Greywander
2019-08-19, 04:13 AM
Preamble
This ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would. I'm not exactly here to present a finished working system. Rather, I just wanted to explore some ideas and get feedback. I'd love for someone to take this for a spin and report back their experiences.
Please, do leave a comment if you have any kind of feedback at all. I'll probably think this over some more and return in a week/month/tomorrow with a more complete and concise system.
Introduction, RE; at-will healing
If you don't care about at-will spellcasting and are just here to hear about wound systems, go ahead and skip to the next section.
Part of the inspiration to write this came from considering at-will spellcasting. I like having at-will spells, which is probably why I like having a lot of cantrips. I think part of it has to do with being a bit of a hoarder; I don't want to "waste" a spell slot, I might run out later. Another aspect is that being able to cast a spell at-will opens up a lot of new tactical options (just look at all the creative ways people can use cantrips to get an edge).
Now, D&D 5e isn't really designed with at-will spellcasting in mind. But that doesn't mean it couldn't work. Cantrips, of course, exist. But even for leveled spells, there are a few ways to get at-will casting. The wizard's 18th level feature, Spell Mastery, is one. There's also the similar Boon of Spell Mastery, available to sorcerers and warlocks as well as wizards. Both of these come very late, so that's the cost you're paying for at-will spells. Warlocks can get select at-will spells much earlier, but this comes at the cost of overall casting power.
Generally, what I've noticed is that most 1st and 2nd level spells would work fine to get at-will, eventually. There are a few higher level spells that might work at-will as well, but we'll need to be more selective. However, out of all the possible spells (damage, support, utility, etc.), there is one group of spells that really breaks things if you allow them to be at-will: healing spells. This is entirely a product of the way the damage and healing system works: Cure Wounds, even at 1st level, can eventually restore you to full HP if you cast it enough times. Thus, allowing any healing spell to be at-will means that the party can heal up to full HP between each fight.
And oh by the way, you actually can get at-will healing, RAW. Be a Divine Soul sorcerer or Celestial warlock, and get the Boon of Spell Mastery. Now, granted, this requires you to be at 20th level and have an Epic Boon. But still.
I've played with the idea of homebrew classes built around at-will spellcasting. In these cases, I can carefully curate their spell list to exclude spells that break down when at-will. However, where this really becomes a problem is when you start to introduce new magic systems to the game. For example, I've been working on a homebrew wild magic system that allows infinite spellcasting, but spells can fail, and each casting carries a risk of a wild magic surge. Unless it doesn't. Unintentionally, because of the way the math works out, you can eventually cast 1st and 2nd level spells with no risk of a wild magic surge. Granted, the spell is highly likely to fail, so it's not combat-viable, so it's more like ritual casting. The thing is, wild magic isn't restricted to any class, so nothing is stopping you from making a wild magic cleric or druid. Ritual (and pseudo-ritual) healing spells have most of the same problems as at-will healing.
But...
What if it didn't have to be this way?
Wound Tracks
The major problem with at-will healing is the single HP track. To remedy this, we can switch to using a wound system. Now, there's a lot of different ways we could implement this, so first I'll present two key points that will help direct our implementation:
(a) We need to have multiple wound level, where low level healing magic can only heal the lowest level wounds. Thus, even at will, we can't heal up to full health using just low level spells. This, by itself, solves the problem almost entirely. It also solves the problem of yoyo-healing, if that's something you care about.
(b) Optional, but we can use a finite wound track, where once a wound track is full, all subsequent wounds of that type get upgraded to the next level of severity. For example, if we've sustained the maximum number of light wounds, then any more light wounds we receive will upgrade to moderate wounds.
Now, as stated, this is more optional. The alternative is to allow wounds to pile up ad infinitum, with each one stacking some kind of penalty to create a death spiral. However, that's a bit more complicated, and it means that every wound must have a penalty (hard to do in 5e, where even a -1 has a substantial impact). Limited wound tracks also feel a bit closer to traditional HP systems, so they'll be more familiar to players. It also allows for Death of a Thousand Cuts (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfAThousandCuts), which allows for bosses that can be defeated eventually as long as you can hit them. We still get a death spiral effect, but it's not quite as severe as it would need to be for infinite wounds.
