Coolkidtopolis's page

Philo Pharynx wrote:

You want to start looking at other games that were designed around different concepts, or begin to design a game from scratch. The hit point system is so ingrained in Pathfinder that changing it will be a huge amount of work. This change affects so much that it's rewriting a huge part of the game. All monster hp needs to be adjusted. So do high-damage spells. Then you need to think heavily on sneak attack and similar damage adds. You've already noted about healing. I'm sure that playing this will figure out lots of other stuff that's not balanced so well.

Adding things to AC is yet another set of changes to do. All monster AC's and to hit's need to be adjusted. If you don't do these changes, many monsters become unable to hit beyond rolling a nat 20, but will kill a character outright once they do hit. When you adjust monsters, then you'll need to adjust characters too.

Oh, and many types of spells just have saves. You'll need to adjust the save system as well.

You could either spend a lot of time and effort reworking Pathfinder, or find another game and add the stuff you like from Pathfinder to it.

Although, it would still be nice to be able to find a simple fix instead of designing a new system and losing access to a whole bunch of pathfinder goodies, so i'll look into making my own hodge-podge system, but I'll also keep thinking about ways to fit this into pathfinder's framework without breaking too much.

Philo Pharynx said wrote:

You could either spend a lot of time and effort reworking Pathfinder, or find another game and add the stuff you like from Pathfinder to it.

+1

A great "realistic" system I have played is Cyberpunk 2020. All the characters have the same number of hit points and receive progressively greater penalties the more damage they take. A character with a high CON (called BODY in CP2020) reduces the damage they take from each hit (effectively DR).

It uses hit locations and receiving 8+ damage in one location in one hit disables it plus causes saves vs death unless it's a head shot which is insta-kill.

It works really well although it makes for a very violent game with characters that are short lived if they aren't careful.

It's not really in the spirit of high adventure though where warriors are slaying dragons in single combat. A big bucket of hit points works really well in that way.

This system sounds super cool! Ill have to check it out. The damage to each individual body part might be a little complicated but theres no reason i cant borrow the stuff i like. Thanks a bunch

You want to start looking at other games that were designed around different concepts, or begin to design a game from scratch. The hit point system is so ingrained in Pathfinder that changing it will be a huge amount of work. This change affects so much that it's rewriting a huge part of the game. All monster hp needs to be adjusted. So do high-damage spells. Then you need to think heavily on sneak attack and similar damage adds. You've already noted about healing. I'm sure that playing this will figure out lots of other stuff that's not balanced so well.

Adding things to AC is yet another set of changes to do. All monster AC's and to hit's need to be adjusted. If you don't do these changes, many monsters become unable to hit beyond rolling a nat 20, but will kill a character outright once they do hit. When you adjust monsters, then you'll need to adjust characters too.

Oh, and many types of spells just have saves. You'll need to adjust the save system as well.

You could either spend a lot of time and effort reworking Pathfinder, or find another game and add the stuff you like from Pathfinder to it.

Yeah, it does change a whole big chunk of the game. Thats a good point.

In testing so far i havent really needed to change monster AC and HP by a lot yet because they mostly dont have character levels and have hit points from being big or being magically tough. You're right about to-hit bonuses and damage though. You dont end up with monsters needing to roll a 20 to hit until about level 13-15, but boy is that annoying. The damage adds and high level damage spells still work well for pcs when they fight monsters because the monsters still have a ton of hit points, but they're a lot more erratic in pc vs npc fights where the npcs have a bunch of character levels too.
Also, i did adjust the save system. I gave pc's a bonus to saves to avoid taking damage equal to their character level and changed how evasion and improved evasion worked. After some more testing though its been too big of a bonus sonim thinking of taking it down to 1/2 character level.
There's still a lot i want to keep from pathfinder but yeah i might not want to constrain myself to it. Thanks for the feedback.

My Self wrote:

Aelryinth wrote:

Figure out how you want Health figured - base Con + Con/level is okay. or racial hit die. Most monsters will have Health. Objects, too. But Fey, for instance, might be mostly soak to reflect their magical natures.

What if you have a negative CON modifier? Say you start with an 7, and become level 4. What happens?

Negative Con modifier only modifies hit dice from class levels.

So you'd have 7 Con of health. Since you don't have a positive con modifier, you'd have 4hd-4 HP of Soak (min 1 hp/level, as normal).

==

Coolkid, you're just mixing up what AC, HP, and stuff do.

It's just a formula. % chance to hit x dmg x other miss chances = dmg dealt.

What you're proposing is what high level mages like to do. They go invisibile (50% miss chance), Displaced (50% miss chance) + mirror image (1/6 chance of being hit).

So any attack has a 75% chance to miss, and THEN a 1/6 chance of hitting the real them, meaning the first swing at them is 95% likely to miss.

