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Mar 1, 2013 -- 5:58AM, Herrozerro wrote:

I am against the separate pools of HP, I'd rather have a single pool and have bloodied points at total HP / Number of Pieces.  For instance a 5 peice creature with 100hp would have bloodied points at 20/40/60/80.  each of these bloodied points would corrospond to a kind of detriment weather it's disabling a part or triggering another kind of event. 

I'm not sure how this differs, other than presentation.  Well, having separate pieces allows people to target certain pieces to interfere with the attacks. 

The key to justmike's concern is to make clear that reducing a piece to zero hp doesn't "kill" that piece.  A piece doesn't die.  The creature dies when all pieces are reduced to zero.  Reducing a single piece to zero merely renders that piece unable to attack -- a condition I would call "disabled"

So let's take a dragon. We'll divide it into the following pieces: head, foreclaws, rear claws, wings.  The head can bite and breathe and cast spells. The foreclaws let it half-move and double claw. The rear claws let it full move and rake. The wings let it buffet and fly.  

If you concentrate on the wings, you can drag the dragon down and confine it to the ground, but you haven't done much to weaken its offensive capacity. If you disable the head, it's not dead and can still fly away, but you've removed its most potent attacks.  You can describe a disabled head as a broken jaw, for instance, and disabled wings as having been shredded beyond the point of being able to fly.

This generally works best for creatures that are large or larger and have distinctive areas with varying attacks.  Ettins, chimera, dragons, wyverns, treants, kraken, hydra, and rocs, for instance make great piecework creatures.  Oozes and swarms make goot piecework creatures.  But creatures with  only one or two types of attacks, no matter what size, make poor piecework creatures.  A purple worm, despite its size, won't work well as a piecework creature.  I've noticed also that humanoid creatures that don't have multiple heads don't work as well.  

 

Mar 1, 2013 -- 6:41AM, Herrozerro wrote:

Instead of tracking multiple HP pools, you are just tracking one and something happens when you would do enough damage to trigger an event.

And yet, the amount of math and number crunching you have to do at the table is the same, so you have not sped up play. In the process, however, you have lost the ability to give parts different stats based on the way you want those parts to play out (heads with higher AC but lower HP). You also lose the ability to code the triggered events so that they logically occur in a cause and effect sequence based on the player's choices and actions—unless you seriously convolute the rules you have to write for each stat block, that is. You hardcode every monster into a very artifical pattern of defeat that will always play out the same way.

So, you don't streamline anything in a way that matters (a way that speeds up play at the table or makes the rules easier to understand), you lose out on many of the benefits that make the idea worthy of implementation, and you must convolute and confuse your presentation in order to try and reintegrate those benefits. If you don't reintegrate those benefits you make the game feel “video-gamey” (read: unadaptive) as a result of the way it is hardcoded into patterns that don't necessarily follow the logical progression of an encounter.

Like I said, I really don't like your modification of the idea. If the idea is used, it should be used via the version where the parts each get their own stat block which is disabled once it is reduced to 0 hit points. Your way doesn't add anything. It just adds extra complexity to the monster stat block without introducing any of the real benefits of the idea.