doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Okay, here's some ideas, that I want to bounce around and see how folks like them.
No HP as a depleting resource. Like many other games, what I'm working on right now has no HP, instead you have a Toughness score that acts as a damage threshold. If it is surpassed, you mark either injury or stress. Both are limited, and when you fill either one, you're out of that scene, and might even die or get retired.
WHen you defend against anything dangerous, it will have a number of dice called it's Hazard Pool, which you are rolling to reduce. Reduce it to no dice, and the hazard simply misses you utterly, no worries. Any other result, however, the remaining dice are rolled, and the result -any armor your have against that type of attack, is compared to your Toughness. When you attack, your level of success determines how many of the dice dice you rolled are counted toward how well you mess with the enemy. (players make nearly all rolls)
Critical success can sway things a bit, and there are abilities that let you temporarily increase your toughness, gain armor, or simply reduce the dice pool of a hazard.
Social (and maybe physical challenges like a chase or exploring an ancient tomb) challenges might have a total stress track, rather than each creature doing so. A bit like Cubicle7's Doctor Who 5e game having encounter HP rather than individual HP, you succeed well enough, enough times, and the enemies lose. Haven't tried to port this to combat, but it would fit with how some other stuff works, like commander type enemies being able to take actions that cause their allies to do things, like a lazy warlord, how swarms or hordes work, etc.
Dying is more in the player's hands. So, it's up to the player to decide what happens when they get taken out. Is it temporary with some sort of cost? Is it permanent but not the end of your story? Or is it truly permanent ?
If you choose the last one, you get 2 benefits for doing so.
Firstly, you can choose how you go out, your last words, and any reasonable arrangements you made in the case of your passing. This also allows you to use character resources, and automatically succeed at something as you die or otherwise get permanently removed from the board.
Second, during downtime you can work with the GM and the rest of the group, but with you in the lead, to determine what your Legacy is. How do folks remember you? What do you leave behind? Who? Do you have a protege or even a kid that one of the other PCs might be inclined to take over teaching?
Alternatives for dying. You can choose to be injured such that you don't feel you can go on these jobs anymore, and fade into a support role, instead, or even a teaching role, or just plain leave the life behind. You can also just be knocked out of the scene, and subsequent scenes until something is done to bring you back in, like major magical healing, finding a safe haven to rest and recover in, etc, and you gain a Scar. Scars usually come with narrative weight, and a new vulnerability. You can also sacrifice something other than yourself, if it can fit the story. You might burn a contact, lose an Ally trait or a Signature Gear trait, or make another similar bargain with the GM to explain how the situation didn't kill you, and what consequence there is for what happened to save you.
Getting wore out over time works different. Pretty much all special abilities, and your ability to push a check up one step on the success ladder, cost Attribute Points. These are limited, and only partially replenish in the field. To fully replenish, you have to take several days or longer to rest in a safe Haven. Injury and Stress also replenish more the longer you rest, but aren't that hard to get fully replenished in a day, as they mostly track what's happening in the moment. AP is how you can see on your sheet that you are getting worn down by days on end in the field.
One thing I am working on how to do is to leave room for injury and stress to linger without coming close to death. Maybe injury and stress recovery should cost AP? Like, you get to erase 1 any time you rest, but to erase more you have to spend 1 AP per mark you're erasing? This establishes a cost for being totally fresh for the fight 2 hours after the last fight.
So, basically, does that strike y'all as a coherent system for getting your butt kicked a bunch of times and eventually dying in a heroic blaze of glory? I don't actually want it to be super brutal, but it's not hyper pulp superhero adventure fiction, either. Assume the math probabilities will have most characters get through a job without gaining a new scar, but most PCs will eventually have scars and a few stories about near misses. It's the kind of action adventure where in the third movie one of the ensemble has a prosthetic arm because his meat arm got bit off by a rampaging void beast, another is a behinds the scenes support character now due to the stress of that time he had to stare too long into the Void in order to pull another character out of it, and another spent the second movie as a bad guy,- but everyone might very well still be alive.
