The Alan Wake RPG is for GMs who have a sort of fun little story they want to tell with their players and want to interrupt it every five minutes with the boringest, most repetitive combat.
roll to check battery levels.
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tzeentchlingDoctor of RocksOaklandRegistered Userregular
it's possible to make some versions of D&D low-magic by brutally enforcing the restrictions on material components and that was certainly part of the rationale for their inclusion (maybe you don't always have a bag of bat guano!) but that is another design element that was best suited for when D&D was a game of meta-logistics and opportunity cost ("should I bring along all the candles I need for this ritual? that's that much less gold I can haul back to town") but at some point you're probably better off playing RuneQuest or The Riddle of Steel or something
I feel like the structure of D&D is still based around magic.
Like, how are you going to heal if you don't have a party member with divine magic capabilities? Healing potions definitely shouldn't be commonplace in a low magic world, and that's classically your best alternative. Natural healing in D&D takes for-fucking-ever, and the heal skill is classically super useless. But as soon as you've got cure light wounds, you've got obscuring mist and summon monster.
And like, I used to work as a stage magician, but I can't sleight of hand that shit. That's some actual magic.
I think you might be able to do better with like, maybe even a Dungeon World rework. Dungeon World is hella magical, don't get me wrong, but at least like, you don't have the hit point bloat, so you might be able to work with the natural healing rules the game gives you.
Late, but this was one of the things I liked best about 4e. You could heal people all sorts of ways, not just divine magic. Nature magic, bardish songs, literally shouting at people. It was a great concept.
it's possible to make some versions of D&D low-magic by brutally enforcing the restrictions on material components and that was certainly part of the rationale for their inclusion (maybe you don't always have a bag of bat guano!) but that is another design element that was best suited for when D&D was a game of meta-logistics and opportunity cost ("should I bring along all the candles I need for this ritual? that's that much less gold I can haul back to town") but at some point you're probably better off playing RuneQuest or The Riddle of Steel or something
I feel like the structure of D&D is still based around magic.
Like, how are you going to heal if you don't have a party member with divine magic capabilities? Healing potions definitely shouldn't be commonplace in a low magic world, and that's classically your best alternative. Natural healing in D&D takes for-fucking-ever, and the heal skill is classically super useless. But as soon as you've got cure light wounds, you've got obscuring mist and summon monster.
And like, I used to work as a stage magician, but I can't sleight of hand that shit. That's some actual magic.
I think you might be able to do better with like, maybe even a Dungeon World rework. Dungeon World is hella magical, don't get me wrong, but at least like, you don't have the hit point bloat, so you might be able to work with the natural healing rules the game gives you.
Late, but this was one of the things I liked best about 4e. You could heal people all sorts of ways, not just divine magic. Nature magic, bardish songs, literally shouting at people. It was a great concept.
5E has a mechanic with short rests, it's slightly more random and much less reliable, but it's still a form of healing that allows you to continue throughout the day without magic.
Vivienne, pimento my sister and I finished pandemic legacy (after a one year hiatus for various life related reasons).
It was good, there is maybe one game mechanic that I wasn't super happy with, but overall I was really happy with it and the funness of the narative. Hopefull next season they will try and push the story telling more (one month was literally less than a line of text which was disappointing) it'd be fun if they work in some videos or something for pre mission breifings.
I'm not sure if the search mechanic is as elegant as the rest of the game. Especially in the final mission which was essentially search forever with a million cards. It isn't that it is super super bad or anything, it just feels clunky comparing to everything else in thegame.
We did get a bit lucky as someone had the binoculers and had the upgrade that allowed you to pull a spent card (that they used) out of the discards) which made it a lot easier and I'm not sure we would have passed it first go if it wasn't for that.
Our score was 838 in total, what did other people get?
I thought the search mechanic was fine? I mean, at the end of the day, it's basically just a lightly-scripted version of the things you already do:
1) Go to location.
2) Spend Actions.
3) Burn cards.
You could come up with various different ways to do this, and have it different each time, but by making a common mechanic you don't have to re-introduce a new rule and mechanic each month. I think it could probably be improved - require searches in different locations, or multiple characters, or phases - but it would probably come at the expense of simplicity. That last search is essentially supposed to be an epic end-of-game search boss battle type thing... and yeah, possibly it could have worked better, but it's should be the only significant objective you should have to do and thing to spend cards on, so it should be on the slightly ridiculous side compared to a month where you're looking for cures.
So overall I didn't really notice searching as being any different from anything else. Just another thing to spend actions and cards on, but with a bit of control over where you can direct players (namely so you can put the players into peril).
But yeah, very much looking forward to season two and hoping that we'll see even more narrative crunch. What I've seen so far is salivating.
I just read your write-up! That second turn in December tho - FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuck that
We had a cluster of losses in the middle part of the year thanks to something similar - an Epidemic card pulled right at the start, and later on 2 Epidemic cards being really close together (almost 2 consecutive turns). But apart from those few losses we actually had a hugely successful game.
Much of it was, as Blake said, just dumb luck that happened to put the right cards with the right people so that we could effectively use their relationships. This happened to us in October with 2 Rivals getting all the event cards, leading to one of the easiest rounds of Pandemic I've ever had, and I'm pretty sure we had a similar scenario again earlier in the in-game year with another pair of rivals that also resulted in a clean win.
