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Nuiat
2008-08-04, 11:03 AM
Okay, I was a big fan of 3.5 rules, even if some of the things (like grappling) took forever to get through. So I've been fairly depressed about the new edition. Like why on earth would six hours of rest completely restore all of one's hit points? That's not realistic at all! Characters shouldn't be able to go to bed battered and bloody and wake up the next day perfectly whole! But that's beside the point. One of my favorite rules was taken out: non-lethal damage. So now I have to cut up my friends before I can knock them out? That's not cool. So here are the new rules for 4th Ed.

1. Healing surges heal non-lethal damage first! The rest of the healing surge value goes to whatever other damage one may have.

2. Saps deal 1d6 non-lethal damage, are boosted by one's strength mod, and carry a +3 for proficiency.

3. Speaking of proficiency, Rouges get it automatically. (Now who else gets it I don't know.) Saps are simple, one-handed weapons.

4. One gets knocked out when non-lethal damage is greater than or equal to current hp, regardless of not being dead at -10 hit points anymore.

5. Powers that the [W] icon in them deal that much non-lethal damage when done with a non-lethal weapon. All other damage (like extra fire damage) is still lethal.

Now, these are by no means complete. For instance, how long does one stay knocked out? 4th ed. seems to be a big fan of five minutes, but that seems a little unbalanced, not to mention that is a little weird that everything would be unconcious for five minutes. So this is where YOU come in! I need help finishing/updating these rules and those with more experience in this field working on it would be a big help. Thanks!

Covered In Bees
2008-08-04, 01:10 PM
Like why on earth would six hours of rest completely restore all of one's hit points?
Because hit points are abstract and do not directly correlate with physical damage. Hit points have been abstract for a long time.


That's not realistic at all!
Hit points aren't very realistic at all. A high-level 3.5 Barbarian can throw himself off a mile-high cliff, pick himself up, teleport to the top (via his boots), and do it again.
In 4E, they're pretty much completely abstract. You're as bleeding as you wanna be.


Characters shouldn't be able to go to bed battered and bloody and wake up the next day perfectly whole!
If there's no cleric in the party, they don't "go to bed bloody". They might wake up still battered, just in fighting form. They might use special herbs (which are going to be more potent in a magical environment). They might be carrying around a Wand of Cure Light Wounds (handwaving healing is handwaving healing--paying 750 gp for a Wand of CLW occasionally so you can empty the charges before bedtime doesn't make things more interesting.


But that's beside the point. One of my favorite rules was taken out: non-lethal damage. So now I have to cut up my friends before I can knock them out? That's not cool.
No, you can just describe your character as hitting the enemy with the flat of his blade or the pommel, not hitting him center-mass with the magic missile, etc. Then, when they reach 0 HP, you get to pick whether you kill them or knock them out.


So here are the new rules for 4th Ed.

1. Healing surges heal non-lethal damage first! The rest of the healing surge value goes to whatever other damage one may have.

This basically makes nonlethal damage totally indistinguishable from lethal damage. As long as the last hit is nonlethal damage, the enemy is KOed, not dead. Well, you can already KO the enemy on the last hit.


Now, these are by no means complete. For instance, how long does one stay knocked out? 4th ed. seems to be a big fan of five minutes, but that seems a little unbalanced, not to mention that is a little weird that everything would be unconcious for five minutes. So this is where YOU come in! I need help finishing/updating these rules and those with more experience in this field working on it would be a big help. Thanks!
What are you trying to get *out* of these rules? What do you want them to do? The current rules are already good at what they do. I don't see what these add. They let you knock out an enemy if you want to. This means that if you want prisoners, you don't have to spend an extra few rounds swinging at -4 to get them.

The 3E nonlethal damage rules are pretty pointless. Tracking nonlethal damage side-by-side with regular damage? How about temporary HP, how do they influence things? And the -4 to hit to do nonlethal damage (which you've removed) just makes it harder for the PCs to knock someone out.

Reinforcements
2008-08-04, 01:30 PM
Because I want to post something even though CIB already said it and I figure I at least have brevity on my side - there is nonlethal damage in 4e. If you want to do 'nonlethal damage', that is, if you want to knock something out instead of killing it... you do. Just say you do. What's wrong with that?

Covered In Bees
2008-08-04, 01:40 PM
Because I want to post something even though CIB already said it and I figure I at least have brevity on my side - there is nonlethal damage in 4e. If you want to do 'nonlethal damage', that is, if you want to knock something out instead of killing it... you do. Just say you do. What's wrong with that?

