About spell damage and scaling...

[MrWaeseL]

I was just thinking: If a character becomes twice as powerful every two levels, then technically the monsters become twice as powerful every two levels (of that character) as well.

So in order for damage spells to remain competitive, shouldn't they scale exponentially as well?

[Wrenfield]

There's no argument here. Damage spells are the crap. Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Magic Missile, you name it ... they are all bottom-tier combat spells for all of the arcane spellcaster archetypes. Including the craptacular Artillery Evoker/Sorceror.

And no, Empower/Maximize does not help. They actually sets you back due to their retarded diminution of comparative level DC's.

In our games, I convinced our DM to up to damage dice on such spells to the next higher die. He finally capitulated, but now realizes that even that minor improvement still makes them suck.

An alternative too, is to allow on-the-fly energy type alteration to energy-based damage spells. Via some sort of mechanical tweak to your entire spell-based system, a feat, class ability, etc.

Or alternately, maybe something like this for dice-based damage spells:

Levels 1-7 = Standard damage dice per spell description.
Levels 8-14 = +1 Boost to damage dice type (say, from d6 to d8)
Levels 15-20 = +2 Boost to damage dice type (sat, from d4 to d8)

Again, just an idea to get more use of damage based offensive spells at higher levels.

[RandomCasualty]

Yeah, damage spells definitely need some help.

And I'm thinking something like what Wrenfield is suggesting might be kinda what we want to do.

I'm thinking perhaps have cone of cold be d8s, and chain lightning/horrid wilting/delayed blast fireball be d10s and maybe a d12 polar ray.

Also, perhaps a feat like "+4 to DCs on direct damage, and +4 to penetrate SR." Considering spell focus sucks for direct damage casters. And having insane spell DCs doesn't make fireball unbalanced one bit.

[Username17]

Fireball specifically is a very situational spell, and may actually be decent in certain play environments. At 5th level you have a Fireball that does 17.5 points of damage - save for half. And you get it maybe three times per day, and an opposing CR 5 Troll has 63 hit points and literally laughs you off the stage. That's not enough damage to kill swarms of dimminutive creatures of your level even if you unload your entire head (so the supposed point of fireball - its use on creatures that regenerate non-fire damage or who are immune to non-area damage - is stuff which Fireball is in fact completely worthless at).

However, an EL 5 encounter doesn't have to be a Troll or Cranium Rat Swarm. It could be two CR 3 monsters. In 3.5, that could mean two Ogres (at 26 hit points each) - a Fireball will drop both Ogres into Cleave territory for the Barbarian. Heck, it can be three CR 2 monsters, which could be 3 Bug Bears. A Fireball will mess their shit up pretty good. It can even be six CR 1 monsters. Each Gnoll has like 11 hit points, and on a failed save will go down. Even on a made save, it'll drop low enough that a second fireball will drop it.

So depending upon what your opponents are, the incredibly bunk Fireball might be a great spell. If you are fighting swarms of enemies rather than BBEGs, a Fireball is just what the doctor ordered.

----

As for fixing Fireball so that it isn't so ass the rest of the time:

1> Direct Damage should not cost spell slots. Fighters don't use up spell slots to swing a sword that can cleave into enemies, Wizards shouldn't be paying spell slots for crowd control either. At the very least, a prepared fireball should simply stay prepared when cast, and those things should quite probably not even take up spell preperation slots in the first place. To be a meaningful expression of anything, you're going to have to throw like six or eight lightning bolts, so you should just be able to do that.

2> Direct Damage should start bigger. A Magic Missile is a god damned joke. 3.5 points of damage? WTF? If you have a low strength, that's quite possibly the equivalent of a thrown rock. Further, Before direct damage even starts scaling, it should be doing at least a d8 plus your various sundry bonuses which you should also have.

3> Direct Damage should add your stat modifier. There are high stat games and low stat games, and right now Direct Damage is kind of a joke in low stat games, and it is even worse in high stat games - that has to stop.

