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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5151155" data-attributes="member: 4937">While swarms are a possible abstraction, if you look at the rules, a swarm doesn't really apply until you start talking about like 300 house cats.  While a swarm of house cats might well be a cool encounter, its also probably above the CR of my needs and its well above the 'few dozen' cats I had envisioned.And in any event, the assertion that 'some creatures are too small to harm someone individually' doesn't apply to house cats.  A house cat with a mind to do so can tear you up pretty good.Right now, my actual rules are loosely inspired by 4e.  (Something Celebrim thinks 4e actually got right?  Well, kinda...)   I don't think that HD should be the sole source of hit points.  I don't agree with 4e's implementation of that concept, but the concept itself is on reflection quite sound.  My implementation is that creatures should get bonus hit points based on size class (for example, medium sized creatures get 8 bonus hit points, tiny ones like cats get 2).  This has been tested now, and for the most part works like a dream.  I'm moderately concerned that single weapon blows are now unlikely to kill normal people without a critical, but on the whole that seems like a good trade off especially when considering large gains in playability over small tradeoffs in versimilitude.The other rule that is weapon that is 4 or more size classes smaller than your own size class is automatically non-lethal (-4 penalty to do lethal damage).  This means that the cat scratches are normally recovered from reasonably fast, and if the cat really wants to rip your throat out, it has to work at it.  Move up to a small sized bobcat though (with diminutive claws) and that's no longer true unless you happen to be an ogre at the time.Between those rules and the introduction of scale with respect to massive damage rules, I think I've resolved most of the scale issues I had with straight D20.   Being fine sized is no longer a straight up advantage compared to being tiny, and being medium sized is no longer a penalty.  I don't know that they'd work for everyone, but they are definately working for me.  I'm playing around with some sort of rule to handle situations like 1d4-4 damage being no better than 1d2-4 and the other general problems with low strength mods without requiring extra die rolls, but really, that would be just gravy.</blockquote>

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