Not enough arbitrary things to track?

Jimp
2008-08-04, 02:06 PM
Not enough arbitrary things to track?

Here-here!
Quote of the week right there :smallbiggrin:.

Morty
2008-08-04, 02:08 PM
While I agree that rules for non-lethal damage are nice to have but not necessary, a penalty to hit when dealing nonlethal damage with a lethal weapon is needed. After all, trying to hit someone with a weapon designed to do damage without significantly hurting that person is bound to be a bit harder.

Reinforcements
2008-08-04, 02:17 PM
After all, trying to hit someone with a weapon designed to do damage without significantly hurting that person is bound to be a bit harder.
Statements like that are how bad rules and overcomplicated systems in the name of "realism" get made.

Covered In Bees
2008-08-04, 02:19 PM
While I agree that rules for non-lethal damage are nice to have but not necessary, a penalty to hit when dealing nonlethal damage with a lethal weapon is needed. After all, trying to hit someone with a weapon designed to do damage without significantly hurting that person is bound to be a bit harder.

Expressing this difficulty in mechanical terms does absolutely nothing for gameplay except occasionally discourage people from doing it. There is no need for this "well realistically it's going to be a bit harder!" stuff in a system which is already not focused on realism (leather-and-dagger guys fighting against and side-by-side with, and doing more damage than, guys with giant swords?).

RukiTanuki
2008-08-04, 02:23 PM
As others have said, the abstraction of HP is where things get wonky and vague, not the healing surge or resting rules.

As I've said in the past, I describe HP as little more than the answer to the question Can you still fight? After a furious day of combat, a evening spent tending to one's wounds, and a night's rest, the character is still bruised, battered, and beaten... but they keep going. If I want to track whether that cut's scarred over or whether the character has stopped favoring one leg slightly, the HP system is a horrid way to do so, and really, it always has been.

I recognize the unique needs of a campaign that runs in 4e and wants to present the notion of a very real cost to a day of combat, even though 3e games could very well be "fully healed every day" thanks to wands of CLW (and the party without someone capable of using that is a rare one indeed). However, 4e does what it intends to do well: DMs that want to describe painful injuries without tracking penalties can do so, and DMs that really want to track penalties can create them. The advantage is that we're adding to a known point of balance, rather than removing something that may or may not be a load-bearing rule in the system as written.

[Edit: Removed a word by order of the Department of Redundancy Department.]

Morty
2008-08-04, 02:25 PM
Statements like that are how bad rules and overcomplicated systems in the name of "realism" get made.

How is a simple penalty in a specific situation overcomplicated? Unnecessary, maybe, but not overcomplicated.


Expressing this difficulty in mechanical terms does absolutely nothing for gameplay except occasionally discourage people from doing it. There is no need for this "well realistically it's going to be a bit harder!" stuff in a system which is already not focused on realism (leather-and-dagger guys fighting against and side-by-side with, and doing more damage than, guys with giant swords?).

Unrealistic or not, they still fight with weapons, so penalty for trying to inflict nonlethal damage is a logical thing to include. I do agree though, that it's probably not relevant enough to bother.

ColdSepp
2008-08-04, 02:28 PM
But... a creature isn't dead at 0, he's dead when he fails three dying saves or reaches -bloodied. Just tell the DM you want that one alive, and have him make checks against dying. It adds tension, and uses the existing rules.

"I can't use my AoE, it will hit the one we want alive, and he's already at -10!"
"Crap, that goblin we want to interrogate failed his second save, I need to use heal to stabilize him rather then attack!"

Is there some reason that won't work that I am not seeing?

Covered In Bees
2008-08-04, 02:29 PM
Unrealistic or not, they still fight with weapons, so penalty for trying to inflict nonlethal damage is a logical thing to include. I do agree though, that it's probably not relevant enough to bother.
If you're going to disregard the problems of fighting an armored guy (or massive scaled beast) with a dagger, why wouldn't you disregard the problems of doing "nonlethal" damage? That's not logical, that's completely inconsistent.

On top of that, it's not logical because HP is so abstract that making a distinction between lethal and nonlethal damage makes no sense! This is also true of 3E. HP loss will already be "nonlethal damage" a lot of the time. A hit scored vs. AC does not have to represent a bleeding wound, and shouldn't most of the time. Just-in-time dodges, staggering out of position, arms-jarring parries, blows impacting against but not penetrating armor... the descriptions of most of the HP damage taken are already going to be nonlethal, unless you play in the "the archer shoots you, you have another arrow sticking out of you, that makes 11" style.


http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/70323382/11238963: rules for nonlethal damage are pointless because regular HP damage already represents, among other things, "nonlethal damage".



