They have this as a precedent already, read what a wight does - it taps your MAX hit points amount. I like this, I could see max hit points healing 1 hp/day naturally, and of course magical healing quicker. If you were almost killed, you're not going to recover after a nap, it wil take some time.
True Damage: An Alternative?
- Thread starter Giltonio_Santos
- Start date
They have this as a precedent already, read what a wight does - it taps your MAX hit points amount. I like this, I could see max hit points healing 1 hp/day naturally, and of course magical healing quicker. If you were almost killed, you're not going to recover after a nap, it wil take some time.
So here is a rewrite of the original OP concept with some of the ideas thrown around.
True Damage
True Damage represents damage taken when a character is utterly unable to reduce the impact of the injury. There are three sources of true damage.
1) Falling Damage from greater than 10 feet.
2) Damage taken while helpless.
3) Any negative hitpoint damage. (A character at 10 hitpoints that takes 15 damage is at -5, that is 5 true damage).
Effects of True Damage
A character suffering from true damage takes no additional penalties, and can heal regular HP damage normally. However, healing True Damage is much more difficult (see below). True Damage is the same as normal damage for determining when a character is unconscious, dying, and dead.
Healing True Damage
1) Magical Healing: For every 4 points of regular damage healed, a character can choose to INSTEAD heal 1 point of true damage.
2) A character heals 1 point of True Damage with each extended rest.
True Damage
True Damage represents damage taken when a character is utterly unable to reduce the impact of the injury. There are three sources of true damage.
1) Falling Damage from greater than 10 feet.
2) Damage taken while helpless.
3) Any negative hitpoint damage. (A character at 10 hitpoints that takes 15 damage is at -5, that is 5 true damage).
Effects of True Damage
A character suffering from true damage takes no additional penalties, and can heal regular HP damage normally. However, healing True Damage is much more difficult (see below). True Damage is the same as normal damage for determining when a character is unconscious, dying, and dead.
Healing True Damage
1) Magical Healing: For every 4 points of regular damage healed, a character can choose to INSTEAD heal 1 point of true damage.
2) A character heals 1 point of True Damage with each extended rest.
Giltonio_Santos
Hero
I believe [MENTION=5889]Stalker0[/MENTION] has an interesting rewrite. You should keep in mind that the point about this idea is not creating a kind of damage in the game that is special, but create a mechanic for injuries that cannot be healed with a simple extended rest. For instance, I'd include critical hits as true damage in my own games, because I like to describe them as nasty wounds and it sucks that the game currently tells me that someone who's severely wounded should be good to go by the next morning.
If you want to go old school on healing you can just take the true damage rules and treat all damage as true damage. If you want to go 4E-style, you just ignore rules about true damage, but I believe, based on the discussions around here, that a considerable group (myself included) wants something in the middle, and the rules I'm suggesting give the DM a huge amount of control without having to change anything in the basic mechanics of the game. I'm sorry, but I can't see how Vitality/WP compares to that.
On a side note, I specially like the idea of all damage taken as negative hit points being true damage. If I ever develop this module further to include in my games, I'll probably include something like that.
Cheers,
If you want to go old school on healing you can just take the true damage rules and treat all damage as true damage. If you want to go 4E-style, you just ignore rules about true damage, but I believe, based on the discussions around here, that a considerable group (myself included) wants something in the middle, and the rules I'm suggesting give the DM a huge amount of control without having to change anything in the basic mechanics of the game. I'm sorry, but I can't see how Vitality/WP compares to that.
On a side note, I specially like the idea of all damage taken as negative hit points being true damage. If I ever develop this module further to include in my games, I'll probably include something like that.
Cheers,
The other thing about this idea thats kinda cool is the implications for the rogues sneak attack.
There has been so much debate about sneak attack, how often and how much. The problem always being that if you over do it, the rogue ends up the default damage machine for the game. If you follow this line, you say that sneak attack does only a little more damage, but its direct to wounds, giving it a really "potential takedown" feel, without having it out-damage the fighter (i.e. the fighter is great at tearing down the HP pool, the rogue seeks to bypass it).
Mishihari Lord
First Post
I like this system and I would certainly use it. I've always disliked hit points, but they're too fundamental to D&D to do away with. This system preserves hit points while addressing some of the issues I find objectionable.
