Decapitation and lethality in your game

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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We have it.

It can occur from a critical hit.

In our system, on a critical hit you choose the hit location. The target gets a saving throw, with advantage if that body part is armored. If they fail by 10 or more and the roll is a natural 1, or fail by 15 or more, decapitation or some other instant death occurs.

As others said, it really depends on the game.
In Against the Darkmaster, we decided to make each blow potentially lethal or maiming for several reasons. First because we wanted to raise the stakes of combat. If in every combat there's a chance that your character will die or suffer a long-lasting injury, fighting is not a choice to be made lightly. It means that either you have no other options, or that you're really invested in the reason you are fighting for, and are ready to take a great risk for it.
In our opinion, this makes the PCs feel more "heroic", in the sense that they're ready to make heroic choices, literally risking life and limb to defend their ideals.

It may seem strange saying that a system that encourages you not to fight, unless there's something important at stake, makes the PCs feel heroic. But, if you think about it, in epic fantasy fiction heroes often try to avoid combat, if possible. In lotr, for example, the fellowship is more often running from foes than fighting them.

It's also a way of making fights memorable, plus power metal is one of our sources of inspiration, and cutting your enemy's head off with a single, mighty strike is definitely metal!

But, this work in our game because, as I've said, it fulfill certain premises. If I'm playing, say d&d 5e, it doesn't really bothers me that I'm not able to decapitate an orc with a single cut (well, vorpal blades aside), because that's simply not what that I seek in that game.

Umbran said:

Though, there is also some space to discuss implementations.

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Absolutely, but I wanted to start out by saying that it wasn't inherently bad to go one way or the other.

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...

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I think it depends on what 'cinematic' quality you are trying to achieve. 'Cinematic' is a word that is used often but vaguely defined in RPGs, but for these purposes by 'cinematic' I mean that the process of play tends to aid in imagining the scene. A game is more 'cinematic' the less the process of play resembles, "The monster hits and you take 16 points of damage", and the more it naturally resembles, "As you fend of the creature with your shield, the monster rakes you with its talons, ripping your cheek and slicing your shoulder. Blood drips into your right eye, blurring your vision and you feel a white shock that promises at some future point to become throbbing pain." You can of course turn a non-cinematic system into a more cinematic one through a process of play - the later description could have easily been prefaced to 'take 16 points of damage' - but a 'cinematic' game decreases the arbitrariness and mental burden of doing so by giving concrete answers regarding positioning, tactics, wounds and so forth.

So whether you want your game to feature decapitations is partly like saying, "What sort of movie are you wanting to produce/direct? Is it a pop-corn munching summer blockbuster with largely cartoon violence and a stylized confrontation between good and evil? Or is it a gritty drama that emphasizes the weakness, suffering and humanity of the heroes? Or is it violent splatter-porn that celebrates gore and over the top violence as heroes exercise their ego in dominating their foes?" All those things are possible by tweaking a system, the skill comes from creating a system that helps achieve what you wanted to achieve without bogging play down in complex processes.

Saelorn said:

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.

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Some days that describes real-world driving in this town...

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.

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I'm not sure where you're getting "every attack has a 5% chance of ignoring h.p. entirely". More likely it'd be "once every now and then a particular situation might arise where every attack [etc.]".

Vitality points are a great idea, having crits go straight to them (except in unusual cases) is not.

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.

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How can you not sometimes end up with a hit point imbalance like that by 15th level when you've got a fighter with 15 rolls of a d10 (so, average 15 x 5.5 = 82) and a wizard with 15 rolls of a d4 (15 x 2.5 = 37); with the fighter far likelier to boost her con at every opportunity.

It'd take some really unlucky/lucky rolling to get a fighter-35 wizard-25 hit point split at any level.

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.

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Depends on approach. If all involved realize that adventuring is a very dangerous and high-risk high-reward occupation and that while goal one might be the mission at hand goal zero is always survival, you're good. It's in part a game of sheer luck, no matter what you do to skew the odds - much like it'd be were this all real.

War not sport, my friend.

Morrus said:

When a player kills a foe, I often ask “how do you kill it?” and let them describe the killing blow however they like.

Decapitation doesn’t come up as often as you’d think!

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Thats similar to what we do. On a critical hit, they choose the hit location which has an impact on the potential outcomes. On a critical miss, they decide what the impact is, which should be at least as bad as provoking an opportunity attack, although it doesn’t have to result in damage. When they suffer an injury, or a possible killing blow, they decide what happens as well. We have guidelines and rules to help, so if they want to just go with the dice, they can.