No HP as a depleting resource. Like many other games, what I'm working on right now has no HP, instead you have a Toughness score that acts as a damage threshold. If it is surpassed, you mark either injury or stress. Both are limited, and when you fill either one, you're out of that scene, and might even die or get retired.
WHen you defend against anything dangerous, it will have a number of dice called it's Hazard Pool, which you are rolling to reduce. Reduce it to no dice, and the hazard simply misses you utterly, no worries. Any other result, however, the remaining dice are rolled, and the result -any armor your have against that type of attack, is compared to your Toughness. When you attack, your level of success determines how many of the dice dice you rolled are counted toward how well you mess with the enemy. (players make nearly all rolls)
Critical success can sway things a bit, and there are abilities that let you temporarily increase your toughness, gain armor, or simply reduce the dice pool of a hazard.
Social (and maybe physical challenges like a chase or exploring an ancient tomb) challenges might have a total stress track, rather than each creature doing so. A bit like Cubicle7's Doctor Who 5e game having encounter HP rather than individual HP, you succeed well enough, enough times, and the enemies lose. Haven't tried to port this to combat, but it would fit with how some other stuff works, like commander type enemies being able to take actions that cause their allies to do things, like a lazy warlord, how swarms or hordes work, etc.
Dying is more in the player's hands. So, it's up to the player to decide what happens when they get taken out. Is it temporary with some sort of cost? Is it permanent but not the end of your story? Or is it truly permanent ?
If you choose the last one, you get 2 benefits for doing so.
Firstly, you can choose how you go out, your last words, and any reasonable arrangements you made in the case of your passing. This also allows you to use character resources, and automatically succeed at something as you die or otherwise get permanently removed from the board.
Second, during downtime you can work with the GM and the rest of the group, but with you in the lead, to determine what your Legacy is. How do folks remember you? What do you leave behind? Who? Do you have a protege or even a kid that one of the other PCs might be inclined to take over teaching?
Alternatives for dying. You can choose to be injured such that you don't feel you can go on these jobs anymore, and fade into a support role, instead, or even a teaching role, or just plain leave the life behind. You can also just be knocked out of the scene, and subsequent scenes until something is done to bring you back in, like major magical healing, finding a safe haven to rest and recover in, etc, and you gain a Scar. Scars usually come with narrative weight, and a new vulnerability. You can also sacrifice something other than yourself, if it can fit the story. You might burn a contact, lose an Ally trait or a Signature Gear trait, or make another similar bargain with the GM to explain how the situation didn't kill you, and what consequence there is for what happened to save you.
Getting wore out over time works different. Pretty much all special abilities, and your ability to push a check up one step on the success ladder, cost Attribute Points. These are limited, and only partially replenish in the field. To fully replenish, you have to take several days or longer to rest in a safe Haven. Injury and Stress also replenish more the longer you rest, but aren't that hard to get fully replenished in a day, as they mostly track what's happening in the moment. AP is how you can see on your sheet that you are getting worn down by days on end in the field.
One thing I am working on how to do is to leave room for injury and stress to linger without coming close to death. Maybe injury and stress recovery should cost AP? Like, you get to erase 1 any time you rest, but to erase more you have to spend 1 AP per mark you're erasing? This establishes a cost for being totally fresh for the fight 2 hours after the last fight.
So, basically, does that strike y'all as a coherent system for getting your butt kicked a bunch of times and eventually dying in a heroic blaze of glory? I don't actually want it to be super brutal, but it's not hyper pulp superhero adventure fiction, either. Assume the math probabilities will have most characters get through a job without gaining a new scar, but most PCs will eventually have scars and a few stories about near misses. It's the kind of action adventure where in the third movie one of the ensemble has a prosthetic arm because his meat arm got bit off by a rampaging void beast, another is a behinds the scenes support character now due to the stress of that time he had to stare too long into the Void in order to pull another character out of it, and another spent the second movie as a bad guy,- but everyone might very well still be alive.
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