What is Your Favorite Wound/Damage System?

[SteveLightblade]

Due to the role playing game's origin in wargaming, in most games, it is common in most systems that the creators expect you, or sometimes, even encourages you, to engage in combat. As many may know, when you engage in physical combat, two or more parties cause physical damage to each other until all parties but one has fled, been incapacitated, or has stopped "living" (this always seems to be a complicated term). However, many games have different ways to handle how much a character is hurt and what that implies for the character. What games do you recommend solely based on their damage system?

To clarify, this does not mean all of the mechanics of combat, but solely the way to gauge life, death, and everything in between. So for D&D, we would only be talking about hit points and ability/level damage/drain.

For me, while it is complicated, I like GURPS's damage system, as every energy type feels significant and I usually feel like I'm choosing a weapon type for how to best kill a monster rather than "Does x damage overcome DR".

Dark Heresy's crits are also fun.

What about all of you?

[Pauly]

The best one I played was a home brew originally based on D&D.

The basic idea was that characters has action points, and un-used APs could be stored up and carried over to a certain limit.
Damage was applied to your CON
Each turn you generated new APs based on your current CON.
Armor reduced the amount of damage taken, but also reduced your CON.

Generally you started at max APs, unless you were surprised, or otherwise in disadvantage. There were certain feats where you could make a test against another characteristic that could generate more APs. The number of APs ot took to cast a spell depended on the level of the spell, and special attacks such as Power Attack cost more APs than normal attacks.

Combat generally started with a flurry, then slowed down. You’d do things like spend a turn resting and collecting your breath in order to pull off a major combo next turn. The end stages of a long hard fight had both sides moving slowly and swinging infrequently. If fresh reserves showed up it was a major swing factor because they were fresh and had APs to burn,

It made it feel like genuine combat, not the D&D BS of a character on one HP being fully capable of doing everything.

[Glorthindel]

Depends on the style of game you intend to play.

My personal favourite is Rolemaster / Spacemaster. For those that don't know, every attack results in a damage code (like 6A, 13D, etc) where the number is the amount of hit points lost, and the letter is a critical code, and determines stunning, bleeding, limb loss and organ faliure, knock outs, etc. Targets are very rarely killed by hit point loss, usually being killed by critical effects long before their hit points are depleted.

But that system is very, very lethal, and particularly in Spacemaster, often comes down to who shoots first determines who dies, and so isn't suitable for a more relaxed campaign, as you could get shanked by the next goblin with little to no warning. For a more relaxed game, D&D does it right, as you have plenty of warning when somethings going south, and plenty of time to rescue a character from a potentially fatal situation.

[Mastikator]

I generally prefer it when plot armor is separated from tissue damage.

I think things like permanent damage is good only if either retirement is expected or if prosthetics/regeneration is available and not a handicap. Either that or making a new character is easy and fun. Incidentally I think D&D misses an opportunity here, because it's fun to make characters but hard to lose them.

[rs2excelsior]

I like Ironsworn's system

Every character has 5 health (and the most powerful enemies do 5 damage - more commonly, you'll be facing enemies that do 2-3). BUT, going to zero health doesn't mean you're dead or incapacitated. You roll endure harm after taking damage, and if you get a miss while at zero health, you have a choice - mark wounded (which reduces your maximum and reset momentum, but can be healed), mark maimed (which does the same as wounded, but is permanent - so unless there's a narrative reason otherwise, you don't mark that until you've already got wounded marked), or roll on a table, which can either mean you shrug off the damage, are badly hurt and need attention within a few minutes, are incapacitated, or are immediately brought to the brink of death - and even in that case, depending on what you roll, you may survive, possibly with a quest you received at the edge of life and death. Overall, I think it captures the feel of the game - it is a dangerous world, and even the strongest can be killed - while giving you a good bit of leeway to inflict other things on your character other than just "you died." You can even choose to take your chances and roll on the table rather than marking wounded, which I have seen someone do.


The best one I played was a home brew originally based on D&D.

The basic idea was that characters has action points, and un-used APs could be stored up and carried over to a certain limit.
Damage was applied to your CON
Each turn you generated new APs based on your current CON.
Armor reduced the amount of damage taken, but also reduced your CON.

Generally you started at max APs, unless you were surprised, or otherwise in disadvantage. There were certain feats where you could make a test against another characteristic that could generate more APs. The number of APs ot took to cast a spell depended on the level of the spell, and special attacks such as Power Attack cost more APs than normal attacks.

Combat generally started with a flurry, then slowed down. You’d do things like spend a turn resting and collecting your breath in order to pull off a major combo next turn. The end stages of a long hard fight had both sides moving slowly and swinging infrequently. If fresh reserves showed up it was a major swing factor because they were fresh and had APs to burn,

It made it feel like genuine combat, not the D&D BS of a character on one HP being fully capable of doing everything.

Do you have a copy of that homebrew floating around by any chance? Sounds very cool, I'd be interested in seeing it.

[hifidelity2]

Depends on the style of game you intend to play.

