Does bounded damage and HP with unbounded accuracy fit D&D ?

[Josh_Kablack]

By bounded damage and Hit Points, I mean that damage dealt by attacks and the health of PCs and monsters does not increase in a way that is correlated with level. A first level character with str N swinging a +X longsword deals the same damage as a 10th level with str N character swinging a +X longsword. Conversely, a 10th level character can only survive the same 1-3 longsword hits that a first level character can.

By unbounded accuracy, I mean that to hit and bonuses and AC numbers explicitly increase by level, and that the scaling by level is the largest component of those increases. Thus a 1st level character is highly unlikely to be able to hit a 10th level character and highly likely to be hit by every attack from a 10th level character.

I also make the assumption that designers and authors can stick to these principals and not break them with splatbook power creep. I know this assumption is unlikely to hold true, as a 10th level character will likely have more chances to have a better +X longsword or have quaffed a tome of cheesing Strength bonus and the like, but for purposes of initial concept discussion I want to assume that there's not even such indirect correlation of damage to level.

Thus a higher level character fighting a large number of low level opponents is gonna look like the hero in an American action movie - they can walk through a hail of bullets that just-about-never hit them while each of their shots knocks a mook off a balcony. And when the real villan shows up, he can shoot the hero with a grievous wound.

Thus the amount of math performed in a game session is smaller and focused on greater than / less than comparisons to AC. The math performed at level-up is focused on single digit additions to AC and to-hit This contrasts sharply with the complexity involved in scaling bonus by BAB (aka Level/2), Stat(which increases by +1/2 every 4 levels if it's a primary stat, or more if you have an Enhancement Bonus to that stat) Enhancement (which increases by +1 every 3,4 or 5 levels depending on magic and equipment assumptions), and Bullshit (power, inherent, unnamed) and also scaling damage by Stat + Enhancement + Feat + Optional Secondary Stat + Sneak Attack + Tier + Elemental Add + Additional bullshit.

Thus you do end up with the problem of horde enemies who only hit on a natural 20 and therefore enemy turns take a problematic amount of realtime to resolve - however if damage and health don't scale, then each of those Nat 20 hits is a serious concern to the PCs which necessitates tactical withdrawal and/or application of combat healing rather than a scratch to be laughed off as the meaningless combat is endured.

But my overall question is, whether this sort of design setup is likely to produce something that would *feel* like D&D? And as a related subpoint, would it *feel* more like D&D than the "bounded accuracy, unbounded damage" model that the current *feel* obsessed D&D next developers keep carping about?

[infected slut princess]

I do not believe it does.

Because if we are talking about D&D, it must model confrontations with everything from pathetic orcs to god-like great wyrms.

It is unacceptable from a "feel" standpoint that a mob of orcs and get a few lucky natural 20's and defeat a great wyrm.

D&D also needs to enable the story of "few against the many", the few being the PCs and the many being 100's of crappy low-level enemies that get cut down and blasted apart by the dozens. But those 100's of crappy low-level enemies will be too dangerous if accuracy is unbounded and hp/dmg bounded.

I believe this is what "unbounded accuracy / bounded dmg/hp" would entail.

I think both should be "unbounded". Your accuracy, defense, damage, and HP should all rise with level. I believe only this is consistent with the stories people want to tell with D&D.

[Voss]

By bounded damage and Hit Points, I mean that damage dealt by attacks and the health of PCs and monsters does not increase in a way that is correlated with level. A first level character with str N swinging a +X longsword deals the same damage as a 10th level with str N character swinging a +X longsword. Conversely, a 10th level character can only survive the same 1-3 longsword hits that a first level character can.

By unbounded accuracy, I mean that to hit and bonuses and AC numbers explicitly increase by level, and that the scaling by level is the largest component of those increases. Thus a 1st level character is highly unlikely to be able to hit a 10th level character and highly likely to be hit by every attack from a 10th level character.

Of course it fits D&D. Several editions of D&D did most of that (except the 1-3 longsword swings, but I don't think this new edition will do that either). That was the whole thing with the fighter in 1e and 2e- no stat improvements, no bonuses (except specialization after unearthed arcana, which... +1 to hit and +2 damage? whatever). Eventually you got multiple attacks, but stabbing people never, ever changed unless you found a girdle or a pair of gauntlets.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well in 1e and 2e, damage was close to bounded (with the exceptions of spell damage, specialization, multiple attacks and the increased likelihood of magic weapons ), but HP totally were not. They had a slower accumulation rate than in 3e/4e, but you still added a hit die per level (up to 9th) and a small static increase above that. In that model a 1st level character is at a real risk of dying from a good sword hit from another 1st level character, but a 10th level character swordfighting another 10th level character needs to land something like 10 sword hits to take the other guy down.

