"Balanced high," or "It's still balanced, but it's swingier."

[RangerWickett]

One of my friends wants to use 4e rules as a baseline, but make a lot of changes to accomplish a feel that matches a Conan game he ran. He is of the opinion that fourth edition feels too much like the PCs and monsters all wear suits of foam rubber, because nothing seems to really hurt anymore. There's too much 'whittling down' of hit points, and not enough brutal devastation caused by PCs and monsters alike.

He doesn't want to stick with 3e because of the established frustrations of tracking lots of modifiers, so his hope is to just change how 4e balances itself. Instead of having a low center of gravity so things don't rock too much, he wants to have things 'balanced high,' where combat can swing back and forth drastically, but still be fair.

I remain uncertain whether we can accomplish such a goal. But I've designed tons of alternate rule sets in the past, so I figure I should give it a shot.


Some of the basic solutions we've considered are:

Up One Step
In this variant, at-will powers can be used as opportunity attacks, encounters can be used at-will, and dailies can be used once per encounter (with the caveat that you can't spam them out of combat).


A Feeling of Fragility
We feel that one problem lies with 'healing surges.' Flavor-wise, you get bloodied, then get better, then get bloodied, then get better, and there's not a consistent sense of danger. This possible change would change healing.

First, we'd split hit points into two pools, each equal to half the normal amount of HP you'd have. You'd have 'Stamina' and 'Hit Points.' Stamina is your ability to ignore minor cuts and scrapes, and to turn a deadly blow into a mild one. You go through Stamina first, and Stamina is the only thing that can heal without an extended rest.

Once you're out of Stamina, extra damage goes to HP, which represents actual serious wounds.

We'd eliminate "healing word" and "inspiring word." Taking a 'second wind' would be the only way of healing during combat, and getting a second wind would require a little work. Either you have to make an Endurance check to get your own second wind, or a buddy can make a Diplomacy check to pep you up enough to get their second wind. Once you're down, a buddy can make a Heal check to force you to wake up.

However you do it, though, your second wind just replenishes your Stamina. It doesn't heal an HP. And if you have any HP damage, you're still considered bloodied for the purposes of some other rules.

It would be possible to get 'third winds' and 'fourth winds.' I'm thinking the base DC for Second Wind would be 10, increasing to 20 for third, and 30 for fourth. This is like in Terminator, when Sarah Connor is screaming at Reese to get up and keep moving. He's already gone through a second wind, so it takes her a few tries, but she manages to get him on his feet.

You'd heal to full Stamina after a 5 minute rest. But I'm not sure how quickly we'd want to let people heal hit points. We'd still have healing magic, which could work out of combat. And stuff like "Cure Light Wounds" might actually heal real hit point damage.


Big Hitters
We either need to reduce enemy HP, or increase PC damage. Not sure.

This is still a work in progress.

 

[Geoff Watson]

A simpler way would be to reduce everyone's hit points.

You'd have to do something else to minions (reduce all their defences?) as they don't have hp.

Geoff.

 

[Dragonblade]

How about just declaring that once any PC or monster is bloodied, all subsequent attacks that hit automatically crit (i.e. do max damage plus bonus dice as appropriate). That should make things suitably gritty, speed up combat, and make bloodied really mean something.

 

[C_M2008]

Has he actually played?

Foam rubber my ass. I'm mowing down PC's left and right.
Current average = 1 corpse/3 sessions.
This is primarily with on level to level +2 encounters, nothing crazy.


If the DM is bad at tactics than I suppose it might seem too easy for PCs, but half decent tactics should result in at least many close calls.

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

I think I'd use the CON score for HP and then everything else is Stamina. The amount of real hits you can take shouldn't go up much. It also gives the dragonborn and tiefling a little scare to use their abilities as 'bloodied' now happens much closer to zero.

 

[vagabundo]

Rather than having to track two pools for 'hitpoints' have the bloodied condition stay until some specified recovery time or a few days of heal checks. You can keep the abstract system but the bloodied condition means you are now visibly wounded.

