Clobbered

[Water Bob]

Or how about this?

If you take enough damage so that your hit points are halved, you are considered clobbered for one round. A clobbered character can only take a standard action.

So, if you've got 16 hit points, and an attack reduces you to 5 HP, you are clobbered. You can only take a standard action on your next turn. But after that, you recover, and keep on fighting as normal.

I like the idea behind this rule, but I'm not sure I like its implementation. If I used it, I'd make it something like: If you are reduced to 1-4 HP, you are clobbered for one round. I don't like the original rule's take that a soldier-type with 30 HP can take 15 and be clobbered while a 1st level fighter with 12 HP is clobbered after taking only 6 HP. Making it a standard number for everybody seems the way to go.

Or, maybe the "Clobbered" threshold should be some function of the character's CON score.

For example, your Clobbered threshold cold be 10 minus your CON bonus. A character with CON 16 would have a clobbered threshold of 7 HP or less, while a character with CON 9 would have a clobbered threshold of 11 hp or less.

Every hit you take, reducing your hp, past your clobbered threshold, makes you clobbered for one round.

Or...you could associate a saving throw with it--a Fort save vs. a DC equal to the damage taken seems appropriate. So, if you are reduced to your clobbered threshold, you make the Fort save or be clobbered for one round.

Then again, if the clobbered threshold was the same for everyone, it would be easier to remember in the game (like the Massive Damage threshold).

Or...you could tie the clobbered state to being victim of a successful Critical Hit.

Just thinking outloud here.

Your thoughts?

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Your thoughts?

Many people start to ignore the Massive Damage rules by the time they reach mid-to-high levels because 50 HP is such a piddling amount by those levels that most CR 15 monsters do that much on an average hit and PCs are doing 50 damage with each hit from level 8 or so. Because Fort saves for PCs are high enough at mid levels to shrug it off, it basically boils down to "roll a d20 for every attack and don't roll a 1," which is neither effective at enlivening combat nor dramatic in the slightest.

Clobbering/bloodied/etc. rules that trigger off a certain amount or percentage of HP and have a direct effect work the same way--they trigger too frequently and are much more annoying than useful. So regardless of the threshold, or the presence or absence of a Fort save, or whatever other factor, this mechanic might be fun and exciting for a few levels and then it reaches the point where it would be better ignored for everyone's sake.

The only workable option here is really the clobbered on a crit one, and I wouldn't terribly mind that, as crits aren't all that useful as it stands (seeing as you can't guarantee them like you can other tactics and therefore things that improve crits are quite swingy in their usefulness, and of course that so many things are immune). It would give crits a bit more of a punch than they have now, but conversely would make combat more swingy, which is always detrimental to the PCs, so it's really up to you whether the tradeoff is worth it.

 

[Water Bob]

Many people start to ignore the Massive Damage rules by the time they reach mid-to-high levels because 50 HP is such a piddling amount by those levels that most CR 15 monsters do that much on an average hit and PCs are doing 50 damage with each hit from level 8 or so.

LOL. In the Conan RPG, the Massive Damage rule is at 20 hit points of damage. Yep, you read that right. 20 HP. It can happen at 1st level with a Critical, and starts to happen more often at the 2-4 level range.

That's basically the ability to lop off someone's head or arm and finish the fight quickly.

On top of the low MD threshold, all the weapons in the game have been raised a level. Spears, one handed battle axes, and broadswords all do 1d10 damage. A greatsword, two-handed, would do 2-18 damage.

Of course, in Conan, armor reduces damage and characters have Fate Points that they can spend to save their hides from such a gritty game.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Just FYI, Water Bob, you seem to think that everyone on EnWorld is familiar with Conan, and from the looks of it you like it better than D&D. However, in a thread tagged "D&D 3rd Edition" no one cares how d20 Conan does massive damage, or weapons, or armor, or Fate Points, or anything like that. We care how things work in D&D, the game mentioned in the title and tagged to the thread. If I tell you "This is a bad rule for D&D, because of X and Y," a response of "LOL, a completely different game works like Z and W instead" is not really relevant. In this particular example, the Conan d20 goal of model people who can die to one or two good sword swings at any level doesn't mesh with the D&D goal of modeling people who are practically superhuman in terms of endurance and durability past the low-mid to mid levels.