Other super lucky things that led to our 838 score would be:
- very few collapsed or fallen cities, and reasonably well-spread rioting which meant we could still fly to most regions fairly easily
- great starting cards for November, because we got a Vaccine Factory up in Chicago on turn 1, and then on turn 3, I as the Dispatcher with the Pilot upgrade had a card to a 0-panic city on the other side of the world which meant I could fly directly there and set up a second Factory within one turn
- we drew not just the City Zero card, but also the Binoculars while in the city adjacent to City Zero to find Patient Zero in October
- drawing NO black infection cards at all in November (C0dA was black for us)
- the factories we'd destroyed back in August/September (can't remember which month) also happened to clear up most of the Faded region (this was NOT intended, it was a matter of convenience at the time)
- all black player cards drawn in December that we happened to draw had already been vaccinated in November, and only 2 black infection cards appeared at all during December
Our final line-up in December was the Immunologist (@pimento), the QS (my sister-in-law), the Researcher (Blake), and the Dispatcher (me); we had not used the Researcher at all since February in-game so she was scar-less and upgrade-less. We didn't have any useful relationships going in.
I argued very hard for the Flexible character upgrade (swap one card for another card of the same color) and it just so happened in December that our Atlanta-based search-person wasn't just the person with the Flexible card, she also happened to draw the Binoculars, which we had on a blue card, which she then used and then got a blue card off our Researcher for her next turn so she could use them AGAIN. So getting the stockpile was easy after that.
And I could be biased because it was my character for most of the game, but Dispatcher + Pilot + a Co-worker is such a fantastically synergistic setup that I think it's hard to give up.
Vivienne, pimento my sister and I finished pandemic legacy (after a one year hiatus for various life related reasons).
It was good, there is maybe one game mechanic that I wasn't super happy with, but overall I was really happy with it and the funness of the narative. Hopefull next season they will try and push the story telling more (one month was literally less than a line of text which was disappointing) it'd be fun if they work in some videos or something for pre mission breifings.
I'm not sure if the search mechanic is as elegant as the rest of the game. Especially in the final mission which was essentially search forever with a million cards. It isn't that it is super super bad or anything, it just feels clunky comparing to everything else in thegame.
We did get a bit lucky as someone had the binoculers and had the upgrade that allowed you to pull a spent card (that they used) out of the discards) which made it a lot easier and I'm not sure we would have passed it first go if it wasn't for that.
Our score was 838 in total, what did other people get?
I thought the search mechanic was fine? I mean, at the end of the day, it's basically just a lightly-scripted version of the things you already do:
1) Go to location.
2) Spend Actions.
3) Burn cards.
You could come up with various different ways to do this, and have it different each time, but by making a common mechanic you don't have to re-introduce a new rule and mechanic each month. I think it could probably be improved - require searches in different locations, or multiple characters, or phases - but it would probably come at the expense of simplicity. That last search is essentially supposed to be an epic end-of-game search boss battle type thing... and yeah, possibly it could have worked better, but it's should be the only significant objective you should have to do and thing to spend cards on, so it should be on the slightly ridiculous side compared to a month where you're looking for cures.
So overall I didn't really notice searching as being any different from anything else. Just another thing to spend actions and cards on, but with a bit of control over where you can direct players (namely so you can put the players into peril).
But yeah, very much looking forward to season two and hoping that we'll see even more narrative crunch. What I've seen so far is salivating.
I just read your write-up! That second turn in December tho - FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuck that
We had a cluster of losses in the middle part of the year thanks to something similar - an Epidemic card pulled right at the start, and later on 2 Epidemic cards being really close together (almost 2 consecutive turns). But apart from those few losses we actually had a hugely successful game.
Much of it was, as Blake said, just dumb luck that happened to put the right cards with the right people so that we could effectively use their relationships. This happened to us in October with 2 Rivals getting all the event cards, leading to one of the easiest rounds of Pandemic I've ever had, and I'm pretty sure we had a similar scenario again earlier in the in-game year with another pair of rivals that also resulted in a clean win.
Other super lucky things that led to our 838 score would be:
- very few collapsed or fallen cities, and reasonably well-spread rioting which meant we could still fly to most regions fairly easily
- great starting cards for November, because we got a Vaccine Factory up in Chicago on turn 1, and then on turn 3, I as the Dispatcher with the Pilot upgrade had a card to a 0-panic city on the other side of the world which meant I could fly directly there and set up a second Factory within one turn
- we drew not just the City Zero card, but also the Binoculars while in the city adjacent to City Zero to find Patient Zero in October
- drawing NO black infection cards at all in November (C0dA was black for us)
- the factories we'd destroyed back in August/September (can't remember which month) also happened to clear up most of the Faded region (this was NOT intended, it was a matter of convenience at the time)
- all black player cards drawn in December that we happened to draw had already been vaccinated in November, and only 2 black infection cards appeared at all during December
Our final line-up in December was the Immunologist (@pimento), the QS (my sister-in-law), the Researcher (Blake), and the Dispatcher (me); we had not used the Researcher at all since February in-game so she was scar-less and upgrade-less. We didn't have any useful relationships going in.
I argued very hard for the Flexible character upgrade (swap one card for another card of the same color) and it just so happened in December that our Atlanta-based search-person wasn't just the person with the Flexible card, she also happened to draw the Binoculars, which we had on a blue card, which she then used and then got a blue card off our Researcher for her next turn so she could use them AGAIN. So getting the stockpile was easy after that.
And I could be biased because it was my character for most of the game, but Dispatcher + Pilot + a Co-worker is such a fantastically synergistic setup that I think it's hard to give up.
Interesting how many people seem to stop using the researcher one or two months in, only to bring them back for that last game; at least one other person in CF did that as well.
And without a Researcher, the Dispatcher becomes the best way to trade cards; from that perspective alone they become much more useful, but I absolutely love the Dispatcher regardless. We had Pilot and Veteran on ours, so he could do military flights.
Yeah, hard to say if the Dispatcher was considered the most useful character in our game, but I think if you were to poll the players in our game, it'd definitely be top 3 over the course of the whole year.