My personal favourite is Rolemaster / Spacemaster. For those that don't know, every attack results in a damage code (like 6A, 13D, etc) where the number is the amount of hit points lost, and the letter is a critical code, and determines stunning, bleeding, limb loss and organ faliure, knock outs, etc. Targets are very rarely killed by hit point loss, usually being killed by critical effects long before their hit points are depleted.

But that system is very, very lethal,

I agree I really liked the system

I remember GM'ing are party (of 5 PC's I think) 1st level - they were all D&D Players - and the 1st encounter was with a wild boar. They attacked it like a D&D Party and were nearly all killed (I might have had to fudge the odd critical die as well)

[Glorthindel]

I agree I really liked the system

I remember GM'ing are party (of 5 PC's I think) 1st level - they were all D&D Players - and the 1st encounter was with a wild boar. They attacked it like a D&D Party and were nearly all killed (I might have had to fudge the odd critical die as well)

Ha, that doesn't surprise me. At the start of one short-lived campaign, one of the party thought it would be funny to break into a farmers pen and "get us some bacon". The corpse we dragged out the pen wasn't the pigs...

We carried that lesson with us - you don't screw with the wildlife, especially at low levels

[Xervous]

Still fine tuning my shadowrun inspired system but the feedback from players is positive. So either I’m doing things right or I’ve found players who share my kind of crazy.

Wound penalties: -1s accumulate for missing hp/stamina/mana. This encourages resource conservation and rest scheduling / adventure planning. With dicepools typically in the high teens/ low twenties and the game being played in a living world the players tend to press on when expecting trivial hazards and rest before attempting larger tasks.

Healing: stamina is rather trivial to regain, an hour of not too stressful activity allows it to start replenishing. Hearty characters can allocate more incoming damage to their stamina, so the beefcake fighter might be knocked out at 4pm and fine at 8pm while the frail caster is going to need bed rest for his injuries. Magical healing costs the recipient mana (mana replenishes naturally under same conditions as health) at favorable ratios (2hp per mana, 4 stamina per mana). This puts a limit on total healing and gives everyone a default use for mana.

Overall it produces a feeling of getting beaten up, worn down, and (along with exploration rules) helps to guide adventure pacing in a way that supports verisimilitude.

[Dienekes]

There are some others where reading through them I think they would be a lot of fun, but my personal favorite that I've actually played has been Riddle of Steel.

The way it works in brief, every combat turn is paired. At the start of the first of the paired turns you get several action dice you can use to attack and defend yourself over various threats.

When you attack, you must choose a direction and type of attack. Which the target opposes with however many dice they have held back for the defense.

If your attack hits it deals the base weapon damage plus an additional amount based on how much more successful the attack was from the defense. The armor at the hit location is then subtracted from the damage.

Damage is then compared to a chart which tells the players how much Shock, Pain, and Bloodloss they have from the hit. Along with other possible effects (cutting at someone's neck is very difficult, but can lead to an instant kill if the hit was high enough).

Shock is immediately subtracted from the targets total action dice on the next turn.
Pain is reduced from all future action dice.
Bloodloss results in a health check to see if you fall unconscious, the check growing cumulatively larger the higher your bloodloss is.

Now, all of this seems complicated. And it is.

But because pretty much all of it is physically done by removing action dice directly and the damage chart is pretty quick to use if you just have it in front of you, once you get used to it the actual running of a round of RoS tends to be pretty fast.

And because it is pretty uncompromising, the end result of the combat system promotes gameplay I like. You don't run into combat without a plan. Armor is fantastic and you should wear it. Every round you need to be thinking about how much you need to hold back for defense, because if you take a hit you're going to be feeling it for the rest of combat.

But what it doesn't do, is create an action hero game where you keep on fighting at 1 hit point and beating the as yet untouched big bad. Which is a fine system, actually. But I always had much more fun playing with the RoS health system.

[Psyren]

Personally I like Called Shots because they get you closer to a grittier wound system while still being fully compatible with more abstract hitpoints. They also tend to enable a suite of debuffs that are specific to martials or at least harder for casters to usurp.

[Vahnavoi]

Simply by usage, hit points, though since they're the second simplest way of modeling damage at all, they end up as component in other systems.

Whenever I get to designing a system of my own, they tend to come up with two tiers of hitpoints - roughly, "stamina", which is lost and recovered first and more quickly, as well as used to pay for various in-game activities, and then "health", which is lost last and is harder to recover. Often with additional hit location or critical hit system where getting knocked down to zero "health" lands you with some-semi permanent penalty, like loss of a limb, before death.

Another system, inspired by and usable in real contact sports, counts point up instead of down. That is, by counting certain hits or types of hits, you inflict a condition and can then leverage that condition to inflict others. For example, hit an opponent's limb and they lose usage of that limb, hit that same limb again and they suffer lethal injury; throw an armored opponent on their back, then use the opportunity to pin to secure a win; so on and so forth. On the tabletop, different actions have rock-paper-scissors type priority relations.

[KorvinStarmast]

For one-on-one combats in Oldest D&D, we all (at the first table where we tried it) liked the alternative hit location system in Blackmoor (pages 7-12) but as we added more participants to combat it got super clunky and we stopped using it.

