What if your HP/Health/Vitality score was replaced by a dice mechanic?
So, I made a mechanic for the stress on a vehicle or device I’ve simply been calling Heat.
When your device is pushed, or hit, or otherwise put under stress, you roll your Heat Die. Your Heat begins at 1 for a normal stable device, but could start higher for an experimental device.
When you roll, if you roll a 1, your Heat increases by 1. Your Heat Threshold is a breaking point represented by a number equal to the maximum due result of your Heat Die (eg 6 for a d6). If you reach that number, the device suffers a complication based on its nature. It might overheat, blow some part or other, etc.
Now apply that to a character. You have a Health Die, or a Fatigue Fie or a Stress Die, whatever. When you fail a defense check or get hit or whatever, you roll that d8 or d4, and on a 1, you increase your Damage/Stress/Fatigue by 1. Now if you have to roll, it increases ona 1 or a 2.
Any thoughts on this basic concept? No HP just a die mechanic and injuries/trauma?
It sounds, if I am understanding it, quite like making a soak roll or suffering a wound. Only with a much tighter failure value.
Sorta like WEG Star Wars, or Storyteller except replacing the opponents success with a static difficulty.
Am I understanding it?
The thread on resource dice made me thinj about using that for hit points. Every time you roll a 1 on the die it goes down a step, and ifnyou're rolling on a d4, you're really at the end of your tether.
In either case you'd probably need a method of scaling for high damage items.
Perhaps in your system a higher damage increase heat by 2 or 3?
It sounds, if I am understanding it, quite like making a soak roll or suffering a wound. Only with a much tighter failure value.
Sorta like WEG Star Wars, or Storyteller except replacing the opponents success with a static difficulty.
Am I understanding it?
The thread on resource dice made me thinj about using that for hit points. Every time you roll a 1 on the die it goes down a step, and ifnyou're rolling on a d4, you're really at the end of your tether.
Yeah I thought about that, but using a rising failure threshold means you can give different creatures different dice without confusion. I guess you could either way, but I Ike this.
It seems serviceable if you can accept that it could lend itself to things being highly tolerant of damage, to the point of dragging things way out.
It could also create a death spiral.
It could also start as the first then rapidly become the second.
Dice be dice and all.
Might I ask, what is it that you are looking to solve and this corrects over a save/resistance roll and various sizes of wound/damage tracks(as an example)?
It seems serviceable if you can accept that it could lend itself to things being highly tolerant of damage, to the point of dragging things way out.
It could also create a death spiral.
It could also start as the first then rapidly become the second.
Dice be dice and all.
Might I ask, what is it that you are looking to solve and this corrects over a save/resistance roll and various sizes of wound/damage tracks(as an example)?
How would it become a spiral? The probability of getting "hit" is the same throughout the process. A death spiral would occur if the "this or less" increased with each hit.
It feels like anything higher than a d6 would result in really resilient characters -- which is okay depending on what you're going for. If "healing" is common though, your d10 toughness is essentially immortality.
How would it become a spiral? The probability of getting "hit" is the same throughout the process. A death spiral would occur if the "this or less" increased with each hit.
It feels like anything higher than a d6 would result in really resilient characters -- which is okay depending on what you're going for. If "healing" is common though, your d10 toughness is essentially immortality.
If I understood correctly, every time you got a (lets say for simplicity sake) Wound you are now 1 easier to wound next time.
Repeat.
Maybe I misunderstood but I took it to show and increased chance of injury for each previously received injury.
If I understood correctly, every time you got a (lets say for simplicity sake) Wound you are now 1 easier to wound next time.
Repeat.
Maybe I misunderstood but I took it to show and increased chance of injury for each previously received injury.
It seems like this is still a hit point mechanic; you're just counting up to whatever level of Stress/Heat/xxx equals "dead," rather than counting down to zero, and using a different system to compute damage from a hit.
I'm with @Thourne -- what is the specific goal you're trying to accomplish?
