TTRPGs & D&D

Fletch said:
Oh. I hadn't considered how AOE would affect an HP pool. Good thing I never tried to implement it.
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Yep, gotta cover all the bases. I cannot wait to use minions in this system. I love those sequences where heroes can cleave through a whole room of baddies on the way to bigger meaner fights.
 
JakeEkiss said:
Yeah, I like the idea of injuries more narratively than mechanically. I love the idea that you *could* lose a hand and then have to replace it with a mechanical or magical one. I love the idea that you *could* end up with a character that has like, the Batman scars of a life lived in combat. And I like the idea that those can happen as emergent from the game itself in specific fights.

I definitely do not like the idea of it being tied to a set amount of damage taken. It has to be some sort of rarely occurring mechanical add on that has some sort of prerequisite. I almost think a critical with a confirmation roll, and then a roll on a chart to define the injury would work, but then it might be too infrequent. Like I say, hard to find the right balance. It could also be something tied to bosses specifically, and that *might* work for how it usually happens in heroic fantasy, and it would certainly make bosses more scary, but I have a feeling it would adversely affect the psychology of players entering into a boss battle (making timid players even more anxious, encouraging over-planning or cheese tactics always, etc)
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I feel like some random 3E splatbook from some random publisher way back then when everyone was a 3E Supplement publisher, had a critical injury system that was something like any time you reach the Dying condition but survive, you roll a D6 and on a roll of 1 you get a permanent injury. So in 3E rules, that's basically a 17% chance of a permanent injury any time you hit -1 hit points or below, which I would say wasn't uncommon for at least one player to do every three or four encounters... ish? Depending on your DM.

I think the system is actually not a bad idea at all. Depending on how harsh you are as a DM, if you feel like falling below 0 HP is going to be a lot rarer in your group, you could change to a 1-2 on a d6, or a coin toss/1-3. Or make it a d20 roll with a roll of 19-20 meaning you're fine and a chart for 1-18 of different injuries.

The thing I remember NOT liking about this system was the injuries were legit punishments that seemed like they'd make the game less fun and potentially even death spiral a character by making them progressively -worse- the worse they do. Like, I think one of the injuries was a permanent limp that gave you -2 to all Dex-based saves and checks. Which can be a MASSIVE disadvantage depending on what type of monsters/traps your DM uses and what class you're playing. A -2 to Dex checks on a Rogue fucking sucks.
Another one was a similar penalty to Constitution, including limiting HP gain? I think? And there was definitely something like a -4 to Perception/Ranged Attacks for losing an eye. Or something very similar to those numbers.


I'd be all for THEMATIC injuries. But I really don't need my character getting fucking kneecapped for the entire remainder of the campaign just because I did badly in one combat.
 
Damien said:
I'd be all for THEMATIC injuries. But I really don't need my character getting fucking kneecapped for the entire remainder of the campaign just because I did badly in one combat.
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Now I wanna play a short Blackhawk Down type scenario where your injuries accrue and it's just a bleak character driven meat grinder about how long they can hold out as they slowly bleed and break into the inevitable.

But that's also how I played with my Joes.
 
This comes up every time I try to have a pirate kingdom in my fantasy setting. "Why are there so many hook hands and peg legs just in this area and nowhere else?"

But broadly, yeah, you're not getting anyone's buy-in on a system that makes their character worse. I like the idea of critical hits leaving aesthetic scars or lingering injuries, but very often I'll see similar tables with CHA or DEX penalties.

I wonder if there could be a system where the player can choose auto-stabilize on a death save in exchange for a debilitating injury. Like, if I fail this roll, my character's dead. But I could choose to lose a hand instead.

Actually, probably not with penalty-free raise dead. Anybody else remember when that used to drain CON?
 
In Star Wars one player did something really dumb, uh, risky, so I took their hand.

I had a plan.

But they were were very sad between sessions, where the next episode I gave them a Beskar fist with a special weapon text.

Then they were ecstatic. But yeah, it was rough, and I could have had that conversation in between but I really did want it to be a surprise for the crew and character and player.
 
Fletch said:
I'm fully on board with HP as a general description of stamina. If anything, I'm more annoyed by how often you have to say "you take an arrow to the shoulder" every time a character gets hit by a non-killing blow. So I'm fully on board for stuff like "you stumble back under the blow and have to recover your footing" as a description of HP loss.

Decades back I read an idea that stuck with me but I've never used. Making an HP pool for an encounter. Five ogres have 30 HP each (don't fact check that) so as soon as the part collectively does 30 pts of damage spread out over all of them, the one just hit dies.