[Kymme]

I like Ironsworn's system

Every character has 5 health (and the most powerful enemies do 5 damage - more commonly, you'll be facing enemies that do 2-3). BUT, going to zero health doesn't mean you're dead or incapacitated. You roll endure harm after taking damage, and if you get a miss while at zero health, you have a choice - mark wounded (which reduces your maximum and reset momentum, but can be healed), mark maimed (which does the same as wounded, but is permanent - so unless there's a narrative reason otherwise, you don't mark that until you've already got wounded marked), or roll on a table, which can either mean you shrug off the damage, are badly hurt and need attention within a few minutes, are incapacitated, or are immediately brought to the brink of death - and even in that case, depending on what you roll, you may survive, possibly with a quest you received at the edge of life and death. Overall, I think it captures the feel of the game - it is a dangerous world, and even the strongest can be killed - while giving you a good bit of leeway to inflict other things on your character other than just "you died." You can even choose to take your chances and roll on the table rather than marking wounded, which I have seen someone do.

Big ups for Ironsworn's health system. I think it does a great job of reinforcing the gritty themes of the game. I think some of the changes made in Starbound make it work even better.

My personal favorite Wound/Damage system comes from Masks: A New Generation, which measures your 'health' in the form of five Conditions. Angry, Afraid, Hopeless, Insecure, and Guilty. Lots of stuff can cause you to gain Conditions, because you're playing a teenage superhero, and they've lots of big feelings. Sometimes your invincible flying brick gets knocked into a dumpster and comes out smelling like garbage, and, well, that pisses them off. Mark Angry. Each Condition penalizes certain actions, because some things are harder to do when you're angry or hopeless or feeling guilty about something. What's neat about that is that the increased chance of failure is also rewarding, because failing rolls is how you gain experience in Masks. Once you've got all of your Conditions marked, you're pretty vulnerable - if something would force you to mark another condition, you're instead taken out of the scene. Next scene, you automatically clear one condition and come back.

Clearing Conditions, then, is a big part of the game. Each Condition has its own special reset action. You can clear Angry by breaking something or hurting someone important. You can clear Insecure by taking foolhardy action without talking to your team, etc. Essentially, when your character acts like an impulsive teenager, they heal. In addition to that you can clear Conditions in a few additional ways. One is through the Comfort and Support action, where one of your teammates helps you and you open up to them about how you're feeling. Another, and my personal favorite, is the Defend action. When you roll to defend somebody from harm, on a successful roll not only do you keep them safe, you can also clear a Condition yourself! This means that saving people in danger, protecting innocents, and generally being a superhero, heals you! These mechanics drive a really enjoyable gameplay loop that reinforces the themes of the game.

Also they facilitate playing characters who are like, completely invulnerable to all harm and yet aren't gamebreaking, which isn't something many traditional games let you do!

[olskool]

Due to the role playing game's origin in wargaming, in most games, it is common in most systems that the creators expect you, or sometimes, even encourages you, to engage in combat. As many may know, when you engage in physical combat, two or more parties cause physical damage to each other until all parties but one has fled, been incapacitated, or has stopped "living" (this always seems to be a complicated term). However, many games have different ways to handle how much a character is hurt and what that implies for the character. What games do you recommend solely based on their damage system?

To clarify, this does not mean all of the mechanics of combat, but solely the way to gauge life, death, and everything in between. So for D&D, we would only be talking about hit points and ability/level damage/drain.

For me, while it is complicated, I like GURPS's damage system, as every energy type feels significant and I usually feel like I'm choosing a weapon type for how to best kill a monster rather than "Does x damage overcome DR".

Dark Heresy's crits are also fun.

What about all of you?

The irony of this thread is I just posted a system involving Hit Points as a type of "stun damage" and Wounds (derived from HP lost) for "killing damage" in another thread entitled "Hit Points as Flesh" in the Worldbuilding forum and it was not well received. It seems that the majority of 5e players like the "adventurer as superhero" concept of 5e and disdain "gritty 5e rules" that are harsher like reality. Still, IF you're interested, check out my posting in "Hit Points as Flesh (worldbuilding).

[Dienekes]

The irony of this thread is I just posted a system involving Hit Points as a type of "stun damage" and Wounds (derived from HP lost) for "killing damage" in another thread entitled "Hit Points as Flesh" in the Worldbuilding forum and it was not well received. It seems that the majority of 5e players like the "adventurer as superhero" concept of 5e and disdain "gritty 5e rules" that are harsher like reality. Still, IF you're interested, check out my posting in "Hit Points as Flesh (worldbuilding).

Part of that may be why fantasy a game is trying to demonstrate. 5e is pretty far on the “it’s epic fantasy, don’t question it” line of game design. The health system is meant to be functional, not the part of the system that is focused on. Do you have enough to fight? Yes or no. That’s the extent of how 5e handles health and it is designed around that point.

Other systems with other goals do try and create an actual game with the the health system. But 5e ain’t that.

