Single mechanics that hurt an otherwise good game

[Ratskinner]

All editions: dying and near-death mechanics. Before 5e there really aren't any - you're fully functional at 1 h.p. and dead (or unconscious) at 0. There's no in-between state where you're wounded but still sort-of able to function; this would really need some sort of wound-vitality system which D&D has so far resolutely refused to implement even though to do so would be very easy. 5e has death saves etc. but the implementation still has a host of problems.

Lanefan

QFT.

Even if the game just occasionally kicked out a "wounded" condition, that might help. (I suppose you could theoretically have Critical>Serious>Light wounds as well, for completeness' sake.)

It always seemed weird to me that a troll (or Regeneration in general) could "reattach a severed limb"...and yet there is nothing particular in the game that can severe a limb. Not a big deal for the troll, the GM can just narrate that in...but I dare you to narrate a PC getting a limb amputated before the party can regenerate it! (unless you let the Cure spells handle that...)

I've actually added my own little mechanic to 5e to replace the 0 HP mechanics:
If you reach 0HP or are hit while at 0HP, then roll 4 dice. Odds are good for you, evens are bad. Assign the results to the following questions:
1) Are you Dying? (Roll d6, you have that many rounds of life left.)
2) Are you Unconscious?
3) Have you lost something precious? (An Item, weapon, limb, eye?)
4) You or the GM, who narrates how this goes down?
Characters at 0 HP cannot make the Attack action or participate in any aggressive combat action. They are too frightened, injured, whatever-being-out-of-divine-favor-is to continue.

It really makes getting dropped an interesting moment of play, rather than just feeling left out as per normal D&D. I've been running a 5e game for about a year now, I've taken one character's ear, a two magic items, a suit of armor...and an axe, I think. Its surprisingly fun for everyone to watch them grapple with the choice of "Should I be Unconscious or Dying?" I can't tell you how many times we've watched the "conscious-but-dying" wizard run for cover with a sucking chest wound.

 

[CubicsRube]

Id considered trying out a simple houserule: players can choose to stay up and act as normal at 0hp.

They still need to make a death save at the start of every round, and as they are still an active combatant, they will get attacked. And if they get attacked they will automatically fail a death save.

So their choice is to drop and have a measure of safety, or risk it and fight on/try to get out of there.

 

[MarkB]

SWSE also had a wound-vitality system, didn't it?

SWSE just has hit points and the condition track. I think it was the d20 Star Wars system prior to SWSE that used Wounds/Vitality. I didn't have much experience playing that system.

 

[Lanefan]

It always seemed weird to me that a troll (or Regeneration in general) could "reattach a severed limb"...and yet there is nothing particular in the game that can severe a limb.

Are swords of sharpness gone, then? Vorpal weapons? If yes, that's really kinda sad...

SWSE just has hit points and the condition track. I think it was the d20 Star Wars system prior to SWSE that used Wounds/Vitality. I didn't have much experience playing that system.

Ah. I knew it was one of the SW games but forgot which one.

Lan-"chop chop"-efan

 

[Ratskinner]

Are swords of sharpness gone, then? Vorpal weapons? If yes, that's really kinda sad...

Not exactly the most common magic items, and not really a solution for the general problem of the binary state issue.

 

[CubicsRube]

They got replaced with a cursed item - vorpal shaving razors.

Cleanest shave you ever had. Just don't roll a 20!

 

[Ovinomancer]

7th Sea 1st edition: Roll Trait + Knack, Keep Trait. It causes two massive issues.

1: Because you Kept your Trait number in dice... a character with higher "universal" ability was almost always going to succeed in things that even the most trained person in the world would not. So a PC with a 3 Finesse and 2 Dancing (5K3) going up against the most trained dancer in the world with 2 Finesse and 5 Dancing (7K2) will beat that person more often than not. Which narrative-wise makes little sense... especially when connected to point 2.

2: The XP cost to raise Traits were not so much higher than raising individual knacks that it was always more economically sound to spend all XP raising traits... because traits would apply and be Kept dice for every single check involving that trait, whereas knacks were single skills and only be Unkept dice on a check that involved it. So in my experience, no PC would spend the cost to raise a single knack (2 x the new level in XP) when they could raise the applicable trait (5 x the new level in XP) and have it apply to EVERY check that involved that trait.

