Still toying around with alternate HP rules and related stuff.
What does Hive Mind has to say about this:
Suffer Harm
When you lose ⅓ of your maximum HP in a single attack, roll+CON.
* On a 10+, it hurts like hell but you grit your teeth and keep going.
* On a 7-9, you’re incapacitated and can’t fight anymore until you receive help.
* On a 6-, as above plus you get the worst out of the injury as set by the narrative (you lose an arm, your guts are open, an artery is cut, your kneecap is busted, you’re stunned, etc).
The trigger is super mechanical, but it could be reworded as “When you suffer a bad injury…” and leave it to the /Players/GM to decide when a wound is bad based on the narrative.
The interesting thing, I think, is the trigger.
Basically, you’re using the mechanical trigger of “lose 1/3 of your HP on a single attack” to indicate that you have suffered a calamity and must therefore Defy Danger against it (almost certainly with CON).
Honestly, that’s probably how I’d do it. “When you lose 1/3 or more of your maximum HP in a single event, you have suffered a calamity. Tell us how you deal with it and Defy Danger.”
Then, you don’t really need the 7-9 clause or the miss clause. You can just follow the fiction and tags and the result of Defy Danger.
How about “when you get hit by something with the Messy tag”.
Benjamin Kramer I’ve always felt messy was more informative than prescriptive.
Like, taking 2 points of messy damage from an orc bloodwarrior means a nasty bleeding wound in my book, maybe your shield or armor getting shredded a little, but not like a calamity, y’know?
But 9 points of messy damage from an orc berserker? That sounds calamitous.
Jeremy Strandberg yeah, my first reflex was actually to call for a Defy Danger move but the move implies that you are ACTING while in this case you are passively enduring. Plus, normally Defy Danger is called to avoid something before it happens while here it’s already happened and we just want to know how bad it is.
Also, I thought it wasn’t clear enough with defy danger that on a 9- you become actually helpless until you receive help (even if from yourself). But maybe it’s a wrong reflex to want a specific event to happen no matter what.
Your solution is actually way more elegant, more open-ended (as usual! :P). Also, I totally didn’t think of a situation where you’d get damaged outside of combat, which your move actually covers.
Addramyr Palinor check the wording on Defy Danger again!
When you act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity, say how you deal with it and roll. If you do it…
Oh, as long as we’re throwing around hacks to damage, how about this one?
First, cut PC hit points in half.
Then, add a new basic (special?) move: Take Damage
When you take a hit or otherwise suffer harm, the GM will describe the blow and tell you what dice to roll. You take that much damage, reducing your current HP by that amount. You can pick one of the following to cut the damage in half:
* Lose something: your footing, your grip, your bearings, an advantage
* Something on your person breaks
* You’re out of it for the moment
Whichever you choose (if any), the GM will describes the details.
Reduce the damage you take by your Armor. If you are reduced to 0 HP, you are out of the action and probably dying.
Ahh, yeah! Well in this case I think Defy Danger seems like the most elegant solution.
Not a huge fan of “double” or “reduce by half”. Especially, if you divide max HP by 2, then all healing moves become OP, so you need to also divide them by 2, etc. Also, a monster doing 1d8+2 becomes much more dangerous when you only have like 11 hp.
Lose something or something on your person breaks, to me it looks both as the same effect. It’s basically “Use up their resources”
I guess in both cases though it makes the game more gritty (which is something I’m all for!)
On the design side, the move is inspired by the hack from Paul Taliesin that suggested to roll+HP spent (which in itself was a very nice idea). I studied closely the move and didn’t like that it added a move to make every time you get hit, plus it made it so you never really receive more than 3-6 damage at once (there’s decreased benefit from having better and better bonuses because of the bell curve of 2d6, and these benefits are negligible passed +6).
He also talked about a sub-system where the GM would roll 2d6 and compare this with a Lethality stat from monsters that would trigger a severe wound when you rolled equal or lower than the Lethality stat, and a killing blow if this number is also a double.
I really like the systematization of the process, keeping it fair and random when a hit would be severe (vs being just the arbitrary decision of the GM). It seemed to me that loosing 1/3 of your hp doesn’t happen too often to become tedious and does represent a nasty blow in the mind of the players (tell a player “you receive 13 damage” and check the reaction of everybody at the table: “WHAT?! OUCH! DANG!”)
The “cut PC HP in half” part of my move is to make the ability to pick a consequence important and necessary. “Oh, that’s enough damage to kill you outright? Better fall down!” Without reducing HP, the ability to take 1/2 damage just makes the PCs even tougher. But you’re right… it’d probably require rebalancing all the healing gear & powers, too.
Re: “lose something” vs. “something breaks”… I see the former as put them in a spot and the latter as use up their resources.
I do think your approach (keep HP as is, with a “calamity threshold” for a single blow) is probably the most elegant.
How about something like this (but better written and thought through):
When you suffer a significant wound [insert a metric for this here – maybe hit points equal to your CON or a fraction of your HP, or a narrative condition like “when you’re at their mercy or caught off-guard”], ask the MC one of the following:
* Just how bad is this injury? Will I live?
* How does this threaten to prevent me from what I need to do?
* Might this leave me in the worst possible position?
The MC, in response, is instructed to make a move (as you do!).
The player’s response is most likely “defy danger” in some form; the outcome of that roll determines the state of the fiction going forward.
Ooh, I very much like these 3 questions format!
Thinking about this further:
A guideline like “lose 1/3 of your hit points” or whatever is rather stilted and potentially limited.
If you use a format which provides interesting choices (like my example above, however poor it is in its details), you can allow the player to judge the fiction herself.
If you set up the move/procedure/mechanic right, you can leave it to the player:
“Was that a significant blow? Might it leave a scar?”
The player will know, trust me.