4> Direct Damage should scale upwards like bonus attacks. Exactly like bonus attacks. Probably they should gain an extra multiple every five levels or so. They don't have to be exponential, since hit points aren't exponential. But they should be quadratic, since hit points are, well... quadratic.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

Just a side note, but you've mentioned the fireball versus troll problem before, and I completely agree with you. Have you thought up a good solution to that one?

[Joy_Division]

I've been thinking of allowing spellcasters to wield devices such as battle wands, staves etc. With these they could make elemental range and melee attacks much like fighters make normal attacks. I'm thinking of also allowing them to use the wands to cast prepared spells without expending the spell slot.

As an example wielding a wand of fire would let you shoot little fire bolts for 1d8 + F(x) where F(x) is a function of whatever the hell I feel like. You could also cast any fire spells of say 4th level and lower whenever you feel like.
All higher level spells would have to do more but require you to expend spell slots (or be given a real cost depending on how many comets you want wizards to be able to call down from the heavens in any given length of time.)

[Joy_Division]

You could increase the damage trolls take from fire as a patch fix. Most people seem to want to think that troll combust violently when exposed to any sort of flame. Most of the people I've played with thought of trolls as walking regenerating kindling.

[Josh_Kablack]

1095520760[/unixtime]]I was just thinking: If a character becomes twice as powerful every two levels, then technically the monsters become twice as powerful every two levels (of that character) as well.

So in order for damage spells to remain competitive, shouldn't they scale exponentially as well?

Problems with your line of reasoning:

-Monster power does not equal hit points. Sure there's a correlation, but it's a damn sight off from one to one. Therefore applying a direct x2 per 2 character levels to damage dealt is going to result in radical disparities.

-The way D&D is set up now, as spellcasters go up in level, they get better spells, more spells, AND more use out of their old spells. If 2 additional level is supposed to mean twice as dangerous, then all three of these factors should combine to equal out to a doubled power level, not just the additional use out of the old spells.

-The doubled power per two levels idea is rather poorly implemented in many areas of D&D.

[Username17]

There's a fundamental problem with damage spells in D&D. That is, as long as you are doing "damage" to peoples' "hit points" as represented by opposingly large numbers, you are better off playing a fvcking computer game.

I'm dead serious. Any time you oppose their growth in hit points by doing more damage, the numbers involved are always going to either:

A: Suck.
or
B: Become intractably large, and suck.

There's not a damn thing you can do about it. The damage people have to do is going to go up indefinately, or rather, it's going to go up until you can't keep track of it anymore at the gaming table. Or, perhaps, it's going to plateau at some arbitrary point and then it's going to start falling behind and be a waste of energy.

There's no other options. We aren't computers, and we can't actually total up die rolls to get twenty seven hundred and eighteen points of damage and subtract that from the fourteen thousand and six hit points you started with in a reasonable amount of time, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, and still have it be fun.

We just did a test around the office, and people blurted out a bunch of answers in the 11 thousand range, most of which were within about a hundred of the real answer - which is eleven thousand, two hundred, and eighty eight. And ultimately, that's the point. Hit Points and damage can scale indefinately on a computer console and can't scale indeinately in paper and pencil gaming.

So why the hell are we even defending direct damage as implemented? We know beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that it simply can't work forever. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And for the rest of your campaign. You just can't have Fireballs rolling a bunch of dice and adding them up. It can not work.

---

Choices:

1> Go to a wound level system.
2> Drop damage as a game mechanic after a certain point.

Option 1 you have much more tractible numbers because you are talking about cancelling bonuses on attack and defense and things can scale virtually indefinately.

Option 2 you simply skip out of the damage business shortly before it becomes retarded and you start inflicting status conditions directly. Status conditions include Death and stuff, so it works out pretty similarly to lower level combats.

