NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lacyon" data-source="post: 4200013" data-attributes="member: 63046">Are you talking about spending X development resources making the combat system playable and fun, and Y development resources making it sensible? If so, you are not spending X+Y resources making it fun and are therefore sacrificing some potential for fun in exchange for "sensibility".If you are talking instead about a system where you spent X+Y resources building the system to be fun, and tacked on a "sensible" explanation, you are back to the same "problem" that HP have, which is that the "sensible" explanation doesn't satisfy everyone's definition of sensible.These are fundamentally hit points by another name. You may change the recovery mechanics, but those have changed from edition to edition anyway and in 4E everyone recovers their own HP pretty quickly outside a fight anyway. You also need to add in some kind of "toughness" mechanic that represents actual "meat points" (see various Vitality Point systems), or else "get hit by the ogre's club" becomes a non-option (cake or death? I'll have the cake please), making the system overall more complex.Besides simply being more complex to implement than HP, you're still back to square one in most gameplay. Any sufficiently bad <s>hit</s>fate will be avoided by spending your <s>hit</s>fate points. You're making it so that grapples and such can be avoided, too, but any sufficiently dangerous grapple will be avoided, and any attacker controlled by a player who knows the rules then won't bother grappling unless it's going to cause a bigger fate point loss than the attack he makes instead. This means that in practice, among skilled players, nobody ever gets grappled - it's a non-maneuver in actual combat, only usable when you've run an opponent out of fate points and don't want to kill them outright. That's fine for those who want grappling and the like not to happen in most fights, but for those who like the maneuvers aren't going to have too much fun.Then you're adding in the idea that instead of people surviving long falls off cliffs (for example), they just don't fall off in the first place, which is actually something I'll consider in my next game without changing the mechanics at all. I can do this just fine on its own because HPs are abstract.Nothing you can't already do if you're willing to accept HP as abstract. Ogre minions and level 10 <s>hobbit</s>halfling rogues get along in the same game just fine.</blockquote>

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