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[Rel]

Originally Posted by ashockney

Rel,

Good stuff, and thanks for throwing it out here for the entire world. A little trickier than many may realize.

I'm particularly fond of your handling of milestones. I agree that it's better as written for "all campaigns" in the books, but that this will add a cool "flava" element to a running campaign.

PC wounding - ok, I get that it's not quite gritty enough. Your example is a good one. My primary concern here is that juggling with the wounding will prove "fatal" to your party at some point. I try to avoid like the plague anything that requires me to make adjustments to "pre-built" encounters, because saving time is king in my gaming experience. If my PC's all agreed they wanted a grittier campaign, with greater threats, I would probably do something like this:
1) Anytime you are bloodied or unconscious make a save. Failed save results in a wound.
2) Steal a wound chart from Rolemaster or Hackmaster and determine randomly.

I also like your thoughts on skills, and the bonus skills to begin the game. I agree with your assessment that the core game system leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to character creation. Very little beyond the basic race/class/buy generic stats. This is a change that is positive in that direction without worrying about unbalancing issues.

Thanks for the feedback!

Funny thing about wounds is that my original idea was very similar to yours in terms of rolling on some kind of chart to determine a sort of wound and its effects. After some consideration and advice from others I decided to scale that back to something that required no additional modifiers or rolls during combat to make sure it didn't slow things down. This is partly for obvious reasons and partly because my campaign setting includes some elements that are likely to impose penalties like that at some point and I didn't want that stacked on top of a wound system with fiddly bits.

As for the deadliness, you are undoubtedly correct. After I had mulled the idea over a bit I thought, "This is kinda screwing the PC's over a bit with no offsetting benefit." So I e-mailed my players and asked what they thought. Their collective response was basically, "We're used to you screwing us over. It makes the games intense and challenging. We really wouldn't know how to feel if you didn't so bring it on."

I've got great players.

However I intend for the Wounds system to be on probation from the start. We're going to use it for the first several sessions and see how it makes the game feel. If it makes things too deadly or threatens the pace of the game that I want then I'll ditch it.