Also interesting to see how different C0dA colours flavour the game. I've always thought it's interesting how the map layout influences how each disease plays out; in terms of mechanics, disease progression is largely identical, but actually those subtle graph connections give each disease it's own slightly different threat model. Some are supposedly theoretically easier than others, but honestly I think the RNG has more influence over how easy or difficult the game is. Black for us was the easy-beat disease and we put all 4 disease upgrades on it very quickly. I've seen some talk suggesting having a Blue C0dA is considered potentially more difficult than the others to contain, but we didn't have as much trouble as some with other colours. It did, however, make the 'go back to Atlanta' bit in December considerably tougher, so it's kinda interesting to think about how other campaigns might have experienced that.
it's possible to make some versions of D&D low-magic by brutally enforcing the restrictions on material components and that was certainly part of the rationale for their inclusion (maybe you don't always have a bag of bat guano!) but that is another design element that was best suited for when D&D was a game of meta-logistics and opportunity cost ("should I bring along all the candles I need for this ritual? that's that much less gold I can haul back to town") but at some point you're probably better off playing RuneQuest or The Riddle of Steel or something
I feel like the structure of D&D is still based around magic.
Like, how are you going to heal if you don't have a party member with divine magic capabilities? Healing potions definitely shouldn't be commonplace in a low magic world, and that's classically your best alternative. Natural healing in D&D takes for-fucking-ever, and the heal skill is classically super useless. But as soon as you've got cure light wounds, you've got obscuring mist and summon monster.
And like, I used to work as a stage magician, but I can't sleight of hand that shit. That's some actual magic.
I think you might be able to do better with like, maybe even a Dungeon World rework. Dungeon World is hella magical, don't get me wrong, but at least like, you don't have the hit point bloat, so you might be able to work with the natural healing rules the game gives you.
Late, but this was one of the things I liked best about 4e. You could heal people all sorts of ways, not just divine magic. Nature magic, bardish songs, literally shouting at people. It was a great concept.
Yeah, it was good with that.
I mean, the way I figure it, hit points are a super abstract concept, especially in a game like D&D where you're constantly gaining hit points. Like, what is that supposed to be? Pain tolerance? Pints of blood?
Or, as I see it, hit points represent your stamina, your ability to keep fighting without making a single fatal error. Because honestly, when you're up against a ten foot tall monster man with a razor sharp sword, it's not attrition that's bringing you down. It's him getting that one good hit on you. So when you take fifteen points of damage, that's throwing yourself out of the way to avoid getting hit. When you get bloodied, that's a gouge on your upper arm. And when you get killed, that's him finally getting that perfect hit on you.
So if hit points are based more around stamina (at least in part), it makes more sense for all of these ways to work at healing you. A song that energizes you, a shout that keeps you on your toes, a bear spirit that empowers you with its own stamina.
Stamina certainly makes more sense, though I've never ran into a GM or player that narrates it that way. D&D is decidedly non-simulationist so levelling up letting your dude get stabbed more works well enough though.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I mean
That is one of the reasons that I think D&D is a bad game, yes
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
To be less pithy about it, my actual issue with hit points (at least in the way that D&D uses them) is that I think they are an active detriment to storytelling.
By being a totally abstract measure, there's not a consistently good way to describe what they do in terms of story description, and frequently trying to create flavorful will essentially contradict and potentially confuse the statistical side of the game.
Like, if a player attacks an enemy and deals ten damage, the best way to describe that in order to make sure that your players know what they did has already been said. It's ten damage - there's an understanding of that, even if it's not an in-universe understanding (although really, I'm sure a couple of clerics and the scientific method could figure something out there). If you say that their arrow ripped through the orc's cheek, splitting it to the lip, leaving behind two flaps of skin that froth with blood as he screams in rage, that doesn't really mean anything. If they didn't know that they'd just dealt ten damage, they wouldn't know how to interpret that.
And then it leads to things that the rules aren't really designed to cover, as well. Let's say instead of going through the orc's cheek, that arrow sunk deep into the meat of his thigh. He howls in agony, raising his foot up off the ground, and as he rebrandishes his axe, you can see that he refuses to put his full weight on it. That description to me suggests that the orc has been hobbled, and that you should be able to run away from him more easily. Or that if you took a called shot at his other leg (not that D&D is typically very fond of called shots, which in part relates to this, if you ask me) then you might be able to drop him to the ground. And personally, as a DM, I'd totally reward that innovative idea, but I don't think that the game really directly supports it.
And if you don't want your players to get those ideas, you have two options. You can describe everything as a surface wound until it's a deadly one, or you can just say, "You deal ten points of damage the orc. He's looking a bit worse for wear - not bloodied, but certainly getting close." Which is some weak shit, if you ask me.
The Alan Wake RPG is for GMs who have a sort of fun little story they want to tell with their players and want to interrupt it every five minutes with the boringest, most repetitive combat.
Combat skills are a trap in that game. It's about maximizing battery life and sprint speed.
To be less pithy about it, my actual issue with hit points (at least in the way that D&D uses them) is that I think they are an active detriment to storytelling.
By being a totally abstract measure, there's not a consistently good way to describe what they do in terms of story description, and frequently trying to create flavorful will essentially contradict and potentially confuse the statistical side of the game.
Like, if a player attacks an enemy and deals ten damage, the best way to describe that in order to make sure that your players know what they did has already been said. It's ten damage - there's an understanding of that, even if it's not an in-universe understanding (although really, I'm sure a couple of clerics and the scientific method could figure something out there). If you say that their arrow ripped through the orc's cheek, splitting it to the lip, leaving behind two flaps of skin that froth with blood as he screams in rage, that doesn't really mean anything. If they didn't know that they'd just dealt ten damage, they wouldn't know how to interpret that.
