You could go back to slow healing, pre-3e style would be 1-3 hp/day, or 3e style 1 hp/level/day. Eliminate the hit dice healing mechanic. Make the Fighter 'Second Wind' power grant temporary hp instead of heal hp. This would make magical healing very important, as it was pre-4e; not necessarily a bad thing. Would make trivial fights more threatening due to hp attrition, would make combat scary in general.

For ultra-gritty, eliminate healing spells altogether, or make them high level.

Thanks for putting up your tables, Trechriron!

OK, having read it, I don't like it.

Waaaaaaaay too gameable (crits and saves), favors magical healing to literally "erase" Injury at will, and needlessly involved. It's a rehash of everything that makes 3e a chore. Too many of those mechanics are enslaved to feats/features that abuse the hell out of it, and in the end doesn't really do much else besides trigger Exhaustion and delay S/L Resting rates. Something that my above suggestion did with none of the gameable exceptions or bookkeeping overhead.

Nope. Delete. Not worth it. I can't see a quick way to salvage this system.

Let's try afresh. What exactly do you want to save flavor-wise from this (or GURPS, RQ6, etc.) that actually enhances either: player gameplay/flavor, or GM campaign management/flavor?

Quote from: Simlasa;898568Not fun for you, maybe.

You missed my point. I am literally talking about a game where if somebody rolls an 8 or better on 2d6 you die. That what Chainmail Fantasy and Man to Man combat amounted too.

Love 5E, hate its HP inflation. My fix: high-level, max. HP characters getting damaged narratively only get grazed. With HP, it's all in the narrative. If you don't visualise the concept of HP to your players via narrative and let the mechanic stand for itself, it simply degenerates into 'life points'. HP just don't work if viewed this way.

Quote from: trechriron;898645I 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.

Yes, I have some familiarity; I live in the area.

QuoteThere are so many game stores in the greater Seattle area I can barely remember them all!!

I can think of about 3... The Dreaming in the U-District, Gamma Ray Games up on Capitol Hill, The Game Matrix down in Tacoma. Unless you're counting the gaggle of board/card games stores, with a minimal Rpg retail presence, as FLGS. Then I can see it being a countless number.

But if you're looking for a variety of Rpgs for retail sale, outside of 5e and Fantasy Flight Games' Rpgs, your options start dwindling. And you need to hit the stores I mentioned above, or start trawling Half Price Books (which is what I typically do).

QuoteThe death of Seattle game stores is highly exaggerated as would be any idea that gaming in general is suffering here.

A great number have dried up and blown away over the years - at least those I would consider as traditional FLGS. Those that have survived were diversified to begin with.

I wouldn't suggest that gaming is suffering in the area. I've always had great success finding players to participate in Rpgs I've run.

QuoteMaybe 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...

Now you're cooking with gas!

Quote from: trechriron;898656First, 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.

.....

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).

It's for you to decide but very complicated.  Very good it happens after combat etc., then you don't need to worry about applying it to monsters.  I know how you feel about hit points, D&D players have been feeling it since the beginning and so many work around.

I like your levels.  Not sure why need to go to 0 HP to gain one, I admit know nothing about how 5th Edition works.  If you want to make getting hurt, hurt, I'd divide hit points into 2 or 4 groups; like 25-50% loss +1 level damage, 50%+, +2 level.  Choose % that are easy to figure, choose few.

If you are going to do this, add a  carrot to your stick.  A positive modifier if completely healthy.

QuoteEffects 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.

Nice flavor; but a headache to track?

QuoteInjury 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.

Again, a lot of stuff to track.  May not be an issue with D&D players.

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.

Indeed:).

Quote from: trechriron;898645I 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

That sounds like your best plan.
After all, if it's real tough to run a system you dislike, how much tougher will it be to write for one;)?

Quote from: trechriron;898522However, it took a step back with Hit Points for me. I feel like characters are now cartoon-ish. I like some grit in my injury rules. I don't like video-game-esque combat churning. I find it odd (and seriously immersion breaking) that people can combat after combat without any effect to their bodies.

Well, in some small way, it's the video games which copied D&D, but I see your point.

QuoteAm I just being too picky?

