Sorry, I have no experience with it.
I'm playing in a campaign set in the Inner Sea and the GM told us that he would like to institute a few of the alternative rules from the Ultimate Combat book. He tends to bounce ideas off of me so I thought I would post here.
He would like us to use the armor as damage reduction, rather than us having an AC. Does anyone else have any experience running this system? Did you change healing or anything else around to accommodate the use of the vitality point/wound point system?
Any advice is appreciated!
I've not tested any of these, but as our group was looking at them I came up with these points for our discussion:
Wound Points & Viger Points
• First level characters are much tougher. This could make a common bar fight much tougher for maybe even into mid levels. Common people take more to kill. Good for realism and the game overall I think.
• High level monsters (& characters) will now be mostly vigor points and won't have near the HP they have in the books. For instance, an Ancient Red Dragon that currently has 362 hp (25d12+200) 27 CON, would have 162 vigor points and 54 wound points. Almost 150 less HP, not as challenging.
• Sooo – this changes the curve for XP because the lowest level encounters suddenly become much tougher, and higher levels aren't as tough. (Although characters use the same system, so it might not be that much of an issue.)
• It also makes larger dice much better than before. You used to be able to compensate with a high con, but a d6 suddenly looks much worse for vigor points than a d12.
• Toughness becomes even more appealing, as are favored class HP.
• It looks like the only way to add to Wound Points is a higher Con.
• Channeling Energy becomes a superior way to heal over spells. You get 1 wound point back per dice. So a 12th level cleric could channel 6d6– heals 6 wound points in 30' radius (21hp avg) while a Mass Cure Minor would heal 2 wound points in 30' radius (21hp avg). In this example, channeling cures 3X the wounds that healing spells do.
• This hurts the Oracle class compared to the Cleric.
• I guess a Monk can only heal Vigor Points since he doesn't use dice at all?
• Undead have no Con. I guess you'd use their Charisma to come up with their Wound Points?
Armor as DR
• I like that defense means the attack missed
• DR can get pretty crazy. An ancient red dragon has a DR of 33, but it's Defense would be next to nothing. Makes sense, it's easy to hit the side of a barn, but hard to break through those scales. But 33 HP damage to break through? I guess there are lots of ways to bypass.
• Adamantine would rock even more, especially for weapons.
• Could add some time to game play or in setup due to updating defense & DR on the fly.