And then it leads to things that the rules aren't really designed to cover, as well. Let's say instead of going through the orc's cheek, that arrow sunk deep into the meat of his thigh. He howls in agony, raising his foot up off the ground, and as he rebrandishes his axe, you can see that he refuses to put his full weight on it. That description to me suggests that the orc has been hobbled, and that you should be able to run away from him more easily. Or that if you took a called shot at his other leg (not that D&D is typically very fond of called shots, which in part relates to this, if you ask me) then you might be able to drop him to the ground. And personally, as a DM, I'd totally reward that innovative idea, but I don't think that the game really directly supports it.
And if you don't want your players to get those ideas, you have two options. You can describe everything as a surface wound until it's a deadly one, or you can just say, "You deal ten points of damage the orc. He's looking a bit worse for wear - not bloodied, but certainly getting close." Which is some weak shit, if you ask me.
I like what some systems do where major injuries are tied to doing a large chunk of damage or percentage of opponents HP in a single blow. That way the narrative holds: small damage amounts are surface wounds and solid hits screw someone up real fast.
Stamina certainly makes more sense, though I've never ran into a GM or player that narrates it that way. D&D is decidedly non-simulationist so levelling up letting your dude get stabbed more works well enough though.
It's one way of looking at hp.
Another is plot immunity.
There's a lot of valid ways to look at hp. Unfortunately the most commonly chosen one is numbers that determine when things stop.
I think at the end of the day it's hard to reconcile most RPG's themes (above average people doing adventuring with lots of fighting) with what feels natural for wounds.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
To be less pithy about it, my actual issue with hit points (at least in the way that D&D uses them) is that I think they are an active detriment to storytelling.
By being a totally abstract measure, there's not a consistently good way to describe what they do in terms of story description, and frequently trying to create flavorful will essentially contradict and potentially confuse the statistical side of the game.
Like, if a player attacks an enemy and deals ten damage, the best way to describe that in order to make sure that your players know what they did has already been said. It's ten damage - there's an understanding of that, even if it's not an in-universe understanding (although really, I'm sure a couple of clerics and the scientific method could figure something out there). If you say that their arrow ripped through the orc's cheek, splitting it to the lip, leaving behind two flaps of skin that froth with blood as he screams in rage, that doesn't really mean anything. If they didn't know that they'd just dealt ten damage, they wouldn't know how to interpret that.
And then it leads to things that the rules aren't really designed to cover, as well. Let's say instead of going through the orc's cheek, that arrow sunk deep into the meat of his thigh. He howls in agony, raising his foot up off the ground, and as he rebrandishes his axe, you can see that he refuses to put his full weight on it. That description to me suggests that the orc has been hobbled, and that you should be able to run away from him more easily. Or that if you took a called shot at his other leg (not that D&D is typically very fond of called shots, which in part relates to this, if you ask me) then you might be able to drop him to the ground. And personally, as a DM, I'd totally reward that innovative idea, but I don't think that the game really directly supports it.
And if you don't want your players to get those ideas, you have two options. You can describe everything as a surface wound until it's a deadly one, or you can just say, "You deal ten points of damage the orc. He's looking a bit worse for wear - not bloodied, but certainly getting close." Which is some weak shit, if you ask me.
I thiiink it was the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which defended this as a design decision - maybe it was also another book which had rules for targeted attacks
The gist of it was that the game was not about gore and you would run into the question of how specific wounds would affect (or continue to affect) player characters
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I believe it was the d20 based Star Wars RPG that did it first, but it was also a UA variant to split hit points into Vitality and Wound points. It's not a perfect system, partially because it's a hack, but it's something I'd consider doing to a future D&D game myself.
It's fully available here, but the basic gist is that hit points are converted to vitality points, which continue to go up with every level up, just like hit points. Your average attack will damage vitality points, most healing is based around regaining vitality points, and so on. Vitality points are described as being the character's ability to turn a direct hit into a glancing blow, which I think is a pretty similar concept to the endurance I earlier espoused.
But if you run out of vitality points, or you get hit with a critical, that targets your wound points. You have wound points equal to your constitution score. That's it - you never gain any more wound points, and if you run out of wound points you're dead (well, dying). Getting wounded also tends to fuck you up in other ways - you're fatigued, you can get stunned, that sort of thing.
There's also some weird notes with healing - as I mentioned, magical healing is focused on vitality points, but it does restore wound points, just at a much lower level. And wound points can take a bit to heal, even with resting - higher level characters recover them faster, which is somewhat bizarre, but whatever. The cool thing is that you recover vitality points even while you're awake. It's still pretty slow, but the idea is that you can get those back without the need for magical healing.
There's still a bunch of things I'd change with it, as, at the end of the day, it's a hit point system and I don't really like those, but I do think it's quite an interesting improvement on the default.
Named Characters had basically 2 layers of HP: The first layer was your luck to scrape by, get a near miss, dodge just in time.
Every character had the second layer, which was actually damage taken. It was scaled lower if I remember, and harder to heal.
I also love the Rogue Trader interpretation:
You have 6-10 Wounds.
Once you get to 0, you are in Real Trouble, but you could still carry on for a long time. Consult the critical hit table! They are per body part and damage type. You reverse the hitdie to determine what body part got screwed.
If you got to -10 you're always dead, but in between there you start losing limbs, eyes, gaining scars, getting knocked back.
Because it takes time to consult I'd do it on named foes only, and had mooks die at 0.
The Vitality and Wounds system has several major flaws, not the least of which is that it's significantly (on orders of magnitude) more lethal than hp.
I like hit points.
Because fuck it, who cares, I'm playing a game and I want them to fight the dragon and not be aghast in horror because the acid melted their arm off and they'll need months of healing.
My personal tastes lean towards relatively high powered epic fantasy or anime, and somewhat mechanically crunchy systems. Hit points work really well for that because if you run high lethality at that power level it's super dumb immediately.
However, if someone gets shot in Monsterhearts, that should feel a lot different than someone taking an arrow while running up the back of a colossus, yknow? There should be conditions and drama and narrative weight to someone pulling a gun or knife or even getting punched because that's the genre expectation.
