I hate hitpoints. If I get stabbed in a fight, I should be injured in some lasting way, or be otherwise hindered. What are some systems with good injuries like broken bones, flesh wounds, etc but no hit points?
>inb4 wfrp/dark heresy
still has hit points
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It's called wounds.
>inb4 wfrp/dark heresy
That's what you want.
This is no different than people who insist on combat wheelchairs
In Traveller your "hit points" are your stats. They tick off endurance first then it spills into Dex or strength
Or, in other words, you keep track - using points ... of the hits you've taken...
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I mean using your attributes as health is not really used no?
The more times you get hit the worse that stat would be eventually you aren't allowed to use it because it dropped to a zero
miss points. once they run out the character can no longer avoid harm and actually suffers the consequences of being hit.
> Plot Armour system
Underrated
Mutants & Masterminds changes HP into a saving throw, the more damage you take the weaker your bonus gets, but no matter how hurt you are there's always a chance you can make the save and ignore a hit. WoD uses health levels, the more hurt you get the bigger penalty you have to deal with when you roll for anything.
you lose your HP cap first, and it only comes back after enough time has passed. There's a chance of that happening everytime you take certain damage types.
Play GURPS you gigantic homosexual
>still has hit points
>conditional injury is garbage
Mage Knight boardgame (and possibly other deckbuilders) have wounds as useless cards you have to take, the point is that when they end up in the discard pile they don't disappear and unless you heal-discard them they'll inevitably crop up after reshuffling and clog your hand, presumably representing old wounds flaring up and such.
warhammer fantasy roleplay or dark heresy is what you are looking for. they have a good wound and a critical hit system
You think you want it but you don't. Death spirals are unfun, and fun should come before realism.
Death spirals are fun.
This. Death spirals encourage players to back away from fights when wounded. Characters that fight equally well at 100% as 10% tend to metagame. When being injured takes away your % to hit and your % to run away, that's when the bargaining starts, and that's good to act out.
I remember this song and dance
>"Ah, we're injured and thus not fighting at full capacity, its time to back out and heal"
>Ten trips back to camp later...
>"What do you mean we took took too long to accomplish any of our objectives?"
>Uses AI DM tools
The frick?!
Hold the frick up, who mentioned AI tools until you two homosexuals? He's obviously referencing the 10-minute-workday problem that DMs run into by not having consequences for wasting large amounts of time.
AI comes in because if you as the DM are resorting to time sensitive objectives constantly as some kind of band aid to the problem of players constantly resting all the time, it's because you, the DM, have adventures made by a shitty AI that thinks you're playing DnD.
This is a lot to respond to. I'll give it a shot.
>Except it isn't, it inherently restricts their options...
OSR characters were not intended to be the main characters of an Anime. This sounds like a snide retort, but if your characters are just a bunch of greedy folks with nothing to lose and everything to gain, there are no reasons for players not to throw caution to the wind. It's a mindset thing.
>Except it isn't, because there will always be a best option, and that option is whatever lets you kill the enemy before they can act.
High Lethality often have LOW health values by direct design, and many don't use static AC either, instead having a dodge action, and armor as DR.
Because armor is DR, but heavy, high Strength foes can drop Agility for dodging, since their armor can cover for it, but that leaves weaknesses in other Agility based aspects that can be used in combat by characters who are not as capable of facing off against a fully armored warrior. Killing such an enemy fast would be good, but trying to set up the kill to be easier may be the best course of action if you can't just alpha strike with a sneak attack.
>Yes, which means the highest damage options are always the best.
In these high lethality games, dealing ANY damage, even a single point, makes the damaged foe weaker, thus less effective in combat. Damage is actively avoided with an opposed roll or with armor as dr.
I'll cont... 1/2
>Except that's not true at all, being tougher is extremely important no matter what because the more party members who go down the more likely you are to TPK.
There's quite a bit of math going into toughness of characters, and it gets a bit muddy when damage on a single attack can be anywhere form 24 to 2.
In Age of Empires II, the Mayan Plumed Archer has more raw HP than a typical archer, as well as being faster moving. This extra HP seems redundant, but it actually allows them to survive a mangonel strike, whereas every other foot archer dies in a single shot. Troops are 100% combat effective until they die, so this is the kind of math that needs to be taken into account.
Having damage be random as it is in DnD means you now have to balance weapons based in a drawn out battle environment with multiple rounds of consecutive attacks. This then demands high HP values across the board.
