Its Official: I HATE Vitality/Wound. You?

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Most of the issues people have with the VP/WP system seem to arise from a bad experience with lightsabers in SW. I'd bet that SW played without Jedi or playing an entirely different campaign that uses VP/WP would change people's opinions. Lightsabers + crits + WP = instant death.

There's a reason why there are no crit multipliers in the VP/WP system. If there were, any crit would be an instant kill. Since lightsabers have so many damage dice, it's like they have a built-in crit multiplier already.

You shouldn't lightsaber fight unless you are ready to lose limbs or life it seems, or have the ability to escape the fight if it turns against you. I guess that is supported by the movies.

 

[Remathilis]

Again, a single critical hit canNOT bring a much-loved character to an end. Unconscious, yes, but it is very hard to actually KILL from that. And again, it DOES fit the source material. Stop focussing on the death part, as its overexaggerated to how common/possible it is in the first place.

A Crit is death when

Your dealing with 4d8(+) lightsaber damage, plus strength (or dex, Form IV mastery)

Your con is lower than 14 (max damage on a rifle is 24, assuming no customization, weapon specializaiton, point blank shot, etc)

Your facing a bounty hunter with sneak attack (up to 4d6 extra wound damage)

Your poisoned (con damage)

Your the last/only one there (one on one duels). You think a Sith would leave a Jedi wounded/alive?

Your opponent has Force Mastery and likes to Force Grip the wounded (no lie on that one either).

Some of these are RBDM and not really the fault of V/WP. However, a Crit can drop you to unconsciousness in one hit, which makes a.) the Player no longer involved and b.) an open target to an opptunistic opponent. And unlike D&D, there is no quick fix that gets you back into the action (Cures) so when your PC is dropped, you can go grab a smoke or something, cuz its a long night before you can recover.

Almost all of our combats end with us dragging the other half our our party over our shoulders.

As an Aside: Its easier to get crits when your Jedi CAN get 7 or so attacks. How? Well, theres TWF, Rapid Strike (Jedi Weapon Master), Normal Attacks, and of course, Heroic Surge. We've faced an NPC Dark Jedi which could hit each of us (6 players) all once without benefit of Whirlwind Atk. That was an encounter with 2 PCs dragging the unconsious (and de-limbed, remember my take-a-limb rule?) back to the ship.

 

[Remathilis]

Of late (again, I'm done DMing it, but I still play it) we've made hundreds of fixes/tweaks to the system:

Lightsabers never do more than 3d8 damage, we're working on what to fix bumps with (previously, all bumps added +2 damage not +1d8, but that still proved too easy to take people to late negatives)
Only one Prestige Class per PC (a few exceptions exist) to avoid the dips into Jedi Wpn Mstr or Elite Trooper.
Crit Threat Altering abilities do not stack (so no Imp. Crit + Customization + devsitating strike combo)
Take-a-Limb (with a limit to cybernetic enhancements)
Oh yeah: Our current team has only two/six Jedi, and neither have lightsabers right now. That sorta helped, but a sufficiently strong bounty hunter with a force pike still managed to knock our martial arts themed soldier to negative -6 on a crit in the second round.

I still think we need to banish our DMs Dice to the God of Hurricanes: Latrine.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Most of the issues people have with the VP/WP system seem to arise from a bad experience with lightsabers in SW.

Well, to be fair, the Jedi would still have been dead if the hit had been with a heavy blaster pistol or blaster rifle, both of which are extremely common weapons. The blaster rifle even has the same threat range (19-20) as the base lightsaber.

I'd bet that SW played without Jedi or playing an entirely different campaign that uses VP/WP would change people's opinions. Lightsabers + crits + WP = instant death.

Yeah, but if you're playing SW without Jedi (Dark or Light), are you really playing SW?

 

[GlassJaw]

Your con

Correct.

Your facing a bounty hunter

You're.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Yeah, but if you're playing SW without Jedi (Dark or Light), are you really playing SW?

Absolutely. Some of the best SW games I've played were Jedi-less, especially when playing during the New Hope/Empire era. Overall, in SW games, I tend to like all-Jedi or no-Jedi games.

