Red Tearstone Ring type of item (low health means more damage)

[LucidZzz]

In Dark Souls there's an item called the Red Tearstone Ring which increases your damage dealt by 20% if you are under 20% health. I want to try and reproduce this type of item.

My initial thoughts are when you drop under 20% health you add a d12 to damage (d12 feels right for the high risk high reward theme). I'm also considering how this item scales. At higher levels it is "safer" to activate because you will have a larger health pool, but the d12 won't be as potent of a reward. Other ideas I've had are scaling damage dice, a set hp you have to drop to before activation, adding attack bonuses at various levels and adding a 20% dodge chance. Thoughts? Opinions? Constructive criticism?

[Craglansun]

Possibly changing how the Str modifier is applied to a weapon for melee.
For example, 2-handing adds 1.5*Str to damage, double it to 3*str modifier. It would need tweaking between 2h (1.5 》3*), 1h (1 》2*), and o-h (0.5 》1*).

For spells, consider adding a free metamagic (not one of the drastic ones)
Maybe Heighten Spell or something.
Or a more powerful one, but only 1/day or something.

Just a bit of food for thought.

[MrCharisma]

Just gonna put this here, the RED TEARSTONE RING adds 50% damage, not 20%. The easiest way to do this might be to actually just multiply any damage by 1.5.

As for getting a character who makes us of it (going into hyper-mode) you're unlikely to see a lot of success in Pathfinder. This system isn't designed to make it easy to avoid damage.

You might get some mileage out of a Paladin with this ring, since you can heal as a swift action - When you get injured, you get 1 round of bonus damage before you swift action heal back up.

Or a Come-And-Get-Me Barbarian build - Where you get to make an AoO before the enemy hits you (and with +50% damage you're more likely to one-shot them). Also Barb's can get pretty reliable Damage Reduction which helps them not die.

Actually you might be able to combine this with the BLUE TEARSTONE RING. I'd probably make it something like: "1/day when you would be killed by HP damage, you are instead dropped to 1hp".

I'd probably make both effects on the one ring (expensive ring). I also wouldn't intentionally activate the effect, It's more of a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free than anything else.

[Childeric, The Shatterer]

This sort of thing would work well with the Wound thresholds variant from Unchained. With the damage bonus increasing as you were more injured. Perhaps something like:

Grazed (3/4 to 1/2 max HP): +25% damage bonus
Wounded (1/2 to 1/4 max HP): +50% damage bonus
Critical (less than 1/4 max HP): +75% damage bonus

In fact, I might just "borrow" this idea for an upcoming game, thanks.

[MrCharisma]

Actually that might be a better way to do it (although +75% damage might be a bit much).

Having to get your character to below 20%hp is a huge ask in Pathfinder. A level 10 Barbarian with 16 Con has an average of 100 hp (120 while raging). Being below 20 hp (24 while raging) means they could be killed at any second. It's unlikely that anyone will really use this as it's really too dangerous to be worth the bonus (again, it'll be a nice thing to have in a pinch, but not something people will go out of their way to do).

However giving the player bonus damage that scales with how hurt they are could encourage players to go for longer sessions without resting/healing. This could be something to help GM's who don't like their players using the classic "2 minute working day".

[Inlaa]

An idea as to what sort of character might use this: archery-focused cleric or warpriest that casts Shield Other on other party members to soak up damage and fight safely from a distance. Maybe?

[The Raven Black]

The biggest pitfall to avoid is the character getting purposefully wounded so that he operates at higher efficiency with low actual risk