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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5955923" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.)</blockquote>

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