• @[email protected]
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    281 year ago

    Fun fact about going below 0 HP: Third Edition D&D tracked that. At 0 you were staggered, below that unconscious, and at -Con Score negative HP you died.

    This being D&D 3.x (3.0/3.5/Pathfinder 1e), there were abilities that extended that limit, abilities that let you stay conscious below 0 HP. I’ve seen someone play a build that was always at negative HP, with a limit of something like -300 before dying, and got bonuses for being in the negatives.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      It is worth noting that the -Con score was a 3.X house rule but Pathfinder 1e raw. It was just -10 otherwise, which could get pretty punishing if you were dropped by bad luck.

      5e’s up-and-down approach to unconsciousness isn’t really an ideal resolution, although making them gain levels of fatigue almost makes it functional.

  • Seeker of Carcosa
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    141 year ago

    Savage Worlds does this right with wounds. Anything under a great success leaves the character shaken, so that they must save of lose their turn. Every wound is a cumulative -1 on all rolls. 4 wounds and you’re out of the fight.

    • @Wogi
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      101 year ago

      Oh boy does it make battles feel more epic.

      Savage worlds does a lot to help with that, honestly. The cards at the start of each session help shake every game up too.

      • Seeker of Carcosa
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        111 year ago

        I’m really singing its praises here, but I really love the classless edge system of Savage Worlds. I’ve never come up against the problem I have with other RPGs where I have to force the mechanics to fit my concept. Want a plate armoured wizard? 2 edges, playable as a beginner character.

        • @Wogi
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          71 year ago

          I also love the trappings mechanic.

          You want your spells to look like a dude’s just throwing cards extremely hard? That’s just how you work baby.

          • Seeker of Carcosa
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            31 year ago

            I also love playing a Huckster in Deadlands. The poker hand mechanic to essentially perform wild magic is ridiculously evocative.

            • @Wogi
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              41 year ago

              Until you run out of bennies. I always ran out of bennies.

        • @[email protected]
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          61 year ago

          That sounds neat. I am so completely bone tired of the “my character comes online at 6th level” dndism. It doesn’t have to be that way! You can have fun now, not in six months!

          • Seeker of Carcosa
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            61 year ago

            Please give it a spin if you haven’t already. Game mechanics need not be constrained to die roll plus modifier. Probably my favourite mechanic is that your level of aptitude in a skill is repesented by the size of die you roll. Also, Savage worlds were doing rerolls for good roleplay in the form of bennies for a few years before D&D dreamed up advantage and inspiration.

            • @[email protected]
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              51 year ago

              It’s been recommended to me a bunch. It’s on my list, but after Fate. I really want to have a solid game of Fate, but unfortunately I am not yet a grandmaster of Time.

              • @[email protected]
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                31 year ago

                I’ve played and briefly GM’d both. They share a lot of stuff while feeling completely different. Savage Worlds is wild and unpredictable, with some narrative control in the hands of the players. FATE is a lot more predictable, with a strongly centered bell curve on rolls and higher narrative control with the players. I love both for different reasons.

  • @[email protected]
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    131 year ago

    HP is messed up because it tries to track two different things at once. The first is how a combatant can be disabled by one big hit or a few smaller ones. The second is how a more experienced or more “heroic” combatant is harder to disable. When you put these together, you get a mess where your Aragorn ripoff can survive multiple blows from an axe.

    But players don’t like being at risk of dying every time they get close to a commoner with a dagger…

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      In GURPS you have relatively low HP, but several ways to defend. Still it’s pretty lethal if you’re combat-happy

  • timtoon
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    111 year ago

    In Traveller, your stats are your HP, so as you lose HP, your physical stats degrade until you are dead. HP doesn’t increase, so bloat doesn’t become an issue.

    • Neato
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      81 year ago

      Does that encourage more of a death-spiral? It makes more sense that a 100% hp and 1% hp person wouldn’t be at the same effectiveness. But once you start downgrading one side’s effectiveness, it can snowball.

      • timtoon
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        31 year ago

        That is true! Combat in Traveller is meant to be quick, deadly, and avoidable at all costs. It encourages strategy because a fair fight could just as easily end up a TPK.

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      Cypher system has a similar mechanic. You have 3 basic stat pools, and apply “effort” from them to make your tasks easier (i.e. lower difficulty of skill checks). These pools are also your “HP” and are reduced by different types of damage. When a pool is emptied you are debilitated in some way, when all 3 are empty you die.

      You can really feel your effectiveness lessen throughout an adventuring day, and it makes your life total more of a resource to manage.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Yeah, I remember that. I didn’t like how it felt tbh. Spend 3 points to get a what, +4 on a d20 roll? That feels real bad when the d20 rolls high and didn’t matter or rolls low and doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter 4/5 of the times so at the end of an adventuring day if you spent all your might on bonuses it could only pay off once.

        I mean sure, you get discounts as you level up, and yes, it really pushes you to use cyphers to actually solve problems, as trying for things directly was always a toss up, and that does push you towards the main themes of exploiting random artifacts all the time but I still didn’t like it.

