My HP Fix

[Herremann the Wise]

The damage would have to be meaningful - otherwise it's just more points!

But once it's meaningful (penalties to hit in combat, reduction in movement rate, etc) then we have the notorious death spiral!

I think care needs to be taken in throwing out the "death spiral" term; too many times I've seen people point to this with a sage nod of the head while saying "it is known". Really though, I'm thinking the potential problem here is easily avoided. The key is fostering the expectation that at any given point most characters will be carrying a wound or two, but because they have pretty much full access to their hit points (the most mechanically real defense for a character), they are both still playable and survivable.

Imagine that there are two limits when it comes to wounds:

* Incapacitated: [For example 16 wound points] As long as the total wound points received does not equal or exceed this limit, then some wounds will have no penalty while others will have a light mechanical penalty. These are the wounds that are easily treated by a mundane healer and don't overtly hamper the group.
However, any wounds received that takes the character to or over this incapacitated limit, incapacitate the character and are more serious. This is the stuff that can impact a character for days or weeks and is typically dealt with through Cure x Wounds Rituals. These are the somewhat rare occurrences where significant resources needs to be spent.

* Death: [For example 22 wound points]Any wounds taken that equal or exceed this limit means that the character is dying and healing no longer works upon the character (although some intense celestial intercession, or dark tainted pact may be able to bring a character back from this absolute brink).

A character's death limit is affected by their bulk, constitution and race and remains fairly similar across most PCs (perhaps between 18 and 30). A character's incapacitated limit however reflects their toughness and will to go on. A fighter or a monk will have that incapacitated limit quite close to their death limit. A wizard or priest will have a much lower incapacitated limit (between 6 and 10 perhaps).

The aim here in terms of death spirals is that those classes who should be more able to avoid incapacitation (and thus bigger wounding) have far more leeway and so the death spiral effect is held off. The end result should be characters who are survivable, thus playable, and all while being believable.

I think there is a fundamental problem in trying to come up with mechanics (like those in the OP) which simultaneously seem both to assert and to deny that hit point loss represents, in some fashion, debilitating wounds.

Which is why I would just neatly split hit points from wounds so that they can be treated separately.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=11300]Herremann the Wise[/MENTION]

I've personally got nothing against death spirals. Rolemaster - the game I GMed for nearly 20 years before 4e - has one. Burning Wheel - the game I hope to GM after my 4e campaign finishes - has one.

But both systems have the death spiral fully integrated from the ground up.

RM, for example, has very (notoriusly?) swingy combat, which helps make the death spiral survivable, or at least not boring. Even at severe penalties you can still roll, hope to get open-ended high and then to roll a good crit - and every RM table has seen this happen often enough that the possibility makes the player stay engaged (this is what WotC was going for in 4e with the 20+ death save, I think, but at least at my table I've never seen it happen yet).

(Rolemaster also conforms, at least roughly, to your approach of wizards/scholars etc differing from fighters much more markedly in their incapacitation threshold than in their death threshold.)

Burning Wheel has an advancement mechanic that makes it advantageous to be wounded - because rolling with fewer dice makes any given challenge harder, and hence (everything else being equal) more likely to contribute to advancement. Of course wounded PCs will fail those checks, but BW is premised on the assumption that failed checks thwart the PC but not the player.

If D&D is going to introduce a death spiral, it needs to be in a way that makes sense within the play of the game (not just the fiction). [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] had a good idea in a recent post where taking wounds could be linked to accruing fate points, which could then be used (now or later) for bonuses/benefits that otherwise are hard to unlock. Thus giving players an incentive to throw their PCs into harm's way, and helping to generate the fiction that most people seem to want of (moderately) wounded heroes pushing on through their injuries because the stakes are just too high to back down!

 

[Lanefan]

If HP is meat, characters should never increase their maximum HP total. 10th level fighters should have 1d10 HP and 9d10 fate.

Ding.

Well, almost ding. A couple of things to mention...

