EdwardForrester said:
Greetings,
I am going to break down and get Star Wars as soon as I read some other D20 books but I was curious about a few things. Namely the Vitality and Wounds that I see on the sheet that takes the place of Hit Points. I have not been able to grab a book for myself recently so any explanation would be greatly appreciated. Also what I am about to ask is a basic newbie question but I am going to ask it anyways. Does the Vitality and Wounds balance out the use of blasters and other SW weapons. My friend when I said I was going to get this said he wouldn't play because he didnt think HP and blasters would be balanced. But our DM we were with said by using V&W it all balanced out. Thank you all in advanced for your info.
Is your friend concerned about players taking multiple hits from blasters only to carry on regardless? If so, the Vitality/Wounds mechanism works very well.
A player character has both vitality and wounds. Vitality are rather like hit points - the character gets new vitality at every level. Wounds are linked to CON score, and so don't go up very often (and will never be very high).
Every single shot that hits a character has a chance of being a critical hit. Critical hits affect Wounds (of which a character does not have very many). Normal hits affect Vitality (effectively hit points in Star Wars - which go up every level etc).
Thus the game is a bit less "heroic" in that for example, in DnD you could have 6 archers (2 lines of 3) guarding the king, whilst the hero decides ("At most they have 6D8 damage, which even at maximum, I can take without going over the Massive Damage threshold, so I'll just charge at the King"). But in Star Wars, any one or more of those 6 stormtroopers could hit with a critical hit, which on average damage for a blaster, could easily down a character - even a high level character.
Of course, if your friend is worried about having 100 hit points and taking damage much quicker than he would in DnD from ranged fire, then he probably won't be happy
Having said that, characters do get other benefits to help reduce the damage they take. Firstly, class level adds a Defensive bonus. Secondly, armour acts as damage reduction rather than making it harder to hit someone. So higher level characters are harder to hit than lower level, and have more vitality (but still subject to the risk of critical wounds).
I prefer the Vitality/Wounds split to the raw Hit Points (though I did steal the lower damage threshold from D20 Modern for my Spycraft house rules - with any damage above DEX resulting in a DC 10+damage-DEX reflex save to avoid being knocked down - e.g. a character with 15 DEX takes 15 points of damage (vitality or wounds), and is unaffected. The same character taking 20 points of damage would need to make a DC 15 reflex or be knocked down).
My advice would be to buy the game. The Revised Core Rule Book is an excellent, jam packed book. The combat rules on vehicles and especially Starships are great. Its definetly a fine addition to the D20 system range.