3rd edition pretty much went for option 2. At high level, you fought with a vorpal blade or people laughed at you. 3.5 goes for neither option and is just a logistical nightmare at higher levels (and of course, damage in all forms managaes to suck anyway, because in addition to being too large to easily keep track of, it's also really too small to make a hog's difference to a piece of cheese).

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

I don't know about the whole "damage is too difficult to keep track of" theory... I mean I don't have much trouble with numbers like 134 or something... so long as the damage remains under 1000, I think it works out ok...

[Username17]

The only reason that the numbers stay in the realm of 134 as long as they do is because they are intentionally retarded in their growth curves after about level six.

That means that high-level damaging attacks become shitty, because they aren't growing as fast as other forms of attack. If hypothetically damaging attacks were going to be "not-shit", they would have to be bigger. And grow faster. And that means talking about numbers that are bigger.

And it means having to add up the old little attacks until they meet your full hit points. 134 points of damage being compared to 126 points to leave 8 left isn't bad, but it implies that you are going to have to add up attacks doing two to seven points until they reach 134, because it's damn important when that camel's back snaps.

Remember, 134 points isn't just a number - it means that you are going to have to keep track of perhaps 20 to 67 separate deductions to figure out when exactly your character goes down. Each one of them backed up by several die rolls.

And 134 is low. To make damage and hit points actually a meaningful thing to worry about at high levels, they'd both have to be a crap tonne bigger than they are right now. And when you get to higher levels, they'll have to keep scaling up even more.

Keeping track of hit points against damage points is something which can be done for a definate limited amount of time. Eventually the system becomes intractable and must be abandoned. There's no other option in a freely scaling game.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

Well, really almost any system you use is going to run into trouble.

Even a system like the one you proposed for your custom game is eventually going to run into huge numbers. It won't be huge numbers of hp, but it will be huge bonuses, you'll regularly deal with d20 +123 damage versus a DC Of 140 or something. And considering you've always got to know by how much each roll beat each DC, that'll get pretty arithmetic heavy too.

About all you could really do to totally alleviate the problem is create some kind of tiered system, where if you reach a certain amount of hp or damage, you jump to the next tier, and your hp or damage resets. If the other guy is the same tier as you are then damage is resolved normally. If he isn't, then some kind of DR, or damage scaling is in place. You won't however deal with this that much, since most combats will be between same tier opponents.

I'd expect a tier shift to occur maybe every 6-10 levels. So you'd end up wtih a guy with an attack like "tier 5 melee 1d8+3", but the other guy would have "tier 5 toughness 31 hp" A tier 4 attack would probably only be doing 1/2 or 25% damage to a tier 5, and maybe a tier 3 attack wouldn't do any damage at all. But like I said, mostly you'd be worried about at most a 1 tier shift. And you'd keep hp within the 10-90 range, and you allow for super invulnerable characters like superman.

And your system would scale like that. That way you could simulate stuff on different scales not being damaged by certain attacks. You could even theoretically deal with damage reduction by saying that weapons that don't peirce DR are considered to be a tier lower in offense.

[Username17]

Even a system like the one you proposed for your custom game is eventually going to run into huge numbers. It won't be huge numbers of hp, but it will be huge bonuses, you'll regularly deal with d20 +123 damage versus a DC Of 140 or something. And considering you've always got to know by how much each roll beat each DC, that'll get pretty arithmetic heavy too.

But the number of numbers being compared is always the same - it's two. As you said, it's not that hard to subtract a number from 134, the problem is when you have to subtract 134 numbers. With a hit point system, the number of numbers you will have to add and subtract goes up as the number of hit points do.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1095624848[/unixtime]]With a hit point system, the number of numbers you will have to add and subtract goes up as the number of hit points do.

Not sure what you mean by this.

[Username17]

Not sure what you mean by this.

Simple, in a hit point system you start with the basic 1 hit point creature and the 1 point attack that will drop it, right? And when you scale things up, there is a 2 point creature and a 2 point attack that will drop it. But the 1 point attack stilll exists.

