NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6951236" data-attributes="member: 6775031">You're exaggerating my position by a significant amount. I never said anything about broken bones or hacked-off limbs. Everyone is wearing armor, after all (and the ones who aren't, like wizards and monks, are fortified with magic).But to go with the general sense of the question, the point of having long-term consequences for combat is that it 1) discourages pointless combat, and 2) means you don't need very many battles in order for the PCs to be challenged. If the party is substantially worse off after a single combat even when they win (as an extreme example), then you only need two combats total in order for the second one to be uncertain; and it's still not as chaotic or random as real combat, since you're unlikely to die if you went into that combat at full capacity, and you can react to changes in your condition by changing your tactics as necessary.As an example, imagine your typical party of four, if the fighter gets beaten up in the first fight of the day (maybe you were fighting an ogre, and it got in a lucky crit). Now, you get to react to the fact that your fighter is injured and probably shouldn't be on the front line. So you let the rogue take point, while the fighter hangs back with a bow; the rogue isn't exactly a tank, but they're relatively tougher than the wizard. And maybe the rogue isn't that great at melee, and the fighter isn't great with a bow, but it's probably better than the alternative. Probably. Or maybe the rogue and the fighter both hang back, and hope you can stop an enemy before they get to you. Or maybe you try to sneak around, and avoid further fights. Or dress up like pilgrims, and let the cleric try to talk your way past enemies. You're forced to consider your alternatives, instead of everyone always doing the same things they always do, because their characters are only built to do one thing.Plus, it makes for a convenient language to describe the world, if sometimes people can't do something because they're injured. A world where nobody gets injured and requires bed rest is hard to believe in, especially when you're hanging out with a lot of soldiers and mercenaries or whatever.The big danger is that players become attached to their characters, and then treat them recklessly and they get killed, because they have the incorrect expectation that combat has no lasting consequences for them. That's not so much a system problem as it is a player problem, though. There's also potential for their characters to get killed or seriously injured through no fault of their own, which can make it hard for players to become invested in their characters in the first place, but that can be addressed on the DM/worldbuilding side.</blockquote>

Verification