Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="heretic888" data-source="post: 7470194" data-attributes="member: 60326">Yep. If pushed into a corner, I would describe hit points as one's capacity to turn a serious blow into a glancing blow or a near miss. This "capacity", however we define it, still has no clear relationship to a character's physical or psychological state as evidenced by the fact that it only indirectly interfaces with any of the game's other procedures or subsystems. Yes, there are a few powers, feats, and traits that interface with the Bloodied condition. However, as I pointed out earlier, the game doesn't care if you are Bloodied with 49% of your hit points or Bloodied with 1% of your hit points. Yes, there are multiple ways to represent "morale" in the game. Morale saves are just another way of representing it.Sounds like a good use of the DM's Best Friend to me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The key to using this approach effectively is to have a goal for your encounters other than "not die" or "kill all the orcs".  I'm not sure that approach is particularly "simple", I mean immediate saving throws are also part of the game's existing architecture too (such as when a character makes a save to avoid being forced into dangerous terrain). It sounds to me like adding a bunch of conditional traits to enemies and I generally think monsters having healing is a bad idea in 4E to begin with. Personally, as a GM it sounds like adding a bunch of book-keeping to the game without much real benefit.Like I touched upon in my last post, I have other goals with my system other than "simulating morale" (although it does that too):* Makes combat faster and more chaotic.* Gives more agency to the players.* Gives more flexibility in using hard or very hard encounters without overwhelming the players.* Discourages the preeminence of focus-fire tactics.* Promotes a cast of recurring villains or NPCs for more story-focused campaigns.* Doesn't significantly add to the game's complexity or book-keeping.I'm not sure what goal adding conditional traits to monster stat blocks reaches but it does sound like more complexity to how I usually run my games.</blockquote>

Verification