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Epic/mythic.
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Something else came to mind.
I can buy that you, with your 40 or 80 or whatever hps, can take a lot of blows and still fight on, sustained by adrenaline, sheer stubborness and willpower, and being used to pain. Most of all when a typical hit doesn't indicate anything more than a flesh wound.
A critical hit though, I envision it as a very well-placed blow. A slashing attack could cut off a limb, a piercing one cause an internal hemorrhage, a bludgeon would crush some bones.
So, I think we still have extra special effects for fighter and other martial types who crit with a favorite weapon group... but I'd also like to have something more than double damage on a crit, according to damage type. For instance, slashing can almost sever a limb (doesn't usually happen to pcs, lots of severed limbs on enemies of course) and that should hinder you, or give you a penalty to all rolls, or slow you, I don't know. Piercing crits could cause bleeding. Bludgeoning... probably similar to slashing, or maybe stunning instead, or something like that.
So yeah, it'd be nice to have crits do even more, imvho.
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I can buy that you, with your 40 or 80 or whatever hps, can take a lot of blows and still fight on, sustained by adrenaline, sheer stubborness and willpower, and being used to pain. Most of all when a typical hit doesn't indicate anything more than a flesh wound.
So to me, and my tables, we have always treated HP as an abstraction, not actual physical damage you can take.
I.E. when you are "hit" the blow comes close enough that it fatigues the hero's abilities to prevent a blow the next time around. Eventually leading to an actual damaging blow (the one that puts you to Dying 1/2).
Now maybe for some characters it makes sense to actually be hit by the blow and just not be injured (like the big strong from Indiana Jones who Indy punches and just smiles at him) but for dexterous characters and the like, it doesn't really make that much sense for every blow to actually be making physical contact.
But that's us, because we consider it more realistic to interpret it that way (also because taking hit point damage doesn't amount to any real change in the character other than a lower number and closer to Dying).
So yeah, it'd be nice to have crits do even more, imvho.
Even in the above context for interpreting hit points as an abstraction, I thin this part would still be fine.
Like getting a condition when someone crits or expanding who has access to Crit special effects.
However, I will say, this type of thing is always in favor of the Monsters/NPCs and not the PCs by sheer numbers and longevity of consequence. Now sure, if it's the BBEG or an important NPC, then it has it's fruits, but those guys are going to be difficult to crit more than likely (higher AC, less easy to crit). Mooks will be vanquished regardless of whether the Crit has more impact or not (and may even die outright).
Now PF2 has helped by giving most of those in combat with the same number of attack actions, but the PCs are still the ones carrying through an adventure with X number of attacks against them over the course of a day. Theoretically, if someone swings at you 20 times, one of those is going to crit.
I do love crits/fumbles as a concept, but the big downside of PCs having to deal with getting Crit/Fumbles more often than the monsters themselves always makes it not worth it.
Eventually my table abandoned our once loved Crit tables due to this, and stopped doing Fumbles entirely (1 is just a failure for attacks only, but it always was). Crits of course had to stay because some people built characters around crits.
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Something else came to mind.
I can buy that you, with your 40 or 80 or whatever hps, can take a lot of blows and still fight on, sustained by adrenaline, sheer stubborness and willpower, and being used to pain. Most of all when a typical hit doesn't indicate anything more than a flesh wound.
A critical hit though, I envision it as a very well-placed blow. A slashing attack could cut off a limb, a piercing one cause an internal hemorrhage, a bludgeon would crush some bones.
So, I think we still have extra special effects for fighter and other martial types who crit with a favorite weapon group... but I'd also like to have something more than double damage on a crit, according to damage type. For instance, slashing can almost sever a limb (doesn't usually happen to pcs, lots of severed limbs on enemies of course) and that should hinder you, or give you a penalty to all rolls, or slow you, I don't know. Piercing crits could cause bleeding. Bludgeoning... probably similar to slashing, or maybe stunning instead, or something like that.
