Implied wounding

[jester47]

Today this ran accross my mind-

Vampires drain blood - this is represented as con loss
the wounding property for weapons - this causes con loss on a normal hit.

So it seems to me that the system already had an implied wound ruleset intact. The DM just sort of has to turn it on.

Generally this has caused me to rethink the whole damage system.

crits: these do con damage of the ammount listed on the equipment chart.
hp: heal at 1 hp per level per hour
non-lethal damage: just comes off the hit points
flat-footed opponents can be knocked out
you are not injured unless you loose con
when you are out of hit points, you start to loose con (i.e. you are injured)
con heals at the normal rate.
edurance works the same way
die hard keeps you from having to make an unconsciousness check when wounded
Environmental damage just wears you down and starts taking your con.

So all of this would be great if there were no magic involved. But there is magic:

regeneration: this is the number of con points the creature heals in one round, whatever bypasses a creatures regeneration does Con damage to that creature. So For examples Trolls take Con damage from flaming oil, torches, fireballs, and acid. This would explain why they havent taken over the world and why they seem to work for evil wizards so readily.
fast healing: this is like regeneration but the character cannot regrow and reattach limbs, and there is no bypass. the rest of the rules for this stand as written.

So can anyone think of other things that doing damage this way would affect?

 

[drexes]

so do you have to regenerate your con before you regain hp or do your hp come back but only to the level your current con would permit? This would make restoration spells oh so vital and I think you would find more and more people inclined toward making con thier high stat. It is already a big stat this just raises its import vastly.

Just my two cents

Drexes

 

[jester47]

hps come back but only to the level that the current con permits. Con heals like normal ability damage.

I might have to do somthing with cure * wounds and restoration.

The restoration spells can remain the same. Cure light would have to use the + to heal con. Thus lesser restoration is still needed to heal other ability damage, and restoration is still needed for magical effects, so they still hold a place in the game, and C*W spells still serve their purpose.

That seems fair.

 

[ValhallaGH]

This sounds a lot like a Wound / Vitality system. Except wound damage is done straight to your Con Score rather than a pool of Wound Points.

Not my cup of tea but if you enjoy such things then go for it.

 

[jester47]

I did a lot of work with the wound vitality points. The problem with that way of doing it is that you had to rewrite a lot of stuff and add a lot of things. There were saves all over the place. There was a lot of stat replication. It took a while to distill both the systems down to this. Its much easier as you don't have to really change any of the numbers or the mechanics much. That is, the character and any monster you use will still be usable in a regular game of D&D without having to recalculate hp etc.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

So, wth CLW you would get 1D8 hps and +1 CON?
Would you get the hps returned due to increase in CON as well?

Perhaps set it up so that CON loss/gain changes total hps by 1/2 character level... that way you don't lose track of when to change the hp total...

Your KO check mentioned...

"die hard keeps you from having to make an unconsciousness check when wounded"
and
"flat-footed opponents can be knocked out"

Is this a FORT save vs DC = damage taken?
or is it scaled by % of total hps and using an 'easy', 'difficult', etc DC?


Otherwize this looks like a fairly decent variant on hps..I may just have to use it

 

[librarius_arcana]

This sounds a lot like a Wound / Vitality system. Except wound damage is done straight to your Con Score rather than a pool of Wound Points.

Not my cup of tea but if you enjoy such things then go for it.

I was going to say that,

but is my cup of tea

 

[jester47]

So, wth CLW you would get 1D8 hps and +1 CON?

Yes.

Would you get the hps returned due to increase in CON as well?

No, since hps will be cheap (you can rest for an a few hours and get them back, also in light of your next question, its best to keep the hp max static)

Perhaps set it up so that CON loss/gain changes total hps by 1/2 character level... that way you don't lose track of when to change the hp total...

This does seem to cause a bit of a rules hassle. Since this is supposed to be aminimalist approach, I think I would change that to the maximum number of hit points never changes. So if you are 10th level with a Con of 18 (+4) and take a 1 con wound, you don't loose 10hp. In fact now that I think about it, critical hits are already doing con damage. So why take hps too? It is a lot easier to keep track of. stuff if you don't raise and lower the hp cap as con goes up and down.

Your KO check mentioned...

Is this a FORT save vs DC = damage taken?
or is it scaled by % of total hps and using an 'easy', 'difficult', etc DC?

This has been somthing that seems very hard to gague. I created the KO combat action. I did this for "cinematic" reasons. Its is almost impossible to KO a low level gaurd in regular D&D. When you want to KO someone who is flat footed and within one size category of your own, you can make an attack against them using fists or weapon, if it is successful they have to make a successful Fort save of 10 + damage taken (not counting special weapon damage). If they fail they go UC. This does no actual damage to the target.

When con is lost, it seems appropriate that unconsciousness is on the threshold. So, I thought that 10 plus total damage taken would be decent. Every time you loose con you would have to make one of these rolls. when you don't have any hp left and you have lost con, you loose one each round, like negative hit points. When this starts, the DC increases by 1 for each con point subsequntly lost. The die hard does not need to make this roll.

So if the character took 10 points of dmage and lost 5 con points, the DC to remain conscious would be 20, next round he would loose another con point unless they stabilise, and the DC to reamin conscious is 21. So if the Character had a Con of 15 and rolled well, they could essentially stay in the fight for several more rounds but would eventually go UC if they don't have the Die Hard feat.

This scales pretty fairly.

Otherwize this looks like a fairly decent variant on hps..I may just have to use it

Thanks!

 

[jester47]

One thing I was going to add is the wounded condition:
When you are down con from an injury, you are wounded. This is a -1 to attacks and AC in addition to any specific wound results should the DM be using them.

 

[Griffith Dragonlake]

In my last campaign I developed a set of rules very similar to this and also incorporated the 'armour as DR' rule.

Normal (hit point) damage is non-lethal. Standard non-lethal damage rules apply.

Critical damage is not multiplied and does temporary Con damage. Standard temporary Con damage rules apply. For example, a 10th level character losing 2 points of Con also loses 10 hit points.

Once hit points have been used up, characters take Con damage.

Healing spells work as written.

Using armour as DR is a very important component of this system. A critical hit by an ogre or giant, even when not multiplied can quickly be a one-hit kill when it does Con damage. Armour as DR reduces the over the top lethality somewhat. Also, I chose to convert armour to DR on a 1-1 basis rather than a 2-1 basis for the same reason. This greatly weakened missile weapons but was needed to survive the ogres, trolls, giants, and dragons.

All in all, it worked pretty well. In hindsight, when converting monster's armour to DR, I should've cut the values in half. Combats ended up taking longer as the a lot of the character's melee damage was getting absorbed by the DR. Power Attack and two-handed weapons became popular.