Fralex
Explorer
This is just an idea I want to try out that uses wounds to make HP loss more meaningful than just a score decreasing.
-HP doesn't represent any one particular thing, but in this case I'm interpreting it as a measure of how much "fight" someone has left in them. Normal hits are just grazing blows that wear a character down and make it harder for them to avoid serious injury from future hits.
-A critical hit, or any hit that reduces you to 0 HP, is a "real" hit. It means you messed up and took an actual blow that physically damaged your body in a severe way.
-Any time you take a critical hit, roll on the Lingering Injuries table. Make the roll with advantage if you have at least half your max HP before the hit.
-Any time you're reduced to 0 HP, roll on the Lingering Injuries table with disadvantage.
I can't quite decide whether rolling with advantage should happen if you still have half your HP left AFTER the blow, or before. I'll playtest it and see what happens, and for now I'm favoring the more forgiving version.
The end result of these rules, I'm hoping, is something where the severity of your injury varies depending on the severity of the hit. If you're doing more or less OK in combat, a crit is more likely to give you something minor, like a scar or mildly inconvenient injury. If someone's hit nearly KILLS you, however, you're looking at lost body parts, or at least a limp or debilitating internal injury. When a player survives near-death, I feel it should be memorable and harder to fully recover from. The major hits a character takes will all leave their marks, and hopefully make the consequences of fighting monsters feel more real.
What do you think of this idea?
-HP doesn't represent any one particular thing, but in this case I'm interpreting it as a measure of how much "fight" someone has left in them. Normal hits are just grazing blows that wear a character down and make it harder for them to avoid serious injury from future hits.
-A critical hit, or any hit that reduces you to 0 HP, is a "real" hit. It means you messed up and took an actual blow that physically damaged your body in a severe way.
-Any time you take a critical hit, roll on the Lingering Injuries table. Make the roll with advantage if you have at least half your max HP before the hit.
-Any time you're reduced to 0 HP, roll on the Lingering Injuries table with disadvantage.
I can't quite decide whether rolling with advantage should happen if you still have half your HP left AFTER the blow, or before. I'll playtest it and see what happens, and for now I'm favoring the more forgiving version.
The end result of these rules, I'm hoping, is something where the severity of your injury varies depending on the severity of the hit. If you're doing more or less OK in combat, a crit is more likely to give you something minor, like a scar or mildly inconvenient injury. If someone's hit nearly KILLS you, however, you're looking at lost body parts, or at least a limp or debilitating internal injury. When a player survives near-death, I feel it should be memorable and harder to fully recover from. The major hits a character takes will all leave their marks, and hopefully make the consequences of fighting monsters feel more real.
What do you think of this idea?