Gammadoodler said:

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),

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Heh. 5e may have smoothed things out a bit, to be sure, but it (unlike 3e or 4e) also supports a variance of levels within a party - a 10th-level fighter could easily have 100 h.p. while a 7th-level wizard might have 25, and three levels isn't that much of a variance.

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?

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No, I don't. Hit-point die sizes (or fixed amounts) are a straight-up class feature in any D&D edition; and while newer editions allow one to boost stats e.g. Con or take feats e.g. Toughness the underlying base remains the same: that the disparity will grow as the average character level gets higher.

So eventually, to really challenge the fighter is going to require nuking the wizard...unless I-as-DM fudge things so the fighter always gets the toughest opponents or the fireball always happens to miss the wizard, which I'd rather not have to do. Either that, or the fighter becomes indestructible - which I also don't want; I'd rather every character have some degree of mortality to it. (there's a reason each edition has a "sweet spot" in terms of levels of play, and this is in large reason why: at the sweet spot the characters are powerful enough to be fun while still being mortal enough that they have to worry about it).

Bypassing hit points every so often brings the fighter's mortality back into play.

Lanefan said:

I'm not sure where you're getting "every attack has a 5% chance of ignoring h.p. entirely". More likely it'd be "once every now and then a particular situation might arise where every attack [etc.]".

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I'm not sure that you're really talking about the topic of this thread, then. The OP is talking about any time you take damage. If it's just certain weapons, or certain monster abilities, then that doesn't really reflect on the rest of the game.

Lanefan said:

How can you not sometimes end up with a hit point imbalance like that by 15th level when you've got a fighter with 15 rolls of a d10 (so, average 15 x 5.5 = 82) and a wizard with 15 rolls of a d4 (15 x 2.5 = 37); with the fighter far likelier to boost her con at every opportunity.

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What game are you talking about? In AD&D, characters stopped rolling hit dice for HP around level 10. By 3E, wizards had access to uncapped Constitution bonuses that applied at every level, and they were more likely to boost it since they had to compensate for the die size disparity. I guess your description could fit a 3E game, with a fighter having a Constitution of 12 and a wizard with a Constitution of 8, but playing a low-Con wizard was widely regarded as a death sentence in that edition; I highly doubt they'd make it to level 15.

Lanefan said:

It'd take some really unlucky/lucky rolling to get a fighter-35 wizard-25 hit point split at any level.

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In 5E, a level 4 fighter with Con 14 will have 18+3d10 HP (average 35.5), and a level 4 wizard with Con 14 will have 14+3d6 HP (average 24.5).

Lanefan said:

Depends on approach. If all involved realize that adventuring is a very dangerous and high-risk high-reward occupation and that while goal one might be the mission at hand goal zero is always survival, you're good. It's in part a game of sheer luck, no matter what you do to skew the odds - much like it'd be were this all real.

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I'm not arguing for any particular level of lethality. I'm just arguing that, whatever mechanic is used to determine death, it should be based on those factors which already represent your ability to survive.

Lanefan said:

How can you not sometimes end up with a hit point imbalance like that by 15th level when you've got a fighter with 15 rolls of a d10 (so, average 15 x 5.5 = 82) and a wizard with 15 rolls of a d4 (15 x 2.5 = 37); with the fighter far likelier to boost her con at every opportunity.

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While that sounds intuitive, it practice fighter's in 3e tended to have lower CONs than wizards.

The reason is that a fighter typically wants a combination of Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity, while a Wizard can safely dump stat everything but Intelligence and Constitution.

In my experience the players of fighters typically don't want to completely neglect intelligence or wisdom, because they end up with no useful skills and poor Will saves. The result is that they tend to rely on less CON and rely more on their large d10 HD.

By contrast, the only attribute a Wizard player cares about aside from Intelligence and Constitution is Dexterity, even if it is of limited value depending on your build and play style. It's perfectly valid to play a wizard with 18 Int, 18 Con, and everything else 8's.

In 3e, CON is every classes second most important ability score, and in practice wizards will tend to have higher CON than fighters. This is one of the reasons spellcasters are much more effective in 3e than they were in 1e.

