Let's discuss HP, damage, and healing!

HP are often a luck-bar in my 5e games at least. You're either scratched up but with nothing serious (>0 hp) or the last hit knocked you the fuck out (0 hp) and death saves will determine how bad exactly you got fucked up (not lethally or lethally).

Maybe they could be done right, but I've never experienced it. They've resulted in nothing but death spirals, turning battle into either a breeze or a trudge toward inevitable doom depending on who got the first hit in.

I'm a fan of Ironclaw's damage rules. While there are penalties for being injured, your character can still do useful stuff until you're dying/dead. If you're reeling, you're just taking more damage until your next turn, when lose one of your two actions and then act normally. If you're afraid, you can still do everything that isn't attacking the enemy. You can still rally your allies, removing afraid/reeling from them. You can still stand in the way so your enemies can't get to your allies.

You can run and hide, which clears afraid. Allowing you to then run back into battle.

Nechronica's HP system is a thing of beauty. The vast majority of your actions are tied to parts, which are spread out over four different hit locations: the Head, the Arms, the Torso, and the Legs. Every point of damage you take means you have to break a part in the affected hit location. So every single point of damage is whittling away your combat options, slowly but surely, as you run out of less important parts to break and get closer to losing your core actions. When you run out of Leg parts, you'll be nearly immobile. If you run out of Arm parts, you're probably pretty much out of any notable attacks.

Now while you can regenerate parts mid-fight, usually if you are doing that you've specialized into it. The majority of healing comes out of combat, when the fight is over. Based on any regeneration boosting parts/abilities you have, the difficulty of the fight, and maybe how generous the GM is feeling, you get a certain number of parts to repair with. From this pool you can decide who needs what back the most, and restore those lost actions once again. Maybe it's enough to bring everyone back to full fighting form, or perhaps you'll have to decide what to do without.

All in all, it pretty much perfectly captures the feel of undead being ripped apart and then piecing themselves back together that the game wishes to evoke.

>All in all, it pretty much perfectly captures the feel of undead being ripped apart and then piecing themselves back together that the game wishes to evoke.

It sounds like it does. It also sounds like it wouldn't work for other games because of the feel it creates.

Which means I'm as close to liking it as I can be without directly experiencing it.

You are, unfortunately, by and large correct. You could use the system for something dealing with robots or mecha, but that's about it. It really is hard to transplant it elsewhere.

>unfortunately
I view that as a good thing. Game mechanics should be tailored to produce the feel that the game designers want players to experience.

Being unable to transfer such mechanics to other campaigns is a typical side effect of getting the mechanics right. Just like how Dread's Jenga tower mechanics only work for a very small range of games.

That's a fair point user. It is that precision in what it evokes that makes me love it that much. Perhaps it's not so sad after all, even if I do wish more people could get something out of it.

It's the details of a system that only work for a specific setting and/or type of campaign that make me really like a system.

I like both GURPS/TRoS style where one hit is highly devastating and might mean the end of the fight for you (keeps things quick and every decision meaningful) and old school dnd where your HP whittles away at a steady rate and it feels like you are trying to beat a stopwatch.

I didn't like Runequests way of doing it where every limb had a minuscule amount of HP but only humanoids had the active defenses to avoid a hit. It made "guy with a shield and a spear" the most dangerous entity in the game while a fucking manticore was a joke enemy. It's funny how similar it was to GURPS, yet it created very different results.

Oh and I don't like the bloated health of later editions of dnd where the game stopped being a stopwatch game and it turned into rocket tag instead (because the bloated HP leads to a meta where you try to ignore HP all together).

>Let's discuss HP, damage, and healing!
I got into an argument about HP a while ago, where at first I thought D&D's increase over time was if not great, at least serviceable, but I realized that whether straight up "meat points" or "meat points+luck-of-not-getting-hit -as-bad points" the fact that low level healing spells that heal a specific number of hit points makes no sense in D&D's system of ever increasing Hit Points, and are probably the single biggest question mark of the system.

If HP is just "meat points", or a measure of vitality, then there's no reason for healing spells to do less as a percentage of it as the player gets more of this vitality.