[Pauly]

I like Ironsworn's system

Do you have a copy of that homebrew floating around by any chance? Sounds very cool, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Unfortunately I don’t. It was a long time ago and in a different continent.
The most difficult to replicate thing the home brewer did was use damage tracks, and as you took damage you’d mark off boxes and every so often a box would have -1 or -2 CON marked on it. As you leveled up you got a new damage track with more empty boxes on it. The damage track was the same for all classes, but since martials had more access to armor and damage reducing feats and less need to put points into non-physical characteristics they had more effective HP than a non-martial with the same CON.

[False God]

Deadlands 1.0 body-part system.

You never really gained any HP, damage could be directed or randomly assigned, certain amounts of damage at the same time could result in wounds, injuries and other afflictions and it felt like it hit that sweet spot (for this system at least) of "you have enough HP and body parts to take a couple hits, but not enough to be absolutely stupid."

It's one of the few systems that uses guns that I actually enjoy. Most are either too soft(lots of HP and low gun damage) or too gritty(low HP and lots of 1-hit kills).

[Vahnavoi]

The irony of this thread is I just posted a system involving Hit Points as a type of "stun damage" and Wounds (derived from HP lost) for "killing damage" in another thread entitled "Hit Points as Flesh" in the Worldbuilding forum and it was not well received. It seems that the majority of 5e players like the "adventurer as superhero" concept of 5e and disdain "gritty 5e rules" that are harsher like reality. Still, IF you're interested, check out my posting in "Hit Points as Flesh (worldbuilding).

That's conceptually similar to the two-tier hit point systems I use. There's few observations I'd like to make:

1) this was an existing rule variant in 3rd Edition Unearthed Arcana and earlier.

2) The same effect can be reached by tracking lethal and non-lethal damage separately. This was an existing mechanic in 3rd edition (and to some degree earlier editions too), but has gone underutilized. (Too few things cause non-lethal damage on their own and lethal damage being default means attacks rarely cause it.)

3) How superheroic characters end up being is largely independent of what hitpoints model and is mostly a factor of how damage is calibrated against hitpoints. Pre-4th edition, small hitpoint numbers at low levels meant D&D was pretty "gritty" and lethal by default, veering towards survival horror.

[MoiMagnus]

My preference goes for Wound/Damage systems that encourage taking risks over being cautious.
So it's not that much a question of how the system works, but more a question of the exact numbers used by the system, and how they interact with the GM's playstyle.

But the system itself does have its influence on it. What helps risk-taking? Obviously, wound systems that fully rely on "rule of fun" and where the wounds are more "roleplay guidelines" than actual constraints can help, but the discussion will maybe be more interesting if we focus on systems that rely on rules:

If the wounds to be are somewhat easily reversible, then you have the safety net of "as long as the risk pays off and you win, you won't suffer big long term consequences".
If the wounds do not prevent you to run away too much (so leg-breaking wounds are pretty rare, and don't prevent you from casting spells like teleportation), then you have the safety net of "if things go badly, you can give up on victory and run away".
You probably want the wound/HP systems needs to interact directly with the resources/magic of the team (aka "spending resources for healing is a good mechanics"), so that every member of that front line characters that suffer the most wounds gets exhausted at roughly the same rate as backline characters. You don't want some characters still having the resources to push for more risks while it's the other characters that suffer from those risks. Well, when I say "you don't want", I mean that it will happen occasionally anyway, but you don't want the system to make it more likely than it has to.

[Vahnavoi]

The last of those is impossible to manage on a system level without severely limiting tactical freedom on part of players, and everyone getting exhausted at the same rate isn't even strategically and tactically desireable for open-ended games.

[Mordar]

My personal favourite is Rolemaster / Spacemaster. For those that don't know, every attack results in a damage code (like 6A, 13D, etc) where the number is the amount of hit points lost, and the letter is a critical code, and determines stunning, bleeding, limb loss and organ faliure, knock outs, etc. Targets are very rarely killed by hit point loss, usually being killed by critical effects long before their hit points are depleted.


Deadlands 1.0 body-part system.

You never really gained any HP, damage could be directed or randomly assigned, certain amounts of damage at the same time could result in wounds, injuries and other afflictions and it felt like it hit that sweet spot (for this system at least) of "you have enough HP and body parts to take a couple hits, but not enough to be absolutely stupid."

It's one of the few systems that uses guns that I actually enjoy. Most are either too soft(lots of HP and low gun damage) or too gritty(low HP and lots of 1-hit kills).

These are the two things I came to say...but with a little more detail :smallsmile:

RoleMaster: To me it always felt like an improvement on the regular Hit Point system - uses hit points, but with some occasional bells and whistles. Criticals that can have non-HP effects. Bleeding damage. Humor. My favorite game period, and this was a little part of why.

Deadlands: No hitpoints, but the colored paperclip idea that made it clear what your wound penalties are, and a location system that felt just a smidge gritty without getting in the way of anything. Quick, easy, and reasonably penalties for being wounded.

- M

[KineticDiplomat]

I'm a big fan of Blade of the Iron Throne. Basically, a hit causes a level of wound (or bounces off harmlessly) based on how well you hit, the weapon, the armor, and relative physiques of those involved.

