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Message: <blockquote data-quote="comrade raoul" data-source="post: 3417778" data-attributes="member: 554">The SWRPG switch to hit points has prompted me to think a little bit about the motivations for the three damage systems WotC has suggested so far--the VP/wounds system (Wheel of Time, Star Wars), the hitpoint system (D&D), and the hitpoint system with a massive damage save (d20 Modern).Suppose you wanted a cinematic campaign with dangerous modern weapons, so that you wanted it to be the case that anyone--even high-level characters--would stand a chance of being taken out of a fight with a single lucky hit. This can be really important for dramatic tension (combat's dangerous) and an approximation of realism sufficient to sustain suspension of disbelief (guns kill). But there are things you don't like about both the Star Wars system--critical hits basically become an auto-kill, especially when high-damaging weapons like lightsabers are involved--and the d20 Modern system--it's too easy to prompt massive damage checks, making hitpoints relatively unimportant and combat a little too dangerous. (But at least a failed massive damage save disables a character rather than kills them.)Why not just combine them? You could have a hybrid system that's very close to the critical hit system, but gave some criticals a chance of taking a target right down to -1 hit points, just as if they failed a massive damage save. It'd look like this: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Characters have hit points, rather than vitality and wound points, just like they do in D&D.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">An attacker who rolls a natural 20 on an attack roll threatens a fatal hit. A fatal hit is a special kind of critical hit, and characters with threat ranges larger than 20 can threaten critical hits without threatening fatal hits.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fatal hits deal double or more a weapon's normal damage, according to the weapon's normal critical hit multiplier. However, if a character has 0 or more hit points after resolving the damage from the fatal hit, he must make a DC 15 Fortitude save. If he fails, he's further reduced to -1 hit points.</li> </ul>The result? You have a simple change to a system that makes characters almost as safe as they are under a hit point system, and encourage risky, heroic behavior. But the "almost" does a lot of work here: everyone, no matter how skilled, is still in real danger every time they get into a fight, though succumbing to a fatal hit needn't always mean death.</blockquote>

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