Proposed Damage / Healing System

[Sunseeker]

Isnt that really the point of new editions though? To change things?

No. Change for the sake of change is worthless. Change is only useful and good if it improves things. I like D&D, I like most editions of D&D, but they differ truly only in terms of refinements.

Besides if they go real retro I seem to recall 2e having pretty low cap on HP. Something like you stop gaining HP at 9th level and only pure fighters could get more then 2 pts per level from CON.

Yeah, I'm hoping they don't go that old-school, I am not a 2e and prior D&D fan.

If you think about it a fighter basically maxed out HP for the game at 126 in that edition and regular warriors (rangers, palidans who got a D8 if i remember right) maxed out at 88pts.

To most people who started in 3e or 4e thats pretty damn gritty right there.

It's gritty if the enemies are tearing into the players yes. Low health is not that gritty if damage is low too.

 

[KarinsDad]

I consider that a feature not a bug. Sticking with the HP is dodging, bruised etc idea.

2 separate wound tracks mid encounter is a bookkeeping nightmare. Anyone who tried some of the old grim and gritty rules can probably attest to that.

Exaggerate much?

It's not a nightmare at all. In 4E, players keep track of hit points and healing surges mid encounter. Is that a bookkeeping nightmare? How is this significantly different from a bookkeeping perspective?

In addition to this being virtually identical here, people in 4E also keep track of bloodied, a ton of conditions (buffs, marks, stunned, warlock's curse, quarry, etc.) which Encounter and Daily powers have been used and which have not, that 1 cure spell by the Leader has been used, but the other has not.

imagine, you get hit critically, lose some con as a result. Now you have to take off HP, take off CON, re-adjust HP for the CON loss etc.

Who said anything about dropping CON? Wound points = CON, not CON = Wound points.

 

[KarinsDad]

My critique is that this adds additional disparity to the system, and even more inequity between certain classes and characters.

A low hit point character will likely always lose all their hit points long before they incur enough wound points for death (figure average Con. score of 10, giving them 10 wound points, unless they have 100 or more hit points, they are almost always going to reach unconsciousness before suffering enough wound points to die).

The same happens to a high hit point PC. See below.

The system says nothing about how quickly death can occur once the PCs are unconscious. A low hit point PC will be knocked unconscious with this system, way before he is killed. But, he can still die if he loses 1 wound point per round while unconscious.

A high hit point character probably has more of a 50/50 shot at whether they lose all hit points (uncconsciousness) or lose all wound points (death) first.

A high hit point character with a low Con is almost always going to die long before becoming unconscious.

Probably not. Think about the numbers we are talking about. A PC with CON 10.

First level PC. 20 hit points. Is he really going to take 10 wound points before he takes 20 hit points? The absolute minimum number of hit points that he has to take to get 10 wound points is 100. Most likely, it will be more than that.

10th level PC. 50 hit points (remember, WotC is lowering hit points). Is he really going to take 10 wound points before he takes 50 hit points? At most he'll take 5 and probably less (i.e. 3 17 hit point shots results in unconsciousness and 3 would points).

30th level PC. 110 hit points. In a single shot, this PC could theoretically take 101 hit points and 10 wound points and be killed (assuming monsters could ever do that much damage in 5E), but in reality, it's not going to be an issue. If it were, WotC would need to tweak the math a bit to make sure it doesn't happen based on their hit point model.

Granted, as the day wears on, wounds will accumulate. Players will need to have their PCs magically healed, or they might risk death. That's the point of a wound system. PCs might die if they do stupid things like go fight when they are heavily wounded and only have 2 wound points. It doesn't matter if the PC has a lot of hit points or few hit points, this is still a pretty dumb thing to go do unless it is absolutely required.

But, players will give their PCs decent CON (front line PCs will rarely have a 10 CON, usually higher), the players will go out of their way to bring some magical healing to the group, the players will go out of their way to try to find magic or items that give damage resistance. When it comes to RPGs, players adapt.


Anyway, I'm thinking the rest of your post is a bit nonsequitor since it was based on this faulty premise of how the system would work. As one example, a Dragon the size of a house at high level SHOULD wound a high level PC a lot more than a dagger wielding Kobold at low level. The PC is still human (or elf or whatever). The Dragon should crack ribs and break bones on a solid hit. It should burn flesh with its breath. The thing's a size of a house. But, the PCs have magic and skill to counterattack this. Although they are still human, they have amazing abilities. But, still human. Falling 200 feet should still do serious damage to them and the more powerful and deadly the foe, the more significant the wounds should be. IMO.

The concept that percentage-wise, a Titan should damage a high level PC the same that a Kobold damages a low level PC doesn't make a lot of sense from a plausibility standpoint.

 

[boredgremlin]

Exaggerate much?

It's not a nightmare at all. In 4E, players keep track of hit points and healing surges mid encounter. Is that a bookkeeping nightmare? How is this significantly different from a bookkeeping perspective?

Its not. and 4e is full of irritating bookkeeping nightmares like that. I dont want to get into bashing it other then to say comparing it to one of the things that people dislike the most about 4e as if its okay that their similar is kind of a non-starter.

 

[boredgremlin]

No. Change for the sake of change is worthless. Change is only useful and good if it improves things. I like D&D, I like most editions of D&D, but they differ truly only in terms of refinements.


Yeah, I'm hoping they don't go that old-school, I am not a 2e and prior D&D fan.


