Avoiding Death Spirals WHILE making damage count

[Sacrosanct]

Kinda inspired by a few other threads that have popped up over the past week or two.

At this point I'm kinda feeling like this is the holy grail of Hit Point/Health design. How do you handle a system where taking damage counts, but also avoids the death spiral that most people hate. Is it truly an opposed design theory, kinda like how Old schoolers are opposed to Modern gamers (more lethal, rulings over rules, etc.)? And therefore not achievable because you can't make both happy? Some people like grittier more punishing systems and others hate it?

A very simple explanation of the problem:
Right now it feels like to make damage feel like it counts, then you would suffer effects other than HP loss when you take damage. The argument of "funny how you have 100% your fighting capacity even at 1 hp, but then 1 tiny wound later and you're unconscious." Right now it feels like monsters and many PCs are just bags of hit points where they don't really mean anything until that last shot.
But on the other hand, if you start doing things like wounds, or detrimental effects, you start a death spiral, and based on feedback I've received, no one seems to like those.

So what's the answer to that?
How you make hit points, and hit point loss matter beyond that binary >0 or =0 determination while also avoiding death spirals?

A week or so ago I mentioned how you could have two layers of "health". You've got something like vigor, which is your combat staying power. Then you've got your actual health, which is measured in much lower values. When your vigor drops to zero or less, you reduce your health by 1 and take a fatigue level, then roll 1 dice for every two tiers you are based on your vigor die, setting that as your new current vigor. Drop to zero health and you die. Vigor recovers fairly quickly on rests, health much more slowly.

Example: Bob the warrior is an adventurer (tier 4, d8 for vigor die). Bob has 22 vigor and 3 health. In combat he takes 16 damage. Vigor is now 6. He takes an additional 8 damage (more than his current vigor). His health drops by 1, he takes one level of fatigue, and rolls 2d8 (1 dice for every 2 tier levels), making that his new current vigor. (for you math nerds, this means a Bob would have a total of 8d8 vigor before health goes to zero)

Every level of fatigue reduced your movement and imposed a -1 penalty to all attack/skill rolls.

But that right there is the death spiral. And there's not enough...meat there to warrant separating vigor and health.

Q: Why not just keep hit points if that's the case?
A: Ok, to address this, you can use vigor (since it's kind of like endurance and adrenaline and willpower all into one) to fuel some of your PC abilities. Want a bonus to attacks? Or increase movement? Or overpower a spell? You can use vigor for that.

Q: OK, but what about that death spiral?
A: Now we get into the real question. We know taking a penalty every time you lose health is part of a death spiral. There are two solutions I can see for this:

1. Some classes have traits to avoid taking fatigue. E.g., a fighter can use a defensive stance that prevents fatigue from being imparted when health is reduced if they want. Others can choose a class feature if they want that helps. The key is that players have the choice to go more conservative and avoid fatigue, or go more aggressive and use their choices for more offensive tactics, risking fatigue as the drawback.
2. The second is something I was working on when I was writing Bugbears&Borderlands OPEN: Desperation points. Every time you lose health, you also gain a desperation point. If you current health is half or below your maximum total, you can use a free action to spend a desperation point to gain a benefit. Choices include but are not limited to damage reduction, extra movement, skill bonuses, remove a negative condition, bonus spell points, etc.

Thoughts? Does this achieve a goal of making hit points actually count and taking damage have a factor, while also mitigating the death spiral?

 

[Pedantic]

I think the key here is to do something other than just add mounting penalties in response to damage thresholds. You could add minor penalties as a baseline, but I think you'd need to more thoroughly work them into your base system assumptions. We've seen a little of that with 4e's bloodied values (which were admittedly more often used as move timers than to reflect damage), but you could absolutely do more.

If you created several different hit point states (say, "Uninjured, Injured, Bloodied, Badly Injured, Barely Conscious, Unconscious") and then used them as design hooks, you could do a lot to make combat feel dynamic. Off the top of my head, you could work in abilities that either require the enemy to be at a certain threshold of injury to function or give you benefits to accuracy/magnitude of effect if the enemy is injured and so on. Magnitude probably needs to be worked into abilities themselves, so you get "If the enemy is Badly Injured" riders after the primary text, but you could simplify down accuracy bonuses, and then make the only question "does it apply?" instead of how big it is. So, the "Bloodied" bonus/penalty is +2, Badly Injured is +3, but you're only adding that number when you have an ability that lets you do so, i.e. "Swashbucklers gain the injury bonus on attacks against injured targets made with light/fencing weapons" or a spell like "Curse of Pain: targets take their injury value as a penalty to all attacks while you concentrate."

