My HP Fix

[I'm A Banana]

Except that, as I edited in with reference to your earlier post, you can't "shout people back from the dead" -

Sure you can. You just shouldn't use HP Healing to represent that. There's still a myriad and sundry ways to represent that without HP Healing. HP Healing isn't necessary to do that.

And if you REALLY WANT, if it is VITAL that you be able to shout people back from the dead in your game via adding points to a score, you can always play a game where it's all Fate and you don't have any HP and people die of absurdly literal metaphors. I assumed that most people wouldn't be really interested in no-meat-at-all, but the proposal works fine that way, too, just as it does without Fate.

Your panic appears unjustified to me, as every bit you love has been potentially preserved for you, without once subjecting any of it on anyone who doesn't want it.

You're welcome.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Sure you can. You just shouldn't use HP Healing to represent that. There's still a myriad and sundry ways to represent that without HP Healing. HP Healing isn't necessary to do that.

And if you REALLY WANT, if it is VITAL that you be able to shout people back from the dead in your game via adding points to a score, you can always play a game where it's all Fate and you don't have any HP and people die of absurdly literal metaphors. I assumed that most people wouldn't be really interested in no-meat-at-all, but the proposal works fine that way, too, just as it does without Fate.

Your panic appears unjustified to me, as every bit you love has been potentially preserved for you, without once subjecting any of it on anyone who doesn't want it.

You're welcome.

But when you have hit points all fate points, then you can no longer have hits causing damage. Poisonous attacks would only affect you when you go unconcious anyway. And you can't have the Cleric cast Cure Light Wounds and have that heal fate points. The spell cures light wounds, not your fate/stamina/training/dodginess.

It is not that simple.

 

[Sadras]

And you can't have the Cleric cast Cure Light Wounds and have that heal fate points. The spell cures light wounds, not your fate/stamina/training/dodginess. It is not that simple.

I disagree. Currently the spell/power Cure Light Wounds is as abstract as the Hit Point system. If you're okay with it now, you should be okay when you have only Fate Points. It's all hogwash.

And Kamikaze Midget (I'm speaking under correction) was just being absurd for emphasis. I mean he does add further

assumed that most people wouldn't be really interested in no-meat-at-all, but the proposal works fine that way, too, just as it does without Fate.

and I think its best to read all his post in context.

 

[13garth13]

I must be part of the 1/10 then, as I'd no idea Twilight had an RPG...though I suppose it comes as no real surprise to learn it does.

That said, my question from upthread remains yet unanswered: how do Twilight's hp mechanics work and what of use can they offer us here?

Lanefan

Heh...I clearly didn't write my response down clearly enough...it was not an rpg based on the Twilight series, but rather a series of rpgs called "Twilight:X" (Twilight:2000, Twilight:2013 etc).

Again, I've never played but I sure do remember the ads from Dragon back in the 1980s.

Cheers,
Colin

 

[pemerton]

But is it, though; and is it?

How many others here have tinkered with h.p. at least to some extent in their edition(s) of choice

<snip>

That said, I'll bang the drum once more for a Body-Fatigue system, it's not that muchmore complicated and it solves so many narration problems. (but I still won't use healing-by-shout)

Aren't tinkering, and drum-banging for particular variants, just what is meant to be in a module (or perhaps a dial)?

So suppose you go 4e or playtest style, and set starting hit points as CON + X. And hp are lost and gained all from a single pool, as per traditional D&D.

It is then easy to say: as an option, treat the CON component of hp as wounds. And then to introduce variant healing rules for that. And, if you're adventurous, even ways of ignoring the "fatigue" hp and cutting straight to the wound points. Or wound penalties. Or an option to fall unconscious once wound points are taken (so CON becomes the back door, and hp totals play a bit more like classic D&D).

This doesn't require rewriting the attack, damage or AC rules (as far as I can tell - though you might offer variant crit rules as part of it) and so seems to make an ideal module.

If I don't want to go down that way, I don't have to. And if I'm feeling like a dose of "shouty fate peanuts", I instead use the "death saves/stabilisation roll give you a chance to revive" option printed in the sidebar on the opposite page. But this also doesn't require changing any other part of the game.

And the warlord healing rules can appear under the warlord class description. You can ban warlords from your game, I can use them in mine, but they don't require changing the basic hit point mechanics: damage depletes, inspiration restores.