 

[genshou]

Sounds like the problem a lot of people have with the system does indeed stem from lightsabers. Like GlassJaw, I am fond of the grittier side of d20 System. I like using vp/wp for modern games because it emphasizes tactics, especially cover and knowing when not to engage. It's great for games that feature a lot more grit than Star Wars usually does for the "heroes." Not my definition of what a "hero" in my game would be doing, but whatever works for you. I think it's nice if you're trying to emulate the feel of a commando team like Wraith Squadron from the X-Wing series. The main characters usually only die in starship combats (not much you can do about surviving if your ship gets blasted), but every once in a while even the heroes get shot up. Usually they're just unconscious and bordering on death, though. Nothing a bacta treatment won't fix

What I really don't understand why everyone here is whining about PC deaths. Then again, my players long since proved my alignment is on the Evil axis when I GM...

 

[genshou]

Absolutely. Some of the best SW games I've played were Jedi-less, especially when playing during the New Hope/Empire era. Overall, in SW games, I tend to like all-Jedi or no-Jedi games.

My player in Pledge of Tyranny also plays a single-player Star Wars game with me occasionally, in which his character is the XO of a mercenary starfighter squadron and an aspiring Jedi Guardian. Other than another fighter pilot who is a Force Adept, the Force is more or less "dormant" among the galaxy's denizens. Of course, the game is currently about 2 months before the destruction of Alderaan... heh, lots of work to be done in that campaign.

When the rare non-starship combat occurs, I want the chance of somebody important getting gunned down occasionally. I could never have that with D&D's hit point system.

 

[kenobi65]

A Crit is death when

Your dealing with 4d8(+) lightsaber damage, plus strength (or dex, Form IV mastery)

Your con is lower than 14 (max damage on a rifle is 24, assuming no customization, weapon specializaiton, point blank shot, etc)

Not death. *Possible* death. Remathilis, you keep intimating that a critical hit is an automatic kill, and it's just not so.

Your first example: An average roll on 4d8 is 18 points. A good damage roll on a crit will be deadly, yes. It's not automatic by any means. (That said, the one thing my Living Force PC lives in fear of is baddies with lightsaber skills.)

Your second example: The shooter would need to get a near-max damage roll (odds of a 23 or 24 on 3d8 are less than 1%) to kill a PC with 13 WP. Even a PC with 10 WP would require the shooter to do 20 points on 3d8...still not likely (though certainly possible). And, unlike the lightsaber example, this is one that armor DR can help.

 

[Desdichado]

My rant is done. Anyone else want to share horror stories of V/WP or try to convince me my group is more lucky than normal with those 20? I like the idea in concept, but the mounds of dead character sheets I've seen leave me on the fence about it in practice...

I like em. Aren't you supposed to have dead characters from time to time? Otherwise, the ones who remain aren't going to feel much like they can die, no matter how stupid (or unlucky) they are.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Next, I have to disagree with the notion that a higher lethality rate makes for a poor RPG. The RP in RPG stands for role-playing. Star Wars isn't about the Jedi duels or the big ship battles... it is chiefly a movie about "morality" and politics whose characters are swept into the Empire's foul plans and put in a position to stop them somehow. That said...

Mostly this thread is full of good stuff, but I do have to take exception to the idea that increased lethality makes for better role-playing.

Star Wars *is* about Jedi duels and big ship battles and morality and politics. It's about all those things. The game system should (IMHO) be able to handle a Jedi without making him death with a glowstick. Maybe it can. In the original poster's experience, obviously it doesn't.

Making combat more deadly does very little, by itself. Much of the time, it results in higher body count and thus more disturbed plot lines and story discontinuity. It results in characters favoring certain feats or skills or character builds over others. None of that encourages playing a role, and the first result actually discourages it (because investment in a role has a very good chance of not being rewarded if the character dies because of an unlucky die roll).

Enjoying more lethal combat is all well and good, but to hold it up as some higher order of RPG play compared to HP isn't accurate.

That said...

There's a lot of good advice in this thread about how to make VP/WP less lethal on crits. My favorite so far: crit damage just goes to WP, not VP. It can help mediate the problem of super-lethality and it helps you to enjoy the system without a major overhaul.