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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 6176821" data-attributes="member: 23240">I used a modified system for wounds and dying a few years ago, when I ran 3e.It assumed very abstract HPs (that means - no meaningful hits until one goes to zero) and aimed low lethality (but I also removed all resurrection-type spells).It goes like this:You don't track HPs below zero. When you're at zero, you're out of fight. No need for stabilization, but you also don't get up when you receive a healing spell. You need 5-10 minutes to regain consciousness.But you have a choice when you are down: you may take a wound to get back to action.A wound is a lasting penalty. The player decides to take it or not, but the GM defines what exactly it is. A wound only starts affecting the character when the current scene ends. So, you continue fight with no penalty, but you are penalized in all further scenes.First time you take a wound, it's a minor one. You take -1 to rolls and/or static numbers that it would affect (eg. movement rolls with wounded leg, perception and social rolls with swollen eye and so on). After healing to full HPs and a full night's sleep, the wound is gone.If you have a minor wound and take one more, it's serious. It's -2 to appropriate rolls (as above) and it needs a week of full rest to recover.If you have a serious wound and take one more, it's severe. It's -2 to all rolls and lasts for two levels.If you have a severe wound and take one more, you die at the end of the scene.In other words, PCs only die on player request, but they may be easily knocked out and kept down without a risk of accidental death. It allowed me to play hard as a GM without fear of TPK and it allowed players to act heroically, escalating stakes when they fought for something they considered important.At first, the wounds and associated penalties seemed minor - but when things got hard, the penalties cumulated. Serious wounds need more time to recover than players could easily spend on it (I run games where NPCs are active and typically don't wait until the heroes feel ready to face them). And severe wounds require quite a lot of adventuring with the penalty to get rid of it.</blockquote>

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