E D&D-style self-parodies or lead you down the path of 'waaaah, the wizard used Reverse Gravity on the Frost Giant Jarl to totally invalidate my fighter's two rounds of full attacks' anyway?

That seems more an encounter design problem. If a wall of stone wins the fight then you're beating on folks that can't handle a wall of stone. This can be because they're under-level appropriate challenge and then level appropriate encounters are expected to be strong enough to bash through walls, able to dash past stone walls being generated in the middle of a 6 second combat round, phase through it, jump over it, climb over it, and so on.

Same with Deeper Darkness.

As for Reverse Gravity the fighter really should be carrying a bow to enjoy two rounds of target shooting.
If it was lifting people with telekenisis I could see a "resist with willpower" effect that just turns it into a slow/stun effect, but reverse gravity's wording makes "resist gravitational pull with willpower" sound weird.

These are harder problems to tackle overall though as it's about certain non-caster D&D classes not having level appropriate abilities to overcome what wizards send at them.

[ishy]

That seems more an encounter design problem. If a wall of stone wins the fight then you're beating on folks that can't handle a wall of stone. This can be because they're under-level appropriate challenge and then level appropriate encounters are expected to be strong enough to bash through walls, able to dash past stone walls being generated in the middle of a 6 second combat round, phase through it, jump over it, climb over it, and so on.

Same with Deeper Darkness.

These are harder problems to tackle overall though as it's about certain non-caster D&D classes not having level appropriate abilities to overcome what wizards send at them.

If level appropriate folks can ignore my wall of stone casting, you've just made wall of stone a trap option. There are better spells to deal with mooks.

[PhoneLobster]

If level appropriate folks can ignore my wall of stone casting, you've just made wall of stone a trap option. There are better spells to deal with mooks.

Having a chance to dash through a wall before it is fully placed, or the ability to spend actions and resources on smashing it, climbing it, jumping it, or teleporting through it is not the same as rendering it useless against level appropriate targets.

A stone wall doesn't have to be an invulnerable unclimbable non-interactive defeat state to be worth your time of day.

And indeed, generally we regard "rocks fall, you all die" as a bad thing, not the minimum for level appropriate actions involving rocks.

[violence in the media]

If level appropriate folks can ignore my wall of stone casting, you've just made wall of stone a trap option. There are better spells to deal with mooks.

Having a chance to dash through a wall before it is fully placed, or the ability to spend actions and resources on smashing it, climbing it, jumping it, or teleporting through it is not the same as rendering it useless against level appropriate targets.

A stone wall doesn't have to be an invulnerable unclimbable non-interactive defeat state to be worth your time of day.

And indeed, generally we regard "rocks fall, you all die" as a bad thing, not the minimum for level appropriate actions involving rocks.

It can feel useless though. The same way it feels useless when someone makes their save, has a unknown immunity, or otherwise mitigates the action through no special effort on their part.

I think that's why you get people that like playing fighters. They don't like the disappointment of having the one Wall of Stone (or whatever) spell they're going to cast this game session do nothing. Sure, they might actually miss every attack they make as a fighter--but the number of attacks they make doesn't feel as limited to them as the number of spells they can cast.

One of my buddies put it something like this: "Every time I cast a spell it has to solve a problem--otherwise I'm just doing nothing."

[Lago PARANOIA]

This can be because they're under-level appropriate challenge and then level appropriate encounters are expected to be strong enough to bash through walls, able to dash past stone walls being generated in the middle of a 6 second combat round, phase through it, jump over it, climb over it, and so on.

But that's still not transparent with vanilla damage. Wall of Stone has effects on combat that are often agnostic of a median threat level of an opponent. It barely even slows an Umber Hulk down but completely fucks over an archery team -- and enemy adaptive abilities still doesn't do anything about the whole 'argh, why did you neuter those enemies like that when I was getting to town on them with my Rain of Arrows?!' problem unless the Wall of Stone is completely ignorable by the opposition. The only way out of that conundrum is to excise or neuter all game effects like that 4E D&D style or just accept that PCs will often be working at cross-purposes.

[ishy]

If level appropriate folks can ignore my wall of stone casting, you've just made wall of stone a trap option. There are better spells to deal with mooks.

Having a chance to dash through a wall before it is fully placed, or the ability to spend actions and resources on smashing it, climbing it, jumping it, or teleporting through it is not the same as rendering it useless against level appropriate targets.

A stone wall doesn't have to be an invulnerable unclimbable non-interactive defeat state to be worth your time of day.

And indeed, generally we regard "rocks fall, you all die" as a bad thing, not the minimum for level appropriate actions involving rocks.

If you get a saving throw and a chance to dash through the wall before it is fully placed and if you fail both, you can spent a single action to break through it / smash it / jump it/ climb it, then yeah it is useless.

[spongeknight]

There's no room in a 'every status effect a player inflicts must be transparent with vanilla damage and vice versa' for plenty of iconic spells. Seriously, how is a spell like Deeper Darkness or Wall of Stone or Stone Shape or Minor Creation supposed to work in such a way that don't render them lameass 4E D&D-style self-parodies or lead you down the path of 'waaaah, the wizard used Reverse Gravity on the Frost Giant Jarl to totally invalidate my fighter's two rounds of full attacks' anyway?

Well, it seems pretty simple to me. First of all, deeper darkness, wall of stone, stone shape, and minor creation aren't SoD spells, which are the only thing I'm talking about. Battlefield control spells can probably also use the HP damage=better success system, but I don't see why they'd have to. There's nothing about putting up a stone wall that invalidates what your allies are doing, it just separates the enemies into small chunks to fight, or walls off minions who don't have worthwhile abilities or whatever. You can just walk out of deeper darkness and you should probably rule that you can't create five gallons of individual save-forcing doses of poison for minor creation anyway. Stuff like fly or blink or etherealness are fine too, since presumably the fighty types would also get nice things. I'm just talking about the spells that have a "remove from combat [Y/N]" effect.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There's nothing about putting up a stone wall that invalidates what your allies are doing, it just separates the enemies into small chunks to fight, or walls off minions who don't have worthwhile abilities or whatever.

Until someone uses Silent Image to screw over a bunch of archers in murder holes when some other members were trying to bring them down with raw hp damage.

What exactly is the difference between a wizard Grease and Stone Shape to dump a bunch of clustered ogres into the valley while the fighter was working on them with a sword and a cleric dumping a Confusion on them and having them devolve into pummeling each other and ignoring the party? Both effects invalidate the contribution of the vanilla DDs.

[ishy]

First of all, deeper darkness, wall of stone, stone shape, and minor creation aren't SoD spells, which are the only thing I'm talking about.

There's nothing about putting up a stone wall that invalidates what your allies are doing, it just separates the enemies into small chunks to fight, or walls off minions who don't have worthwhile abilities or whatever.

It is possible, but difficult, to trap mobile opponents within or under a wall of stone, provided the wall is shaped so it can hold the creatures. Creatures can avoid entrapment with successful Reflex saves.