Then you'd also probably want to work those states into the healing/recovery system somehow. Either applying limits to healing that moves you between them, something like 4e's healing surge system (something like "magical healing can only move you between Con bonus injury states per day") or limitations on healing effects themselves, say regeneration that only works if you're over Bloodied or Cure Wounds not being able to move your total HP more than 2 states at a time. You could do more long-term stuff if you wanted that flavor, like tallying the number of times you enter each state daily and then rolling some kind of wound check modified by that tally on a set schedule to see if there's lasting consequences.

Basically, I think you need to treat the system as a mechanical hook in the rest of the design, instead of a standalone mini-game unto itself.

 

[darjr]

I tried with bloodied for PCs.

They’d have powers they couldn’t use after being bloodied and they’d get a thing they could do when they became bloodied and powers they could only use when bloodied.

Yes it was during 4e.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Just chiming in to say that Death Spirals would be a totally rad name for a super-hot pepper.

EDIT: Apparently, the reason I think this is because it already totally is.

 

[Asisreo]

The simple answer: HP isn't "hit points" as in the number of hits you can take, it's an abstraction of the flow of combat and yourself. Taking 10 points of HP damage means that your generally on the backfoot due to the enemy's action. How the DM wants to arbitrate that is up to the imagination. Maybe the big, tough guy is getting nicked alot and is slowing down. Maybe the swift, dexterous gal is getting tired of dodging attacks. Maybe the spellcaster is running low on their passive defensive magic. While it doesn't address the exact problem, it might target the underlying issue that player a feel like taking 20 direct hits should slow you down somehow.

Another answer: The above answer is both system agnostic and leaves everything RAW. This next solution is something borrowed from a game Library of Ruina which I think offers an interesting mechanic.

Emotion Coins:

Whenever you make an attack, or are the target of an attack (or harmful effect), you gain an emotion coin. This emotion coin can be positive (heads-up) or negative (tails-up).

If you succeed at what you are doing, either successfully attacking or avoiding damage/effects, you gain a positive emotion coin. If you fail, you gain a negative emotion coin.

At the end of the round, you can tally up your emotion coins to see how many you have. If you have 3 or more, you gain an effect. If you have less, they carry over to your next round. Every time you gain a positive effect, you need one more emotion coin to get the next effect on the next round. So, if someone has two effects already, they need 5 emotion coins to get a third effect at the end of the round. Emotion coins carry over between rounds.

If you have a majority positive coins, you gain a small, strictly positive effect. For example, you might gain a +1 AC for the rest of the combat.

If you have a majority negative coins, you gain an effect with a large power-buff but with a consequence as well. For example, you might deal double damage for the rest of the day, but you attacks against you have advantage and you have disadvantage on your saving throws. Or you might be able to cast your next spell without consuming a spell slot but your initiative from then-on will always be 1.

These aren't necessarily completely a spiral, and as the game goes on, things begin to accelerate. Keep in mind, that means that players might actually be stronger the more damage they take.

 

[Pedantic]

Speaking more specifically to your proposed system, how do you avoid creating a situation where some PCs want to get hurt and stay hurt all the time? Hit point attrition isn't generally spread out evenly between characters, and a lot of damage mitigation tends to come down to positioning (ideally, your robe wearing wizard is mostly standing somewhere they don't get hit). If there's a benefit to being injured, especially an aggressive one, then you might end up creating a potentially very negative glass cannon play loop for some character classes, where they want to try and drop down to say, 1/2 health, and then pointedly avoid taking any more damage while squeezing as much value as they can out of their desperation points.

That may actually be a terrible plan in practice (seeing as the actual chance of death goes up significantly), but it has the downside of looking like a good optimization case on paper, and could create a negative play experience if a player commits to it. Worse, might exacerbate/encourage an antagonistic GM/player relationship, because the player is putting even more weight than usual on not getting hit and is potentially more likely to take any attack that breaks their equilibrium more personally.