That is, while sometimes both the attack and the hit points will be bigger, sometimes only the hit points will be. And when a character could still be dropped by the smaller attack, it requires being struck with (and therefore keeping track of) more hits.

So doubling the hit points from 1 to 2 means that potentially you'll have to keep track of 2 damage events before you fall. Doubling it again means that you will potentially have to consider 4 separate cumulative damage events - and you can see where this is going, and it is going to be alot of pencil marks on your character sheet, isn't it?

When hit points become very big, you don't just have to compare your big hit point number to a big damage number and see if you went down - you potentially also have to compare your big hit point number to a big number of small damage numbers and see if you went down. And that's hard.

Try having your friend tell you 40 numbers between three and seven and then quickly tell him back whether they all added up to more than 200 or not. That's really difficult, especially if the numbers are generated by dice and have no discernable pattern.

And that's where the Hit Point system breaks down. Eventually it's so much easier to have the small damages simply have a small chance of inflicting a noticable amount of damage that's it's ricoculous. In the long run, it can come out the same, but you end up being able to ignore 90% of the data - and that makes adding up the results a tractable problem in real time.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

1095699738[/unixtime]] and that makes adding up the results a tractable problem in real time.

for a human.

[RandomCasualty]

1095699738[/unixtime]]
When hit points become very big, you don't just have to compare your big hit point number to a big damage number and see if you went down - you potentially also have to compare your big hit point number to a big number of small damage numbers and see if you went down. And that's hard.

Well, the problems still more or less come about whenever you've got multiple health levels. And while it is true that it gets more complex the more you have, it's why I propose some kind of scaling system where your hp and damage eventually hit a new tier and then reset down. This creates a natural and relatively easy to handle system where creatures and characters of similar power levels are handled much like 4th-5th level fighters and lots of easy math.

Trying to scale up to vehicle combat similarly becomes easy under the system because instead of granting vehicles tons of HP, you just put them on another tier. So you're still dealing with a combat between a 35 hit point frigate and a 55 hp galleon, instead of trying to give these things monstrous amounts of HP or fortitude dice. Similarly, their weapons, also on the same scale, do relatively normal levels of damage. Because the tiered effect keeps everything within a set range of human complexity.

And this is I think the scaling we need to make a universal hit point system. Then it's easy to handle things like flies or cats. They work on the same system as everything else they're just of a lower tier. And since the tiers are all relative, you can theoretically have an infinite number of them to handle basically any kind of scale you want from cosmically powered deity fights to a psuedopod battle between two microorganisms. And yet, everything is pretty much going to handle like 3rd-6th level D&D math wise.

And that's where the Hit Point system breaks down. Eventually it's so much easier to have the small damages simply have a small chance of inflicting a noticable amount of damage that's it's ricoculous. In the long run, it can come out the same, but you end up being able to ignore 90% of the data - and that makes adding up the results a tractable problem in real time.

Well using your system, you don't actually eliminate the math, you just eliminate some of the pencil marks. Which given that most characters use scrap paper to record damage anyway, is pretty irrelevant. You're still making two calculations with every successful attack roll, and while those calculations may not amount to real damage, it's actually slightly more complex than the existing damage system, which requires only one subtraction and a greater than comparison.

[User3]

And that's where the Hit Point system breaks down. Eventually it's so much easier to have the small damages simply have a small chance of inflicting a noticable amount of damage that's it's ricoculous. In the long run, it can come out the same, but you end up being able to ignore 90% of the data - and that makes adding up the results a tractable problem in real time.

Thats already represented by the AC system, and to some degree the Save system.

The problem is that the current system is so open that monsters are designed in such a way that the more powerful they get, the bigger their armor gets, scaling with the BAB and bonuses of the attacker to a point where the mage can no longer make an armed attack with a magic dagger except on a 20, and the fighter is bleeding off BAB for more AC or damage vs the same monster.