Those wounds are comprised of Shock (a one round debuff), Pain (long term damage that decreases your capability or kills you) and blood loss. (A continuous threat that accumulates across wounds ). So you can get a minor ding with a mace that ings your bell and gives a lot of shock and creates a great opportunity to follow up but no real long term harm, or a few small pokes with a rapier that maybe don't give you options now, but will bleed your enemy out. Or of course a dagger to abslewping throat or a strong poleaxe to the kneecap that pretty much end the fight.

[kyoryu]

I think both GURPS and Fate do fantastic jobs with their damage system, but with very different end goals in mind.

[Max_Killjoy]

I generally prefer it when plot armor is separated from tissue damage.


Pretty much the same. I don't like concatenated or conflated mechanics, or mechanics with circular definitions.

[Stonehead]

I generally prefer it when plot armor is separated from tissue damage.

I think things like permanent damage is good only if either retirement is expected or if prosthetics/regeneration is available and not a handicap. Either that or making a new character is easy and fun. Incidentally I think D&D misses an opportunity here, because it's fun to make characters but hard to lose them.

Truly permanent damage I mostly agree isn't great most of the time. I really prefer semi-permanent injury though. A damage system where it isn't assumed that you'll spam potions/wands to get back up to max hp after every single encounter. It limits the design space of encounters so much, and nothing feels as consequential.

My favorite damage systems are where damage goes to a characters attributes (maybe damage above a buffer of "hp"), which are slow to heal naturally. GURPS is a close second with it's crippling injury rules.

[Psyren]

The irony of this thread is I just posted a system involving Hit Points as a type of "stun damage" and Wounds (derived from HP lost) for "killing damage" in another thread entitled "Hit Points as Flesh" in the Worldbuilding forum and it was not well received. It seems that the majority of 5e players like the "adventurer as superhero" concept of 5e and disdain "gritty 5e rules" that are harsher like reality. Still, IF you're interested, check out my posting in "Hit Points as Flesh (worldbuilding).

It's not hard to see why. In practice, those systems tend to penalize martials even more since they usually have a harder time not getting hit. Like if you add a wounds system to 5e, who is more likely to suffer from it - the wizard who can throw up a bunch of mirror images/invisibility/forcefields to hide behind, the cleric who can undo all the effects with a couple of prayers, or the fighter who can do neither?

[Telok]

The irony of this thread is I just posted a system involving Hit Points as a type of "stun damage" and Wounds (derived from HP lost) for "killing damage" in another thread entitled "Hit Points as Flesh" in the Worldbuilding forum and it was not well received. It seems that the majority of 5e players like the "adventurer as superhero" concept of 5e and disdain "gritty 5e rules" that are harsher like reality.

Which is funny because Champions has had that stun/body division for decades in a real superhero game. Pazio's Starfinder does it too.

[olskool]

Which is funny because Champions has had that stun/body division for decades in a real superhero game. Pazio's Starfinder does it too.

Our system is a mod from the old FANTASY HERO game that used STUN and Wounds. Isn't CHAMPIONS published by the same company?

[olskool]

It's not hard to see why. In practice, those systems tend to penalize martials even more since they usually have a harder time not getting hit. Like if you add a wounds system to 5e, who is more likely to suffer from it - the wizard who can throw up a bunch of mirror images/invisibility/forcefields to hide behind, the cleric who can undo all the effects with a couple of prayers, or the fighter who can do neither?
There are three issues with this logic which I will explain here.

1) You do NOT suffer a Wound if the damage is less than your Hit Die. In our "gritty 5e," a Wizard/Sorcerer has a D4 Hit die (in raw 5e a D6). A Fighter has a D8 (D10 in raw 5e). You have to do an 8 damage or more to injure the Fighter (10+ in raw 5e). The Wizard gets hurt at 4 points (or 6 in raw 5e).

2) You are only seeing one component of an evolved system for 5e. Another part of that system is that armor in our game absorbs Wound Damage. The armor will absorb from 1 point (for light armors) up to 5 points (for plate armor) of Wound damage. Hit Points are not absorbed, as they are a combination of stun damage, fatigue, and demoralization. Thus an armored Fighter can be beaten into submission without ever suffering a wound or killed while still having HP left (or be LITERALLY "dead on his feet").

3) The healing of wounds is done with Hit Dice so the Fighter will recover more HP per treatment than the casters will.

Overall, the system works pretty well for a grittier 5e like the games we play.

[Psyren]

There are three issues with this logic which I will explain here.

1) You do NOT suffer a Wound if the damage is less than your Hit Die. In our "gritty 5e," a Wizard/Sorcerer has a D4 Hit die (in raw 5e a D6). A Fighter has a D8 (D10 in raw 5e). You have to do an 8 damage or more to injure the Fighter (10+ in raw 5e). The Wizard gets hurt at 4 points (or 6 in raw 5e).

2) You are only seeing one component of an evolved system for 5e. Another part of that system is that armor in our game absorbs Wound Damage. The armor will absorb from 1 point (for light armors) up to 5 points (for plate armor) of Wound damage. Hit Points are not absorbed, as they are a combination of stun damage, fatigue, and demoralization. Thus an armored Fighter can be beaten into submission without ever suffering a wound or killed while still having HP left (or be LITERALLY "dead on his feet").