How is a simple penalty in a specific situation overcomplicated? Unnecessary, maybe, but not overcomplicated.
It's not. But it's how overcomplicated systems are made. "Simple penalty in a specific situation", done everywhere someone feels it would be "realistic", would lead to massive tangle of bonuses and penalties and single-case rules.

Morty
2008-08-04, 02:36 PM
If you're going to disregard the problems of fighting an armored guy (or massive scaled beast) with a dagger, why wouldn't you disregard the problems of doing "nonlethal" damage? That's not logical, that's completely inconsistent.


Good point.


Teal deer: rules for nonlethal damage are pointless because regular HP damage already represents, among other things, "nonlethal damage".

In 4ed, yeah. In 3ed, not necessarily. But since we're talking about 4ed here, I guess you're right.

Tengu_temp
2008-08-04, 02:37 PM
My comment to everything CiB and Reinforcements said here:
http://ffrpg.republika.pl/approve.PNG

Covered In Bees
2008-08-04, 02:38 PM
In 3ed, not necessarily. But since we're talking about 4ed here, I guess you're right.

If you don't do it the way I described in 3E, you wind up with characters with dozens of slashes and gaping wounds, which is absolutely even more ridiculous than a lack of penalty for "nonlethal damage".

Making HP totally abstract is one of the best things 4E did in terms of adding consistency.

Morty
2008-08-04, 02:43 PM
If you don't do it the way I described in 3E, you wind up with characters with dozens of slashes and gaping wounds, which is absolutely even more ridiculous than a lack of penalty for "nonlethal damage".

Making HP totally abstract is one of the best things 4E did in terms of adding consistency.

Talk about operating in extremes... look, I know HPs are abstract and it's preety much the only way for them to look belivable. But I don't subject to the notion that majority of the hits aren't really wounds. When playing 3ed, I tend to work in the middle- not every HP loss is a bleeding wound, but they aren't all glancing blows either, and most of them are cuts and bruises that hurt and hinder your character without actually killing him/her. Is this so hard to accept different approach to something? Looking at 4ed threads it might seem it's the hardest thing ever for a man to do...

thevorpalbunny
2008-08-04, 02:57 PM
Hit points aren't very realistic at all. A high-level 3.5 Barbarian can throw himself off a mile-high cliff, pick himself up, teleport to the top (via his boots), and do it again.

Some things just demand correction. This is one of those things.
At a level where wizards can create a magic item from thin air with a thought (by casting wish), it is not surprising or stretching disbelief at all that a barbarian can withstand a ridiculous level of punishment and not care. The greatest of the great in the real world would have been no more than 5th level in 3rd edition D&D. 4th edition, I'm not sure. In general, I don't think the greatest of the great in anything but battle could be statted in 4th ed.

A 5th-level fighter (call him "Aragorn" if you like) with 16 Con, 16 Str, weapon specialization, and Toughness has 50 hp. If two identical such fighters were fighting each other with greatswords, they would deal an average of 13 damage per hit, and it would therefore take an average of about four hits to drop the enemy.
These are the best soldiers the world has ever known, here. They take four hits from a skilled opponent to drop. That's not unreasonable.

RukiTanuki
2008-08-04, 03:01 PM
Talk about operating in extremes... look, I know HPs are abstract and it's preety much the only way for them to look belivable. But I don't subject to the notion that majority of the hits aren't really wounds. When playing 3ed, I tend to work in the middle- not every HP loss is a bleeding wound, but they aren't all glancing blows either, and most of them are cuts and bruises that hurt and hinder your character without actually killing him/her. Is this so hard to accept different approach to something? Looking at 4ed threads it might seem it's the hardest thing ever for a man to do...

It's not hard at all, but I believe it's most accurately handled by creating a house rule for the number of healing surges that may be recovered with an extended rest. Offhand, I'd try restoring 1+Con modifier surges after a rest, and see how it affects the game.

