Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
Tink-Tink-Boom vs. the Death Spiral: The Damage Mechanic in RPGs
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7756243" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Fractions are rounded up, so a hypothetical PC with single digit hit points would be staggered at 1 hit point remaining, potentially unconscious at 0 hit points remaining, and potentially unconscious and dying ('bleeding out' as my players call it) at -1. However, in point of fact, single digit hit points in my game are extremely rare if you aren't playing something like a Pixie. That's because everything gets a bonus to maximum hit points based on its current size, and the bonus for medium sized creatures is 8. So, a typical 1st level human fighter with 14 Con has 20 hit points, and even a Wizard would have 12. </p><p></p><p>At first level, most foes are doing only 2 to 3 damage on at a hit, so despite the narrow range you can only be staggered in before worse things happen, it still comes up relatively frequently. It changes the dynamics of combat significantly, because there is no 'partial evasion' action in my game, so once you get staggered it's too late to run away. The best you can do is try to turtle up and hope for help, and parties really need to cooperate to rescue players that have had bad luck or gotten themselves in over their head, because a 'wounded' player can't self-rescue an there is a broader range at which they are 'wounded'. You also need to decide to fall back before you get in trouble. </p><p></p><p>As for the questions about why can't you adopt your procedures of play to accommodate rules that would make injuries more lasting, you could, but then you wouldn't be playing the same game.</p><p></p><p>For example, assumption #3 "There are such a large number of players that it is not functional for the gaming group to insist that everyone be present in order to game." is at some level the underlying assumption behind assumptions #1 and #2. It's not a necessary assumption for #1 and #2 and many people played with assumptions #1 and #2 without considering why, solely because the procedures of play presented to them through the examples of play had those assumptions stated or unstated, but #3 actually creates and requires #1 and #2. For example, the existence of the 'Haven' is predicated on there not being a proactive villain that will pursue the party back to the Haven. If that happens, it's no longer a Haven. But if you have assumption #3, then you have a process of play problem if the villain does pursue the party back to the Haven, and that is that at the Haven there are a bunch of PC's who by virtue of being at the Haven can be assumed to be out of play, but if the proactive villain enters the Haven then there is no clean separation between the dungeon where the game takes place and the haven where down time takes place. This is a headache. </p><p></p><p>If you examine the game described in the 1e DMG, it's filled with assumptions about clean separation between game time and down time. But as you note many and if not most groups abandoned those procedures of play. Depending on what game they started playing, it isn't necessarily functional to say that regardless of the mechanics the game adopted with respect to injury, they could keep playing the same game by simply introducing down time. The game they are playing might not include downtime and adding it may violate the setting that had been imagined.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Anything that violates the assumption that you have downtime and can handwave that downtime prevents you from having 'injury recovery' in the sense you mean it. That can include:</p><p></p><p>a) There is no Haven where downtime takes place, because story and threat still happens at the haven. That is to say, even if a player takes 'downtime' there may be no procedure of play at the table that endorses hand waving away this time and producing an outcome outside of the process of play. If a player says, "I spend the week wenching and gambling", a DM might have good reason for not resolving that as a hand wave, which means that play goes on with only some players removed as participants. </p><p>b) Villains are proactive and will take meaningful action during the down time, punishing players who could otherwise be active for waiting for their colleague to improve. This is true even if there are no hard deadlines. You neglect the possibility that the PC will have in game reason to be impatient.</p><p>c) As you stated, a deadline, such as for example the end of the world Next Thursday unless the PC's defeat the BBEG, or even 'by tomorrow night the bandits will be clean across the border', or 'they are going to sacrifice the captives to their dark god on the New Moon'. You call this an overused trope, but in doing so you are saying that any plot where the protagonist does not need to be an active participant for the antagonist to be thwarted is overused. On the contrary, AD&D created a world that overused the trope of a nearby, untouched, static adventure site in order to support its preferred structure of play which was one with no time pressure. The prevalence in D&D of static, untouched, virgin adventure sites populated by beings that seem to have no real motivation, industry, or impact on the outside world is weird, and the more you think about it, the weirder it gets. The longer you go in D&D's history, the more diversity you see. </p><p></p><p>Or in short, having no time pressure is intimately connected to the desire not to remove a player from the play, and D&D both mechanically and in its procedures of play reinforced that goal. As the procedures of play changed, the meta-goal of 'everyone gets to play and have fun' was retained, and it was only because mechanically down time wasn't necessary (and anything that made downtime necessary mechanically was ignored) that D&D could be a rules set that supported that. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Sure, been there, done that: but you'd be amazed I think by the percentage of tables where henchmen aren't a thing and never were a thing. For one thing, henchmen are a pain, since the presence of 2-3 per party member quickly bloats even a small group with only 4 players into a wandering army with 14 combatants that have to act each round, and neither the DM nor the player tends to be actually prepared for the mental overhead of keeping track of all of that. So again, the answers here for what to do should the game mechanically impose downtime on a PC in the form of 'injury recovery time' are fine for certain procedures of play, but are not general answers.