Hit points as Action point currency?

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

I'm curious.. why did that play out badly?

Because it caused force-users to be seriously weaker than saber swingin jerks, or even a guy with a gun. Which, in reality, might be a good thing, but it made the game less fun. A lot of people play Star Wars to play as Jedi or force users, and when the main element of being a force user, i.e. using the force, was essentially punished, it made the game more one dimensional.

This is when they implemented the generation of force points, an exhaustible resource for force users in SWSE. This is sort of like Action Points in that they can be used by non force users as well, and can be used to simulate fatigue or mental exertion.

When it came down to it, it just played out harsh and boring. In conjunction with the wound point system and damage thresholds, a single grenade could kill a party of level 5 jedi. It just seemed unreasonable and it played out awkwardly.

 

[Yesway Jose]

Essentially, it boiled down to having warrior-types (Jedi) who could either not use any special abilities and have a good chance of surviving a combat*, or they could use their special abilities and probably not survive combat.

Thus, using your special abilities was often actively detrimental to continuing to play your character, so you didn't use them. And if you aren't going to use them, why have them?

Got it. As I implied in the OP, how about a more mixed approach... what if Jedis had the array of special abilities that they could use WITHOUT deducting hit points, and ONLY used hit points to recharge or upgrade Force powers in dire straits?

 

[Celebrim]

Got it. As I implied in the OP, how about a more mixed approach... what if Jedis had the array of special abilities that they could use WITHOUT deducting hit points, and ONLY used hit points to recharge or upgrade Force powers in dire straits?

However you implemented it, you'd still have the problem that you were rewarding glass cannon tactics.

Think of it in terms of a game of MtG. We have a fight between two characters who have 20 hit points. To simply, each has a power that says, "Sacrifice X hit points; Do X Damage." MtG actually has a card that works out very close to that. It's called 'Channel'.

How does this fight play out? Well, the first player to gain a life advantage on the other - that is the first person to hit for Y damage - can activate his power to deal X = 20 - Y damage and automaticly win. So the fight comes down to 'who hits first'. This is very much how the Channel+Fireball combo works, except that at least in MtG there were probabilities at play before you could put the combo together (you had to have mana, and channel, and fireball or equivalent, and have a life lead once you did that). Even so, it wasn't very fun in MtG either.

Even if we make the power more balanced like, "Before your attack, sacrifice X hit ponits; If the attach succeeds, do X damage.", the dynamics of the fight don't change much. If you work out the logic, it still ends up being the same swingy fight. If you attack and activate your power, the logic works the same. If you attack and don't activate your power, and miss, then you aren't better off, since you can still lose if your opponent activates his power and hits. If you attack and don't activate your power and hit, you are better off but you are not as well as you would have been had you activated your power (you still haven't won). The only advantageous position to not activate the power is to attack and miss, and then have your opponent attack and miss. But really, this results in a game state exactly the same as the former less balanced power. Since if you don't activate your power, you are gambling that your opponent will miss his attack you are gambling whether you choose to or choose not to activate the powerl; most players will take the active route and gamble on themselves.

In short, it will be very hard to balance this sort of thing. Hit points are a marker of who is winning the battle. Trading hit points for a faster win is just that - faster. But what faster also means in this case is: a) fewer decision points where tactical choices could influence the outcome and b) fewer dice rolls so singular lucky and unlucky rolls are more influential in the outcome.

 

[Umbran]

OK, but I thought it did, because you can sacrifice hit points for a harder hit (=furious), and if you use up your own hit points faster you are more likely to drop (=fast) or drop the opponent (=fast), and the battle is less predictable (=swingy), but either way, I hope the spirit of the statement is more or less intact, if not semantically.

When I think of "fast and furious" fights, I think of Jackie Chan movies. There's a lot of dynamic action per unit time. For a fast and furious RPG combat, the key is keeping the time to make decisions and resolve actions low, while keeping the actions highly variable (at least in flavor).

While I think I see your thoughts here, I am not at all sure adding another hard resource spending choice will lead to what I'm talking about.

 

[Naszir]

I like this idea despite the negative initial implementation that Star Wars D20 had (personally I haven't played this, just going on the comments of the others in the thread).

The point would then be how do you make sure that you don't get the glass canon effect? And how do you prevent some of the swinginess that could happen?

Limit the number of times a character can pull off a maneuver/spell in an encounter based on level? This could represent that sometimes your body can only put so much extra effort into doing the special maneuver/spell. Kind of like lifting weights. You can do so many reps and then eventually your body hits that point where you just can't even do one more.

 

[Umbran]

You can do so many reps and then eventually your body hits that point where you just can't even do one more.

Wouldn't that be... when you ran out of hit points?

The hit points already impose a limit - if you run out of those, you *die* - not too many hard stops you can come up with than that. If you need a second limit, that suggests the first one is largely inoperative, and probably should be chucked.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Not that I've played every game out there, but the closest I saw this idea working the way intended was in the early Runequest rules. Your POW (power) stat is used to defend against magical/spiritual attacks, and also used to power such attacks. This creates an interesting dynamic where the harder and more often you hit something with magic, the more vulnerable to magic you become. It works more or less as intended, because in Runequest, everyone can use some kind of magic, and you need to discourage casual use.

Note that the intent was to discourage use. The Runequest folks could have predicted the SW result of force users not wanting to use those powers. And even so, it is also no accident that later versions of the rules went to some form of "magic points" as a derived stat from POW, so that MP can move around and get used, but POW stays more stable. This also gets around the niche problem of the great wizard or priest who has cast a lot of magic going down to a simple charm faster than a dumb fighter type (a feature for some, but a bug for many).

For a D&D variant, if you really wanted something like this, I'd recommend deriving hit points and "fatigue points" or whatever you want to call them from a common source. And then use that common source as a way of replenishing both. A repurposed surge might work for that. That is, a given surge could be used to replace hit points or these other points, but not both. I think by the time you got done, then abstracted the system properly to match the rest of the D&D structure, you'd wind up with powers usable N times per time increment, or something that might as well be that. But that's never stopped the Power Point advocates before.

 

[nedjer]

There's the 'the engines cannae handle it' variant, where psychic or magic powers can be recharged/ paid for by taking it out on your own hide. Play this a lot for the descriptive options from slight nosebleed up to 'your head just exploded'.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I like the idea. I've implemented something similar, but not with the regular "hit points" in my game. Those represent meat. I have a second type of hit points that represent fatigue, and you can sacrifice those to get a bonus on certain checks. These fatigue hit points (not what they're actually called, but eh) return some amount each round, based on your Constitution.

The bonuses are admittedly pretty small, but hit points are a good amount harder to get in my game, too, so that helps with combat.

As always, play what you like

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I'd rather play with a version that granted extra action points as hit points were reduced by damage. Something like . . . one at 1/4, another a 1/2, another at 3/4, another while stabilizing at under 0-hp but not dead yet.

Would incentivize playing without healing to full after every combat.
Would give melee types coolio things just for being the meet shield sucking up damage.
Would offer instant backup for spellcasters caught from behind.