So yeah, it'd be nice to have crits do even more, imvho.
In my PF1e houserules, I've made resting to recover hit points/spells a lot easier (typically a ten minute rest, although some of my campaigns use other variants). However, attribute damage heals at the normal slow rate.
I've also made it that getting knocked into the negatives leaves you with 2 points of Con damage (that don't reduce your current hit points, I'm not a monster) and that suffering a crit causes Con damage equal to the crit modifier.
It means that you can quickly recover hit points, but if you are careless you can end up stacking up Con damage and having to deal with reduced max hit points for an extended period.
Got the idea from Dragon Age's wound system, and it's been pretty popular with my players. I could see doing something similar in 2e.
So to me, and my tables, we have always treated HP as an abstraction, not actual physical damage you can take.
I.E. when you are "hit" the blow comes close enough that it fatigues the hero's abilities to prevent a blow the next time around. Eventually leading to an actual damaging blow (the one that puts you to Dying 1/2).
Now maybe for some characters it makes sense to actually be hit by the blow and just not be injured (like the big strong from Indiana Jones who Indy punches and just smiles at him) but for dexterous characters and the like, it doesn't really make that much sense for every blow to actually be making physical contact.
But that's us, because we consider it more realistic to interpret it that way (also because taking hit point damage doesn't amount to any real change in the character other than a lower number and closer to Dying).
I've tried running games both with "up to half hp you haven't really been hit/hurt" and with "flesh wounds/cuts/bruises/nothing serious unless it's a crit", and I feel uncomfortable with the former. My players did too apparently. It generates a whole plethora of incongruences - if I haven't really hit you, how did I poison you? How did I make you bleed? Etc. We tend to see the latter interpretation as more intuitive at the very least.
However, I will say, this type of thing is always in favor of the Monsters/NPCs and not the PCs by sheer numbers and longevity of consequence. Now sure, if it's the BBEG or an important NPC, then it has it's fruits, but those guys are going to be difficult to crit more than likely (higher AC, less easy to crit). Mooks will be vanquished regardless of whether the Crit has more impact or not (and may even die outright).
Yes, that's very true, just by virtue of superior numbers enemies might be able to inflict this kind of conditions more often. But even if that doesn't happen, they will still cause more crits, and that's baked in the game. So yeah, it's not strictly in favor of the party, but still.
Also, in my experience... I don't remember my players taking a lot of crits. They either armor themselves as best they can - and that makes crits hard to land - or they just avoid the front lines and let the tanks do their thing. Not that monsters crits don't happen, but it's like, they don't happen as often as we'd think...
It generates a whole plethora of incongruences - if I haven't really hit you, how did I poison you? How did I make you bleed? Etc. We tend to see the latter interpretation as more intuitive at the very least.
I'd say a grazing still qualifies as "not actually hitting" in the case of Poison/Bleed, but status ailments in general already provide their own mechanics for dealing with how that affects the character.
Why did the poison "hurt" you, but not the knife wound that delivered it? (that's effectively what "you always deal actual cuts to a person" when speaking hit points translates to).
Also, in my experience... I don't remember my players taking a lot of crits. They either armor themselves as best they can - and that makes crits hard to land - or they just avoid the front lines and let the tanks do their thing. Not that monsters crits don't happen, but it's like, they don't happen as often as we'd think
I mean statistically, I don't think the math adds up to mean that. With a new system that strongly regulates AC numbers to be contingent on level (and attacks the same way) that's most certainly going to be the case.
PCs might crit 5x more often, but 5x more often when you fight 100 creatures in a day, vs. 4 PCs taking relatively the same number of attacks.... means the PCs are getting Crit unless the encounters are vastly under level.
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A called shot system like was in Ultimate Combat. Rules for low magic item games. The 2nd one for rules low magic games would include scaling damage to cover lack magic items. This could already be partially addressed in the rules. Pathfinder gave some damage bonuses for martials based on class and level for martials and Starfinder did it based on proficiency level with the weapon. So Pathfinder 2 may have something similar already.
