New HP System

[Corporate M]

I call this the wonderboy system. Mostly cause I like that song and it's supposed to be intense but lighthearted like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_QFUi6eMY


How the wonderboy system works, is essentially damage deals damage to stats in the form of "damage tokens" instead of to your HP. HP is lost later. Here's an example...

Player A jacks up player B with a bastard sword. For 1d10 str token damage. After consulting damage modifiers and everything. He deals 15 str token damage. But player B only has 12 strength. So what happens is he discards twelve of those tokens, is drained of 1HP, and now has 3 damage tokens floating on his strength, waiting to be filled yet again so he can lose more HP.

Yes, HP drain. HP does not recover. Instead, you gain more HP later. (Making hit die more important, and feats like toughness a lifesaver) Some wording will have to be changed to distinguish actual HP from "temporary HP" that just exists to soakup damage and be a proxy. I'm not entirely certain how balanced such a system would be. I don't think it'd change the tiers too much. (Sept maybe warmage...)


Damage Reduction: It's a little more useful now. It can prevent token damage, thereby slowing down HP drain.

Fast Healing/Regeneration: More annoying now. But not much stronger. Getting rid of damage tokens every round can prevent HP drain. But since it's fairly easy to trigger it, it probably won't be that much different.

AC: AC Bonuses will become far more important to prevent even getting hit.

Vigor/Stoneskin: Will have to be forbidden. Even if they were just "temporary HP" and exist only to soakup token damage, no caster would go without them in this enviorment.

Healing: A cleric will be more inclined to actually play a cleric atleast a few times per day. Healing token damage will prevent HP drain, but HP itself cannot be recovered.

Poisons/Disease: All the more threatening as stat damage now makes them more suseptable to HP drain. I may be inclined to reduce stat damage down to minutes or hours tops. But even so, more then enough time to really **** someone up.

HP Gain: Since you cannot recover HP, merely gain HP down the line. There are different ways to gain HP...

Hit Die: The obvious. And a large step in encouraging lower tier classes despite their lower end abilities.

Feats: Toughness, greater toughness, some may not like wasting a feat on what'll essentially be gone soon. But when it's life or death, they'll be glad they took it.

Action Points: Action points could be used to boost you +1HP. A little something incase someone just has a reign of badluck and the DM feels sorry for them.

Con Increase: Though the con bonus may be temporary, the HP boost is not. This may very well put barbarian's atleast into tier-3. Now that they have the highest hit die possible, AND can a few times per day increase their HP. Where as before I think whirling frenzy was strictly better then rage as written. Now you'd actually have to think about it. A bonus attack+AC bonus, or boost to a stat to avoid token damage+fortitude+HP gain? Bear's Endurance spell will have to be watched carefully. As a caster could easily just flushdown his level 2 spells per day to continually grant him HP bonuses and otherwise have alot of versatility...

[Milskidasith]

Yeah, permanent anything loss is inherently contradictory to D&D's design. Not to mention it makes everything incredibly weak because you'd have to deal, even against a dump stat, six times the normal amount of damage to deal HP damage.

What is this variant supposed to accomplish? It doesn't make things grittier; you can take six-eight times as much punishment minimum, and unless you can strike charisma, most characters would probably wind up taking a ten to twelve times as much damage. It just adds tedious bookkeeping and further reduces melee/blasters abilities to do anything.

[Glimbur]

It does make life incredibly suck to be a PC. Monsters generally only appear "on screen" once, and even reoccurring villains show up at most to one fight in four. But PC's are at every fight we see, mostly because our point of view follows them. So if enemies enter fights with their full hp as though they had never been in a fight in their lives, and PC's don't... it is a very bad time to be a PC. The alternative is for the DM to figure out how many hit points should already be drained from every monster the party meets. This is, as Milskidasith says, tedious bookkeeping.

What design goal are you aiming for? I have heard good things about vitality and wound points (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/vitalityAndWoundPoints.htm) though I have not tried them myself.

[Hyooz]

You really need to go into more detail here. I don't even know what you're talking about with the tokens and stuff, and I'm not sure where the calculations are coming from.

And I have a feeling this is going to break down big time when damage gets to the kind of numbers it does. If I can do 100+ damage in a round, that's going to be a problem for a system like this.

[Orzel]

I really don't the point. Unless your world has a "no one survives long enough to be high level" theme, it's gimps PC for no reason or creates massive bookkeeping not to (like others said).

Now if you wanted PC to gain loads of HP on level up to be equal to the HP used for the next X fights (where x is the number of average fights needed to level), maybe...

I played a game ONCE where the PC's only received "reserve HP". Essentially it was your level *10 * your HD roll+Con. It was ALL the HP you could gain between levels. So when my Ranger5 with 13 Con rolled a 6, He have to deal with 350 HP until level 6. By fight 4, the party sent buffed mounts, ACs, familiars, and hired goons in to soften up EVERYthing, then massive battlefield control. By fight 7, RAGEQUIT.

[imp_fireball]

Yeah, permanent anything loss is inherently contradictory to D&D's design. Not to mention it makes everything incredibly weak because you'd have to deal, even against a dump stat, six times the normal amount of damage to deal HP damage.

