Changing the Bloodied Condition

[Mesh Hong]

You could give certain creatures special bonuses or powers they can only use when they're bloodied.

Yes you can and a lot of creatures already get extra bonuses or attacks when bloodied.

But with your system you would have to add them to pretty much every creature. If you do that then you are not only making your own life a lot more complicated than it otherwise would be, but you are also creating a penalty for players and not the creatures they are facing. This strikes me as being overly adversarial, unbalanced and as I have said before.....just wrong.

But this is just my opinion. If this rule change works for your group then I have no right to criticise you for it. This could just be one of those cases where two philosophies of game design differ.

 

[Stalker0]

I don't have a problem with penalties to defenses or vulnerabilities, but I think applying the weakened condition will cause problems.

4e can already get a little grindy, no reason to make it moreso with the weakened condition. It also completely screws over dragonborn.

 

[eriktheguy]

This

It also completely screws over dragonborn.

Also, the bloodied condition doesn't have to refer to characters that are battered and bruised, it could just refer to a character that got wounded once. HP are all the character's resources for staving off wounds, and this should also let them stave off injury. You can still have realism and danger without this rule. DnD already uses the 'unconscious' condition to describe characters that are badly battered and bruised.

If you do implement this rule, certain character builds are going to become obsolete, some powers and magic items will be useless, and you will probably have upset players dieing very quickly unless you send weaker/fewer monsters. Moreover, attacks that add statuses will become useless. Why deal 1[W] and daze a target for one turn when you can choose a power of the same level that deals 3[W] and bloody the monster, weakening it for probably the rest of the encounter.

I don't want to discourage creativity. You see the condition bloodied and you begin to think about how it would affect the character, which is encouraged, but I want to point out two important ideas.

Game-play and fun take precedence over realism: weakening bloodied characters will probably make them enjoy the game less.

Bloodied does not mean mangled: to me, bloodied means hit. Until you become bloodied, the damage you take is just means that your morale is down, you are getting tired from dodging so much, the arcane or divine power that protects you from attacks is being used up... When you become bloodied you're enemies land a solid hit on you. An adrenaline surge keeps you from dropping and you keep fighting, but one more hit like that and you could go down.

If you implement this, it could work if your players are open minded and experienced players, but I wouldn't suggest it otherwise.

 

[Starfox]

To me, it makes more sense to lower defenses and INCREASE damage at bloodied.

 

[DanmarLOK]

To me, it makes more sense to lower defenses and INCREASE damage at bloodied.

I'd fall into this camp myself, the wounded badger, wolf, wolverine, berserker syndrome etc are very common elements if fantasy fact and fiction. They get easier to hit but they're even more dangerous to approach.

 

[Garthanos]

humans in stress state do the same, they can hit measurably harder but less accurately
they can move faster but stumble more

bloodied fleetness and powerstrike (or something very like it) automatically whenever bloodied... not sure where to bring in the increase chance of stumbling ... and you can jump farther but might land wrong.

You know for simplicities sake one could pretend they balance out and ignore them mechanically except fot the special cases like the game might be already doing?

 

[JoeNotCharles]

I think effects like that are covered by various feats and powers that trigger when you're bloodied - I'm sure different people react to stress in different ways. If you want that to be an important part of combat, you could emphasize these feats somehow, such as dropping the skill prerequisites, giving people bonus feats that must come from the "effects that trigger on bloodied" category, or adding some minor additional effects to these feats so that they're more attractive than other feats.