If HP has a luck element, and 6 HP of damage means a more serious wound on a low level character, but codes to a scratch on a high level one, it still doesn't make sense, because why wouldn't a spell that could heal a serious wound at a low level still do it as the player became more good at dodging blows?

The only thing that makes sense, in that case, is to have a lowish cap on the amount of "vitality" you can go up, which codes to how serious of wounds you can survive, and a completely different skill that continues going up, that allows you to roll with blows, dodge more effectively, and otherwise turn more serious wounds into glancing ones, which might work similar to some versions of damage resistance.

Healing would only restore the "vitality" aspect, because that's the only thing to heal.

basically what I argued until I figured out and realized that it makes healing spells kind of funny.

>because the bloated HP leads to a meta where you try to ignore HP all together
Come again?

If sword stops working you get a finger of death instead or something of similar effect.

Ah, I get you.

Then again, games like TRoS are rocket tag from the get go, for almost the opposite reason: Not save-or-die effects, but just plain old sword thrusts that if you get the first hit with, you've got a good chance to win.

The idea of HP, in our experience, is best treated when embraced for what it is: abstraction. Leave the detailed limb damage, realistic healing, and long-term fatigue/injury to the games that try it.

For us, we tend towards the school of having lost HP not necessarily meaning a "hit". Ever see a cowboy movie where someone gets crowned? That'd be losing 1 HP for us.

Generally, the smaller the HP loss, the more abstract our descriptions and damage dealt (close calls, damaged armour, etc.), which give critical hits even more impact--it has the feeling of a one-shot kill even if it mechanically wasn't.

Gotta go with the Fantasy Flight 40k games.

The fear/joy of taking/dealing Just enough wounds below 0 to the point of perm ability damage or just popping into a bloody mess that sets off the ammo on your body, which might pop anyone else, is truly a feeling I don't get from other TRPG.
All be it just might be 1 of a handful I play on a weekly bases.

Currently working on it in my system. Kinda thinking of giving wounds set HP and different weapons give different wounding results when they finally give out (serrated heat sword will make a different wound from a smooth and standard axe).

giving limbs*
I'm too tired for this shit.

Yeah, but games like GURPS/TRoS are built for "rocket tag" from the get go. As a result you get functional defenses that lets you defend yourself against the rocket (damage reduction, active defenses). The problem with later dnd is that you got a single passive defense usually.

Basically, I think you can do both hp pools and "one shot, one kill" systems functional, but you can also do them wrong.

I hear ya about GURPS being more set up for it in that way, and D&D does get kind of screwy in the later levels, or at least so I've heard, I've only played and DMed in the lower levels, but may I ask, what versions of D&D have you played?

2e, 3.5, 4e (and fantasy craft). Haven't tried 5e, so I'm uncertain of the meta in that one.

i'm quite partial to the way SWD20 handles HP - you get two bars, vitality and wounds.
vitality's rolled with hitdice like usual, and represents your ability to more or less roll with the hits you're taking, so while you -are- taking hits you're able to shrug them off
wounds are based directly on your CON score and are what you start digging into when you lose all your vitality - when you're taking wound points, you're taking serious damage and are at risk of dying
if you take wound damage you start getting seriously fatigued (penalizing str and dex checks, and forcing you to roll a fort save or fall unconscious) and when you hit -10 wound points you're dead.

GURPS is pretty neat too but depending on the situation you can end up with some incredibly lethal fights, since when you take damage you take a penalty to your DX and IQ rolls for the next turn, based on the damage and up to a penalty of -4 (which is massive, by the way, bringing a score of 14 down to 10, or a 90% chance of succeeding down to 50%, and if you're already at ~10 then the penalty brings it down to as little as a 4.6% chance)

then again you can also build RWBY-tier characters where they just have this massive pool of ablative DR (which, unlike HP, doesn't penalize you for losing) that depletes instead of their health and must either be bypassed or reduced to 0 to start dealing actual damage to them
'course, most sensible DMs won't let you use ablative DR in most campaigns since it's a little broken (1 point for what's basically 1hp, when normally it's about ~5 for 1hp, but then again you heal ablative DR at a rate based on your real HP, so if that's low then you can forget about using most of your DR for a few weeks after a battle), but it's possibly something you could give to the entire party as a shield (again, RWBY and aura, anyone?)

