Makers Mark will help you.

First, Thanks for the responses thus far. I appreciate it.

Quote from: Bilharzia;898572Get RuneQuest6 + the Classic Fantasy supplement for RQ6 - http://ubiquitousrat.net/?p=3331

I actually have the PDF and ordered the book. I do like the system overall, HOWEVER, there is still the popularity issue. I imagine I can just pitch it as "my house rules" or some such, but I'm specifically drawn to D&D5e because many are playing it and seeking out games.

Quote from: Opaopajr;898542You're being picky. ...

So, now that I got that out of the way, what specifically do you want to accomplish from this conversation? Do you want the lethality grit or do you want the narrative flair? ....

See? I knew it! :-D

I would like some opinions on the Injury system I cooked up. Are they playable? Fair? Does anyone have any alternate systems for 5e I haven't considered? I'm thinking of describing HP as your "avoidance", endurance and luck, and then describe injury more in terms of "after the combat, you notice you're thumb is missing..." or "the past few days our knee has been very tender...". My biggest gripe is not DURING combat, HP seem fine there. It's more of the idea that the heroes have been in four battles across the valley to get to the cave entrance and are now as frisky and non-plussed as your average modern day hiker. :-D

Oh, Tenbones, I don't drink while I play. Mostly because I need to have my wits about me but also these days Alcohol interacts with the alchemical morass of drugs my doctor has me on.

I'm not a fan of the abstraction of hp, but for the most part I've learned to live with them because of their positive traits --  they are simple, and give players a feeling of their life ebbing away, adding to the emotional content of the game without the buzzkill of a death spiral.

Sometime I jazz up HP with a few house rules. In 3e, I was using an injury system that mostly only kicked in when characters were about to go down anyways, so it didn't have a big death spiral component, but it spared me some of my immersion hangups with representing damage in combat. I may implement it in Pathfinder some day if my players get more advanced.

Hit points work because the rest of the system is abstract. Once you start using specific wounds and getting fiddly with injury the rest of the combat system looks like a square peg in a round hole.

One way to look at it is that only first level hit points represent real injury. Hit points gained from higher levels are simply endurance, more like stun points than anything else.

That being said, 5E characters do tend to emulate Tigger the tiger. No amount of battering can't be cured by a nights sleep and a combatant with a single hit point takes a 24 point shot and goes only to 0, and simple healing world can pop him back up and into the fight as if nothing happened. Fighting any group that has a healer is like playing whack-a-mole.

These are the things I find the most issue with, the wolverine like recovery rates and the lack of any real consequence for being dropped to 0. The sheer numbers of hit points are kind of a non issue. Without escalating bonuses and defenses, hit points are a logical means to measure gaining more oomph at higher levels.

You can play with the healing rates to make recovery a bit slower and grittier and introduce consequences beyond death checks for being dropped to 0 hit points. A simple rule that makes healing magic only work on creatures with 1 or more hit points or imposing the incapacitated condition for X hours after dropping to 0 regardless of how many HP are healed would end the pop-up healing which is so annoying.

Quote from: trechriron;898591My biggest gripe is not DURING combat, HP seem fine there. It's more of the idea that the heroes have been in four battles across the valley to get to the cave entrance and are now as frisky and non-plussed as your average modern day hiker. :-D

Ok, yeah. This is what changed my mind about crit tables. Some of the effects can be short term, like blinded for 1d4 turns, or long term, like blinded until the characters can get some magical healing. Blindess is pretty extreme, and there are lots of other results, like broken bones, torn muscles, etc. What really got to me, as usual, is the evocative art in DCC. I can't find it online, but it's an illustration of a dwarf with a hook replacing his hand. One notion in DCC that I took away was the idea the characters are meant to be changed by their adventures. Wounds, boons, corruption, curses, favors. A character with a missing hand has a story to tell about how he lost it.

OP, your situation is hopeless, just live with it;).

Quote from: trechriron;898522Also, with my philanthropic endeavors in my local gaming community, supporting the popular game helps local game stores. There are simply more people playing D&D than other games. If I run some D&D at the local cons, the local stores, etc. I'm likely to have a bunch of eager participants itching for a game.

There are local game store(s) in the Renton area? From my experience, FLGS are mostly a dying breed in the Seattle metro area. But maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention...

I agree with @AsenRG: your situation is hopeless. Stop trying to court 5e-ers and stay true to your GURPS FANATICISM!!!! Or, even better, run some BRP and convert the heathens.

Hit points are an arbitrary abstract construction Gary Gygax came up with to make the game play a certain way.

There are approximately six versions of D&D... pre AD&D, AD&D1st, 2nd, 3/3.5, 4th, 5th.  Something in there should suit you, or, if not, make up your own arbitrary abstract construction to make the game play a certain way you want.

