Hit Point style preference

[chaochou]

I like Rocket Tag. But I think there are caveats.

I've always much preferred D&D at Rocket Tag levels (say 1st to 7th ish). I've run a lot of Chaosium RQ. HP virtually never increase. Armour rarely gets better. You get better attack, better parry and more effective magic to defend yourself with.

And it's very hard to keep PCs alive - even when they overmatch the opposition. I've no desire to kill characters, but one crit or even impale to the head, chest or abdomen and often you just have. It makes combat brilliantly tense, but there's a price to pay for that excitement. Tried and trusted solutions include:

i) Fate / Hero points, like the original WHFRP and many others.

ii) Making the non-combat parts of the system entertaining and meaningful. That is to say, when combat is deadly provide both fun and opportunity in other areas. I think games like Cthulhu, Pendragon, L5R take this approach (in our L5R game, Tea Ceremony, Investigation and Etiquette are very enjoyable, and often key, skills).

iii) Making the stakes involved something other than life and death, even when combat is involved. This is more of an indie approach, from games like Dogs in the Vineyard to Burning Wheel. Fights last until one side gets what they want - but losing in combat is rarely fatal because NPC motivations rarely default to 'kill them all'.

Of these approaches I prefer ii) and iii). I think it's tempting to view the 'combat system' in isolation, but I think well designed mechanics for skills or conflicts, beliefs or motivations can be central to giving combat just the right feel.

 

[Naszir]

Plot immunized rocket tag here.

Take healing surges and change them to just heroic surges. Basically, a character can use a heroic surge to change a hit to a minimum damage hit. This represents the extra effort to dodge the attack in some form. To me this represents and would reflect the near misses that you see in the movies. The character uses that extra effort to roll out of the way just in time before the ogre would have squished him with his club.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I think I like plot immunity better. Rocket tag is very random. Since the only factors to worry about are how often you get hit, then you will simply die that percentage of the time. Enemies kill you in one hit but have a 30% chance to hit you? Then 30% of the fights you have will end in someone's death".

Plot immunity is ablative. If you have 100 hitpoints and the enemies do 5 damage each, you know that 20 enemies will definitely take down 1 person in a round. You know that one enemy will take 20 rounds to kill one person. It enables you to better plan the difficulty of an encounter. If you add a couple of random factors that you can control, then there can still be surprise in a system without taking away some of the ability to judge difficulty and to be a little forgiving of mistakes.

For instance, if all enemies have a 50% chance to hit and all do 5-15 points of damage, then the average character with 100 hitpoints dies in 1 round to 20 of them. But chance being what it is, the character can possibly survive that round. Also, one monster can kill someone in 20 rounds. But chance being what it is, a character could die as early as 7 rounds.

Using the right calculations, it can be random enough that most people can't calculate the chances in their head, but predictable enough that a DM can create an encounter that is supposed to be easy without it randomly killing off the whole party. Or creating an encounter that is supposed to be challenging without it be extremely easy.

 

[mmadsen]

Now consider how "plot immunity" affects the situation. Lets make the master survive two hits at first (still 100% vs. 5% hit chance)...

A kindred spirit! I actually did that analysis too, and a little bit of plot-protection goes a long way.

I think rocket tag needs back-up fate points or something similar. Otherwise PC attrition becomes too great.

Exactly. If we expect the party to survive a dozen deadly encounters just to advance one level (of a dozen or more), they need a buffer of plot protection.

No one else needs such a buffer though -- certainly not their faceless enemies!

And because plot immunity tends to produce gonzo outcomes - especially when applied to falls over cliffs, being caught in explosions/cave-ins etc - it needs the rest of the game and the gameworld to support that gonzo fiction. I personally don't like the way 3E handles this, with gonzo plot immunity in combat, but non-gonzo grittiness in other areas of the game, like swimming, climbing and crafting.

D&D definitely conflates plot-immunity with toughness in a way that leaves characters surprisingly vulnerable to threats that don't do "damage" -- and the certainty of a plot-immunity buffer makes big one-time threats oddly non-threatening, especially when you can just refill your buffer afterwards.

Who's afraid of falling off a cliff or staring down the barrel of matchlock gun, when it can't kill you?

Lanchester's Square Law works wonders.

Bringing up Lanchester's Square Law reminded me that while individuals don't suffer a death spiral in D&D, groups do; as they lose numbers, they lose attacks.

We play D&D to live heroic/legendary fiction: Cú Chulainn, Drizzt, Conan, Elric, et al.

I agree that D&D should be about playing heroes -- or maybe anti-heroes, when you're 13 -- but isn't it odd that anyone and everyone who's good at anything has plot-immunity, not just the heroes?

