D&D 4E Warhammer-esque wounds in 4e

[Stalker0]

I think the concepts are good, but the system takes the complexity a bit too high, and I don't think that's needed.

For example, let's for a moment ignore the positional wound effects and just focus on the ideas of being wounded.

The basic goal of your system seems to be to inflict wounds that have some lingering aftereffect past an encounter and weaken the person who has inflicted the wounds.


I like the condition track idea, but all the minor/major stage 1 through X location wounds get a bit confusing to me. What if we try combining them into a singular mechanic.


Wounds
1) You suffer a -1 to attack rolls, checks, and all defenses for each wound you currently have. (location doesn't matter, just the number.)

2) Healing Wounds: Depending on the number of wounds you have, you have the following options to heal them. The healing option will recover all of your wounds. Note that if you have more wounds than the healing option allows, you cannot use that option to heal any of your wounds.

a) 0-1 wound: Short Rest
b) 2-3 wounds: Extended Rest
c) 3-4 wounds: Remove Affliction
d) 5+: Raise Dead


To me this streamlines a lot of what you are going for. Characters can still take lingering penalties, the penalties are noticeable (-'s to attack, checks, and defenses is noticeable to everyone), and the healing options are easy to understand.


Past that point you could still tweak your system how you want, how healing surges work, how crits are involved etc.

 

[the Jester]

I like inflicting terrific maiming wounds on my pcs, but I do it through critical hits- the severity is based on the amount of damage the crit does as a percentage of your current hit points, so if it does half of your current hps or less, it's not nearly as bad as if it kills you.

Edit: Wow, that sounds stupidly obvious. What that means is that if you have 25 hps and a crit does 10 hps, the severity of the crit (I use a severity chart) is 1d12. If it's over half your hit points but not enough to knock you out- e.g. you take a crit for 20 hps when you have 25- severity is 2d12, which tops out at losing a hand or foot. If you take enough damage to knock you out but not kill you, the severity is 4d8 (up to "Spine shattered")- not enough to kill you, but the odds are you will put your eye out and it will no longer merely be fun and games, but fun and games that leave you a permanent and exciting character enhancement. (Well, not strictly permanent- I do have a regenerate ritual in my game due to the whole matter of crits.) If a crit kills you, the severity is 3d6+22- at minimum, you lose your lower jaw, and at maximum you are cut in half (with some cool Shakespearian results like "unseemed from nave to crotch" in there as well).

The lowest severity that has a "no way can you live through that" result is 33 (throat slit). That means that, without crit severity enhancing stuff )) you can't auto-kill someone unless the damage will kill them.

 

[RangerWickett]

the Jester, if you run out of HP but still have surges, somebody can still coup you and kill you. I actually like the resilience, because I hate when six months of working up to a climax that pays off a PC's backstory is ruined by some bad dice rolls.

But I have a simpler method. I suppose what we could do, is:

HP damage kills you, as does failing 3 death saves.

When you crit, the target takes a wound to a specific location that incurs a penalty until it rests. If the target gets critted in the same spot, or if you spend an action point when you crit, you instead inflict a wound that requires a long rest to heal.

If the crit knocks you to 0 HP or below and the person crits and spends an action point, the wound requires magic to heal. (Also, if somehow he gets critted thrice in the same spot.)

Minions can't inflict wounds. Elites and solos can hypothetically wound PCs long-term, possibly even chop off their limbs. Magic healing should leave some trace, either a scar or a glowing sign where a limb was reattached or something.

 

[RangerWickett]

In Rogue Trader, by the way, wounds work the following way. There are no hit points. You just have a 'toughness' score. When you hit and do more damage than the target's toughness, the target gets a wound of stage X, where X is how much damage you did beyond his toughness.

1 point of extra damage, it's an annoying graze. 10+ points, and his head is exploded so viciously that it blinds nearby enemies with the gore and viscera. I'm not going for quite that severe.

 

[EugeneZ]

I decided to try these rules out in my group's level 25 Scales of War campaign. They had stretched themselves quite thin attacking Pelor's Dawnbell tower and several PCs were out of surges or only had one left. They knew they had to fight the "boss guy" at the top of the tower, and do it now, because any delay would mean the tower gets reinforced beyond their ability to attack it again. So they pushed on, knowing it may be certain doom... and I introduced the above concepts of Heroic Surges and the wounds that result from dropping below 0hp.

It made for an awesome fight and some permanent scars the characters could show off. We've been using it since then for a handful of combats.

One thing I immediately noticed is that the purpose of combat changes subtly. It used to be that even when the NPCs know they're gonna lose, they'd try and waste as many PC surges as possible. Fights would become a matter of attrition, and even when boredom began to set in towards the end of a long fight, I would usually insist we play it out so that any potentially used surges would "count."

It gave me a feeling of satisfaction when an easy fight managed to knock away a decent number of surges for the day but it was a deception... most of the time, the PCs would extended-rest at a point where the number of surges they had left had not yet hampered them. Or they would run out of surges, like at the Dawnbell, and basically be forced to die like dogs in the next battle all because they made a few surge conservation mistakes in the first or second battle of the day.

What I'm saying is that I really like how this system reduces this "long-term endurance" aspect of DnD. But this advantage is also a disadvantage. Every time a fight is over now, and I see everyone heal up to zero wounds and their surges pop back up to "full", it definitely rattles me. The battle was basically meaningless... just a time waster. Five to ten minutes afterwards, there is nothing to show for my poor NPCs efforts unless the battle was hard enough to inflict at least a stage 2 wound.

But I think the problem there is Scales of War. This system just basically revealed how meaningless battles are in WotC's adventure path. I will likely begin to use the system in my level 14 Burning Sky campaign, where I think the payoff will be far better, since battles have alternative objectives besides surge loss.