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lvl 1 sharnian
2009-06-04, 03:14 PM
I was thinking... how do humanoids gain HP? Shouldn't a person still beable to be cut by swords or pierced by arrows? Regardless of any muscle growth they had.

So I decided to change the HP growth to something else but keeping the rest of the level progression the same.

Any thoughts on what should it be replaced with? Maybe DR or AC?

Tingel
2009-06-04, 03:21 PM
I was thinking... how do humanoids gain HP? Shouldn't a person still beable to be cut by swords or pierced by arrows? Regardless of any muscle growth they had.

So I decided to change the HP growth to something else but keeping the rest of the level progression the same.

Any thoughts on what should it be replaced with? Maybe DR or AC?

In modern D&D, HP do not reflect how much damage someone can take. Instead, they are supposed to be a mixture of toughness, luck, combat experience etc., all rolled into one very abstract measure of survivability. The fact that such an interpretation makes a lot of things completely illogical (most prominently healing) didn't keep the Wizards of the Coast from reinventing HP like this. The modern D&D editions are just not very good games if you appreciate an inner logic or realism.
If you take this into account, maybe your problems are already solved.

If not then I must ask how exchanging excessive HP for DR is supposed to be able to solve the issue? If you dislike large HP numbers because you interpret them as "swords cannot cut or puncture flesh", then shouldn't you dislike "natural" (and thus supernatural) DR just as much or even more? How can you explain DR of human skin?

Ouranos
2009-06-04, 03:33 PM
Hp is not the ability to take blows or shrug them off, it's about luck and skill. I take a hit to the face from a monk, oww, second hit, I'm out. I get tougher, and more skilled, and while the same monk hits just as hard, it affects me less. It's just like how the average guy hears gunfire and ducks, a marine however would keep calm and find the origin.

lvl 1 sharnian
2009-06-04, 04:31 PM
thanks I just needed someone to explain Hp to me before i work on something

EDIT: maybe add a concentration check to ignore HP damage (to a point)

as for DR, i had thought much into it

AC would be more along the lines of what I'm trying to do

Devils_Advocate
2009-06-04, 06:55 PM
D&D 3.5 doesn't really model injury much. Until you're dying on the ground, you generally don't lose body parts or mobility or even blood. You can still fight and run and jump and climb and tumble and everything just like you could before you lost 100 hit points, so long as you still have 1 left. Whatever one takes hit points to represent, this general lack of meaningful injury is pretty clearly unrealistic.

There are several variant rules (http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/variantAdventuring.htm) designed to make things more realistic, and you can alter and mix and match them to suit your tastes. For example, you could change armor to give significant damage reduction, add defense bonuses to AC from class, only give characters a relatively small number of hit points, and penalize their ability scores when they lose hit points.

A character's Constitution score seems like a good number for the limit of the amount of actual severe injury he can take.

Eldan
2009-06-04, 07:04 PM
For what you are trying to do, I'd actually recommend the Vitality and Wound point rules, which you can find above. It models a kidn of system, where you get rarely hit and instead evade, but one or two hits can well kill you.

lvl 1 sharnian
2009-06-04, 08:32 PM
alright thanks

Xallace
2009-06-04, 09:03 PM
You could take from d20 Modern, wherein it is harder to hit a person (improved AC bonuses as you level up, and such), but if a character takes more damage than their Con score they have to make a Fort save against massive damage. So in this way, you can still wear people down with smaller wounds (via HP), but a single well-placed blow can kill even at high levels.

NakedCelt
2009-06-04, 09:16 PM
Yeah, it never made sense to me that in D&D your HP grows by leaps and bounds with each level but your AC stays right where it is. If the rise in HP is supposed to reflect your ability to get out of the way to some extent, why not put it on AC instead?

How about: If you take more than, say, 5 hp damage from a single attack, you lose 1 point of Con? In fact, every 5 points of damage would result in a loss of 1 point of Con. This would have to be combined with a defence/protection system such that (1) armour bonuses are subtracted from any damage you sustain and (2) you have a "defence" bonus which rises with your level (say 10 + your Reflex save). Also: you don't die when your hp reaches -10, you fall unconscious when your hp reaches -[your current Con score]. You die when your Con reaches 0.