I've recently been toying with the idea of getting into GM'ing and have examined the alternative rules from Ultimate Combat. Specifically the Wounds and Vigor and Armor as DR rules.
Have any GMs tried these, or any players been in a game with these rules? If so, how well did they work? Were there any serious game changing mechanics to be aware of when replacing these rules? Also, is this something that a new GM should perhaps shy away from? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
The early Wizards of the Coast "Star Wars" RPG was close in system to D&D 3.0/Pathfinder, yet used a wounds and vitality system.
(Wounds were your constitution score for Star Wars, not double your CON).
Weapons that confirmed a critical hit bypassed vitality and caused wound point damage. With weapons that did 2d8 or better damage, a critical could possibly kill any level of character. This meant that combat was potentially deadly for anyone as a lucky shot could end someone at any time. This is similar in status that only "save or suck" spells have in Pathfinder. Personally, I liked the adrenaline rush knowing that my 10th level PC might die in any combat to a lucky shot. There was also every chance that the big villain at the end could die anticlimactically by a single lucky shot.
My two cents - try it. Let players know it is an experiment, if they like it the system stays. If the players feel uncomfortable with the change, switch back. A person can't learn until they try.
I've dabbled with them, but they're alright. Armor as DR requires some serious re-writing of the beasties though. My miniscule play group liked it, though they liked them even better after I did some modifications to how both systems worked (mostly some tasty stew of my own ideas, 3.5 Unearthed Arcana's versions, and PF's versions).
Echoing Kestrel here, but try it. Let people know it's an experiment, give it two or three sessions where nothing ultra-important is going on in the story (IE: boss fight), so you can switch back to the comfortable familiarity of the base game.
Seriously. Using both systems at once tends to make things more challenging for the players. Me and most of my friends like it that way, but YMMV.
Thanks for the feedback so far, everyone. Like Suichimo mentioned, did you all find it that much more noticeable difference in the difficulty in encounters, and if so, should I double check the CRs for a given creature? Also, how aware should I be with the negative energy and Wound damage?
I believe I already stated it makes it more challenging for the players. I suppose I should expand on this and state it's due to the amount of time it takes to drop things. It becomes much more heavy on resource management, since combats will, over all, take longer.
Since I never gauge by CR, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I find CR for my games to be wholly useless, but that's due more to hand-tailoring my games around the party, which I've been doing for years... CR system just confuses me, because it assumes an 'average, ordinary' set up, and nothing should ever be 'average/ordinary'.
With Armor as DR, anything that hits hard with a single attack is going to be noticeably better than the plinkers that wrack up a lot of damage over multiple small hits. Especially when you start taking into account the size category ignores DR table.
With Wounds and Vigor, you seriously need to keep track of negative energy and be a little conservative. When I first started running W&V as it was written up in UC, the party wound up with nearly TPKs due to excessive usage of undead.
They work... They ratchet up the difficulty of the game a few notches though. It takes a bit of playing to figure out exactly how much for your players andtheir characters, but once you got a good feel for it, you should be fine. Thus, I'd suggest some "one-offs", or a set of mini-adventures, solely to explore these options.
If your players like it, but it doesn't work as written, field some fixes, and try again. If in the end it just doesn't do it for any of ya, scrap it.
With wounds and vigor good berry becomes one of the best curative spells on this side of heal.
We experimented with the Wounds and Vigor system with the Kingmaker Campaign and it did help keep us alive through most of the really dangerous stuff, even if the bookkeeping was a bit confusing and the healing complicated. Ultimately we shelved it but as experiments go it wasn't a failure.
I haven't used the armor as DR system exactly as written in UC, but I did use a custom version in a recent game. The biggest change I noticed is that to hit became less important, but damage became more important. At low levels, two handed weapons did best, and light weapons/archery took big hits. I didn't get too far, but since only archery has a way to punch through DR, I can only extrapolate that light weapons (and TWF) would have eventually become useless.
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Our group uses armour and natural armour as damage reduction as per Ultimate Combat with several changes as shown below.
Fights last a lot longer using these rules, especially at lower levels. Monsters with high natural armour become especially dangerous because this is converted directly to DR.
The lack of AC from armour has tended to ensure that more characters use shields instead of two-handed weapons. Defensive fighting has become more popular (until the maximum dodge bonus cap kicks in) as has Combat Expertise (we rule that Combat Expertise provides a circumstance bonus so that it isn't affected by the maximum dodge bonus cap).
Here are our houserules:
1) The DR provided by armour and natural armour is only bypassed by incorporeal attacks. Convert the AC bonus directly to DR. Armour and natural armour do not increase AC under any circumstances. Shield bonuses still increase AC as normal.