But nebulous "hit points" work just fine for me, and 4E's fine/bloodied/dead system was about the most work I'd ever want to do for applying bonuses/penalties based on wounds taken.
40K-style critical hit tables are an absolute joy to bust out on occasion, I guess? It loses some of the luster for me when they pop up in every session, though.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
The Vitality and Wounds system has several major flaws, not the least of which is that it's significantly (on orders of magnitude) more lethal than hp.
Yeah, it really is. Crits making it straight to wound gets really nasty as you gain levels and are fighting enemies that do like, 2d10+5 damage with their attacks. Odds are you're going to be taking 16 damage from that crit, so unless you're a constitution heavy character, you're pretty fucked.
Like I said, I'd pretty extensively revamp it for my own use, but I like the idea behind it a bunch.
Off the top of my head, here's what I'd do:
- Reduce the total vitality points of all classes. Maybe a lot, maybe a little (this is a bit playtest dependent).
- Increase the rate at which vitality points regenerate. Essentially, when you're out of combat for an extended period of time (a couple hours, maybe), you should get most of them back.
- Potentially add a second wind action in that allows you to spend a turn in combat regaining your own vitality points. I like the ability for characters to heal themselves, and it super makes sense with this structure.
- Reduce the potential for critical hits to wreck people. I'm not sure exactly what to do here - I like crits auto-wounding, so I'm thinking maybe change it so like, that 2d10+5 crit deals 2d10 VP and 5 WP. It's still nasty, but not inherently deadly.
- Potentially create some sort of critical hit style table for when people take wounds. Make those suckers hurt.
I think at the end of the day it's hard to reconcile most RPG's themes (above average people doing adventuring with lots of fighting) with what feels natural for wounds.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
See, I'm perfectly okay with that. Which is why I am attracted to systems like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Legend of the Five Rings.
I like it when getting into combat is a big deal and scary for everyone involved. Personally nothing bores me faster than a pnp roleplaying game that is just a series of dungeon rooms and fights designed to slowly drain your resources (like spells per day) instead of actually being a scary threat to the players. Consequently I find D&D to be super boring.
Named Characters had basically 2 layers of HP: The first layer was your luck to scrape by, get a near miss, dodge just in time.
Every character had the second layer, which was actually damage taken. It was scaled lower if I remember, and harder to heal.
I also love the Rogue Trader interpretation:
You have 6-10 Wounds.
Once you get to 0, you are in Real Trouble, but you could still carry on for a long time. Consult the critical hit table! They are per body part and damage type. You reverse the hitdie to determine what body part got screwed.
If you got to -10 you're always dead, but in between there you start losing limbs, eyes, gaining scars, getting knocked back.
Because it takes time to consult I'd do it on named foes only, and had mooks die at 0.
I think at the end of the day it's hard to reconcile most RPG's themes (above average people doing adventuring with lots of fighting) with what feels natural for wounds.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
See, I'm perfectly okay with that. Which is why I am attracted to systems like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Legend of the Five Rings.
I like it when getting into combat is a big deal and scary for everyone involved. Personally nothing bores me faster than a pnp roleplaying game that is just a series of dungeon rooms and fights designed to slowly drain your resources (like spells per day) instead of actually being a scary threat to the players. Consequently I find D&D to be super boring.
Early versions of D&D could be deadly as fuck and people mostly shudder when thinking back to it I found
I think at the end of the day it's hard to reconcile most RPG's themes (above average people doing adventuring with lots of fighting) with what feels natural for wounds.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
See, I'm perfectly okay with that. Which is why I am attracted to systems like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Legend of the Five Rings.
I like it when getting into combat is a big deal and scary for everyone involved. Personally nothing bores me faster than a pnp roleplaying game that is just a series of dungeon rooms and fights designed to slowly drain your resources (like spells per day) instead of actually being a scary threat to the players. Consequently I find D&D to be super boring.
Early versions of D&D could be deadly as fuck and people mostly shudder when thinking back to it I found
To be fair, weren't early editions of D&D basically a skirmish wargame where you controlled a whole party and didn't really care that much if your dudes died horribly anyway?
I think at the end of the day it's hard to reconcile most RPG's themes (above average people doing adventuring with lots of fighting) with what feels natural for wounds.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
See, I'm perfectly okay with that. Which is why I am attracted to systems like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Legend of the Five Rings.
I like it when getting into combat is a big deal and scary for everyone involved. Personally nothing bores me faster than a pnp roleplaying game that is just a series of dungeon rooms and fights designed to slowly drain your resources (like spells per day) instead of actually being a scary threat to the players. Consequently I find D&D to be super boring.
Early versions of D&D could be deadly as fuck and people mostly shudder when thinking back to it I found
To be fair, weren't early editions of D&D basically a skirmish wargame where you controlled a whole party and didn't really care that much if your dudes died horribly anyway?
People would still lose their shit but that's how it was designed, yes
I think part of the reason why they used a generalized system for wounding was also that no one really thought that wounds added to a character or represented something like a roleplaying opportunity
But I might be wrong
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
D&D is kind of a bad game to have super deadly combat in just because of how involved character creation can be.
If you have a system where you can whip out a new character in half an hour and be ready for an introduction in the next couple of scenes, that sort of lethality works, but a lot of people can't do that with D&D. And, honestly, the character creation is arduous enough that even if you can do it, I can totally understand not wanting to.
Too bad I can't make heads or tails of the games themselves.
The reverse to hit always remains weird and it's a 2 layer defense system which is also slow (dodge and armor, and I even outlawed different armor per body slot)
After 4 sessions the immense power of cover became known which caused major slowdown.
Psions are terrifying. Ours was extremely lucky and mutated positively 3 times and became a god.
