Schrodinger's HP and Combat

[AbdulAlhazred]

In Classic Traveller there is a death spiral: injury deducts from your stats, and minimum stats are needed to gain bonuses, or avoid penalties, on making attacks; and losing END reduces your number of non-weakened blows and swings.

I can't remember how/if RQ handles death spirals - I'll look it up when I get home!

I don't even remember the END part TBH. You're right though, STR and DEX damage can reduce you to penalties. The truth is though you have 7 on average in each stat, and damage is usually on the order of at least 2-3 d6, and IIRC you cannot 'split' damage, you have to take it all on one stat (your choice which one) until it overflows onto a 2nd one. So the vast majority of the time in Traveller you get hit and you now have 0 in usually STR, and maybe you can still move around, sort of, but combat is right out anyway. The spiral isn't much of a spiral, its more of a steep ramp! Combat with primitive weapons is a bit less outright lethal than old-school D&D at low levels, but its still pretty brutal. Armor would help of course, but being a sci-fi game its sort of like "Oh, you have ARMOR, and the space pirates have PGMPs, RPGs, and Gauss Rifles...."

 

[Bluenose]

I can't remember how/if RQ handles death spirals - I'll look it up when I get home!

Arguably the most "death spiral" aspect is that if you're injured badly enough to disable a body part, that body part stops functioning. Bad if it's the arm you hold your sword with, worse if it's your head and you'r enow unconscious on the floor.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] - I looked up Book 1 (Characters & Combat) when I got home.

On the END issue: wounds taken to END in a given combat encounter do not reduce the number of available blows/swings in that combat, but do reduce the number of available blows/swings in the next combat.

On the damage dice issue: the first wound comes all of one randomly-determined stat (creating the "ramp" you describe); if the character survives that, then damage dice can be split and allocated to stats as the player chooses.

On Runequest - yep, as you said there is no death spiral other than bleeding.

EDIT: Though, as [MENTION=49017]Bluenose[/MENTION] points out, there is body-part dysfunction which is a type of death spiral.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] - I looked up Book 1 (Characters & Combat) when I got home.

On the END issue: wounds taken to END in a given combat encounter do not reduce the number of available blows/swings in that combat, but do reduce the number of available blows/swings in the next combat.

On the damage dice issue: the first wound comes all of one randomly-determined stat (creating the "ramp" you describe); if the character survives that, then damage dice can be split and allocated to stats as the player chooses.

Huh, my recollection is that the player chose from STR, DEX, or END and allocated each wound entirely to one of those 3, with any excess spilling over. I'm still playing with the original LBBs from 1977 though, so perhaps things have evolved since then! Honestly we haven't broken out Traveller in a few years now. It was always a fun system, but I think perhaps nowadays I'd use something like 'Strike!' for the game mechanics, and just pilfer Traveller for a lot of the tech and whatnot.

On Runequest - yep, as you said there is no death spiral other than bleeding.

Yeah, BRP IIRC doesn't really have any at all since it lacks the detailed wound placement rules of RQ. Maybe they're in there somewhere as an option. Honestly I find BRP to be too cumbersome these days. It was a nice system circa 1980, but its terribly dated. Again, something like Strike! would seem like it would be a lot cooler way to play something like CoC and would almost drop in. CoC always BEGGED to be a story game, but it was always saddled with the very mechanistic simulation driven BRP mechanics. Never was a good match. The material made it a fun game, but it kind of succeeded despite the rules.

 

[chaochou]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] On Runequest - yep, as you said there is no death spiral other than bleeding.

EDIT: Though, as [MENTION=49017]Bluenose[/MENTION] points out, there is body-part dysfunction which is a type of death spiral.

Chaosium RQ also featured shock. A body part taking twice its HP in damage not only renders that body part unusable, but also incapacitates you with shock and you are unable to do much more than heal yourself (if you could).

An human arm in RQ typically had 3-4 HP. A human with a sword could comfortably be doing 1d8+1+1d4 damage. A troll or scorpionman could be doing 2d8+2d6 with a maul.

So the death spiral went down pretty steep. First solid hit usually defeated an opponent, certainly until high initiate/early rune level where players' magic could begin to compensate for the lethality.