I'm not trying to be snarky or rude, just pointing out that your familiarity with Conan d20 to the exclusion of other d20 systems seems to have colored your view of everything you post on this forum, D&D or Conan d20, and your lack of knowledge of D&D means that many of your assumptions about how the game works (or "should" work) are inapplicable. D&D is not gritty or detail-oriented in combat by any stretch of the imagination (though it can pull off swords and sorcery rather than high fantasy at low levels, if desired) so repeatedly suggesting houserules to make D&D more gritty are (A) likely to appeal to only a small segment of the population and (B) probably not going to work as well with the rules as they are.

 

[JamesonCourage]

However, in a thread tagged "D&D 3rd Edition" no one cares how d20 Conan does massive damage, or weapons, or armor, or Fate Points, or anything like that.

Well, I'll strongly disagree with you here. Since he's using a very similar system to 3.x, I'm interested in the rules he's presenting (whether they be RAW from Conan or things he thinks would be interesting house rules).

Also, he is entirely able to make a comparison. It is usually acceptable for someone to say "I prefer Game X, where Y is the rule, so the proposed change of Z -which is even as bad- appeals to me." Comparing a rule from Conan should be acceptable, especially considering how close it is to the 3.x rules.

However, I would probably agree that many discussions are probably best had in the General RPG forum, rather than the D&D Legacy forum. There are many people here who like their D&D by the rules, and they tend to foam at the mouth sometimes when people talk about other games (it is the D&D Legacy forum, after all).

I kind of wish they hadn't eliminated the House Rules section. I loved browsing through it. A lot of really interesting concepts, even if the massive majority didn't appeal to any one gaming group.

 

[the Jester]

If you make a pc less effective when they are badly wounded, you encourage pc death and cowardice and discourage heroism.

So just keep that in mind.

The "Death Spiral" is a well-known factor in game design; different playstyles like or dislike this, and some games incorporate it, but I personally like it when the pc fighter is at 1 hp and he's still willing to take a shot at that enemy that's beating him up before trying to get away.

If he has a penalty to hit worth mentioning, or only one action, or what have you, he's more likely to try to get away and not waste that attack- he's going to miss anyway, right? So what's the point?

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Well, I'll strongly disagree with you here. Since he's using a very similar system to 3.x, I'm interested in the rules he's presenting (whether they be RAW from Conan or things he thinks would be interesting house rules).

Also, he is entirely able to make a comparison. It is usually acceptable for someone to say "I prefer Game X, where Y is the rule, so the proposed change of Z -which is even as bad- appeals to me." Comparing a rule from Conan should be acceptable, especially considering how close it is to the 3.x rules.

I take no exception to his raising the original suggestion of clobbering, since they would work essentially the same in any d20 variant. That's not the problem. The problem is that he's presenting a rule for use in D&D, and then when someone (myself in this case, though it's happened before with others in other threads) says "It wouldn't work/would be difficult/whatever in D&D because..." he responds "Oh yeah? Well in Conan d20 that doesn't apply because...."

If he had said "I prefer Conan d20, where lower massive damage is the rule, so I'd prefer more lethality/swinginess in my combats," that's one thing; given that as a premise, the rules in the OP aren't bad, you'd just need to adjust the numbers for D&D to account for higher threshold, lower weapon damage, and such. To respond to a critique of the OP with a total non-sequitur about a different system without even appending something like "...and I've houseruled my D&D to be like that, so take that into account" is something entirely different.

However, I would probably agree that many discussions are probably best had in the General RPG forum, rather than the D&D Legacy forum. There are many people here who like their D&D by the rules, and they tend to foam at the mouth sometimes when people talk about other games (it is the D&D Legacy forum, after all).

I kind of wish they hadn't eliminated the House Rules section. I loved browsing through it. A lot of really interesting concepts, even if the massive majority didn't appeal to any one gaming group.

Agreed completely on both counts.

If you make a pc less effective when they are badly wounded, you encourage pc death and cowardice and discourage heroism.

So just keep that in mind.

The "Death Spiral" is a well-known factor in game design; different playstyles like or dislike this, and some games incorporate it, but I personally like it when the pc fighter is at 1 hp and he's still willing to take a shot at that enemy that's beating him up before trying to get away.

If he has a penalty to hit worth mentioning, or only one action, or what have you, he's more likely to try to get away and not waste that attack- he's going to miss anyway, right? So what's the point?