It seems serviceable if you can accept that it could lend itself to things being highly tolerant of damage, to the point of dragging things way out.
It could also create a death spiral.
It could also start as the first then rapidly become the second.
Dice be dice and all.
Might I ask, what is it that you are looking to solve and this corrects over a save/resistance roll and various sizes of wound/damage tracks(as an example)?
See the bottom of the post for a detailed answer to this.
I do think that between y'all's responses, and thinking more about it, it might be a better dice model for handling exertion, rather than health/resilience.
How would it become a spiral? The probability of getting "hit" is the same throughout the process. A death spiral would occur if the "this or less" increased with each hit.
It feels like anything higher than a d6 would result in really resilient characters -- which is okay depending on what you're going for. If "healing" is common though, your d10 toughness is essentially immortality.
Yeah it is a spiral, as the other poster pointed out upthread. One thing that I'm not sure about is how to model damage in order to get a situation where you aren't going up the track every time you get targeted, but when someone really goes hard, failing a defense check will usually mean at least one point aded to your stress.
It seems like this is still a hit point mechanic; you're just counting up to whatever level of Stress/Heat/xxx equals "dead," rather than counting down to zero, and using a different system to compute damage from a hit.
I'm with @Thourne -- what is the specific goal you're trying to accomplish?
The conclusion I've come to after years of picking apart all these health systems is that they are all ultimately still HP systems, or at least can be described as such. Even a pure Wounds systems is still going to go from "totally fine" to "dead" over a course of 1 or more steps.
That doesn't mean that one "hp" system isn't potentially better than another for a given type of play.
As for the goal, partly the goal is just to explore the implications of the suggested system and what effect it would have on otherwise traditional TTRPG play. Beyond that, I like the idea of a system wherein the only lasting consequence of getting hurt is your trauma (injuries mental and physical), with the HP equivalent being more of a per scene consideration.
I also have a game that is currently 90% dice driven, with very rare numerical bonuses and the like, and changing the health/hardiness system to a more strongly dice based model would make the game a little more consistent in design.
Currently, what I'm using is a threshold, fatigue, and wounds, model. You have a toughness score, with a default of 8 + the higher of fortitude or will. Attributes range from 1 to 5 at chargen, and you get 1 AP per level. You level roughly every 3-5 sessions as of right now, but that may slow down since you actually advance between levels. ie, when you have gained 50 cahracter points, you gain a level, and character points can be spent to gain new traits or advance skills during downtime, so by the time you gain a level you have already done a decent amount of advancement, and a level gives you a small amount of additional advancement, while primarily serving as a pacing and challenge building mechanism.
Anyway, average starting toughness is about 11. Your fatigue limit is 3x your toughness, so average 33. When you get hit or otherwise stressed externally, you gain fatigue. If you gain fatigue from an effect that exceeds your toughness, you gain Trauma. Trauma is both specific and a scale. That is, you have a mental and a physical trauma track, from minor to deadly, and whenever you gain trauma you also gain a condition related to how you gained Trauma, which gets more severe when you gain additional trauma in the same category. So, you might injure your ankle with a totally failed parkour check that you push by accepting a complication to get a mitigated failure and get part of what you wanted. Then you get attacked and don't do that well on your defense check to dodge, and take more fatigue than your toughness. So, you go from Minor Trauma with the Hamstrung condition, to Moderately Hamstrung.
Whajt the dice would replace would be the whole toughness and fatigue dynamic, leaving only a stress mechanic that resets between scenes, and the trauma tracks.
The attribute scores are a resource pool, like in cypher system I guess (having only read about it) that fuels "pushing" bad skill checks without taking complications, and special abilities like advanced spells and techniques. You have 6 scores, and 1-5 points in each score, with a total of about 20 points (minimum 1 in each, two from ancestry, two from archetype, and then 6 more freely spent). You only regain a few when you rest, unless you rest in a safe haven or for an extened period, so they can become precious.
