Never going to "Dieing" in combat?

[marli]

Hi wondered what people think of this idea.

Some of the numbers below are intentionally vague as this idea is system unspecific.
for obvious reasons these rules only apply to the heros.

being "downed" mid combat sucks in roleplay.
you just sit thier pointing out that if they don't revive you the party's screwed(at least from your point of view) for slower systems it means the difference from doing nothing 3/4 of the time to doing nothing at all.
but having a character that cant be killed also sucks.
so I have come up with an interesting idea. you cant die in combat. you die later from your wounds!

you start with X wounds(depending how hard your are). having positive wounds is just that, all damage is minor and you laugh it off.
having 0 or less wounds means some tasks now exert yourself you risk causing futher damage.
as you number drops further into the minus mark your change of surviving after the fight gets less and less likely.
being a "Hero" you always survive the fight but then drop dead from your wounds.

This creates two effects.
you always get the option to fight until you win but at a cost.
you always get the option to retreat.

but at what cost???
so at -1 wounds you can collapse and hope your party defeats the bad guy or fight on knowing you are risking fatal wounds.
however at this point you are % change to incure further wounds depending on two facters.
the % of your max wounds in negetive / how hard an action is.
so a character with 10 wounds at -5 wounds is 50/3= 16% for an easy action 32% for a mediam action and 50% for a hard action.
once you reach -10 wounds you are 33% for easy actions 66% for medium actions and 100% for hard actions.

after combat if you are in negetive wounds you collapse.
any wounds over you max you must roll beat negetive efffects.

various effects start applying depending on how many fails you get, anything from a nice scar to death with additional decapatation.(he might have taken your head off but you're a HERO! you held it on long enough to teach him nobody messes with heros)

this means TPKs get cool!
suicide missions get cool!

ADDITIONAL RULES.
this rule applys to all characters and the "collapse" point comes when all of one party reaches minus points.

 

[the Jester]

So pcs never actually fall in combat?

Not to my taste, that's for sure. I'm not one for softening the blow.

 

[marli]

correct...just 30 seconds later when the effects hit!

i'd say trying to fight a fight that you know will TPK when you had the chance to run/hide is failure.
the fact that effects dont hit until POST combat make it no less a failure.

 

[DracoSuave]

The reason dying exists in the game is to add tension. If a dying player isn't doing anything in your 4 man group, 3 players aren't doing their job. There's so many ways to get a guy back up that dying itself should only be a threat once those ways run out.

Also, house rules and variants yo

 

[marli]

ah though it did post house rules...
anyway.
as an additional note you dont "STOP" dieing you just do it later in stead of now in the middle of fun combat.
and healing still applys.

 

[interwyrm]

I like it. Being mortally wounded but fighting on is a staple of heroic fiction. Dying is still part of the tension, but instead of a let down, it's an opportunity to go out with a bang.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It's kind of like the Diehard ability, but for every PC.

I can see the appeal, but it's not my personal cup of tea. What about making it a feat with a Con min as a prerequisite?

 

[KarinsDad]

Meh.

Personally, I prefer to have give players "go to the well" abilities (typically specific items that I hand out as DM) so that they can work at preventing dying themselves instead of cinematic rules that make an implausible game even more implausible.

The other aspect of it is that players will want to then use magic in that 30 second timeframe to change the outcome and then be disappointed when nothing they do works.

And being down midpoint in combat only sucks if the player is a bit immature. I've had PCs down due to great rolls by the DM, and had a great time cheering on the other players. Nail biting fights where the survival of my PC was totally dependent on the success of the other PCs. It's all on how one approaches the game.

I've seen this (somewhat whiny) concept of "my PC died, that sucks" just this summer. We were playing Encounters and a very young player (late teens, early 20s) made several serious earlier tactical mistakes for his PC and then ended up getting criticaled at first level for something like 25 hit points when his PC was currently around 5 hit points (he thought it was smart to go charge the toughest guy on the board when at really low hit points instead of staying put and finishing off the lesser foe his PC was currently fighting). Straight to death, do not pass go. He was one unhappy player. To me at the time, it seemed like he wasn't going to be having fun unless he was part of the group taking out the BBEG.

