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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5788285" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think there are a number of things to be said for having a set of "dodge an attack" chits. They add to the player's agency in combat, giving him a way to inject some creativity into the story. They add a dimension besides simply a single straight numeric progression too. There is more room in the system design for various kinds of unique and interesting ways for characters to develop. It gives the game developers another knob they can twist in order to achieve different types of feel in the game.In any case it certainly allows you to differentiate more readily between combat and other sorts of situations where PCs can take damage. Hit points always had the issue that they were not too bad as an abstraction for dealing with a couple of combatants trading blows. Sooner or later one of them tires, suffers enough minor damage to bring down their defenses, etc. Not perfect by any means, but at least you get a reasonable feel there. Hit points OTOH are terrible as a gauge of other sorts of situations when you have huge piles of them. You can work around it, sort of, but the guy that can fall off a 200' cliff and walk away is the classic case. OTOH if you build a system where everyone has a few hit points and they don't increase much you DO have a swingy system. You can argue otherwise but clearly a few lucky die rolls in such a system will rapidly swing a fight one way or the other. So constructing a couple of different ways for defense and durability to work makes sense. To clarify, the 'dodge chit' thing is applicable to both PCs and NPCs. One of the things this can do is allow for situations of greater advantage or disadvantage. Get caught by surprise? You can't dodge a blow you didn't see coming. All of a sudden there's a premium on planning out a good strategy for a fight. Hacking guys up in a melee is one way to approach an enemy, but avoiding his active defenses is even better and there can be ways to do that.It just adds another dimension to the game overall, and can be set up in such a way that it somewhat decouples the core numbers from the power curve. I think it would overall add a decent amount to the flexibility of the system.</blockquote>

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