      • @Stamau123
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        11 year ago

        You’re the only other person online I’ve seen talking about cypher. I love numenera!

  • @[email protected]
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    91 year ago

    I prefer the original hit point system where 1 hit point means getting hit with one 14 inch shell. Considering this I’d say few living things have more than one hp.

  • Psaldorn
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    71 year ago

    Don’t get me started on mana points. YOU CANNOT CONTAIN THE POWER OF THE AETHER IN MERE NUMBERS

    • Aesthesiaphilia
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      41 year ago

      I’d love to see a mechanic where mana points are just “here’s how much magic you can control” and you can go beyond that if you want to but crazy unpredictable things will happen and you will almost certainly die.

      • OpenStars
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        31 year ago

        In the old SNES game Paladin’s Quest, HP and MP share an identical pool. You could either hit with your weapon or use magic, depending on which would cost you more. Magic comes at a PRICE!:-P

        • Neato
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          21 year ago

          So it was all Blood Magic? How villainous. :)

          • OpenStars
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            11 year ago

            Meh, but you saved the world so… there’s that:-P.

            You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Mage the awakening (2e) has a concept of Reaches. As in overreaching. You can throw more than your safe amount of reaches on a spell to get it to be bigger, longer, more complicated… but you’ll have increasing odds of causing a Problem. And every time you make that check in a scene, it gets harder to pass safely.

        Good game. Extremely different than DND

      • Drgon
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        11 year ago

        The Wheel of Time rpg was 90% D&D3, but it had a fun twist on the casting mechanics that let you try to go beyond your spell slots at the risk of losing all your casting.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Dresden Files RPG works that way, Wizards can attempt to do basically anything but the more magic you try to control the worse it can go wrong.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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    1 year ago

    “You attempt to dodge the ogre’s attack but fail. Ok, so now you gotta take out the medical dummy and see if you’re still conscious after taking a 20 pound wooden club to the side of your head at 45mph.”

  • Fonzie!
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    51 year ago

    Genuinely, I like how Ironclaw (Squaring the Circle) does it; attacks and dodges are skill checks, like anything else, how well an attacker succeeds determines which status the victim receives. Low successes only make them Hurt (with its status ailments) which a high enough roll makes them Dying or Dead (again, just statusses you inflict)

    I think it’s a cinematic, intuitive, yet powerful and scalable mechanic!

    • GizmoLion
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      31 year ago

      Sounds like the exact same thing, just slightly more abstracted. How many hurts is a dying?

      • Fonzie!
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        1 year ago

        No it’s a status condition, either you’re Hurt or you’re not.
        It’s a debuff, that makes it easier for others to attack you/inflict bigger statuses on you

  • @[email protected]
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    51 year ago

    We used to have an angel of death once you hit a certain number of negative hit points, like you would lose you intestines or a limb that would have a negative effect that would stay until a regeneration spell was cast

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    I don’t mind the health and hit point system is Cataclysm. Health is a hidden stat that has all kinds of things contributing to it from disease progression to vitamin deficiencies. Each limb has its own hit point value that effects their functionality. Where 0 hp would mean a broken and useless arm but torso or head reaching 0 will end in immediate death.

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    Complex logical systems for PnP are just boring tbh. It’s always stalling the adventures and encourages tryharding.

    I prefer people just being in the moment with a simplified system.

    • @[email protected]
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      61 year ago

      Maybe some of us like it that way. I didn’t sign up for improv night, I signed up for UTTERLY ANNIHILATING GOBLINS with THE BOYS

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        I’m also not the biggest improv person, I enjoy it when other people do it tho. And I don’t understand why people see this as an ‘either improv or crunching numbers’ thing. There’s more you can do to have fun with PnP.

        And there’s nothing wrong with destroying them goblins. I just don’t wanna spend the whole night doing it… also relearning the whole combat system every month is a pain. Even more experienced players struggle with that lol.

    • Neato
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      21 year ago

      In that system what does combat look like? You can just narrate that the players hit the monsters with swords. But most people and monsters won’t die in 1 hit. Or if they do, that’s rocket-tag.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        I’m not saying you should have no combat system at all. I just think many take too long to learn and are too complex, if flow and a rounded experience is more important to you e.g.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          I think you’re right for most groups tbh. My group just happens to enjoy metagaming, rules lawyering etc, with some roleplay mixed in ofc. And since most people play DnD, you only have to learn it once a new edition gets popular.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            Totally a group dependend thing, 100% agree. I just sometimes get the feeling that we break the flow too much when crunching the numbers with DnD, and I wish there would be a shortcut.

  • TwilightVulpine
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    31 year ago

    Well I for one like being a fierce warrior with a huge number representing endurance, who remains completely unbothered and fights with full power even when covered in arrows, up until the final hit lands. Realism? pfft!

    • @[email protected]OP
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      71 year ago

      nah, sarcastic. just came up in chat, and someone was complaining about HP complexities, when it was mentioned that someone should make an HP version of the “stop using math” meme. Thus here we are.