Hit points, of all injury systems, are the easiest to scale by a wide margin. It's trivial to assign hit point to a worm (1!), and if you don't think 200 hit points is enough for a dragon, try 250.

Go to a wound system, though, and...yuck. Just how many light/serious/critical can a dragon wing take? A dragon leg? Dragon head? You might have to tinker with all locations...bleh.

Quote from: trechriron;898522When 5th Edition came out I was impressed.

Your first mistake!

Quote from: trechriron;898522How do you bring the "grit" in your D&D games?

By running RuneQuest or Warhammer instead.

That's not even snark. Your injury concern has been universal since 1974 and I haven't seen any good answers inside D&D. The need for gritty combat by some players is exactly why RQ and WHFRP have their fanbase.

FOR ME I make my OD&D gritty by making PC death a real deal. That's why I do 0 = unconscious and -1 = dead. The "gritty" of my games comes from the fact that once you are at 1/2 HP or less, you are risking death.

Personally, the more you allow and increase negative HPs, the less gritty your D&D. Screw wounds, go with death!

Quote from: trechriron;898522Am I just being too picky?

Yes, and that's totally good.

The idea that D&D of any edition can be (or should be, or must be) Everything for Everyone at All Times is a myth that does nothing good for the hobby.

Quote from: Spinachcat;898613Your first mistake!




By running RuneQuest or Warhammer instead.

That's not even snark. Your injury concern has been universal since 1974 and I haven't seen any good answers inside D&D. The need for gritty combat by some players is exactly why RQ and WHFRP have their fanbase.

FOR ME I make my OD&D gritty by making PC death a real deal. That's why I do 0 = unconscious and -1 = dead. The "gritty" of my games comes from the fact that once you are at 1/2 HP or less, you are risking death.

Personally, the more you allow and increase negative HPs, the less gritty your D&D. Screw wounds, go with death!




Yes, and that's totally good.

The idea that D&D of any edition can be (or should be, or must be) Everything for Everyone at All Times is a myth that does nothing good for the hobby.

That's basically what I've come to. There really aren't many if any good ways to "gritty" up the D&D hp system. The best I have really managed is allowing characters a potential save vs death at 0 hp, if they survive some sort of long lasting or permanent injury has been sustained. Other than that you end up trying to shove a square peg in a round hole.

Honestly the best thing about HP is simplicity, it's just plain easy.

OP, HP's, kiss and make up.  There. Better?:-)

No fixing the sack of HP's issue in 5E, man.  But, for me, small potatoes. Now getting resentful about how fuckin hard it is to get anyone around here to okay something that's NOT D&D. One of the prime meetup pages is basically a shill for a multi-evening 2E love fest.  Everything else is 5E.  I'm starting to hate seeing the initials. Agh!  (Time to stop worrying and love the bomb, man)

Quote from: K Peterson;898607There are local game store(s) in the Renton area? From my experience, FLGS are mostly a dying breed in the Seattle metro area. But maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention...

I agree with @AsenRG: your situation is hopeless. Stop trying to court 5e-ers and stay true to your GURPS FANATICISM!!!! Or, even better, run some BRP and convert the heathens.

I work with Dragonflight, a non-profit that supports gaming here in the PNW. We have a game club called Metro Seattle Gamers for members where a monthly due nets you access to our play area that includes the nifty shelves for people to store wargames on between sessions. There are so many game stores in the greater Seattle area I can barely remember them all!! The death of Seattle game stores is highly exaggerated as would be any idea that gaming in general is suffering here.

Maybe I'll stick with my love of the RuneQuest game, use Classic Fantasy and stick to my original plan of converting a D&D setting over to it (Like Scarred Lands, which I dig). Then I can just pitch it as "Scarred Lands with Mythras Classic Fantasy" and see what looky-loos I can drum up. :-D

Quote from: trechriron;898591See? I knew it! :-D

I would like some opinions on the Injury system I cooked up. Are they playable? Fair? Does anyone have any alternate systems for 5e I haven't considered? I'm thinking of describing HP as your "avoidance", endurance and luck, and then describe injury more in terms of "after the combat, you notice you're thumb is missing..." or "the past few days our knee has been very tender...". My biggest gripe is not DURING combat, HP seem fine there. It's more of the idea that the heroes have been in four battles across the valley to get to the cave entrance and are now as frisky and non-plussed as your average modern day hiker. :-D

If you don't mind, could you give a quick rundown on what you have posted in Google-whatever. I think I have a Google Play acct due to all the phone apps on my android phone, but damned if I can remember it off the top of my head anymore, and can't really be arsed to fudge looking at small tables on my phone. I'm a lazy, entitled shitbag, I know... but I'm honest about it!

My quick guess, going by the bolded text I highlighted from you above, is that you want Battle Consequences Post-Combat so that players feel an actual threat.