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7756243, member: 4937"] Fractions are rounded up, so a hypothetical PC with single digit hit points would be staggered at 1 hit point remaining, potentially unconscious at 0 hit points remaining, and potentially unconscious and dying ('bleeding out' as my players call it) at -1. However, in point of fact, single digit hit points in my game are extremely rare if you aren't playing something like a Pixie. That's because everything gets a bonus to maximum hit points based on its current size, and the bonus for medium sized creatures is 8. So, a typical 1st level human fighter with 14 Con has 20 hit points, and even a Wizard would have 12. At first level, most foes are doing only 2 to 3 damage on at a hit, so despite the narrow range you can only be staggered in before worse things happen, it still comes up relatively frequently. It changes the dynamics of combat significantly, because there is no 'partial evasion' action in my game, so once you get staggered it's too late to run away. The best you can do is try to turtle up and hope for help, and parties really need to cooperate to rescue players that have had bad luck or gotten themselves in over their head, because a 'wounded' player can't self-rescue an there is a broader range at which they are 'wounded'. You also need to decide to fall back before you get in trouble. As for the questions about why can't you adopt your procedures of play to accommodate rules that would make injuries more lasting, you could, but then you wouldn't be playing the same game. For example, assumption #3 "There are such a large number of players that it is not functional for the gaming group to insist that everyone be present in order to game." is at some level the underlying assumption behind assumptions #1 and #2. It's not a necessary assumption for #1 and #2 and many people played with assumptions #1 and #2 without considering why, solely because the procedures of play presented to them through the examples of play had those assumptions stated or unstated, but #3 actually creates and requires #1 and #2. For example, the existence of the 'Haven' is predicated on there not being a proactive villain that will pursue the party back to the Haven. If that happens, it's no longer a Haven. But if you have assumption #3, then you have a process of play problem if the villain does pursue the party back to the Haven, and that is that at the Haven there are a bunch of PC's who by virtue of being at the Haven can be assumed to be out of play, but if the proactive villain enters the Haven then there is no clean separation between the dungeon where the game takes place and the haven where down time takes place. This is a headache. If you examine the game described in the 1e DMG, it's filled with assumptions about clean separation between game time and down time. But as you note many and if not most groups abandoned those procedures of play. Depending on what game they started playing, it isn't necessarily functional to say that regardless of the mechanics the game adopted with respect to injury, they could keep playing the same game by simply introducing down time. The game they are playing might not include downtime and adding it may violate the setting that had been imagined. Anything that violates the assumption that you have downtime and can handwave that downtime prevents you from having 'injury recovery' in the sense you mean it. That can include: a) There is no Haven where downtime takes place, because story and threat still happens at the haven. That is to say, even if a player takes 'downtime' there may be no procedure of play at the table that endorses hand waving away this time and producing an outcome outside of the process of play. If a player says, "I spend the week wenching and gambling", a DM might have good reason for not resolving that as a hand wave, which means that play goes on with only some players removed as participants. b) Villains are proactive and will take meaningful action during the down time, punishing players who could otherwise be active for waiting for their colleague to improve. This is true even if there are no hard deadlines. You neglect the possibility that the PC will have in game reason to be impatient. c) As you stated, a deadline, such as for example the end of the world Next Thursday unless the PC's defeat the BBEG, or even 'by tomorrow night the bandits will be clean across the border', or 'they are going to sacrifice the captives to their dark god on the New Moon'. You call this an overused trope, but in doing so you are saying that any plot where the protagonist does not need to be an active participant for the antagonist to be thwarted is overused. On the contrary, AD&D created a world that overused the trope of a nearby, untouched, static adventure site in order to support its preferred structure of play which was one with no time pressure. The prevalence in D&D of static, untouched, virgin adventure sites populated by beings that seem to have no real motivation, industry, or impact on the outside world is weird, and the more you think about it, the weirder it gets. The longer you go in D&D's history, the more diversity you see. Or in short, having no time pressure is intimately connected to the desire not to remove a player from the play, and D&D both mechanically and in its procedures of play reinforced that goal. As the procedures of play changed, the meta-goal of 'everyone gets to play and have fun' was retained, and it was only because mechanically down time wasn't necessary (and anything that made downtime necessary mechanically was ignored) that D&D could be a rules set that supported that. Sure, been there, done that: but you'd be amazed I think by the percentage of tables where henchmen aren't a thing and never were a thing. For one thing, henchmen are a pain, since the presence of 2-3 per party member quickly bloats even a small group with only 4 players into a wandering army with 14 combatants that have to act each round, and neither the DM nor the player tends to be actually prepared for the mental overhead of keeping track of all of that. So again, the answers here for what to do should the game mechanically impose downtime on a PC in the form of 'injury recovery time' are fine for certain procedures of play, but are not general answers. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
Tink-Tink-Boom vs. the Death Spiral: The Damage Mechanic in RPGs
Top