Why must numbers go up?

[ggroy]

As far as combat goes, hit points do a fine job of representing increasing toughness. Sure that gate guard might be able to score a hit against a heroic higher level fighter but he will be doing damage that represents possibly no more than the energy expended to parry it and he certainly won't be standing after receiving the returning blow.

Of course the implications of this mean that large numbers of those guards will be able to eventually wear down that super fighter which is more satisfying for the types of games I enjoy playing. Automatic misses due to nothing more than level discrepancy remind me of MMO mechanics.

In such games a level 40 warrior taking on a level 65 monster simply cannot hit. You can bring 100 such warriors to the battle and not be able to scratch the monster because the mechanics are written to prevent you from doing so.

If hit points and damage dealing ability are supposed to represent how much tougher one thing is than another, then the only purpose of massive bonuses to hit and defense are to artificially define what is allowed to interact with what. In reality it makes the entire level concept as a measure of relative power meaningless.

The situation reminds me of one that cropped up in the Babylon 5 space battle game. The game was point based but the raider fighters could not so much as scratch a Mimbari fighter. So a single Mimbari fighter taking on 1,000,000 raider ships would win 100% of the time.

This is the kind of thing I see scaling hit/defenses doing.

The way levels work in this manner, may very well be a byproduct of the tools we are using to play the game. Using a d20 die for "to hit" rolls against:

"AC" + (level_target - level_attacker)

is one of the easiest ways to scale monsters/characters of differing levels. (It's by no means the only way). It's also one of the easiest ways to implement character advancement.

If one wants to eliminate levels but still retain character advancement in some form or another, there's other systems which do this such as Runequest. Runequest has players improving their skills with repeated use.

Another way of removing the level scaling in 4E, is to drop the +level/2 adjustments on the both the player character and monster sides for both attacks and defenses. With this being done, what's left that differentiates the power of the players and monsters, is how many hit points they have and what powers and abilities they have (including magic weapons). The side which has significantly more total hit points (including healing surges, potions, etc ...) and better weapons/powers, has a better chance at surviving a battle purely by attrition.

 

[Garthanos]

Well D&D does have tools you can use to adjust the situation to something you prefer. Critical hits will push damage through if you have enough attackers going at someone. You also have the option of using minions to simulate a lot of weaker units ganging up on a single powerful hero.

The difference advancing hit points have ... is a sense of innevitability... but also reliability you can rely on probabilities to induce some of there effects... but hit points give the player a measure of when the luck of heros is wearing thin and and sense of the fatigue of muscle and mind for his character.... if its all probabilistic it removes a basis for choice.

 

[Ariosto]

Roll-to-hit + roll-for-damage is a sacred cow that really needs to be slaughtered, IMO. I'd kind of prefer either-or, not both.

Having tried it, I am of the opinion that some chance of taking no damage is a very worthwhile thing to have. If it came down to such a choice, then I would do without the damage roll -- as I have in, e.g., Chivalry & Sorcery and The Arduin Adventure.

I like having both partly because that works better for me than having only one dimension on which to adjust an abstraction of a situation with multiple axis.

Finally, I don't see the "sacred cow" rap as sensible when we're talking about something that has been in the game from the first because people like it that way. How can you claim to have some more objective standard? There are hundreds or thousands of other games doing things differently; D&D just happens to be itself, rather than one of those.

 

[ggroy]

Having tried it, I am of the opinion that some chance of taking no damage is a very worthwhile thing to have. If it came down to such a choice, then I would do without the damage roll -- as I have in, e.g., Chivalry & Sorcery and The Arduin Adventure.

Eliminating the to-hit roll would seem kind of odd for ranged attacks. In practice, even the best sharpshooter archers can miss.

If one eliminates the to-hit roll for melee attacks, one would probably want armor which can soak up damage.

 

[xechnao]

Eliminating the to-hit roll would seem kind of odd for ranged attacks. In practice, even the best sharpshooter archers can miss.

If one eliminates the to-hit roll for melee attacks, one would probably want armor which can soak up damage.

I think hit points do not represent physical integrity but rather your comfort situation or condition in combat. So, when they reach 0 you are fatally exposed. By having hit points, you have a controlling mechanism of being able to see when this can happen.

 

[Ariosto]

Eliminating the to-hit roll would seem kind of odd for ranged attacks. In practice, even the best sharpshooter archers can miss.

Yes. The "Mystical Sixth" edition of Tunnels & Trolls drops the saving roll to hit in favor of adding or subtracting dice. I am not acquainted with the details of that variant, but T&T has had armor "soaking up damage" (one way or another) since 1975.

Even without armor, the original T&T melee rules are based on only one side -- the loser of a round -- taking as damage the difference in "hit point totals". If my dice and "adds" sum to 14 and the monster's to 10, then the monster takes 4 hits.

That's pretty neat, but it's not a "one size fits all" answer. Sometimes there's a situation in which getting hit is unlikely but is going to hurt just as much if it happens -- or vice-versa.

 

[ggroy]

Roll-to-hit + roll-for-damage is a sacred cow that really needs to be slaughtered, IMO. I'd kind of prefer either-or, not both.

I tried this once for 4E, where the damage rolls were eliminated and replaced with equivalent maximum damage from the damage dice. (Criticals were made to be double the max damage). It certainly made the combat encounters end sooner.

But overall, the players and I thought it didn't have the same feel. Apparently we missed rolling for damage. So we went back to rolling for damage, and tried something else to shorten the time of combat encounters.

 

[Wiseblood]

I tried this once for 4E, where the damage rolls were eliminated and replaced with equivalent maximum damage from the damage dice. (Criticals were made to be double the max damage). It certainly made the combat encounters end sooner.

But overall, the players and I thought it didn't have the same feel. Apparently we missed rolling for damage. So we went back to rolling for damage, and tried something else to shorten the time of combat encounters.

I'm partial to the attack roll damage roll paradigm. I would just prefer a cap on Attack Aonuses (boni?) and Armor Classes. Preferably within a range that would keep the d20 relevant regardless of the "power level" of the target vs the attacker. It is this reason that I enjoyed 3e up until about 10th level as a martial class. At the same time I didn't really enjoy playing a spellcaster until about 10th level. Either hitting an enemy means less as you progress or you run out of steam kinda early. ( AKA 15min.workday)

 

[Wiseblood]

4e kind of fixed one but made the other one worse.

 

[pemerton]

If hit points and damage dealing ability are supposed to represent how much tougher one thing is than another, then the only purpose of massive bonuses to hit and defense are to artificially define what is allowed to interact with what. In reality it makes the entire level concept as a measure of relative power meaningless.

Agreed! Their function is to "artificially" (ie by way of artifice) to push play in the direction of "the story of D&D".