Wound-Vitality systems and death risk

[Lanefan]

In the attract-new-players thread, Celebrim said

Yes. It's hard to have a system where there is meaningful risk and 0 chance of death. But typically WP/VP systems tend to generate fairly high risks of death in a wide variaty of situations.

How would a VP-WP system generate higher death risks than a system using straight HP?

I suppose it depends how many different types of effects/damage are allowed to bypass VP and go straight against WP.

For me, it'd be:
- coup-de-grace and the like vs. a completely defenseless foe
- some or all falling damage
- some or all damage caused by an effect that has other obvious physical consequences e.g. a sharpness weapon cuts your leg off
- and, obviously, all damage taken after you've run out of VP.

But all those things are pretty high-risk anyway? What is it about VP-WP that makes it higher?

Lanefan

 

[FireLance]

How would a VP-WP system generate higher death risks than a system using straight HP?

I suppose it depends how many different types of effects/damage are allowed to bypass VP and go straight against WP.

Yes, this.

What is it about VP-WP that makes it higher?

Critical hits are one of the effects that usually bypass VP in such systems. This inherently makes combat riskier because there is always a chance on each attack against you that your VP buffer will be bypassed and the damage will be taken directly from your WP. For high-damage attacks, this could be immediately lethal.

 

[Lanefan]

Critical hits are one of the effects that usually bypass VP in such systems. This inherently makes combat riskier because there is always a chance on each attack against you that your VP buffer will be bypassed and the damage will be taken directly from your WP. For high-damage attacks, this could be immediately lethal.

Ah.

For background, what brought this about was a discussion about falling damage. I started thinking a bit...

In our games, we've always had a variant of the WP-VP system - we call they "Body Points" and "Fatigue Points" (so BP-FP). FP are the usual hit points you roll by level, so d10/level for Fighters, d4/level for Wizard types, and so on. BP are an additonal roll that everybody gets, even commoners; it's a one-time roll based on race and Con. The way it shakes down, just about everyone has between 2-4 BP, a few have 5, occasional Dwarf and Part-Orc rarities get 6. Your hit point total is usually the sum of BP+FP.

Well, it occurred to me that if even a small fraction - say 1 point per die - of falling damage went straight against BP it'd make falls much more realistic. My 75-h.p. Fighter won't be so quick to leap off a 60' cliff - the 6d6 is trivial to him, but if 6 of those points go straight against BP he runs a risk of going to or below 0 BP and thus knocking himself out; and if nobody tends to him he'll possibly later bleed out and die.

It also makes falls somewhat more fair among classes. The average 7th-level Fighter should be just as able to die from a fall as a 7th-level Wizard.

But as I said earlier, I'd not have many other things go directly against BP...unless, of course, you're out of FP...

Lanefan

 

[MerricB]

Well, that's what Death from Massive Damage, Fort saves, Con damage and Save vs Death are in there for.

And, to be fair, if Gary Gygax hadn't had his original text modified away, a 60' fall in AD&D would have been 20d6 damage. (There's a reason one of the Thief-Acrobat ability looks so odd... it's using Gary's version of falling damage rather than the one that was edited down in the PHB.)

Are there instances *apart* from falling where you want VP/WP?

Cheers!

 

[delericho]

In the attract-new-players thread, Celebrim said

How would a VP-WP system generate higher death risks than a system using straight HP?

I suppose it depends how many different types of effects/damage are allowed to bypass VP and go straight against WP.

This, exactly.

In the original version (Star Wars d20), critical hits went directly to WP. Combined with blasters doing 3d6 to 3d10 damage, and especially with Jedi getting lots of extra dice of damage with lightsabers, this made critical hits absurdly lethal.

In the one and only session* of that game that I ran, what should have been the climactic encounter of the adventure was rendered a major anti-climax when the PC Jedi won initiative, charged, scored a critical hit, and killed his opponent outright. (My players are making a habit of this - three times now they've one-shotted what was intended to be a significant opponent, in SW d20, D&D 3.5e and now WFRP.)

Now, the thing is that that doesn't actually matter - I can always get another NPC. But if it happens to a PC, then it's a major problem.

* The problem with VP/WP was only one of the reasons I didn't run that game again. The original SW d20 also had major problems with starship combat, and I wasn't at all fond of the implementation of Force powers either. Between those factors, I felt it was pretty much useless as a Star Wars role-playing game.

 

[delericho]

Well, that's what Death from Massive Damage, Fort saves, Con damage and Save vs Death are in there for.

The problem with Death from Massive Damage in 3e was that any character who could survive 50 hit points of damage at once would almost certainly pass a DC 15 Fort save on anything but a 1.

Additionally, of course, in all versions this was one of the hated save-or-die effects. Given that these were routinely fudged or ignored, I would be extremely surprised to find that many PCs were killed by this rule - groups are unlikely to allow a high-level character to just be slain by something as mundane as a fall.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Dnd 3.x was plenty deadly with it's 3x and 4x criticals. I have had several characters die from unlucky criticals.

Dnd 4e has much more moderate criticals and it's unlikely that you will die from one unlucky roll.

In my group we usually fudged the 3.x criticals that killed characters. It's not much fun to have your character die in a random encounter, so for us going back to a purely luck based system is quite out of the question.

 

[delericho]

Dnd 3.x was plenty deadly with it's 3x and 4x criticals. I have had several characters die from unlucky criticals.

Indeed. It does occur to me that maybe the best fix for falling damage is the simplest: recast it as an attack, and allow the ground to inflict a critical hit.

A high-level Fighter might be quite blase about a 50 ft fall that 'only' does 5d6 damage, but he might well think twice if an unlucky attack roll turns that into 10d6 or a guaranteed 30 points (depending on whether using 3e or 4e critical hits).

Edit: in fact, 3e already went some way down this path, where if a character fell into a spiked pit trap, some of the spikes would attack the PC. This just expands that principle (and, indeed, the spikes should just add a bonus to hit, and/or change the damage type from B to P, and/or apply more damage to a successful attack).

 

[Nagol]

This, exactly.

In the original version (Star Wars d20), critical hits went directly to WP. Combined with blasters doing 3d6 to 3d10 damage, and especially with Jedi getting lots of extra dice of damage with lightsabers, this made critical hits absurdly lethal.

In the one and only session* of that game that I ran, what should have been the climactic encounter of the adventure was rendered a major anti-climax when the PC Jedi won initiative, charged, scored a critical hit, and killed his opponent outright. (My players are making a habit of this - three times now they've one-shotted what was intended to be a significant opponent, in SW d20, D&D 3.5e and now WFRP.)

Now, the thing is that that doesn't actually matter - I can always get another NPC. But if it happens to a PC, then it's a major problem.

* The problem with VP/WP was only one of the reasons I didn't run that game again. The original SW d20 also had major problems with starship combat, and I wasn't at all fond of the implementation of Force powers either. Between those factors, I felt it was pretty much useless as a Star Wars role-playing game.

The same is true in the old WP/VP systems like Chivalry and Sorcery, 1st edition. Critical hits apply (up to) the full damage ditectly to the WP equivalent (Body in this case).

 

[MerricB]

The problem with Death from Massive Damage in 3e was that any character who could survive 50 hit points of damage at once would almost certainly pass a DC 15 Fort save on anything but a 1.

I'd just like to point out that the rule originated in 2nd edition. An 8th level fighter would need to roll a 10 or higher to avoid death.

It was one of the legacy rules in 3e that wasn't properly updated to the new system.

Cheers!