Simple Toughness Variant - Opinions?

[Malin Genie]

Rather than using percentile dice to decide the 10% stabilisation check, we roll d20, with a 19 or 20 stabilising. Which gave me the idea to have the Toughness Feat grant "+3 hit points and a +3 to stabilisation checks." A character with Toughness could still die if reduced to negative hit points and left alone, but would have a much better chance of surviving the experience than a character without.

Opinions?

 

[ConcreteBuddha]

Since Toughness is a worthless feat as is, giving it any form of additional power is a good thing. Your variant seems pretty good, and some people might actually be inclined to take this feat.

 

[Cheiromancer]

One of the biggest uses for Toughness seems to be as a pre-requisite for prestige classes. Sometimes a prestige class ability throws in toughness as a bonus.

Making toughness as strong as a "normal feat" will make some prestige classes too easy to get in to, and make their granted abilities too powerful. Prestige classes are bad enough in these respects as it is.

It might be worthwhile to make a feat that is clearly superior to Toughness, but give it a different name. Ditto for Skill Focus.

In that case, your feat is a nice variation. The one I've proposed to my players (none have yet taken it) is that toughness be 3 hp plus the character's base Fortitude save. So if a third level fighter takes it, it is worth 6 hp. I think your variation might be better.

 

[Nifft]

I see three paths for Toughness:

1) It stays as is, but you need it for PrCs and custom Feat chains. This effectively says to player: suck it up and suffer.

2) It scales with level. Say, 2 HP + 1HP per character level, or 3HP + Fort save (grows more slowly, but still grows). This is like some Feats which act as an augmented ability score but only for one aspect of that ability --- like Great Fortitude acts like +4 Con but only wrt/ Fort saves, or Combat Casting acts as +8 Con but only wrt/ casting defensively, Toughness could act like +2 Con only wrt/ HPs.

3) It's part of a greater Toughness Feat chain, so you can get significantly higher HPs at high levels (when +3 HP seems like a waste). This would make Fighters compare more favorably to Barbarians.

Are there any other things to do with Toughness?

-- Nifft

 

[Xeriar]

I just set toughness as granting +1 HP per level. Can only be taken once.

dwarf's toughness requires toughness and gives another +1 hp/level

Giants toughness -> Dragon's toughness > epic toughness.

 

[Anubis]

A perfect fixing and tweaking of the ENTIRE useless Toughness chain of feats has already been made. Go to the following thread:

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24624

No need to change stabilization checks, especially if you use my house rule (which is required for these feats to work properly) that characters don't die until they reach a negative number of hit points equal to their Constitution score plus their total level. (In other words, a Level 3 Human Fighter with 16 Constitution wouldn't die until reaching -19 hit points.) Heck, that house rule is also more realistic than anything else release and/or proposed, meaning not only do you add a great house rule that makes the game more realistic and less fatal at high levels, but you also get a chance to use an actually useful Toughness chain of feats that is neither underpowered nor overpowered.

I believe that these modifications are the best way to solve the uselessness problem while keeping things balanced. Check it out!

 

[Sir Whiskers]

Malin, I would suggest making the stabilization check succeed automatically, as +3 hp is not much benefit for a feat. IMC, Toughness adds +5 HP, with automatic stabilization. Combined with death occuring at negative Con score rather than -10, Toughness becomes something worth taking, at least for the front-line types.

Anubis' variant is interesting: +5 hp and +10 to death's door, but no change to the stabilization roll. This makes the character harder to kill with one lucky blow, and provides extra opportunities to stabilize when below 0 hp. Given that Anubis adds character level to death's door, in addition to basing it on the Con score, it must be fairly difficult to kill characters in his campaign (other than "save or die" spells, of course). If that's what a GM wants, that seems to me a perfectly reasonable direction to take with this feat.

 

[Anubis]

Well, my reasoning is basically that not only does ones Constitution help prolong one's life, but so does ones experience and power. Believe it or not, most people still don't ever take those Toughness feats. The prerequisites are staggering for one, and there are still other useful feats. When there are so many feats to choose from, well, that's what happens.

It's also to prolong characters' lives so as to make the campaign less fatal. Games where people die too much are never fun.

 

[Malin Genie]

IMHO auto-stabilisation is *too* good. Having said that, we often end up in cliffhanger situations where half the party are negative, with the other characters desparately trying to stay alive while stabilising / healing them - maybe that's not a common experience?

Pushing out the -hp window seems like another reasonable option, but if taken to -5 and 'left to die,' a character with my version would have a 76% chance of surviving, whereas if the stabilisation chance stays at 10%/round the character will have a 57% chance with a -13 threshhold; and even with a -15 threshhold only a 65% chance of survival. So to my mind the version I'm using makes the character 'tougher' in the sense of 'more likely to survive without help if left to die,' without providing in effect more than 3 bonus hp (even if not all of them are 'conscious' hp...)

And as Cheiromancer points out, Toughness shouldn't be made *much* better given its role in class prerequisites.

 

[Endur]

Toughness migration

My suggested fix for Toughness is something WOTC didn't choose.

I suggested that Toughness feats migrate. That is, if you have the pre-req for Dwarf's Toughness, your normal Tougness feat becomes Dwarf's Toughness. If you have the pre-req for Giant's Toughness, your Dwarf's Toughness becomes Giant's Toughness. If you have the pre-req for Dragon's Toughness, your Giant's Toughness becomes Dragon's toughness.

The migration would make Toughness more relevant to high level characters.

As is, Toughness is useful for low level characters, but high level characters only tend to have it if it is a pre-req for a prestige class.

Tom