Jack7
First Post
Or maybe you're saying that you don't want HP to be what ends a fight. I don't know what other methods you're thinking of, though.
I'll try to explain a bit below.
Yeah, hit point totals like that make me want to not use hp either. Any ideas on a replacement? Active defenses? Maybe we should fork this to another thread.
I think that's a good idea EW as you'd probably pick up interesting ideas from others as well.
As for me I'm experimenting with play-testing three different methods for the Conjunction Contest, including Weal. Weal is simply one's Physique score, or it would be Constitution score, in regular D&D.
But it is modified by other factors as well, and as one's Weal falls then it has other effects, such as weakened resistance to attack and weakened strength, speed, agility, etc.
Let me put it to ya this way, if you've ever been knocked around in a boxing match or stabbed then you know such wounds don't just "reduce hit points" they also slow you, make you sluggish, you don't react as well or as efficiently as when you are uninjured, etc. It's not just a matter of being injured, being injured has "systemic effects" not just "loss of hit points."
(Though you do reach an accommodation point, a sort of point where you become accommodated to the pain and less worried or resistant to it, and you actually start to loosen up again, which is why I don't mind "Second Winds," though the idea of healing surges is kinda silly. It's at least a misnomer. You don't heal anything, you just become less influenced by pain and injury at a certain point, and then it goes the other way again once things like adrenaline start to wear down and you become "reconscious of your situation.")
I'm thinking when it comes to certain monsters Weal will work in a little different way than with characters, that is to say they don't wear down as fast, but then again they don't get second winds much either. Many monsters would act like reptiles, a lot of energy up front, with very slow reduction to abilities, then once they crash then they start to fall quickly. Like a lizard or an alligator or a snake. They are extremely dangerous and they don't lose their lethality immediately, but once they do they sort of "collapse." Many reptiles absorb energy directly from the sun, and less through chemical means. That means they do very well in certain conditions (no man could outsprint a man-sized lizard, but then again a lizard could never run a marathon either. Men would easily out-distance lizards.) but once they exhaust their energy reserves they "crash quickly." (You might could use "bloodied" as a "crash-point" for some monsters.) Humans on the other hand get most of their energy through chemical means which means less immediate and direct applicability but it also means they carry internally more stores of energy and they hold energy stores longer and can operate in nearly any environment because of that. So I picture many monsters as ambient energy absorbers, and therefore more like reptiles, and characters as being the opposite. I definitely don't like the idea that monsters and people would be identical in the way they behave, operate, or fight.
Combats would then become a lethality challenge between the extremely vicious and up-front lethality of some monsters (some monsters being more like people) - can they kill quickly enough to overcome the character's Weal - or the longer term, tougher, more enduring, but less powerful up front lethality and Weal of the characters. The characters will be looking to inflict intense immediate lethal wounds to overcome the "breaking point or collapse point of the monster," and the monster will be looking to kill characters quickly so as not to have to risk the danger of collapsing against a foe who may be tougher in the long run.
This gives characters and monsters different kinds of "Weal and lethality advantages and disadvantages," but also encourages both groups to be as lethal as possible as immediately as possible (for different reasons). And that's what real killing fights are like. Optimally you don't want your opponent to survive his first encounter with you. If he does then it just becomes progressively more dangerous for you every second thereafter. So as a combatant you have no interest in combat per se, instead you want to kill. Combat then is just a medium or method of killing, it is not a method of "attriting and brawling." You wouldn't enter a combat against a monster "to fight," you'd enter it to kill.
But Weal is one method I am experimenting with.
The best method I'll put into my game work-up.
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