>Haven't tried 5e, so I'm uncertain of the meta in that one.
Haven't played it in high levels, but it's what I wanted to mention actually, because there's a 3rd level spell called "counterspell" which can be cast at higher levels as you level up, and can instantly nullify any save-or-die spells if cast at the right time. I expect if taken advantage of, that can change the dynamic a lot, that and the sheer amount of damage fighters do at high levels.

then again you can also build RWBY-tier characters where they just have this massive pool of ablative DR (which, unlike HP, doesn't penalize you for losing) that depletes instead of their health and must either be bypassed or reduced to 0 to start dealing actual damage to them
'course, most sensible DMs won't let you use ablative DR in most campaigns since it's a little broken (1 point for what's basically 1hp, when normally it's about ~5 for 1hp, but then again you heal ablative DR at a rate based on your real HP, so if that's low then you can forget about using most of your DR for a few weeks after a battle), but it's possibly something you could give to the entire party as a shield (again, RWBY and aura, anyone?)

Ablative DR isn't actually that good. Ordinary HP can be increased by 1hp per 2 points, but unlike ablative DR, ordinary HP also has a "shadow pool" of negative HP.

The main perk of ablative DR (besides the slightly lower price) is that it doesn't care about hit locations.

losing ablative DR doesn't give you any of the penalties that losing HP does, and it also prevents crippling, so where somebody with 20 points in HP gets about 10 extra HP and will be crippled if they take a hit to their dominant arm worth about 5-7 damage (and on top of that will have to deal with the -3 to -4 in shock, and then most likely whatever optional rules have been tied in with major wounds, such as rolling HT to avoid knockdown or stunning), somebody with 20 points in ADR gets 30 extra 'HP' and won't give a shit if they lose all of that to a single attack, even if every point of damage was to their dominant arm.
and since you're getting double the bang for your buck you'll always be getting more for buying ADR than HP (although if you're spending a lot on getting this hench, it's worth buying some ST or HP on top of that anyway)

anyway, THAT is the real strength of ADR and why you'll want to limit it.

also you don't want to rely on your negative hp limits either, unless you have advantages to let you wade through that like hard to kill, hard to subdue, extra HT, or unkillable, in which case you're spending just as many if not more points to be able to survive and operate with your 'shadow pool'.
remember: it's a roll to stay conscious for every action you do while in negatives AND when you first hit negatives, and again for each multiple of -1xHP with an additional roll not to outright die.
you're still going to be suffering from your halved move and dodge from having less than 1/3 HP left, too.

> somebody with 20 points in ADR gets 30 extra 'HP'
gets 20 extra 'HP'*

Keep HP as it is, but most spells including healing recharge after a short rest, and instead it's the amount you can *be healed* that needs a long rest to recharge.
No, healing surges are not quite the same thing, not all healing uses a surge.

It's weird and abstract, but Legends of the Wulin has my favourite damage system of any RPG ever.

Attacks inflict Ripples, an abstract measure of the toll of combat, a mix of minor wounds, expended endurance, attrition and other such things. On their own, Ripples don't do anything, and there are absolutely no ways to remove them. They always increase over the course of the fight.

Particularly successful attacks inflict Rippling Rolls, where the amount of Ripples inflicted on someone are rolled as a pool to inflict Conditions on them. While Injuries are one type of Condition, various different techniques and secret arts can inflict other kinds of condition. A skilled courtier can bring down a warrior without ever landing a blow, his words breaking his opponents will to fight.

It's just one element of LotW, which is a complex system overall, but it still helps create a combat dynamic I really love.

In terms of healing there isn't really anything in LotW. Any ripples or conditions suffered in a fight don't go away during that fight. The closest thing is techniques which let you mitigate penalties from conditions, letting you fight as though you were uninjured.