But it was still a very fun campaign to play. Having spaceship and ground combat is fun, and I even conspired once to do a Star Wars version with the Xwing mini rules for space, but the friends interested just live to far apart to make it work.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
edited January 2017
As a DM I have absolutely had players in D&D who if I killed their character they would have 100% freaked out & rage-quit the game.
D&D is kind of a bad game to have super deadly combat in just because of how involved character creation can be.
If you have a system where you can whip out a new character in half an hour and be ready for an introduction in the next couple of scenes, that sort of lethality works, but a lot of people can't do that with D&D. And, honestly, the character creation is arduous enough that even if you can do it, I can totally understand not wanting to.
Depends on which edition, I feel like you can whip up a 5th edition D&D character in under 10 minutes pretty easily. Some early editions like 3.5 would have been annoying though.
I think at the end of the day it's hard to reconcile most RPG's themes (above average people doing adventuring with lots of fighting) with what feels natural for wounds.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
See, I'm perfectly okay with that. Which is why I am attracted to systems like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Legend of the Five Rings.
I like it when getting into combat is a big deal and scary for everyone involved. Personally nothing bores me faster than a pnp roleplaying game that is just a series of dungeon rooms and fights designed to slowly drain your resources (like spells per day) instead of actually being a scary threat to the players. Consequently I find D&D to be super boring.
My current health system for Rising Tides is probably up your alley:
Characters have between 2-6 (likely 3-4) health. Damage from any attack can range from 1-7 (based on your armour it'll skew heavily to one end of the spectrum). If you go below 0 in a fight you're incapacitated and take on a long term injury of strength equal to how heavily in the red you are, -6 is dead. However, to make it so players can contribute still, you can take on stress to keep acting while incapacitated. To represent guys pulling out pistols as they lay bleeding out or slamming the door locked before collapsing. Players can voluntarily go incapacitated after any damage taken if they're worried about being suddenly blown away (like if they're on one health and don't want the sniper to just outright murder them).
Health comes back relatively quickly (between sessions or with a days rest, can recover a decent chunk with first aid once per encounter) but the injuries are harder to recover from.
It's designed to make combat scary because a single good hit will incapacitate anyone but still keep players active and able to contribute to multiple fights.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
D&D is kind of a bad game to have super deadly combat in just because of how involved character creation can be.
If you have a system where you can whip out a new character in half an hour and be ready for an introduction in the next couple of scenes, that sort of lethality works, but a lot of people can't do that with D&D. And, honestly, the character creation is arduous enough that even if you can do it, I can totally understand not wanting to.
Depends on which edition, I feel like you can whip up a 5th edition D&D character in under 10 minutes pretty easily. Some early editions like 3.5 would have been annoying though.
I haven't played 5th, so I can't speak to that.
But I've done a lot of 3rd and 4th, and it can be a bear there. 4th was easier (which is nice, given that was the system we were running in the campaign where I died all the time), but even then, once you start getting to higher levels, it can become a real monster. Especially because of the splatbook bloat problem, when you need to compare four different books to see what will be a good feat.
As a DM I have absolutely had players in D&D who if I killed their character they would have 100% freaked out & rage-quit the game.
I would have bet hard money on it.
I love having one or two players like that as long as I have another couple of players who welcome character death because it makes it insanely easy to raise stakes and get them emotionally engaged in a combat.
"Gabriel takes a crit, the tentacle pierces him through the heart and he falls into the maw of the abomination."
"Oh shit, maybe we should run? I don't want to die! They got Gabriel!"
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Late, but this was one of the things I liked best about 4e. You could heal people all sorts of ways, not just divine magic. Nature magic, bardish songs, literally shouting at people. It was a great concept.
5E has a mechanic with short rests, it's slightly more random and much less reliable, but it's still a form of healing that allows you to continue throughout the day without magic.
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
I just read your write-up! That second turn in December tho - FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuck that
Much of it was, as Blake said, just dumb luck that happened to put the right cards with the right people so that we could effectively use their relationships. This happened to us in October with 2 Rivals getting all the event cards, leading to one of the easiest rounds of Pandemic I've ever had, and I'm pretty sure we had a similar scenario again earlier in the in-game year with another pair of rivals that also resulted in a clean win.
Other super lucky things that led to our 838 score would be:
- very few collapsed or fallen cities, and reasonably well-spread rioting which meant we could still fly to most regions fairly easily
- great starting cards for November, because we got a Vaccine Factory up in Chicago on turn 1, and then on turn 3, I as the Dispatcher with the Pilot upgrade had a card to a 0-panic city on the other side of the world which meant I could fly directly there and set up a second Factory within one turn
- we drew not just the City Zero card, but also the Binoculars while in the city adjacent to City Zero to find Patient Zero in October
- drawing NO black infection cards at all in November (C0dA was black for us)
- the factories we'd destroyed back in August/September (can't remember which month) also happened to clear up most of the Faded region (this was NOT intended, it was a matter of convenience at the time)
- all black player cards drawn in December that we happened to draw had already been vaccinated in November, and only 2 black infection cards appeared at all during December
Our final line-up in December was the Immunologist (@pimento), the QS (my sister-in-law), the Researcher (Blake), and the Dispatcher (me); we had not used the Researcher at all since February in-game so she was scar-less and upgrade-less. We didn't have any useful relationships going in.
I argued very hard for the Flexible character upgrade (swap one card for another card of the same color) and it just so happened in December that our Atlanta-based search-person wasn't just the person with the Flexible card, she also happened to draw the Binoculars, which we had on a blue card, which she then used and then got a blue card off our Researcher for her next turn so she could use them AGAIN. So getting the stockpile was easy after that.
And I could be biased because it was my character for most of the game, but Dispatcher + Pilot + a Co-worker is such a fantastically synergistic setup that I think it's hard to give up.