It's gritty if the enemies are tearing into the players yes. Low health is not that gritty if damage is low too.

From what i remember damage was virtually the same as 3e. Except that some magic items were stupidly over powered in 2e to top it off.

 

[Sunseeker]

From what i remember damage was virtually the same as 3e. Except that some magic items were stupidly over powered in 2e to top it off.

Honestly without pulling out my 3e/4e books, I can't really say for certain.

I tend to create my own monsters and tailor them after the first few sessions to better give my party a workout.

And I am glad magic items aren't the god-mode stuff they were in earlier editions.

 

[KarinsDad]

Its not. and 4e is full of irritating bookkeeping nightmares like that. I dont want to get into bashing it other then to say comparing it to one of the things that people dislike the most about 4e as if its okay that their similar is kind of a non-starter.

You should probably go take a poll. It's not that people hate the bookkeeping of keeping track of healing surges, it's that healing surges mean that PCs can self heal and that physical damage has been removed from the game system (shy of dying). The bookkeeping of an occasional number is such a minor nit that I cannot even understand why you are bringing it up.

In every version of the game system, there has been a ton more bookkeeping than an extra single number. There were Vancian spells to keep track of, psionic points, charges on items, modifiers from a plethora of buff and debuff spells, etc. Granted, the earliest versions of the game had the least number of these, but in addition to spells, the earliest versions had other game elements that were kept track of such as arrows, food, torches, and a lot of stuff that more or less got blown off in latter editions for the most part.

If your main objection to this is that the players have to keep track on a single extra number, it's not much of an objection.

 

[boredgremlin]

You should probably go take a poll. It's not that people hate the bookkeeping of keeping track of healing surges, it's that healing surges mean that PCs can self heal and that physical damage has been removed from the game system (shy of dying). The bookkeeping of an occasional number is such a minor nit that I cannot even understand why you are bringing it up.

In every version of the game system, there has been a ton more bookkeeping than an extra single number. There were Vancian spells to keep track of, psionic points, charges on items, modifiers from a plethora of buff and debuff spells, etc. Granted, the earliest versions of the game had the least number of these, but in addition to spells, the earliest versions had other game elements that were kept track of such as arrows, food, torches, and a lot of stuff that more or less got blown off in latter editions for the most part.

If your main objection to this is that the players have to keep track on a single extra number, it's not much of an objection.

Vancian spells=powers per day
Psi pts, optional and =to powers per day
charges ='s you guessed, powers per friggin day
There werent nearly as many buffs as in 4e. And at least back then only casters and bards had them and no one ever played bards. Now everybody and their butler has some sort of iffy, sometimes on, sometimes off buff to track.

And anyway keeping track of healing surges is much easier. You ad your pts and knock one off. Its not two separate wound tracks.

The only way the whole thing would add to the game is if you had various penalties for various states of wounding, and then your adding more bookkeeping. Especially considering you have to track it for bad guys too. At least BBEG's.

Otherwise your just keeping track of 2 sets of HP for very little purpose.

You would have to nerf healing magic to a crazy degree for this to matter. Even if every healing spell only fixed one real wound point at a time even low level clerics would still very quickly heal them and then just rest.....

And then your back in 4e's dumb 15 minute adventuring day.

 

[KarinsDad]

And anyway keeping track of healing surges is much easier. You ad your pts and knock one off. Its not two separate wound tracks.

Yeah, I don't buy it. You are way over-exaggerating how keeping track of healing surges is much easier than keeping track of wound points.

Subtracting one from healing surges once in a while vs. subtracting one (sometimes 2 or even 3 at high levels) from wound points once in a while.

Or, for people who like to add, adding points until one gets to the max.

Sure, one might have to subtract from wound points a little bit more often than healing surges, especially in the tough fights. But we're talking about subtracting a single digit from a one or two digit number. Not exactly mathematically challenging when one considers that keeping track of hit points is already subtracting one or two digit numbers from two or three digit numbers.

The only way the whole thing would add to the game is if you had various penalties for various states of wounding, and then your adding more bookkeeping. Especially considering you have to track it for bad guys too. At least BBEG's.

Otherwise your just keeping track of 2 sets of HP for very little purpose.

You would have to nerf healing magic to a crazy degree for this to matter. Even if every healing spell only fixed one real wound point at a time even low level clerics would still very quickly heal them and then just rest.....

And then your back in 4e's dumb 15 minute adventuring day.

Yeah, not much worth commenting on here. If you don't see the benefits of having hit points auto-heal up during a short rest (i.e. never having to roll dice and cast spells and adding hit points back up until either maxxed or closed to maxxed), having second winds and self healing and Warlords shouting PCs back on their feet without people claiming that they screw up verisimilitude of D&D, having damage, magical healing, and rest actually mean something, and compromising on healing so that players of all versions of D&D could find something they like, then nothing I say will change your mind.

You do appear to be pointing out a lot of nits and even points that are just plain invalid (like having to add in penalties, or the nerf healing magic one) with nothing solid to back up your arguments, so it's not worth arguing with you. You've made up your mind about your likes and dislikes.

 

[Kynn]

Yeah, I don't buy it. You are way over-exaggerating how keeping track of healing surges is much easier than keeping track of wound points.

Subtracting one from healing surges once in a while vs. subtracting one (sometimes 2 or even 3 at high levels) from wound points once in a while.

So just to be clear here, you're arguing that the mechanic behind healing surges is a good model for the appropriate level of complexity you'd like to see in 5e?