fun with massive damage

[mhensley]

I am considering making the following change to massive damage. Tell me how stupid this is (or not).

Massive Damage is changed to: If damage done to a creature
equals or exceeds its Strength score, it must make a Fortitude save
with a DC equal to the amount of damage. If failed, the creature's
hit points are immediately reduced to 0 - (damage - STR).

Example - Ogg the Barbarian hits a Troll (63 HP) and gets a crit
causing 30 points of damage. The Troll has a STR of 25, so he has
taken Massive Damage. He must make a FORT save of 30 or he is
immediately reduced to -5 HP (0 - (30 - 25)).

 

[Planesdragon]

You should base the damage on CON, not STR.

Other than that--makes sense to me.

 

[Zad]

You're going to end up with a LOT of dead players with that rule. It's just too much. It's also going to cause a lot of people to play differently.

Second one first: characters will want to take Power Attack, and do massive first swings rather than hitting with all iterative attacks. Rogues will very likely kill anything they get a sneak attack on once they get a few dice of sneak damage going. Ranged comat will be ignored as it's not good for doing massive damage in a single strike, and power attack won't apply. And every single AE damage spell will likely cause a follow-up round of massive damage saves.

Party is attacked by a wizard. The party is, oh, say 10th level. The wizard is 12th level. He throws a 10d6 fireball. 35 damage average without the save, 17 with. Anyone in the party who fails their save is flat out going to die. A DC 35 save will be almost impossible for anyone of 10th level. If you do make your save, you still have a DC 17 save for all the party spellcasters probably. Oh wait, the wizard throws a 12d6 cone of cold instead. Make that 42/21. More carnage.

Massive damage saves are an option to keep things from being just plain silly. But your revision means that any time a wizard takes damage, he'll probably die. Monsters will kill PC's left right and center. AE spells will be waves of instant death. You're going to be rolling massive damage saves after every third attack, and I don't think that's what you want.

 

[mhensley]

You should base the damage on CON, not STR.

I have two reasons for basing it on STR instead of CON.

1. STR scales nicely with size. A Red Dragon Wyrmling has a STR of 17 and a CON of 15. A Red Dragon Great wyrm has a STR of 45 and a CON of 31. STR increases faster with size than CON making it tougher to do massive damage to the larger creatures. This also has the effect of opposing STR with STR which seems correct to me.
   
2. A lot of creatures don't have a CON score. If you base it on CON, then all undead would be exempt from Massive Damage. Basing it on STR makes it so only those creatures without a STR score would be exempt. And since pretty much anything without a STR score is Incorporeal, that makes sense to me.

 

[Zad]

Edited to provide details/examples.

 

[mhensley]

waves of instant death

That has a nice ring to it.

Getting people to play differently is kinda the point of this little experiment. But perhaps it would be a bit harsh. I would like to playtest it a bit though.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

That has a nice ring to it.

Getting people to play differently is kinda the point of this little experiment. But perhaps it would be a bit harsh. I would like to playtest it a bit though.

Just one quick point: the more likely characters are to die in combat, the more players will avoid combat. If you want a system to encourage players to find non-violent solutions to problems, this may work nicely. If, OTOH, you still plan on throwing numerous combat encounters at the party, well...get used to your players creating lots of new characters to replace the dead ones (or going elsewhere for their game).

 

[WizWrm]

Have you looked at Ken Hood's grim-and-gritty HP rules? That may be the sort of thing you're looking for.