Wound-Vitality systems and death risk

[Lanefan]

4E increased falling damage to 1d10 per 10 feet and removed the cap (so a two-thousand-foot fall is 200d10 damage), ...

The cap, oddly enough, had something of a rationale: to try and simulate terminal velocity.

There comes a point - a friend who knows more about physics than I do tells me it's at about 500' for a normal-size human - when your falling speed generates so much air resistance that you just won't fall any faster. Which means you could in theory fall from orbit and hit the ground at about the same velocity as if you'd fallen 600' - provided, of course, you didn't burn to ash on re-entry.

Therefore, a cap of 50d[whatever] makes sense.

That said, 4e's changes make falling more sensible at higher levels/longer falls (it's deadlier) but less sensible at lower levels/shorter falls (not dangerous enough, given 4e characters tend to have more h.p. at very low levels than characters of other editions).

I still think I'd like to see the first point from each die go straight against WP, though discussions in our games here have got me thinking I'd skip this if the die roll was a natural 1. Rationale: people have occasionally been known to survive falls from extreme heights; and this would put the possibility of such in play, however unlikely.

Bows and crossbows are another one. If someone shoots you from 10' and you're mostly defenseless (e.g. it's a stick-up and you've raised your hands in surrender) that damage should go mostly or all to WP...if the roll to hit is 5 better than required, perhaps.

Lan-"too much thinking - my brain hurts"-efan

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I've run a number of games with a Wound/Vitality system; I've generally come to prefer it. I think it works best if:

1) Vitality increases very modestly (I use 1d6/level + 1d6) but recovers very quickly when you catch your breath (all Vitality returns in 1 min). I make no adjustment for Con. Vitality is also fun if rolled every day.

2) You use Wounds = Con, a defense bonus, armor as DR, and some kind of Action Point mechanic to help get characters out of a scrape if they're in too deep.

3) Nothing bypasses Vitality except [Death] effects - although, in the final analysis, what exactly you decide to designate as a [Death] effect is up to you, I guess.

For spells, I have [Death] effects usually do 1d6 Wounds/spell level, save for half: a character with Con 16 (16 Wounds) who faces a finger of death (7d6) will probably die if he fails his save and will probably live if he makes it.

I find it works for low-magic better than high.


Edit: How auspicious! I notice I now have three times three hundred, three score and three posts.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

But IIRC you didn't die at -10 in SWd20 (the original version). That is why it was unlikely to die as a result of crits to wounds.

Cheers

Not in the Revised version, which is what we played. It clearly states you die at -10 WP (p. 159, SWd20R).

I was rather hoping that my DM was just being an illiterate ass, but alas, no.

Then again, my pilot died on that damn web adventure where "oh, on this world blasters don't work and neither will your repulsorlifts but mysteriously the big droids' work just fine so they can run you down and kill you."

Needless to say, the next character had a ton of Con and wore armor, even though it was otherwise useless and actively discouraged in that edition for PCs. And used slugthrowers, which, while doing less damage overall, had certain advantages, like not being reflected by lightsabers, working in generally all circumstances, not being as readily detected by scanners, and not having a stun setting.

Brad

 

[Beginning of the End]

You can use VP/WP simply as a way to control hit point recovery (granting a certain amount of "instant healing" while still imposing long-term consequences for serious injuries).

... which still makes the system more lethal.

Either you always have time to fully recuperate (in which case the VP/WP system is simply irrelevant) or at some point the slower recovery rate will result in you entering combat with fewer VP/WP then you would have had if you weren't slowing the recovery rate. And then the fact that you can take fewer points of damage before dying makes the system more lethal.

This is not, necessarily, a critique of VP/WP systems. They're very useful if you want to maintain the "ablative combat" of an HP system while modeling certain effects (lava, falling, critical hits, radiation, poison, disease, whatever) as being more lethal. But the entire point of a VP/WP system (Slavicsek's claims to the contrary) is to make the system more lethal in either targeted or general ways.

If you're not looking for lethality, than you shouldn't be wasting your time on the VP/WP system. It's not accomplishing anything.

 

[Lanefan]

... which still makes the system more lethal.

Either you always have time to fully recuperate (in which case the VP/WP system is simply irrelevant) or at some point the slower recovery rate will result in you entering combat with fewer VP/WP then you would have had if you weren't slowing the recovery rate. And then the fact that you can take fewer points of damage before dying makes the system more lethal.

Which in turn will at times force the party into a choice: carry on with not everyone in prime condition, or wait for people to recover and accept whatever consequences such delay might cause. I have no problem with this at all.

This is not, necessarily, a critique of VP/WP systems. They're very useful if you want to maintain the "ablative combat" of an HP system while modeling certain effects (lava, falling, critical hits, radiation, poison, disease, whatever) as being more lethal. But the entire point of a VP/WP system (Slavicsek's claims to the contrary) is to make the system more lethal in either targeted or general ways.