>Except that always comes with high risk...
>because the alarm is raised and the entire fortress descends upon you...
Worth it!
So far it seems your problem is with the perception of how High Lethality Death Spiral games are run, and not with the actual game itself.
>They already are, outside of combat. All the time.
In these game, yes. In modern DnD, who cares? Charisma gets used so rarely when it's not for magic, sadly, it's a heap of unused potential.
All of your other points aren't stable enough to respond to, and assume a DM issue, not a system issue. We've all had bad DMs, my dude, those are system agnostic, I can't pull a hypnozinger and pretend those are DnD exclusive I'm afraid.
Shit gm with skill issue
It's an AI issue, he uses a trash AI DM tool to write sessions for him. hence why he has 33 combat encounters each with 20 minotaurs against a fresh new party, thus demanding they take so many rests.
He basically doesn't even DM, just reads the AI prompt.
whom?
If you don't create a narrative impetus for speed then that's on you. I have literally never run any game without time being a factor, nor have I run a game where a location had a fight happen without -there having been a fight- impacting how the location looked and acted in future. If players attack a fortification it doesn't remain static. I also do not play with people who, as adults, do not understand that the world around them is not static.
But even if I did run a boring, uninteractive, and simple battle game:
>We lost 50% hp
>Let's go back and heal
Whether or not the game has death spiral literally does not affect the outcome.
>Death spirals encourage players to back away from fights when wounded.
It encourages them to play the game without considering their characters or worse yet to make all their characters into cowards who flee at the first sign of danger. Or, even worse, it makes them have no interest in playing at all because they're doomed to fail because you get off on power tripping as a GM.
>Characters that fight equally well at 100% as 10% tend to metagame
It's the opposite. A character that can operate the same at 100% or 10% will lead to players playing their characters properly as people.
>When being injured takes away your % to hit and your % to run away, that's when the bargaining starts
If you are seriously advocating for making your players "bargain" with you for the survival of their characters, you should consider suicide or at the very least never sitting behind a GM screen again. Antagonistic GMs can go suck an entire bag of wieners, and they'll like it cause they're all raging homosexuals. Also, it encourages metagaming;it becomes less about "This is how my character would behave in this siutation" and more about "how much HP can I lose before it's optimal to just leave"
The problem is that you run into the situation where the players will refuse to play the game because you're a sadistic c**t of a That GM who combines time limits with unforgiving brutal encounters, be they natural disasters, traps, or fights, which means that it becomes a feedback loop of:
>Go start a quest
>Realize that it's impossible to complete the quest in one go
>Go back, spend time recovering
>Return, realize that you can't do the quest now because the time limit is up
>Repeat
Death Spirals force players to make their characters act like total cowards just to get anything done, and if you're the sort of subhuman filth that gets off on making his players waste their time with meat grinder dogshit then I sincerely hope your players wise up, leave you, and form their own better group.
Death Spirals aren't the fun part of Death Spiral mechanism having games, but you're close.
The Death Spiral itself isn't the part that's carrying the fun, but the game built with it in mind is because of the Death Spiral.
With the lethality potentially high at any time, the freedom of choice to a player to work around or avoid slipping into the spiral becomes a core part of the game's design by necessity. Of foes to slay, like beasts or minions, this means that dispatching them quickly is encouraged.
Because lethality is high, combat is quick, and because combat is quick, each option open to a player on their turn can afford to be very potent, thus easier to make. The risk of failure is there, but because of the more intuitive combat, turns can move along swiftly, without a player sat waiting for the new guy to read and choose one of their 16 damage dealing spells (they don't need that many spells at once, because combat will never last long enough to need them all).
Damage means something. Because of that, tougher characters are good by default, whereas in HP games with no wound systems, being tougher is just a side thing, you can survive maybe an extra attack in a single combat of 50+ total attacks made.
Being sneaky is also better, because it means you can avoid slipping into the Spiral outright, or at least not be the first one to slip in, it gives you an actual advantage, or even outright victory.
Being smart and trying to talk down or bluff your humanoid foes becomes a desirable option, even if it only stalls combat. It makes charismatic and intelligent characters worthy of adventure by the virtue of those traits in themselves, rather than having magic power arbitrarily tied to them to make those traits good for direct damage dealing through magic.