I'd have a stricter condition if they fail a death save:

- Fail one death save: Dazed
- Fail two death saves: Dazed and Weakened
- Fail three death saves: Dead

The conditions need rest and healing to recover from and you don't need to add more complications to the HP system. If you want you could have a 3/4's limit on HP recovery for bloodied characters.

 

[Harr]

One of my friends wants to use 4e rules as a baseline, but make a lot of changes to accomplish a feel that matches a Conan game he ran. He is of the opinion that fourth edition feels too much like the PCs and monsters all wear suits of foam rubber, because nothing seems to really hurt anymore. There's too much 'whittling down' of hit points, and not enough brutal devastation caused by PCs and monsters alike.

We (all of my group and myself) had the exact same complaint. Solution: make everybody do maximum damage on every hit, double-max damage on a critical hit. Worked like a charm let me tell you. 4e monsters have SO many hit points doing this actually makes it feel like real combat again. I would describe the result exactly as your thread title, "Still balanced but swingier in a good way."

Added bonus of doing this is, you don't have to muck around with house rules or trying to change, introduce or balance new things. It's still the original rules, just everybody does as much damage as they can.

 

[comrade raoul]

We (all of my group and myself) had the exact same complaint. Solution: make everybody do maximum damage on every hit, double-max damage on a critical hit. Worked like a charm let me tell you. 4e monsters have SO many hit points doing this actually makes it feel like real combat again. I would describe the result exactly as your thread title, "Still balanced but swingier in a good way."

Added bonus of doing this is, you don't have to muck around with house rules or trying to change, introduce or balance new things. It's still the original rules, just everybody does as much damage as they can.

Yeah; I think this is absolutely on the right track. Just increasing damage solves a lot of problems! Combat's swingier because each attack roll matters more, and missing a turn from being stunned or poorly positioned can make a much bigger difference.

There are a bunch of ways to do this. I'd double damage, actually. I'd also muck about with a few house rules to make the damage boost a bit more organic: at-wills, for example, would start at 2 dice at heroic levels, and go to 3 dice at paragon and 4 at epic; ability bonuses would give you a smooth [Score]-10 damage bonus, so a 16 Str would give you +6 damage to basic attack.

Alternatively, of course, you could just reduce hit points, which amounts to the same thing.

 

[comrade raoul]

Let me try suggesting some health and healing rules, taking off from RangerWickett's. I'd be super grateful for any critiques!

Hit Points and Stamina
This starts with the hit point/stamina split from the OP. I'd try a not-quite even split, making role and Constitution disproportionately important for Stamina. That way, defenders and high Con characters get better at taking repeated beatings, encounter after encounter. If you also reduced total HP (which, again, I think is the most direct and efficient way to increase swinginess), you might try the following:

• Everyone starts with 4 hit points and a number of stamina points equal to 5 + their Constitution modifier.

In addition, at every level, including 1st, everyone gets one extra hit point, and a number of extra stamina points depending on their role.

• Defenders get 2 stamina points per level.
• Leaders and strikers get 1½ stamina points per level.
• Controllers get 1 stamina point per level.

"Heroic Surges"
You get one "heroic surge" every encounter. This largely replaces both action points and healing surges. When you spend a heroic surge, two things happen:

• You can take an extra standard action.
• You recover all of your stamina points.

Hopefully, this would make combat more dynamic and provide another interesting strategic decision: do you take the extra action when it can make the most difference, even if you already have most of your stamina? Or do you wait until you really need the healing? Ideally, it'd add directly to dramatic tension: characters would have an incentive to break out the fireworks just when they start getting into trouble, like when movie heroes come back from the brink to do something awesome.

Heroic surges would be (more or less) the only way to heal during combat. Maybe leaders would have analogues to healing word and inspiring word that gave you temporary hit points or something, though.

(I noticed, in rereading the post, that the "heroic surge" suggestion has the same name as, and is fairly close to, smaugfrost1's idea from another thread. This is an accident, but it probably comes from my seeing and liking his idea!)