What is this variant supposed to accomplish? It doesn't make things grittier; you can take six-eight times as much punishment minimum, and unless you can strike charisma, most characters would probably wind up taking a ten to twelve times as much damage. It just adds tedious bookkeeping and further reduces melee/blasters abilities to do anything.

Wait, wait, wait...

I hope I'm getting this right:

Say, Bob the fighter has 10 hp and 18 Str. Ricky the barbarian power attacks Bob for 19 damage. Bob is now at -9 hp. Because his str reserve was completely depleted, he suffers 1 permanent hp loss (now at 9 max hp) and he gets 1 token put on his strength and its now at 17 (his actual strength score is like his 'second strength reserve').

Bob is also nearly dead, however the cleric manages to cast cure minor wounds and stabilize him at -8 hp. Later on, his temporary strength damage recovers itself back to 18 but his max hp is still 9, as he now suffers from detrimental lifelong scars.

Because Bob's strength is 18, his massive damage threshold is effectively 36 (double strength reserve), however he does not save or die when suffering massive damage - rather, his strength is reduced to 0 and he can't move until it recovers again (which makes sense - Bob suffers so much damage that he goes into shock - perhaps a save could allow him to instantly recover from strength damage); because his strength reserve is also effectively whittled down to 0 twice, he'd suffer 2 permanent hp drain and his max hp would be 8 instead of 9 or 10. Maybe a feat could allow Bob to recover from this condition more quickly (ie. die hard might have some additional affects)?

At the beginning of each new round (or after each enemy's damaging attack; OP hasn't clarified this), Bob's strength reserve reverts back to maximum. His hp is still allocated as normal with the regular system and can be healed as normal (but not to increase his maximum hp except through HD, feats, etc.).

Is this what the OP intended?

Personally, I think the system is alright since not every character is always suffering from massive amounts of damage (the spell caster with 6 strength shouldn't be at the front line anyway).

I also think D&D allows for a lot more strategy then what players are let on to.

Perhaps there could be a PRC that benefits from 'life long scars' (permanent hp drain). Granted, willingly receiving permanent hp drain is dangerous too (the PRC would probably say that you have to receive in battle).


If I can do 100+ damage in a round, that's going to be a problem for a system like this.

It's already a problem for the existing system. That is, if you think that characters shouldn't be one shotted.

[Milskidasith]

Wait, wait, wait...

I hope I'm getting this right:

Say, Bob the fighter has 10 hp and 18 Str. Ricky the barbarian power attacks Bob for 19 damage. Bob is now at -9 hp. Because his str reserve was completely depleted, he suffers 1 permanent hp loss (now at 9 max hp) and he gets 1 token put on his strength and its now at 17 (his actual strength score is like his 'second strength reserve').

Bob is also nearly dead, however the cleric manages to cast cure minor wounds and stabilize him at -8 hp. Later on, his temporary strength damage recovers itself back to 18 but his max hp is still 9, as he now suffers from detrimental lifelong scars.

Because Bob's strength is 18, his massive damage threshold is effectively 36 (double strength reserve), however he does not save or die when suffering massive damage - rather, his strength is reduced to 0 and he can't move until it recovers again (which makes sense - Bob suffers so much damage that he goes into shock - perhaps a save could allow him to instantly recover from strength damage); because his strength reserve is also effectively whittled down to 0 twice, he'd suffer 2 permanent hp drain and his max hp would be 8 instead of 9 or 10. Maybe a feat could allow Bob to recover from this condition more quickly (ie. die hard might have some additional affects)?

At the beginning of each new round (or after each enemy's damaging attack; OP hasn't clarified this), Bob's strength reserve reverts back to maximum. His hp is still allocated as normal with the regular system and can be healed as normal (but not to increase his maximum hp except through HD, feats, etc.).

Is this what the OP intended?

Personally, I think the system is alright since not every character is always suffering from massive amounts of damage (the spell caster with 6 strength shouldn't be at the front line anyway).

I also think D&D allows for a lot more strategy then what players are let on to.

Perhaps there could be a PRC that benefits from 'life long scars' (permanent hp drain). Granted, willingly receiving permanent hp drain is dangerous too (the PRC would probably say that you have to receive in battle).



It's already a problem for the existing system. That is, if you think that characters shouldn't be one shotted.

The way I read it made it sound like this:

Attacks deal certain token damage; X str, X con, X dex, whatever. When the amount of tokens exceeds your stat, you lose 1 HP permanently (from the normal HP pool), and all tokens are removed, while your stat stays the same.

Actually, that is the way it's worded. You never lose HP save with the drain, so basically your HP is just normal HP * X (where X is whatever stat is being targeted).

EDIT: Anyway, taking 100 damage in this system isn't actually that bad; it would be somewhere between ten and eight permanent HP drain. A huge amount, sure, but since everybody effectively has a massive amount more HP, it makes direct damage worthless.

[imp_fireball]

EDIT: Anyway, taking 100 damage in this system isn't actually that bad; it would be somewhere between ten and eight permanent HP drain. A huge amount, sure, but since everybody effectively has a massive amount more HP, it makes direct damage worthless.

Which makes combat take that much longer.

I don't think that's what the OP intended. :P