1. In defense of the OP, this would pretty much clobber the idea of FP being an optional tack-on: you'd either have to use them or *really* dial back the damage your dungeons could do to the characters. That said...

2. With one minor tweak your idea above is what we've been using for about 30 years; the minor tweak is instead of the first hit die being your (what we call) Body Points and the rest being Fate (we call 'em Fatigue) Points, your BP are an extra, separate small die the size of which is determined by your race - Elves and Hobbits roll d4, Humans and Part-Elves d5, Dwarves and Part-Orcs d6 - and your Con determines a minimum value for that roll e.g. someone with Con. 16 can never have less than 3 BP. Commoners, peasants, kings, name-level adventurers - all have about the same BP range. Your BP score never changes; it just is what it is.

Your FP are what you get from level, in any class. HP = BP + FP, and we just track total HP most of the time.

(nice side effect is that having BP makes 1st level characters a tiny bit more resilient in a consistent-with-the-game-world manner)

When you take damage, almost without exception it automatically comes from FP first. When you run out of FP you're into BP, which are harder to rest and to cure. When you get to 0 you risk going unconscious (roll under Con modified by current HP total to stay awake), when you get to -10 you're dead.

If you go below 0 but survive you'll be what we call "incurable" for a length of time determined by how far below 0 you went. Magical healing short of a full Heal or a Wish does not work on someone who is incurable; they get back a point or two each night of rest (a bit more if in town) and that's it.

Lanefan

 

[3catcircus]

Want a mechanic that works? Twilight:2013. That is all.

 

[Lanefan]

(2) It is therefore not clear, at least to me, how your suggestion makes room for the "inspiration helps me recover and/or push on" trope. Adding fate points doesn't seem to represent pushing on - because, in the fiction, it's largely indistinguishable from knitting together flesh, and there are also no wounds to be pushed through. And adding hit points seems in any event to occupy whatever "push on" space there might be to the same extent as hit points.

The greater question is whether "inspirational" recovery should exist at all. I'm not sure it should.

(3) Under your approach I can't do the Aragorn recovery scene in the second LotR movie -because if Aragorn is unconscious, under your system he is at 0 hp, and being at 0 hp no amount of inspiration from Arwen can restore him.* That is a big blow against your system, that it cannot produce this sort of classic fantasy motif.

A problem, yes.

But, a problem shared with every other edition of D+D except 4e; if and when earlier editions bothered with "unconscious" at all as a damage state between "alive" and "dead" there was never a way to wake up on your own - someone always had to help you.

4e went too far the other way; unless your dice do funny things you either wake up or die within a few minutes. There still hasn't been a good mechanic to replicate slow (as in hours or days) recovery from unconsciousness due to damage (as opposed to spell or poison); nor has there been a good mechanic to handle the long slow death - again over hours or days - of someone who is conscious.

I've tried designing both, now and then. Never been happy enough with the result to actually use it in a game.

* - it can be argued someone did help Aragorn, for all that; if one sees Arwen as a form of - in game terms - divine intervention.

(4) Under your approach, I can't have a Nordic/Celtic master of words, who simply through his speech can unravel the sustaining essence of a thing, and leave it destroyed and worthless. Vicious Mockery is closer to these classic fantasy tropes than any artillerist or flying mage of the normal RPG variety.

If a Bard is gonna hurt you she'll do it by twisting sound into something almost physical and clobbering you with it (much of the pain will be in the ears...), not by mocking you to death. That said, she might Suggest that you really can fly if you just step off that cliff...

I don't see Bards as the types who pull souls apart, I'll leave that for the Necromancers - they just want the bodies.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Want a mechanic that works? Twilight:2013. That is all.

For those of us who look at Twilight:[any] as something to run away from screaming, can you please elaborate on its h.p. mechanics?

Lanefan

 

[I'm A Banana]

Part of the virtue of this is that whenever someone says, "Well, then it HAS to have quality X!" about this system, they're probably wrong.

