HP, meet your new associate SRP! [Discussion]

[Lysander]

Currently D&D uses a saving system when people have to resist magical effects. Disintigrate or Destruction could kill you at round one if you're unlucky, or you could theoretically resist dozens of castings if the die is on your side.

What if there was a different system where instead of saving throws you had Spell Resistance Points (SRP)? The number of SRP would be based off your Wisdom, like HP is off Constitution. Spells would have a number of dice of SRP damage, in addition to whatever the intended effect is. This SRP damage chips away at your SRP, but until you are at 0 you are not struck by the effect. For instance (using a made up spell):

Hands To Spoons turns the victim's hands into large metal spoons. It also deals 3d6 SRP damage.

Gortok the Barbarian has 10 SRP points. Zzzzzz'ddxzz the Wizard casts Hands to Spoons on him, dealing 8 SRP damage, taking Gortok to 2. There is no saving throw of any kind, but no effect from the spell beyond the SRP damage.

The wizard casts Hungry Sock on Gortok, which with 2d6 SRP damage easily overcomes Gortok's remaining 2 SRP (but doesn't bring it below 0). A giant sock smacks Gortok in the face and begins dealing damage.

There is no ill effect from being at 0 SRP except that any spell cast on your will automatically succeed. Sleeping 8 hours fully restores SRP, and there could be various spells and abilities to regain it quicker.

Ideas?

[Kellus]

There is no ill effect from being at 0 SRP except that any spell cast on your will automatically succeed.

So basically by throwing lots of spells at something until it's out of SRP, the target can't make a saving throw against a deadly spell? That seems implausible, not to mention unbalanced. It would mean that you could solve all of your higher-level encounters by simply hitting them over and over again with low-level spells that shouldn't have any effect on them, until they're out of SRP, and then hit 'em with any save-or-die spell.

Maybe some kind of buffering system that adds bonuses to your saves until you've soaked up enough magic to reduce it, at which point you're on your own... Hm... I've got an idea...

Anyhow, just my 2 cents. :smallamused:

[TheLogman]

Bad idea, since the whole reason that they created Saving throws instead of making the SRP like you did was to make it so that you couldn't just arbitrarily die after a while. The reason Hp isn't like Saving throws is that generally, there are no melee attacks or anything like that that automatically kills you. If there was, there would be saving throws for it, since death automatically, even after time, is stupid.

Hope this make sense, I'm basically saying that Wizards being able to kill after a while would unbalance them even more.

Good idea though

[Moff Chumley]

An interesting concept, but it might be prudent to allow saves against spells in addition to SRP.

[DanielLC]

I assume low-level spells would have low SRP damage, which would keep people from casting low-level spells until they run out of SRP. I think you're also allowed to not use a save, and in this system that would mean just taking the low spell damage rather than the hit. I feel like you should either still get a save, or you should have your SRP heal faster. A good way to do the latter would be to have a second SRP set the same size as the first that fills into it at a certain rate.

For example: Gortok has 10/10 SRP. Zzzzzz'ddxzz casts Hands to Spoons on him, bringing him to 2/10 SRP. The next round 1 SRP from his second set goes into his first, bringing him to 3/9. Zzzzzz'ddxzz then casts Hungry Sock. Gortok doesn't resist, and the spell works on him. Gortok now has 4/8. Zzzzzz'ddxzz casts Fumble (also a made up spell) which has 1d6 SRP damage. Gortok only takes 3 damage and doesn't fumble his weapon. He has 1/8, then he does his round and has 2/7.

You could have the player wait until after the damage is rolled to choose if he tries to resist instead.

How will you figure out how much damage is dealt? Will it be a d6 for every point of the DC (the spell level plus the caster's relevent modifier)? That seems a little steep, but could be fixed by giving the players high enough SRP. It would still mean a lot of rolling.

[Miles Invictus]

You could reduce the amount of rolling by assigning constant SRP damage per spell level. 1st level spells would do 1 damage, 2nd level spells 3 damage, and so on.

That leaves the problem, though, that the player is invincible until they run out of SRP, at which point they are hurt by everything. Further allowing players to forgo SRP damage in favor of being affected by weaker spells would weaken spellcasters too much -- casters would have to spam spells like mad in order to soften up targets.

Hmm. You could keep the regular saving throw system, but allow players to expend SRP to boost a crucial save. For example, you could give players SRP-per-day equal to their level, and increase one saving throw by +1 for every point of SRP they sacrifice. It'd keep the danger of save-or-die effects while reducing the odds of player death through bad rolls.

...on the other hand, though, the point of save-or-die spells is that it only takes one lousy roll to kill a character. If you're looking to avert that, it'd be much simpler to remove the offending spells instead of homebrewing ways to get around them.

[jindra34]

This would work decently but it would work best if a player had the excess of a save subtract from it. that way you would not have to re-write every spell and still allow a chance to ignore any spell.

[Lysander]

True, having your SRP chipped away to 0 leaves you vulnerable to spells, but how is that more overpowered than having your HP reduced to 0 and knocking you unconscious? More powerful characters would have more SRP, and more powerful spells would have more dice of SRP damage.

In many ways this makes fighter characters more powerful, rather than weaker. Rather than having to fear being teleported to the plane of elemental fire in round one a high enough level character is guaranteed some time to act before they're smoted. Even if the wizard rolls well on SRP damage the one or two spells he needs to cast before leaving you unprotected could be enough time to get within melee range.

[AKA_Bait]

The is not an awful idea, but I think it would work better as a modification to SR rather than saving throws.

[Grey Paladin]

The is not an awful idea, but I think it would work better as a modification to SR rather than saving throws.

AKA 3.0 Psions :smallannoyed:

[firepup]

If I were to suggest something it might be that maybe SRP can be added to a saving throw. but on the downside, if you use it all up, you autofail.