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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jonrog1" data-source="post: 253699" data-attributes="member: 189">Hey, if it's not too annoying, still playing devil's advocate here.  I'm a huge fan of skill-based systems, so I'll nudge on ...  But you shouldn't need calculators at a gaming table.  you should need characters and imagination.Okay, I fully get the whole fractional armor/damage thing now.  "armor reduces damage" vs. "armor reduces your chance of taking damage" is a fine-line argument, and seeing as both are conceptual representations of combat, I think which you prefer is pretty arbitrary.  But this one is a decent choice.  Although the first time somebody argues that while leather armor absorbs the shock of a baseball bat, a meat cleaver cuts right through it,  the system starts to wobble.I struggled to create a more fluid gaming system myself for ages, but what I kept running into -- indeed, what I think many alternative game systems kept running into -- is that the abstract systems of HP as "survivability" made for an easier, more efficient way to track damage than HP as a physical attribute.Yes, but actual mass doesn't affect strength.  Or it may reasonably affect it, but it doesn't dictate it.  In a system where the whole point is to toss out the streamlined conceptual for the logical, this to me is a huge logic gap.  A system that tells me that Jackie Chan has to pump iron 4 hours a day to kick Sharon Gless's ass just seems hinky. Yes, so this HP system tracks damage more efficiently. But damage is only relevant vis-a-vis a PC's ability to take X-amount and keep functioning.  In your explanation stamina means you can take more damage and keep functioning, but it's separate from the actual damage. In 3 ed, more HP means you can take more damage and keep functioning -- with no need to track the actual damage.  Why make HP more grounded yet a less efficient way of tracking a character's effectiveness?I think what you have to do here is just toss out the whole idea of HP -- it's admittedly useless if not used properly, as a mathematical metaphor for PC's ability to function.The idea of restructuring HP so it more logically can be applied universally, as to tanks and such, is a noble goal.  But I must argue, and I don't think unreasonably, that any gaming system that has you tossing around six digit numbers is not one that'll catch on or provide ease of use.  Am I wrong to think the first time your normal human opens a rule book and sees "100,000,000 hp of damage" they'll think this game might not be the fun, improvisational game they've heard so much about?And before I get accused of being one of the same marketing hacks who doomed D&D to old-school ways, let me suggest a half-step.  Regardless of system, use HP for organic matter and wound points with DR for inorganic.  That seems logical -- organic systems shut down after receiving far less proportional damage than a building can take before it collapses.  Using a different scale would allow you to keep the numbers while dealing with inorganics in a reasonable range.  Yeah, sure, a tank only has 60 WP, but  it has DR 20.  And perhaps 1 WP=10-100 HP, whatever playtests out as logical.  This may actually integrate with the "absolute hardness" concept.</blockquote>

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