>With the lethality potentially high at any time, the freedom of choice to a player to work around or avoid slipping into the spiral becomes a core part of the game's design by necessity
Except it isn't, it inherently restricts their options because there are few to no outcomes that result in survival of the player characters. You will always pick the optimal choice because you don't want to get your PC killed. If anything it stifles choice, because low lethality means that you can afford to take risks without the punishment being immediate death and/or maiming.
>Of foes to slay, like beasts or minions, this means that dispatching them quickly is encouraged.
This is the same regardless of system.
>Because lethality is high, combat is quick, and because combat is quick, each option open to a player on their turn can afford to be very potent, thus easier to make
Except it isn't, because there will always be a best option, and that option is whatever lets you kill the enemy before they can act. This is why D&D combat is and always has been dogshit, because it's just swinging into meat points against a static number (AC). Yes, even back to THAC0.
>The risk of failure is there, but because of the more intuitive combat, turns can move along swiftly, without a player sat waiting for the new guy to read and choose one of their 16 damage dealing spells (they don't need that many spells at once, because combat will never last long enough to need them all).
No, instead it becomes waiting for the new guy to figure out which option won't get him killed instantly because the GM is a sadistic subhuman and gets off on killing player characters.
>Damage means something
Yes, which means the highest damage options are always the best.
I like the death spiral for all the reasons anon said, but I'm also not a sadistic or antagonistic gm. I help talk my players through their options to help them assess threats and make meaningful game decisions. I don't enjoy killing their characters, I enjoy running a good game that the table enjoys, and that means having high stakes.
What now?
>tougher characters are good by default, whereas in HP games with no wound systems, being tougher is just a side thing
Except that's not true at all, being tougher is extremely important no matter what because the more party members who go down the more likely you are to TPK. This is universally true, but even moreso in systems where your defenses aren't static values and are instead contested rolls or even more dicepool systems.
>Being sneaky is also better, because it means you can avoid slipping into the Spiral outright
Except that always comes with high risk, because all it takes is one bad roll to fail and tumble all the way down the spiral.
>or at least not be the first one to slip in
Shitty attitude to have in a TTRPG, it's a cooperative game. There is no I in party and anyone who acts this way is 100% That Guy.
>it gives you an actual advantage, or even outright victory.
Or absolute failure, because the alarm is raised and the entire fortress descends upon you and kills you instantly.
>Being smart and trying to talk down or bluff your humanoid foes becomes a desirable option
Except it doesn't, because they'll just stab you in the back anyway because your GM is a sadistic subhuman.
>It makes charismatic and intelligent characters worthy of adventure by the virtue of those traits in themselves
They already are, outside of combat. All the time.
>rather than having magic power arbitrarily tied to them to make those traits good for direct damage dealing through magic.
Your brain is smooth and small if you think magic = damage. The power of magic is utility and crowd control, and in any good system (read: not any edition of D&Dogshit or its clones like troonyfinder, shitter of the doo doo lord, or OSmoronation) spellcasters' damage will pale in comparison to that of a martial.
So am I allowed to play a guy who can take a hit or does everyone equally become a cripple with five minutes to live when lightly kicked in the shin in this hypothetical system?
Try Harnmaster OP. Wounds give you a negative to all your combat actions and take weeks/months to heal it's very detailed and fun to stab someone in the neck and have the appropriate thing happen in game
Wfrp is great, but the default critical wounds tables are too generic. Get the fan made critical wounds table from the Winds of Chaos site. They have lots of different effects depending on the weapon used- claws, flames, bullet, slashing, piercing etc
Here you go. Concentrated autism.
oh that's where the forehead is
For a simple system, the old Traveller wargame Azhanti High Lightning used this chart - just roll 2d6 for a result. It was modified by gear - body armour and intervening cover reduced the result you rolled, while stronger weapons (blades, guns, explosives) added to it. We sometimes used to link it to a random location chart or dice, so a serious wound to the head might have different results (blinded, cant breath, knocked out) than a similar result to a limb (broken limb, lose fingers) or torso (broken ribs, organ damage).. We even used it the chart for vehicles. robots, doors, walls, etc, just gave them an appropiate damage reduction.
Vegot this idea, it's called "if I die, I die".
Your character has two basic states: dead and alive. Failing a roll when the stakes would result in a change of state from alive to dead kills the character.
In Nechronica your character is made of parts, which make up most of your combat ability, and when you take damage to a location (head, arms, torso, or legs) you break that many parts in that location. Parts that are broken can't be used until they're fixed and if every member of the party breaks all their parts - Game Over.