Anecdotally, it seems like most games don't run on day-to-day attrition; that's why the CLW Wand is mentioned so frequently. For those that want that, changing healing surge restoration is a quick way to get the desired feel. If the game works well at what it's trying to do, and it doesn't take a whole lot to make it do other things, it works well for me. :)

Covered In Bees
2008-08-04, 03:03 PM
Talk about operating in extremes... look, I know HPs are abstract and it's preety much the only way for them to look belivable. But I don't subject to the notion that majority of the hits aren't really wounds.
You're welcome to keep doing so. Let's not pretend that it's "more realistic" that way, though.


When playing 3ed, I tend to work in the middle- not every HP loss is a bleeding wound, but they aren't all glancing blows either, and most of them are cuts and bruises that hurt and hinder your character without actually killing him/her.
This gets pretty ridiculous if you think about. How many shallow cuts/bruises/scrapes can one person pick up, anyway? What you describe is, I'd say, the usual method--but it's one I try to avoid precisely because the idea of a character with twenty cuts on him from being in a fight is more ridiculous than either of the alternatives.

Nerd-o-rama
2008-08-04, 03:08 PM
This gets pretty ridiculous if you think about. How many shallow cuts/bruises/scrapes can one person pick up, anyway? What you describe is, I'd say, the usual method--but it's one I try to avoid precisely because the idea of a character with twenty cuts on him from being in a fight is more ridiculous than either of the alternatives.Actually, I do it this way myself. I call it the "Die Hard" Hit Point methodology, since like John McClane, characters receive a ridiculous number of small wounds and injuries and nonetheless keep fighting at full efficiency.

I agree that HP are mainly abstract, but you can flavor bigger hits as flesh wounds and keep within "cinematic" sense, if not realism.

Morty
2008-08-04, 03:20 PM
You're welcome to keep doing so. Let's not pretend that it's "more realistic" that way, though.

Maybe it is less realistic, but you said yourself that D&D isn't supposed to be realistic. And I'm perfectly ready to sacrifice realism for the sake of non-silliness.


This gets pretty ridiculous if you think about. How many shallow cuts/bruises/scrapes can one person pick up, anyway? What you describe is, I'd say, the usual method--but it's one I try to avoid precisely because the idea of a character with twenty cuts on him from being in a fight is more ridiculous than either of the alternatives.

I don't see it as any more ridiculous than a character fighing axe-wielding orcs, hungry undead, huge bear/owl hybrids and other standard D&D opponents yet somehow rarely suffering any wounds at all. I think it's best to use both, which is what my group does.

FoE
2008-08-04, 08:14 PM
Actually, I do it this way myself. I call it the "Die Hard" Hit Point methodology, since like John McClane, characters receive a ridiculous number of small wounds and injuries and nonetheless keep fighting at full efficiency.

I agree that HP are mainly abstract, but you can flavor bigger hits as flesh wounds and keep within "cinematic" sense, if not realism.

Exactly. That's I don't worry about a character covered in small wounds or waking up from a day's rest healed as being "unrealistic." The Rule of Cool/Fun applies.

Nuiat
2008-08-04, 08:22 PM
Did I hit a sore spot? Let's remember that being snide and sarcastic isn't helpful to anyone.

Okay, I think that my definition of what HP was was lacking. I knew it was more than physical, but I guess I wasn't thinking about how much was physical wounding and how much was physical taxation. Trying to distinguish between the two does seem unnecessary. I'll live without the non-lethal, but I STILL liked it.

It occurred to me earlier today that rules for sunder weapon, trip, disarm attempts and unarmed strikes are also missing. I can get over the first three, and I know that there aren't monks (yet), but what if I have my players captured and disarmed and one of them (that doesn't have spells) escapes and has to punch his way through to reclaim his sword? 1d6 for medium creatures, I guess, but would balance be an issue if unarmed attacks caused opportunity attacks?

...guess they wouldn't cause non-lethal damage anymore.:smalltongue:

Dhavaer
2008-08-04, 08:46 PM
Did I hit a sore spot? Let's remember that being snide and sarcastic isn't helpful to anyone.

Okay, I think that my definition of what HP was was lacking. I knew it was more than physical, but I guess I wasn't thinking about how much was physical wounding and how much was physical taxation. Trying to distinguish between the two does seem unnecessary. I'll live without the non-lethal, but I STILL liked it.

It occurred to me earlier today that rules for sunder weapon, trip, disarm attempts and unarmed strikes are also missing. I can get over the first three, and I know that there aren't monks (yet), but what if I have my players captured and disarmed and one of them (that doesn't have spells) escapes and has to punch his way through to reclaim his sword? 1d6 for medium creatures, I guess, but would balance be an issue if unarmed attacks caused opportunity attacks?