If I want to use warlords and "CON hp = wound points", then I have to decide whether or not warlord healing can restore the CON points. But again, I can make that decision without having to rewrite any other part of the basic hit points mechanics.

At least, this is how I envisage modularity working in this area.

 

[pemerton]

It is not that simple.

Agreed.

 

[I'm A Banana]

These are all fluff issues, which means they're not too hard to solve:

But when you have hit points all fate points, then you can no longer have hits causing damage.

If you're using a system where there is nothing but Fate Points, every hit you take gets Fate Points spent to avoid dying from it, until you run out of Fate Points, and then you can't avoid dying from damage.

"Run out of luck" was the euphamism I believe pemerton used.

Poisonous attacks would only affect you when you go unconcious anyway.

Poison in a Fate-using system can be transmitted through scratches, cuts, and mere broken skin. Which isn't entirely unrealistic. A sting from a scorpion would just be a painful pinprick (e.g.: not potentially lethal in and of itself) if it wasn't for the deadly venom. In a fantasy world, it also makes sense that if you get splashed with a droplet of dire scorpion venom, you might have some poison effects, even through the skin.

Additionally, if a poison's effect is mostly additional damage, it ends up just being more lost Fate anyway, and can be fluffed away however you prefer to fluff away lost Fate. +1d6 poison damage is no different from +1d6 sneak attack damage or +1d6 damage on a charge.

And you can't have the Cleric cast Cure Light Wounds and have that heal fate points. The spell cures light wounds, not your fate/stamina/training/dodginess.

In a Fate-only system, all healing is Fate healing, so C*W is more about restoring divine favor and receiving a god's blessing and luck and maybe scabbing over some knicks and bruises than it is about knitting flesh. In Gygaxian HP it's always been a bit about that anyway, a Fate-only system just removes the elements of C*W that magically give you back that hunk of brain you lost when the morningstar walloped the back of your skull, because now that doesn't ever really happen in the narrative unless you're adding description to some already-realized death.

It is not that simple.

Fixing fluff is pretty easy once you determine what you want your "damage" to mean.

And I still think that a better way to embody the fiction of inspiring someone to get back up after being wounded beyond their usual threshold in the game mechanics is to avoid restoring whatever "points" in use entirely, but for some reason it is apparently vitally important for some folks to have permanently restoring some point-pool as the only way to bring you back from the brink of death. I don't really yet understand that myopic fixation on that particular specific mechanical implementation, but the proposal certainly doesn't necessarily invalidate it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

So suppose you go 4e or playtest style, and set starting hit points as CON + X. And hp are lost and gained all from a single pool, as per traditional D&D.

It is then easy to say: as an option, treat the CON component of hp as wounds. And then to introduce variant healing rules for that.

You don't need "variant" healing rules for meat damage.

And, if you're adventurous, even ways of ignoring the "fatigue" hp and cutting straight to the wound points. Or wound penalties. Or an option to fall unconscious once wound points are taken (so CON becomes the back door, and hp totals play a bit more like classic D&D).

This doesn't require rewriting the attack, damage or AC rules (as far as I can tell - though you might offer variant crit rules as part of it) and so seems to make an ideal module.

If I don't want to go down that way, I don't have to. And if I'm feeling like a dose of "shouty fate peanuts", I instead use the "death saves/stabilisation roll give you a chance to revive" option printed in the sidebar on the opposite page. But this also doesn't require changing any other part of the game.

And the warlord healing rules can appear under the warlord class description. You can ban warlords from your game, I can use them in mine, but they don't require changing the basic hit point mechanics: damage depletes, inspiration restores.

If I want to use warlords and "CON hp = wound points", then I have to decide whether or not warlord healing can restore the CON points. But again, I can make that decision without having to rewrite any other part of the basic hit points mechanics.

At least, this is how I envisage modularity working in this area.

Well, looks like you've described the proposal fairly accurately, using only subtly different terminology.

So, why aren't you a smiling kitten about this yet?

Is it because I use HP to mean meat and Fate to mean fate and that this definition is intolerable to you? Is this really just a semantic squabble over which half of the Gygaxian HP gets to be enshrined as "The Real HP" and which one is "The Other HP?" That you want Fate-mostly to be the "default" and Meat-mostly to be "an option" and take issue with a proposal that inverts that? Cuz if so, this is a lot of word count blown on a fairly meaningless buzztem.