And it's very hard to keep PCs alive - even when they overmatch the opposition. I've no desire to kill characters, but one crit or even impale to the head, chest or abdomen and often you just have. It makes combat brilliantly tense, but there's a price to pay for that excitement.

As you point out, even an extreme overmatch won't grant you any kind of immunity, just better odds, and having the odds on your side isn't enough if you want to fight dozens of battles and know your heroes will survive.

Tried and trusted solutions include:

i) Fate / Hero points, like the original WHFRP and many others.

ii) Making the non-combat parts of the system entertaining and meaningful. That is to say, when combat is deadly provide both fun and opportunity in other areas. I think games like Cthulhu, Pendragon, L5R take this approach (in our L5R game, Tea Ceremony, Investigation and Etiquette are very enjoyable, and often key, skills).

iii) Making the stakes involved something other than life and death, even when combat is involved. This is more of an indie approach, from games like Dogs in the Vineyard to Burning Wheel. Fights last until one side gets what they want - but losing in combat is rarely fatal because NPC motivations rarely default to 'kill them all'.

Of these approaches I prefer ii) and iii). I think it's tempting to view the 'combat system' in isolation, but I think well designed mechanics for skills or conflicts, beliefs or motivations can be central to giving combat just the right feel.

If you take away plot immunity, fighting to the enemy's death stops looking like such a good option, even when you expect to win. Suddenly everyone starts behaving more like real people (and animals) and relying on threats rather than outright violence, because a small chance of getting crippled or killed is still a big deal.

You may have to write up a post about making tea ceremonies and etiquette interesting, because I'm sure most groups would find that quite challenging.

 

[Aenghus]

I prefer long campaigns and established PCs so I prefer plot immunity. I hate Rocket tag with a passion.

I wonder how much this issue is coloured by the differing styles of various groups and individual players?

I know players who treat PCs as disposable and always have a number of ideas for a new PC. A number of them get bored with PCs quickly and either retire them or use siucidal tactics until they get killed and a shiny new PC can be brought it. Obviously rocket tag lethality facilitates this, while plot immunity makes it more difficult.

Some other players get attached to their PCs, have lots of plans for them, integrate them in to the setting, form attachments to NPCs and want to play the PC for an extended period. Plot immunity lethality is appropriate for such Pcs, rocket tag makes them very sad puppies.

And then there is the middle ground, which is very wide and where I suspect most players are.

Rocket Tag lethality typically is accompanied with fudging, deliberate or covert. I suppose deliberate fudging would fall into the Plot Immunised Rocket Tag category.

 

[pemerton]

I think it's tempting to view the 'combat system' in isolation, but I think well designed mechanics for skills or conflicts, beliefs or motivations can be central to giving combat just the right feel.

Agreed (but can't XP your post at this time).

If we expect the party to survive a dozen deadly encounters just to advance one level (of a dozen or more), they need a buffer of plot protection.

No one else needs such a buffer though -- certainly not their faceless enemies!

Agreed also. Which is why I quite like minions. But for those 4e enemies that do have hit points, I see them not so much as plot protection but pacing protection.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Rocket Tag lethality typically is accompanied with fudging, deliberate or covert. I suppose deliberate fudging would fall into the Plot Immunised Rocket Tag category.

This is why I personally prefer Fated Rocket Tag, of the systems listed. It admits that base Rocket Tag by itself doesn't work, except for some very specialized applications. But instead of trying to confuse the issue, it comes right out and says plainly how you work around the problems, within the game mechanics. Because it is so overt, it is easier to tweak to get the exact results you want.

The exception would be systems where you want some form of plot immunity by character power, but don't want to think about it much. In that case, I'd prefer straight Plot Immunity as the option (scaling hit points).

What I don't like in any form is "Pretend Rocket Tag": The system is relatively lethal and/or random, so that everyone can feel tough and clever, but the nasty jolts are smoothed out so that the reality is that the actual system hardly mattered at all. That's like using a calculator to do single digit simple addition so that you can feel like a technophile.

 

[Kaodi]

I think I would prefer to go with Plot-Immunized Rocket Tag or straight Plot Immunization (or maybe even Fated Plot-Immunized Rocket Tag). Fewer numbers get bigger, and the ones that do are easier to manage when big.

 

[chaochou]

What I don't like in any form is "Pretend Rocket Tag": The system is relatively lethal and/or random, so that everyone can feel tough and clever, but the nasty jolts are smoothed out so that the reality is that the actual system hardly mattered at all.

While I can kind of envisage the concept I'm struggling to think of examples. Do you have any systems in mind to illustrate this?