I have doubled down on the idea that hit points equal health. Pathfinder 2 characters are fantasy super heroes. They have spark that separates them from the mundane. Saying hit points represents something else dodging, blocking, ect falls apart when there are surprise rounds due to ambush ect. There is not a different system to track damage when characters are not aware to dodge block ect. So for me it is easier just to say that the characters are heroes that can take blows that would dispatch the mortal. That is why I do not need allot of damage system variants.
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Hit points also equaling health is also sort of presumed because otherwise you get some really tortured logic about having Heal/cure spells restoring your mystic reservoir of lucky dodges in addition to the guy lying in a puddle of his own fluids after getting brained by a giant's greatsword.
It's not like either of those scenarios are any less silly under a system where hit points equal hits.
Then you have people getting bitten by a dragon, taking a critical hit, and not dying.
The amount of damage you can take before being "brained by a long sword" is measured in how many hits you can avoid without being fatigued.
Im not saying considering them for the most part an abstraction is flawless, but acting like they make any more sense as true hits also makes little to no sense when you really think about it.
I'm not saying it makes total (or even a lot) of sense. I'm saying that you need to torture a whole lot more logic trying to make the close calls interpretation fit in with the existing game than you do people just being inhuman piles of meat and blood.
You don't really have to do anything. Everything stays the same, the only thing that changes is the description the gm gives for the move (if they even do so). It's not like calculations or mechanics change from conceptual descriptions.
I just conceptually refuse to acknowledge that getting struck with a long sword from a giant literally is blade to flesh strike if the person he strikes does not go negative (dying now) from the hit.
There are loads of ways to visual moves hitting without blade to flesh scenarios, most movies/tv do this type of thing.
If you look at D&D or Pathfinder as a simulation then yes you are right. If you look at it from the fantasy superhero model it does. The abstract model falls apart in the example I gave of the ambush surprise round. You are not dodging are parrying anything. If simulation is what damage system I am after I would go with crimson exodus, blade of the iron throne, or Warhammer 4th. They all have more gritty damage. What I personally look for in Pathfinder and D&D is heroic fantasy super heroes. That is just me though.
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Guys, take the hit points discussion to another thread please, this is for optional rules people would like to see in the 2e Unchained.
Thank you.
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The hit point discussion would actually be optional rules. One version would be what is in the game the other would be the optional rule.
Beyond how you view hit points maybe a wound level system. Light 25% damage heavy 50% maximum health. This was actually in unchained. Maybe wound vitality system. Critical hit descriptions, that is usually in card deck form though. Armor as damage reduction.
The hit point discussion would actually be optional rules. One version would be what is in the game the other would be the optional rule.
Beyond how you view hit points maybe a wound level system. Light 25% damage heavy 50% maximum health. This was actually in unchained. Maybe wound vitality system. Critical hit descriptions, that is usually in card deck form though. Armor as damage reduction.
Wounds/Vigor and Starfinder's Stamina/Health systems are some of my favorite things Paizo has come up with, all of the yes to that from me. Armor as DR (or "resist physical" as it would be referred to now) is a very interesting idea, but it scales very slowly, and with the fact that damage ramp is a massive part of the design of monsters now, I'm not sure how well it could get implemented. Wound Thresholds make for very nasty snowballing if one side happens to land a lucky crit or two, so if that was put in, I hope they would add a mechanism to slow that (unless the snowballing is what makes it appealing to you, in which case have fun with that! :P )
That is true with the Damage Ramp up. It could be combined with the shield block so it stacks.
Also maybe spell point variant for magic.
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If you look at D&D or Pathfinder as a simulation then yes you are right. If you look at it from the fantasy superhero model it does. The abstract model falls apart in the example I gave of the ambush surprise round.