...guess they wouldn't cause non-lethal damage anymore.:smalltongue:

I'm away form my books at the moment, but I'm pretty sure there are unarmed strike rules. 1d4 for medium creatures, I think, and they don't cause opporunity attacks.

thevorpalbunny
2008-08-04, 09:16 PM
You're welcome to keep doing so. Let's not pretend that it's "more realistic" that way, though.



Quote:
When playing 3ed, I tend to work in the middle- not every HP loss is a bleeding wound, but they aren't all glancing blows either, and most of them are cuts and bruises that hurt and hinder your character without actually killing him/her.


This gets pretty ridiculous if you think about. How many shallow cuts/bruises/scrapes can one person pick up, anyway? What you describe is, I'd say, the usual method--but it's one I try to avoid precisely because the idea of a character with twenty cuts on him from being in a fight is more ridiculous than either of the alternatives.

But it is more realistic. At low levels, you can take a few hits before dying, but not more than a handful that dealt significant damage. At high levels, you are, by real world standards, super-human (or super-elven or whatever), so you can take more hits, up to the point where at very high levels you can take obscene amounts of damage and keep plugging.

Incidentally, evaluation of realism in D&D is pretty much impossible without at least considering this: The tiers in 4e are a formalization of something that existed but usually wasn't discussed in 3e. In the first five or so levels, you are a great hero, but still just a guy at the pinnacle of what Joe Schmo can achieve. In the next five or so, you are at the point where you can face down hordes of ordinary folk without much strain and can do things no J. Random Luser can ever hope to equal. After that, you are in the range where you fight off threats to countries and can, with little help, massacre armies of redshirts if you so choose. After that, you have passed the threshold of possibility and are in the realm of ancient myths, where you routinely beat up Hercules and foil plots against the material plane by killing the archdevil responsible. At this point, if it were not for other adventurers like you you could conquer the entire material plane in a matter of months. (You reach that point around 16th-17th level, right about when casters get their 9th level spells.) That's where caster-melee balance irrevocably breaks down (before that the DM preventing the 15-minute adventuring day can keep casters from breaking the game completely).

So what I'm saying is, don't expect characters above 6th or 7th level to have tolerances in line with your experiences of what humans are capable of. They've surpassed all your benchmarks. The wizard is smarter than Einstein, the fighter is more badass than Aragorn, the general is better than Rommel, and everyone else is in line with that.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-08-05, 03:58 AM
I'm away form my books at the moment, but I'm pretty sure there are unarmed strike rules. 1d4 for medium creatures, I think, and they don't cause opporunity attacks.

Yes. PHB page 219, second entry under Improvised Weapons. No proficiency bonus, 1d4 damage, Unarmed group, no special rules about opportunity attacks or the like - no special rules at all, in fact.

Nuiat
2008-08-05, 09:22 AM
Yes. PHB page 219, second entry under Improvised Weapons. No proficiency bonus, 1d4 damage, Unarmed group, no special rules about opportunity attacks or the like - no special rules at all, in fact.

Whoops. Yeah, your right. I skipped over the weapon lists...

I realize that "Perform ______" would be a useless skill at this point, but how will WotC handle Bard abilities when they put that class out. The suspense is wonderful... I hope it will last.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-08-05, 09:37 AM
Whoops. Yeah, your right. I skipped over the weapon lists...

One wonders why, since most games (like D&D 3.0 and 3.5) put unarmed attacks in the weapon list.


I realize that "Perform ______" would be a useless skill at this point, but how will WotC handle Bard abilities when they put that class out. The suspense is wonderful... I hope it will last.

Presumably the same way other classes' abilities, since the idea is to use the same mechanics for all classes. Look at Warlord and Cleric abilities for some clues. Not that I get what that has to do with this thread.

The Rose Dragon
2008-08-05, 09:46 AM
I'm gonna say, Hit Points weren't abstract in 3rd Edition and 3.5 at all. If you were hit by a poisoned weapon, you were injured. You didn't "dodge out of the way barely, losing the fight in you", you were injured and bleeding. The poison got in your bloodstream and you had to make a save.

Exactly how much blood you lost was an abstract, but after so many little scratches, you had to be a good deal of bloody at 10- HP at high levels.

I don't know about 4th Edition, but in 3rd Edition, and IIRC, in 2nd Edition, too, every hit point loss resulted in a wound which could allow you to be poisoned.

