is a MDS needed with VP/WP?

[genshou]

As with normal hit points, when your Constitution goes down (either truly or effectively for the purpose of determining hp/vp only), it lowers both your maximum and current points. Let's use the numbers from before:
8th-level Fighter
Base vp + Con bonus vp: 48 + 24 = 72
Con: 16
You've taken 24 vitality damage, reducing your total to 48. Then, a foe scores a critical hit against you, dealing 8 points of Wound damage. If we use GlassJaw's option of the attack dealing both wound and vitality damage, your current vp is reduced to 40. You also drop from 16 wp to 8, so you have an effective Con score of 8 for the purpose of determining your max vitality points at the end of the fight.

For simplicity's sake, let's say you take no further damage in the encounter. Now, because you have suffered a -4 penalty to your effective Con modifier for the purpose of vp, your current and maximum vp drop by 4 per HD, in this case 24. So, you are reduced to 24 vp (16 with GlassJaw's rules variant) with a maximum of 48. The current and maximum would rise equally as your effective Con modifier increased (due to healing of wound damage).

Here's a question, though. What if you'd taken 49 vitality damage before the wound was struck? Then, your vp end up as -1 vp at the end of the encounter (-9 with GlassJaw's system). Since you weren't mechanically dealt that wound damage in the encounter itself, you could rule that the extra vitality loss was meaningless and just pop it back up to 0 current vp. Alternatively, you could consider the negative vp to be "extra damage the hero didn't even realize they had taken at the time or simply weren't affected by yet," and let it reduce wound points further. However, this would also drop the effective Con score again, leading to a rather large amount of wound damage. This could lead to some cool Boromir-ish cinematic action, but weakens the benefit of having vitality points to protect you in the first place.

I'd appreciate feedback on either idea I've presented.

 

[GlassJaw]

What if you'd taken 49 vitality damage before the wound was struck? Then, your vp end up as -1 vp at the end of the encounter

Well that's essentially what I was getting at. If WP damage gives you a penalty to your Con, you'll end up with situations where you have more VP's than your newly adjusted Con would normally allow.

What you are implying is one way to handle it: have your VP's drop to what your new Con score would allow. The other idea is to just ignore the "weird math" situations and use your adjusted Con to determine the max amount of VP's you can heal while you still have WP damage. If your VP's are already higher than that amount, oh well, just ignore it.

Honestly, I like the idea behind this concept but from what I can tell so far, the mechanics to implement it are cumbersome at best. As harsh as it is, I would rather just stick with my original idea: you can't regain VP's until your WP are healed. I agree some compromise is probably needed but I wouldn't sacrifice good mechanics for it.

Another idea I had is to allow VP's to be regained normally, whether you have WP damage or not but use the fatigue mechanic I mentioned before: increase the WP fatigue penalties depending on how much WP damage you have taken (sort of like the Shadowrun condition meter). So as you take more WP damage, your Str and Dex penalties increase to -4 and then -6. You could regain all your VP's but you might still have pretty significant Str and Dex penalties (which would inherently reduce your chance to avoid further WP damage). That might be the easiest mechanically.

My one question about increasing the fatigue penalities is whether to increase them at finite point in WP's or make it a percentage of WP's lost. I'm thinking that a percentage would penalize those PC's with higher Con scores. If your penalties increase when you lose 50% of your WP's, someone with a Con of 18 will get penalized at 9, whereas someone with a Con of 10 will be penalized at 5. Granted the PC with a Con of 18 can take more damage before their abilities are reduced, but it seems a numeric scale should be the same for everyone. 5 WP's is a specific point in the damage scale.

The other idea is to have a range where your penalties increase: 4-6 WP, -4 Str and Dex, 1-3 WP, -6 Str and Dex. This seems ok for Small-Large creatures but it gets a little weird when a creature's WP's are increased based on their size (x2 for Huge for example).

 

[genshou]

Well that's essentially what I was getting at. If WP damage gives you a penalty to your Con, you'll end up with situations where you have more VP's than your newly adjusted Con would normally allow.

What you are implying is one way to handle it: have your VP's drop to what your new Con score would allow. The other idea is to just ignore the "weird math" situations and use your adjusted Con to determine the max amount of VP's you can heal while you still have WP damage. If your VP's are already higher than that amount, oh well, just ignore it.

Honestly, I like the idea behind this concept but from what I can tell so far, the mechanics to implement it are cumbersome at best. As harsh as it is, I would rather just stick with my original idea: you can't regain VP's until your WP are healed. I agree some compromise is probably needed but I wouldn't sacrifice good mechanics for it.

Another idea I had is to allow VP's to be regained normally, whether you have WP damage or not but use the fatigue mechanic I mentioned before: increase the WP fatigue penalties depending on how much WP damage you have taken (sort of like the Shadowrun condition meter). So as you take more WP damage, your Str and Dex penalties increase to -4 and then -6. You could regain all your VP's but you might still have pretty significant Str and Dex penalties (which would inherently reduce your chance to avoid further WP damage). That might be the easiest mechanically.

My one question about increasing the fatigue penalities is whether to increase them at finite point in WP's or make it a percentage of WP's lost. I'm thinking that a percentage would penalize those PC's with higher Con scores. If your penalties increase when you lose 50% of your WP's, someone with a Con of 18 will get penalized at 9, whereas someone with a Con of 10 will be penalized at 5. Granted the PC with a Con of 18 can take more damage before their abilities are reduced, but it seems a numeric scale should be the same for everyone. 5 WP's is a specific point in the damage scale.

The other idea is to have a range where your penalties increase: 4-6 WP, -4 Str and Dex, 1-3 WP, -6 Str and Dex. This seems ok for Small-Large creatures but it gets a little weird when a creature's WP's are increased based on their size (x2 for Huge for example).

I am all for the fatigue rules. I think setting them at a specific point may be imbalanced, however, as it tends to reward those who have low Con scores with permanent fatigue. Having a -2 or -3 penalty to Con is penalty enough, if you ask me.

As for the adjustment to current/total vp, I agree that it is cumbersome and harsh. But that is how the current system handles changes to Constitution, so I felt I should point out the problem, at least. Perhaps the "effective Con damage" caused by wound damage should function differently; inflicting its penalty only on the maximum? That was your idea, and I like it better. Keeps charaters from dying off suddenly at the end of encounters, but also prevents them from having nearly as much vigor restored to them until they have healed their wound damage.