The concept that every PC has to be "THE HERO" every encounter was what led to this PC's death. The same applies to dying PCs. D&D and other FRPGs are a team activity and a given player's PC doesn't have to be in the spotlight every single time. It's really ok to just sit it out for a few rounds and allow the other players to attempt to save your PC. Your PC doesn't have to be the center of attention every round and able to fight all of the time, regardless of situation.

In fact, it's the more selfless concept of being a team player that typically results in combats not resulting in TPKs. Not all, but quite a few PC deaths that I have witnessed were because some player had his PC go off and do something on his own, or have a striker PC charge a group of foes and get surrounded, or some other equally subpar "heroic decision" that ended up with that PC getting smoked. Working as a team sometimes avoids these "heroically stupid" deaths.

It's better for the players to work on ways to avoid PC death in the first place (acquiring Daily items, working as a team, etc.) then to come up with house rules to allow a player to go out heroically (especially when it's sometimes the fault of the player that his PC is dying in the first place).

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

This reminds me of how "damage" works in Dogs in the Vineyard. (I put "damage" in quotes because the concept in Dogs, called fallout, is both broader and different from normal damage.) The Dogs approach also has you never falling during a conflict. In fact, you don't even know how badly hurt you necessarily are--you just pick up dice of fallout. After the conflict is over, win or lose, you roll the fallout dice--typically a big handful of dice, ranging in size from d4s to d10s, but for the most part only the two highest rolls matter. If you get a 20 (only possible if you've been shot, and unlikely then--I've never seen it happen), you're killed--you get to give a little speech if you like, and then your PC is dead. If you get a 16-19, your PC dies unless somebody else succeeds in a "skill challenge" to save you, in which case you take some long term effects. Lower numbers won't kill you, but can produce some long-term or short-term negative consequences.

The d20 equivalent would be that you don't roll damage as you take the damage, only at the end of the battle. In the meantime, you're accumulating dice of damage--so instead of an ogre hitting you for 15 hp (the results of 1d12+8), it would hit you for 1d12+8 (unresolved until the end of the combat). You might then end the combat with 4d12+3d10+5d6+30 damage. You would then roll all of those dice, compare it to your hp total, and get a result like "Greater than two times hp, dead; greater than hp, serious wound that takes a while to go away (and maybe a skill challenge to save you, but meh); greater than half-hp but less than hp, minor wound that lasts for one encounter or something; less than half-hp, you dust yourself off and are fine."

One of the things I like about the idea is that you would have interesting tipping points--"Hmm, I could get killed by this fight, but I'm probably okay--I better start being more cautious." Or "wow, I'm almost certainly dead at the end of this fight--time to go out like a hero! Let's do everything we can to direct damage to me, and I'm going to stay in this fight and win it, but the rest of you can retreat." I could see that being very awesome and cinematic.

How magical healing would work is an interesting question. My guess is that it should remove dice from the damage pool, but that there should be a rule that the final pool can never be smaller than the biggest the pool got to? (i.e. if you made it up to 4d12+6d6+20, and got healed for 4d6+10, your current pool would go down to 4d12+2d6+10, from which it might then climb to 4d12+8d6+24. But if at the end of the fight, your pool is lower than 4d12+6d6+20, you roll that instead.) The idea would be to prevent lots of healing all at the end of a fight, while it's technically still going on but the PCs have clearly won. But this is inelegant. Maybe you could just let the DM declare that a fight is over, and roll damage, at the DMs option?

Anyway, it might be neat. It wouldn't be for everyone, but it would create an interesting cinematic feel for combat, while retaining the possibility of PC death. Note that this also needs to be considered with the game's approach to raising the dead. If the dead can be raised easily, then increasing the probability of PCs dying while guaranteeing that the PCs can win every fight has the effect of vastly increasing the PCs' capabilities.

 

[the Jester]

So if I understand you right, my 100-hp dude can take 149 points of damage and just keep swinging until the fight is over, giving anyone with any healing all the time in the world to save them and taking all the pressure off. So basically the bad guys always get whittled down in numbers while the good guys don't (so again, the pressure is off).

Yeah, definitely not to my taste.