| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hey, and thanks in advance to anyone who has advice and thoughts to share on this topic.
I'm going to run my very first game of Pathfinder soon, and want to do things a little differently from the PF baselines. Specifically, my campaign is going to be grounded in a much more realistic mechanics system that tamps down hard on the epic fantasy assumptions of the baseline. My specific design goals here are:
- Keep things feeling "real" across levels. Being stabbed in the gut with a knife should always be a troubling thing, no matter what level you are; and even the greatest heroes should be worried about what happens when 20 level 0 goblins have them surrounded. And just because I'm a level 20 mage should not mean I'm better at shoving people around than a level 1 Fighter who has invested massively into Str and Athletics. Levelling up lets you get better at the things you invest in, not just getting arbitrarily better at everything.
- Make combat feel a bit more like real life, where getting wounded doesn't simply mean "still feeling just dandy, but marginally closer to keeling over dead!". Getting stabbed, slashed, or smashed by weapons should always feel meaningful, without opening the door to hyperrealistic one-shot player deaths.
Also to introduce more fun, interesting considerations to how players choose their weapons. I've always disliked how D&D has always treated a d12 sword and a d12 spear as essentially the same once they stick you (putting aside resistances, which generally only come from magical effects), and it erases the real-world rationales between different kinds of weapons.
So, here is the in-house system I'm planning to use:
1: I'm adopting the variant rule to remove Level from proficiency bonuses, this is the relatively easy part.
2: New mechanics for additional wounding mechanics on-hit, as follows:
- Whenever a hit lands, the natural die roll for the attack is compared to a threshold to determine if it is a Solid Blow or not. This threshold is calculated as:
10 + Defender's Fortitude bonus + Defender's armor bonus - Attacker's weapon Potency, maximum 20.
Whenever the natural d20 roll for the attack meets or exceeds this value, and the attack is a hit, it is a Solid Blow, with additional effects based on damage type:
- Slashing: Slashing weapons are designed to open grievous, bleeding wounds on unarmored targets. Their effectiveness against armor is severely diminished, but they should be terrifying to unarmored or lightly armored targets.
On a Solid Blow, a Slashing weapon applies Persistent bleeding damage to the target equal to the damage die type of the weapon, -1 step for each point of Armor bonus to AC. So, a d10 damage Slashing weapon against +3 armor would inflict 1d4 bleeding damage per turn.
- Piercing: Stabbing wounds penetrate deep, even if they're not as gruesome as slashing wounds, and are effective at applying force to weak areas on an armored target. A solid blow from a piercing weapon has 3 effects:
- inflict 1dx persistent bleeding damage, where x is their Str or Dex bonus, as appropriate to the type of attack
- when determining if the attack was a critical hit only, add the attacker's Strength or Dexterity to their attack total, depending on which stat was applied to the attack roll (ie, armor does less to prevent hits from becoming Critical Hits)
- the DC to remove the persistent bleed damage is increased by the attacker's Str or Dex bonus, again as appropriate to the type of attack (a small, deep hole in your gut isn't going to bleed as profusely as a huge gash, but is a lot trickier to staunch)
- Bludgeoning weapons lack the raw killing power of bladed attacks, but have the significant capacity to knock down or otherwise disable an opponent to allow for a coup de grace, and are particularly effective at pummeling heavily armored targets into submission. On a Solid Blow from a bludgeoning weapon:
- Inflict upon the target either the Shove effect, or knock them Prone
- If the hit was a Critical Hit, inflict Stunned X, where X is your Str or Dex bonus, depending on the type of attack
I have some additional modification to how persistent damage is handled that I'll circle back to later, but for now, I'd love the advice of the community on how these rules will play in terms of balance, keeping combat intense but not "oops ur dead lol", and maintaining a more down-to-earth, violence-is-scary feel. Particularly, if there are any character builds that get under or overpowered, or if there are other mechanical interactions I should be considering, I thank you for your insights!