However, if it hits, it still does full damage. IT's just that first hit is like needing a 20 from the opponent to actually do damage, and even without mirror image, they will ALWAYS need a 16+ (50% miss + 50% miss) to hit the wizard.

But the damage in the end still follows the math. A miss chance is a miss chance, be it by AC, concealment or displacement.

You get the same results if you do the Warhammer system. Warhammer, you roll against weapon skill to hit, add Str + Wpn dmg, and subtract ARmor+Toughness of opponent. If Str=Toughness, and Armor =3, then you need to roll 4+ to do dmg to an opponent. So, 50% miss chance, only flavored as 'toughness' instead of 'dodge'.

End result, you figure average damage exactly the same way. Miss chance x dmg inflicted.

Hit points just waives the dodge/toughness/feint/concealment 'flavor text' into the metasphere to describe as you want to. IF this guys hit points are from agility, describe it that way. If this guy's are from parrying,...

This is unfortunately the only kind of feedback I've been getting. I do not misunderstand what hit points try to represent. To be very clear, I just don't think they represent it very well. I wanted to see if I could design a system that doesn't require this particular bit of hand-waving and creates something with mechanics that i find more flavorfully satisfying without being too complicated and in a way that still upholds the same average damage but in a way that makes it so, as characters level up, they become harder to hit and gain fewer hit points. I am asking for help in designing it, i.e.- problems with it, solutions to problems with it, ideas for it, not reasoning as to why its unnecessary. Of course its unnecessary; So are half the rules in this game. I understand how to calculate average damage. I understand I am simply shifting attacks-until-dead into an alternative format. I understand what hit points wound points, soak points, etc. represent. I still want to try to design this.

The main point is this: Hit points, the way they are described from early on in the game, feel to players like they are a representation of how much damage a character can take. Not how much they can dodge before they can get tired, not how long they have until their luck runs out, not how adept they are at rolling with the damage. All these things are what they intend to represent, but they still just feel like they are how tough you are, right down to using your con mod to calculate them.

AC, on the other hand, feels like how hard to hit you are. Your armor and shield deflect things, your magic might make a shield of its own, you may have some preternatural awareness of danger allowing you to add your wisdom, and your dexterity lets you dodge out of the way.

As someone experiences more combat and challenges and learns from themvc (the flavor of gaining xp and levels) they do become somewhat tougher (the flavor of gaining hit points). However, not by much; a sword to the neck should kill just about anybody. They gain much more in the way of expertise. They may learn how to dodge better, or anticipate an attack by telegraphed body movements and momentum or how to counter or parry or more efficient use of their limbs or a shield to block, etc.

All of these are represented best by armor class improvements instead of hit point improvements.I am trying to design a system that reflects this. If you are satisfied with hit points or wound/soak points that's great and this system is unnecessary for you but that does not mean that it shouldn't be designed. So, please, if you have anything constructive to say, I am all ears.

Coolkidtopolis wrote:

It's always super bugged me that a high-level character can essentially just take a cannon ball to the face and walk away like nothing happened.

This used to bug me too, then I I began to see hit points as a resource for "not-dying", not as the amount of wounds a hero can take before dying.

The way I like to see it, nobody can take a cannon ball in the head and survive; that's impossible. One survives a cannon ball to the head by avoiding it in extremis, at the cost of great personal resources (call it skill or luck or cinematographic action or bad-ass-ness, whatever). Deadly goblins blade are easier to deflect than cannon balls to the head are to avoid, therefore one needs to be higher level to survive that last attack, and still, chances are that the hero cannot do it all day long.

I'm afraid that your houserule will result in a lot of "I attack you, I miss, you attack me, you miss" and a lot of one-shot death. D&D/Pathfinder was designed with more granularity on the live-death scale and much of the system rely on that (the way healing works for example)

I strongly recommend having a look at Evil Lincoln's Strain-Injury houserule. While the application is different, it addresses the same original concern about cannon balls to the head.

'findel

Yeah, i understand thats what hit points try to represent, i just dont believe that they represent that very well. I enjoy the flavor of the wound and vigor system and the strain and injury system because they add to the narrative of a character being tired from combat but both of those make the players keep track of and calculate a whole additional stat and make sense of a bunch of additional rules to understand when to take wound/injury or vigor/strain damage. I really want to try to get this system to work because it has the potential to be very concise and only uses numbers that players already have to keep track of.

True, this system results in a lot of one-hit ko's and a lot of misses. Thats a really good point. Im planning on trying out playtesting around level 10 to see if those have a significant negative effect on fun. I do love flavor, but fun is always more important. Its possible that the misses and ko's will be boring or feel dissatisfying but its also possible that the threat of a one hit ko will add a real sense of danger so that each roll of the die makes your heart pump and worry about your character, so i think it warrants a play test. If you can think of a way to negate this factor without increasing complexity too much though i'd love to hear it.