An excellent point. Players often bemoan that D&D isn't realistic because you're as effective at 1 HP as you are at full HP, but that's really a necessary abstraction for gameplay purposes. Things like progressive penalties (à la the SWSE condition track) or loss of actions (this and other houserules) or the like help realism, but there are several issues with these. First and most obvious is the death spiral--unless you provide means to recover from them mid-combat, such as SWSE's ability to spend swift actions to move up the condition track, the person to get hit first is likely to lose, and the likelihood of this happening vs. making a comeback depends on the severity of the penalties. Second is the added complexity and design space: if you add these mechanics, you need to add more rules to interact with them (Does regular healing fix conditions if you heal up to more than half? Can you drop people multiple steps at once via special abilities?) and combat can take longer as a consequence.

Third is the fact that anything that introduces either more randomness or cumulative negative effects into the game will hurt PCs more than NPCs. If you have a Massive Damage rule that gives you a 5% chance to die on each attack (all your enemies' attacks deal 50 or more damage, don't roll a 1 on that Fort save!), a PC who gets hit for 40 attacks has an 87% chance to die. This means that if a 10th-level PC is full-attacked for 4 attacks once per round in every 3-round combat he fights, he has an 87% chance to die before the end of the 4th combat he fights; a PC is expected to fight about 13.33 combats to level, so at those rates that PC has a 99.9665% chance to die before leveling just from trying to avoid rolling 1s on his Massive Damage save! Even a more reasonable rate of 1 hit per round means he has a 96.6% chance to die to massive damage before he levels. So this seemingly-negligible rule, more of an annoyance than anything else, becomes extremely lethal once you get to the levels where it triggers on every hit.

The same applies to action-denying or penalty-inducing rules. Take a party of 4 random PCs with at least a +14 Fort save and pit them against 4 random enemies (I'll be using the Massive Damage example again, because it's easy and simple to illustrate). If you reduce the Clobbered rule to something even simpler like "When hit, [do X] or take -1 to attacks and saves" along the lines of SWSE, that doesn't do much to help the PCs, just gives them a slightly better chance of affecting their enemies with spells and a slightly better chance of avoiding being hit. However, let's say a given PC is going to be hit 5 times this combat, to pick a number arbitrarily; if the enemy manages to inflict this penalty even once, on the first attack, that means the PC's chance of death by massive damage goes from 19% over the next 4 attacks to 34%. If the enemy gets three of those hits in because it's an ambush situation or whatever, his chance of death over the next 4 attacks is 19% vs. 59%, and again, this is disregarding all of the other save-or-dies he might run into in the remainder of combat. All this from a tiny -1 penalty added to increase realism.

That's the problem with rules that add realism: in reality, people are hurt when they're stabbed, so real people avoid situations where they might get stabbed. A rule that makes Random Mook #47 lose a move action once in a combat is practically meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but if that same rule means a PC loses 1 full attack per combat on average, that simple little rule can mean the difference between success of a mission and permanent death. PC cowardice is one logical result, as the Jester mentioned; another is sucking up tons of game time in an already-complicated system to lessen the danger of combats through extra buffs and the like; neither of those is really desirable in a heroic fantasy game like D&D.

 

[Water Bob]

However, I would probably agree that many discussions are probably best had in the General RPG forum, rather than the D&D Legacy forum.

I'll gladly post in another forum, if that's the place for this stuff. But it says in the header to the forum that this forum is for "any other pre-4E" version of D&D. Conan is a version of D&D, a clone based on d20 3.5.

Moderator: Should I be posting this stuff in the General forum?

And, I tag the Conan-specific stuff with the Conan tag. I use the D&D 3E tag for stuff that is useable in that game (like this rule. You may not agree with it, but it certainly can be used in a D&D 3E game).

I'm not trying to be snarky or rude...

Just to let you know....you come across to me as snarky and rude in a lot of the posts you make.



Let me note that I am not advocating these rules. I'm not using them in my game. I'm not even saying that they are good rules. This is a discussion forum about this sort of thing, so I like to throw interesting topics up for debate and just talk about it.

Many times the topic is not something I'm endorsing, just discussing.

This rule is like that. I think its interesting, but I wouldn't use it.

 

[Dandu]

Just to let you know....you come across to me as snarky and rude in a lot of the posts you make.

The Buddha sees the Buddha-nature in people.