Decapitation and lethality in your game

Saelorn said:

Decapitation in games is a little bit more acceptable, but not by much. If I feel like anything I do has a chance of invalidating all of my previous work, then I'm unlikely to want to do anything. If I'm swinging an axe around, the chance of me cutting my own head off is significantly less than one percent. Even if someone is swinging an axe at me, as long as I'm wearing armor, the chance of decapitation is not high. Decapitation in combat is one of those unrealistic things, that happens in movies for dramatic effect. Basically, if you have a game mechanic to address such a thing, then you've already vastly over-estimated how often it should occur.

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Unless there's elements (traps) or items (sharpness/vorpal weapons) or effects in the game that force it to occur, at which point you do need mechanics: not so much for decapitation, as the results of that are usually both quick and obvious; but for limb loss and so forth. Sadly, no version of D&D has ever really addressed this; I (and probably many others) made up my own rules for it ages ago.

From a game design standpoint, incidental mechanics which bypass core mechanics are a bad thing.

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I absolutely disagree. For me, trying to shoehorn everything into core mechanics is poor design which inevitably leads to elements in the game not working as elegantly or smoothly as they otherwise could.

Core mechanics should be nothing more than the default used when there's no other mechanic in place.

Critical hits which bypass armor are a bad design. Random decapitation which bypasses HP are a bad design. If you want an axe to have the possibility of killing someone outright, then you should work with the existing core mechanics, and make sure that the high end of the damage roll is sufficient to kill anyone you think should be vulnerable to insta-death.

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Again, disagree. I'd rather see a system where sometimes - not always, but sometimes - having 100 h.p. as a fighter leaves you exactly as vulnerable as the magic-user who only has 25.

Your idea about the high end of the damage roll for the axe being enough to kill someone doesn't address this at all: if the damage roll is, say, 2d50 then it's almost never going to kill the fighter but will nearly always kill the MU. But if the axe does the usual d8 damage but has a small chance of removing a limb or head on any hit the vulnerability factor gets much more even. The vulnerability is even more balanced when the effect of a trap or whatever is to remove a limb or head without regard to h.p. at all.

Otherwise having lots and lots of hit points just becomes too important.

Lanefan said:

Again, disagree. I'd rather see a system where sometimes - not always, but sometimes - having 100 h.p. as a fighter leaves you exactly as vulnerable as the magic-user who only has 25.

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I can only speak for myself, but if you have a random chance of decapitation which ignores all of the normal metrics for survivability, then the game feels like more of a slot machine and less like something where my choices matter at all. Why should I care about having a good HEALTH score, or agonize over which potion to save and which one to drink, when there's a not-insignificant chance that the whole mechanic will be ignored outright? Choices should matter, and mechanics which bypass those choices can make those choices irrelevant.

Lanefan said:

Your idea about the high end of the damage roll for the axe being enough to kill someone doesn't address this at all: if the damage roll is, say, 2d50 then it's almost never going to kill the fighter but will nearly always kill the MU. But if the axe does the usual d8 damage but has a small chance of removing a limb or head on any hit the vulnerability factor gets much more even. The vulnerability is even more balanced when the effect of a trap or whatever is to remove a limb or head without regard to h.p. at all.

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I don't want the vulnerability factor to be even. I want it to scale with those variables which measure vulnerability. That's why we bother to track those things in the first place. If death and maiming are essentially random, because they ignore the relevant stats, then those stats shouldn't be in the game.

Lanefan said:

Otherwise having lots and lots of hit points just becomes too important.

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Then it's up to the game designer to balance such things. If you sacrifice speed and power and accuracy and evasion, all in the name of not dying instantly, then you're basically just a punching bag. A decent game designer should be able to make those trade-offs worthwhile.

Lanefan said:

Again, disagree. I'd rather see a system where sometimes - not always, but sometimes - having 100 h.p. as a fighter leaves you exactly as vulnerable as the magic-user who only has 25.

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There is no right or wrong answer here. It depends on the conventions of the story you are trying to create.

Celebrim said:

There is no right or wrong answer here. It depends on the conventions of the story you are trying to create.

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Though, there is also some space to discuss implementations.

If you want a system that has some more lethal elements, what's the best way to achieve that? Is it by having a decapitation chance, or just overall lower hit points? Can you get 80% of what you want from playing E6? Would that be good enough? And so on...

Lanefan said:

I'd rather see a system where sometimes - not always, but sometimes - having 100 h.p. as a fighter leaves you exactly as vulnerable as the magic-user who only has 25.

Your idea about the high end of the damage roll for the axe being enough to kill someone doesn't address this at all: if the damage roll is, say, 2d50 then it's almost never going to kill the fighter but will nearly always kill the MU. But if the axe does the usual d8 damage but has a small chance of removing a limb or head on any hit the vulnerability factor gets much more even. The vulnerability is even more balanced when the effect of a trap or whatever is to remove a limb or head without regard to h.p. at all.

Otherwise having lots and lots of hit points just becomes too important.

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Having lots of hp and thereby permitting success in melee combat is the main class feature of a fighter - as early editions of D&D tended to point out. So negating that class feature seems a dodgy move.

If you want a d8 axe to be able to decapitate a fighter, the easiest thing seems to be to allow max damage to open end (ie make another roll, if it's max to make another roll, etc).