Not at all. These are games. We do them to have fun. If the system isn't fun for you, then you should change it. That said, people have been trying to do this for as long as RPGs have been around, and will continue to do so because:

Quote from: Simlasa;898568Not fun for you, maybe.

Exactly. Everyone's needs are different. Everyone wants a different blend of playability, realism, and risk.

Quote from: Jason Coplen;898534D&D HP turns me right off the game at about 30 HP. I feel it gets too carried away, and the newer editions are so ridiculous.

I've never really understood this part. If the average hp numbers double and the average damage numbers double, than the only thing that has changed is a level of granularity.

Quote from: trechriron;898591I 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.

My work internet seems to not let me look at this system, so I'll take a gander when I'm on a longer break. Places to look I would suggest might include GURPS 3e (I don't know about 4e, but obviously you have some experience), Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (just tone it down if you don't want expendable PCs), or Mordheim (miniature battles, I know, but
tracking ongoing figure status is one of its better points).

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;898610Hit points are an arbitrary abstract construction Gary Gygax came up with to make the game play a certain way.

Exactly! This system is in place because it creates a certain type of combat experience. No more, no less.

Quote from: daniel_ream;898557Does anyone know if the Epic 6 rules work with 5E?  I found they radically changed the feel of 3.x and Pathfinder in a way that some players with these same complaints seemed to like.

Hey, thanks for mentioning Epic 6! I'm not sure I've seen those rules, but they seem familiar (Didn't J Arcane do something like this in his game?> so I might have. I'll be reading them more fully and trying them out with my group. Maybe I can handle D&D better this way. After getting into RQ back in the day D&D HP have always bugged me, but D&D is the system for monsters.

Quote from: Jason Coplen;898722Hey, thanks for mentioning Epic 6! I'm not sure I've seen those rules, but they seem familiar (Didn't J Arcane do something like this in his game?> so I might have. I'll be reading them more fully and trying them out with my group. Maybe I can handle D&D better this way. After getting into RQ back in the day D&D HP have always bugged me, but D&D is the system for monsters.

TL;DR:  Instead of "epic level" (where you stop gaining levels and HP and just get special epic-level feats every X thousand XP) you set epic level at 6th level.  There's a little bit of hacking necessary to get certain class features available as epic feats or else those classes feel underpowered.

This caps HP at 30-50, makes median level monsters a serious threat, eliminates a lot of LFQW (you're capping spells at 3rd level), and makes some monsters just plain unbeatable without an army, an artifact, or serious planning.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?206323-E6-The-Game-Inside-D-amp-D

Quote from: trechriron;898522I created a couple optional rules for 5e you can see here --> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_lJhbSwBglnWVctajViTkgyaU0

So. Help me change my mind on Injury and HP in D&D. How do you bring the "grit" in your D&D games? Are there other optional rules you've seen for HP? (Yes, I've read the stuff in the DMG for 5e, seemed too abrupt for my tastes). Am I just being too picky?

I like your injury rules.  They seem to intuitively represent different levels of physical damage.  Still, I wouldn't use them.

I was in the same position as you, several months ago.  Hit points just seemed too abstract and cartoonish.  So I replaced them with what I considered to be a simple system of abstract injuries - every injury had a Wound Level, which acted as a penalty to all rolls, including resisting future wounds.  You'd only count the level of your most severe wound.  Simple, right?

Well, it wasn't as simple in practice as I wanted.  Without getting into detail here, there were two problems: too much bookkeeping, and combat became too lethal.  I tried to play around with things a lot to get the kind of results I wanted.  And that forced me to clarify what I wanted.  I wanted a system that could produce a very wide range of results that would be roughly equivalent to reality, with some abstraction.  But most of the time, the system should result in the accumulation of small amounts of damage, for purposes of pacing a dungeon crawl.

Well, if you think about it, these two goals are in opposition.  When anything can happen, eventually it will.  And then your players might not be happy when an elite fighter is killed by an errant pen-knife thrust from a frightened child.

I tried for a compromise.  I added a Stamina pool, like hit points, that would buffer your injuries.  Once that was reduced to zero, you'd actually get real injuries.  This is kind of like old WHFRP.  My approach was that this pool would be the same for everyone (simplifying bookkeeping), but the amount of damage you take would be reduced by your constitution.  Well, my heart was in the right place, but this became impossible to balance.  You'd have some guys who were so tough, they couldn't be damaged at all by someone who wasn't.  All the tweaking didn't make it work.

