My player's have made their characters, and now we are going to get down to playing this saturday. I have a lot of different rules that I'm allowing on top of Pathfinder.
One rule that I am using is from the Book of Experimental Might. It gives all characters bonus hp equal to their Con score, and separates hit points into Grace and Health.
Grace hit points are lost first, and reflect the more luck based aspects of hit points. You can recover 1 Grace hit point per minute of rest that you take, and Grace hit points are always healed first via magic.
Health hit points reflect that you are no longer able to dodge, parry, or block all of the swings that are coming in at you and some damage is accruing on your physical body. Health returns at the standard rate for healing.
A character's Health equals all hit points gained from Constitution (bonus hit points per level, and the kicker hit points that are granted on top of everything else at first level) + 1 hit point per HD. Grace points cover all of the other hit points.
It is a system that I read over a year ago, and have wanted to use next time I ran a game. The one thing that I am wondering is if I should look at lowering the CRs that monsters have due to this significant boost to the party's survivability.
I'm not so worried about the danger level of encounters, I think that I will be able to tune that pretty easily, but more to the point how quickly a party would gather experience points. I want to try Pathfinder's experience point system and have decided on the Slow path, but even with that it seems like experience would roll in very quickly.
I would love to hear people's experiences on how quickly XP comes in, or thoughts on if I should effectively lower the CR awards that the party is getting do to the bonus hit points and easier healing they have access to.
Thanks much for thoughts.
Barator
Thanks for the reply, and I have done XP-less games in the past. I find that people enjoy getting experience, even if that means their character advances slower. I think that passing experience out rewards them with something tangible every week, rather than haphazard levels where they get their big boost of happy one week, and feel they are treading water during others.
Thanks for the thoughts though.
Barator
To answer this, one must look at the 3.5 XP model first. That model was based on (approximately) 4 balanced encounters per game day (between opportunities to rest) with further suggestion that if the number of encounter increased above 4, the DM should consider choosing a lower CR for some or most of them.
The reason for this is that a party of level X should be able to fight four CR X encounters in one day without running out of spells, HP, and other resources until the end of the 4th encounter, but a fifth such encounter would be very dangrous since that party would be pretty much wiped out before it started.
That was their goal, anyway.
To my knowledge, Pathfinder didn't change this goal despite changing the XP system. Backwards compatibility, and all that jazz.
So with that assumption, I would assume that a Pathfinder party should be able to beat down four encounters of an appropriate level, but a fifth would be very dangerous - because the same assumption that the party should be out of spells, HP, and other resources by the end of the fourth encounter should still apply.
But with your grace HP, this will not be true.
A character with a very average CON will quickly have more grace HP than he has physical, maybe even by level 2. Characters with good CON scores will take a couple extra levels, but I would say by level 6ish (guesstimating off the top of my head) most characters will have at least as many grace HP as they have physical, and many of them will have considerably more.
This means that between every fight, they can just rest a half hour, when the situation allows for it, and get back half (or more, maybe even 2/3 or even 3/4) of their total HP between every fight. And that's at level 6ish. At level 15, the rest periods may take a couple hours, but they will recover 80-90% of their HP in that time.
That's an awful lot of recovery between every fight. Recovery that will seriously extend the game day.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for turning the 15-minute game day into an 8-hour game day with a dozen challenging encounters rather than only four.
But it means your PCs could, possibly, go up a level every time they rest. In three weeks they might be epic...
OK, that's a bit extreme, but the potential exists, even if the potential falls a bit short of that extreme.
So long story short, yeah, you're PCs will have an easy time of it, especially if you use published adventures as written without editing them (those published adventures assume the 4-encounter, 15-minute game day in their design, and such a model will be ridiculously easy for your PCs most of the time).
Unless...
You could put them into situations where they never have the free time to rest between encounters. "Sure, you can rest, but that necromancer is supposed to sacrifice the virgin princess at midnight, and that's less than a half hour from now, and you just barely entered his really large tower..."
Of course, why create a neat rule and then never let them use it?
It's a double edged sword. Let them use it, the game is too easy. Don't let them use it, then it's like you've gone back on your word, offering them a useful mechanic but then taking it away whenever it's inconvenient for you.
Or your could doctor every encounter. "Yeah, I know you have heard rumors about goblins only having 4 or 5 HP, but in this land, goblins are really tough, and they all have at least 20 HP. So forget about those rumors. Oh, by the way, forget about all the other rumors about all the other monsters too!"
OK, that's a silly way to do it, but it won't take your players too long to figure out that everything they fight is really hard to kill, or really numerous, or really well-trained with their swords or claws, or packing really deadly spells, or whatever. And they'll wonder why all these hard encounters only give ordinary XP...
In this case, it's still a double edged sword. This time, you gave them a nifty mechanic then morphed the world around them to force them to use the mechanic. Hardly worth the trouble.
Really, when you start tampering with game mechanics like this, you're just creating a bunch of really sharp double-edged booby traps to cut yourself every time you try something.
But it's evident you've given this a lot of thought and anticipation, and in truth, it sounds like a fun way to handle HP. I don't blame you at all for wanting to try it.
If I were you, I would take the easy way out.
1. Talk to the players in advance. Make sure they understand that this HP mechanic will trivialize most encounters and make the game so easy it will seem boring.
2. Let them know that you plan to counter that with a number of solutions that will seem unfair to them, but are really just means of balancing the HP mechanic. Let them know in advance that these solutions include:
a. Tougher monsters without more XP.
b. More monsters without more XP.
c. Some monsters don't have to confirm critical threats.
d. Some monsters will have free feats that you don't expect.
e. Some monsters will be naturally able to augment spells and spell-like abilities with metamagic at seemingly no cost.
f. Some monsters might have mutations that you don't expect.
g. Anything else you can think of to keep the game interesting for the overpowered PCs.
And especially h. You'll be using the Slow XP track.
Then have fun and experiment with just how far you can push them, and just how creative you can be with designing new and unusual methods to push them with.