I like the idea of it as it allows for more dynamic fights and less "we all focus on the injured one" dog piles. Again, never tried it, though.
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Same. Honestly, I play, research, read up on a lot of games, and for me the more fiddly the damage system is the more annoyed I get. Candela Obscura has three types of damage with varying impacts on the player that the player and the GM need to keep an eye on, and any one of them can end the character forever. Maybe it's because I play a lot of games with new players or because I'm comfortable narrating from simple rules, but that pool of how worn down you can get is a fine, simple baseline and it's up to using the three pounds of uncooked bacon in my skull to make it dynamic. But then again that's kind of how I like my games the older I get anyway. give me a simpler mechanic I can narrate in an interesting way. But I also know not everyone wants to narrate ever action.

Nothing puts me off a new game like "you get X stamina, Y brain, Z courage, but if you take stamina damage you can roll X to soak the damage by Y, or if you are hit with Z courage damage you can flip your Z card to negate the..."

Man, just tell me how hard the player hit the goblin and I'll tell you the sound it makes when your sword splinters bone into meat and gets caught on his spinal column as he looks up into your eyes and insults your mother with his dying breath. I feel like HP is kinda too simple, but it's also Indy shooting the master swordsman in the square because he's got the runs and doesn't have patience for an extended dance.
 
JakeEkiss said:
Literally. Isn't there a de-limbing in every mainline Star Wars movie? 6 out of 9 at least.
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ANH: Bar Scene, more if droids count
ESB: Bespin, more if droids count, also the wampa
RotJ: Final battle

TPM: I guess one's entire lower half is two limbs
AotC: Two hands, separate people
RotS: Nine severed limbs total

I think my new biggest beef with the sequel trilogies is the lack of dismemberment.
 
docsilence said:
Dammit, now I want to run VtM.
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Since I don't want to keep re-derailing that thread I pulled this one over here, did I mention the VtM game idea that I've been wanting to run? I feel like I must've. Anyway, premise was a short-ish campaign, maybe 10-12 sessions, and the pitch is all the players are young, recently turned vampires in a band together. They're road-tripping across the country in the back of a bus or tour van living from gig to gig on their way to the first show where they've been asked to headline. During the first show of the tour where they're still just the opening act, something terrible happens, a massacre that draws attention from both the vampire world and the human one. Everyone assumes the band is killed, but enough evidence is there that *someone* survived, and so all sides are on the trail of our players.

So the rest of the trip they're stopping in at each new gig, and things keep going wrong. One side or the other will catch up to them, or the club owners at a gig will be some sort of rotten supernatural bastards, or some other complication. It's the tour from hell and the players just have to get to their headlining gig... if they can just get there it'll be ok.

Plan is for it to be very episodic, with this overarching thing happening in the background that's tying all the disparate stops together.
 
Fletch said:
I like the idea of it as it allows for more dynamic fights and less "we all focus on the injured one" dog piles.
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I only recently learned about the math behind ganging up on your foes. It enhanced my understanding of combat efficiency, but it also rescinded my freedom. If I'm not targeting the same enemy as at least half the party, I'm actively hurting us.

As DM, I've toyed with the idea of removing opportunity attacks for that reason. My players are already rooted in place. I don't need to give them another reason not to move the entire combat.
Damien said:
The thing I remember NOT liking about this system was the injuries were legit punishments that seemed like they'd make the game less fun and potentially even death spiral a character by making them progressively -worse- the worse they do.
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Yep. This is ultimately why I hand-wave the silliness of someone on death's door operating at peak performance. The alternative is worse. By giving a character a mechanical disadvantage, like a lost limb that gives a -2 DEX penalty, you make the player dislike their character. That doesn't serve the story at all.
Fletch said:
I wonder if there could be a system where the player can choose auto-stabilize on a death save in exchange for a debilitating injury. Like, if I fail this roll, my character's dead. But I could choose to lose a hand instead.
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I think that would work if it were limited to flavor.

I just heard about a system called The Shrike. It basically exists in the case of a TPK. In it, you send the party to a demiplane to fight their way back to the land of the living. I know a lot of DMs allow the players to quest into hell to retrieve their party member's lost soul, but that option doesn't exist if they're all dead.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I just heard about a system called The Shrike. It basically exists in the case of a TPK. In it, you send the party to a demiplane to fight their way back to the land of the living.
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So I've never run a TPK and at this point I've DM'ed so many games, and types of games, I think it would be hard for me to have one happen by accident, but presuming it's in a fantasy setting I've already got the very next scene ready to roll.

"You wake up on a stone slab. You are inside a low-ceilinged room lit by dim candles. The light plays off a thousand skulls set into recesses in the stone walls. Beneath the recesses you can see the tops of old stone coffins. Everywhere there is the smell of decay. Old death. You try to move but you are still wrapped in your own funerary shroud. A soft, sinister voice speaks to you from a shadow in the corner of the room."

"Ah good, at last you're back with us. It's so rare to get such formidable stock. You will be used well. Rise."

"You feel the shroud melt away as the Necromancer steps out from the shadow, and your limbs respond to his command. As you raise yourself off the slab you see your own skin, sloughed and grey, dead. Dead for many days, or months, perhaps longer. The voice speaks again."

"Now then... what are we going to do with you?"

And then end the session to be continued.
 
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