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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4430903" data-attributes="member: 7635">While the rest of your document is interesting (and decisively different than what I would play) I want to address this.V/WP is an illusion. Having played countless games of Star Wars Revised, I can tell you Vitality/Wound SOUNDS good, but it has the following flaws:1.) It is binary: if an attack 2-19 hits, it's no better than hit points + healing surges (absorb massive damage in fight, short rest to heal afterwords). If you roll that 20, the PC is effectively out of fight, if not dead. There is rarely ever middle ground; few PCs survive a wound-attack, few PCs who never get critted ever experience anything different than what hit points provide.2.) Damage Scale: Typical Con Scores for PCs range from 10-18, barring racial traits. Typical damage can deal WELL over that number, particularly at high level. Spell damage, sneak attack, favored enemy, paladin smites, arcane strikes, etc often maximize damage so that an attack that might not make a dent against a foes vitality KILLS a equally hearty foe on a crit.3.) Vitality is an Illusion: You never know how many hits your PC can take. Ever. A fully rested party, no matter their level, can die in four rounds against an orc with a great-axe if that orc crits four times in a row. Perfectly healthy PCs drop in one blow, and can die before anyone can help them. Because of this, there is no way to judge how lethal a given challenge actually IS. There is no way guess if you can fight another round or such. As I said before, You could have PCs with infinite vitality, but every round they have an increased chance of dying.4.) It all boils down to crits: Since you could spend 5-10 rounds chopping through somethings vitality, its often safer (and wiser) to short-cut to crits. Crits become the most important thing in the game; they spell victory or defeat. A fight completely going in the PCs favor swings wildly on that 20, in one round, the monster with 5 wp left just killed your almost-full VP fighter. Improved Crit, Keen Weapons, and anything else that improves crits become paramount to success. Even spells that target AC (like Acid Arrow) become worth more than thier high-damage cousins (like fireball) because fireball can only target VP, but Acid arrow can potentially do 2d4 wp a round...5.) It unfavorably affects PCs. A given monster (be it dragon, orc, or whatever) is only subject to one encounter's worth of combat. Even if all four PCs target him with their attacks, the chances of given monster dropping with a crit is low. However, PCs are subject to COUNTLESS attack rolls from a bunch of monsters, traps, etc. The odds one will get critted is extremely high, and that means  more than likely that a PC will die of crit-damage than any given monster will. IIRC, Rodney Thompson said there is a 25% chance any given PC will die over the course of 20 levels. That means statistically, if four heroes start at level one, chances are only one will be playing the same PC at level 20. 6.) Its anti-climatic. Sometimes, the orc chieftan, the BBEG, or any other major encounter you have planned ends in one round, before all the PCs (or even the boss himself) get to act. Sometimes, your PC is down and dying before you even roll initiative. Sometimes, you have the foe to 1 VP, and THEN You crit, making the last 5 rounds of VP chopping worthless. Sometimes, you get the foe to 1 wp, and he drops you with a well timed crit. Combat becomes swingy, too dependent on the d20 (and not on the PCs luck, skill, or stats) and often times leads to anti-climatic encounters where all the rounds you didn't crit were wasted because the crit ended everything.7.) It encourages cheating: No joke. If you want your PCs to live through a given encounter, you WILL be ignoring a lot of 20s you roll as a DM. Likewise, if you have a less-than-scrupulous player, the odds a 20 gets rolled as things look grim goes up exponentially. Its highly dependent on the group, but calling out "twenty!" when things look grim becomes very tempting to even the most honest player...8.) It makes for some weird rule calls: If Vitality represents non-serious injury, what does AC represent? Can a scorpion who does vitality damage also poison a foe (since its not a "wound" per se?) How does one turn a fireball into a non-serious blow? Are all sneak attacks (which target a foes vital spot) automatically wound damage then? The verisimilitude V/WP offers breaks down on these corner cases.A note on crits: I keep bringing them up because they, and they alone make the difference in V/WP. If crits don't go to WP, you've just given the PCs +con score to hp (with the caveat that they have a hard time healing those last 10 hp). Crits make the game "dangerous" but in practice they just make everything swingy and dependent on luck, not stats.I should also note there is PLENTY of discussion on why Star Wars went away from V/WP in the SAGA edition on WotC's board. Do a Google search, you'll find plenty from the SAGA designers and the fans of V/WP on the issue.</blockquote>

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