3) The healing of wounds is done with Hit Dice so the Fighter will recover more HP per treatment than the casters will.

Overall, the system works pretty well for a grittier 5e like the games we play.

Do your games go above Tier 1? Because 8 damage is a pretty low threshold unless you're never fighting anything beyond bandits and goblins...

[olskool]

Do your games go above Tier 1? Because 8 damage is a pretty low threshold unless you're never fighting anything beyond bandits and goblins...

Did you actually go and read how the system works? The vaunted Fireball can do 48 hit points of damage. To the Fighter, that would be 6 wounds inflicted. He might have a CON of 16 and can even Save for half damage. That means the Fighter (even at 1st Level) would STILL have 10 Wounds left before death. IF he makes his saving throw, he would suffer just 3 Wounds from a fireball spell. A Wizard with the same CON of 16 would suffer 12 Wounds on a failed save from the same 48 Hit Points of damage, and be pretty bad off compared to the fighter.

The Hobgoblin chief in the caves of Phandelver(?) does 2D8 damage(?) with his weapon. He would probably inflict a single Wound on the Fighter with each strike. That same Hobgoblin would average 2 Wounds inflicted on the Wizard per average striking damage. Of course, BOTH characters would run out of Hit Points and be laying on the ground winded from that loss of HP before any Wounds actually killed them. Then you have the effect of armor. It will absorb the most common damage types (piercing, slashing, bludgeoning) and that would reduce the wound counts by 1 to 5 based on the armor worn.

Hit Points will still often determine who wins a fight, but the creature in question will be laying on the ground pleading for its life rather than bleeding out.

[Psyren]

Did you actually go and read how the system works? The vaunted Fireball can do 48 hit points of damage. To the Fighter, that would be 6 wounds inflicted. He might have a CON of 16 and can even Save for half damage. That means the Fighter (even at 1st Level) would STILL have 10 Wounds left before death. IF he makes his saving throw, he would suffer just 3 Wounds from a fireball spell. A Wizard with the same CON of 16 would suffer 12 Wounds on a failed save from the same 48 Hit Points of damage, and be pretty bad off compared to the fighter.

Yeah but a wizard can avoid being hit with that fireball in the first place much more easily. They can counterspell it, or absorb it, or be out of range/around a corner, or be invisible, and so on. Obviously if they take the full brunt of it they'll be in more danger than a fighter would, but that's how hit points work too. That's what I mean when I say gritty wound systems tend to be worse for martials.

[Easy e]

I liked a simplified Shadowrun style two tier track of Mental vs Physical with 5 levels of injury; light, moderate, serious, critical, and unconscious and possibly dead. It was a bit of a death spiral but it made a clear risk v reward process.

I must say, that Masks system sounds really awesome!

[SteveLightblade]

I'm not able to respond often, so be ready for several bulk replies.


The best one I played was a home brew originally based on D&D.

The basic idea was that characters has action points, and un-used APs could be stored up and carried over to a certain limit.
Damage was applied to your CON
Each turn you generated new APs based on your current CON.
Armor reduced the amount of damage taken, but also reduced your CON.

Generally you started at max APs, unless you were surprised, or otherwise in disadvantage. There were certain feats where you could make a test against another characteristic that could generate more APs. The number of APs ot took to cast a spell depended on the level of the spell, and special attacks such as Power Attack cost more APs than normal attacks.

Combat generally started with a flurry, then slowed down. YouÂ’d do things like spend a turn resting and collecting your breath in order to pull off a major combo next turn. The end stages of a long hard fight had both sides moving slowly and swinging infrequently. If fresh reserves showed up it was a major swing factor because they were fresh and had APs to burn,

It made it feel like genuine combat, not the D&D BS of a character on one HP being fully capable of doing everything.

Do you have this system saved anywhere? I actually tried developing a system based on Pathfinder where the idea was that getting wounded would slow you down in combat. However, I mostly abandoned the project when I started overhauling magic and combat feats to fit around things like wounds and stamina, as well as changing how certain items worked and started coming to a point where, unless I cleaned it up, it would make FATAL or Hybrid look like Powered by the Apocalypse by the time I was done (In terms of rules. Don't worry, the fluff isn't as horrible as those games).


Depends on the style of game you intend to play.

My personal favourite is Rolemaster / Spacemaster. For those that don't know, every attack results in a damage code (like 6A, 13D, etc) where the number is the amount of hit points lost, and the letter is a critical code, and determines stunning, bleeding, limb loss and organ faliure, knock outs, etc. Targets are very rarely killed by hit point loss, usually being killed by critical effects long before their hit points are depleted.

But that system is very, very lethal, and particularly in Spacemaster, often comes down to who shoots first determines who dies, and so isn't suitable for a more relaxed campaign, as you could get shanked by the next goblin with little to no warning. For a more relaxed game, D&D does it right, as you have plenty of warning when somethings going south, and plenty of time to rescue a character from a potentially fatal situation.