And that makes ALL THESE PUPPIES VERY SAD, YOU GUYS

 

[pemerton]

Isn't this very much done on a simpler scale with the "bloodied" state within 4E? Benefits accruing to certain classes/races when the bloodied state kicks in.

But "bloodied" can cut both ways - there are attacks/effects that can be more dangerous against bloodied foes.

Crazy Jerome's suggestion was for a distinct Fate Point-type mechanic where the points are unequivocally a good thing to have and spend, and you can use them even after you recover from your wounds. So pressing on when wounded can make you more bad-ass even later on down the track when you're better.

At least as I understood the proposal, some of these features of it are meant to address the same, recurring issue of making the incentive to push on real and unambiguous.

Okay this sounds quite interesting. In a completely rough example using DnD as the game system, is it similar to granting a character XP when being challenged within a death spiral? So almost treating the death spiral like an "Encounter" like an environmental hazard. Because that actually sounds like quite a neat idea - lending to the growth of the character through tough circumstances (if I'm interpreting you right).

In BW, advancement is a bit like RQ - you advance either by using a skill/ability, or by practising it.

Using a skill/ability involves a check, and besides the DC of a check (which, in BW, is set in objective terms - more like 3E D&D than 4e D&D, which uses relative/scaling DCs) a check can also be classified in terms of how difficult it was for a PC (there are 3 categories - in D&D this might be "succeeds on at least 10+", "succeeds on 15+", "succeeds on 20 only").[/I]

To advance a skill ability, you need to accrue a certain number of checks at each level of relative difficulty. As your skill goes up, the advancement table requires more checks, and more of them have to be from the higher levels of relative difficulty. So it becomes harder to improve higher abilities. And this is compounded by the fact that DCs are objective - so as you get better, it is actually harder to find things to do that are in the higher levels of difficulty (ie the ingame situations don't automatically get tougher as you do, unlike say 4e).

And this is where wounding comes in. Wounding imposes penalties, which therefore increase the relative difficulty of a given DC. So when you are wounded, it is easier to find checks to make that have higher relative difficulty. Thus facilitating advancement. Furthermore, as a general rule you don't need to succeed at a check to accrue a tick towards advancement - you just need to make it. So even if your wounds are making you fail all those checks that have just become relatively more challenging, you are still scoring those higher-level checks towards your advancement.

(Practice works, basically, by letting you "tick off" checks at a given level of relative difficulty simply by spending lots of time. Wounds actually make practice harder, because you generally can't practice while resting and recovering.)

Anyway, that's a long explanation of how BW does it.

My first though about how to do this in 4e is this: level up the opponents, DCs, etc when you're wounded - so they're harder to succeed against, but worth more XP. And give the XP for trying, not just for succeeding (Essentials has a stealth errate to skill challenge XP awarding them for trying, not just succeeding - you'd need to do the same for combat).

Now levelling up skill challenge DCs on the fly is trivial, but levelling up 4e monsters can be a bit maths-y, so you might want to find some other more practical way of doing it. And also, at this stage you haven't got the incentive that BW generates by making the relatively harder checks more easily available in the gameworld. In 4e, to generate that incentive we want to make the levelled-up encounter just a bit more appealing than a normal encounter of that level.

The simplest solution would seem to be to give all the monsters +1 to hit, and all the PCs -1 to hit, and make the monsters be worth +1 level XP. The bonuses and penalties produce the same effect as monsters levelled up by 1 as far as attacks and defences go, but the monsters aren't getting the extra hp they would for that level, nor the extra damage. That's the incentive for pressing on when wounded.

Does that make any sense? (You'd need to actually add the rules for inflicting and recovering from wounds, of course. The disease track is the natural place to go to for recovery mechanics.)

 

[jrowland]

I refereed Twilight 2000. What can it's "HP" system teach us? That realism sucks. You tracked every bullet. The bullet penetrated gear, armor, then flesh. A SAW (Squad Assault Weapon) fired something like 100 bullets in a round (in game mechanics). Tracking each bullets hit, hit location, gear-armor-flesh penetration was a nightmare. Basically, don't get shot at and don't shoot.

Abstract HP works in a narrative/strategic game. I suppose 4E would be better with a more realistic HP system like twilight 2000 (not fully like it, just more like it) since it is more tactical. The tactical battles are the shining star in 4E. If that is all your doing every session: playing out a battle, then more realism is cool. But if story is your thing, lets resolve the battle quickly and get on with the story.