My system is based on 3.5, but I changed the HP rules a bit. The most significant detail is that if your total damage (lethal+nonlethal) equals half your max HP, you are Fatigued, and if your total damage equals three-quarters of your HP you are Exhausted.

Working on a Wound and Vitality system for DnD5e. Your normal health is now called Vitality, and running out doesn't cause death saves.

Instead, if you're not killed outright, you get back Vit equal to an average HD roll and choose Fight or Flight. Fight gives +1 Attack, but -10ft move, while Flight does the opposite. Abilities like Relentless Endurance trigger if you're knocked to 0 Vit again. Once you've been put down to 0 for the last time without being killed outright you fall unconcious. Any more damage just kills you.

Still unhapy with it.

Actually, I should mention how conditions work, since that's the other side of the coin.

Conditions are used to represent a lot of things in LotW, including injuries, but also buffs of various sorts.

A Condition, at the most simple level, is a narrative clause tied to a mechanical bonus or penalty. For Weaknesses, negative conditions, if you don't obey the narrative clause you take a penalty. For Hyperactivities, positive conditions, if you do obey the clause you get the bonus.

Injuries are Weakness Conditions, so you have to obey the clause or you take a penalty. This might seem unintuitive, but it makes getting injured an interesting choice.

If the enemy manages to damage your arm, as a swordsman, do you keep attacking as normal, violating the narrative clause and taking the penalty, or do you figure out a way to fluff around it? Whether it's switching hands (which might open you up for the opponent to exploit it) or holding the sword in your mouth, which has its own associated difficulties.

It does make assigning good injury conditions a little tricky, since you need to think of things which provide an interesting narrative restriction, but it's a really fun system which creates really interesting combat dynamics.

This is partly why I like how 4e went about it, by making the healing just as abstract as the damage for once, instead of the 3.x thing where hit points were supposedly a combination of things, but healing was mostly just healing meat points exclusively.

Yeah, like how Fighters had a stance that gave regeneration. Not literally because they regenerate but because they have an endless endurance and force of will to keep fighting.

Pretty much. I always get a kick out of the people who still think Warlords were shouted wounds closed and limbs to re-attach themselves, unless you were going with a drunk comedy-style game where that sort of thing makes enough sense/would be funny.

I was actually sceptical of 4e until I played it as a Warlord, and it was so much fun. The way the fluff and mechanics worked together, being an inspiring leader who 'healed' his allies made just as much sense as a Cleric doing it. Giving them the strength and courage to keep fighting, no matter what.

There really hasn't been anything like a Warlord in D&D before or after 4e, and I was really disappointing they didn't find some way to bring it over to 5e, Mearls' raging hateboner for the class not-withstanding.

I'm a bit more partial to the Artificer (Which really found it's home in 4e) but the Warlord is still a load of fun. A friend of mine is playing a Bravado Warlord and is having a ball with their unique mechanic being 'My powers can offer a disadvantage if I fuck them up but are much better when they work'

He likes the element of risk without it being 'I fuck up everything for all my allies forever' like say, a 3e Wild Mage or 40k Psyker.

The Battlemaster is SUPPOSED to be 'The warlord in 5e' but it really isn't. It's sorta like the Eldritch Knight to the Wizard. You get a fragment of the effect but are also a full fighter.

>The Battlemaster is SUPPOSED to be 'The warlord in 5e
I thought the battlemaster was more supposed to be a substitute for all the fighter's feats in 3.5, except this time it's unique abilities rather than more of what everyone gets access to.

Well, it's got a few 'This is kinda a fragment of what a warlord did' tricks. Like handing out a small amount of temp HP and giving up extra attacks to let an ally make an extra attack.

Battlemaster is actually the Slayer in disguise with like, 3 maneuvers that do something other than "damage+status effect".

Warlord in 5e is actually the Bard - they inspire allies and do off-turn things with their reaction.

Battlemaster is just 'the only good fighter option'.

>Warlord in 5e is actually the Bard - they inspire allies and do off-turn things with their reaction.

That's not what the warlord does tho. It's what the 4e bard does.

bemp

Hey,

So I am making my own tabletop RPG based on the Ivalice world in FFD.

