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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5735219" data-attributes="member: 3448">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.</blockquote>

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