[Spellbound] Damage revised and other miscellanea

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Well, I don't know what more can be done here. If you reject 80 wound boxes as terrible, but not 10 wound boxes each with 8 subdivisions, you have left the land of reason.

THIS.

10 Wound boxes with 8 sub-units is 80 boxes.

My response to this is "Wait whut?". So yeah, I totally missed that, there is some pretty foundational crazy right there.

[merxa]

Another revision, to clarify how stacking fire damage is intended and to (hopefully) make clear that someone cannot be both burning and melting at once. I greatly appreciate everyone's feedback so far, thank you.

Ignite

If you are not already on fire, whenever you take fire damage (‘damage taken’), you may gain the burning or melting condition.

Whenever you take 1 to 4 fire damage (‘damage taken’), roll a toughness save DC 10+fire damage incoming or gain burn equal to fire damage taken.

If you already have burn, roll no save and gain additional burn equal to existing burn plus fire damage taken, to a maximum of 4 burn.

If you take 5 or more fire damage, roll a toughness save DC 10+Burn+fire damage dealt or gain melt equal to the fire damage taken minus 4, and lose any prior burn. On success gain burning 4 instead, and for every point above the success DC, reduce burning by 1, and at burning 0 or less you do not gain burn (although any preexisting burn condition persists).

You cannot have both burn and melt nor multiple burn, greater burn supersedes lesser burn and melt supersedes burn.

Burn

At the beginning of your turn, take 1 fire damage. Any objects that could reasonably act as an accelerant (such as lamp oil), must make a save vs DC 10+burn (see damaging objects) or catch on fire. Additionally, roll 1d3 and see table 1-a to determine how many items possibly burn.

While Burning, you shed orange light in a 1m radius for every point of burn, other colors may be appropriate depending on the material on fire, double this radius for Large creatures, triple for Huge, etc. For Tiny and smaller creatures, cut this range in half.

Anyone touching you or striking you with a non-reach melee weapon must make a Dex save at DC 10+Burn or take fire damage incoming equal to your current burn.

You may spend 1 AP to put out any ongoing burn, but must have something that can extinguish flames such as water, and with a suitable flame retardant or enough water to submerge yourself, this is automatically successful. Otherwise (such as dousing yourself with a bucket of water) reduce burn by 2. Without a suitable means to extinguish flames, you can spend 3 AP to smother yourself by rolling along the ground or the like, make a DC 10+burn Dex save to reduce burn by 2.

At the end of your turn reduce your burn by 1 unless an accelerant is on fire, in which case it will burn until consumed (defaults to 1 minute or 6 rounds unless specified).

Melt

At the beginning of your turn, take 2 fire damage. Any objects that could reasonably act as an accelerant (such as lamp oil), must make a save vs DC 14+melt (see damaging objects) or melt. Additionally, roll 1d3 and see table 1-a to determine how many items possibly melt.

Anyone touching you or striking you with a non-reach melee weapon must make a Dex save at DC 14+Melt or take fire damage(‘damage incoming’) equal to your current melt plus 4.

To reduce melt, you can apply a large amount of fire retardant, such as jumping into a pool of water in which case reduce melt by 2 per round or burn by 4. Otherwise melting objects take time to cool off, reduce melt by 1 per pound per minute. Melt 0 becomes burn 4.

While under melt, any additional fire damage does not trigger ignite nor burn, but if enough fire damage is taken to trigger melt (and this somehow does not kill the creature) add the additional melt to the existing melt.

Interactions

Every point of fire ‘damage incoming’ (applied before fire resistance) reduces chill by 3, and reduces freeze by 1.

Every point of cold ‘damage incoming’ reduces burn by 3, and melt by 1.

[merxa]

Well, I don't know what more can be done here. If you reject 80 wound boxes as terrible, but not 10 wound boxes each with 8 subdivisions, you have left the land of reason.

THIS.

10 Wound boxes with 8 sub-units is 80 boxes.

But if you VISUALLY like 10 boxes with 8 subdivisions, you can make '1/8' = 1 and have them fill in one 'box slice'. '8 damage' would then fill in 8 slices (1 full box).

