Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5814165" data-attributes="member: 54877">That's part of it, but a bigger problem is that as soon as you have the second type of thing as some kind of &quot;points&quot;, you've already thrown away half of its resonance. &nbsp;Think about it this way. Traditional hit points are a counter to determine how close you are to being in bad trouble. But until you run out, you keep fighting as well as you ever did. This is deliberate, and thus hit points are as much a pacing mechanism as a way of measuring health. (The &quot;hit points should be actual damage&quot; crowd like to ignore this point--and I mean ignore, as in, &quot;won't address it&quot; because they find it irrelevant.)&nbsp;So part of the resistance to alternatives like, &quot;damage saves&quot; or soaking options is not only do they change how damage is taken and/or introduce wounds/death spirals, but they provide a whole lot of uncertainity in the pacing part. &nbsp;However, if you are going to add a separate track to handling serious wounds and death in a mechanical fashion, suddenly uncertainity is a lot more acceptable! After all, the people that don't want it can normalize it away, and hit point pacing still works like it always did. The people who do want it, want something that is different in kind.&nbsp;Postulate: A highly useful secondary mechanic for more handling more lethal results should not be any form of &quot;points&quot;. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />&nbsp;Edit:&nbsp; Completely agree with John Snow's point above.&nbsp; Another reason to make them different is to reinforce that any wound system can only touch pacing so much.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5814165, member: 54877"] That's part of it, but a bigger problem is that as soon as you have the second type of thing as some kind of "points", you've already thrown away half of its resonance. Think about it this way. Traditional hit points are a counter to determine how close you are to being in bad trouble. But until you run out, you keep fighting as well as you ever did. This is deliberate, and thus hit points are as much a pacing mechanism as a way of measuring health. (The "hit points should be actual damage" crowd like to ignore this point--and I mean ignore, as in, "won't address it" because they find it irrelevant.) So part of the resistance to alternatives like, "damage saves" or soaking options is not only do they change how damage is taken and/or introduce wounds/death spirals, but they provide a whole lot of uncertainity in the pacing part. However, if you are going to add a separate track to handling serious wounds and death in a mechanical fashion, suddenly uncertainity is a lot more acceptable! After all, the people that don't want it can normalize it away, and hit point pacing still works like it always did. The people who do want it, want something that is different in kind. Postulate: A highly useful secondary mechanic for more handling more lethal results should not be any form of "points". :) Edit: Completely agree with John Snow's point above. Another reason to make them different is to reinforce that any wound system can only touch pacing so much. [/QUOTE]

Verification