If you're not looking for lethality, than you shouldn't be wasting your time on the VP/WP system. It's not accomplishing anything.

In our game, I'd hazard a guess* that it's worked out about even: the number of extra deaths caused by parties not waiting for people to recover roughly cancels out the number of deaths prevented - particularly at very low levels - by having those extra few points as a buffer.

* - caveat: I have no hard numbers to back this up.

But what it does allow is a slightly better simulation of reality in a few cases.

Lanefan

 

[Dausuul]

... which still makes the system more lethal.

Either you always have time to fully recuperate (in which case the VP/WP system is simply irrelevant) or at some point the slower recovery rate will result in you entering combat with fewer VP/WP then you would have had if you weren't slowing the recovery rate. And then the fact that you can take fewer points of damage before dying makes the system more lethal.

More lethal? Than what? Most hit point systems treat hit points like wound points, not vitality points. Doing it the other way is a peculiarity of 4th Edition that I have not seen replicated anywhere else.

Slavicsek's basic idea was perfectly valid. Since Star Wars lacks clerical healing, if they'd used traditional hit points, PCs would have been at less than full health in almost every fight. VP/WP converts a portion of PC hit points to rapid-healing and thus provides a buffer. The only reason it didn't work was the decision to get fancy with crits.

 

[Raven Crowking]

More lethal? Than what? Most hit point systems treat hit points like wound points, not vitality points. Doing it the other way is a peculiarity of 4th Edition that I have not seen replicated anywhere else.

Hold on......Are you saying that there was never an element of vitality in pre-4e D&D? I.e., that 4e hp are different than pre-4e hp? Because I remember that song-and-dance on this board very well, and I don't think that the majority would agree with you.

Well, unless doing so helped to bolster their position, anyway. And that would be temporary; the minute that it worked against them, we'd be back to "hit points are the same as they always were".


RC

 

[Dausuul]

Hold on......Are you saying that there was never an element of vitality in pre-4e D&D? I.e., that 4e hp are different than pre-4e hp? Because I remember that song-and-dance on this board very well, and I don't think that the majority would agree with you.

I'm saying that in the absence of healing magic, 4E hit points take minutes to recover while pre-4E hit points take days. Therefore, 4E hit points work like vitality points, while pre-4E hit points work like wound points.

The in-game explanation of what's going on is a whole other ball of wax, and I don't think it's relevant; we're discussing the mechanical effects of the rules on game lethality.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I'm saying that in the absence of healing magic, 4E hit points take minutes to recover while pre-4E hit points take days. Therefore, 4E hit points work like vitality points, while pre-4E hit points work like wound points.

The in-game explanation of what's going on is a whole other ball of wax, and I don't think it's relevant; we're discussing the mechanical effects of the rules on game lethality.

Perhaps. But that is very contrary to the stance taken by the "Same as it ever was" brigade earlier. I agree that 4E hit points work like vitality points, while pre-4E hit points work like wound points, but I am not in the least bit shocked to not see those same people decrying the same now that it "serves the cause", so to speak.

(And I don't mean you, Dausuul. It's just the way the InterWeb works, apparently. Black is white until it becomes useful for it to be green!)




RC

 

[NichG]

I've never run a game using VP/WP, but the concept brings forth an interesting idea one could use them for. Maybe the danger of WP is not that certain things bypass VP, but that strikes that affect WP correspond to the cases where the character has actually taken a physical injury, whereas strikes that affect VP correspond to the character tiring out, etc.

Crits would make it so that a small portion of the damage dealt by the crit, maybe only the base damage die of the weapon goes to WP, and characters would have a decent WP pool, say equal to half their hitpoints, so it'd take quite a few crits to actually kill someone that way.

Immediately what this does is that it nerfs injury poisons, inflicted diseases, etc. Things that require getting into a character's blood. However, this also allows poisons, diseases, etc to be made more dangerous and insidious than they currently are (e.g. perhaps more like 2ed poisons, where the save vs the poison might only be for half effect). It'd add a particular edge to some monsters, either ones that have a lot of attacks or a wide crit range even though their attack damage isn't terribly high, in which case you'd want to mitigate the risk of a crit as part of the battle strategy, or certain monsters that you simply do not want to risk fighting when you're at the edge of your VP.

You could also play games with save or die abilities that require drawing the enemy's blood as a component of the ability, so that way they only come into play later in the fight when the character has already taken some abuse.

It'd work well for a campaign that you want to be gritty (people get infections from open wounds on a battlefield, people get diseases that aren't washed away by a 5th level cleric in 10 minutes, etc), but in which you also don't want the PCs to be constantly dying of these things.