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.
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.
Lmao that’s fucking wild
Totally. Third edition D&D (and its continuation Pathfinder 1e) is amazing for doing the most insane things you can come up with. So many janky combos to be had, with an utterly absurd amount of choices, and characters tend to make more build choices each level than a 5e character does in their entire career. Downside, it’s less newbie-friendly because that many options can be overwhelming. But it’s perfect for those that tried 5e and found it too shallow.
Man I wish I had the time (slash the control of my time) to play D&D again. I was on a 5e campaign and I just couldn’t keep up with it due to work. 3e sounds even better but even more time consuming haha
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.
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.
This but unironically. In medieval total war 2 everythinh except for things like elephants had 1 hitpoint. And a certain chance to recive damage based on atack and defence values. So if the model was hit it died. And it looked much cooler. Contrast that with modern total war games like warhammer where there are health bars. a cavalary charge would send some dudes flying 20mm into the air and after bouncing several times they get up and walk back. Arrows and misiles also work in wierd ways. With the unit loosing sometimes half of its health before anybody dies.
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.
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.
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.
We used to say if you get in a fight in Traveller you already fucked up.
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.
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.
You’re the only other person online I’ve seen talking about cypher. I love numenera!
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…
In GURPS you have relatively low HP, but several ways to defend. Still it’s pretty lethal if you’re combat-happy
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.
“Shell?” Like “turtle shell” or “fired from a canon shell”?
Its “fired from a cannon shell”. The system was made as a military war game.
It’s-a me, confederate soldier
I really like the way it’s handled in Matryoshka (a homebrew variant of Powered By The Apocalypse). There is a harm mechanic and there is a lot of leeway in how the DM dishes it out both to NPCs and PCs.
I generally prefer its focus on collaborative storytelling over straight up tactics and minutia of stats and attack ranges etc.
Check out the Red Game Table podcast if you’re interested in a ttrpg that is basically cosmic horror x-files in the eastern bloc during the cold war.
I like Fate. You have a small quickly restoring pool of stress to soak up harm, but anything more becomes a Consequence. Players agree on what an appropriate consequence is and the narrative follows. You don’t really have the “he’s at 1/483 HP but still fighting strong!” thing.
That sounds really similar to the harm system in Matryoshka actually.
Like there are 7 points of harm anyone can take and as they pass certain thresholds they can receive wounds both physical and otherwise that may cause negative modifiers to subsequent rolls on certain stats or even just in general.
Like in the campaign I am in my character almost got themselves killed in a monomaniacal attempt to communicate and study a psychic entity and wound up just letting them literally live rent free in his head.
Yes, was going to bring up Fate! I really like systems that split damage into ‘heroic near misses or light damageless scrapes’ and ‘actual wounds’, without getting too bogged down in random tables and lookup charts.
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“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.”
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!
Sounds like the exact same thing, just slightly more abstracted. How many hurts is a dying?
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
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
Don’t get me started on mana points. YOU CANNOT CONTAIN THE POWER OF THE AETHER IN MERE NUMBERS
Hello yes I would like 32 aethers please
^^^ statement dreamed up by the utterly DERANGED
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.
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
So it was all Blood Magic? How villainous. :)
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
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
In GURPS, you expend either Fatigue Points or Hit Points to cast a spell.
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.
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.
That’s in Glitch
I don’t understand what this graphic is saying, but I agree
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.
That actually sounds very similar to the health mechanics in Rimworld.
It’s possible that you would appreciate Cataclysm for its similar attention to detail to somewhat realistic simulation.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
