ForumFerret said:
Honestly I'm pretty disappointed the SWSaga HP/VP system got dropped from consideration for 4e. I thought it made a lot of sense and really liked it that it made critical hits -matter-, even from low level enemies. You could never disregard a random alley fighter - he could always get lucky and shank you to death.
It kept you on your toes. I dug that.
See, the problem with Vitality/Wound is that it made Critical Hits matter. And that's all it did. And it did too much of that.
Because, most of the time, you could still safely ignore the low-level stormtrooper. He had a small chance of hitting you, and he didn't do much damage. So he wasn't a threat at all unless he rolled a critical hit. And when he did that, he was pretty vicious. And given the sheer number of combats you get into in the course of a star wars game, that occasional lucky shot was eventually going to kill you. (Math
here).
Making a mook really really dangerous once in a blue moon makes the PCs wary of bad dice, not of stormtrooper patrols. And indeed, the only other game I'm aware of that used VP/WP re-wrote the critical hit rules entirely to avoid the problem. Crits were activated only by spending action dice, which mooks didn't have.
Now, a smart game designer would look at the problems with mooks in d20 and realize "Hey, the problem here is that high-level characters vastly outpace low-level ones. Maybe we should fix the math so that doesn't happen." And that's exactly what the 4e folks did.
Consider: In 3rd Edition, a pit fiend that hits with each of it's attacks deals an average of 107 damage. Plus poison (1d6 con initial, death secondary), plus disease (1d4 str), plus improved grab (+35 grapple, average of 35 constriction damage).
In 4th Edition, that same pit fiend (now an epic-level elite monster) does an average of 68.5 damage, including ongoing damage from the poison and being on fire).
A 1st-level rogue with sneak attack will do an average of 8 damage in 3e and 13.5 in 4e.
In 3rd edition, a CR 1 lemure has a +2 to attack. A CR 20 pit fiend has +30. And that's one of the smaller disparities. A white dragon's attack bonus goes from +5 to +45 over twenty levels.
In 4th edition, the primary scaler is going to be the universal half-level bonus. If you had a +1 to hit at 1st level, you'll have a +16 at 30th. Magic weapons will add to this somewhat (and afaik, we don't actually know how much yet), but it'll never approach the ridiculousness of 3e scaling.
In 3e, you didn't earn normal experience for characters that were 8 CR higher or lower than your own. The game basically assumed that at that point, the weaker opponent poses absolutely no threat to the stronger. So a CR 9 monster is an impossible challenge for first-level characters.
In 4e, a 9th-level monster is worth 400 xp. That's considered an average encounter for a party of four 1st-level characters.
So yeah. I don't think I'll be missing VP/WP much.