And without a Researcher, the Dispatcher becomes the best way to trade cards; from that perspective alone they become much more useful, but I absolutely love the Dispatcher regardless. We had Pilot and Veteran on ours, so he could do military flights.
Yeah, hard to say if the Dispatcher was considered the most useful character in our game, but I think if you were to poll the players in our game, it'd definitely be top 3 over the course of the whole year.
Also interesting to see how different C0dA colours flavour the game. I've always thought it's interesting how the map layout influences how each disease plays out; in terms of mechanics, disease progression is largely identical, but actually those subtle graph connections give each disease it's own slightly different threat model. Some are supposedly theoretically easier than others, but honestly I think the RNG has more influence over how easy or difficult the game is. Black for us was the easy-beat disease and we put all 4 disease upgrades on it very quickly. I've seen some talk suggesting having a Blue C0dA is considered potentially more difficult than the others to contain, but we didn't have as much trouble as some with other colours. It did, however, make the 'go back to Atlanta' bit in December considerably tougher, so it's kinda interesting to think about how other campaigns might have experienced that.
Yeah, it was good with that.
I mean, the way I figure it, hit points are a super abstract concept, especially in a game like D&D where you're constantly gaining hit points. Like, what is that supposed to be? Pain tolerance? Pints of blood?
Or, as I see it, hit points represent your stamina, your ability to keep fighting without making a single fatal error. Because honestly, when you're up against a ten foot tall monster man with a razor sharp sword, it's not attrition that's bringing you down. It's him getting that one good hit on you. So when you take fifteen points of damage, that's throwing yourself out of the way to avoid getting hit. When you get bloodied, that's a gouge on your upper arm. And when you get killed, that's him finally getting that perfect hit on you.
So if hit points are based more around stamina (at least in part), it makes more sense for all of these ways to work at healing you. A song that energizes you, a shout that keeps you on your toes, a bear spirit that empowers you with its own stamina.
That is one of the reasons that I think D&D is a bad game, yes
By being a totally abstract measure, there's not a consistently good way to describe what they do in terms of story description, and frequently trying to create flavorful will essentially contradict and potentially confuse the statistical side of the game.
Like, if a player attacks an enemy and deals ten damage, the best way to describe that in order to make sure that your players know what they did has already been said. It's ten damage - there's an understanding of that, even if it's not an in-universe understanding (although really, I'm sure a couple of clerics and the scientific method could figure something out there). If you say that their arrow ripped through the orc's cheek, splitting it to the lip, leaving behind two flaps of skin that froth with blood as he screams in rage, that doesn't really mean anything. If they didn't know that they'd just dealt ten damage, they wouldn't know how to interpret that.
And then it leads to things that the rules aren't really designed to cover, as well. Let's say instead of going through the orc's cheek, that arrow sunk deep into the meat of his thigh. He howls in agony, raising his foot up off the ground, and as he rebrandishes his axe, you can see that he refuses to put his full weight on it. That description to me suggests that the orc has been hobbled, and that you should be able to run away from him more easily. Or that if you took a called shot at his other leg (not that D&D is typically very fond of called shots, which in part relates to this, if you ask me) then you might be able to drop him to the ground. And personally, as a DM, I'd totally reward that innovative idea, but I don't think that the game really directly supports it.
And if you don't want your players to get those ideas, you have two options. You can describe everything as a surface wound until it's a deadly one, or you can just say, "You deal ten points of damage the orc. He's looking a bit worse for wear - not bloodied, but certainly getting close." Which is some weak shit, if you ask me.
Combat skills are a trap in that game. It's about maximizing battery life and sprint speed.
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I like what some systems do where major injuries are tied to doing a large chunk of damage or percentage of opponents HP in a single blow. That way the narrative holds: small damage amounts are surface wounds and solid hits screw someone up real fast.
Another is plot immunity.
There's a lot of valid ways to look at hp. Unfortunately the most commonly chosen one is numbers that determine when things stop.
Most people probably wouldn't like having to roll up a new character if a first level enemy got a lucky shot in. Heck I kinda adore that sort of thing and even in Rising Tides my current damage system can put you out the fight in one shot but won't kill you.
I thiiink it was the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which defended this as a design decision - maybe it was also another book which had rules for targeted attacks
The gist of it was that the game was not about gore and you would run into the question of how specific wounds would affect (or continue to affect) player characters
"Somehow, the headsman's cleaver just misses your neck. You might have lost some chin hairs, though."
It's fully available here, but the basic gist is that hit points are converted to vitality points, which continue to go up with every level up, just like hit points. Your average attack will damage vitality points, most healing is based around regaining vitality points, and so on. Vitality points are described as being the character's ability to turn a direct hit into a glancing blow, which I think is a pretty similar concept to the endurance I earlier espoused.
But if you run out of vitality points, or you get hit with a critical, that targets your wound points. You have wound points equal to your constitution score. That's it - you never gain any more wound points, and if you run out of wound points you're dead (well, dying). Getting wounded also tends to fuck you up in other ways - you're fatigued, you can get stunned, that sort of thing.
There's also some weird notes with healing - as I mentioned, magical healing is focused on vitality points, but it does restore wound points, just at a much lower level. And wound points can take a bit to heal, even with resting - higher level characters recover them faster, which is somewhat bizarre, but whatever. The cool thing is that you recover vitality points even while you're awake. It's still pretty slow, but the idea is that you can get those back without the need for magical healing.
There's still a bunch of things I'd change with it, as, at the end of the day, it's a hit point system and I don't really like those, but I do think it's quite an interesting improvement on the default.
Named Characters had basically 2 layers of HP: The first layer was your luck to scrape by, get a near miss, dodge just in time.
Every character had the second layer, which was actually damage taken. It was scaled lower if I remember, and harder to heal.
I also love the Rogue Trader interpretation:
You have 6-10 Wounds.