[hogarth]

Well in 1e and 2e, damage was close to bounded (with the exceptions of spell damage, specialization, multiple attacks and the increased likelihood of magic weapons ), but HP totally were not. They had a slower accumulation rate than in 3e/4e, but you still added a hit die per level (up to 9th) and a small static increase above that.

And for extra fun, in 1E different classes hit the "static increase" point at different times. For instance, druids got d8 hit dice up to level 15 and bards could get a theoretical maximum of 8d10+23d6 hit points (or something ridiculous like that)!

[Voss]

@ JK

And while they may change it, it seems to be leaning that way for 5e. The playtest characters got a slightly modified hit die roll (reroll low numbers if you bothered to have a con score), but no bonuses at each level. If they do reduce hit points, it will probably be the flat con score bonus at level one, leaving essentially (level)d(class hit die), so a level 1 fighter would have 1d12 hp, and a level 10 10d12. They may cap it, or adjust it some other way, but the current model is essentially characters can survive an extra longsword hit every 2-3 levels or so. Which is why it feels similar to the 1e model to me. Adjusted, but fundamentally similar.

Of course, we have no real idea why high level monsters will actually look like, but I suspect the designers don't either.

[Blicero]

Mathematically, I think this is a viable system. But I don't know if it would be actually fun to play.

In my experience, players would much rather hit an enemy for a small portion of that enemy's health than outright miss with a more damaging effect.

Now, there is clearly a limit to this behavior. If your attack would KO an opponent in one or two hits, then the risky attack becomes more enjoyable to use. Ex: SoDs in 3e.

But, in situations where the two options would be mathematically equivalent, I think that knowing that your attack did "something" at least is more rewarding. It's probably an irrational thing, but it's something I've consistently noticed in play.

For this reason, I can't see a leveled system where accuracy is unbounded and damage and hp are static being especially enjoyable. And this is mildly unfortunate, because the system Josh is suggesting would be extendable for a much greater range before becoming numerically too large to deal with.

Logarithmic damage scales or a CAN system can also solve this problem without extreme numerical inflation, but they can be difficult to implement.

[Ice9]

I agree on preferring semi-consistent damage to potential spikes, even if it averages the same. Also, it makes things more random/spiky the higher level you go - which is not, IMO, desirable.

And it falls down on the high end. If PCs are initially supposed to take 2-3 hits (4-6 swings) to drop a Gnoll, then rising attack bonus could improve that to 2-3 swings (hitting all the time), but never to a one-hit kill - which should be eventually a thing that happens.

Now if keeping HP numbers unchanging is what you care about, you could accomplish that by adding Soak. The damage numbers will still be rising though.

[CCarter]

I agree on preferring semi-consistent damage to potential spikes, even if it averages the same. Also, it makes things more random/spiky the higher level you go - which is not, IMO, desirable.

And it falls down on the high end. If PCs are initially supposed to take 2-3 hits (4-6 swings) to drop a Gnoll, then rising attack bonus could improve that to 2-3 swings (hitting all the time), but never to a one-hit kill - which should be eventually a thing that happens.

Now if keeping HP numbers unchanging is what you care about, you could accomplish that by adding Soak. The damage numbers will still be rising though.

I think a system can work around that by having bounded HPs but with damage increasing to low-level opponents based off how much an attack roll is made by, or via special abilities with associated attack penalties like Power Attack. Or there's CAN.
[we can argue about whether that would still count as 'bounded' though, I guess].

In terms of the OP question though: duplicating 'D&D' in this system is tricky since high-level spells and big monsters should both do a tonne of damage. Unbounded attack/bounded HPs is more the Runequest model where dragons and behemoths are 'superhuman', rather than high-level.

[OgreBattle]

Yes

I think many people play D&D that way because they dont go past level 9



if you had a working tier system, it would be sensible.

[kzt]

The "bounded" option is how Gurps, RQ, etc work. Every PC is vulnerable to being incapacitated or killed by a single good hit, as are most of the adversaries. PCs and foes however get better at blocking/stopping attacks over time, and acquire tools (magic, armor, etc) to absorb damage.

[TarkisFlux]

It's a potentially functional system (depending largely on the details), but it runs into weird leveling issues. Evocations, as an example that you probably couldn't cut without changing the feel too much, don't have much room to scale in terms of damage. You can just keep them all the same damage and scale them in other ways (size, range, rider effects, DCs, etc.), but they feel very samey and you have a smaller reason to use a higher level effect in place of a lower level one. And everything that depends on damage has a similar problem, because there's nowhere for damage to go as you level.

[Wrathzog]

I think it works fine on the assumption that power creep never gets involved but I'd throw in the following changes:

Take out Nat-20 auto hits. People seem to think that this would be an issue. Easy solution: Take it out.
Add in Cumulative Penalties to Defense for taking multiple attacks in a round (a la WoD). Swarms of low level dudes are still a potential hazard but in a manner that's predictable. Downside is some bookkeeping, but I view that as being manageable.