 

[darjr]

In a way D&D does reflect the harm a fight can have on a PC, sort of. It comes in using up spell slots and long rest and short rest abilities. And the increasing tension in the players as their HP dwindle and as more character drops happen etc.

It’s very abstract rules wise and isn’t directly tracked as what it represents (maybe accidentally or incidentally?) but I think it’s real enough for most folks that death spiral effects are not generally needed.

 

[Staffan]

I'm thinking maybe something like a combination of PF2's optional Stamina rules and 4e's Bloodied condition.

Somewhat simplified, the Stamina rules split the hit point pools of PCs (and NPCs/monsters you bother counting with) into two: Stamina and Hit Points, with each getting about half the total. Stamina is lost before hit points, and can be fully recovered by resting for 10 minutes and spending a Resolve point, which you'll have about 4 of (though you might want to keep one back with which to stabilize if you hit 0 hp). 8 hours rest will also recover all Stamina and Resolve points. Other than rest, you pretty much can't get Stamina back. Hit points heal as normal (which in Pathfinder is 1 hp/level/night, barring magic or medical treatment).

This means that Stamina is easy to recover during an adventuring day, so as long as you've only taken Stamina damage you are essentially unhurt. You might be tired and losing the edge you need to stay unhurt, but you're not quite there yet. It's only once you've taken hit point damage that you're actually injured.

Bloodied in 4e means you've taken more than half your hit points in damage. Conveniently, that's about where Stamina turns into Hit points, so for PCs and important NPCs this limit could be "has taken hp damage". This state probably shouldn't do anything in and of itself, but it can be a trigger for other things, both positive and negative. Maybe some monsters have abilities that can only be used on bloodied foes. Maybe being bloodied unlocks some of your abilities, as some sort of "desperation moves", or makes them work differently. But overall, it should make you more vulnerable.

If I were to implement something like this, I'd make it difficult to heal hit points and easy to heal Stamina. Perhaps healing magic heals 1 hp per die of healing, with the rest going to Stamina. That means that if you've taken hp damage, you're going to feel it for a while. It may or may not be a "this fight" problem, but it's probably going to be at least a "this day" problem, and maybe longer.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Speaking more specifically to your proposed system, how do you avoid creating a situation where some PCs want to get hurt and stay hurt all the time? Hit point attrition isn't generally spread out evenly between characters, and a lot of damage mitigation tends to come down to positioning (ideally, your robe wearing wizard is mostly standing somewhere they don't get hit). If there's a benefit to being injured, especially an aggressive one, then you might end up creating a potentially very negative glass cannon play loop for some character classes, where they want to try and drop down to say, 1/2 health, and then pointedly avoid taking any more damage while squeezing as much value as they can out of their desperation points.

That may actually be a terrible plan in practice (seeing as the actual chance of death goes up significantly), but it has the downside of looking like a good optimization case on paper, and could create a negative play experience if a player commits to it. Worse, might exacerbate/encourage an antagonistic GM/player relationship, because the player is putting even more weight than usual on not getting hit and is potentially more likely to take any attack that breaks their equilibrium more personally.

The solution that immediately comes to mind is that the benefits you get while hurt are short term. Perhaps for the length of the encounter at best. But the penalties are long term and cumulative.

So if you get hurt in combat, you get some extra stuff to help prevent a death spiral for that combat, but you don't want to stay hurt to exploit the system, because it will be more harmful than helpful.

Your post reminds me of that low health build in Fallout76. No thanks. I don't want that.

 

[Blue]

One thing I have in one of the two systems I'm working on is that there are worsening penalties for damage, which includes on checks to avoid more damage. Classic death spiral.

But all PCs have a special feature that I tongue-in-cheek call "When the going gets Tough...". Basically, for the last band of penalties, for anyone with this feature have it reversed. So when the chips are down and you are the most hurt, you have this big boost to everything you.

And that everything includes resisting more damage, so it's in a way a hidden buffer between "Oh poo!" and actual character death - great for jacking up tension in a scene and making the players feel like they just managed to pull through.