1e AD&D is the only system where I've seen the large disparity in squishiness you suggest, and that's because one of the class abilities of fighters was they got bonus hit points from 17 or higher CON, where as the maximum bonus hit points for other classes capped at +2/HD (at 16 CON). Because players tended to roll first and then decide what to play, it wasn't unusual to have a party with a fighter of 17-19 CON, and a wizard with say 10 CON. In this case, you very much would see a disparity of 100 hp versus the 25 hit point of the squishy wizard, which is precisely the sort of thing that helped keep high level spellcasters in check in 1e AD&D. When that squishiness went away, as it did in 3e, it was part of the reason that balance between spellcasters and non-spellcasters was lost.

Lanefan said:

So eventually, to really challenge the fighter is going to require nuking the wizard...unless I-as-DM fudge things so the fighter always gets the toughest opponents or the fireball always happens to miss the wizard, which I'd rather not have to do. Either that, or the fighter becomes indestructible - which I also don't want; I'd rather every character have some degree of mortality to it.

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You don't actually need to address that, as the DM. If the fighter is really that much tougher than the wizard (for whatever reason), then the party will agree to put the fighter on point, where they'll face the brunt of incoming attacks and end up taking the most damage as a result of their own decisions. Wizards have fewer HP, as a class feature, which is fine because they hang out in the back where they won't be attacked as frequently.

A bad round is equally capable of instilling fear in either a high-HP fighter or a low-HP wizard. It's just that, a bad round for the fighter involves getting hit twice and then crit, while a bad round for the wizard involves getting crit by the one arrow sent against them.

Heh. 5e may have smoothed things out a bit, to be sure, but it (unlike 3e or 4e) also supports a variance of levels within a party - a 10th-level fighter could easily have 100 h.p. while a 7th-level wizard might have 25, and three levels isn't that much of a variance.

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First, math I guess..
10th level fighter. (Base XP: 64,000!!!) Avg HP before Con modifier/feats/racial bonuses/etc.
9d10 +10
9*5.5 +10
49.5+10
59.5 = Avg HP before CON mod and other hp sources

Would require Con mod of 4 to even approach 100 HP before any other HP sources (to which a wizard would have equal access). Not impossible with the 3 ASIS by level 10, but would probably require a bit of sacrifice somewhere.

7th level wizard (Base XP: 23,000!!!) Avg HP before Con modifier/feats/racial bonuses/etc.
6d6 +6
6*3.5 +6
21 + 6
27 = Avg HP before CON mod and other hp sources. (Which means to be around 25hp, the wizard would have to have a negative Con Mod)

So, even in this "low variance" hypothetical scenario where one PC has earned nearly triple the XP of the other, it's still unlikely that a party would see the amount of hp differential you describe.

No, I don't. Hit-point die sizes (or fixed amounts) are a straight-up class feature in any D&D edition; and while newer editions allow one to boost stats e.g. Con or take feats e.g. Toughness the underlying base remains the same: that the disparity will grow as the average character level gets higher.

So eventually, to really challenge the fighter is going to require nuking the wizard...unless I-as-DM fudge things so the fighter always gets the toughest opponents or the fireball always happens to miss the wizard, which I'd rather not have to do. Either that, or the fighter becomes indestructible - which I also don't want; I'd rather every character have some degree of mortality to it. (there's a reason each edition has a "sweet spot" in terms of levels of play, and this is in large reason why: at the sweet spot the characters are powerful enough to be fun while still being mortal enough that they have to worry about it).

Bypassing hit points every so often brings the fighter's mortality back into play.

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It's all there in your second sentence. "Hit-point die sizes (or fixed amounts) are a straight-up class feature in any D&D edition." You know what else is a class feature? Spells, things that Fighters do not get (or get with dramatically reduced progression, number, selection, and utility). What you are saying is that you'd like to bypass that class feature, with no compensation for the Fighter. Does it make equal sense to you to say that sometimes a Wizard's spells should just fail to function, regardless of enemy saves?

All that is from a game design perspective. It also functions from the perspective of verisimilitude. Wouldn't you expect that lethality be marginally greater for the unarmored, book learned, combat naive character in most any circumstance? (Note that following this philosophy makes the game even more not-fun for Sir Spells-a-lot).

Perhaps to "truly challenge" the fighter, instead of negating the strengths (which the player has made sacrifices to attain), you attack the weaknesses; mental saves, investigations, puzzles, traps, mobility, etc. (which the player has chosen to accept in return for their strengths).