To put it another way, a finite wound track will motivate you to heal the more minor wounds so that you don't fill the track up. It makes low level healing actually worthwhile, and a lot more efficient against weaker enemies.
Now, as stated, there are a lot of ways we can implement a wound system, even if we stick to the two principles above. So, I'll present two (incomplete) systems that demonstrate how this could be done in a couple of different ways. Let me start by presenting some things that these two implementations will have in common:
Roll damage normally, compare to wound thresholds. If the damage falls within a certain range, it causes a particular type of wound. This is nice because it let's us get away without touching the damage system (which is quite massive). We still need to tweak all healing effects, but there are a lot fewer of those, and we can easily develop a rule of thumb to handle it.
We'll also use a five-tier wound system for both implementations: Light, Moderate, Serious, Critical, Lethal. Each type of wound will have its own effects.
Light wounds will have no penalty. Their job is to act as a buffer before hitting Moderate wounds.
Moderate wounds give a -1 penalty on all ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws.
A Serious wound gives disadvantage on all ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws.
A Critical wound knocks you out, and causes you to start bleeding out.
A Lethal wound kills you instantly.
Because of the specific penalties for Serious and up wounds, you'll only be able to take one of each of those before your tracks for them are full. This means that if you take, say, two Serious wounds, the second one will upgrade to a Critical wound. If you take a second Critical wound, it upgrades to a Lethal wound. This more or less mirrors the rules for instant death due to massive damage (i.e. taking enough damage to knock you unconscious in a single hit, while you're already unconscious, would be enough to instantly kill you). Only Light and Moderate wounds allow for longer tracks. This actually makes things a bit easier for us.
The two major differences between our two example implementations will be:
(a) What's the damage threshold for each wound? I.e. how much damage do I need to take in order to suffer that type of wound?
(b) How many wounds do I have on my wound track? I.e. how many wounds can I take before they start upgrading to more severe types?
Traditional Implementation
Want something that feels pretty similar to default 5e? Want to be able to take roughly the same amount of damage as before, but using a wound track instead of HP? This is what we're aiming for here.
One of the nice things about this is that we can keep hit points as they are. Instead of losing HP when you take damage, though, your HP determines your wound thresholds. This allows us to quickly and easily convert monsters and NPCs over to using a wound system. Here's some of the thresholds we could use, but you could also tweak them if you wished:
Damage greater than twice your HP is a Lethal wound (instakill).
Damage greater than your HP but less than double your HP is a Critical wound (knockout).
Damage greater than half your HP is a Serious wound (disadvantage).
Damage greater than 1/10 your HP is a Moderate wound (-1 penalty).
Damage less than 1/10 your HP is a Light wound (no effect).
For comparison, a goblin's thresholds (7 HP) would be 1-3 Moderate, 4-6 Serious, 7-13 Critical, 14+ Lethal.
For a lich (135 HP), the thresholds are 1-13 Light, 14-67 Moderate, 68-134 Serious, 135-269 Critical, 270+ Lethal.
For the tarrasque (676 HP), the thresholds are 1-67 Light, 68-337 Moderate, 338-675 Serious, 676-1351 Critical, 1352+ Lethal.
In this implementation, all characters by default can take the same number of wounds. A stronger character requires more damage to than a weaker character to cause a severe wound. As previously mentioned, the tracks for Serious and up are limited to one wound per track.
The Moderate wound track can hold up to three wounds.
The Light wound track can hold up to six wounds.
This means it takes about 11 individual attacks, each causing Light wound damage, to knock a creature out. You might feel that's too few (especially for a boss) or too many (although lower HP means lower thresholds and higher chances of skipping past Light wounds). In particular, the tarrasque is noticeably susceptible to Death of a Thousand Cuts. While this is somewhat intentional, it's a little bit ridiculous that you can kill a tarrasque by dealing a total of 12 damage to it (over 12 different attacks). You could either give a creature extra wounds on their track so they can take more punishment, or you could add a lower limit on damage for Light wounds. For example, if you deal less than 1/25 of a creature's HP in damage, then it gets ignored entirely. This would mean you'd need to deal at least 28 damage to even inflict a Light wound on the tarrasque.