Once you get to 0, you are in Real Trouble, but you could still carry on for a long time. Consult the critical hit table! They are per body part and damage type. You reverse the hitdie to determine what body part got screwed.
If you got to -10 you're always dead, but in between there you start losing limbs, eyes, gaining scars, getting knocked back.
Because it takes time to consult I'd do it on named foes only, and had mooks die at 0.
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Because fuck it, who cares, I'm playing a game and I want them to fight the dragon and not be aghast in horror because the acid melted their arm off and they'll need months of healing.
My personal tastes lean towards relatively high powered epic fantasy or anime, and somewhat mechanically crunchy systems. Hit points work really well for that because if you run high lethality at that power level it's super dumb immediately.
However, if someone gets shot in Monsterhearts, that should feel a lot different than someone taking an arrow while running up the back of a colossus, yknow? There should be conditions and drama and narrative weight to someone pulling a gun or knife or even getting punched because that's the genre expectation.
But nebulous "hit points" work just fine for me, and 4E's fine/bloodied/dead system was about the most work I'd ever want to do for applying bonuses/penalties based on wounds taken.
40K-style critical hit tables are an absolute joy to bust out on occasion, I guess? It loses some of the luster for me when they pop up in every session, though.
Yeah, it really is. Crits making it straight to wound gets really nasty as you gain levels and are fighting enemies that do like, 2d10+5 damage with their attacks. Odds are you're going to be taking 16 damage from that crit, so unless you're a constitution heavy character, you're pretty fucked.
Like I said, I'd pretty extensively revamp it for my own use, but I like the idea behind it a bunch.
Off the top of my head, here's what I'd do:
- Reduce the total vitality points of all classes. Maybe a lot, maybe a little (this is a bit playtest dependent).
- Increase the rate at which vitality points regenerate. Essentially, when you're out of combat for an extended period of time (a couple hours, maybe), you should get most of them back.
- Potentially add a second wind action in that allows you to spend a turn in combat regaining your own vitality points. I like the ability for characters to heal themselves, and it super makes sense with this structure.
- Reduce the potential for critical hits to wreck people. I'm not sure exactly what to do here - I like crits auto-wounding, so I'm thinking maybe change it so like, that 2d10+5 crit deals 2d10 VP and 5 WP. It's still nasty, but not inherently deadly.
- Potentially create some sort of critical hit style table for when people take wounds. Make those suckers hurt.
See, I'm perfectly okay with that. Which is why I am attracted to systems like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Legend of the Five Rings.
I like it when getting into combat is a big deal and scary for everyone involved. Personally nothing bores me faster than a pnp roleplaying game that is just a series of dungeon rooms and fights designed to slowly drain your resources (like spells per day) instead of actually being a scary threat to the players. Consequently I find D&D to be super boring.
The 40K RPG crit tables are beautiful genius
Too bad I can't make heads or tails of the games themselves.
Early versions of D&D could be deadly as fuck and people mostly shudder when thinking back to it I found
To be fair, weren't early editions of D&D basically a skirmish wargame where you controlled a whole party and didn't really care that much if your dudes died horribly anyway?
People would still lose their shit but that's how it was designed, yes
I think part of the reason why they used a generalized system for wounding was also that no one really thought that wounds added to a character or represented something like a roleplaying opportunity
But I might be wrong
If you have a system where you can whip out a new character in half an hour and be ready for an introduction in the next couple of scenes, that sort of lethality works, but a lot of people can't do that with D&D. And, honestly, the character creation is arduous enough that even if you can do it, I can totally understand not wanting to.
The reverse to hit always remains weird and it's a 2 layer defense system which is also slow (dodge and armor, and I even outlawed different armor per body slot)
After 4 sessions the immense power of cover became known which caused major slowdown.
Psions are terrifying. Ours was extremely lucky and mutated positively 3 times and became a god.
But it was still a very fun campaign to play. Having spaceship and ground combat is fun, and I even conspired once to do a Star Wars version with the Xwing mini rules for space, but the friends interested just live to far apart to make it work.
I would have bet hard money on it.
Depends on which edition, I feel like you can whip up a 5th edition D&D character in under 10 minutes pretty easily. Some early editions like 3.5 would have been annoying though.
Oh, or just a FATE Core game of some kind.
My current health system for Rising Tides is probably up your alley:
Characters have between 2-6 (likely 3-4) health. Damage from any attack can range from 1-7 (based on your armour it'll skew heavily to one end of the spectrum). If you go below 0 in a fight you're incapacitated and take on a long term injury of strength equal to how heavily in the red you are, -6 is dead. However, to make it so players can contribute still, you can take on stress to keep acting while incapacitated. To represent guys pulling out pistols as they lay bleeding out or slamming the door locked before collapsing. Players can voluntarily go incapacitated after any damage taken if they're worried about being suddenly blown away (like if they're on one health and don't want the sniper to just outright murder them).
Health comes back relatively quickly (between sessions or with a days rest, can recover a decent chunk with first aid once per encounter) but the injuries are harder to recover from.
It's designed to make combat scary because a single good hit will incapacitate anyone but still keep players active and able to contribute to multiple fights.
I haven't played 5th, so I can't speak to that.
But I've done a lot of 3rd and 4th, and it can be a bear there. 4th was easier (which is nice, given that was the system we were running in the campaign where I died all the time), but even then, once you start getting to higher levels, it can become a real monster. Especially because of the splatbook bloat problem, when you need to compare four different books to see what will be a good feat.
I love having one or two players like that as long as I have another couple of players who welcome character death because it makes it insanely easy to raise stakes and get them emotionally engaged in a combat.
"Gabriel takes a crit, the tentacle pierces him through the heart and he falls into the maw of the abomination."
"Oh shit, maybe we should run? I don't want to die! They got Gabriel!"