Magic is the same way. Easy death magic (different from Sleep or Hold spells which require an extra action on top of the save to cause death) happens around a time when all the monsters start getting massive save bonuses and SR, meaning that the fighter's quest for even more stackable Str or Dex is matched by the mage's quest for more DC and caster level. Pure damage magic falls behind quickly as more monsters get crazy Cons or partial immunities, forcing the mages to bust out tricks where they add cheap or free metamagic to spells rather than following the normal scale of things.

Basically, the tools exist in the 3.X system for it to be simplified without creating entirely new mechanics with their own feel. It would just take a particulary hardcore person to run the numbers through statistical analysis.

The basic idea that a higher level person has more HP and can be more daring, since he can survive mistakes(hits), is fine. Its the fact that damage scales to a point where focused-build characters like charge fighters and two weapon/ghost touch/blinking rogues and cheese casters can negate that entire mechanic by putting all their class features into a box and watching the universe go away in a singularity.

Basically, there should not be mechanics where you can add bonuses that so grossly distort a character out of its power range (using magic items, monster levels, combos of spells, etc) that the only thing that can kill it is an equally cheesed out monster to raise the bar, because some days a Fighter 10 walks along next to a massively multiclassed charge fighter, and the monster kills the fighter 10 and fails to damage the other.

A simple cap like "you can't have more than your level+3 in passive, non-circumstance mods adding to a roll" and a system of "no more than one active(action-based) feat per turn" would seem like a good place to start any rewrite of the system.

The old systems were capped by a "Only so much material has been written for this game, and with more material comes more ways to break it," forcing speople who want to play the game say things like "this sourcebook is off limts, as is this one, and that other one."

By adding built-in limitations to just how crazy things can get, you can infinitely expand the game without increasing the number of ways to break it.

[Username17]

And while it is true that it gets more complex the more you have, it's why I propose some kind of scaling system where your hp and damage eventually hit a new tier and then reset down.

That's just a health level system except that it's more annoying. Having "Megadamage" like Rifts is all bad. It causes instantaneous and irrevocable power creep and horrendous confusion. If you are ever going to "scale down" your hit points, there is no reason why you wouldn't just have them continually scale the whole time and have a static health levels system.

No reason at all.

Thats already represented by the AC system, and to some degree the Save system.

No. It isn't. While it is true that it's going to be many more attacks before you go down even than your hit points themselves would indicate, because of your greater ability to ignore damage layered on top of your greater number of hit points.

But the number of deductions you have to keep track of is still going up! Unless your hit points are static, the number of deductions that you have to keep track of will always rise.

Which is not to say that the AC and Save Systems can't take care of this problem. Of course they can. saves and AC can make you less likely to be hit or take damage from smaller attacks until your survivability is the same as a system in which your hit points keep going up.

So it doesn't "already" do that. It should do that. Not the same thing. Console games have no problem subtracting small numbers from big numbers hundreds of times. Humans do. Consoles can go ahead and use hit points as their sole form of scalage out to infinity. Humans can't. Humans should use a static number of health levels in their pencil and paper games. Not "health levels where you can gain a few extra somehow" or any of that bullshit. Just a static health level system. Anything else is inviting disaster for no reason or gain.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1095709107[/unixtime]]
That's just a health level system except that it's more annoying. Having "Megadamage" like Rifts is all bad. It causes instantaneous and irrevocable power creep and horrendous confusion. If you are ever going to "scale down" your hit points, there is no reason why you wouldn't just have them continually scale the whole time and have a static health levels system.

No reason at all.

The reason is that a health levels system is essentially a damage versus soak resistance problem. Which suffers from gross inflation of numbers. I mean consider trying to simulate something like d20 future with a health level system. Instead of having carriers with tens of thousands of hp, you're having defense shield bonuses in the thousands and damage rolls in the thousands, which really isn't all that much better.