Anyway, I wanted to do away with HP all together, so this is what I got so far:

Choose bodypart to attack
Attack Roll vs. Dodge Roll (if defend action, depends on bodypart)
Same Attack Roll vs. AC (depends on bodypart, always given)

Finally, if the guy was defending (and failed his dodge) or not defending, and the attack pierced the armor, they make a toughness roll and get wounded depending how good the roll is.

After X number of wounds in a body part, that body part is mangled and useless. If you take too many wounds you die.

My concerns is if this will make too many rolls, or a death spiral, since u get penalties from wounded bodyparts. Should I make them nonstacking maybe?

Final Fantasy 500?
Also, what purpose does your system serve?

You say you want to get away from HP. But:
>After X number of wounds in a body part
It sounds like each body part has its own HP.

GURPS. Simple and modular.

Tokyo Nova does something similar, though by far not as elegant.

There are no HP, instead each successful attack inflicts a Wound with a rating and an associated effect.
There are three Wound Charts, one for physical attacks, one for mental attacks and one for social attacks.

A rating 3 physical Wound is just a facial wound without any mechanical effect.
A rating 9 mental Wound makes you drop whatever you're holding unless you succeed on a self-control check.
A rating 17 social Wound lands you in the slammer.
And a rating 21+ mental wound instantly renders you catatonic.

>purpose
I dunno why make a game that nobody will play anyway? Just bored of doing the usual stuff I do when im bored
Well yes, but weapons don't deal damage like short sword d6 bludgeoning. They either wound you, or they dont, though I still got damage types against various AC

No, I mean what pupose does your health system fulfill in the context of a game?
What are you trying to accomplish by making it so detailed?

And what the hell is FFD?

Well I wanted to make distinct the cases when you dodge and when your armor takes the hit. I wanted player's to be able to focus on either one or the other to encourage more varied playstyle, or have the option to do a little of both, but at lower chances of not being wounded at both.

I also wanted injuries to not be the usual HP sponge. FFD was a typo i meant FF12. I am playing on the cutscenes part here, where characters actually are quite vulnerable and not the crazy 1239123 million hp you have in encounters.

>They either wound you, or they dont, though I still got damage types against various AC

So every fight will be: You must score X or more damaging hits to incapacitate your opponent. Probably more if you're hitting a location that won't kill them once it runs out of wounds points.

That really sounds like HP. But worse, since no weapon will ever deal more than one damage per hit.

>though I still got damage types against various AC
How many different systems have you personally played ?

Because AC is a bit of terminology that I don't see outside of D&D. If your knowledge is limited to D&D*, your system is going to be crap. To design a good system, you need to understand how different systems produce different types of campaigns.

If you really want to get rid of hit points, take a good look at systems which don't use them. See what you can copy. The only systems I can think of without hitpoints are:
- Ironclaw/Myriad Song (same core rules)
- Dread (I doubt it will do what you want)

*This is not a complaint against D&D. If your knowledge is limited to any single roleplaying system your lack of knowledge is going to be a problem.

What said.

And if you want the feel of cutscenes, why not look for a more abstract, cinematic way to go about this?
Mechanics do not exist in a vacuum. No matter how different the mechanical options you give to your players, if they end up feeling the same or if there is a 'best solution', all that effort is wasted.

>more than one damage per hit
Well yeah, I realized this. So I put the wounding roll in table. It's based solely on your personal resistance to damage. Basically you roll to survive, and if you roll poorly you take multiple wounds at the same time from one attack.

>knowledge limited to D&D
Pretty much the only tabletop RPG i played consistently yeah, so you're right on the money there. As far as alternatives to AC I have been looking around for a while, but I just liked the simplicity of: armor works, or armor doesn't work, and I'm assuming it's pretty ok for realism (except trauma from force transference, but don't know how to deal with that yet so made AC types).
What do you suggest? Like a free-form "I want to do this" "Ok, roll this" system?

I like the way Hero System does it. You've got two hit point pools. One for how close you are to death, and one for how close you are to unconsciousness. Body and Stun respectively.