Here's a different take on your tables and penalty mods. It'll be very abstract, so not as flavorful. But it'll be extremely lethal for every step and might get you to where you want aesthetically with less bookkeeping and permanent penalties:

Use the Exhaustion Table. :cool:

e.g.1. After X number of battles, all surviving participants go up 1 level of Exhaustion. Remove the spells and effects that quick rinse away Exhaustion.
e.g.2. Anytime a player goes unconscious due to HP loss but is actively revived back (a.k.a. "bouncy death throes"), they get 1 level of Exhaustion. Reserve Nat 20 rezzes as "miraculous" and "filled with portent."
---------------------

There's several advantages within this mechanic.

First, less permanency. Which means more than just ball & chain bookkeeping. It also means less "delicate counterbalancing of table values," and less "the right spells make consequences go away!" reliance. A fighter without a thumb or a caster without a tongue is essentially useless, for example, so a bad roll on a poorly drafted table essentially grinds the whole expedition to a halt. Further, everyone's suddenly slavishly beholden to those who can make limbs and things grow back (read: you're another tithing bitch to whichever religion has its representative tag along).

Second, by being not specific you don't run into Clash of Expectations. This way you not only avoid haggling over which injuries a PC sustains, you also avoid any valuation of said injury. This nips Thespianism, Simulationist Whore, and Munchkinism in the bud. Less specifics means: more freedom for the Thespian to be be inflicted by their heart's desire, no details for the Simulationist Whore to whinge the penalty values (and subsequently the campaign) into the ground, and no gameable mechanics means nothing for the Munchkin to exploit (Lucky is a solid Feat, I hear...). When in doubt, make yourself happy, your work easier, and avoid playing "favorites."

Third, Exhaustion is crazy lethal and -- outside a single spell (IIRC), which can be easily banned outright from your world -- is extremely hard to circumvent. This brings the Short/Long Rest economy firmly into your GM grasp again, which is important to control Tactical and Strategic Pacing. Essentially since you can easily adjust the value of X Number of Battles for Exhaustion, you can easily avoid 15 Min Workday or Bataan Death March as Day Hike pacing issues. Further, Exhaustion affects more than just combat -- which means that all classes, not just the combat heavy martials, will face the brunt of "Injuries" repeatedly testing their Exhaustion limits.

Those are my arguments to make your life easier and still stay within the 5e paradigm. I hope that helps! Are you looking for a different sort of solution?

Quote from: Opaopajr;898653If you don't mind, could you give a quick rundown on what you have posted in Google-whatever. ... I hope that helps! Are you looking for a different sort of solution?

First, yes that helps. My Injury system emulates the Exhaustion system. :-)

Basically you gain potential levels of Injury. There are five ways for it to happen.

1. Hit Points reduced to 0.
2. A critical hit is scored during combat.
3. A death save is failed by 5 or more.
4. A fall over 10' (a DEX Save can avoid, see below).
5. Severe or extreme damage as the DM feels it applies.

Once combat is over (or the situation, like you fell), you make a save vs. DC 20. On success, you take only one injury level (regardless of potential injury), otherwise Injury = potential injury.

If the character has Damage Resistance vs. the damage done, that character gains half the levels of Injury (round down). If the character has Damage Vulnerability vs. the damage done, that character gains double the levels of Injury (round up).

Effects of Injury

Injury Level | Effect
1 Gain a flaw representing your current level of Injury. This flaw is only temporary and is removed when all Injury is healed. Gain disadvantage on ability checks.
2 Your speed is halved.
3 Gain disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws.
4 Your hit point maximum is halved.
5 Your speed is reduced to 0.
6 Roll for Coma (potential Death). Your hit point maximum is reduced to the max of one HD + CON bonus. Use your highest HD if you have different HD from multiclassing.

Roll for Coma: Make a CON save vs. DC20. On a failure, you slip into a coma for 3d6 weeks. On a success, you slip into a coma for 2d6 weeks.

Coma: During a coma, the character makes a death save daily following the same rules as a normal death save (daily vs. per turn). If the character stabilizes (succeeds on three death saves) during the coma they will not perish, but remain in the coma until it breaks. The coma will break once the random time period has elapsed. If any Injury remains upon awaking from a coma, those effects are still applicable until all Injury is healed.

Injury Level Healing Times

Injury Level | Normal | Ideal
1 2 Weeks 1 Week
2 1 Month 2 Weeks
3 1 Month 2 Weeks
4 2 Months 1 Month
5 2 Months 1 Month
6 4 Months 2 Months

Normal is "on adventure", ideal is bed rest, hospice, etc.  Every 20 points of magical healing removes one level of injury. Players keep track of magical healing as the total is cumulative across healing spells.

That's the summary with the two tables. I modeled it after Exhaustion but with a focus on actual HP loss and critical hits, death saves, etc.