Think it has to have low meat HP? Well, it doesn't. If you like gritty action heroes who survive cuts and bruises and even spears to the shins and swords to the guts and who keep on fighting because they're fickin' badasses, well, you can have lots of meat HP. It could even all be meat HP if you want.

Think that strains believability? Then, friend, take away all HP and replace it with Fate if you'd like (and hey presto you have 4e's vision of hit points and everything comes back every night when you rest).

Think inspirational healing is bunkum? Then guess what: don't use Fate. Just use meat HP. You don't have to truck with all that noise.

This has gone from One Vision of Hit Points That All Must Share to a meat dial, able to be set at a customized meat volume for our hard-of-hearing or very-attuned DMs.

So in other words, stuff like this:

it does make two pools of stuff to stack, keep separate, and remember what rejuvenates what.

or this:

The damage would have to be meaningful - otherwise it's just more points!

But once it's meaningful (penalties to hit in combat, reduction in movement rate, etc) then we have the notorious death spiral!

doesn't have to be true.

It can be. We can maybe plug a death spiral into that if you want. But it doesn't need to be. For a lot of people, all the "gritty realism" they want or need is that you fall unconscious at 0 hp from an actual wound. For others, they're OK with you just running out of luck and dying from sucking too hard.

We don't need to over-complicate things. HP can be the "base rule," and then you can sauce Fate on top like that, and you can introduce mechanics made to up the realism of losing HP, if you want. But you needn't. You can have just meat HP for all the livelong day.

This just takes that other, extraneous element of HP, the "luck and heroism and insubstantial handwavey jibberish" element, and puts it in its own little house.

We all like HP to be the dividing line between life and death. I think whatever else we want out of HP, we want that. We want some "meat" component, however small. Where we differ is how much of that "meat" we want. This lets you set that dial.

 

[jrowland]

I just wanted to point out one thing: Death Spirals rarely, if ever, lead to death.

The penalties that lead to a death spiral are there as a balance to benefits gained for "pushing on". Wounds etc are a means to an end: longer game days and the story concept of "pushing on" through adversity despite being "beat up". At some point, the penalties are so great that pushing on is futile: The game day ends at a rest.

Death Spirals are ok if they encourage pushing on further than if the death spiral wasn't there at all. In addition, it provides a feedback loop that informs players of when pushing on is too much. As long as each "loop" of the spiral is small, it may take many "loops" before the penalties are too severe.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The greater question is whether "inspirational" recovery should exist at all. I'm not sure it should.

It exists in the fiction, so it must exist. That's just my opinion, obviously. Many people have opinions, but this is mine, and I like it. And more importantly, want it to be reflected in the game.

I don't want inspiration to remove flesh wounds. But I want it to be able to make my character overcome the pain and limitations imposed by the flesh wound and soldier on.

It be nice if the game would also represent some of htis mechanically, which is why a fate/wound spit of hit points may be interesting. But I am not convinced that it's the best solution.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Wouldn't the easiest way really just be to tell folks how the healing system works, and then tell them to just add, change or remove X, Y, & Z to set the dial to how deadly you want it?

As it stands now... when under 0 HP you're dying. Make death saves and lose 1d6 HP each time one is failed. Three successful death saves and you stabilize. You remain unconscious until you regain 1 HP or until after 2d6 hours have passed, at which time you regain 1 HP.

Some people think that non-magical, unassisted recovery is too fast, so you just add in a dial right after that in the rules which says: "For a longer healing period, change '2d6 hours' to '2d6 days'." And since some people think that dying might be too easy... you put in a dial that says "For a less deadly game, a PC loses 1 HP on each failed death save."

And when the book gives non-magical healing rules via the Warlord class and the hit die mechanic, you add in a dial that says "If you do not want non-magical hit point recovery in your game, do not use the hit die mechanic or the Warlord class."

Seems pretty simple to me.