It really doesn't fall apart in that scenario, which was why I had given up trying to explain how the hitpoints abstraction is perceived at my table.
In the original post, I don't even say that hits are never "hits", just that every hit doesn't amount to always being a physical strike that makes contact.
A hero can be ambushed an unable to defend himself as well as he normally could, while still not taking a full stab to the chest, maybe he reacts slightly slower than normal and the blow got closer than expected, maybe he takes a punch/kick/elbow because he spends all his strength stopping a dagger and can't defend that, so on and so forth.
If you want to choose to believe that Hit Points = physical wounds and not Hit Points = amount of theoritical hits you can prevent before a wound would put you to dying, then that's your prerogative.
However, it does not "break the narrative" or "not work" in any sense of those definitions. Choose the superhero life if you want but "killing dragons by stabbing them in the kneecaps" is not something that has ever happened at my tables (nor at any table without Called Shots, because the rules don't even have space for it).
Now if you want to champion the "Wounds" system as an alternate mechanic to give your "superhero fantasy" a little more grit, then by all means. However, I do not find it necessary given the rules do not define Hit Points as rigidly as some here seem to play them.
Critical Hits having more presence and wounds systems are nice, but HP provides a metric for weighing those effects now, if you choose to see them as an abstraction and not binary "damage == blood/wounds".
And to the "mental gymnastics" that it takes, I think it requires more mental gymnastics to justify "dragons dying from knee stabs" than it does to say that attacks "hit" in different ways. To each their own.
EDIT: And this is my last response on it given it is dragging, and I think the concept has been covered. In summary, Wounds systems only seem necessary to me in a world where you define hitpoints as "physical damage", so systems like that to me are something I don't want/need to see to make my games work. Others may feel differently.
Back to the regular program of optional rules.
To be fair, while dragons are arguable, most small or medium-sized fighters probably do kill titans (and other colossal-size humanoids) by stabbing them in the ankles/kneecaps. :P
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I would like Words of Power back.
I think it would fit well into a "there are only 4 (or 6) spell lists" model. If we got a prepared analogue of the sorcerer in the "pick a list" mode, we could make "Word Caster" an archetype for those two classes.
Ooh, I hadn't considered that. Yeah, Words of Power would be nice. Or something like Truenamer; it was one of my favorite 3.5 classes, despite being so anemic. It would be nice to have a proper implementation of the concept.
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So... how bout those spell points? I prefer spell points systems since running out of SP fits my expected model of how spellcasting would work better than spell slots but it is hard to balance a spell system designed around spell slots to work with spell points.
If you have SP cost equal spell level cost (the most straightforward way) and give casters the equivalent number of SP needed to cast their normal level of spells than they can save up all their points and just nova their higher level spells all at once which can be difficult to work with.
On the other hand if you have the SP cost in a super-linier fashion (as with the Unearthed Arcana DnD 3e version) eventually lower level spells become virtually free which again can be difficult to work with.
Neither of those are absolute game-breakers but they both would really change the game in a significant fashion.
It might be necessary in a PF2 SP system to have some additional throttling on higher level spell slots other than SP cost. In the 5e spell point variant rule they have the throttle higher level spells by saying that once you cast a spell of 6th or higher level you cannot cast another one of that spell level until you finish a long rest.
That specific restriction wouldn't work for PF2 but something is probably needed.
Since there is a short rest mechanic in PF2 maybe we vastly choke the number of SP (something like lvl + casting modifier) but you can get all of them back on a 10 min rest? That would essentially mean that casters have enough SP to cast two or three top level spells each fight or a lot of lower level spells for a few fights but would want to stop and rest often. Of course it looks as if the 10 min rest will be something the party does as often as possible anyways.
That leaves almost unlimited out of combat low level spells but that I think is less problematic than Novaing.
