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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ravenheart" data-source="post: 5703425" data-attributes="member: 72088">Apparently the series of articles I wrote a few months back has stirred some conversation, so I thought I'd pop by.Glad you like it! Well, the idea was that everyone should be dealing hard hits. This might have been a bit confusing, since I altered my formula while writing this series (brought it up in part 2). Apologies for that!A hard hit represents 1/8 of a monsters hit points, which means that a party of 4 non-strikers should be able to take one out in no more than 2 full rounds (assuming each party member attacks once every round). Note that the threshold is modelled after the average expectations of at-will damage, incorporating likelyhood of landing a hit, miss effects etc.This might seem a bit on the slow side, but this also assumes no strikers, extra damage, terrain effects, encounter/daily powers, action points, minor action attacks etc. Considering those it quickly speeds things up.And when it comes to the multiples, that's where the chart comes in handy: it's an easy reference guide, and you'd still be adding all those dice and modifiers together with this system.The soft hit threshold is really there to mitigate trivial and incidental damage, but also to buff up higher level monsters (and encourage players switching to more potent powers). It works sort of like damage resistance, but I must confess it might be a tad too much at higher levels as it effectively renders low ongoing damage obsolete. One idea is to have ongoing damage "burn" the thresholds a bit for a turn, making it easier to damage the monster temporarily.And as Viking said, a low roll can be narrated just like that. This is all off-screen anyway, so why bother with such miniscule detail and micromanagement? It's not like it makes much of a difference. And I always feel it is sort of silly and anti-climactic when a monster is bloodied or killed by falling on its own feet or something similar (barring the case where such hilarity is called for and appropriate, of course). I also found this true while playtesting, which seems to indicate I at least somewhat succeeded in my design. A few things did occur to me though:1. Player Insecurity: I didn't openly present this system to my players at first, partially to see how they responded to it without knowing of it (this was a behind-the-screen tool for me as a DM anyway, and I was fairly condifent in its balance. If issues would arise, I could just wing it.). I noticed that the players started to feel unsure about what effect their damage had on the enemy, and as the game continued and I bit by bit revealed and exposed my system to them some of them started to speculate how they should retool their characters to better handle such a system. This made me realize how important metagame assumptions and rules transparency is to 4E (especially compared to the olden thymes when players got their hands severed if they so much as touched the DMG or MM). Something to keep in mind at least.2. Minions: As I explained in my article, I use the two-hit minion variety. To compensate for this, they lose their immunity to miss effects. Also, their soft hit threshold is always 0. This accomplishes several things. First, any two separate instances of damage will kill them, regardless of their level or hard hit threshold. This makes environmental factors and splash damage deadly to them. Second, dailys with miss effects are much cooler. Third, minions can be bloodied, which opens up new design space (without much micromanagement). Just find some convenient way of tracking which is which and you're all set to go.3. Incidental Soft Hits: Although the system is built to compensate for low and high damage based on averages, it made me cringe every time a player just fell short of hitting a multiplier, ergo they lost a good portion of their damage. So I started ahnding out an incidental soft hit like it was candy. And I just did it ad hoc; if it made sense that they should be dealing more damage or bloodying/killing a creature in that one epic blow, fine by me. I mean, a crit is always a crit, right? So I house ruled my own house rule: If appropriate, add an incidental soft hit or treat a near multiple of a hard hit as a multiple.----------------------------Now, before anyone points it out: Yes, this has little to do with implementing a blow by blow system instead of Hit Points for PCs as my work has been all about monsters/NPCS. But maybe there are things to be learned from it, something one can adapt to fit the other side of the table. That's what I'm thinking, at least.Anyway, thanks for the feedback!/Haze</blockquote>

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