Quote from: trechriron;898814Yes, Edgewise that was immensely helpful.

Thank you for saying so.

Quote from: trechriron;898814I 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.

In that case, it actually sounds like 5e can work very well for you with only a little bit of tweaking.  Perhaps something like Spinachat's suggestion...I like this idea of the lowered HP ceiling with a couple of small penalties i.e. "Bloodied."

I think the thing you have to consider when it comes to healing times is how you want to pace encounters.  If it takes characters an hour or two to rest their HP back to full, you have to ask yourself what is to keep them from doing that after most battles.  And that may be fine...in that case, it would be a special circumstance when they couldn't.  Or you could be really old-school with rolls for wandering monsters.  Or you might just have a lot of adventures where there's some kind of time constraint.  What I'm saying is that healing times need to take into account how you pace your adventures and encounters.

The nice thing about hit points is that it makes it pretty easy to anticipate how things will play out if you tweak the variables, in most cases.

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

Not a fan of it either. Though limiting access to short rests helps alot.

Hence the suggestion to switch to the longer recovery times. With the added removal of the rule preventing rest interruption.

We bounced around on another fora an idea for every time someone goes to zero HP they take a level of exhaustion. Or variations on that.

You could look into tweaking just how many hit points a character gets as they go up levels.  Instead of rolling for it, or taking the half hit dice plus one (that was it, right?   Going by memory here), you could just say each character gets 2 or 3 per level.  

If I recall right, I think Hackmaster had you track healing of each wound you took.  While I played some HM5 combats, we never did the stuff afterwards, so I have no clue how that worked out.

My best advice would be- if you're going to run d&d (whichever edition), just go with it perceived warts and all and do your best not to worry about it:)

Quote from: RunningLaser;899133...just go with it perceived warts and all and do your best not to worry about it:)

Yeah, I'm starting to worry about my mindset/perception. Why do I need things to be "gritty"? Players I've played with don't generally like permanent wounds or dying all the time. I've been blessed with good players who, when a character dies, don't freak out (usually). Also, themes can be brought to bear with description, encounters, etc. It happens in movies all the time. The protagonists make it to the end of the movie yet crazy awesome bad stuff happened.

Here's what I'm thinking now.

Use the optional rule so that Long Rests don't recover HP, only 1/2 level HD (as per rules). You can spend HD after a short or long rest.

If you hit 0 HP during a combat and pass out, you're out for a certain amount of time. Healing does NOT pop you back up. Any suggestions on a time? I was thinking 3d6 minutes (would be an average most of the time).

If you hit 0 HP during a combat, and don't die (succeed at death save), you gain a level of Exhaustion as many here have suggested.

Outside that my experiences with 5e have been good. My last group was a tad wonky, so I need to get a 2nd group and try it out with less... problematic newbies.

I was kicking around some ideas.  One thing I've noticed with HP was that some attacks scale.  Sneak Attack, magic Evocation spells among other things.  So I was looking over Cantrips and the fact that they scale in dice at levels 5 and 11, I was wondering if we could do the same with the Fighting Man classes (Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin and Ranger) with their weapon based attacks.

Would that help mitigate the HP bloat?  At least a little?

Quote from: trechriron;899184Yeah, I'm starting to worry about my mindset/perception. Why do I need things to be "gritty"? Players I've played with don't generally like permanent wounds or dying all the time. I

That's what I've seen too.  Players who want the "feel" of a gritty game, but not the rest of the stuff that comes with it.  

I just started running a hex crawl for my friends using Castles & Crusades.  At first I was going to go with a more gritty game, but then it hit me.  I just want to see my friends have a good time.  If I see them laughing and grinning, then in most cases, I'm laughing and grinning like an idiot with them.  I said "to hell with it" and now use the Sine Nomine Solo Heroes rules overlay for them.  They are kicking ass across the hexes and taking names and were all having fun.  Best of all- I don't have to roll monsters hit points- go me!

And a little off topic, but to add...  for those people running a game with only one player, or even a small group, the Solo Heroes rules seem to be working pretty sweet.

Wounds and critical hits don't have to be complicated. Here's my house rules:

If reduced to 0 HP or lower, roll a d20 and subtract the number of HP below zero you suffered. For example, if you have 3 HP and take 7 damage, roll d20 -4.

11-20 Exhausted. Disadvantage on all rolls until short rest
1-10 Injured. Disadvantage on all rolls and 1/2 movement until long rest.
0 or less. Death save as per 5E PHB

If you make a death save and you recover, you are automatically injured.

Quote from: RunningLaser;899237That's what I've seen too.  Players who want the "feel" of a gritty game, but not the rest of the stuff that comes with it.  

Yeah, just as in everything else, there are quite a few pretenders...

Quote from: Christopher Brady;899203I was kicking around some ideas.  One thing I've noticed with HP was that some attacks scale.  Sneak Attack, magic Evocation spells among other things.  So I was looking over Cantrips and the fact that they scale in dice at levels 5 and 11, I was wondering if we could do the same with the Fighting Man classes (Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin and Ranger) with their weapon based attacks.

