Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Boltgun]

Hit points can be considered like the amount of blood loss or pain one can take before giving in. I usually announce a broken bone or something of the player get something impressive.  If the player use the hurt limb, he get harder rolls. Players are okay with that because the context back it up and it can be used in most system without problem.

Plus it makes the game interesting as players gets scars and old wounds over time.

We recently played a game with no hit points but open sets of light/heavy/deadly wounds, it was annoying because I was to arbitrarily decide that the players won/lost.

[Fniff]

Why even use hit points at this rate? Just convert all weapons into save-or-wound/die. After all, armour is abstracted in that way, so why not do the same with weapons?

Because turning big numbers into small numbers is fun.

[Tack]

I know FATE does specific wounds.

[Neonivek]

Why even use hit points at this rate? Just convert all weapons into save-or-wound/die. After all, armour is abstracted in that way, so why not do the same with weapons?

Welcome to the issue with Mutants and Masterminds

Where every fight ends with an anti-climax because even bosses are generally defeated within a few turns.

But rather just watch any movie. How many of them end in like 1 or 2 moves?

[scrdest]

Why even use hit points at this rate? Just convert all weapons into save-or-wound/die. After all, armour is abstracted in that way, so why not do the same with weapons?

Welcome to the issue with Mutants and Masterminds

Where every fight ends with an anti-climax because even bosses are generally defeated within a few turns.

But rather just watch any movie. How many of them end in like 1 or 2 moves?

I've thought that a way to play with the abstractions of HP would be to not make it a direct measure of health, but survivability instead - a concept a'la Luck - depleted Luck means not that you have such-and-such number of wounds, but that, depending on the weapons in question, Something Lethal Happens - if it's a firefight, you get a headshot, or if it's a swordfight, you didn't manage to evade that one last strike, but if you were bleeding, for example, you bleed out.

Since it's a (marginally) more tangible thing than Magic Health Count, it could be used as a basis for some interesting mechanics. For example, a cover system would be very simple - it would simply tack on a bunch of temporary HP for the purposes of being attacked from the cover's direction, and attacks would damage those temporary points, whereas being flanked would still deal damage to normal HP. Armor could be similar except omnidirectional.

All attacks would deplete a certain amount of HP - because eventually your luck will simply run out - but the various stats would, for combat, raise it - plus would in different ways come in handy out of combat - so a high-AGI and equally high-CON character would fight the same, but when you had to climb a tree the first one would be the one to call, whereas the second would be called to dive.

Some abilities could represent crazy stunts, and so would be essentially cast from HP.

[Neonivek]

It is a mix of luck and actual stamina.

[My Name is Immaterial]

WOTC released the results of their latest survey. It was about campaigns, and no news about the actual game.

[Tack]

Oh yeah I should talk about that pathfinder game.

A druid shapeshifted into a pterodactyl and caught me out of mid-air whilst I was falling because a flying invisible lich had dispelled the Flight that our cleric had magnanomously thrown on me.

So I nailed the climb check to catch myself on the pterodactyl, nailed the ride check to ride her and then flew up to the lich, harpooned it, nailed the ride check to dismount as a free action, hauled this lich down through a 120 foot fall, took the damage on the chin like a boss (14 hp left), grappled it, tanked the cold touch (2hp left), pinned it and proceeded to punch it in the face whilst he successively failed concentration checks to blink away.
I WAS LEVEL SEVEN. (Mythic 4 *cough*)

Congrats, you made an Ogre shonen protagonist. 

WHO'S SHONEN NOW!!?


Our GM is a good sport when he keeps up with this kind of stuff. I do it amusingly often.
His choice quote for me is 'STOP THE BOAT!!! ...I'm going fishing"

[Yoink]

Does anyone know the name of that RPG system I saw an ad for once in Dungeon and/or Dragon magazine?
It had a picture of some barbaric-lookin' dude clad in furs and such and promised gritty combat and a low-fantasy setting.
I think it may have had 'Iron' in the title but I am unsure. It wasn't Iron Throne, I know that much.

[chaoticag]

I don't think I ever saw the ad, never owned a copy of dragon until DnD insider, but are you talking about Iron Heroes?

[Sergarr]

Iron Heroes

It was written by Mike Mearls

Yoink, I'd suggest you avoid playing that system, or else you'll suffer from sheer badness.

[chaoticag]

Okay, let's seriously not bring the edition warring into this. You're going to need a bigger reason that written by Mike Mearls as a reason the system is bad, especially if you haven't read it.

[scriver]

Another game with something iron-like in the name is Riddle of Steel, I believe?

[Reelya]

With the acid thing, the simplest abstraction is good enough for table-top play, as it provides the basic concept of damage over time. And if the total damage is the same, then what is the benefit of the extra record keeping? It just comes at the expense of roleplaying time.

Consider an acid that you determine (however you want) should do a total 40 points of damage and the ongoing damage should last around 8 combat. you can either apply this @ 5 points of damage per turn, or you could start higher and keep track of the damage that needs to be dealt by the acid each round. So, the acid could start out doing 10 points of damage per round, and reduces to 1 point of damage per round by the end, but you work it out so that the average and total damages are the same.

The real problem lies in the fact that the outcome is the same either way. So you've added extra complexity and record keeping, yet the outcomes have not changed, and the faster acid damage near the start gives the players less rounds to try and do something about the acid, thus it reduces gameplay options.

So the idea of gradually decreasing acid damage fails the test of adding anything interesting to the game. Even if the realistic model is implemented, it will just end up being an extra set of tables to look up, that have pre-computed acid values in them, and won't actually amount to a discussion of the pros and cons of different acid chemistry.

[Jeshin]

http://www.onepagedungeon.info/2015/

Just saw this on the escapist the other day, looks pretty neat and might be useful for any tabletop runners.