How decisive should each combat round be in terms of HP loss/healing?

[CroBob]

You get attached to brand new characters?

Sure. It's not so much you get attached to that specific character, so much as the character concept. You come up with a fun concept you're looking forward to playing, then splat, there he goes. You could, technically, just make someone with the same concept for your next character, but that's never going to feel right. The group did a good job incidentally running into sn exact duplicate of that last guy!

 

[LostSoul]

I think you need to look at it in terms of player choice: how many poor decisions does it take to kill a PC? How does luck play into things (bad rolls, good rolls)?

 

[System Ufera]

That was another thing I was worried about, the concept of lethality for characters. During playtesting, there were no PC deaths outside of a TPK caused by the players being entirely reckless during the first session, but every other session things got pretty close, pretty quickly. Things got especially close while testing the Steampunk setting, since firearms not only pack an extra punch in terms of raw damage, but they make armor next to useless. I think the biggest reason that players survived, though, was because they happened to eliminate the enemies before they themselves were eliminated.

I think I want PC lethality to be where it was (in my experience, at least) in DnD 4.0, where, barring stupidity, you can fairly reasonably expect to keep a character for a long time. I could, of course, make house rules to make things riskier for PC's, but I would want the default game to be less lethal per round. The issue remains, however, in how exactly to implement this mechanically.

The easiest thing to do would be to simply increase HP. However, I think it would be a bit intimidating or confusing for new players, especially ones used to other systems, to have a level 1 wizard with no investment in durability sporting 36 HP. Decreasing damage would be much harder, since you can only decrease die size or dice rolled so much.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'd like a round of combat to be about 20% lethal.

That is, for two equally matched sides, combat will last five rounds on average. As one side or other overmatches the opponent, the duration of combat decreases. So if you're matching damage output to HP, the average damage output for one creature of a given level should be about 20% of the HP that creatures of that level possess. This also provides a way to scale combat sizes -- for combat of many against few, HP of the "few" is increased (the solo monster), or alternately the HP of "many" are decreased (for the mob of mooks, or what have you).

The catch is "average". One needs to adjust the standard deviations of the damage output so there is some variability without introducing so much randomness that combat becomes arbitrarily swingy.

 

[CroBob]

That was another thing I was worried about, the concept of lethality for characters. During playtesting, there were no PC deaths outside of a TPK caused by the players being entirely reckless during the first session, but every other session things got pretty close, pretty quickly. Things got especially close while testing the Steampunk setting, since firearms not only pack an extra punch in terms of raw damage, but they make armor next to useless. I think the biggest reason that players survived, though, was because they happened to eliminate the enemies before they themselves were eliminated.

I think I want PC lethality to be where it was (in my experience, at least) in DnD 4.0, where, barring stupidity, you can fairly reasonably expect to keep a character for a long time. I could, of course, make house rules to make things riskier for PC's, but I would want the default game to be less lethal per round. The issue remains, however, in how exactly to implement this mechanically.

The easiest thing to do would be to simply increase HP. However, I think it would be a bit intimidating or confusing for new players, especially ones used to other systems, to have a level 1 wizard with no investment in durability sporting 36 HP. Decreasing damage would be much harder, since you can only decrease die size or dice rolled so much.

I really don't think it's fair for your product to worry too much about the preconceived notions formed from the play of different games. On the other hand, there's also the coconut effect to worry about. I guess it depends on if you want to make a solid game, a good product, or something in-between. Either way, if you are worried about starting HPs being too high, simply do a little math to reduce early damage output and, thus, starting HPs. I don't know anything substantial about your system, so I really can't offer advice on how to do that. Assuming damage output is a combination of dice rolling and fixed numbers, you could reduce the number or type if dice, or both. This will have the benefits of lowering the damage output and making it more predictable, thus allowing strategy to matter more and the survivability of the PCs to rely more on player actions than dice rolls. It may not reduce damage as much as you'd like, but a character's death would be more avoidable through tactics and teamwork.

On the other hand, I definitely understand wanting to maintain some randomness, so that the outcomes isn't basically set in stone beforehand. This one's easy; reduce the set number you add to the rolls. Of course, you could reduce all three variables; kind of dice, number of dice, and bonus to roll. As I said, though, exactly how to do those things I couldn't say, as I'm not familiar with your system. I'm actually more a fan of making sure the system works well, and then fitting HPs around it. I mean, if your wizard starts with 36 HPs on average, but takes 18 damage on your typical attack on him, the feel of low HPs remains, especially if the other characters have many more, or even if they have defenses which reduce their damage taken, instead. As long as people don't have preconceived notions concerning your game, it won't suffer the knee-jerk rejection 4E faced at the hands of many D&D players. Just spell it out straight in the forward and on the back cover, or wherever people get a synopsis of the game from.