Would that help mitigate the HP bloat?  At least a little?

HP bloat isnt as severe as it seems. Its mainly that the PC classes have overall been bumped up a die type and start out effectively like they had the average HP of a level 2 character. (Or an AD&D ranger) Monsters on the other hand are all over the place. A 5e Beholder has about three times the HP if an AD&D one. Same for an adult green dragon. Its got close to three times as much average HP (45 to 5e's 193) Whereas the Ankheg or kobold for example arent too much more than their A versions.

Its more like HP escalation. But the damage is escalating too to match. Again docking EVERYTHING a die type in HD and damage would ease things down some. The system works as is overall and its been surprising the amount of balance thats been applied. Just not the route I would have gone. Combats still warp along fast even at the higher levels.

Quote from: Edgewise;898780I 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.

My solution to this has been to allow only a fraction of stamina to be used at any given time as a buffer. The rest goes to HP. So for example if your character has 20 STA and 12 CON I'd allow only 25% of CON rounded up to be used as STA buffer. So your character could only buffer 3 points at any given time. The rest go straight to hit points. So you can get cut and cut again by a small blade or punched again and again as long as it deliver 3 points of less. A weapon that does 4 or more delivers 3 to STA and the rest (1HP or more) to actual HP damage and wounds.

Quote from: Doom;898612Hit 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.

The problem with that is that the more they scale the less relevant the PC actions and planning become. My party can have a great plan to take on the dragon, but if we can't neutralize it within the first round or two we're toast. We'd probably fall into a combat of attrition until all PC or dragon HP are depleted. More so, in many games HP depletion has no effect on the creatures effectiveness. So the dragon is either at a value between 1 and 250 and able to wipe my party out or is dead 0 HP. All the actions taken by my party in between have no effect whatsoever on the combat effectiveness of the dragon. Another way to look at this issue is the assassination rules which have to work around a large amount of HP for assassination to actually mean something in the game.

Quote from: RunningLaser;899237That's what I've seen too.  Players who want the "feel" of a gritty game, but not the rest of the stuff that comes with it.

Well, you can't choose a gritty set of rules and expect to play out the comic action hero sort of stuff D&D does. Having deadly combat suppresses the urge to rush into situations without a plan or a sizeable advantage... and foregrounds other stuff. So maybe those of us who want gritty rules want them because we're not that enamored of combat. If we end up in combat we've fucked up somehow. It's just a different style of play, but there's not much point in trying to make D&D fit into it when other systems were built to do it.

Quote from: trechriron;899184Why do I need things to be "gritty"? Players I've played with don't generally like permanent wounds or dying all the time.

You need a D.O.N.G  intervention. Walk outside.  Take a deep breath.  Now punch yourself in the nuts.

Better?  Ok.  Play the system you want to play, the way you want to play it, so that *you* have fun.  Maybe you have to change it to get players, maybe you have to reverse 180 degrees from what you originally thought, but it doesn't matter.  If you're not having fun, no one else will either.  Some people want to play their D&D character like Sauron from the LotR opening, fine.  Flappy Birds needs players too, but you don't have to stop playing Civilization V to play it all the time.

D&D has always been flexible (well aside from the obvious), and this ruleset was designed to be flexible and modular.  Not sure I would go all the way to Hit Locations and Wounds, or Armor as DR.  Maybe go to the old standby of 1st level Hit Points+Con are actual meat and everything after is a Stamina-Willpower-Hope-Resolve-Skill stew.

While I think Mythras/Classic Fantasy would be great for Scarred Lands, you might want to think about 5e since Scarred Lands 5e is coming out soon.  Scarred Lands seems to work well as a "everyone knows a little magic" type of setting, even if most of the "non-mages magic" is more God-gifted (or Titan-gifted).  Warlocks as Titan-worshippers, the shit writes itself.

But, in the end, better to flush a couch-fainter then make your setting a satire of itself.  You want grit and challenge, you want winning to mean something, you don't want your players making "Boiing!" noises everytime a PC pops back up again, stick to your guns.

Anytime you find yourself wavering, persuaded by lesser beings, just walk outside and repeat procedure above.

Quote from: Haffrung;899249Wounds and critical hits don't have to be complicated. Here's my house rules: ...

That is Brilliant!! I love it. It's perfect. You just made this my 1 million dollar thread. :-D

Quote from: CRKrueger;899392You need a D.O.N.G  intervention. Walk outside.  Take a deep breath.  Now punch yourself in the nuts.

Better?  Ok.  ...

:-D As a D.O.N.G. Black-Belt I should know better of course.

I'm diving back into 5e with an eye towards some publishing, being a better ambassador to my local hobby space, and expanding my player base.

I sincerely appreciate all the advice, admonishments and hilarity. It's why this place is my go-to for talking games.

If you want more brutal craziness when someone hits zero use the old Arduin critical tables.  I'll never forget...
"Head pulped and splattered over a wide area. Irrevocable death ensues."

Ah Arduin.  Even today, my players fear Sahaugin more than anything because of the dreaded Shark Bolt one High Priest had.