Most attacks do some of both but there's ways to alter it so you do more or less body/vs stun for an attack. So you could have something like Mono-filament dismemberment or Knockout Gas or somewhere in between.

For more narrative systems I like Torchbearers statuses. You just pile statuses like sick, tired, angry, injured. If you get all the statuses and would then gain one more, you die.

Hero uses an optional hit location system for stuff like that.

It's good for gritty realism. If you want that in a game it's great.

>I wanted to make distinct the cases when you dodge and when your armor takes the hit.

Then you should have two different rules for mitigating incoming damage. One for dodging and one for armor. Don't even attempt anything like D&Ds AC mechanics.

Typically this is done with:
- Roll to hit
- Opponent rolls to dodge/parry/etc
- Roll for damage
- Armor reduces damage

Some systems merge the rolls together. I'll give two specific systems as examples:
>Dark Heresy (or other WH40K RPGs)
- Attacker rolls to hit. If they succeed, they hit. With some attacks, succeeding more means more hits.
- Defender rolls dodge/parry. Each success reduces the number of hits the attacker makes.
- If the number of hits is at least 1, attacker rolls damage.
- Armor is a flat damage reduction.
Yes, it's an HP system. But I've never felt it was a spongy HP system.

>Ironclaw
- Attacker rolls their attack dice.
- Defender chooses between dogge/parray/counter and rolls their defence dice.
- If the attacker wins, each success increases how much damage they do.
- If the defender wins or draws with a dodge/parry, the attack doesn't hit.
- If the defender wins with a counter attack, the defender hits the attacker. With each success increasing the defenders damage.
- If it's a draw with a counter, both attacker and defender get hit.
- Roll armor dice. Each success reduces damage.
Ironclaw is a system that doesn't use HP. Myriad Song is a sci-fi system based on the same core ruleset, so it might be the better one to check out.

>I also wanted injuries to not be the usual HP sponge
I've seen plenty of systems avoid the HP sponge.

>I'm assuming it's pretty ok for realism (except trauma from force transference, but don't know how to deal with that yet so made AC types).

Forget about 'realism'. Decide how you want the combat in the game to feel. Then find a system that produces that feel and copy it.

I like Traveller's model. Damage is done directly to stats.

I love charts! Tables! Hit locations!

I really love The Riddle of Steel (and it's derivatives) for this reason. You swing a sword, and in all honesty you're most likely to get parried or only scratch your opponent - but when you get a clean hit you roll to determine if your overhead swing hit their head, neck or shoulder, and then read the description for how bad it looks.

It seems like you might get bogged down in simulating things, but I've found that it makes a really good prompt for role playing - a better one than HP anyway, where it's usually unclear whether your character was hit or just barely dodged. In one game a player scored multiple kills in a row with upward mace swings that all pulverized his opponents pelvis, and he became infamous for crushing his enemies' manhood.

Well, I want it to feel gritty and real, and totally deadly, so like in real life, but I also want the flashy grandeur of FF cinematics without ruining this. So far it's been really hard to combine these two without going full neckbeard fedora katana shit, which it why it all looks so messy

>two different rules
But I though they were different?

So, I got the attack roll vs. dodge roll, but only if you ready the dodge. So you, in an abstract compromise, lose some of the time you could have spent going all out on attacks to play defensively and dodge.

Even if you dodge or not, you are still wearing armor, and this roll comes afterwards only if you didn't dodge, or your dodge failed.

Do you want me to post some numbers and stats for the direct mechanics?

Not that guy, but it occurs to me that it might be worthwhile (depending on the particulars of the system) to have some kind of powerups that can kick in once you're suitably damaged.

That way injured people are less effective most of the time, but that guy over there picked up a super move that's only usable when he's below half health, the other guy gets higher strength as he's damaged, etc.

So death spirals would still be a thing, but you do get some bonuses to offset them, and depending on which ones you choose you may actually want to get injured so your sweet damage combo becomes available (or whatever).

Incidentally, this is where I am planning to introduce limit breaks. I'm playing with the idea of having the ability to choose between different conditions to activate a limit break

*AC roll

Sorry I meant you don't roll for AC, it's just a static value.