Bear in mind that the RQ magic system was also a kind of death spiral, where using your power to cast spells made you more vulnerable to enemy magic!

Great game.

 

[pemerton]

Huh, my recollection is that the player chose from STR, DEX, or END and allocated each wound entirely to one of those 3, with any excess spilling over. I'm still playing with the original LBBs from 1977 though, so perhaps things have evolved since then!

The rule I described is from the 1977 edition. (The first RPG I owned.)

 

[Bluenose]

Huh, my recollection is that the player chose from STR, DEX, or END and allocated each wound entirely to one of those 3, with any excess spilling over. I'm still playing with the original LBBs from 1977 though, so perhaps things have evolved since then! Honestly we haven't broken out Traveller in a few years now. It was always a fun system, but I think perhaps nowadays I'd use something like 'Strike!' for the game mechanics, and just pilfer Traveller for a lot of the tech and whatnot.

Each dice of damage could be allocated independently, although different versions of the combat system took a slightly different approach. 12d6 from an FGMP-15 still hurts just a little.

Again, something like Strike! would seem like it would be a lot cooler way to play something like CoC and would almost drop in. CoC always BEGGED to be a story game, but it was always saddled with the very mechanistic simulation driven BRP mechanics. Never was a good match. The material made it a fun game, but it kind of succeeded despite the rules.

Trail of Cthulhu uses the same rules as Gumshoe, and there are several Fate conversions. In my opinion an adaptation of the Pendragon rules could have been a really good fit.

Bear in mind that the RQ magic system was also a kind of death spiral, where using your power to cast spells made you more vulnerable to enemy magic!

Though using someone else's Power...

Now where did I bind that spirit?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The rule I described is from the 1977 edition. (The first RPG I owned.)

Well, its possible we just played it wrong all those years. I'd have to go dig my books out, but its not like I disbelieve you.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Each dice of damage could be allocated independently, although different versions of the combat system took a slightly different approach. 12d6 from an FGMP-15 still hurts just a little.

Well, then there's space combat where if your anti-missile laser turret software doesn't work you get to eat a 20 kiloton nuclear tipped gift package. Generally speaking its a pretty deadly game. I used the original Striker! (heh, just noticed the name clash with the kickstarted RPG) supplement and ran a few mercenary army scenarios with tanks and really heavy weapons. It was silly deadly. Even a pintel mounted fusion cannon is pretty much instant death, even if your clad in the nastiest power armor available.

Trail of Cthulhu uses the same rules as Gumshoe, and there are several Fate conversions. In my opinion an adaptation of the Pendragon rules could have been a really good fit.

Yeah, I've heard all about ToC, but never played it. I think maybe I'll do a Striker! game, they have already put out a sample Lovecraftian adventure. Once the kickstarter finishes up it should be a reasonably nice system. I think the analogies to 4e are a bit strained, but it does present an interesting hybrid of different rules systems. Definitely reading their free rules preview has given me a few things to think about...

One of the interesting things is they use hit points as purely a temporary thing. You go into combat with N hit points, every combat (I think, some things were a bit unclear, its only a draft of the final rules, and not complete). Whether or not the stakes include the possibility of death is decided before the encounter starts, so going to zero means you are 'knocked out' of the fight, but could be interpreted various ways, and you can spend APs both as something like an HS or to get a kind of plot coupon, again its somewhat unclear, but the point is hit points are more like 4e's THP, and their APs can act like HS. There are also healing powers ala 4e and I think you can maybe invoke a plot complication to get out of some damage or something. In any case the end result is you get 'wounded' conditions, which impose penalties on your checks, and possibly other conditions. If you get 2-3 wounds you're pretty much non-functional, though again you don't really explicitly die at any specific point.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I think a more forthright presence of a Lingering Wounds mechanic or a more prominent position for the Disease Track would have been something that I would have used in 4e.

If we could have gotten over the 'Play the Game RAW' mindset earlier. I think the Character Builder was the biggest barrier for that.

It took 4e to really bring what bothered me in earlier editions into focus with respect to the definition of HP.