Looking for advice to help a friend. We are looking to put together an adventure were combat has a much more Visceral & Grueling feel to it. His main inspirations are the game, Dark Souls & the anime, Attack on Titan, where in both you always feel that death is a very real possibility.
To be clear, the goal is **not** to just unfairly kill the PCs. But we want their to be the threat of death in nearly all the combat events. If the PCs round the corner and see a goblin with a rusty knife, they still need to use caution.
Any ideas or thoughts?
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different AC and HP system.
increase AC, make it hard to get hits, (ALOT harder) but each hit hurts A LOT. say. roll % dice each hit, have severity of hits be based on what is rolled. It would require an overhaul though.
another thought. run an HUGE low-power game. 10-15pt buy. low hp, like 1/4 your HD per level +1/2 con mod.
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Greatly limit or remove healing magic. When recovery is not just a tap of a wand away, the threat of death becomes more real. Also, if there is less healing, builds that sacrifice AC in favor of pure damage start to become a liability. They will get hurt, but unlike other situations, those hurts will continue to build up. Death by a thousand paper cuts can really evoke the feel of the long slow horror or siege type death.
yup less healing and no raise dead spells, make natural healing faster to reduce down time a bit, and once the players hps exceed their Con, make a separate HP type called body pts, that equal the CON stat, crits no longer cause multiple damage..but go straight to the Body points...once those are gone character starts to bleed out.
Just some quick and dirty ideas.
Less cure spells can help, but I think it might be worth it taking a look at the massive damage rule and tweaking it a bit, for example making the threshold something like 10+Con+HD (or even simply your con score +HD, if you are evil) with bonuses for larger-sized creatures like titans or adult dragons. Any single attack that does as much or more damage incurs a hefty save, if you fail you are at -1 and dying. It might be useful to stagger the healing effects, i.e. replacing immediate heals with over-time healing effects.
Rather than go whole hog and remove healing, I would suggest removing healing items. Make them rely solely on a caster ability to heal, or the heal skill. It will significantly increase the amount of resources your cleric or oracle will expend and there will be no patch-em-up item. I think this alone will sacre players into being more judicious. If the cleric only have 10 spells per day he has a finite amount of healing that can be done, so you better be careful.
I think removing any source of healing besides natural healing will just mean players heavily avoid anything that involves more than one combat per day.
You could introduce a wounds system. Wounds are = to Con. When you run out of hp, you take wounds. critical hits go to wounds. Wounds can't be healed by cure spells they take the standard time to rest and heal.
TPK has a product currently in playtest that might help you. Watch for the release of Laying Waste: A Guide to Critical Combat. They outline some ways to make Crits more interesting, and make the heal skill more useful. Unfortunately for this conversation, the product is still in limited (backer only) playtest. I believe it is supposed to be published soon, but I'm not sure on the date.
-+1 to removing healing items, so you have to rely on the cleric/oracles to heal you with their limited resources.
-As stated above, use a low point buy for character creation.
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different AC and HP system.
increase AC, make it hard to get hits, (ALOT harder) but each hit hurts A LOT. say. roll % dice each hit, have severity of hits be based on what is rolled. It would require an overhaul though.
another thought. run an HUGE low-power game. 10-15pt buy. low hp, like 1/4 your HD per level +1/2 con mod.
I totally agree here. Pathfinder is not a good system for edge of your seat raw gritty combat. It is more geared toward heroic fantasy.
I personally love, and was recently introduced to, Legend of the 5 Rings (1st edition) and I have to say that I have never seen a cooler combat system that makes every hit count. It is a wonderfully easy system and my group is currently trying to figure out how to port it into Pathfinder for when we switch to a Pathfinder campaign soon. It really is awesome.
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Eh. I've played in a (mostly) 2nd ed campaign were the only healing available was goodberries; you were limited to healing 8hp per day that way. (Nobody felt like playing a cleric with real healing spells; this happened to be on my hunter-gatherer priest's spell list.)
Recovering from a major battle could take several days of intense berry-chewing. If we'd been in a big fight, we'd be slinking away trying to find a hidden spot to recover.
The whole thing was on a sort of Mongolian steppe kind of setting, so more than one encounter a day was rare. Practically the only reason for that is if someone is tracking you. If we'd been in Orcland and got in a fight, we'd be working to make sure no orcs got away to bring back help.