As far as FEELING like D&D... man, I don't know.

[Josh_Kablack]

Yeah, I think Nat 20s need to give way to open-ended rolls or something and crits would likely need to be handled as some sort of "if you hit by at least N" you deal double damage or some other alternative to nat 20s

You probably would also want to tweak it to have either monster asymmetry ( where behemoths take scores of spear hits to take down ) or a just a bit of indirect scaling to damage and HP to allow one-hit mook KOs and gives PCs with more player time and investment in them greater survivability against random death. You probably could keep that tight enough so that the 10th level character only deals like twice to triple the damage and has twice to triple the HP of the 1st level character instead of the classic assumption that the 10th level character will have more than 10x the HP of the 1st level char.

[sabs]

4th edition has criticals be : You do max damage. Which is, I dunno. It means that rolling max damage is basically a ghetto crit. Which makes criting.. seem less awesome.

[Josh_Kablack]

You obviously read, but never played 4e.

The way you describe it is "Hey Eric, just assume all your dice deal maximum damage and then add them to your bonuses" That may not be exciting, but it actually resolves at the table.

The actual procedure is "Hey Eric, how many [w]s in the attack?, Do you have Sneak Attack and/or Hunter's Quarry? Is it a high crit weapon? What's the enhancement bonus? Okay what type of magic weapon/implement is it? No, you alreayd told me the enhancment bonus, I need to know the *type* of magic, not the number. Why the fuck isn't that written down on your sheet? Who made Eric's char sheet? Okay, is that from PHB 2, Ad Vault or Ad Vault 2?" That's not exciting nor resolvable at the table -- that's frustrating and confusing.

And I'm not even kidding there. The Real True Rules they don't tell you up front are that in 4e a critical hit Maximiazes the dice rolled for [w]s in the power used, maximize the dice for Hunter's Quarry and/or Sneak Attack, then roll without maximizing another die for High Crit, then roll without maximizing a number of dice of size determined by the magic property attached equal to the enhancement bonus of the weapon or implement used in the attack. Except, sometimes you don't because like 20% of magic weapon / implement abilities after the PHB have critical effects other than adding extra damage dice.

[Stubbazubba]

I agree that if you replace nat 20 crits with 'beat AC by X/2X, roll damage 2x/3x, etc.' crits that solves a lot of the problems, and yeah, I would make HP and damage scale just enough so that a small number of soft tiers appear. That combined with penalties for taking on too many guys in a single round, and I'd say that's a game I'd like to play. Feel like D&D? I'm not entirely sure, but I don't really know what would feel like D&D to me anyway.

[Chamomile]

D&D feels like squeezing fun out of a rag. "Feels like D&D" is never really going to be a design goal for me. More like "feels like what D&D promised but was too much of a slog to deliver." That would be cool.

[TarkisFlux]

The crit adjustments sound a lot like something I wrote up a while ago Josh. I'll just quote myself from here in case you find it useful -

I've been toying with a fixed(ish) hit point total and a measured success damage boost on and off for a while now, and so far it seems to give you the things you want without suffering standard problems. It's similar to your fixed hp, variable AC and DR setup, just with varying damage instead of DR.

The plan is to give you a hit die that's comparable to weapon damage dice in size, so the 3.5e dnd hit dice and weapons are a fair point of comparison. Then we give you 4 of them at level 1 (plus some attribute modifier if there is a comparable attribute modifier to weapon damage for parity). And you get 1 hp (yes, 1 hp, no more rolling) per level that adds on to that randomish pool of starting hp. From there we say you have your defense bonus is equal to you attack bonus (armor needs to do something else in this setup, TBD). You now have a level appropriate attack and defense numbers, assuming reasonable attribute policies for attack and defense bonuses are in place.

When you roll to hit, if you hit by 10+ you deal 4x damage. If you hit by 5+ you deal 2x damage. If you hit by less than that you get regular damage. Crits are otherwise nonexistent (and this means that weapon differentiation will need to happen some other way, also TBD). So you get to swat down mooks fair easily since you hit them by a lot more than they hit you, and you just take bigger hits from guys higher level than you. And the single hp growth with level allows magic damage bonuses / properties to live in the system without breaking stuff (though attack bonuses would need to be separate things or just go away).

The measured success damage bonuses make it such that fights don't generally go longer than 4 rounds, cause padded sumo is retarded and overly swingy isn't that great either. It also generally fits with the standard power curve since 2 guys are a damage match for 1 guy 2 levels higher, 4 guys are a damage match for a guy 4 levels higher, and 8 guys are a damage match for a guy 6 levels higher, and then it starts to break down which is fine because no one cares if you one-shot tons of guys 8 levels lower than you (in these systems anyway). It also breaks down when multiple attacks get added into it. It handles called shots well enough though, just take a -8 penalty and if you hit you deal 4x damage (with limits on when you can even do this).

