NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3319329" data-attributes="member: 4937">Depends on what you want to do and where in the spectrum of prowess you want to put the PC's.  In an earlier post, I wrote:"If your design goal was to provide complete immunity for high level characters against the attacks of low level characters, you'd adopt something like a defensive save/resisted roll. Typically you see this design approach in 'super-heroic' games where you want any number of bullets to just bounce off the hero if they are being fired by henchmen, or any number of laser blasts to fly by the hero so long as they are being fired by storm troopers."Which is basically what a Toughness save + Hero Points lets you do in MM.  You get a save that pretty much always works and in the rare event that it doesn't, you get a freebie.  It works this way because the superheroic PC's are supposed to be at the high end of prowess amongst things in the universe.  Depending on how you implement them, damage saves are really great at simulating scale, and handling interactions between widely different prowesses - much better than hit points.  For an improper use of hit points in the design of a game, see Rifts.Interestingly, you can use the same damage save mechanic to make an extremely lethal/gritty/horror game as well.  Instead of making the hero's toughness formidable, simply make the hero's toughness weak in comparison to the challenges.  Now, instead of being able to act heroicly and capable of shrugging off most attacks with impunity, the characters will drop like flies.   For example, in our hypothetical system, suppose that PC's did a damage save on a d6 and to win your save you had to beat the damage roll on a d6.  Failure produced a wound level for each multiple of the save with something like 5 wound levels being death.  So, a hit of 4 and a damage save of 2 produced two wound levels.  That's already pretty lethal, but if you start throwing in higher scales - like say a giant or vehical mounted weapon that does 2d6 damage or even 3d6 damage, you get a system that is 'realistic' but it realisticly squashes characters.  Something like that might be good for a horror game though.  Notice that are implementation of scale is great, but our fine resolution is crap.  Things like implementing the difference between a battle axe and punch would be hard in this system.  Also notice that we've got alot of dice rolling (if we wanted to differentiate between dodging and toughness we'd do up to four rolls per attack), and that we've got alot of math (division!).  Finally, notice that the system just begs for 'hero points' because its really really swinging.  You can go from being in great health to dead in one blow.  It's like the difference between soccer and football.  In soccer, scores seem to come out of nowhere.  In football, scores can come out of nowhere, but more often you can mark off the progress toward them.   Hit points give you that 'marker' of field position.  Is this better?  Depends on what you want.There is such a thing as a badly designed system.  You can have a system that is unnecessarily complex.  You can have a system that's too simple to do much with.  You can have a system that has mechanics which interfere with its flavor and design goals.  But amongst two well designed sytems, there is no such thing as a 'superior' system.  It's only superior for what you want to do.  D20 is a well designed system.  There are things it doesn't do well, but that is true of any system you could point to.</blockquote>

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