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3 years ago ::
Dec 20, 2009 - 8:34PM
#471
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To be honest this example does not seem like Indy lost a lot of hit points. One fist fight means the damage would be mainly subdual. It seems like he may have failed an Endurance check somewhere along the line though.
First, we were discussing AD&D damage -- unarmed combat wasn't subdual damage (unless the combatant declared it to be so), and there were no Endurance checks. (If I remember my AD&D rules on subdual damage; it's been awhile.)
Second, Indy wasn't just in a fist fight. He was slammed through a windshield, dragged under a jeep, beaten into a dashboard, not to mention the long fall into a tomb, forcing a statue to collapse, and riding it down on a fall. In D&D terms he would have taken plenty of hp damage, but the numerous fist fights would not have helped.
Third, I'm not sure why he would have had to make an Endurance check. For all his adventure on that day, he wasn't exposed to any environmental hazard, extreme temperature, hunger, or thirst. He didn't have to hold his breath or tread water. Nothing happened except physical trauma, which is represented by hp loss.
Alright, I was going off your example which didn't mention windshields, jeeps, dashboards, falls, statues or water falls. Sounds like I may need to watch the movie again. From your original post:
How about Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Indiana Jones steals the Ark, and rescues Marion, from the Nazis in Egypt, through a fight with a brute under a propeller plane, a thrilling car chase, until he finally makes it onto a freighter with the girl and the ark. In their cabin, Indy is so injured he has to point out the handful of places on his body that don't hurt, and then collapses into unconciousness rather than canoodle with the very willing Marion.
The next morning, Indy wakes up to find the Nazis have taken the freighter. He suspends himself in an exhaust vent to eavesdrop on them and then swims hundreds of yards through open ocean water to get onto a German U-Boat, which he then rides -- exposed to the elements -- to a Mediterranean Island, and then proceeds to knock out a few Nazi soldiers, commandeers a bazooka, and then follows the Nazis on a military march through rough terrain, until he finds high ground from which he attempts (unsuccessfully) to bluff the Nazis into returning Marion and the Ark.
Swimming hundreds of yards through open ocean and a ride onto of a U-Boat sounds like it could be physically exhausting, something I could imagine requires an endurance check.
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3 years ago ::
Dec 20, 2009 - 10:26PM
#472
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HP don't specifically represent health or stamina really. All they represent is the ability of your character to stay in the fight, whether it be those, or mental resolve, or any other reason you can think of. The best part about this is, it helps remove the "need" for a healer type character.
Yea, i know that is the case, I pretty much have a hard time accepting that character can charge into battle time after time and not come out with injuries and scars.. so i play with the rules i have mentioned above. In general I find most players see hitpoints as life points of wound points, and on occasion it is difficult to understand how they can have somebody trying to belt them with a warhammer and the results either ends up with death or you can sleep it off over night. Using critical hits or a condition track just help add that little extra danger and grittiness to the game that my group enjoys.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing the game as RAW, i just prefer not to. 
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3 years ago ::
Dec 20, 2009 - 10:33PM
#473
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@Hocus: when 4e was still in development, Keith Baker ( IIRC ) suggested that you easily model injuries after diseases: for example, whenever a PC drops to 0 HP during an encounter, the DM can assign him a wound (with an associated penalty).
While your PCs would still be at full HP after an extended rest, the penalty would stay for at least a couple of nights ( depending on how severe you want the wounds to be ).
I think such a system would be far more realistic than just having few HP, especially considering that, as noted, you could still run a marathon at 1 HP.
I like this idea.. it could be fun to involve things like infections etc for a wound "progressing" of course it may slow the game down a little bit.. but I know my group would appreciate the extra gruesome detail lol
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 1:18AM
#474
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Date Joined:
Apr 15, 2001
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If you really want to have a grittier 4th ed game its easer. 4th ed is still a d20 based game and I'm sure other d20 games have other rules one could add and still keep it 4th ed for the most part. Seems very easy to add the damage threshold system from Star Wars. Basicaly if an attack deals more damage than your fort defence you go -1 down the condition track.