Bit by bit, I found myself implementing hit points.  I completely scaled back my requirement for breadth, since it was just causing problems.  Instead, I would rely on the OSR concept of "rulings" when necessary.  Having random critical strikes simply wasn't adding anything to the game.  And neither were realistic injuries.  I ended up massively simplifying injury modeling: you're fine until you reach 0HP, at which point you're wounded.  That means you're basically incapacitated, unable to fight with highly limited mobility.  At -4 or less, you're in critical condition, and you will eventually die if not treated.  At -8, you die.  

In a way, it more realistic than having all kinds of specific injuries.  In my limited experience, any injury more significant than a minor one will be completely debilitating for any sort of vigorous activity.  I could add rules for permanent injuries, but then, it's just simpler to kill the character.  Are you going to keep adventuring with a one-armed thief?  I guess some people find that sort of thing interesting, but I'd rather start a new character, at that point.

Now, what do hit points really represent?  I think that everyone understands that they are an abstraction.  So the old D&D rules, where you'd regain 1HP per day, were crazy unrealistic and debilitating.  It takes me two weeks for my elite warrior to catch his breath?  And he wasn't even really hurt?  That doesn't even feel cinematically correct.  But for the sake of pace, I think 5e approach sucks away some of the tension, if you're able to recover most of your damage between fights.  Personally, I prefer something in between the two.  In my game, characters whose HP are zero or more will recover their level in HP every hour of rest (though the first rest only takes ten minutes).  If your HP drop below zero, however, they recover at the rate of one per WEEK till you reach 1HP, or one per MONTH if you went critical.

The only thing this makes tricky, for me, are things like poison and touch-effects.  Loss of HP doesn't necessitate, in my mind, that the attacker even makes contact with the defender.  So how can you tell if that poisoned dagger really made any contact, or if a cleric's Cause Serious Wounds spell was successfully delivered by touch?  In such cases, I give the defender a Reflexes saving throw (I use attribute-based saves instead of the weird old-school saves against petrification etc.)  If you fail, then they have to save against the effects of the poison/spell/taser/etc.

Sorry to be long-winded, but I've had to do a lot of thinking about hit points along a similar (but not identical) vein, so I hope you find these musings slightly useful.

Yup, yup! Thanks for your testimonial Edgewise, it's a good summation of simulationist aspiration coming to terms with actual table play. It's everything I already summarized as problems for Wounds in my first post; they look good on paper and crumple in actual play, adding little but what I already defined. Spiral of Suck Anchors and Flavor of the Month Scars; rocket tag and rolling on the adjective table got old faster for me than most.

Look, the biggest issue with bland, ol' HP is the sheer size of the number -- it looks to us like a bloat wall. Big numbers scare us (as they should), and big numbers for human-sized hero health make us sit back and scratch our verisimilitude heads. But here's the thing: we're thinking about an abstract quantifier of an abstract world abstractly, not "concretely from within the world's perspective." Essentially we poison our perspective from the beginning with meta-game fore-knowledge.

Now before someone throws that old canard about falling damage, remember it came about as a typo. And it was also a mere optional suggestion to resolve quickly any situation with GM desired granularity. That very same section said it was up to the GM to resolve it as they please, including instant death. And given fiat, saves, massive damage rules, a typo equation, et al., there was no shortage of options the GM had to choose from.

And that's where people stumble: We are scared of big numbers. We want granularity. We're afraid of GM judgment on the application of fiat.

Go back to the beginning of WHY you want certain aesthetics, then deconstruct what seems most applicable to a fast paced (once upon a time...) abstracted resolution system.

Quote from: Opaopajr;898800Yup, yup! Thanks for your testimonial Edgewise, it's a good summation of simulationist aspiration coming to terms with actual table play.

You have it in a nutshell.  I used to ask myself, as a rules designer/tweaker, how I could design simple rules to enable various in-game outcomes.  Now, I ask myself what I want the players to experience.  My focus has changed from considering what happens in the game to considering what happens at the gaming table.  

