Coolkidtopolis's page

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.