2) A minimum damage rule applies; one-fifth of the damage done by the attack before DR (rounded up) will always be taken. So if armour and natural armour produce DR 10 whilst the weapon does 6 damage before DR is applied then the target takes 2 damage (6/5 rounded up = 2).
3) Characters get an armour class bonus equal to the Reflex bonus provided by their class and level. This is a dodge bonus. Our group has long felt that a higher level character should be harder to hit than a lower level character with the same magical items because of their skill and this rule does this to some extent.
Creatures get a "reflex bonus" to AC equal to their Reflex save minus their DEX bonus.
4) The DEX bonus to AC is now a dodge bonus.
5) The Maximum Dexterity bonus for armour is now called the maximum dodge bonus. You can add your strength modifier to the maximum dodge bonus and Mithral armour adds 2 to the maximum dodge bonus. The effect of this is that armoured characters will eventually find that their armour caps limits their AC bonus provided by level.
6) Maximum dodge bonus cannot exceed your Dexterity attribute.
7) Armour and bracers do not stack.
8) Crossbows are armour piercing (DR from armour and natural armour is halved, down)
e.g. a 7th level Bard with DEX 14 and STR 10 wears a +1 Mithral Chain Shirt and a +2 Amulet of Natural Armour. Armour and natural armour provide a DR of 4 (shirt base) +1 (shirt magic) +2 (Amulet). So her total DR is 7 / incorporeal. Her armour class is 10 + 2 (DEX) + 5 (7th level Bard Reflex save bonus) but her 7 points of dodge bonus (DEX + REF) is subject to the maximum dodge bonus cap.
So her maximum dodge bonus is capped at 6 (Max. DEX For Chain shirt of +4, +2 for Mithral, + 0 for STR) so her AC is 16. If she also uses a +1 Heavy Wooden Shield then her AC is increased by 3 points to 19 (a +1 heavy shield gives +3 AC as per normal).
We have also experimented with some weapons being armour piercing against some types of armour (e.g. bodkin arrows vs. all forms of chainmail)
I always allow Called Shots. I think they are really good without being the end all-be all. Worth the usage and the feats, probably more so for a melee guy than a ranged person. I even allow players to do a called-shot coup de grace, where they can replace a coup de grace attempt for the highest disabling shot against a limb.
I also like Wounds and Vigor. It makes the players a bit more robust, but the monsters are also a bit tougher.
I don't like Armor as DR because it makes it easier for people to get hit. Dex characters in light armor get shafted pretty hard since they are easier to hit but won't have the DR someone in Plate Mail will. I'd probably couple this with an active dodge mechanic honestly.
Dueling is actually something I use for normal combat. It's fun and makes combat and counterspelling more interesting.
I haven't used Performance Combat yet, but I plan on it one day.
All in all, I like almost all of the systems, save for Armor as DR.
Thanks guys! It definitely seems like Wounds and Vigor would be a good way for me to go with a try out. Perhaps Armor as DR would best be saved for a time when I'm a bit more experienced at GMing.
My old tabletop group used to run Called Shots and we had a blast with them; in fact, our DM used the Called Shots/Critical Hit/Fumble charts from Hackmaster. Talk about interesting!
One fix I did to the system, over all and not just because of this, was particularly helpful in the Armor vs DR system.
I gave every class a built in Defense Bonus, ripped right from the Wheel of Time d20. At your option, you could also use the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana Class Defense Bonus version.
Basically, classes get a defense bonus to AC that doesn't stack with armor. Way I used it with Armor as DR, was that it added to the defense score, though the armor rating of the armor subtracted from it. For example, rogues would get +11 by level 20. If they were running around in Full Plate for whatever reason with it's 9 armor bonus (thus, DR in this system), they'd only get a +2 to their defense.
Of course, that was before I modified the whole thing to work as DR AND Conversion (see Unearthed Arcana), which just made combat that much more of an adrenaline rush... Not something I'd suggest until you've got a good handle on GMing and mook-to-party power ratios...
A note on that: If you want to keep a good idea of the general power level of your party while designing encounters... Request up to date versions of their character sheets. This is an old trick I picked up from my pre-3.0 days. Also lets you keep track of what spells characters know, have in their spell books, what specific bits of equipment they have, etc. (I'd also advise implementing a house rule that all prepared spells for a day, and spells known if you don't want full sheets, are to written out and given to you, but I only implemented that because I had 1 spells known player that always seemed to have just the right spell for the job... At level 2. She stopped playing spells known after that, and got even more pissy when I required spells prepped casters to give me their spell lists for the day).