I would like to add a few things to the list of what can cause True Damage
- Special effect undead damage (replaces energy drain)
- Rogue sneak attack
- Magic specifically designed to cause it, like voodoo-doll type magic
- Area effect magic
I don't think this or the OP's system live up to the OP's claim that it's better than WP/VP systems in that you have just one thing to track. You still have to track true damage and normal damage.
Patryn of Elvenshae
First Post
I'd be really, really careful with this, though. We saw in Star Wars Revised the problems of allowing certain attacks (in that system, critical hits) to bypass hitpoints and go directly to wounds. To whit, it made the system almost stupidly lethal (Gary Sarli did a great post in the lead-up to Saga explaining the average party life-expectency under the old system only accounting for one-shot crits; including the other ways of dying [like being normally run out of hit points] were completely separate and would have added to the odds of dying]).
eamon
Explorer
Letting crits bypass hitpoints was definitely a mistake.
In general, anything that might apply to "hitpoints" needs to scale with level to account for the general abstractness of hitpoints in that they increase due to skill, training, luck, etc. Assuming wound points don't scale with level, they're obviously measuring entirely different things; it makes no sense to allow an effect that does lots of hitpoint damage (representing its ability to seriously affect even opponents of significant skill) to therefore inflict particularly serious wounds.
If sneak attack damage applies to wound points, it may not scale.
At this point we'd have somewhat resolved the survivability issues; but it's still a bad idea to include bypassing effects commonly. It's going to be hell to balance for one; suddenly rather than working together; the fighter and the rogue are working against separate clocks. Very commonly, that'll mean that in some scenarios the fighter might as well give up; and in others, the rogue might as well twiddle his thumbs, depending on the ratio of vitality points to wound points.
It's OK for PC's to excel at differing tasks, but that's pretty extreme. Not just that, it takes away a key point of D&D combat, namely party cooperation. With that mechanic, it's actively harmful to cooperate and focus fire; you're much better off each focusing on your own opponent. The idea that the fighter might engage and the rogue use the distraction to flank would be dead; after all, any enemy the fighter's already engaged is likely going to die of hit point loss before the rogue can kill him (assuming they both are roughly balanced). Or, if the rogue can still get the kill faster despite the fighter's head start, he'll be rightly asking himself what exactly he's contributing - why not play a spell caster or another rogue since his strong melee attack is irrelevant?
So the problems you point out in terms of survivability are compounded by problems in gameplay.
The key win of a wounding system shouldn't be trying to distinguish what type of attacks can wound and which cannot, it's that healing feels more natural. Of course you can let some effects exclusively to vitality points only (say, damage on miss), and you can let others deal wounds directly (say, coup de grace) - but those should be exceptions, not the rule, otherwise you'll mess up balance, survivability, gameplay... and I bet it'll result in ludicrous corner cases problematic for believability too.
Giltonio_Santos
Hero
And that's why I believe a system of true damage is better than working with vitality and wound points: you don't have two separate resources, you can easily apply or ignore it without changing anything in the basic mechanics of the game, or even the stats of monsters and PCs.
True damage only matters when your character is trying to heal damage taken, and in that moment, some of us believe that healing everything with an extended rest is just too much (that's why I suggested the rule).
On the other hand, a vitality system adds a layer of complexity and is a pain to ignore (if it's core) or implement (if it's optional). It should be used in games that want heroic combat, but with some added mortality (critical hits tend to be deadly), I don't believe they have a place in D&D, to be honest.
Cheers,
True damage only matters when your character is trying to heal damage taken, and in that moment, some of us believe that healing everything with an extended rest is just too much (that's why I suggested the rule).
On the other hand, a vitality system adds a layer of complexity and is a pain to ignore (if it's core) or implement (if it's optional). It should be used in games that want heroic combat, but with some added mortality (critical hits tend to be deadly), I don't believe they have a place in D&D, to be honest.
Cheers,
Skyscraper
Adventurer
I like this idea. I think that creatures or situations (helpless) targetting wound points specifically should be very rare.
Completely agree, this was ultimately the failure of the Star Wars VP/WP system. People starting lumping in types that "felt" like WP damage, without accounting for the massive game issues.
If a crit does WP damage, then it should only do 1 or 2 damage (on top of the normal VP damage imo).
Same with SA, no more than a few points of damage.
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