Constitution Implementation
Wasn't really sure what to name this implementation, but this works. This implementation eschews any attempt to give a similar experience to vanilla 5e in favor of being a bit easier and more clear to understand. In contrast to the above, in this implementation, wound thresholds are determined solely by Constitution scores, and higher level creatures get longer wound tracks.
Again, here's some thresholds we could use:
Damage greater than eight times your CON score is a Lethal wound (instakill).
Damage greater than four times your CON score is a Critical wound (knockout).
Damage greater than twice your CON score is a Serious wound (disadvantage).
Damage greater than your CON score is a Moderate wound (-1 penalty).
Damage less than your CON score is a Light wound (no effect).
Damage less than or equal to your CON modifier is completely ignored. You're basically so buff that the attack just bounces off of you.
For reference, for a creature with a CON of 10, the thresholds are 1-10 Light, 11-20 Moderate, 21-40 Serious, 41-80 Critical, 81+ Lethal.
For a creature with a CON of 20, the thresholds are 1-5 ignored, 6-20 Light, 21-40 Moderate, 41-80 Serious, 81-160 Critical, 161+ Lethal.
For a creature with a CON of 30, the thresholds are 1-10 ignored, 11-30 Light, 31-60 Moderate, 61-120 Serious, 121-240 Critical, 241+ Lethal.
The specific number of wounds per track would then depend on level. Likely, they'd have to be folded into each class as a class feature, but we might be able to come up with a general rule for d8 hit die classes.
For example, initially at 1st level, a PC would have only one wound on their Moderate track, and nothing on the Light track. Thus, a Light wound would automatically upgrade to a Moderate wound. Every even level, they gain one Light wound, and each tier (5th, 11th, and 17th levels) they gain an extra Moderate wound. Thus, at 20, you'd end up with 10 Light wounds and 4 Moderate wounds. Classes with greater or lesser hit dice would get more or fewer wounds in each track. Likewise for monsters with greater or smaller hit dice.
In contrast with the above implementation, the thresholds are a bit easier to understand and calculate, but it becomes more difficult to figure out how many wounds each monster or class has on their tracks. CON is probably more important here than in the previous implementation, but ability scores are hard capped at 30. If you're able to cause enough damage with a single attack, you can knock out even the strongest monsters in one hit, but Death of a Thousand Cuts isn't as effective.
Effects of a Wound Track
Obviously, healing spells would need to be changed. I won't speculate exactly how just yet. Maybe later. Not sure what to do about Cure Wounds vs. Healing Word.
Resting rules would also need to change. A sensible implementation might be that a short rest heals all Light wounds, and allows you to downgrade one wound. So, you could downgrade a Moderate wound to a Light wound. Enough short rests eventually allow you to return to full health. More interestingly, if you have a Critical wound (knocked unconscious, equivalent to 0 HP), you could downgrade it to a Serious wound, but only if you didn't already have a Serious wound. As such, it might take as long as three short rests to return a downed PC to consciousness: the first wipes out their Light wounds and downgrades a Moderate wound to Light, the second downgrades a Serious wound to Moderate (now that they've freed up a spot), and the third downgrades a Critical wound to Serious.
Or maybe short rests only take care of Light wounds, and you need to long rest to heal Moderate and up wounds.
Another effect of handling damage and injury this way is that it creates a stark contrast between classes that deal a lot of damage with one attack (rogue, paladin, blast mages) and classes that make a lot of attacks (fighter, monk), even though the overall damage might be similar. Obviously, dealing more damage in a single attack is better, but making more attacks is more reliable.
As far as bookkeeping goes, it should be easier to track wounds than it is to track HP, but figuring out the length of wound tracks and/or the wound thresholds will be a bit of a pain. The PCs can make it easy by keeping all that info on their character sheets, but NPCs will need to be calculated on the spot, or prepared in advance.
This ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would. I'm not exactly here to present a finished working system. Rather, I just wanted to explore some ideas and get feedback. I'd love for someone to take this for a spin and report back their experiences.
Please, do leave a comment if you have any kind of feedback at all. I'll probably think this over some more and return in a week/month/tomorrow with a more complete and concise system.
Introduction, RE; at-will healing
If you don't care about at-will spellcasting and are just here to hear about wound systems, go ahead and skip to the next section.
Part of the inspiration to write this came from considering at-will spellcasting. I like having at-will spells, which is probably why I like having a lot of cantrips. I think part of it has to do with being a bit of a hoarder; I don't want to "waste" a spell slot, I might run out later. Another aspect is that being able to cast a spell at-will opens up a lot of new tactical options (just look at all the creative ways people can use cantrips to get an edge).
Now, D&D 5e isn't really designed with at-will spellcasting in mind. But that doesn't mean it couldn't work. Cantrips, of course, exist. But even for leveled spells, there are a few ways to get at-will casting. The wizard's 18th level feature, Spell Mastery, is one. There's also the similar Boon of Spell Mastery, available to sorcerers and warlocks as well as wizards. Both of these come very late, so that's the cost you're paying for at-will spells. Warlocks can get select at-will spells much earlier, but this comes at the cost of overall casting power.
Generally, what I've noticed is that most 1st and 2nd level spells would work fine to get at-will, eventually. There are a few higher level spells that might work at-will as well, but we'll need to be more selective. However, out of all the possible spells (damage, support, utility, etc.), there is one group of spells that really breaks things if you allow them to be at-will: healing spells. This is entirely a product of the way the damage and healing system works: Cure Wounds, even at 1st level, can eventually restore you to full HP if you cast it enough times. Thus, allowing any healing spell to be at-will means that the party can heal up to full HP between each fight.
And oh by the way, you actually can get at-will healing, RAW. Be a Divine Soul sorcerer or Celestial warlock, and get the Boon of Spell Mastery. Now, granted, this requires you to be at 20th level and have an Epic Boon. But still.
I've played with the idea of homebrew classes built around at-will spellcasting. In these cases, I can carefully curate their spell list to exclude spells that break down when at-will. However, where this really becomes a problem is when you start to introduce new magic systems to the game. For example, I've been working on a homebrew wild magic system that allows infinite spellcasting, but spells can fail, and each casting carries a risk of a wild magic surge. Unless it doesn't. Unintentionally, because of the way the math works out, you can eventually cast 1st and 2nd level spells with no risk of a wild magic surge. Granted, the spell is highly likely to fail, so it's not combat-viable, so it's more like ritual casting. The thing is, wild magic isn't restricted to any class, so nothing is stopping you from making a wild magic cleric or druid. Ritual (and pseudo-ritual) healing spells have most of the same problems as at-will healing.
But...
What if it didn't have to be this way?
Wound Tracks
The major problem with at-will healing is the single HP track. To remedy this, we can switch to using a wound system. Now, there's a lot of different ways we could implement this, so first I'll present two key points that will help direct our implementation:
(a) We need to have multiple wound level, where low level healing magic can only heal the lowest level wounds. Thus, even at will, we can't heal up to full health using just low level spells. This, by itself, solves the problem almost entirely. It also solves the problem of yoyo-healing, if that's something you care about.
(b) Optional, but we can use a finite wound track, where once a wound track is full, all subsequent wounds of that type get upgraded to the next level of severity. For example, if we've sustained the maximum number of light wounds, then any more light wounds we receive will upgrade to moderate wounds.
Now, as stated, this is more optional. The alternative is to allow wounds to pile up ad infinitum, with each one stacking some kind of penalty to create a death spiral. However, that's a bit more complicated, and it means that every wound must have a penalty (hard to do in 5e, where even a -1 has a substantial impact). Limited wound tracks also feel a bit closer to traditional HP systems, so they'll be more familiar to players. It also allows for Death of a Thousand Cuts (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfAThousandCuts), which allows for bosses that can be defeated eventually as long as you can hit them. We still get a death spiral effect, but it's not quite as severe as it would need to be for infinite wounds.
