Wound-Vitality systems and death risk

[Beginning of the End]

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.

If anything bypasses VP the system has become more deadly.

In addition, if suffering a WP results in a penalty of some sort (as it did in Star Wars), that makes it more likely that you'll take more damage and also die quicker. (If the penalties are allowed to accumulate, this becomes a full-fledged death spiral.)

VP/WP systems are inherently more lethal than a D&D-style HP system.

If you want an early example of Slavicsek's
"Our goal is to do X. And in order to do X, we're going to do not-X." methodology, you don't have to look any farther than his announcement that they had implemented the VP/WP system in order to make Star Wars D20 more cinematic (when it seems specifically designed to achieve exactly the opposite of that).

 

[Remathilis]

Gary Sari (Wizo-the-hutt on the WotC boards) said this in a chat pre-Saga.

so the problem, then, is the introduction of the "straight to WP" mechanic for critical hits that makes PCs too fragile in the long term -- I did a statistical analysis that concluded that a PC has somewhere around a 30% chance to be killed -- literally "one-shotted" -- at some time before reaching 20th level and when I asked other players about this, almost everyone said, "Well, sure, but we have a house rule for that."
If *everyone* uses a house rule, then there's something wrong with the rule.

I added the bold for Emphasis.

V/WP and the auto-crit problem was a giant detractor from the SW game we played through, for a variety of reasons...

1.) We would lose a party member to a random crit about once every six sessions. We'd have probably lost more but attendance was poor in those days. Our DM was notorious for rolling crits (in the open mind you) and we lost new PCs constantly. One player lost three PCs to auto-kill crits in the span of 2 months!
2.) Getting an auto-crit was anticlimatic for any major combat. Note all six SW movies involve prolonged lightsaber duels. SWRE did a miserable job of mirroring that; most often someone would crit on 4-5th round and that was it.
3.) Getting auto-critted was worse. Thanks to SWRE lack of decent healing, any time-sensitive mission (escape the Death Star, find the hidden base, etc) often failed horribly. Someone would get critted early and end up staying on the ship OR more commonly, one lone PC survivor would be carting 5 unconscious corpses on a trolley on the way out because of wounds. I wish I was joking.
4.) Lots of players, once critted and dead/out cold, resorted to Gameboys and Laptops. One player finished Super Mario Advanced after being knocked out cold early in the night. Not my idea of a fun D&D night...
5.) It favored underdogs, throw-away villains, and the lucky over skill, experience, and continuity.

Maybe V/WP might work in another style of game; it would (ideally) feature a never-ending supply of "fresh troops", be more group focused than individual focused (IE it doesn't matter what PCs complete the quest) focus on short, self-contained adventures rather than epic narratives, be more exploration/dungeon focused than dramatic/story focused, and feature a "life-is-tough" attitude where death is around every corner and life is either long and glorious or nasty, brutal and short.

Not, IMHO, a good Star Wars game.

Take that for what its worth;

 

[Lanefan]

Maybe V/WP might work in another style of game; it would (ideally) feature a never-ending supply of "fresh troops", be more group focused than individual focused (IE it doesn't matter what PCs complete the quest) focus on short, self-contained adventures rather than epic narratives, be more exploration/dungeon focused than dramatic/story focused, and feature a "life-is-tough" attitude where death is around every corner and life is either long and glorious or nasty, brutal and short.

Pretty much sums up my current campaign right there. Well, except for the epic narratives bit; I seem to be running more adventure-path-type stuff this time around than ever before. But otherwise, yes. So maybe I've stumbled onto a system that works...?

Not, IMHO, a good Star Wars game.

True, if the intent is to have long-standing characters and recurring villains in true SW form.

What I'm wondering is whether there's a place, albeit a small one, for WP-VP (or BP-FP) in pre-4e D+D specifically to a) handle the otherwise-thorny issue of falling damage and b) to give 1st-level types a tiny bit more survivability.

Lan-"my life has been long, but rarely glorious"-efan

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Add me to the crowd that found VP/WP in SWd20 to be way too lethal. We had way too many deaths due to big crits taking PCs down to -10 WP. WAY too many.

Brad

 

[Krensky]

Spycraft and Fantasy Craft use W/V systems, with critical hits going against wounds, but critical hits (and success and fumbles and failures) are more narratively controlled. Both the players and the GM need to spend Action Dice to turn a threat into a critical hit.

As a GM, this gives me decent control of how much danger the players are exposed to since I don't have to activate a threat or I can spend an extra die and go to the critical injury table instead doing wound damage. It also means that if they're about to anti-climatically one shot the Villain, I can just add some XP to the NPC and negate the critical.

EDIT: Oh, and the vast majority of NPCs don't get to activate ciritcals anyway, only Special NPCs oStandards with a specifical quality get to do so.

 

[Dausuul]

If anything bypasses VP the system has become more deadly.

In addition, if suffering a WP results in a penalty of some sort (as it did in Star Wars), that makes it more likely that you'll take more damage and also die quicker. (If the penalties are allowed to accumulate, this becomes a full-fledged death spiral.)

VP/WP systems are inherently more lethal than a D&D-style HP system.

But neither of those traits is inherent to a VP/WP system. It is not necessary to have a bypass mechanic. You can use VP/WP simply as a way to control hit point recovery (granting a certain amount of "instant healing" while still imposing long-term consequences for serious injuries).

V/WP and the auto-crit problem was a giant detractor from the SW game we played through, for a variety of reasons...

