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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5805604" data-attributes="member: 70709">That looks accurate...and a better synopsis than the one I gave! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I've dabbled in almost exactly the same way!  Like you I had healing surges as wounds (for some wounds perhaps multiple surges) so that they were basically a very small pool of "real" hit points.  I still allowed surges to restore hit points, and with the right magic wounds could be healed by expending unused surges equal to the number of surges the wound covered.  So a critical wound might be worth 3 surges, and heal very slowly, but cure critical wounds could expend 3 surges to heal it on the spot. (I see now that this prefigured the "burning the hit point candle at both ends" operation I used above...)  In this way characters were very incentivized to avoid wounds, and spending surges on hit points was a strain in that it reduced the ability of the creature to tolerate wounds proper.  That being the case, it may have been better for the creature to keep the wound for a while because if they spent healing surges to heal it they might simply have no means to regenerate hit points or tolerate additional wounds.  In the end it's still a bit too gamist for my taste, I think.  And after several different ways of trying to figure out when to apply wounds (like when damage exceeds healing surge value) I decided I didn't care for a static threshold.  (More on that in a moment.)  For 5e, however, I've come to think that it's best to approach D&D from the perspective of pure hit points rather than a surge-like mechanic.  Building a surge-like mechanic into the core will alienate enough people to give me pause, and I can't see a way to do a pure hit points module and a hit points plus surgelike module that both have the same basic balance in the game.  It's that property of my new idea that I find most elegant.Thank you!  Actually, when I realized there were similarities with the nonlethal/subdual damage rules my immediate reaction was "Oh crap! Didn't you kind of hate those?" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  It took a little while for me to work through the cognitive dissonance, but eventually I realized that the origin of my distaste did not arise from the similar features.Yeah, I'm not married to the idea, and I can definitely appreciate why it might seem wonky.  After all, aren't the most damaging attacks almost by definition the wounds? That sounds rhetorical, but I think the answer is actually "no."  Sometimes a very damaging attack can take the wind out of ones sails, arise from a curse, reflect a powerful change in mental state (say psychic damage), or a hundred other things that might not persist more than even a minute.  Likewise, some wounds are in fact small, so there is no reason that damage should be either "all vitality" or "all wound", and even reason that "all vitality" is small and "all wound" is large.  I grant that this isn't a very gamist viewpoint, but even there I can see some advantages.  For example, if wound points and vitality points are kept in totally separate pools (like a more conventional system), then a static threshold (like 1/4 total hit points) that turns an attack that exceeds it into a wound will only ever be taking of huge chunks of wound points from the pool.  Say the wound pool is 10 + Con score.  If a creature has a threshold of 10 damage, then at the very minimum a wound is about 1/3 of the target's wound points.  In other words, it looks like we have a lot of granularity from that many wound points, but in actual fact we do not.  Using the maximum die has a very punctuated feel, one that will feel very swingy in the heat of battle, but with very well-behaved long term properties.I think that could work decently, and I especially like how the window for being dazed grows as wound points increase.  Like with SeRiAlExPeRiMeNtS' suggestion, I think that base 5e pretty much needs to be surgeless for wholly non-mechanical reasons, but I don't see a way to add surges in a module without significantly changing game balance.  The fact that wound points accrue so reliably is good indicator of your gamist tendencies, I think!  I'm also a big fan of monsters imposing wounds directly as well, but think it can cause modularity problems for people who don't want wounds at all.  (In a different thread I proposed introducing "null wounds" so that monsters can be written with wounds, but that apart from these specific effects whatever the rest of the wound system looks like could be ignored.  That could be enough.)  I'm curious how you would adjust the grittiness of your idea?  The easiest thing would probably grant more wound points for taking less damage, but no wants to find multiples of 9.  Finally, in a classic case of YMMV, the inability to take wounds without being "bloodied" trips my verisimilitude alert, while for some reason the ability of a creature to sustain ever increasing amounts of physical damage using my idea (since wound points have no fixed maximum other than total hp) does not.Cheers.</blockquote>

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