Making Combat more Visceral / Grueling

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?

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.

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.

Remove cure spells, Channel Energy, Infernal Healing, and so on. All healing must be done via the Heal skill or natural healing. Allow feats to reduce the time needed for long term care, and to double the amount healed by long term care.

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.

As was said make healing more rare. You can also try the exploding die system I think its called. Whenever someone rolls the highest number on a die you roll it again for more damage. This process keeps repeating for the highest number I.e. if you roll 1d4 damage and get a 4 you roll it again. Roll another 4 do it again. Roll a 2 you're done for a total of 10 damage.

You could also go old school. -10 means you are dead or below 0 is dead. Trust any 1e or 2e player when they tell you that this method leads to the game being much more deadly.

Let me tell you, Exploding dice makes Daggers, Kukris, and Falchions incredibly deadly. When you have a 25% chance of getting an extra die of damage every time you roll, it is easy for a dagger to out damage a great axe. Regularly. Shurikens become a rain of death.

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.

Google: Tucker's Kobolds.

As DM, treat every encounter as if the enemies you are running think that they are the protagonist of their own story, not just speedbumps to someone else's adventure.

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.

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.

Be aware that using these suggested methods is going to change the norms of D&D. Players will become far more conservative. They may become very hesitant and run from combat more. They may get frustrated dying 30 times. They'll get th rough far less encounters a day likne say grinding through a dungeon. You'll likely have to up your rp if you go to this and get way more "we rest for the night".

You're basically going to be rewinding the clock back to less pc friendly versions where there were less kid's gloves.

Well, one of my DMs used the exponential critical system.

It certainly made combat more deadly.

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.