About spell damage and scaling...

[Username17]

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.

No. As RC said, a Health Level system can potentially make there be less one-hit kills, because the death margin scales up to your character automatically.

More importantly, it's going to get rid of the weirdness with two hits that a hit point system always enjoys. See, when a a guy has 10 hit points, and is hit for 50, he explodes. He's totally dead, proportionately he's out the door. But if he's hit twice for 8 points of damage, he's just unconcious.

But the guy with 60 hit points can shrug off the 50 point attack no problem. Proportionately it's about the same as the 8 point attack on the 10 point dude. But the second 50 point attack is not like the second 8 point attack on the 10 point dude at all. It's just like a 50 point attack on the 10 point dude - you're dead.

Scaling up the hit points, and the attacks, does not give you more second chances, it makes your second chances worth less and less because the amount of over-damage you're going to finally go down under is going to loom larger and larger. If you want people to have extra chances, you should just give them extra chances.

Give out some Karma Points or Action Points and let people spend them down to avert death or dismemberment. If they were purely defensive and actually good, they would really feel like they were your luck running out.

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.

That's an artifact of the d6 and TN system. In a d20 and DC system, a small injury penalty isn't as big of a problem. The standard TN is 4+, so a 1 point penalty reduces your success by 33%. In a d20 and DC system, you roll a single die where the standard DC is 11, so a 1 point penalty reduces your success by 10% - that's much more manageable.

And of course, if you really don't like the injury penalties, you can have a health level system without them. Static Health Levels just means that the amount of hit points you have is fixed, and the scaling happens in the determination of how many of them you lose from an attack. Since this essentially logs the numbers we have to deal with, things become incomparably more manageable.

I mean, in a hit point system someone who is twice as tough needs twice as many hit points. In a health level and DC system, someone who is twice as tough has about a +6 to their defense roll. After you scale things up, say, a thousand times (about a thousand times the hit points, or about +60 defense rating), you can see how it might get a lot easier when the logarithm is working with you instead of against you.

-Username17

[User3]

After you scale things up, say, a thousand times (about a thousand times the hit points, or about +60 defense rating), you can see how it might get a lot easier when the logarithm is working with you instead of against you

Nope. I'm a college grad who went as far as calculus and I'm having difficulty figuring out in my head how good stuff is based on a logarithmic scale and a d20.

Now, considering that this game is supposed to be played by 10 year olds, and material should be written by 12 year olds, that system you've got cooked up is not going to work.

I mean, what's the problem with capping bonuses like damage, HP, AC, attacks bonuses, feats used per turn, and capping number of attacks? That way, no one is doing 50 damage to 10 hp guys, and no one has 400 hp. Artificial contraints on the amount of damage a dude can dish out and the amount of HPs a guy can have and constraints on attack roll bonuses and AC, and suddenly you have a system where people can write all the material you want and continuously expand the beauty and range of your game and the system will still be pretty balanced.

I know it requires rewriting the whole system, but thats what you are doing anyway.

[Username17]

The logarithm is behind the scenes. You don;t have to do shit with it. All you need to know is that you have a bigger defense bonus. That's really it. You roll it, you compare to the damage DCs, and you take less damage than you did before.

Now as it happens, it takes about twice as many of the same hits to take you down if you have +6 more defense, and if you have +24 defense you aren't being hurt at all. So if you just give people +3 defense per level they'll just naturally scale to being about twice as tough per two levels and wading through dudes 8 levels below you is a cake walk - does that rubric sound at all familiar to you?

The CR system is based on logs, and if it is to be maintained, the damage system should be as well. Otherwise the damage system will rather quickly fall out of pace with the challenge of monsters. It doesn't take all that many kobolds with light crossbows to kill a 12th level paladin. At least, it doesn't take that many based on the fact that the paladin doesn't get any XP for any of them at all and a billion of those chuckleheads are considered a "non-challenging encounter".

