Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5546865" data-attributes="member: 52073">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.Agreed completely on both counts.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.</blockquote>

Verification