Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8606187" data-attributes="member: 6790260">While overall I am skeptical about such mechanics as a player-facing tool (partially because I am biased and find 5e combat rather rocket-tag heavy for my tastes), I have actually used them in my DW game as a boss thing. Specifically, the first "boss" the players had to fight was a spell scroll golem (affectionately known by the players as the scrollem). I gave it a large pool of HP for its intended challenge level, but it could spend some of that HP to cast actual Wizard spells against the party (flavored as literally reaching into its chest to pluck out a scroll to cast). By defeating it quickly, the party was able to recover some of its scrolls before they were all consumed.So, at the very least, I think this can be an interesting space...I just don't think it's one that works well for player-side abilities generally. It suffers sort of the inverse problems that lifesteal suffers. That is, lifesteal is usually stupidly broken if it works at all well, but mostly useless if it isn't very powerful, and it is very hard to find the narrow sweet spot between "I can survive forever because I can just do more damage to restore my HP" and "my lifesteal simply cannot keep up, so it offers little benefit while costing me elsewhere just to have it." (A former friend of mine ADORES these kinds of mechanics...and the fact that such mechanics are so min-max-able is a major draw for them.) Conversely, "blood magic" etc. is usually a raw deal because you're sacrificing a precious resource, and long-term survival, for short-term gain...but if you go too far in making such "blood magic" worthwhile, it flips into a no-brainer down payment for assured victory.I guess the issue is, such mechanics are EXTREMELY dependent on the fine details of their execution, even more than most questions of balance and game design. They are sufficiently sensitive that even otherwise very well-made and balanced games often struggle with making them neither worthless nor OP. Keep that in mind as you go: making them too weak is rather a wasted effort if no one would actually bother using them, while making them too strong will leave you with perverse incentives. Monsters and opponents have an easier time in this space because they aren't "expected" to last beyond a single encounter, win or lose. So spending their HP to accomplish their goals doesn't have long-term consequences, and you can thus balance around exclusively the costs and benefits within a single encounter. (4e, with its Healing Surges and 5 minute short rests, was also a more friendly environment for this kind of mechanic, because you could presume that most fights, the PC would be at max health, and thus again focus on the in-fight consequences more or less alone.)</blockquote>

Verification