The solution of course would be to reverse the kept-unkept pair... Roll Knack + Trait, Keep Knack. That way a character's training in a particular knack always made you better at it than just being naturally strong, dextrous, smart etc.

This doesn't work out as well as you might expect. Given some skills are much more used than others, and many sets overlap, you ed up rather quickly with everyone keeping 4 or 5 on the big skills.

The solution I came up with is k3. Keep three period. It flattens the expected difficulties and makes too many raises infeasible, meaning the game settles down quite a bit and you don't as rapidly run into having characters that require serious foes to be challenged. I still use the 10+ die rule for those cases where, through risks and raises, a player gets more than 10 dice. Maxing at 10 dice rolled but have every die that you had over 10 become increase the kept pool instead is a great reward for that.

I've played this, and it worked beautifully.

 

[5ekyu]

QFT.

Even if the game just occasionally kicked out a "wounded" condition, that might help. (I suppose you could theoretically have Critical>Serious>Light wounds as well, for completeness' sake.)

It always seemed weird to me that a troll (or Regeneration in general) could "reattach a severed limb"...and yet there is nothing particular in the game that can severe a limb. Not a big deal for the troll, the GM can just narrate that in...but I dare you to narrate a PC getting a limb amputated before the party can regenerate it! (unless you let the Cure spells handle that...)

I've actually added my own little mechanic to 5e to replace the 0 HP mechanics:
If you reach 0HP or are hit while at 0HP, then roll 4 dice. Odds are good for you, evens are bad. Assign the results to the following questions:
1) Are you Dying? (Roll d6, you have that many rounds of life left.)
2) Are you Unconscious?
3) Have you lost something precious? (An Item, weapon, limb, eye?)
4) You or the GM, who narrates how this goes down?
Characters at 0 HP cannot make the Attack action or participate in any aggressive combat action. They are too frightened, injured, whatever-being-out-of-divine-favor-is to continue.

It really makes getting dropped an interesting moment of play, rather than just feeling left out as per normal D&D. I've been running a 5e game for about a year now, I've taken one character's ear, a two magic items, a suit of armor...and an axe, I think. Its surprisingly fun for everyone to watch them grapple with the choice of "Should I be Unconscious or Dying?" I can't tell you how many times we've watched the "conscious-but-dying" wizard run for cover with a sucking chest wound.

Imo damage save sustems tend to work fairly well for this type of thing. They basically replace HP with saves to avoid various conditions. As you get worse off, your saves get harder and the conditions pile up and escalate.

Second best are split body/stun type systems where most of the damage is easy quick recovery - more strain than hurt KO not kill - and a much smaller pool for actual physical health and injury. Howver, many of them tend to not apply conditions as opposed to just make the health hard to recover.

From way back in 1e 2e days when we used lots of house rules, we tried several variants for "lose HP makes you worse" but never found good fits ourselves.

But there are so many non-hp systems out there its easy to find options.

 

[Aldarc]

Any system that mandates rolling up character creation. Optional? Fine. Mandatory? No.

Fantasy Age: the magic system. It achieves the rarely achieved design state of simplistic but awkwardly clunky. I don't entirely understand how Green Ronin managed to take the Dragon Age RPG, with time to consider its problems for creating a generic fantasy system, and then somehow make it worse. The magic system in Blue Rose RPG, which draws more heavily on True20, is a vast improvement. Unfortunately Fantasy Age is stuck with its oft-cited dud of a magic system.

 

[Blue]

Imo damage save sustems tend to work fairly well for this type of thing. They basically replace HP with saves to avoid various conditions. As you get worse off, your saves get harder and the conditions pile up and escalate.

In actual play, those are my absolute least favorite. The death spiral where you character gets less and less effecive and more likely to die, becoming useless and just a drain. It's no fun to play, and even one bad die roll early can screw you up for the whole time.

Do you have an example where they work out well in play? I'd love to learn of a place that is done well.

I had thought of using that with a system I designed, but *all* PCs had a special ability (and some major NPCs) called "When the going gets tough..." that would reverse the penalties. So as you were wounded you got better at everything and harder to kill.

Really, a system that makes it easy to get into dire straights but hard to lose that last bit; where we can build tension but the heroes can win by the skin of their teeth -- that's the system I want for a heroic RPG.