If you like systems with a bit of crunch then Harnmaster (both 3. edition and HM Gold) has one of the best systems to handle damage and injury. The system doesn't have hit points at all. Rather, damage is tracked as individual injuries that inflict appropriate penalties.

Harnmaster's combat system manages to combine enough realism, the fun random things like amputations of random body parts and internal injuries you get in chart-heavy games like rolemaster(without using a ton of charts) and speed of play.

>Like a free-form "I want to do this" "Ok, roll this" system?
I am just going to strongly echo the recommendation to actually read, if not play, something outside of D&D.
The fact that you call the way most RPGs are intended to work (describe intended action, then interpret that action through the system's rules) "free-form" speaks volumes about your ignorance.

So you are trying to unite two diametrically opposite aesthetics?
Look, either you go for FFXII or you go for gritty and realistic. And if you go for realistic, remember that "realistic" mechanics often fail to feel realistic, because they're just too cumbersome to compute in any reasonable amount of time.

>Do you want me to post some numbers and stats for the direct mechanics?

Go through the steps involved in one character attacking another and determining if damage is dealt. Don't worry about exact numbers, you're far too early in the design process for the exact numbers to matter.

>intended to work
Yeah I can see that, especially the way i phrased it, but I just meant that you indeed only have this as the only rule, and you can try and do whatever you want, always, and are not limited to things like class, race, spell lists. Anyway, I am not trying to hide my ignorance here, I am just trying to do good with whatever experience I have (since I won't have time to read through other systems right now in this thread).

>either ... or
Why? I really would prefer it if you could do both. Are you saying it's impossible, that nobody has ever done this, or just very difficult?

I always do this actually. I have a lot of fun trying to make all these different mechanics, and roll up a lot of fighters and angry goblins with anydice in my tab to see how it comes out.

Right now, being ambushed at level 1 is pretty much guaranteed death.

>I am just trying to do good with whatever experience I have (since I won't have time to read through other systems right now in this thread).

Go read through other systems. Play a few of them for a few months each.

Then come back and make a new thread asking for help.

Making a new system requires a lot of time and effort. If you're not willing to do research on how other systems do things (to copy what works and avoid what doesn't), then you're far too impatient to make a decent system and should give up now.

Why do you have levels ?

I will do that. Ironclaw looked particularly interesting. Anyway, thanks for feedback.

Well your character level is the sum of the tiers/levels you have in the paths you have specialized in, so it really doesn't mean anything yet, though I am planning to use it for balancing monsters later on.

These paths are a sort of simplified version of the FF12 exp grid. So, instead of progressing levels in a class, everyone has access to a "paths", and you can walk down many paths at the same time. You buy into the path with EXP, and the further you walk down (path levels) the more EXP it costs to get whatever benefits the path have.

Wait, how has Tenra Bansho Zero not been mentioned in this thread so far?

TBZ has Vitality and Wounds.
Vitality works exactly how you'd expect it to work. It's a pool of points that is depleted by successful attacks and once it hits zero, you're out of the fight.

Wounds are where it gets interesting.
Whenever you take damage, you can distribute it between your Vitality and your Wounds. Vitality is just a simple pool and recovers quickly, but Wounds have multiple levels.
Light Wounds are plentiful, heal reasonably quickly and have no direct effects on your character.
Heavy Wounds take longer to heal, but if you have at least one Heavy Wound, you get +1 die to all checks.
Critical Wounds are even worse, but they give you +2 dice to all checks at the cost of slowly draining your Vitality.

And then there's the Dead box.
No matter how high your Body attribute, you only have one Dead box.
If you tick that box, you get to ignore all effects of a single attack and get a +3 dice bonus without any Vitality loss.
But there is a price. Normally, your character can't really die. Even if you drop to 0 Vitality, it just means you're unconscious, but still alive.
Checking the Dead box means you give up that protection. It means that this fight is important enough for your character to put their life on the line.

So, yeah. A reverse death spiral. Love it.
But I don't get to play it, because nobody likes the setting.

>Heavy Wounds take longer to heal, but if you have at least one Heavy Wound, you get +1 die to all checks.