To put it another way, a finite wound track will motivate you to heal the more minor wounds so that you don't fill the track up. It makes low level healing actually worthwhile, and a lot more efficient against weaker enemies.
Now, as stated, there are a lot of ways we can implement a wound system, even if we stick to the two principles above. So, I'll present two (incomplete) systems that demonstrate how this could be done in a couple of different ways. Let me start by presenting some things that these two implementations will have in common:
Roll damage normally, compare to wound thresholds. If the damage falls within a certain range, it causes a particular type of wound. This is nice because it let's us get away without touching the damage system (which is quite massive). We still need to tweak all healing effects, but there are a lot fewer of those, and we can easily develop a rule of thumb to handle it.
We'll also use a five-tier wound system for both implementations: Light, Moderate, Serious, Critical, Lethal. Each type of wound will have its own effects.
Light wounds will have no penalty. Their job is to act as a buffer before hitting Moderate wounds.
Moderate wounds give a -1 penalty on all ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws.
A Serious wound gives disadvantage on all ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws.
A Critical wound knocks you out, and causes you to start bleeding out.
A Lethal wound kills you instantly.
Because of the specific penalties for Serious and up wounds, you'll only be able to take one of each of those before your tracks for them are full. This means that if you take, say, two Serious wounds, the second one will upgrade to a Critical wound. If you take a second Critical wound, it upgrades to a Lethal wound. This more or less mirrors the rules for instant death due to massive damage (i.e. taking enough damage to knock you unconscious in a single hit, while you're already unconscious, would be enough to instantly kill you). Only Light and Moderate wounds allow for longer tracks. This actually makes things a bit easier for us.
The two major differences between our two example implementations will be:
(a) What's the damage threshold for each wound? I.e. how much damage do I need to take in order to suffer that type of wound?
(b) How many wounds do I have on my wound track? I.e. how many wounds can I take before they start upgrading to more severe types?
Traditional Implementation
Want something that feels pretty similar to default 5e? Want to be able to take roughly the same amount of damage as before, but using a wound track instead of HP? This is what we're aiming for here.
One of the nice things about this is that we can keep hit points as they are. Instead of losing HP when you take damage, though, your HP determines your wound thresholds. This allows us to quickly and easily convert monsters and NPCs over to using a wound system. Here's some of the thresholds we could use, but you could also tweak them if you wished:
Damage greater than twice your HP is a Lethal wound (instakill).
Damage greater than your HP but less than double your HP is a Critical wound (knockout).
Damage greater than half your HP is a Serious wound (disadvantage).
Damage greater than 1/10 your HP is a Moderate wound (-1 penalty).
Damage less than 1/10 your HP is a Light wound (no effect).
For comparison, a goblin's thresholds (7 HP) would be 1-3 Moderate, 4-6 Serious, 7-13 Critical, 14+ Lethal.
For a lich (135 HP), the thresholds are 1-13 Light, 14-67 Moderate, 68-134 Serious, 135-269 Critical, 270+ Lethal.
For the tarrasque (676 HP), the thresholds are 1-67 Light, 68-337 Moderate, 338-675 Serious, 676-1351 Critical, 1352+ Lethal.
In this implementation, all characters by default can take the same number of wounds. A stronger character requires more damage to than a weaker character to cause a severe wound. As previously mentioned, the tracks for Serious and up are limited to one wound per track.
The Moderate wound track can hold up to three wounds.
The Light wound track can hold up to six wounds.
This means it takes about 11 individual attacks, each causing Light wound damage, to knock a creature out. You might feel that's too few (especially for a boss) or too many (although lower HP means lower thresholds and higher chances of skipping past Light wounds). In particular, the tarrasque is noticeably susceptible to Death of a Thousand Cuts. While this is somewhat intentional, it's a little bit ridiculous that you can kill a tarrasque by dealing a total of 12 damage to it (over 12 different attacks). You could either give a creature extra wounds on their track so they can take more punishment, or you could add a lower limit on damage for Light wounds. For example, if you deal less than 1/25 of a creature's HP in damage, then it gets ignored entirely. This would mean you'd need to deal at least 28 damage to even inflict a Light wound on the tarrasque.
