I think there should be some penalty for having low percentage of hit points, for example lower hit roll and higher DC for concentration check for casting spells etc.
darken
Light, is the lack of darkness.
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darken |
Combat performance vs wounds |
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Anyone have rules on this? I mean, hp 0 is staggered, but hp 1 you are perfectly fine... that doesn't sound right
I think there should be some penalty for having low percentage of hit points, for example lower hit roll and higher DC for concentration check for casting spells etc. darken Light, is the lack of darkness. |
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BigRedRod |
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i had that thought myself not long ago
but there are a few problems -hp is an abrast concept, not representing actual damage -it over complicates combat (i forget little details easily and this would be one of them) ...Lucky that my breasts |
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Raidi Sovinfaile |
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Technically the way they designed it, you can function perfectly fine until you get that one hit that brings you down to 0 or lower. Think of it as the straw that broke the camels back.
However, to make things more exciting, I have a house rule that you have some detrimental effects when you get down to 25% and 10% of your max HP. 25% you'd have a -1 to all rolls.. 10% you'd have a -3. Something like that. Also, if you lose more than 50%hp in one round you suffer a system shock (roll Fort save). Critical hits have added <random> detrimental effects aswell. |
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Laguna |
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Raidi Sovinfaile's method seems decent, but if you don't want to mess around with stat changes (which I hate with a passion, unless they're good), here's a different way to think about HP loss:
We've all seen in movies where a very tough person goes down in one stab or slice after a long, hard fought battle. Maybe HP represents the amount of times a person can evade that lethal strike with only minor, non-hindering damage. Think about it, Constitution, which HP is highly dependant on, also represents stamina. HP loss could represent a person's Constitution/stamina being dropped to a level where he/she cannot deal with blocking another blow, so the strike becomes lethal or near lethal. However, as Gladiator has shown us, some people easily drop 5 seconds into a match, so maybe my idea is completely wrong. ***We didn't make him sacrifice his dog, we "persuaded" him into doing it.
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Shadow P Monkey |
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In the 2ed group I play with they use a rule that when you get to 1/2 HP your attacks are at -1, at 1/4 HP you're at -2. That's about as far as it goes...not too complex, but reflects that little bit of fatigue. Also when you reach 0 HP you have to make CON checks(I guess you could use Fort Sves in 3ed) to remain concious. Since you are still concious at 0 HP in 3ed, maybe you could use that rule for characters at -1 HP.
Why procrastinate today what you can put off until tomorrow?
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EnSabahNuhr |
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Quote: Maybe they were 1st level fighters? |
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no interference |
Re: Combat performance vs wounds | |||
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They may have gotten criticals too.
- waste of time - waste of mind - waste of life -
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Laguna |
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Perhaps all of Russel Crowe's attacks in Gladiator were critical threats. Sure as hell looked like it.
You know you've spent too much time with your nose in the PHB when you try to convert characters and actions in movies into D&D terms. ***We didn't make him sacrifice his dog, we "persuaded" him into doing it.
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CelticDragonlord |
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I agree, it may seem a little confusing, but it is an abstract concept. If you want to incorporate some more logical rules, take a look at the Shadowrun gaming system... the more damage you take, the more penalties you get to everything.
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Gralhruk |
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One thing to watch for if you are going to use any of the suggestions above (ie. assign a penalty when the character reaches a certain % of their hit point total) is that characters with higher hit point totals will start getting penalties at higher hit point totals.
For example, you've got a fighter10 (80 hp) and wizard10 (50hp). If you assign a -1 penalty at 50%, that means the fighter gets his -1 when he still has 40 hp left, while the wizard doesn't get a penalty until he's got 25 hp left. To me, that seems a little odd. I'd rather see it as some function of your constitution or character level.
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Shadow P Monkey |
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Why does that seem so odd? Look at it another way...the fighter gets a -1 when he has lost 40 HP, while the wizard gets a -1 after only losing 25 HP. The fighter doesn't get a penalty until he has lost an ammount of HP that would be 4/5 of the wizards's total. That makes perfect sense to me. By the time the fighter gets a -2 for being at 1/4 of his HP, he would have taken 60 points of damage. The wizard would be dead...not just unconcious, but dead.
Another way to look at it would be the difference in levels. A 1st level fighter with 10 HP, and a 10th level fighter with 80 HP. The 1st level fighter doesn't get any penalties until he's down to 5 HP, and the 10th level fighter has a -1 penalty when he's down to 40 HP. However, the 10th level fighter has already taken 8 times as much damage. The 1st level fighter only took 5 points of damage to get a -1 penalty, while it took a whopping 40 points of damage to bring the 10th level fighter to a -1 penalty. "Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill"
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Scott |
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Just to throw something out there, but the game Earthdawn has a wound system which seems to work fairly well. In Earthdawn your hit points are based on your con. You also have a Wound Threshold ( WT from now on) based on that same stat. Increases in your hit points are through the development of Durability which every class has. For the most part your wound threshold doesn't change with the exception of certain classes and magic. As you take wounds, your abilities decrease. You're able to take one wound without any penalty, but after that your abilities take a cumluative -1 past the first wound.