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So... how bout those spell points? I prefer spell points systems since running out of SP fits my expected model of how spellcasting would work better than spell slots but it is hard to balance a spell system designed around spell slots to work with spell points.
If you have SP cost equal spell level cost (the most straightforward way) and give casters the equivalent number of SP needed to cast their normal level of spells than they can save up all their points and just nova their higher level spells all at once which can be difficult to work with.
On the other hand if you have the SP cost in a super-linier fashion (as with the Unearthed Arcana DnD 3e version) eventually lower level spells become virtually free which again can be difficult to work with.
Neither of those are absolute game-breakers but they both would really change the game in a significant fashion.
It might be necessary in a PF2 SP system to have some additional throttling on higher level spell slots other than SP cost. In the 5e spell point variant rule they have the throttle higher level spells by saying that once you cast a spell of 6th or higher level you cannot cast another one of that spell level until you finish a long rest.
That specific restriction wouldn't work for PF2 but something is probably needed.
Since there is a short rest mechanic in PF2 maybe we vastly choke the number of SP (something like lvl + casting modifier) but you can get all of them back on a 10 min rest? That would essentially mean that casters have enough SP to cast two or three top level spells each fight or a lot of lower level spells for a few fights but would want to stop and rest often. Of course it looks as if the 10 min rest will be something the party does as often as possible anyways.
That leaves almost unlimited out of combat low level spells but that I think is less problematic than Novaing.
Given that low level slots are very weak in PF2, being able to use a ton of them wouldn't be so bad compared to in 1st edition. Paying for the higher slot matters a lot more in this edition since that's how you scale spells to keep up with new enemies.
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Agreed on moving on from hit points since it is such any easy thing to tweak as far as how you view them. I am from the hit points are how much damage can be taken others like the abstract view. Both can be done with no rules tweaks.
My other rules options from Unchained would have been combat feats and conditions baked into the feats and this is already done with Pathfinder 2.
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Agreed on moving on from hit points since it is such any easy thing to tweak as far as how you view them. I am from the hit points are how much damage can be taken others like the abstract view. Both can be done with no rules tweaks.
My other rules options from Unchained would have been combat feats and conditions baked into the feats and this is already done with Pathfinder 2.
Or rather than having unlimited numbers of 'refresh' available, have a cost of some sort other than just a 10 minute rest.
A simple way would be to arbitrarily limited number of refresh's in a day, or instead it could be that each time you refresh, your max SP goes down by one each time. So if you are casting all day, using up all your SP, by the end of the day you are depleted and aren't going to have SP available to cast your higher level spells any longer. (which seams a reasonable way of reflecting becoming fatigued by your casting) If you start the day with 9SP, deplete all or most of your spells points and know something is coming up, so you refresh, and you are back to 8SP. You only cast a couple spells but somehow know you are going to need to soon cast a 3rd and 4th level spell back to back, and only have 6SP left, so you have to rest again and get yourself back to 7SP. And so on. having slowly reducing max, and potentially longer rests on subsequent rests might help keep someone from simply spamming low level non-cantrip spells, in case any of them could become problematic at mass quantities.
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Given that low level slots are very weak in PF2, being able to use a ton of them wouldn't be so bad compared to in 1st edition. Paying for the higher slot matters a lot more in this edition since that's how you scale spells to keep up with new enemies....
I totally agree in terms of combat power. The thing that I have found problematic in the past is the sheer utility of some low level spells to invalidate non-casters in the past. Specifically things like Jump and Knock which in the past simply eliminated the need for skills. Now those types of spells in the new edition work differently (and in my opinion better) so perhaps this is less of an issue. On the other hand DCs scale independently from spell level so low level debuffs can still hit.
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Arcanist-style spellcasting, exclusive NPC classes for all playable ancestries...
That's what I can think up as of now.
YES! Prepared spellcasters should have been this from the start. All spells should be spontaneously heightenable, too.
Of course, this would require Sorcerers to get more unique abilities, which I'm all for.