Constitution Implementation
Wasn't really sure what to name this implementation, but this works. This implementation eschews any attempt to give a similar experience to vanilla 5e in favor of being a bit easier and more clear to understand. In contrast to the above, in this implementation, wound thresholds are determined solely by Constitution scores, and higher level creatures get longer wound tracks.
Again, here's some thresholds we could use:
Damage greater than eight times your CON score is a Lethal wound (instakill).
Damage greater than four times your CON score is a Critical wound (knockout).
Damage greater than twice your CON score is a Serious wound (disadvantage).
Damage greater than your CON score is a Moderate wound (-1 penalty).
Damage less than your CON score is a Light wound (no effect).
Damage less than or equal to your CON modifier is completely ignored. You're basically so buff that the attack just bounces off of you.
For reference, for a creature with a CON of 10, the thresholds are 1-10 Light, 11-20 Moderate, 21-40 Serious, 41-80 Critical, 81+ Lethal.
For a creature with a CON of 20, the thresholds are 1-5 ignored, 6-20 Light, 21-40 Moderate, 41-80 Serious, 81-160 Critical, 161+ Lethal.
For a creature with a CON of 30, the thresholds are 1-10 ignored, 11-30 Light, 31-60 Moderate, 61-120 Serious, 121-240 Critical, 241+ Lethal.
The specific number of wounds per track would then depend on level. Likely, they'd have to be folded into each class as a class feature, but we might be able to come up with a general rule for d8 hit die classes.
For example, initially at 1st level, a PC would have only one wound on their Moderate track, and nothing on the Light track. Thus, a Light wound would automatically upgrade to a Moderate wound. Every even level, they gain one Light wound, and each tier (5th, 11th, and 17th levels) they gain an extra Moderate wound. Thus, at 20, you'd end up with 10 Light wounds and 4 Moderate wounds. Classes with greater or lesser hit dice would get more or fewer wounds in each track. Likewise for monsters with greater or smaller hit dice.
In contrast with the above implementation, the thresholds are a bit easier to understand and calculate, but it becomes more difficult to figure out how many wounds each monster or class has on their tracks. CON is probably more important here than in the previous implementation, but ability scores are hard capped at 30. If you're able to cause enough damage with a single attack, you can knock out even the strongest monsters in one hit, but Death of a Thousand Cuts isn't as effective.
Effects of a Wound Track
Obviously, healing spells would need to be changed. I won't speculate exactly how just yet. Maybe later. Not sure what to do about Cure Wounds vs. Healing Word.
Resting rules would also need to change. A sensible implementation might be that a short rest heals all Light wounds, and allows you to downgrade one wound. So, you could downgrade a Moderate wound to a Light wound. Enough short rests eventually allow you to return to full health. More interestingly, if you have a Critical wound (knocked unconscious, equivalent to 0 HP), you could downgrade it to a Serious wound, but only if you didn't already have a Serious wound. As such, it might take as long as three short rests to return a downed PC to consciousness: the first wipes out their Light wounds and downgrades a Moderate wound to Light, the second downgrades a Serious wound to Moderate (now that they've freed up a spot), and the third downgrades a Critical wound to Serious.
Or maybe short rests only take care of Light wounds, and you need to long rest to heal Moderate and up wounds.
Another effect of handling damage and injury this way is that it creates a stark contrast between classes that deal a lot of damage with one attack (rogue, paladin, blast mages) and classes that make a lot of attacks (fighter, monk), even though the overall damage might be similar. Obviously, dealing more damage in a single attack is better, but making more attacks is more reliable.
As far as bookkeeping goes, it should be easier to track wounds than it is to track HP, but figuring out the length of wound tracks and/or the wound thresholds will be a bit of a pain. The PCs can make it easy by keeping all that info on their character sheets, but NPCs will need to be calculated on the spot, or prepared in advance.