• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

Need help checking scaling of wound levels

Don't know. The first thing I think of is Zweihaender, where if you take enough damage, your wound category can change and you roll to see what specific wound you received. Or there's Star War's wounds, which are a separate type of hit points. Or there's D&D 3.5 condition-like wounds, where you take a general roll penalty for reaching half hit points. Just don't tell me you're doing the 4e thing, where you get better as you're wounded.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

No nothing like 4e. The wound point system that I found was in Rune I think. Basically the idea is that instead of having a pool of hit points like DnD you have a set amount of chart that says how much damage a certain kind of weapon would do to a human in general. Then you have toughness which varies from person to person instead of having different amounts of hit points.

So if you have a weapon that does 12 points and you attack someone with 8 toughness then only 4 points gets through as a wound. A normal human's chart is 5/10/15/20 which covers Light (-1)/Moderate (-2)/Serious (-3)/Heavy(-4). So that attack did a light wound. You don't write down the 4 hit point damage. You only write down the light wound mark (-1). After the first attack or so this becomes very fast because everyone knows what the damage chart for a human is. A humans can only take a total of -8 before they go down. This can be from a light wound (-1), 2 moderate wounds (-2), and one serious wound (-3) or some other combination. Each of those damage marks is applied to all the actions and defenses of that character.

The advantage of this system is that players seem to actually care about getting hit. They don't just stand there and fight in the open. They start looking for ways to take cover or maneuver to lower the hit or not get hit.
A tough character can take a lot of damage without a lot of bookkeeping (if most of the damage is less than their toughness). However a grandmother can make a lucky hit and kill most any human with a knife so normal characters do not become superheroes just from leveling. There is no point at which a character can just jump off a cliff or something and walk away because they have lots of hit points. On the other end a low level character can't kill themselves by picking their noses either.

Plus you have additional effects depending on the level of damage you take at one time. You could become stunned or staggered from a hard hit. Some one can kill your character by doing deadly damage in one hit or by wearing you down.

To me this models reality AND movies better than most of the other systems I've seen. You can have a coldly real game just be not allowing a high toughness or you can get a bit heroic with high toughness.
 


Into the Woods

Remove ads

Top