Hit points actually work quite beautifully for this.  Since I'm running a lot of semi-traditional dungeon crawls, I'm shooting for a certain kind of pace.  Outside of fights with name-brand enemies, I don't want there to be a high chance of PC death in any one fight.  Instead, the role of these smaller battles is mainly to deplete their resources, and hit points are the primary depletable resource (spells are the other).  This leads to situations where the party is battered and weary, and don't know if they can push on or need to fall back, or just need to rest (and risk wandering monster encounters).

The rules themselves don't handle every contingency and factor.  For instance, there are no rules for knockback or stunning.  The role of verisimilitude is not that anything can happen in a given combat, but that whatever does happen in combat feels believable.  Rulings fill in the rest, so I can throw in some custom modifiers if the players want to try to shove an opponent over the edge of a cliff or something like that.

If you want wounding to mean something, you could take a page from 4e's Bloodied. Bloodied was the term when you reached 50% of your total HP and it triggered various effects. If you wanted to use Bloodied for Wounding, then once a PC is at half HP, that's their new max HP until they rest.

But the problem is magic healing. Magic is magical, and it makes sense magic should fix wounds / fatigue / loss of "luck", etc.

BTW, I remember Mike Mearls saying back in the 5e playtest that DMs could decide that "short rest" was defined as "sleeping overnight" and "long rest" could be "one week, one month, etc" if you wanted a more "realistic" reset time.

Maybe you could rule that for whatever reason, even magic can only heal you to 50% HP and only rest can fully heal you.
 
However, I gotta ask - what is the GOAL of having unhealed wounds in the game?

BTW, I'm NOT saying it isn't a good goal. I play RQ and WFRP. BUT I would like to hear what you crazy kids think is the GOAL of having unhealed wounds in D&D.

Quote from: Opaopajr;898678...

Let's try afresh. What exactly do you want to save flavor-wise from this (or GURPS, RQ6, etc.) that actually enhances either: player gameplay/flavor, or GM campaign management/flavor?

Quote from: Spinachcat;898811...
 
However, I gotta ask - what is the GOAL of having unhealed wounds in the game? ...

Quote from: Edgewise;898780I like your injury rules.  They seem to intuitively represent different levels of physical damage.  Still, I wouldn't use them. ...

Sorry to be long-winded, but I've had to do a lot of thinking about hit points along a similar (but not identical) vein, so I hope you find these musings slightly useful.

Quote from: Opaopajr;898800Yup, yup! Thanks for your testimonial Edgewise... then deconstruct what seems most applicable to a fast paced (once upon a time...) abstracted resolution system.

Yes, Edgewise that was immensely helpful. So to answer Opaopajr and Spinachcat;

I want battles to be intense with the danger/threat of death in them. However, I also don't want PCs dropping like flies. I want the narrative of fighting in multiple battles to show some effect on the characters, so that it doesn't feel like a video game. If you fought six battles to get to the valley, you should have some bruises to show for it. Do I need a missing hand each time? No. In fact, I like Heroes to be Heroic, so maybe a henchman missing a hand but not the hero. :-D I also don't like people going down in battle and then just "popping" back up. Completely ruins my immersion. That in itself feels like some seriously kitschy gonzo shit.

I don't know. Nerfing Short rests and long rests will just encourage the team to stop adventuring. There will be longer lulls while they heal up. Or they will stack the magical healing in their favor and make "rests" of any sort pointless. I can nerf healing magic and just exacerbate the lulls. I don't want that either.

I don't need MASSIVE "spiral of death" stuff here, just something that represents "I've been injured" or hurt. I want there to be a tangible effect for being in battle without completely crippling the heroes. One of the things I worry about with BRP/Mythras/Classic Fantasy is how brutal it can be. I ran a Legend game and the cleric lost an arm in the first battle! I allowed a cheat using magic to restore it, but by the rules that arms was gone. I don't really want to use exhaustion for this as it's not all just exhaustion. I want to use exhaustion for real fatigue, loss of sleep, etc.

I actually rather like getting HP back via HD rolls. That is cool. Maybe instead of full healing after a long rest you just get HD back? You have to spend them to actually heal? After you hit 0 HP and fall unconscious, you are out for say 1d6 minutes even if you're healed?  I appreciate the feedback and discussion, I think I'm coming around, just a little tinkering...