Under a system like what I'm proposing, space combat would seem a lot like normal combat in terms of numbers and everything. By creating alternate tiers of damage and hit points you allow for combats to be handled the same and retain the same basic size of numbers.

Because your injury system breaks down when you start having d20+652 when you try to handle a high tech battleship or some epic monstrosity, because you're dealing with lots of super high numbers for no real reason.

Essentially a tiered system is cleaner, because you are able to scale down bonuses and work on any level you want to and still be fine. I mean you could use an injury system alongside a tiered damage system too, you'd just have bonuses/penalties when converting tiers. But the existance of the tiers keeps the numbers small and that's the goal here. So whether you keep your hp and damage rolls below 100 or you keep your damage soak DCs below 30 doesn't really matter that much. The point is that you're creating some kind of control mechanism to keep the numbers smaller.

As for the power creep argument, power creep is caused simply by new designers making new shit more powerful than old shit, no system can prevent it, and no system is innately more vulnerable to it than any other system.

[Username17]

I mean consider trying to simulate something like d20 future with a health level system. Instead of having carriers with tens of thousands of hp, you're having defense shield bonuses in the thousands and damage rolls in the thousands, which really isn't all that much better.

Yes it is. More importantly, it doesn't have to be tens of thousands. You are only having to add the entire d20 every time you are shifting to a new "tier". Unless you were planning on having fifty different tiers to keep track of, it's never going to get to one thousand. And you don't have arbitrary jump points where people are on the cusp of one tier and the other - if you have ever played Rifts, even once, you would instantly understand why your proposal is laughable out of hand.

You already admitted that comparing two big numbers isn't a problem. Shifting to health level system limits it all to exactly that, which means that keeping track of the damage system is never ever a problem. Anything else you do will be a problem at some point.

There is simply no reason for things to have different numbers of hit points on things when they already are differently hard to hit and differently resistant to damage. It's an extra variable that serves no purpose except to confuse. And occassionally, to make things more broken.

-Username17

[User3]

HPs should represent "how many mistakes I can make with this character" rather than "how soon till I die," letting players who have invested years of real time in their character get extra chances rather than having elaborate Raise mechanics, as well as being a dramatic device where the closer to death you get, the more you realize what you are risking by continuing.

A health system like your proposal is not going to let you make mistakes. It still includes potential one hit kills on characters, which is terrible.

The current system can be salvaged, but with a dramatic reworking of the way the numbers are set up.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of work to do on all other aspects of the system. With status conditions and save or die effects and ability damage, its often far easier to kill someone by keeping them Stunned and having children beat them with sticks rather than by hacking away at their HP in heroic combat until they fall. Characters can take enough HP damage to go from full HP to 0 HP in a single attack.

AC should represent "How long I can stay in a combat until I die," where you can look at your AC and your enemies ability and be able to calculate how many turns you can last in the combat, and your ability and their AC so that you can know how soon you can drop them.

Basically, I'm saying that a hit point and AC system can work as long as status effects are limited in some way and damage always stays within a range

Perhaps the core damage on a weapon is a good starting point as a cap, so that bigger and more vicous weapons are better suited to high Str guys since those weapons have bigger caps, while lighter weapons like rapiers might have caps raised by high Dex for Dex fighters. Con, instead of adding more HP, could add more AC.

Most status effects can easily be translated to either damage or ability damage, with Special effects at 0 like petrification. I mean, if Sleep did 2d6 Dex damage to 1d4 people for 1 round/level, it could be a useful spell all the way to 20th level, it would have a scaling effect, and it could do partial damage rather than the save or die mechanic.

Fireballs have no reason why they need to do more than 1d6 + level in damage, where you can clear a large number of CR 1 guys out, and based on your level remove a number of "chances" from more powerful enemies, and the HP system can do what the health level system cannot, which is show gradiations of effect.

I mean, Shadowrun is the game that has health level systems, and after playing that, it seems a bad idea since characters become useless after even the smallest amounts of damage. Creating a system where after a single hit you are closer to dying and you suck is adding injury to insult. Either one is representative and mechanically sound, but both is just silly.