Example: one wound, no penalty, two wounds, -1 penalty, eight wounds, -7 penalty. A wound is scored if you take X+ amount of damage where X is your wound threshold. Regarless of the damage you take from an attack, you'd only take one wound per attack unless some special circumstance applied. Such a circumstance might be a spell which broke every bone in your body, like the harm spell. Maybe the harm spell would be rewritten to do wounds rather than damage. Something like 8 wounds plus the damage caused from a cause critical wounds. Example: Your WT is 9 and you take 9 points of damage, that's a wound. Later you take 20 points of damage, that's one more wound. You don't take two wounds from 20 points of damage, you only take one. Perhaps a wound threshold can be developed for D&D based on your con score, class and total hit points? I can see a possible feat which adds to your wound threshold. Maybe your WT can be your level plus your con and charisma modifier. For every wound past the first, you take a -1 to attacks, damage, saves and skills. These heal at the rate of one per day like temporary stat damage. With successful heal checks you can get back two per day and if you combine it with total bedrest, you can get one more wound healed for a total of three per day. If the wound level is too low, maybe give certain classes a bonus. Every two levels of fighter you can add one more point to your wound threshold. Example: 4th level fighter with a 16 con and 10 cha has a WT of 9 (4 level +2 fighter bonus + 3 con + 0 cha). Average hit points for the fighter 38 (10 + 5.5*3 + 12). On average he can take 4 wounds before dying. Afte taking his 36 points of damage and four wounds, he's penalized -3 points to his attack and damage. This makes mages very powerful in terms of dishing out wounds. It would also make spells like magic missile not so powerful at high levels since d4+1 won't wound anything other than a normal kobold. Anyway, feel free to adopt something like this for your own use. I just thought of this on the fly. I give you full permission to canibalize it as you see fit so long as you give me and the Earthdawn makers some credit. FYI, Earthdawn is a property of Living Room Games, not FASA. Scott |
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MerricB |
Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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The solution I suggested was as follows:
When a certain condition occurs, you may only take partial actions unless you make a Fort save (DC 22) at the beginning of that round. What's the condition? Well, that's up to you. I suggest either 50% of hit points; or if you take a strike equal to your Constitution score in damage. It's worth reading what Ryan said about Hit Points. You can find the thread here: www.gamingreport.com/modu...=31&page=1 Cheers! |
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Laguna |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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One thing that deserves to be taken into account about this is Adrenaline (spelling?). When a character is dropped to, say for instance, less than 10% of his full HP, he gets an adrenaline rush, perhaps granting him temporary resistance to damage. I'm really not sure what could be done with this, but it seems realistic enough. One point that is needed to be made is that a barbarian should get the most benefit from this rush, I think.
***We didn't make him sacrifice his dog, we "persuaded" him into doing it.
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Shadow P Monkey |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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I think a barbarian's rage qualifies as an adrenaline rush already.
"Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill"
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Kimokebab |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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shadow, you were commenting about how characters with higher hit points get the minus's for much longer and your arguement, whilst sound, assumed everyone is usually on full hitpoints, most fighters in our groups get beaten up and the party can't heal them back to full everytime... thus they are running roung with less than half their hitpoints for most of the game. maybe it should be an encounter based thing where it is exactly as you said but only works for one encounter then the minus' are 'reset'...
might be too complex though to keep track of... and it is abstract anyway.. "Here catch"
- Caslin to Wilby Tealeaf (Standing on a, known, pressure Trigger for a CR 10 Trap) |
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Shadow P Monkey |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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Well if you're running around beaten down to half(or less) of your hit points, you're probably not feeling your fittest. Still, technically, it takes more damage to bring down a high level fighter to penalties than a wizard. I don't see why these penalties would be reset...you still have the crap beaten out of you as long as you're not getting healed...your muscles are still sore...cuts are still bleeding...bruises are still aching. It's like getting stabbed, and thinking you'll be up to full fighting ability if you walk around a while without any medical attention, or rest even though you're still bleeding to death. It would be more realistic to have those penalties get worse as time goes by without healing, but I would prefer to keep things a little more simple than that. Besides, I was just giving a suggestion to the topic at hand by relating a rule used by one of my groups.
"Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill"
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Laguna |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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One thing that has always troubled me about wounds is this: Isn't there a chance that the wound may become infected? Think about it, if a wound goes untreated, ie, no heal or CLW spell, it would remain open to the outside, and the PC could contract a disease. Maybe to determine if the character gets a disease would be make a fortitude saving throw after x amount of time. I have no idea what the DC would be, though. It would definently be different in almost every situation, ie, damage taken, surrounding conditions, time since wound.
***We didn't make him sacrifice his dog, we "persuaded" him into doing it.
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Shadow P Monkey |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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If you wanted to add something like diseases you could make a chart similar to the poison chart with diseases in place of poisons. List DC's, times, and effects. I would say most diseases might only be a DC 1-5 per hour untreated. Nothing worse than having a character die from natural causes...except maybe living a calm, peaceful, long life Characters should always die horribly violent, bloody, gory, spewing, gut-wrenching deaths...it's what they want after all, and we, as players/DM's, should give them just that. Diseases just aren't good enough for them.
So if you encounter a PC who is either about to die of some dabilitating disease, retiring and settling down, or dying of old age...do them a favor and hack their head off...they will thank you for it. "Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill"
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Laguna |
Re: Ryan Dancey asked this too... | |||
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There's a feat in Ravenloft Campaign Settings called "Back to the Wall". When you're at 1/4 of your full hp or less, your AC and BAB increase by 2.
So, I guess if you want your PC to get an adrenaline rush of sorts, this is it. ***When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.
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