Saelorn said:

I can only speak for myself, but if you have a random chance of decapitation which ignores all of the normal metrics for survivability, then the game feels like more of a slot machine and less like something where my choices matter at all. Why should I care about having a good HEALTH score, or agonize over which potion to save and which one to drink, when there's a not-insignificant chance that the whole mechanic will be ignored outright? Choices should matter, and mechanics which bypass those choices can make those choices irrelevant.

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Much of the time those choices would be as relevant as ever. But every now and then a situation might arise where no matter what you do or who you are, someone's gonna live and someone's gonna die. Whether the someone who dies happens to be your PC or someone else's PC or a summoned goober - well, that's what dice are for.

I don't want the vulnerability factor to be even. I want it to scale with those variables which measure vulnerability. That's why we bother to track those things in the first place. If death and maiming are essentially random, because they ignore the relevant stats, then those stats shouldn't be in the game.

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What I'm after is that while a 100 h.p. fighter should be tougher than a 25 h.p. wizard, 'tougher' shouldn't mean indestructible. If I-as-DM want to hit the party with some effect that'll do enough damage to make the 100 h.p. guy sit up and take notice I'm going to slay the wizard every single time - hardly much fun for the wizard's player.

So, to compensate I have to find (or create) ways of making the 100 h.p. guy mortal while still keeping the 25 h.p. guy viable. The most obvious option is to bypass hit points every now and then.

Then it's up to the game designer to balance such things. If you sacrifice speed and power and accuracy and evasion, all in the name of not dying instantly, then you're basically just a punching bag. A decent game designer should be able to make those trade-offs worthwhile.

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One would like to think so, anyway.

Lanefan said:

Much of the time those choices would be as relevant as ever. But every now and then a situation might arise where no matter what you do or who you are, someone's gonna live and someone's gonna die. Whether the someone who dies happens to be your PC or someone else's PC or a summoned goober - well, that's what dice are for.

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Imagine a game where driving is important, and you have 30 pages of driving rules to determine how different factors affect your ability to drive. And imagine that you're playing the game, and you need to drive somewhere, under difficult circumstances that would normally call for a check with your driving skills. Now imagine that, before you make your roll, the GM flips a coin; on heads, you move forward with your driving check (taking into account all of the many rules for driving), but on tails you crash and no check is allowed.

The coin flip is a bad game mechanic, in this example, because it invalidates every factor that should be relevant. If your skill at driving is not a factor in how well you drive, then something has gone horribly wrong; doubly so if this is an area of gameplay that you've invested effort into, because you actually want to be good at it. Why bother investing in something, if failure is going to occur regardless of your investment? Why bother having thirty pages of rules, if the outcome is going to be determined by a coin flip?

Going back to HP and decapitation, you can have effects which make HP irrelevant, but it shouldn't be something that comes up with every swing of an axe. If every attack has a 5% chance of ignoring HP entirely, then that's a bad mechanic, because it relegates HP damage to pointless bookkeeping - the character will die when you roll decapitation, and HP don't matter. (You saw this a lot, when people tried to introduce Vitality points into D&D, and had critical damage go straight to Vitality.) If you want to take someone out without going through their HP, then it should be attached to an action that doesn't interact primarily through the HP mechanic, like petrification or something.

Lanefan said:

What I'm after is that while a 100 h.p. fighter should be tougher than a 25 h.p. wizard, 'tougher' shouldn't mean indestructible. If I-as-DM want to hit the party with some effect that'll do enough damage to make the 100 h.p. guy sit up and take notice I'm going to slay the wizard every single time - hardly much fun for the wizard's player.

So, to compensate I have to find (or create) ways of making the 100 h.p. guy mortal while still keeping the 25 h.p. guy viable. The most obvious option is to bypass hit points every now and then.

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The more obvious solution is to not allow such a wild power imbalance while still trying to challenge them both with the same obstacles. If the fighter has 35hp, and the wizard has 25hp, then you can hit them both for 8d6 damage (save for half) and they'll both care. It's enough that the fighter will probably stay up, and the wizard will probably fall, but the saving throw matters more than the HP totals in determining the outcome.

Because throwing out a save-or-die effect, or just randomly killing one without regards to HP or save values, is a way to invalidate player participation. Nothing kills player enthusiasm like a GM fiat declaring that all of their choices are irrelevant.

If I, as-DM want to hit the party with some effect that'll do enough damage to make the 100 h.p. guy sit up and take notice I'm going to slay the wizard every single time - hardly much fun for the wizard's player.

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So ignoring the crazy hypotheticality of this scenario (if you have 100 hp and 25 hp characters in the same party, it's probably not a result of standard leveling), what you are saying here is that the guy who invested in survivability at the expense of world-altering powers should retain a certain even level of vulnerability despite that investment AND expense. Meanwhile, the "no-fun" wizard character, whose player has made the choice to be more vulnerable with the benefit of gaining world-shaking power with no comparative power ramp in the fighter class should have certain situations where their odds of survival are even with the fighter character's odds?

Do you see why this doesn't make sense?

I've mentioned that I've grown more toward the make combat matter side of things. That said, most creatures aren't going to want to fight to the death, unless they're insane, mindess, sick, or going to die either way, e.g., "go fight those guys or be executed for cowardice".

PrometheanVigil said:

How important is it for you to have the possibility of decapitation for any character unlucky enough to receive damage? What should the chance of a character being maimed be? Does this add to the lethality of a game or is it a step too far? How severe should the effects be? Does it depend on the system or setting?

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None. I consider it detrimental to a game.