[RandomCasualty]

1095713145[/unixtime]]
You already admitted that comparing two big numbers isn't a problem. Shifting to health level system limits it all to exactly that, which means that keeping track of the damage system is never ever a problem. Anything else you do will be a problem at some point.

Well, the problem is that you're doing a lot of subtractions, and while you can do this and make it work, you'd rather not. Ideally you'd like to keep the numbers small, and then use some kind of conversion system when you've got weird shit happening like a dragon taking on a 1st level commoner. Most of the time a conversion over many scales should be a no brainer overkill. A weapon that can seriously damage a castle should kill any mid level character outright.

And really your system supports a tiered approach rather easily, so I'm not sure why you're against it so much. Suppose you simply said each tier is worth a +/- 20. And so instead of saying a castle has a damage resistance of 1d20 + 85, it would simply be a tier 5 (1d20 +5). Mechanically there's no difference, but game play wise, the tiered system is much cleaner and easier to calculate.

There is simply no reason for things to have different numbers of hit points on things when they already are differently hard to hit and differently resistant to damage. It's an extra variable that serves no purpose except to confuse. And occassionally, to make things more broken.

The main reason for variable HP is that it's tough to figure out how many is a good amount of health levels. And there is one problem I've run into with doing some basic tests on your damage system.

Basically if you want something to take a lot of hits from a character dealing good damage, it means that characters dealing minor damage almost never hurt it. And if a character that isn't a primary meleer can hurt something, your fighters will totally destroy it.

Now at low levels you really don't care if orcs die in one swing, that's ok. But you don't want the same being true of your dragons, nor do you really want them indestructible though to your party rogue or a guy who didn't invest in a lance and mounted charge. And if your non-massive damage dealer can hurt the thing at all, chances are your massive damage dealer will have it dead easily.

With health levels that increase, that isn't as much of a problem. Since you can let minor damage characters deal some minor amount of damage, and not let them feel totally useless compared to the big guns.

That's really the only advantage to the D&D damage system. A bunch of commoners can surround you and eventualyl bludgeon you to death. Under your system that might be totally impossible.

A health system like your proposal is not going to let you make mistakes. It still includes potential one hit kills on characters, which is terrible.

Well in all fairness, one thing that I thought Frank's system handled well was the element of character death. The advantage of a health system is that instead of having a fixed -10 death point, your death point is constnatly scaling. So -10 health levels is the same as it was at level 1 when you're level 20 and that's a good thing.

You're going to have a lot less true deaths using his system than you will using an HP system. However, the HP system is a lot more predictable, where his system has a more gritty feel where every blow could be the one that takes you out of action.

Though keep in mind that save or dies already work that way... I'm thinking you could just implement a more heroic campaign by allowing PCs a set number of rerolls each session that they could use on damage resistance or on save or die spells.

Really the main problem with his system from a game point of view, is that what becomes difficult to damage for a heavy hitter is totally invulnerable to a medium or light hitter. That's where problems are created, not really in terms of fatality.

[User3]

A weapon that can seriously damage a castle should kill any mid level character outright.

The point where mages start walking around with seige equipment in Shink Item form or in Portable Holes so that they can one hit kill the BBEG is officially known as the "stupid point." (And if you don't like magic and plan to houserulle that all away, then expect adventurers to cart around wheeled ballista into all dungeons).

Like Rifts, magadamage always leads to one guy walking around and cacking everyone in sight with his megadamage weapon until someone cacks him with a megadamage weapon.

[User3]

1095707707[/unixtime]]A simple cap like "you can't have more than your level+3 in passive, non-circumstance mods adding to a roll" and a system of "no more than one active(action-based) feat per turn" would seem like a good place to start any rewrite of the system.

Wow, suck all of the fun out of D&D to "save" its "balance."

What a solution! Why didn't I think of that???