healing and heroism: an Elenssar free thread

[ckafrica]

The question of "how do we mix injury, healing, and a sense of heroic timing?" is a good one but one that will not get us anywhere as long as Elenssar is participating in the discussion, so I thought it best to start this thread.

Personally, I want some kind of injury system that can be longer lasting injury that will affect the character. Being able to insta-heal all injuries save death after a battle trivializes the wear of tear of battle. But at the same time I don't want players so worn out and gimped by the final encounter that BBEG fuzzy bunny has demi-god characters quaking in their boots.

I really like the idea of encounter HP which auto heal after a reasonable short break (5-15 minutes). When those points are finished you suffer injuries which will be an inconvenience, but not a gimping. Healing of these injuries would be a more serious undertaking which can't simply be removed by a single round action.

Any other people's thoughts?

[Elennsar]

Yeah, because people like you are determined to be assholes and insulting. Because you'd rather say that I am a dumbfuck than deal with why someone would actually want to have an actual chance of character death that isn't somewhere <1% total.

So, in the words of someone whose name I forgot: Fuck you and fuck your attitude.

[Draco_Argentum]

I think Manxome mooted a good plan in the other thread but it got drowned out by the crap.

[ckafrica]

Elenssar: Here is just a sample from only 3 pages of a single thread which shows the pretty wide opinion which is held of your "contributions" to this topic

In other words, you want disposable characters and we do not. Thank you for playing.

You know what, I'm done with this thread. Elennsar's decided to ignore the entire fvcking point about how often 'heroism' happens and the fact that 4e's 150 fight minimum (or 3e's 200+) creates a situation where there's very little room for his Gygaxian slaughter in order to actually ever expect to see the entire game with one character.

Elennsar needs to remember that we're simulating Conan here, not Call of Cthulhu. The goal of Sword and Sorcery heroic fantasy is not to kill off the heroes even remotely regularly. When a hero dies, it's a rare and major event.

Elennsar seems to want a string of bodies turning up and for heroes to be totally expendable.

I have an idea, if someone other than Elennsar wants to argue that heroism requires mechanically risky choices speak up. Otherwise lets all just assume that this is another argument where there is no intelligent dissent, just a massive spam wall from the spam king.

What you want is for people to consider taking risks as a benefit. You want people to do things because they are risky. With no other benefits that are perceivable. That's... retarded. In almost every case, players who actually do that are considered disruptive. You're seriously talking about players who drop fireballs into melee here.

-Username17

But insisting that both player and character take actions that result almost certainly in death makes neither player nor character a hero, just a fool.

Note that the heroes in the source material are not heroes by Elennsar's definition. They are definitely going to succeed so they are not fighting against odds. This is Lago's entire point and he is right. In a novel the outcome is determined by the author. In an rpg its the mechanics plus player choice. If the mechanics don't make success overwhelmingly likely then the heroes don't succeed. Simple as that.

I don't see how repeating the same thing, over and over, is actually contributive like you always think you are; especially when you're almost every other post on this thread for the last couple pages.

We get the point. You think perceived risk for characters should be actual risk, and they must be hero characters.

Now that we got that point, maybe you should get ours, that we consider you horribly wrong. Perceived character risk should not be actual risk, using many of the options given here to at least maintain the illusion.

Lago wants the stark realities of the gaming system in your face, and you want a Gygaxian pile of dead stupid people.

You've been measured and judged wanting.

So please stay out of this thread. Tell me to stay of any thread you start no problem but stay out of mine.

[ckafrica]

I think Manxome mooted a good plan in the other thread but it got drowned out by the crap.

Yeah it sounded similar to 7th Sea (though 7th sea you don't have hit points, you keep track of the damage you've taken and roll your "constitution" against the total damage). What would you say are acceptable injuries that aren't insignificant yet not crippling either.

[Elennsar]

No, I've been insulted by people who think "OMG! Actual risk! Actual risk! We might lose a character, and break our perfect never-had-anyone-die-in-our-campaigns!" is a horrific thought.

Since you don't want to have any actual risk, you should just say that characters who are in danger of dying (enough hit points to drop below 0 in one average attack) regain 90% hit points (or even 100%).

There, now characters are nice and immortal. Maybe bosses have a way that on a natural 20 they can prevent this, in which case characters only go to 50%.

If you don't want that, then find some way to get used to the fact an actual chance of dying (without resurrection, which does not count for purposes of this point...if you can be raised, you didn't lose the character) means you may lose a character.