When you're designing a system, you get to set where the floor is. If you've set the floor to the point where you need negative numbers and/or fractions, you've really done a disservice to your players. If you're approaching this from a position that you're good at math, you should understand that a simple transformation doesn't change the underlying math. If .125 maps to 1, and 1 maps to 8, nothing has actually changed except you're counting by 1s instead of by 1/8ths.

I'm not sure if I'll convince you, I'll reiterate that this is worthwhile for me to playtest.

But there is still some differences, and that is how damage scaling is working when damage is 0,-1,-2 -- it doubles, but damage of 1,2,3 does not scale the same way. If I shift everything over to 80 wounds, I would need to write a conversion table for damage taken.

theoretical damage conversion table at 80 wounds:
damage taken | damage taken conversion
0 | 0
1 | 1
2 | 2
3 | 4
4 | 8
5 | 16
6 | 24
7 | 32
8 | 40
9 | 48
10 | 56

and so on -- this is what would be required to make it isomorphic, this isn't somehow superior to the fractional system, is it?

fractional damage will also play a few other roles, one is it doesn't have any impact until the wound becomes 1/1 so doing 1/2 a wound has no impact, but a full wound could potentially be impactful. I am also explicitly saying to not carry over fractions, so if someone has a 5/8 wound and takes 4/8, you would discard the 1/4 remainder.

[deaddmwalking]

@Merxa

You're not likely to convince me that adding fractions is good, and it's your system - you can do whatever you want. But I still want to convince you that playing with fractions is bad. Now, there's a very good chance that I'm not 100% understanding what you've explained, but I also think that even PARTIALLY understanding I see some major problems. I want to focus my criticism on 'table time' and 'speed of operation'.

In most systems, combat is complicated, and resolving combat is time-consuming. When you're determining whether you've hit, whether you've done damage, whether that damage is applied to the target, whether there are rider effects (like burning), you're performing operations. No matter how efficient you are, each operation takes time. That's time that the players aren't engaged with the world or the story. People use the term 'logistics and Dragons' derisively for a reason - when there are too many operations and/or they're too complicated, players stop using them. While the specific level of complexity players are WILLING to tolerate may vary from one individual to another, your goal should be to reduce the complexity as much as possible while still maintaining satisfying results.

When you fire an arrow you could calculate the velocity at launch, the angle of departure, the effect of gravity, air resistance and, if you knew the range that was intended, the exact velocity of the projectile at the time of impact (determining damage, etc). An arrow that has reached velocity 0 at the highest point of its trajectory before accelerating due to gravity as it returns to the earth can't actually hurt anything. If you DON'T do these calculations, you don't REALLY KNOW whether you can hit a griffon flying at 100 feet or 200 feet. Now, as a designer, if you want your physics simulator to return plausible results, by all means run some expected values through it to set some baselines, but you SHOULD NOT have the players do that. You can set an accuracy value and a range value, and have a quick easily used rule like 'vertical distance counts double' and that's going to work well enough that what you lose in simulation you more than make up for in calculation time. This is not intended as a spurious example or a deliberate mischaracterization of what you're proposing.

You have an attack roll. You have a damage roll. You have a soak value. I then apply my damage to your soak, potentially reducing a hit that does 3 damage to a hit that does 1/2 damage or 1/4 damage. If your soak is 5 I have to go '3-1 is 2, 4 to go; 2-1 is 1, 3 to go; 1-1 is 1/2, 2 to go; 1/2 - 1 is 1/4, 1 to go; 1/4-1 is 1/8, done'. That's ponderous, and exposure to the system isn't going to really make a difference for how fast people can perform this operation - especially keeping in mind that you're introducing a 'trick' so 1-1 is 1/2 instead of 0.

Now, if I'm the designer and I decide that I want you to be able to kill an opponent in 80 hits (which is bad for other reasons, but we're going to go with it), mathematically I get the same result if damage is 6, DR is 5 and the opponent has 80 hit points. Now I'm doing 1 point of damage per round, and it still takes 80 hits. But what it doesn't take is ANY CALCULATION TIME. I hit, after DR I deal 1 point of damage. Unless your game is 'math problems with fantasy trappings', removing the calculation time is a net positive.

