Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm-Bringer" data-source="post: 4166100" data-attributes="member: 57832">In other words, your character's fate is indeterminate until the outcome of the recovery roll.In this example:"The Axe hits you directly in the chest, but the armor is absorbing the worst, but the impact is strong enough to press all air out of your lungs, and you drop to the ground."If the character isn't healed in time, or the recovery roll is failed, then the armour clearly didn't absorb 'the worst' of it.More evident in this example:"The Devils Trident hits your arm, hurling you to the ground. As your head connects with the ground, you drop unconscious. Your comrades see you're bleeding from the arm and the head, but nobody really has the time to check you."Even if the trident gets a critical and the ground impact does further damage, when you make your recovery roll, it actually didn't do as much damage as you described.In other words, the nature of Healing Surges and warlord/leader healing abilities doesn't work better with wholly abstract hit points, it requires them.  It requires that you retcon nearly every instance of healing, or leave descriptions vague to the point of being meaningless, or unusable.DM:  The soldier swings...  Ooooh.  A 20, that is max damage...  30 points.  You caught that axe right in the chest and are bleeding all over the place.Player:  Crap, that puts me down to -10.<remainder of the round>DM:  Ok, recovery roll.Player:  A 20!  Excellent!  I am back up to 25 hit points!  I guess that axe didn't hit me at all!Or something else that makes running descriptions useless or impossible.  Either your group is continually re-writing events or the details will be added later.  In both cases, it requires reconning the event.  The other choice is to simply announce damage, wait for the outcome of a recovery roll or healing surge, and then describe the entire chain of events.The encounter sequence is exactly the same.  You may or may not actually perceive anything with your perception roll.  That history check may or may not actually reveal anything pertinent.  No check is relevant to the sequence of events until the outcome is determined, at which time, the entire sequence must be described from scratch, or the events in the sequence are retconned.  Each skill roll is an individual fragment that must be fitted to the others once the outcome is determined.Additionally, until the failure threshold is reached, there are no consequences.  The Perception and History checks are successful.  The corpse is sewn up, and this is an uncommon but known trap.  Four failures to go, so use your weapon to cut the body down, and someone else uses Athletics to pick the body up and throw it/carry it off.  Since cutting the body down has no applicable skill, it would be a routine attack against the rope.  If it succeeds, you now have four chances to toss the body away with no consequence for failure.  You can literally kick the body around the clearing until you get four failures total.  And if four other characters succeed in their skill rolls, you will end the encounter with the six successes no matter how roughly they disposed of the body.  Even if cutting down the corpse was a skill roll of some kind, you would need to fail four rolls to set the trap off.Naturally, the DM can adjust the totals if the players are doing something ridiculous.  Again, however, this makes the system closer to a single pass/fail skill check.  If the characters in the above example were to have their totals altered because they were being careless, it then becomes far harder to succeed than to fail, which falls into the 'anti-fun' category.  The failure totals would by necessity be a minimum of 2.  A single failure in an encounter would be (to use the vernacular) 'too swingy'.  Additionally, that brings us back to a single skill check being the only significant one.In both cases (combat and skill challenges), the outcome must be determined before the sequence of events that lead to that outcome can be described.  Either the running descriptions will be so vague as to be un-needed, or the whole session will be a matter of re-writing prior events.</blockquote>

Verification