[ckafrica]

STAY THE FUCK OUT OF MY THREAD!!!!!!!!!!

[Elennsar]

Not unless it violates the code of conduct to post in it.

If it does, I will stop. If not, too fucking bad for you.

[ZER0]

Now now children, play nice.

[TavishArtair]

This thread will only serve its purpose (as stated in the original post) if everyone actually ignores what Elenssar posts. In spirit of that wish, I will proceed to do just that.

Someone said something like "Healers should heal fatal conditions, not mere HP" and I actually think this works pretty well. If you assume HP are just restored every scene or something, then we're probably good. Now HP become a resource you take in lieu of something that would actually hinder you and are restored often enough and in a rapid enough fashion. You can adjust the amount to taste, but actual healing is to restore conditions.. i.e. what happens after you lose your HP.

Thus we're in a situation where, instead of having to shuffle back to town to get raise dead cast, we're shuffling back to town to heal a gaping wound in our gut. Or at least, we are if we don't have a cleric on-hand. Since "gaping wound in body" replaces "dead" as the penalty for failure, making fixing it uncommon, that is, restricted to priests or some other specific healing skill, can be done without having a significant problem if the PCs don't have that archetype in particular. Hopefully they can manage their HP well enough that the situation doesn't arise. Equally presumably, though, they might have some kind of limited resources even so against such kind of injury and mishap, i.e. in the form of healing potions and medicine kits, but those would be presumably rarer and less efficacious.

Depending on the system you prefer it could be measured in terms of resources, or in terms of DC of fixing the problem, with "return to town" either being a way to restock your resources on bypassing wounds to full or a way to get enough space to take 20 and fix the problem with the benefit of, essentially, intensive care. Also dependent, this would mean that you could simply fling yourself at the "boss" even if you had no way to heal any of the injuries you would inevitably receive, since you are capable of backing out with horrible injuries now that you have defeated all obstacles (hopefully).

This might indicate a system design where running out of HP (and getting it back) is a significantly more common event, since it isn't automatically character death.

[ckafrica]

TA: I think you could have a combat healing to help players stay on their feet (though it would have to do that, none of this d8 hp bullshit), but yeah real healing should be for real wounds that have real effects on you. It should not be something you do between rooms while you're walking. Perhaps all serious healing would be similar to 4e rituals that take up extended time and/or resources.

But that still leaves what does it mean to have an injury? I think it's generally held that WHFRPG style crit charts is not what we really want. Do you have location specific injuries? Should they just cause a numerical penalty or a action restricting?

[Bigode]

Kinda skimmed the last page, so forgive me if this isn't totally on-target...

Lago, you seem to be assuming that the climax battle must be calibrated such that you have a significant risk of defeat even if you're in perfect condition, and all the battles leading up to it must be calibrated so that you have a significant risk of death, and that the difference between doing well and doing poorly is based mostly on random chance. I don't see why any of those should be the case.

I can easily imagine a campaign set-up where the lead-up fights against the castle guards are all guaranteed "victories," because you're just that badass, but the challenge is to avoid taking any serious injuries or expending significant resources in the process of winning. If you fight ten guards, slaughter them to a man, but get stabbed in the gut in the process, then you "lost" that combat, even through from a narrative perspective you won and you're still chugging along nicely.

Then, at the end of the campaign, there's a climax battle where you seriously might die. The more encounters you "lost" up to this point, the harder it will be to avoid dying, but you've always got a fair chance (either because the worst combination of prior outcomes is only so bad, or because the DM would have ended the campaign prematurely if you were an irredeemable screw-up). How well you did in all the previous battles combines with how well you do in this battle to decide whether you win the campaign; since your previous "wins" and "losses" affect your initial standing in this fight, the outcome is really a measure of how well you played the entire campaign, rather than whether you made good or bad decisions in the last 15 minutes. In this case, when you lose the combat, you die, rather than taking a wound and moving on, but that's because the BBEG is vastly more dangerous than a handful of guards--if the final fight was another handful of guards, there'd be no real risk of losing.

You don't heal all your wounds before the final fight because you can't. There's a time limit, or the king will only order his priests to cast the necessary spells if you win, or there's just a mechanic that says that those wounds cannot be healed by any means prior to the end of the adventure. No shortage of options there.

And if the system is well-designed to support tactical play, the difference between "winning" and "losing" all the encounters should be based primarily on how clever you are, how well you plan, and how well you work as a team, not simply on whether you roll high or low. There are various valid reasons to have more or less randomness in various games, but if your mental image involves more randomness than you're comfortable with, that means that you should reduce the impact of the random factors compared to the skill factors, not that the entire approach must be inherently unworkable.