1.) We would lose a party member to a random crit about once every six sessions. We'd have probably lost more but attendance was poor in those days. Our DM was notorious for rolling crits (in the open mind you) and we lost new PCs constantly. One player lost three PCs to auto-kill crits in the span of 2 months!
2.) Getting an auto-crit was anticlimatic for any major combat. Note all six SW movies involve prolonged lightsaber duels. SWRE did a miserable job of mirroring that; most often someone would crit on 4-5th round and that was it.
3.) Getting auto-critted was worse. Thanks to SWRE lack of decent healing, any time-sensitive mission (escape the Death Star, find the hidden base, etc) often failed horribly. Someone would get critted early and end up staying on the ship OR more commonly, one lone PC survivor would be carting 5 unconscious corpses on a trolley on the way out because of wounds. I wish I was joking.
4.) Lots of players, once critted and dead/out cold, resorted to Gameboys and Laptops. One player finished Super Mario Advanced after being knocked out cold early in the night. Not my idea of a fun D&D night...
5.) It favored underdogs, throw-away villains, and the lucky over skill, experience, and continuity.

So, in other words, throwing out "crits go straight to wound points" would have pretty much done away with the problem, yes?

It seems like almost all the objections to WP/VP are in fact objections to allowing 1 in 20 attacks to bypass VP. So what if we get rid of that? Restrict bypassing effects to the stuff that you actually want to bypass VP (which could be "nothing whatsoever," or could be things like falling damage, although honestly I'm not sure why falling damage gets singled out over being shot with arrows, stepped on by a wooly mammoth, or blasted with dragonfire). Then the system ought to work fine.

 

[Banshee16]

Why not modify how crits work then? Reduce the likelihood that they bypass vitality points?

Make it so that if you roll a 20, you threaten a crit. If your roll to confirm hits, then you double your damage, and apply it to vitality points.

If you roll a 20 again, on the roll to confirm *then* you apply your damage (not doubled) directly to wound points).

Now you've got a vitality/wound point system where you still get the benefits of healing up between encounters, while reducing the likelihood of character ending criticals. Yes, mathematically, it's possible.....as DM, I've rolled 3 consecutive 20's against a player before.....but it's going to be very, very rare.

Frankly, a game where there's little or no risk of character death also sucks. If the challenges are all hypothetical, and you've got fighters who think it's expedient to jump off a cliff to get to an opponent quicker, because they know their hp can absorb the damage, or where they feel that mathematically, it's ok for their lvl 20 fighter to attack an army single handedly, then just how fun is it? I don't mind characters able to take on huge odds....but there has to be a risk of them dying otherwise it's meaningless.

Some of the memories we've kept the most have been the fantastic deaths that some characters have suffered over the years. We still talk about one of the characters, a former stunt man, who was killed in a car accident during a chase scene in a Dark Matter game about 10 years ago. Not to make fun of it, but to say that if he was going to go, he was going to go with style.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

It seems like almost all the objections to WP/VP are in fact objections to allowing 1 in 20 attacks to bypass VP. So what if we get rid of that? Restrict bypassing effects to the stuff that you actually want to bypass VP (which could be "nothing whatsoever," or could be things like falling damage, although honestly I'm not sure why falling damage gets singled out over being shot with arrows, stepped on by a wooly mammoth, or blasted with dragonfire). Then the system ought to work fine.

I still think some things should bypass wound points, no matter what. I mean......if your character is knocked off the back of a griffon flying at 2000' in the air, and falls onto a mountainside, given 20d6 is the max damage from a fall, it's realistically possible that he would survive.....in fact, it is *likely* that he would, if he's of a warrior class and over about 10th lvl with above average CON. To me, it just doesn't make sense.

Similarly, if a character falls into molten lava. Again, should be more than 20d6 damage.

I did tend to find that players in my games were amenable to character death, so long as it wasn't gratuitous. During 3E days, it usually gave them a chance to try out a new character concept. Only one character in our group (the druid) didn't die and eventually get replaced during the life of our longest running campaign (lvl 1 to 17).

Banshee

 

[Plane Sailing]

Add me to the crowd that found VP/WP in SWd20 to be way too lethal. We had way too many deaths due to big crits taking PCs down to -10 WP. WAY too many.

Brad

But IIRC you didn't die at -10 in SWd20 (the original version). That is why it was unlikely to die as a result of crits to wounds.

Cheers

 

[Dausuul]

I still think some things should bypass wound points, no matter what. I mean......if your character is knocked off the back of a griffon flying at 2000' in the air, and falls onto a mountainside, given 20d6 is the max damage from a fall, it's realistically possible that he would survive.....in fact, it is *likely* that he would, if he's of a warrior class and over about 10th lvl with above average CON. To me, it just doesn't make sense.

Similarly, if a character falls into molten lava. Again, should be more than 20d6 damage.

Emphasis added.

4E increased falling damage to 1d10 per 10 feet and removed the cap (so a two-thousand-foot fall is 200d10 damage), while also reducing the hit point disparity between low-level and high-level PCs. I have not heard nearly the level of complaints about falling in 4E that I heard in 3E.

As for lava, the damage dealt by falling into lava should certainly be extremely high. (I originally suggested it should be "X+1" where X is the amount of fire damage required to reduce you to ash, but now I'm reconsidering; running across some indications that people can survive falling into, or rather--since you won't sink--onto, lava for very brief periods. Haven't dug up a specific, confirmed account of someone surviving, though.)

I don't see why these things need a bypass mechanic instead of simply increasing the damage dealt.