Full Heath
1 step -1 to hit and defences
2 steps -2 to hit and all defences
3 steps -5 "" ""
4 steps -10 "" "" ""
5. KOed.
It takes 3 swift actions to go one step back up the CT (doesn't have to be all in the same round)
Theres feats and the like that can improve your damage threshold along with armor and the like. One could rule a healing surge also sends you up the CT but you gain no hit points.
Reducing a character to a list of dice rolls and modifiers is not role playing*
*pg 30, AD&D 2nd Ed DMG, 1989.
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 3:32AM
#475
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That is basically I have as one of my two methods, except I don't allow a swift action to clim back up, it requires healing.
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 3:42AM
#476
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Well, wasn't that pretty much the point? I thought your problem was that the lack of lasting injuries bothered you.
I never said that a lack of lasting injuries bothered me. What I said, originally, was that the idea of full HP after a night's rest felt too "gamey". I also said (repeatedly) that this was a mechanic that lots of people enjoy, I just wasn't one of them. The consequences of falling to 0 HP don't have to be lasting wounds. I'll explain more further down.
Uhm, which then begs the question: "as opposed to what?".
You said that you feel that "full HP after a night of rest" feels too gamey. This means that, unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're looking for something that's more realistic: you don't want your PCs to be at 100% efficiency shortly after a difficult battle. That's what I meant by "lasting injuries".
If you don't like the fact that some wounds could stay for weeks or months, it's not hard to tune said injuries to make them go away in a couple of days rather than a month, introduce powers or rituals that deal with them, tinker with the heal skill and so on.
Furthermore, if you don't like the idea of a penalty to hit rolls or defenses, you can just reduce the number of healing surges of a wounded character until he's healed, for example, or find a different kind of penalty.
The negatives to attack and damage rolls was just thrown out there as an example. It could be lost Healing Surges. It could be negatives to skills. It could be lots of things. I actually like the idea of lost Healing Surges. Get taken to 0 HP and lose a healing surge when you get back on your feet. The idea that something happens to a PC who has been dropped to the point of death sits much better with me than just rise and shine and kill some more.
Depending on how "realistic" you want your campaign to be, you could assign a wound whenever you're bloodied the first time in an encounter, for example, rather than when you drop to 0 HP.
This is something I'll probably do as soon as I get to play a grim&gritty, low magic campaign I'm planning, BTW :P
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 4:53AM
#477
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- Forum Guide
- Hero Craftsman Gold Medalist
- Master Dungeon Master
Date Joined:
Jun 23, 2005
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Swimming hundreds of yards through open ocean and a ride onto of a U-Boat sounds like it could be physically exhausting, something I could imagine requires an endurance check.
If you read my post, you'd see the swimming comes after the extended rest (at which points he's back to full hp). After swimming, he rides a U-Boat to a Mediterranean island, beats up some Nazis, steals a bazooka, goes on an extended march while stealthily trailing the Nazis, and unsuccessfully attempts to bluff the Nazis into releasing Marion. No extended rest until the end of the movie (and it's not even implied he needs an extended rest at that point).
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 5:29AM
#478
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Date Joined:
Apr 12, 2008
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I really don't call it a "lack of reading conprehension".
That's part of the problem.
You said that you don't know how it would work in play, because of the slippery slope it would cause. It's obvious you see that slippery slopes might have issues in gameplay. So, does that also mean you have issues with the slippery slope presented by slow HP regeneration?
I said it sounded like a slippery slope issue. I don't know 100% if it is or not. That's why I asked. I don't know how it would work in game-play. Would it be better to give the "wound" after taking a critical hit? After dropping to 0 HP? After a night's rest to restore HP? That's why we were having the discussion...to try and expand on the idea. In the meantime, people keep popping in with garbage remarks and distractions, further derailing an already-derailed thread. If the forum-police around here would simply shut up and wait, they would see we were getting around to a possible house-rule mechanic that might inject some semblance of believability to the healing mechanics.
It's getting sort of tedious to see how you're going to take each of my posts as an offense against you and then refuse to respond other than "stop flaming".
Yet you keep doing it, anyway.
In fond memory of Mark "Wrecan" Monack.
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 6:00AM
#479
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- Forum Guide
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Date Joined:
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If the forum-police around here would simply shut up and wait, they would see we were getting around to a possible house-rule mechanic that might inject some semblance of believability to the healing mechanics.