I am personally a fan of grittier games where combat is something that needs to be carefully planned and executed, which is somewhat strange given my Pathfinder obsession. Rolemaster and Spacemaster seem fun. I will check them out. Hopefully I can find time to run a game within this millenium.


I generally prefer it when plot armor is separated from tissue damage.

I think things like permanent damage is good only if either retirement is expected or if prosthetics/regeneration is available and not a handicap. Either that or making a new character is easy and fun. Incidentally I think D&D misses an opportunity here, because it's fun to make characters but hard to lose them.

Have you checked out Star Wars D20?


There are some others where reading through them I think they would be a lot of fun, but my personal favorite that I've actually played has been Riddle of Steel.

The way it works in brief, every combat turn is paired. At the start of the first of the paired turns you get several action dice you can use to attack and defend yourself over various threats.

When you attack, you must choose a direction and type of attack. Which the target opposes with however many dice they have held back for the defense.

If your attack hits it deals the base weapon damage plus an additional amount based on how much more successful the attack was from the defense. The armor at the hit location is then subtracted from the damage.

Damage is then compared to a chart which tells the players how much Shock, Pain, and Bloodloss they have from the hit. Along with other possible effects (cutting at someone's neck is very difficult, but can lead to an instant kill if the hit was high enough).

Shock is immediately subtracted from the targets total action dice on the next turn.
Pain is reduced from all future action dice.
Bloodloss results in a health check to see if you fall unconscious, the check growing cumulatively larger the higher your bloodloss is.

Now, all of this seems complicated. And it is.

But because pretty much all of it is physically done by removing action dice directly and the damage chart is pretty quick to use if you just have it in front of you, once you get used to it the actual running of a round of RoS tends to be pretty fast.

And because it is pretty uncompromising, the end result of the combat system promotes gameplay I like. You don't run into combat without a plan. Armor is fantastic and you should wear it. Every round you need to be thinking about how much you need to hold back for defense, because if you take a hit you're going to be feeling it for the rest of combat.

But what it doesn't do, is create an action hero game where you keep on fighting at 1 hit point and beating the as yet untouched big bad. Which is a fine system, actually. But I always had much more fun playing with the RoS health system.

This is cool, I'll check it out as well. It sounds like something I would have a ton of fun with. Also, you technically are still an action hero if you narrow your list of action films solely down to the first Die Hard movie.


The irony of this thread is I just posted a system involving Hit Points as a type of "stun damage" and Wounds (derived from HP lost) for "killing damage" in another thread entitled "Hit Points as Flesh" in the Worldbuilding forum and it was not well received. It seems that the majority of 5e players like the "adventurer as superhero" concept of 5e and disdain "gritty 5e rules" that are harsher like reality. Still, IF you're interested, check out my posting in "Hit Points as Flesh (worldbuilding).

I'll look at your thread, because I have no idea what you mean by "gritty 5e rules". I played it quite a few times and personally was turned off by 5e due to how shallow the entire system felt, and that if I wasn't playing a full caster I was only going to have a fraction of the variety and fun everyone else was having. The game, in my opinion, also has this weird identity crisis where it wants to be 3e, but at the same time wants to be it's own thing. However, this is not a thread about ranting about 5e, so I won't write an entire essay about why I don't like the system that much.

[Mordante]

Depends on the style of game you intend to play.

My personal favourite is Rolemaster / Spacemaster. For those that don't know, every attack results in a damage code (like 6A, 13D, etc) where the number is the amount of hit points lost, and the letter is a critical code, and determines stunning, bleeding, limb loss and organ faliure, knock outs, etc. Targets are very rarely killed by hit point loss, usually being killed by critical effects long before their hit points are depleted.

But that system is very, very lethal, and particularly in Spacemaster, often comes down to who shoots first determines who dies, and so isn't suitable for a more relaxed campaign, as you could get shanked by the next goblin with little to no warning. For a more relaxed game, D&D does it right, as you have plenty of warning when somethings going south, and plenty of time to rescue a character from a potentially fatal situation.

I played some rolemaster fantacy setting a long time ago. But I didn't like the system much. For hitting and doing damage there were like 10 tables and so many dice rolls, just to find out you do zero damage.

[Mordante]

For Close Combat I prefer a system where wearing armour doesn't make you harder to hit. Armour should be damage reduction. When attacking someone with a sword it should be weapon skill vs weapon skill.

[MoiMagnus]

In an homebrew I'm currently helping to design, we have the following system:
(1) Characters have between 0 and 5 HP (recharging at long rest), plus a total of around 3 points of dodging/parade/luck/etc (recharging at short rest).
(2) After accounting for weapon skills and armour reduction, damages ranks are usually around 1d4 (though the dice system is much more complex than that), and the defending character can spend dodging/parade/luck/etc points can be spent to reduce the damage rank.
(3) When suffering damages, the character can chose between losing HP or taking wounds on a randomly determined part of the body (known by the player before the choice):
+ For damage of rank 1, it's either 1 HP or a minor wound (inducing disadvantage to all related checks)
+ For damage of rank 2, it's either 1 HP (same as rank 1) or a major wound (making related actions impossible)
+ For damage of rank 3 or more, it's either 3 HP, or a deadly wound (inducing death if not stabilised quickly)

[Telwar]

I can honestly say that the Vitality Point/Wound Point system as implemented in SWd20... let's just say I'm not a fan. Having critical hits skip VP and go straight to Wounds might be okay if the typical damage roll (3d8) didn't average out to more than a typical PC's Constitution. I generally like to be beaten up some before dropping, and we don't see PC types in the movies available at the time drop from one hit normally, certainly not from a minion type.

