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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8939866" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I think the key here is to do something other than just add mounting penalties in response to damage thresholds. You could add minor penalties as a baseline, but I think you'd need to more thoroughly work them into your base system assumptions. We've seen a little of that with 4e's bloodied values (which were admittedly more often used as move timers than to reflect damage), but you could absolutely do more.If you created several different hit point states (say, "Uninjured, Injured, Bloodied, Badly Injured, Barely Conscious, Unconscious") and then used them as design hooks, you could do a lot to make combat feel dynamic. Off the top of my head, you could work in abilities that either require the enemy to be at a certain threshold of injury to function or give you benefits to accuracy/magnitude of effect if the enemy is injured and so on. Magnitude probably needs to be worked into abilities themselves, so you get "If the enemy is Badly Injured" riders after the primary text, but you could simplify down accuracy bonuses, and then make the only question "does it apply?" instead of how big it is. So, the "Bloodied" bonus/penalty is +2, Badly Injured is +3, but you're only adding that number when you have an ability that lets you do so, i.e. "Swashbucklers gain the injury bonus on attacks against injured targets made with light/fencing weapons" or a spell like "Curse of Pain: targets take their injury value as a penalty to all attacks while you concentrate."Then you'd also probably want to work those states into the healing/recovery system somehow. Either applying limits to healing that moves you between them, something like 4e's healing surge system (something like "magical healing can only move you between Con bonus injury states per day") or limitations on healing effects themselves, say regeneration that only works if you're over Bloodied or Cure Wounds not being able to move your total HP more than 2 states at a time. You could do more long-term stuff if you wanted that flavor, like tallying the number of times you enter each state daily and then rolling some kind of wound check modified by that tally on a set schedule to see if there's lasting consequences.Basically, I think you need to treat the system as a mechanical hook in the rest of the design, instead of a standalone mini-game unto itself.</blockquote>

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