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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5886038" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the late 70s (I think - maybe early 80s) Roger Musson had an article in White Dwarf called "How to lose hit points and survive". I think it was the first proposal for a wound/vitality system for D&D. His version uses CON as wound points, regular hit points as vitality points, and uses a "make your to-hit by more than X" as the criterion for wounding. He also adds a few bells and whistles: every step up on the attack matrix (2 levels for AD&D fighters, 3 levels for AD&D clerics, etc) increases the value of X by 1; when you are at 75%, 50% or 25% CON your hit points can't be higher than that percentage; and at each of those percentages you also have a chance of a mortal wound (with a 100% chance when you drop to 0 CON).I can't remember whether he discusses falling, but he suggests that, for dragon breath and fireballs, on a save you take half damage to hp (for the effort of ducking etc) and on a failed save you take full damage to hp and half damage to CON. I think that when you're helpless you take full damage to CON, but not simply when you're surprised.If you use a system like this, and change it so that:(i) X does not increase with level; (ii) X decreases for each subsequent attack in the round; (iii) when surprised, all hits go straight to CON; (iv) falling damage is doubled (or more), but falling gives a save comparable to dragon breath or fireball;then you could get a system in which a PC can have a better chance against a dragon who doesn't surprise him/her than against 12 archers who do surprise him/her.To make it consistent, though, you'd probably have to rule that surprised PCs automatically fail their saves vs breath, fireball etc, which would make scry-buff-teleport even more deadly.But offering this as a module isn't just tweaking a dial or toggling a switch on or off. It's jacking on a wholly different subsystem that may well not work with signficant other parts of the system (eg the encounter building guidelines, the healing rules, etc).</blockquote>

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