This hypothetical arrangement does NOT:

• Require that the fight with the BBEG be easier than the guards at the entrance
• Guarantee that the heroes that press on to the end will all die horribly
• Require players to make objectively bad OOC decisions
• Eliminate meaningful risk from any encounter
• Require that the outcome of the campaign basically comes down to blind luck

Now, this whole get-up may not be what everyone prefers to play. You may want to play a bunch of small combats that have nothing in particular to do with each other (at least strategically), and that's a valid game, too. But the fact that you happen to prefer that doesn't mean that the other option is unworkable.

If you see some obvious reason that no game could possibly function in the manner I've outlined, please point it out for me.

Indeed, a fail-free post.

Remember: the burden of keeping this thread Elennsar-free's on you, poster - some kinds of people just aren't held responsible for their acts. The Ignore function's in your head.

[ckafrica]

I think it's alright to possibly lose a non BBEG encounter, but they should all be beatable, and preferably without too much difficulty (though that should depend on tactics used).

Perhaps we could give out action/drama/judge/whatever points depending on how well the battle was executed. These would then naturally make future encounters easier if the prior ones are executed well. It might become a little adhoc though.

It still begs the question of what should it mean to be injured?

[Calibron]

Stop being so childish Elennsar, don't go where you're obviously not welcome.

[Elennsar]

The issue is the people who are being "I can't be civil when disagreeing with people." dicks.

Its not good enough to express "I disagree because the kind of game you want to play is too dangerous for me."

No, someone has to be a loser and a dumbfuck and a moron and whatever other insults can be conjured up for actually wanting characters to be in danger instead of being too stupid to recognize that they can be far more reckless than any (in setting) human being supposedly has a right to be and not be killed.

"The dragon has killed hundreds of knights before you!" "But they were NPCs, they don't count." might make a hillarious OOTS, but its a bit silly.

[Username17]

Making posts about how you should make posts is childish trolling.

---

Given the long nature of an RPG campaign, carrying any noticeable chance of death basically translates into character expendability over the long haul. And if you're attempting to tell a story like Game of Thrones, where characters really do get weeded out at some quite perceptible rate only to thrust other characters to the fore - that's fine. If you're trying to tell the Epic of Name, where the word Name is replaced by some actual character whose story is being told, then that's obviously completely unacceptable.

Assuming for the moment that we are attempting to tell the story of some heroes, rather than for example the story of a faction that uses champions like ammunition or toilet paper to move forward its agenda, then the system has to assume a player death rate of essentially nothing. which in turn means that players have to pretty much be invulnerable so long as players act within the game's assumptions (ie.: the game need not allow people to literally swim in lava). The challenge then is to create a system by which the players have some challenge to oppose them.

The obvious of course is Death Margins. Characters can drop over and over again without "really dying." I don't like it, because it creates a situation in which the winners end up throat slitting the losers. Bad guys never get away, and it ultimately just makes it so that one team all lives and the other all dies. That's unfortunate.



What I'd rather see is a situation where people tend to not even go down, let alone die in battle. The best method for that would be to encourage retreating. This is best methods for this fall into two categories:

• Loss of offensive potential due to damage before loss of movement ability.
• Threat of response by guards from other areas going up before battles actually conclude.

Basically, if the assumption is that failing to push through the current orcish guards in a timely fashion by itself forces you to retreat, then people will retreat based merely on offensive failure, which in turn means that people can escape from battles with their heads. So a system that assumes that you're trying to break into the dungeon or tower and accomplish a thing, rather than personally fighting the entire enemy army- that failure can be real, even likely without characters dying all the time.

-Username17

[Orion]

Elennsar --

This is absolutely the last response you get out of me unless you learn some civility.

It's not wrong for you want a different style of play. It's not wrong to advocate that style of play.

*THIS* thread is not about preferred play styles. It's not about choosing a playstyle. It's about low-risk heroism. If you have no interest in that kind of game, you have no business in this thread.

[virgil]

Damn, go to sleep with an idea/plan on bringing up the fact/problem in D&D where loss of effective fighting also means loss of effective retreat (no margin, especially) being the source of death; and I awake to a thread titled with hope and Frank much more eloquently stating my idea (on my behalf! ...or something...).