Having creatures that don't give you XP inflict damage on you is basically pretty bad for the system.

---

Damage caps require level caps. If you want to impose level caps on D&D, go ahead. But that's got to be the least popular option I've seen paraded on this thread so far. "No worries, the system breaks down after level X, so we'll just ban your character when he hits level X+1!"

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1095715997[/unixtime]]
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.

Well the disadvantage to siege equipment should be that it's inaccurate, not that it can't kill someone on a personal scale. Up until you get high enough in level to actually survive an attack by a weapon of that scale, you shouldn't actually have to worry about one very much.

Basically a catapult aimed at a person instead of a structure or big monster would probably grant a reflex save and would just be treated as a normal save or die.

The problem with rifts, as I've heard about it, is that you've got some people walking around with megadamage attacks and others who don't have them. My system wouldn't do that, as by the time you get to mid levels, everyone is raised a tier of damage and hp, so it's merely power boost for everyone. Wizard's spells basically are doing the same amounts of damage, they're just doing it on a different tier. Fighters sword attacks are doing the same thing. And when tiers do intersect, the guy on the lower tier is doing a lot more damage. You may have a 3d8+5 attack on tier 3 versus 20 hit points tier 4, and scaled down the tier 3 attack would be doing around 3-4 damage on the tier 4 guy, or something like that.

Your defenses also go up in tiers as well, so you don't have to worry much about guys walking around with weapons that far exceed their toughness, unless you really wanted to do that, but you don't have to, and I certainly wouldn't recommend doing it. There may be some places where you want characters carrying truly deadly personal scale weapons for their level, like in a futuristic game, but then it'll also be up to you to create armor types that can deflect those kinds of attacks too.

[User3]

[begin kinda ranty, but relevant point]

Damage caps require level caps. If you want to impose level caps on D&D, go ahead. But that's got to be the least popular option I've seen paraded on this thread so far. "No worries, the system breaks down after level X, so we'll just ban your character when he hits level X+1!"

I don't think so.

How is saying: "a character of X level has a max damage per turn of Y" the same as level limits?

I mean, you are essentially saying that "you are not allowed to break our system, but you are allowed to do anything short of that."

The point where you let people be "the bestest at this one thing and a total parapelegic the rest of the time" is the point where your game is, by definition, unbalanced.

Building a level-based system where people are forced by basic design principles to live within the level system is not a bad thing.

The point where a charging paladin is doing a hundred points of damage every round and his equal level fighter companion is doing twenty, or the summoner with Summon Monster V is getting worked by the minions of the Lesser Planar Binding summoner, then that is the point where you have to admit that your system does not work.

-----
The summoner problem could be worked out if it was based off the Leadership feat, where the Summon Monster n summoner got to switch out his henchmen slot casting by casting from the monsters on the list, and the Planar Binding summoner did the same on a day per day basis from the same list, but with a slightly more powerful monster or with a slightly bigger, but still proscibed, list.

Both of those guys would have to be using monsters less powerful from the Leadership feat, so that then total range of power for "extra dudes" looked like, from most to least power: Leadership henchmen, forever until quest replacement > Planar B., per day > Summon Monster n, per casting.

However, the system we have is still has legacy crap from 2e, where there was no organization between similar mechanics, so that ideas of balance never entered the equation. 3e is more balanced simply because more mechanics were grouped under fewer mechanics, making comparisons of power actually possible.

The game becomes more fun when more options become available, not when options become available that break the game.

The fact that spell damage is seperate from weapon attack damage, or that spellcaster levels are seperate from fighter levels is just another legacy problem that failed us in the past and fails us now because different mechanics for doing the same things exist.

[/end kinda ranty, but relevant point]

[Username17]

How is saying: "a character of X level has a max damage per turn of Y" the same as level limits?

It's not. But the suggestion was for absolute hit point and damage caps, not scaling ones. And that is the same as level limits.

-Username17