Now, as I said before we still have to maintain satisfying results. Maybe you want 'variable damage' so maybe it takes 40 hits and maybe it takes 80 hits, or somewhere in-between (still too many, but whatevs). In that case 1d10 damage against DR 4 basically gets us there. Sometimes a hit does nothing (40% of the time) sometimes it does 6 damage (10% of the time) - that's still a really simple operation... And if STR/TOUGHNESS offset (ie, Strength adds to damage and Toughness reduces damage), since those don't typically change during a fight I can calculate damage one time and plug in my roll to that formula. Ie, if I have STR +3 and the opponent has TOUGH +4, I can just apply a -1 to my damage roll and we can forget about soak. If I have STR +4 and the opponent has TOUGH +3, I can just add +1 to my damage roll.

I do think you need to start with answering the question 'what am I trying to simulate and what does that look like?'. If two town guardsman get in a fight, is it a situation where the first one that swings is likely to drop the other? Or do they need to trade 2-5 blows? If you can start answering questions about what a mirror fight looks like you can start choosing damage values and wound boxes that support that. What you NEVER, EVER want to do is create a formula that is aesthetically pleasing to you and then try to build the system around that. You're going to create epicycles upon epicycles to try to get it to calculate correctly and you're left with an unplayable mess.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

If you are not already on fire, whenever you take fire damage (‘damage taken’), you may gain the burning or melting condition.

All else aside. This change now makes Burn the best defense against Melt.

[merxa]

If you are not already on fire, whenever you take fire damage (‘damage taken’), you may gain the burning or melting condition.

All else aside. This change now makes Burn the best defense against Melt.

I think you are misreading it, as its presented in the order of:

If neither A nor B, X
If A, Y
If B, Z

But there could be a misstatement in the current verison, or surely some way i can reword it for better clarity.
~

Table time and speed of operation are both important to me. The expectation is this system will be played online via vtts, but can be played in person requiring only pencil, paper, d6s, and access to the rules.

Currently, a simple attack is resolved by rolling to hit vs a static ac, then rolling damage vs static defenses. Spells and combat abilities will incorporate saving throw vs static dc then rolling damage vs static defenses.

There are some additional complexities being introduced, and sometimes it hard to say its a complication so much as departure from the norm. The wound system will simplify some things, and I believe it can be used to help model things I'd like to model, but its different from hit points. The system itself is 3d6, numbers for most circumstances are not expected to go above 18, so usually you are adding together sub 20 numbers. Damage is a very constrained range, as the listed weapons go a 1d3 to 1d6+1:

Damage | example weapon

1d3 fists
1d6-1 clubs, daggers
1d3+1 short swords
1d6 long sword
2d3 great club
1d6+1 great sword

I don't think subtracting small numbers is too onerous, 3-1 or 3-2, that shouldn't be too hard. Yes, asking someone out of the blue to calculate 3-4 will cause some people to pause or get the wrong answer. But people will very quickly adapt to calculate small negative numbers, so 5-7 or whatever, won't be insurmountable. Then, people will need to remember that 0 is 4/8, -1 is 2/8 and -2 is 1/8. Again, I agree that argument from intuition suggests this isn't great, but I also believe it isn't as bad as you feel it is.
~

Staying focused on fire damage, some example spells.

Burning Hands
School Conjuration, evocation [fire]; Level 1,
Casting time. 2 AP
Components. V,S
Range. 3m cone
Duration. Instantaneous
Saving Throw. Dex; SR. Yes

Flames erupt from the casters hands, burning everything in a 3m cone, roll 2d3+SB fire damage. Dex save for half.
~
Firebolt
School Conjuration, evocation [fire]; Level 0, cantrip
Casting Time. 1 AP, 2 AP
Components. V, S
Range. Close
Area. Target Creature
Duration. Instantaneous
Saving Throw. None; SR. Yes

A bolt of searing flame launches from your hand.

