View Single Post

Thread: Hit Point Alteration: Wound Multiplier

  1. - Top - End - #1
    Troll in the Playground
     
    AssassinGuy

    Join Date
    Apr 2007

    Default Hit Point Alteration: Wound Multiplier

    The current hit point system in D&D has never seemed too realistic to me. While D&D tries its best to make fighting a dragon man-to-beast feasible, the process inevitably seems to involve a number of hit points so staggeringly high that a decent meatshield can take a hundred javelins to the face and walk out without any problem at all.

    That said, there are a few alternatives to the traditional system. Through vitality and wound points, for example, the life of a hero is inevitably tied to a rather small sum of points, points that any old farmer could hit with a lucky shot. Even though that farmer can injure you in a serious way, however, the fact remains that you could still technically take a hundred pitchforks to the face and walk away with no problems (actually healing faster than with our current system). If you want to say that vitality points are serving as an “abstraction”. In this case, you are welcome to explain how those characters can repetitively jump off of 5-story buildings or stand in a bonfire for a few minutes (neither of which has any chance of getting a critical hit) and walk away more or less unfazed.

    I’ve also about systems that basically spiral one closer to death as you go along (lesser wounds lead to greater wounds lead to death) but from what I’ve heard, using grades of wounds would prevent proper scaling of damage over the course of a 20-level rpg like D&D (In other words, it would be hard to have a CR 20 monster deal more damage than a CR 19 monster which deals more than a CR 18 monster and so forth). I may be mistaken in this belief, however, so you are free to correct me.

    Below is a mechanic that I created over the course of a 10-minute brainstorm session.

    The Wound Multiplier:
    In this variant, most rules involving hit points work completely unchanged. One additional value that each player, NPC, and monster has, however, is a wound multiplier. At character creation each player has a wound multiplier of 0. At the end of each round in which a creature takes damage equal to or greater than half of their ECL (or HD if they have none), that creature's Wound Multiplier increases by 1. Whenever a creature takes damage, that damage is increased by xd6 before applying energy resistance and/or damage reduction, where X is the creature's Wound Multiplier. All creatures take a penalty to attack rolls, saving throws, skill checks, armor class, save DCs of spells and abilities that they use, and to their caster level(s) equal to half of their their wound multiplier (rounded down).

    Lowering the Wound Multiplier:
    After 8 hours of rest, a creature’s wound multiplier is reduced by 1. If receiving bedrest via the heal skill, it is reduced by an additional 1. If the creature is at full health, it is reduced by an additional 1.

    Any source of healing that would restore hit points other than fast healing and regeneration can be used to lower a creature’s wound multiplier. When casting such a spell or using such an ability, the caster may choose to halve any hit points healed (round down) to lower the wound multiplier of all targets by 1. For restorative items, the caster creating the item chooses how this decision is made ahead of time.

    A creature restored from the dead returns with a wound multiplier of 0.

    Other Rulings and Exceptions:
    • Damage taken from being dying and unstable is unaffected by your wound multiplier. Other sources of similar damage (such as nonlethal damage from thirst or forced marches), however, is multiplied.
    • If you take 50 points of damage or more from a single source while your wound multiplier is 1 or 0, it is increased by 2.
    • If a single attack or source of damage would deal more than one form of damage (such as a +1 frost shortsword), the agressor selects which form of damage is increased by the target's wound multiplier.


    Implications of the Variant:
    I’m sure that implementing this thing has far deeper implications than I could ever hope to fathom but I think that I could list some possible side-effects.
    1. Anything can kill you: Using this system, anyone trying to stand in a fire will find themselves burning alive in under 2 minutes (by which time they’d have taken 210d6 fire damage) unless they are immune to fire or have decent resistance and a low wound multiplier. By the time you’ve leapt from your 3rd huge cliff, you’d need to be darn lucky to still be alive (instead of the normal 6+ cliffs our normal system requires). If you have a decently high wound multiplier, even angry farmers or guerrilla soldiers can give a player in this situation pause.
    2. Teamwork… works: Unlike the current system, fighting together against a single enemy is particularly effective in this system. A rogue’s sneak attack not only reduce a Dragon’s hit points but also helps the fighter deal a lot more damage with his full attack. Not only does the fighter’s full attack seriously damage the dragon but it also penalizes its saving throws when the wizard casts his next spell.
    3. Groups over Bosses: With this variant, “boss monsters” can expect to reach higher wound multipliers before death than mooks, meaning that they are more disadvantaged by this system. As such, large numbers of foes can actually help win battles and battles with boss monsters (such as dragons/liches/etc.) won’t last as long.
    4. Infinite levels of lethality: As a character’s wound multiplier goes higher and higher, the gap between different increments of damage goes higher and higher. As an example, the difference between 1d8 and 1d4 is about 2 damage while the difference between 10d8 and 10d4 (if you have a wound multiplier of 10) is around 20. Multiplied enough, even the smallest difference between two sources of damage make one source seem far preferable to the other.
    5. The return of combat healing: When each injury hurts the spells of the wizard, the attacks of the fighter, and even the sneakiest of the rogues, lowering wound multipliers becomes of paramount importance. As each blow increases the potency of the next, healing immediately (even in the midst of combat) is invaluable. On an interesting note, cure minor wounds becomes a decent utility spell when using this variant. Whether you like this change or not likely depends on your views towards the traditional “heal-bot” cleric.
    6. Decent low-level survivability: Despite increased long-term lethality, this variant isn’t much more lethal for low-level characters than the normal game is. The first hit that a player takes only gives them a small penalty, the second only increases the penalty, and the third hit (when the damage is first multiplied) is about where a normal low-level character would be knocked out either way.
    7. No Real Change at High Optimization: When everything revolves around uber-charging for hundreds of damage, launching death spells before rolling initiative, and other such insane tactics, it seems rather unlikely that your damage will ever get multiplied by too much. Similarly, though martial characters may be hit every now and then, you would need a pretty high wound multiplier before the penalty would stop most popular combos and locks.

    As stated above, it only really took about 10 minutes of thought to come up with this variant. Do any other systems out there use something like this? What obvious errors have I overlooked? Questions? Thoughts in general?
    Last edited by Realms of Chaos; 2011-08-16 at 01:24 PM.
    I'm try not to be too vain but this was too perfect not to sig.
    Quote Originally Posted by Primal Fury View Post
    okay RoC, that is enough! the gitp boards can only take so much awsome, you might actually hurt somebody with this one!
    At long last, I have an extended signature