Have you tried Wounds and Vigor, because it sounds like that's what you want.

Yeah ive tried it out and its more satisfying than hit points but i still want to see if i can improve this system. Thanks though.

I suggest taking a hint from Exalted and straight up going with Health and Soak.

health being actual material harm you suffer.

Soak being 'warrior magic' or temporary hit points, or whatever you want, but clearly taking the hit instead of you.

Figure out how you want Health figured - base Con + Con/level is okay. or racial hit die. Most monsters will have Health. Objects, too. But Fey, for instance, might be mostly soak to reflect their magical natures.

Soak only comes from class levels, otherwise.

Classes recover Soak at the same speed as they do nonlethal hit point damage.

Let the character choose if he wants to take a hit against Soak or Health.

Healing magic only heals hits against health (physical damage). Only time heals hits against Soak.

So you draw a clear line in the sand of physical damage and damage obviated by 'magical toughness'. One heals on its own fairly quickly, the other you can mend between fights. fast healing and regen only work on Health.

==Aelryinth

This sounds like a really cool system, and reminds me a lot of the wounds and vigor system that paizo designed and it sounds like it probably works pretty well, but i'm trying to move away from the 'magical toughness' with this system in a way that makes it really feel like your character has become more adept at avoiding damage in combat by linking it to armor class, the statistic that represents best that your character is difficult to hit.

Ah, you prefer characters who level to 'just become more experienced in combat' rather than becoming Higher Level Characters who are innately more powerful.

Makes sense, thank you for the clarification. [I prefer the other way so I'm not going to be much help, best of luck.]

Well,to be clear, i would still like characters to become more resistant to harm as they level up, just in a way that makes more flavorful sense to me by representing it differently. I don't blame you for liking the original system though. It's worked very well.

May I inquire why it bugs you? The better we understand your reasoning behind your houserules the better we can help with them.

Yeah totes. As people become more experienced in combat they don't become able to physically take significantly larger amounts of damage very easily. It makes more sense to say that they learn to avoid damage better. That's the flavor that hit points try to express. They mention this in the wound and vigor system. However, hit points just feel like for some reason the meat of your body has become nearly indestructible instead of feeling like a representation of increased skill in combat.

It's always super bugged me that a high-level character can essentially just take a cannon ball to the face and walk away like nothing happened. There's a few fixes that I've seen for this, like the massive damage rule: If you take 50 or more damage, make a fort save or die, but high-level characters can almost always make the fort save. There's also the much less-structured chunky salsa rule: If something would logically reduce your head to the consistency of chunky salsa, you are dead, other rules be damned. This works, but is dissatisfying from a rules perspective. I decided to design a system that makes characters only marginally tougher as they level up, but significantly harder to hit as well. It's been successful so far, but it still needs work and I'd love suggestions or for people to try it out and tell me how it goes.

Here's how it works:

You begin at 1st level with a number of hit points equal to the maximum for your hit die plus your constitution modifier. At every additional level, you gain 1 additional hit point (alternatively: every other level, you gain a number of hit points equal to your constitution modifier. Still testing this).

Your base attack bonus becomes your base combat bonus. You add this bonus to all attack rolls, all combat maneuver checks, your combat maneuver defense, and your armor class.

You receive a bonus on saving throws to avoid taking damage equal to your character level-1. Successful saving throws to take half damage from an effect instead allow you to take no damage. Evasion functions as improved evasion. Improved evasion instead adds a +6 bonus to reflex saves.

If something would reference your Hit Dice, it instead uses your hit dice (which is 1 unless you have bonus hit dice from a template or because you're using a non-standard race) plus your character level-1. For most characters, this is simply their character level.

So far I've found that it increases the randomness of combat, which can make encounters more difficult, especially against monsters with high attack bonuses. It also makes doing lots of damage kind of unnecessary when fighting NPC's instead of monsters. Similarly, it turns monsters that deal huge amounts of damage into either pansies if they have low attack bonuses or absolute overkill KO cannons if they have high attack bonuses. Some spells that reference hit points need to be edited or removed, such as Power Word Kill. Other spells that bypass AC or saves also need to be fixed or removed, like magic missile.

The biggest problem so far though is fixing clerics and other healers. Higher level healing spells and healing abilities become kind of useless in this system. I'm thinking of allowing the healing of a spell to be spread out over subsequent turns. For example, a cure serious wounds, instead of healing 3d8+1/level to a single target, would allow its caster to spread out the healing to multiple different touches, whether on the same target or other targets, until all of the healing has been used up or until a number of rounds equal to the caster's caster level have passed, a lot like the way lay on hands works. This system is also a tad complex, which is less than optimal.

But yeah, if you can think of any additional problems, solutions to problems, or ways to reduce complexity please share them.