Roll a ranged attack to hit, if you are within reach to your target gain a +3 bonus to hit. On a successful hit deal 1d3+1 fire damage or 2d3+1 fire damage if you expended 2 AP.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

If you are not already on fire, whenever you take fire damage (‘damage taken’), you may gain the burning or melting condition.

All else aside. This change now makes Burn the best defense against Melt.

I think you are misreading it, as its presented in the order of:

If neither A nor B, X
If A, Y
If B, Z

What? Why are you imagining it's even that complex.

If I am on fire, the ignition rules do not apply to me. Burning is the weaker form of being on fire. If I am Burning but not Melting I can never Ignite and gain Melting unless I stop Burning first so that the Ignition rules can apply again.

Fire attackers who could deal 5 damage are SAD that their target fails a save vs any of their 4 or less damage attacks and catch on fire because if that happens they are now temporarily resistant to a large component of their future fire attacks.

The wound system will simplify some things, and I believe it can be used to help model things I'd like to model, but its different from hit points.

How? You take one damage you fill one box of hit points right? The only difference is that one box of (big) hit points is also like 8 fractional hit points which is actually just 8 (little) hit points and really that means that when you say 1 point of damage you mean to say 8 little hit points of damage.

That doesn't simplify things AND is still hit points.

The system itself is 3d6, numbers for most circumstances are not expected to go above 18, so usually you are adding together sub 20 numbers. Damage is a very constrained range, as the listed weapons go a 1d3 to 1d6+1:

"The system itself is 3d6"... is that a named commonly used RPG system I should know? If not why do you think that statement means anything, much less the thing you think it means. Which I pretty sure is "the base roll mechanic uses 3d6" or something like that.

But lets see hey, damage is 1d3 to 1d6+1? Oh look a thing which itself is not good news compared to already observable Toughness variation on size alone then also immediately contradicted by the damage output of the two example fire spells.

OK so I was going to point out how crazy swingy your Hits/Turns to kill outputs are. And they ARE crazy swingy.

But it's TOO crazy. Basic examples of even minor advantages or disadvantages multiplying with each other from too hit/save to damage/soak give things like near guaranteed 1 Turn to kill vs 20/100/200 Turns to kill, without even coming close to extremes in available modifiers. It sounds too damn nuts to say out loud.

This system almost cannot apply modifiers without breaking in either direction. And considering "default" "no net modifier" scenarios with fire damage are pretty nuts... It kinda needs modifiers just to try and reach a stable starting point which it basically can't because there isn't enough functional room available.

[Thaluikhain]

If you haven't already, I would strongly recommend you creating two characters and have them fight each other and see if you are happy with the way things work. Now, this by no means covers the entire range of possibilities and probabilities a system can have, but it can bring to light things that otherwise you might have missed.

[deaddmwalking]

Table time and speed of operation are both important to me.

.....

I don't think subtracting small numbers is too onerous, 3-1 or 3-2, that shouldn't be too hard. Yes, asking someone out of the blue to calculate 3-4 will cause some people to pause or get the wrong answer. But people will very quickly adapt to calculate small negative numbers, so 5-7 or whatever, won't be insurmountable. Then, people will need to remember that 0 is 4/8, -1 is 2/8 and -2 is 1/8. Again, I agree that argument from intuition suggests this isn't great, but I also believe it isn't as bad as you feel it is.
~

So you recognize that combat taking too long is a major complaint, and you're going to ADD to the time it takes, but justify it as 'it's not THAT MUCH EXTRA TIME on top of what is already too much time?' That's chutzpah.

I also predict that your expectation to 'get time back' by simplifying condition tracking is doomed to failure. Conditions don't always apply; therefore even if your conditions took less time that wouldn't apply in fights where no conditions are used, therefore there is no opportunity to save time. If you increase the number of times conditions come into play to offset how often damage comes into play (every time) you're adding additional complexity and operations, not reducing them. Conditions don't typically take that long to track so adding even a few extra seconds to every combat turn is going to add up.

You think that this form of wound tracking offers other benefits. You have not articulated them. I strongly suspect that a different mechanic will allow you to achieve your design goals with greater simplicity.

With game design, like airplanes, "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away"