My sole exposure to Deadlands has been the d20 version. Just as PEG no doubt hoped, I bought the book figuring it would be easier for me to get my D&D players to jump in. It didn't work out too well. The same players that are content to hack an owlbear a half-dozen times with greatswords and battle-axes before it drops cannot accept that both barrels of a 12-gauge can be emptied into a human being with no appreciable effect.
Aaron2 said:
If you take damage from an 88 and walk away (i.e. with hps left) it WAS NOT A DIRECT HIT. I'm sick of this. Plenty of games have "hero points" or some such and that is exactly the same mechanic.
I don't know which systems you're alluding to, but I can make a few generalizations about how the "hero points" or "fate points" used by other systems differ from d20's hit points:
1) They are reserved for heroes and major characters. Thugs and other bit players don't enjoy the same benefits that larger-than-life characters receive. On the contrary, in d20, you can expect to reach a level where even minor opponents have sufficient hit points to withstand extreme damage (e.g. the aforementioned shotgun blast).
2) There are methods for replenishing them, but they aren't something that can be taken for granted. In d20, on the other hand, there are no inherent means for regaining hit points, other than the woefully inadequate "regain-your-level-in-hit-points-per-day-of-complete-rest" system. The specific game setting is left to its own devices to handle healing. D&D and Deadlands take the path of least resistance: magic. They expect at least one of the party members to be relegated to the role of "healer". This is a fairly inelegant method. Some high-level parties wind up with so much healing power that absurdly suicidal antics become feasible (e.g. jumping off a mountain instead of climbing down, because it's quicker), while others will have to stop and "set camp" for 8 hours after very combat. Moreover, this an artificial, "inbred" method with no literary or cinematic point of reference (which means jack-all to some folk, but to others the illusion that they're living-out an action movie or fantasy novel is the main appeal of role-playing). As I understand, Spycraft has an action point system that provides each character with a method for tending to their boo-boos, representing the "second wind" that characters of heroic stamina routinely get somewhere between the second or third act of a movie.
3) Even if a system uses "hero points", they don't necessarily take an all-or-nothing approach to taking damage. Take the example provided above with the guy who was shot with the 88, yet wasn't actually struck due to the magic of hit points. Now, that same character gets a frag grenade lobbed at him. If he survives, we may once again assume that it wasn't a "direct hit", but how are we supposed to tell if he's been hurt badly, hurt slightly, or not hurt at all? Do we assume that attacks of every sort either miss or harmlessly graze the character until he runs out of HP, at which point he promptly drops dead?
Let's forget about ultra-lethal "gritty realistic" combat, where characters by all rights should be dropping like flies left and right. The appeal for that style of combat is limited to RPG's where players are discouraged from ever drawing a weapon, or where players are simply not terribly attached to their characters (ala Paranoia). I don't think Deadlands falls under either category. Let's run with that notion I mentioned earlier, that many--if not most--players envision themselves as the same sort of larger-than-life characters from literature and cinema. They likewise expect their combats to mirror the action scenes depicted in literature and cinema, be it a bloody spaghetti western shootout or the climactic free-for-all melee from LoTR. The d20 system's hit-point system does not deliver that experience. If a character with 200 hit points takes 199 points of damage, he's still able to physically perform at 100% of his capability. At 0 he suddenly drops, and ten short points of damage later, he dies. There is really no stage between "perfect condition' and "at death's door". John Wayne may be able to take a bullet in the shoulder without flinching, but the arm does hang limp at his side, if only for the rest of that scene.
I can tell you from experience that suspension-of-disbelief gets stretched beyond its limits when an NPC gets shot five times, runs away with 3 hit points left, and the PC's aren't able to catch up to him because those wounds don't slow the guy down even slightly. Should I just point out to everybody that they didn't really score any direct hits after all, but rather the loss of hit points represents how their attacks fatigued the hell out of him as he skillfully matrixed his way around the bullets? I can tell you they won't buy it.
There are some other big problems with Deadlands d20 combat. There's the Armor Class issue. With all due respect to Jim West, cowboys riding around wearing bulletproof vests and dusters lined with steel plates are pretty lame. Then there's the problem with the amount of actions a character can cram into a round. If a man with a knife and a man with a gun spot each other from a distance of 60 feet and they both decide to attack, the man with the knife can cover the entire distance and stab the man with the gun before the latter can get off a shot--heck, he'll still be flat-footed. My players didn't buy this either.
Now, let's look at Call of Cthulhu. Here we're talking about a game where the combat isn't human-vs-human so much as it is fragile-human-vs-things-man-wasn't-meant-to-kill. Hit points, in conjunction with the modified death-from-massive-damage rule, work in CoC because players are supposed to be easy to slaughter while monsters are supposed to be incredibly hard to put down. Players don't need to worry about healing, because they have no reasonable expectation to survive a single violent encounter, let alone multiple ones. Here is a game where characters aren't larger-than-life, and players readily accept that they can die ignominiously at any time. The notion that combat should be fair or balanced or tons of fun is pretty laughable. I'd say comparing the appeal of Deadlands and CoC is a matter of apples-and-oranges.
Frankly, I wish more d20 publishers had been willing to wait for d20 Modern to come out. I have high expectations for it, and I hope it will address at least some of the issues I've mentioned above. I hear it's retaining the hit-point-based system though, which is not encouraging.
