Injury & Death Variant

[Angel Tarragon]

INJURY AND DEATH
Your hit points measure how hard you are to kill. No matter how many hit points you lose, your character isn’t hindered in any way until your hit points drop to 0 or lower.

LOSS OF HIT POINTS
The most common way that your character gets hurt is to take lethal damage and lose hit points

What Hit Points Represent: Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one.

Effects of Hit Point Damage: Damage doesn’t slow your character down until her hit points reach 0 or lower. At 0 hit points, your character is disabled. When your character has negative hit points that is less than her DTH she is dying. When the character has negative damage that equals or exceeds her DTH she is dead.

DTH: DTH, or Death Threshold, is the negative number at which your character ceases to live. All characters have a base DTH that starts at -10. The player then subtracts her Constitution modifier from the base to find her modified DTH. Further at 1st level and every level thereafter the player’s character gains a -1 to her DTH. The selection and application of certain feats may further reduce the character’s DTH.

Massive Damage: If you ever sustain so massive that a single attack equals or exceeds your MDT and it doesn’t kill you outright, you must make a DC20 Fortitude save. If this saving throw succeeds your character is pushed or blown back 1 square (unless there is something stopping this from happening, like if the character is grappled, pinned, up against a wall, or some other circumstance) and is dazed for the remainder of the round plus the next round. A failed save indicates that the character might be okay or that her life is in jeopardy.

A character that fails her Fort save must make another; this time at DC30. If the second save is successful the characters’ hit points drop to 0 and she is disabled. If it fails the character is reduced to a number of hit points equal to one higher than her DTH; she is unconscious dying. Her comrades have one round to help her. If they fail to do so, then on the next round she loses one more hit point and is dead.

MDT: Fine 10 Base + 10 for every size category above. Add Con score. Sum of the two equals characters base MDT.

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As per massive damage I might add a bit about crushing damage coming from above. Its deadliness would depend on the character's Awareness/Perception of the attack. Such an attack on the character from an object would most likely cause the pc to be pinned and to get the object off requires a collective Strength check (the more it weighs the higher the DC).

These rules are standard for Tale of the Twin Suns.

 

[airwalkrr]

Meh. It's superior to the 3.5 system. I'll give you that. I still think there ought to be a simpler way to do it. One problem I have with your massive damage rules is that it seems like they will be quite a bit lower than 50 for most characters. At higher levels (15+), PCs incur massive damage saves at least once every other combat, sometimes more. This would make them even more common. I'm not sure that is a good thing as they tend to slow down play.

I still prefer my system for death and dying, where there is theoretically no limit to the number of negative hit points you can take, but when you fall to negatives you must make a Fort save equal to your negatives. Fail the save and you lose 1 hp and keep dying. Fail by 5 or more and you die. Succeed and you stabilize. Succeed by 5 or more and you are merely disabled, though taking strenuous actions knocks you unconscious.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

One problem I have with your massive damage rules is that it seems like they will be quite a bit lower than 50 for most characters.

Lower?! My modification is meant to increse the amount of damage taken before potentially succumbing to massive damage. Most PC races of the Tale strat off at Medium, giving a base of 50. If the character has a 12 Con, she doesn'nt need to make a save unless she takes 62 point or more of damage from a single blow.

 

[starwed]

Lower?! My modification is meant to increse the amount of damage taken before potentially succumbing to massive damage. Most PC races of the Tale strat off at Medium, giving a base of 50. If the character has a 12 Con, she doesn'nt need to make a save unless she takes 62 point or more of damage from a single blow.

I think you meant to start off Fine creatures with 10 MDT instead of Tiny creatures, then.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I think you meant to start of Fine creatures with 10 MDT instead of Tiny creatures, then.

Yeah, I did. Whoops. Thanks for the eye opener.

 

[airwalkrr]

Ok that makes more sense then. So you are basically using the variant size-based massive damage variant from the DMG and adding someone's Con score. Not a bad idea. Massive damage is something I have oft considered removing from my games completely though. I ran the Age of Worms Adventure Path from start to finish once and the latter adventures got bothersome with so many massive damage saves. What was worse was that it wasn't like anyone was going to fail without rolling a '1' either. So occasionally the PCs or the monsters would get a lucky blow, but it hurt the PCs more. It isn't so big of a deal if every once in a while a monster dies from that 5% chance. But when a PC dies from that 5% chance it is often very punishing. It is one of those rules that I think is aimed at realism but hurts the game.

I should point out that while your variant helps PCs, it also makes it much, much more difficult for PCs to score massive damage on monsters. PCs take on big monsters far more often than PCs are big themselves. A Colossal dragon with 32 Con would have 126 MDT, which is virtually unattainable without Power Attack and a criitcal hit from a scythe. So unless your campaign features enemies that are mostly class-leveled humanoids and smaller monsters, expect your PCs to be the ones making most of the MD rolls, which is not an ideal solution unless you hate your PCs or they don't mind a grim n' gritty campaign.

These are just things to think about. I'm not saying your ideas are bad. I'm just pointing out some things to think about before introducing them into your campaign.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I should point out that while your variant helps PCs, it also makes it much, much more difficult for PCs to score massive damage on monsters. PCs take on big monsters far more often than PCs are big themselves. A Colossal dragon with 32 Con would have 126 MDT, which is virtually unattainable without Power Attack and a criitcal hit from a scythe.

This is what I'm shooting for. I want to make it much harder for the tougher creatures to be beat in combat.

So unless your campaign features enemies that are mostly class-leveled humanoids and smaller monsters, expect your PCs to be the ones making most of the MD rolls, which is not an ideal solution unless you hate your PCs or they don't mind a grim n' gritty campaign.

Almost none of the races larger than Large size are naturally occurring in the Tale. Instead these races are mortals that have chosen to pursue the goal of becoming a creature of that type. This includes dragons.

It is also important for me to point out that I have a modified Essentia system for my world, which sort of acts like an action point system. One of the abilities PCs gain is Second Wind, allowing them to refresh a small number of hit points based on how much essentia they expend.