I like it, personally. Although it's a difficult system to sell if you aren't running as undead or robots.
>I hate hit points
>If I get stabbed in a fight, I should be injured in some lasting way, or be otherwise hindered.
Reduce max hp by type of wound so you are less effective.
>Two spoonfull of hp for you
Hârnmaster
How about limb conditions such as in fallout?
Here's an idea, low hitpoints, but you can recover HP by rolling on an injury table. For example, a table with 20 entries, and you roll 1d6+n, with n equalling your total lasting injuries. As you go further down the table, they become more serious before culminating in a fatal blow such as decapitation or skewered through the heart.
My homebrew uses two stats: Stamina and Health. The former is how hard you can push yourself, and is the "just grazed" idea. Once you're through that, or the attacker gets a lucky hit, it's into your Health which is the 'meat points'.
You typically don't have a lot of Health, and a single blow from a large weapon can kill you, so it's more salient to run away than to fight tilted matches. They're also harder to heal in a lot of ways.
There is an optional rule for hit locations, with destroyed limbs etc, but that's completely hard-core stuff and character will be made cripples fairly quickly if they're used. Sort of like in real life, if you get hit by a sword in the arm, it's likely that the limb is now useless.
It doesn't need specific injuries most of the time so they aren't in there. HARN is the go-to for critical injury tables if you really want them.
we do basically the same thing lmao. we call them posture points. once your posture breaks completely then you take real injuries. in the negative point range you make rolls to take permanent, lasting injuries to avoid death.
Nechronica. Every point of damage breaks a body part and locks out its related abilities, recovery is stitching on new ones.
FFG starwars has hit points in the same vein as wfrp, but you can take lasting injuries before running out of wounds.
As much as I hate FATE, they have a good point about their system, by default it has a mental and body stress track that can take damage equal to that box number, you get to chose as long as you can distribute it. These go away on short rests and might still hamper you if they fill out. They also offer you to fill a special type of box, its basically a longer lasting wound that can have a disadvantage depending on the type like maybe you have some sort of specific insanity or a broken leg that gives you a penalty on jumping, and these boxes can take more damage points. By default these are basically -2 penalties on something specific. So you get to have a mix of resource and risk management with nuance on your damage without being too mechanically obstructive, you could also merge the stress tracks.
It stems from a larger system that calls in the opposite with character traits but thats not my cup of tea.
Tl;dr: short rest damage boxes with points tier vs action treatment specific boxes with situational disatvantage with higher damage threshold boxes
I like the Fate damage system a lot too. especially as implemented in some of their crunchier versions, like dresden files or Diaspora. and a nice thing about Fate being so modular is you don't have to play the whole game, you can just steal chunks of it and drop them in to other systems.
In the WEG Star Wars, if you get hit you fall prone. You can get hit three times before you die, which leads to some hilarious Three Stooges slapstick when PvP happens. I thought this rule was really silly, but then I thought about it and people really do fall down almost every time they get hit in the OT.
>What are some systems with good injuries like broken bones, flesh wounds, etc but no hit points?
My system.
You record your physical injuries individually if they are significant, while all effects of injuries are either mechanical in nature (providing temporary or permanent debuffs or penalties), or narrative in nature (forcing the characters to react in certain ways) per a resolution reached by the DM.
Critical injuries are the only automatic death a player can suffer, although suffering numerous-enough less significant injuries can result in player death as well.
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>Hit points suck, I'm going to make a gritty, realistic system where wounds MATTER.
>Oh shit the player characters all die in two encounters because every fight is a crapshoot.
>Okay, so here's this metacurrency you can spend to avoid death...
Laughed, because this is true... And it's in DnD!!
For real, though, if your PCs are dying, it's because they're DnD brained, or they're new to the hobby. Those are both fine, babysteps, they'll learn.
i like the warmachines warjack system and i could see that easily working for RPG characters.
a hitpoint box but some of the boxes correlate to specific parts like right arm, left arm, leg, cortex, etc. lose all the boxes with the corresponding letter and that body part is disabled. idk if warmachine ever fricked with it but if you wanted to have the equivalent of "called shots" you could have the attacker get to choose the specific box if you want to represent precision attacks, whereas normal attacks roll randomly to see what they hit.
I see that OP got tired of pretending that he's not a homosexual.
Now he directly uses gay porn to start his threads