Iron Kingdoms RPG's wound system was interesting. You rolled to hit versus the target defense, then they soaked with armor and stamina. Damage was rolled into three locations, which depending on stats would be like 4-10 hit points, and if all the boxes were filled on that location the target took a penalty to something, but could still function until it went down. After combat, you had an automatic heal that, if you were clever, could uncripple that location. Having locations crippled after healing was bad, though.

I "grew up" with Shadowrun and World of Darkness wound penalties, and as long as it's clear that they don't apply to soak rolls, wound penalties are fine. The first game of Shadowrun I was in, the GM didn't understand that. That was even more of a death spiral than normal.

[Mordar]

I played some rolemaster fantacy setting a long time ago. But I didn't like the system much. For hitting and doing damage there were like 10 tables and so many dice rolls, just to find out you do zero damage.

Certainly not the point of this thread, but this (bold) is utterly false. You may have played some game like that...but ICE/Rolemaster uses 1 roll, and *perhaps* a second roll if you got a critical hit. D&D uses at least 2 rolls for every hit. 1 table per weapon. 1 roll per attack. If good enough result, a second roll to resolve the critical.

Yes, there were specific weapon tables, and yes, players had to perform basic arithmetic, but those are the characteristics that made it a distinct (and in my opinion, more enjoyable) combat system. I roll my attack, add/subtract modifiers, and get my result. Learning curve, of course. Once you learn it, as fast as AD&D or every version of D&D I played outside the red/blue boxes.

Added benefit was removing the cognitive dissonance of rolling a nearly perfect attack that resulted in 1hp of damage.

- M

[Milodiah]

I actually rather enjoyed Deadlands Classic's. It had hit locations, injury penalties, stamina versus major bodily harm, and damage trackers, all without being clumsy in play. Plus it handled creatures of differing sizes fairly well in my opinion, and also (for the most part) struck a decent balance between survivability and perceived danger in combat. Even a fairly low caliber revolver can be fatal with multiple shots or a critical hit.

[olskool]

I'm not able to respond often, so be ready for several bulk replies.



Do you have this system saved anywhere? I actually tried developing a system based on Pathfinder where the idea was that getting wounded would slow you down in combat. However, I mostly abandoned the project when I started overhauling magic and combat feats to fit around things like wounds and stamina, as well as changing how certain items worked and started coming to a point where, unless I cleaned it up, it would make FATAL or Hybrid look like Powered by the Apocalypse by the time I was done (In terms of rules. Don't worry, the fluff isn't as horrible as those games).



I am personally a fan of grittier games where combat is something that needs to be carefully planned and executed, which is somewhat strange given my Pathfinder obsession. Rolemaster and Spacemaster seem fun. I will check them out. Hopefully I can find time to run a game within this millenium.



Have you checked out Star Wars D20?



This is cool, I'll check it out as well. It sounds like something I would have a ton of fun with. Also, you technically are still an action hero if you narrow your list of action films solely down to the first Die Hard movie.



I'll look at your thread, because I have no idea what you mean by "gritty 5e rules". I played it quite a few times and personally was turned off by 5e due to how shallow the entire system felt, and that if I wasn't playing a full caster I was only going to have a fraction of the variety and fun everyone else was having. The game, in my opinion, also has this weird identity crisis where it wants to be 3e, but at the same time wants to be it's own thing. However, this is not a thread about ranting about 5e, so I won't write an entire essay about why I don't like the system that much.

Gritty 5e increases the lethality/difficulty by modifying the following...

Hit Points: these are reduced by a die type (ie D6 becomes D4). To help low-level survivability we give a full die type for zero level. So a 1st level Wizard would have 4 + 1D4 Hp. We only add the CON bonus to the Hitpoints ROLL. The max HP per level you can get is STILL the maximum you can roll on that die (ie 4 for the Wizard above).

Proficiency Bonus: we use the following...
0 Level = 0
1st to 2nd Level = +1
3rd to 5th Level = +2
6th to 9th Level = +3
10th to 14th Level = +4
15th to 20th Level = +5

Attribute Bonus: we use the following...
1 = -4
2 - 3 = -3
4 - 6 = -2
7 - 9 = -1
10 -13 = 0
14 -16 = +1
17 - 19 = +2
20 - 22 = +3
23 - 26 = +4
27 - 30 = +5

We also require a Proficiency check to cast spells. The caster must roll a DC of [10 + Spell Level, with cantrips being 0 level] to successfully cast a spell. This check allows the use of any Attribute bonus (based on class attribute used) and Proficiency bonuses on the roll.

Those are just some of the changes we made to make 5e a little "grittier" in play.