[Username17]

In answer to the original question: yes. If hit points and damage were reasonably static, but being higher level made you unhittable and larger groups could take "volley" actions that gave them large to-hit bonuses at the cost of attacking each enemy in the area only once, that would indeed work out.

Mike Mearls would be totally uncomfortable with the amount of to-hit bonuses and defense bonuses you'd need to hand out to make that shit work, but it would work.

What you'd probably actually want to do is to scale hit points and damage some (but less than 4e) and scale attacks and defenses some (but considerably more than 4e).

-Username17

[codeGlaze]

Isn't the static HP similar to what Vitality/Wounds attempted to replicate? A more mortal PC, while still allowing for heroic toughness?

I, personally, like the idea of being able to run a game where the PCs are still 'mortal' underneath all their armor, feats, skills, weapons and magic. People who are liable to be laid low when caught unaware and unprotected. Which I think is where you're sort of going with this premise, no?

On one hand you're an epic hero, but on the other it can still be made quite clear that you're very very mortal.
Would a Vitality/Wounds system play better in allowing for toughness while still allowing for that statistical end result you want to achieve?

[tussock]

I'd say no. Not at all.

You'd have a great wyrm dragon who took 2-3 hits to kill a peasant, and also 2-3 hits to kill a great hero, and the same to kill a near-epic old master of dragon-slaying. All of those tiny humans get some random number of critical hits and any five of them can slay a great wyrm by pure chance because it takes the dragon so many rounds to kill any of them.

High level monsters need to be both hard to hit and hard to kill when you do hit them. Same for high level characters. Inflated hit points are there to make your defence reliable. The damage just gets inflated to stop it being too slow to kill them. Even in plain AD&D you go from 1d8+1 once per round vs Orcs up to 1d12+11 twice.5 per round vs big guys, eight times as high.

[MfA]

I know I'm alone in this ... but I think AoE damage spells should do D6 per CL damage with save for half, if that means hitpoint/damage inflation so be it.

ps. what is wrong with called shots for crits? (With the MM giving crit areas for each species, maybe giving some parts more "vitality" points and/or allow some scaling per level.) New players always want to shoot out beholder eyes after all.

[Josh_Kablack]

You'd have a great wyrm dragon who took 2-3 hits to kill a peasant, and also 2-3 hits to kill a great hero, and the same to kill a near-epic old master of dragon-slaying. All of those tiny humans get some random number of critical hits and any five of them can slay a great wyrm by pure chance because it takes the dragon so many rounds to kill any of them.

In a tightly bounded system as presented in my first post the great wyrm kills the peasant in 2-3 hits, but on average that takes it only 2-3 attacks; the great wyrm kills the hero in 2-3 hits which on average take 4-6 attacks; and the great wyrm kills the near-epic dragonslayer in 2-3 hits, which on average take 40-60 rounds.

Yes if you do keep natural 20s as auto-hits, combined with tightly bounded HP then a large enough force of tiny humans can kill anything provided that

• they can all get attacks (they aren't limited by space/reach or missile deflection abilities), AND
• the target has no access to healing abilities (like fast healing, regeneration, and cure) AND
• the target has no sort of damage reduction or negation abilties (like Damage Reduction, parrying, temporary HP, Energy Resistance, attack redirection, etc) AND
• the target does not have movement, retreat, or withdrawal type abilities that allow it to avoid unfavorable engagements

Now even if such a system is fleshed out so that all of the above attain, the 5 serfs will kill a dragon on crit hits example because it takes the dragon too long to kill each of them example contains yet another assumption - namely that the dragon takes 2-3 rounds to kill each individual human so that a group of 5 humans will get to make 45 or more attacks against it before it drops them. Even within tightly bounded damage and maintaining all of the above assumptions, that only happens if the dragon has no access to Area of Effect or multitarget attacks. If the dragon can let's say, i dunno maybe breathe fire and hit all five of those dudes at once, then it drops them in 3 rounds and the wyrm only suffers 15 attacks. Meaning that while 5 serfs can kill it due to random chance, their odds of doing so are not good.

Thus either any such system has to be designed EITHER with the intent that 5-on-1 fights can go either way regardless of the relative levels of the combatants OR so that some of the above assumptions do no attain. (which is the direction I was already suggesting in previous posts)

[...You Lost Me]

See, with this kind of system, a dude can't hit the ground at terminal velocity, and then stand up and walk away. It's just not as cool.

So in a fantasy game, I don't think this is a good thing. But somebody like Captain America actually seems to run on high to-hit/defense and low HP.