To recover Manxome's idea, that would recover some kind of wound system, I would think. Not the VP/WP base system, for certain, because of the critical strike problem or whatnot. For ease of conversion, what if you do something like cut HP in half? Half the HP is recoverable very easily with rest and magic, as normal. The other half takes significant effort to heal and can't just be CLW. All damage goes to the recoverable half first, once that goes away, you start suffering on the tough-to-heal half.

This would mean 'easy' fights are ones where you never lose more than half your HP, and the resource loss is minimal-at-worst. Now, I'm not sure whether it should just be a division of base HP, let alone a precisely half one; it's also ideally something you append to 3e ideally without having to redo the entire system.

As for Frank's fight-before-flight death system, any ideas?

[Caedrus]

To recover Manxome's idea, that would recover some kind of wound system, I would think. Not the VP/WP base system, for certain, because of the critical strike problem or whatnot. For ease of conversion, what if you do something like cut HP in half? Half the HP is recoverable very easily with rest and magic, as normal. The other half takes significant effort to heal and can't just be CLW. All damage goes to the recoverable half first, once that goes away, you start suffering on the tough-to-heal half.

What do you think of the Spycraft 2.0 VP/WP system?

[name_here]

Another important method for encouraging retreating is some way of keeping the people you're fighting from just running you down and hacking stragglers to bits.

[virgil]

Never touched Spycraft, so I have no idea what its rules are about.

[bosssmiley]

The Rambling Bumblers blog has an interesting article here on HP as abstraction for 'state of combat readiness' which seems more than a little influenced by the Wound/Vitality variant.

Relevant portion quoted below:

...in general Hit Points represent that state of combat readiness that makes the veteran soldier able to react almost instinctively to avoid all the hazards that kill the green soldiers so easily, including not just reflexes, but awareness of surrounding, mental toughness so as not to hesitate in the slightest, physical conditioning, economy of motion, and so forth. Damage, in this view, is primarily not actual wounds but the kind of accumulated fatigue and minor injuries and strains that require not just a night’s sleep to restore but days or weeks of R&R. Only that very first hit die represents real, sustained damage to your body...

[ckafrica]

Frank: the lobsters would be really be awesome if they weren't babies.

You need ones like this


Back on point:

So does being hurt have to mean something mechanically? McClane seems to be hurt and then not hurt pretty quick, it's often hard to tell how hurt he is. Or do we want to be able to have a Wesley (Princess Bride) where he could be seriously impaired yet still part of the story?

Caedrus: I'm assuming the work with VP being for regular hits and WP are for crits and when VP run out. If so problem is that you either get a crit and get an insta-kill or you wear them down and it's an insta kill/ exactly the same as a normal HP.

The Maxome/7th Sea idea is (as I understand it) once you take X amount you are wounded. When you take X again, you are wounded again; getting wounded may or may not reset X.

Which brings me back to my biggest question, which is what should it mean to be injured?
Is it just an alternative to counting HP?
Is it a penalty to the character until it's healed?
Is it a DM bonus they get to apply to make the PCs lives more difficult?
Is it something completely different?

[Caedrus]

Caedrus: I'm assuming the work with VP being for regular hits and WP are for crits and when VP run out. If so problem is that you either get a crit and get an insta-kill or you wear them down and it's an insta kill/ exactly the same as a normal HP.

Spycraft does not work that way, no. In fact, most enemies are not even capable of critting, because you need to use the equivalent of Action Points to activate a crit threat.

Also,

[baduin]

A somewhat realistic suggestion: as long as you are in the heat of battle, you don't feel your wounds, and receive no or only minimal combat penalties. But as soon as you end fight, your adrenalin goes down and your wounds cool, the penalties kick in. The healing time should be realistic - months at least.

Most healing spells shouldn't shorten long-term healing, but only stop you from suffering wound penalties, and from dying. Eg normally you are disabled after 3 wounds, but with combat healing you can keep going even with say up to 6 wounds, and suffer no penalties.

This way, if your maximum (with combat healing) is 6 wounds, and you begin the final combat with 5 wounds, you know that it will be difficult to win, and that it would be better to withdraw.

To permanently heal one wound you need a month, and combat healing doesn't shorten this time.

If you receive more than the maximal number of wounds, you are disabled - able to slowly move, but not to attack. For the unpractical players who dislike the idea of coup de grace, I would introduce the rule that anyone disabled dies after about 1 minute if not stabilized. Typical opponents should not be able to stabilize themselves.

I assume some kind of damage rolls system as in True20 or here

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48593

, but a version of that should work with Frank Trollman's damage rules from Warp Cult.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49189