Is "believabiliity" the new "verisimilitude"? What's the metric for "believability"? I'm not sure what you're going for here.
You wanted something less "gamey", although you don't seem to want something with "realism". Maybe if you could more clearly explain what you're looking for, we could help you craft something to your liking. Do you want realism? Do you want a wound chart? Bring back system shock and rolling to see if wounds get infected? I just think a lot of the confusion is it's not very clear what your ultimate goal is.
With respect to your concern that the wound mechanic would create a "slippery slope" (or "cascade effect", to use game design terms), I assure you it will. It has to because a lingering penalty always makes you less able to survive more encounters, and the more they stack up, the fewer encounters you can handle
Here's a hypothetical for illustration. In AD&D, let's say the party of adventurers at full hp can get through about 5 encounters before their hp is so low (say, 20% or lower) they feel they need to rest. If the resting mechanic fails to restore their hp to at least 90% of capacity, they'll be able to handle less encounters the next day. If this continues, they'll handle fewer and fewer with each rest until they don't feel comfortable handling any. That's a cascade effect because the worse you're injured the less you can handle. Now, this can be ameliorated with other mechanics (in AD&D, clerical healing was used, and in 3e cheaply available wands of cure light wounds). Without this alternative mechanic (which essentially renders your resting mechanic moot), the party will eventually have to abandon the quest to recuperate, or will be killed (unless, of course, the DM accommodates the cascade effect either by making sure the adventure ends before the point of no return, or makes successive encounters less and less challenging to reflect the party's diminishing capacity to endure damage).
If you impose a wound mechanic ala disease, that too offers a cascade effect. Each wound penalty makes you less able to handle succesive challenges. Again, the longer the adventure continues, the less the party can handle. Eventually, the party has to either abandon the quest, or will receive a party kill. The only solutions are (1) an extraneous mechanic to render the wound mechanic moot (like, for example, giving the cleric free use of the Remove Affliction Ritual, or ubiquitous Scrolls of Remove Affliction) or (2) the DM designs the adventure so the party succeeds before reaching the point of no return, or (3) the DM designs the adventure so they face easier and easier encounters to accommodate their diminished capacities.
For me, the 1st and 2nd solutions make the entire process of coming up with a wound mechanic futile because you're spending a lot of time designing a wound mechanic that's not intended to actually see play. The 3rd seems like it would just be anticlimactic to the players who end up facing their toughest challenges in the beginning of the adventure.
That's just my two cents on this endeavor. Of course, YMMV.
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3 years ago ::
Dec 21, 2009 - 6:46AM
#480
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- Senior Volunteer Community Lead
- Sesquipedalian
Date Joined:
May 20, 2001
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Bear with me as this response is for a comment posted a while ago. I do like Hocus' suggestion on losing healing surges. Now Hocus- I understand what you mean by 'gamey', but it is in fact eh... a game. :D You stated that if your party couldn't push on, you'd pull back. But that leads to my next question. Did you ever roleplay every day of your character's recovery? Or does the DM hand wave away the weeks/months it would take so you can get on with your adventure? I seem to recall in 2nd edition, that's what we did. Glossed over all the recovery time. If you wanted to, you could consider "healing surges" to be special healing potions geared towards each character. Or, it's some sort of magic item. Or call it suck-it-up-soldier surges.
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Of the two approaches to hobby games today, one is best defined as the realism-simulation school and the other as the game school. AD&D is assuredly an adherent of the latter school. It does not stress any realism (in the author's opinon an absurd effort at best considering the topic!).
It does little to attempt to simulate anything either. (AD&D) is first and foremost a game for the fun and enjoyment of those who seek the use of imagination and creativity....
In all cases, however, the reader should understand that AD&D is designed to be an amusing and diverting pastime, something which an fill a few hours or consume endless days, as the participants desire, but in no case something to be taken too seriously.
For fun, excitement and captivating fantasy, AD&D is unsurpassed.As a realistic simulation of things from the realm of make-believe or even as a reflection of midieval or ancient warfare or culture or society, it can be deemed only a dismal failure. Readers who seek the later must search elsewhere. - Gary Gygax. 1e DMG.
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