So everyone starts of combat with a heavy wound or gets one the first time they get hit ?

Can happen, but the highest Wound Level taken determines the difficulty of any emergency healing, so taking a Heavy Wound right off the bat makes it difficult to recover if things do go south.

I know it's been talked about already in the thread but yeah I really like GURPS hp system. The way damage is pretty realistic, the negative effects from low HP, bleed rules, crippling rules, and on a mostly related note I really like how poison works where you suffer various negative effects based on how much damage you've taken from the poison.

My problem with wound systems was always the risk of things turning into a death spiral, this is a really interesting way of handling things. And not only is it mechanically interesting, it works for drama, simulating the feeling of more intense battles becoming more dramatic as characters pull out all the stops to fight, instead of turning into a gang of bleeding half-dead people slapping each other.

Except in real life armour doesn't just absorb a set amount of blows and them be useless, which is all added HP is. AC indicated likelihood to be hit, which armour affects, and damage reduction would be another inherent trait of armour.

That's pretty cool. Is there magical healing? Do you need to rest after fights? The thing I hate about D&D is hopping back up after a grizzly battle to fight the next group of mobs. I wish characters had to be carried back to camp, or rest a few days or whatever. It may not seem as glamorous or fun but it's definitely more interesting and dramatic, but I feel like it's hard to figure out the right way to do this.

>I am just going to strongly echo the recommendation to actually read, if not play, something outside of D&D.
I will second this with a little more detail. Every so often you see a new system pop up created by someone who has clearly only played D&D. They're almost immediately identifiable by their numerous attempts to reinvent the wheel. There is 30+ years of developments in tabletop that is almost entirely absent from any given edition of D&D, because D&D is slow to change and intentionally avoids change much of the time. Its like watching a movie from the early days of film making - yeah, they can be good movies, but they're clearly lacking many elements that make up the modern film making lexicon.

I like TBZ, though I wish it was a little more down to earth setting wise sometime. And that character creation was a little tighter - the power level disparities can get a bit disgusting.

One of the archetypes (basically, sets of skills and stuff you use multiple of to build your character) is a guy who permanently has his death box checked. It's pretty neat.

This is exactly the problem I'm having. We're playing Fantasy Age and while it's an amazing system if you're looking for something that feels like D&D but is a little.. better? The rolls are all 3d6 which feels better than d20, it's got a stunt die mechanic which replaces crits and can make combat a little more interesting, and the way skills and magic work is pretty neat. A lot of great ideas. However.. hit points are just hit points. No wounds, critical injuries, vitality, nothing special at all. Just by the book hit points. Damage reduces hit points. Healing heals hit points. First aid heals hit points. Resting heals hit points.

That one single aspect ruins it for me. If I ever ran it I'd want a homebrew for that. They even have a stunt called 'lethal blow' that does a lot more damage but there isn't some bleeding condition or whatever 4.0 had to make it more interesting. I mean 4.0 also had 'bloodied' which at least was an attempt at something.

I think of other systems I've personally played that do hp just better (world of darkness is the simplest way to roleplay damage, for example) and it's sad that Green Ronin didn't even try to get creative with it.

My system is reminiscent of Exalted in a way; Damage is basically disadvantage in fight and wounds have effect on you.

You damage your opponent, and once 3hp is reached, you choose a status ailment your opponent gets. It can be wounds according to your weapon's wound rating, or it can be disarm, or trip, or anything that changes the fight noticeably.

Every time you get wounds, you roll your physical resistance die (d4...d12) against the amount of wounds you have. Roll same or under and you're out. Depending on total wounds and the situation you're either incapacitated, unconscious or instantly dead.

You can push any roll, getting bonuses to the roll, but causing damage to yourself.

When 3 damage is reached, status ailment is caused and 3 damage is removed.*

AC and damage reduction are no more realistic abstractions than what I said. D&D hit points have been and always will be plot armor, so the quality of your armor adds to your plot armor.

And running out of armor HP wouldn't break the armor, it's just the point blood has actually been drawn. It also allows for effects to bypass armor in a more logical way.