There’s been a lot of talk of alternate Damage and HP systems. Here’s another that I cooked up as a thought experiment. The main goal was to keep class damage dice as written, but to mitigate the effects of excessive armor and low damage rolls.
When I first wrote it up, it was more complex than it sounded in my head—I set it aside expecting to forget about it, but it’s grown on me some since then. Still not sure it’s worth using, but I thought I share if it sparked someone else’s imagination.
Cool. How do you get armor over 4 though?
Aaron Griffin e.g. a Wizard wearing +1 armor with Arcane Armor and a spell prepared for +4 more.
Or a fighter with plate (3armor) shield (+1armor) and Iron Hide/Steel Hide (+1/+2armor).
Nick Nunes this is interesting. Have you run it through any test scenarios to see how it plays out?
Maybe I missed it, but do the descriptions (light, moderate, serious, deadly, critical) do anything more than just add language tags? Like, does a light injury mean something specific in the fiction?
I really like the concept. I’m worried that it might lead to lots of bookkeeping and crossreferencing, as dice rolls need to be translated through a table
Having played MCG’s cypher system for a while, the “divide by 3” to get damage doesn’t bother me. This looks really nice – especially when getting away from the D&D style scores! Thanks for sharing, Nick Nunes!
Jeremy Strandberg, no haven’t tested it other than just doing some abstract numbers to see if it ballparked the way that I expected. As described in the system light, moderate, etc., are purely mechanical. However, I do think they could be used as a guideline for GMs to help describe damage.
With fewer HP to keep track of I have been wondering about some kind of system where you could track wounds with some tagging. E.g. like the HP as Boxes thing that Addramyr Palinor shared awhile back.
That said, I do think it’s all a bit fiddly. I think a lot of the things I was trying to fix in the rules as written could be dealt with by adding a flat damage bonus as players level up and normalizing monster damage and armor so it’s easier for the GM to gauge how challenging a monster will be.
Basically have the party’s average armor level function as a pseudo challenge rating. I.e. if the party has about 3 armor, then monsters with +3 damage are a decent challenge.
First impression on a read through is that the way armor works is clunky and you would get close to the same effect just by subtracting the armor rating from the damage roll.
I also don’t get the point of adjusting monster damage. You’re not eliminating a roll or anything. Just keep the monster damage as is and lookup the roll on the same table. Most of the modifiers you list would just happen naturally if you did that (e.g. a monster with +9 is pretty much going to get at least a deadly wound anyway). Seems like a bunch of bookkeeping work to convert monsters that doesn’t buy you much.