That, or poisoning weapons suddenly allow them to be much more accurate and capable of wounding others.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-08-05, 10:01 AM
I'm gonna say, Hit Points weren't abstract in 3rd Edition and 3.5 at all. If you were hit by a poisoned weapon, you were injured. You didn't "dodge out of the way barely, losing the fight in you", you were injured and bleeding. The poison got in your bloodstream and you had to make a save.

Exactly how much blood you lost was an abstract, but after so many little scratches, you had to be a good deal of bloody at 10- HP at high levels.

I don't know about 4th Edition, but in 3rd Edition, and IIRC, in 2nd Edition, too, every hit point loss resulted in a wound which could allow you to be poisoned.

That, or poisoning weapons suddenly allow them to be much more accurate and capable of wounding others.

I fail to see how this means that hits with non-poisoned weapons draw blood. It does not follow. If it's a poisoned weapon and the attack hits, yes, it must've drawn blood, because that's the point with a poisoned weapon. If it's not a poisoned weapon, it may or may not have drawn blood.

The Rose Dragon
2008-08-05, 10:15 AM
Well, like I said, that, or poisoning a weapon makes it more accurate all of a sudden.

only1doug
2008-08-05, 10:32 AM
I fail to see how this means that hits with non-poisoned weapons draw blood. It does not follow. If it's a poisoned weapon and the attack hits, yes, it must've drawn blood, because that's the point with a poisoned weapon. If it's not a poisoned weapon, it may or may not have drawn blood.

or perhaps a few drops of a contact poison have splattered onto bare skin?

see i can justify poisoned weapons not drawing blood.

Doug

The Rose Dragon
2008-08-05, 10:36 AM
Not contact. Injury. Contact poisons, from what I can tell, cannot be applied to weapons.

In fact, I'm not sure if there are contact poisons. It has been so long since I looked at D&D books.

Shatteredtower
2008-08-05, 10:46 AM
I'm gonna say, Hit Points weren't abstract in 3rd Edition and 3.5 at all. If you were hit by a poisoned weapon, you were injured. You didn't "dodge out of the way barely, losing the fight in you", you were injured and bleeding. The poison got in your bloodstream and you had to make a save.Except that's exactly how it worked in 1st and 2nd Edition, both of which expressly stated that hit points were an abstraction. Nothing about that changed for 3rd Edition. You could still cause poison damage with a blowgun needle through a full suit of plate armor, even if it did cover the target completely.


I don't know about 4th Edition, but in 3rd Edition, and IIRC, in 2nd Edition, too, every hit point loss resulted in a wound which could allow you to be poisoned.Only if you were using a contact-based poison. Injury-based poisons and bludgeoning weapons did not mix. :smallwink:


That, or poisoning weapons suddenly allow them to be much more accurate and capable of wounding others.If true, it would still be the case only if the target failed a saving throw against the poison -- and even then only if one expresses poison damage as anything other than hit point damage. Otherwise, it's just one more close call, the same way not getting killed by a (supposedly) critical hit -- or a falling boulder the size of a horse -- would be a close call.

This isn't to say I've any objection to the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts school of thought when it comes to indicating damage, though that's never been borne out by the rules of any edition. The closest we get to that is 4th Edition's bloodied mechanic, but second wind rules might be seen as a refutation of that idea by some. Bruises and cuts or no, however, the important thing is to recognize that the day's events have been slowly wearing you down.

Nuiat
2008-08-05, 01:53 PM
Not that I get what that has to do with this thread.

I started this thread, so I'll yack about whatever pleases me, thankyouverymuch.

That "bloodied" mechanic... It does take a little of the ambiguity out of HP. The DM guide does say that when a creature becomes bloodied that the DM should say something like, "The lightning crackles around the kobold, causing its skin to rupture and bleed. It's bloodied." At least, it was something like that. So, one could say that the top half of HP is all fighting spirit and bruises and whatever, while the bottom half is starts getting really physical.

So, what if one imposed a rule that if a player enters "extended rest" while bloodied, they only get HP up to the bloodied line (bloodied at 48, only get to 49). It's only a 2 healing surge penalty, sure, but it makes a little sense. I don't think that I'd use it (because the group I play with wouldn't want to fool with gratuitous rules), though.

However, RukiTanuki mentioned a house rule that after a short (five minute) rest, their players could only spend 1+con modifier healing surges. That's freakin' awesome! I'm using it! Props to you, RukiTanuki.