Vitality and Wound points
At the beginning of the Pathfinder book, it presents several options for starting HP's. Well here is my thoughts on that:
I tend to prefer my fantasy games more gritty than normal.
I’ve run D&D. I’m here to say that HP’s are inferior to the Vitality/Wound points presented in the Unearthed Arcana.
I feel that HP’s are a piss poor representation of taking wounds. When you have over 50, you’re pretty much immune to ever being taking down in one shot. You can walk through burning building and fall down mountains and survive. HP’s in D&D do nothing to evoke any emotion in the players.
Unearthed Arcana presents Vitality and Wound points. Vitality is essentially equal to your HP’s. Wound points is equal to your Constitution.
Your Vitality represents you escaping with minor cuts and bruises and getting yourself tired. Wound points represents serious hits where you are in a real danger of dying. You chip through your Vitality and then eat into your Wound points.
Now the ‘trick’ here is that Critical hits bypass your Vitality and score damage directly on your wound points.
So far, I LOVE how this plays out, both mechanically and visually. The players have a nice protective ‘shield’ of ‘hit points’ (Vitality) which actually represents them getting out of the way just in the nick of time. But doing that tires them out or that last dodge makes them pull a muscle.
But every character, whether 1st or 20th, has a static wound point value (again, equal to their Constitution). At 20th level, if your Con is 12, your wound points are 12. One critical hit that causes 12 damage…you’re taken out.
The system is simple and yet visually fantastic. I love to describe combat and I can explain when a character manages to dodge or takes a ‘scrape’ of damage (Vitality) or when a character takes a serious, bleeding painful hit (Wound points).
Oh yeah, your Vitality comes back in hours, your wound points come back in days.
I would love if Pathfinder offered these as optional rules in their book. They are open source to my knowledge.
Surges
Now then, this is my own creation and I know that a lot of players will not like to use ‘house rules’. But whatever, they work so well, I barely want to play D&D without them.
As a player, have you ever rolled an 18 to hit when you needed a 19. Or rolled a measly 1-2 damage on a longsword? You feel rather defeated. Your contribution to the fight was negligible to the point of being ignorable. It’s unsatisfying and boring.
Thus, during combat, I allow players (and smart NPC’s) to make Surges. A Surge is: spend your own Vitality and you get either a +5 bonus to hit and/or damage. You can do a Surge before you roll to hit (costing 1d6 Vitality for hit or damage bonus of 2d6 for both) or you can do a Surge AFTER you roll to hit/damage (costing 1d10 for hit or damage bonus or 2d10 for both). It really gives power to the player and I always encourage that.
More than that, it makes Vitality come alive, making it a dynamic element to the game, rather than a static one. (Vitality as written is just as static as HP’s are. It’s a cushion of points that need to be whittled down.)
With Surges, the player essentially chips into their own Vitality. And it makes a ton of sense if you think about it. Dodging attacks isn’t the only thing that’s going to tire a person out. Throwing those powerful attacks or missing and then following up with a last second adjustment (i.e. taking a +5 to hit after you’ve rolled and ‘missed’) is quite taxing to a character.
So far, the Vitality/Wound points and Surges has been working out amazingly. I love it and all other D&D seems a little drier and stale in comparison.
(And in case you care, I plan to have some progression so that at 10th level the hit and damage bonus will increase to +10, then +15 at 15th level and +20 at 20th level. But the cost will increase as well. But I started at +5 to make things simple and smooth. Anything less is such a trivial bonus so as to not be worth it and having it equal to your level creates the weak at 1st through 3rd level and I didn’t want players to have to add things like +7 to hit or +13 to damage. Easier just to keep it in increments of 5).
Surges make combat much more exciting and allow combat to be finished faster. Oh yes, and I do let mages do it too to power their spells. Mages can get tired too, ya know. For them I tend to describe it as them giving their own endurance for their spell, but RP descriptions are neither here nor there.
The point being: I want to put forth that Pathfinder gives Vitality/Wound point as an option in their book and Surges are to be considered. They are simple enough to include in combat and make things flow better.
Thoughts?
