Damage Track

[Medwyn]

For my games I use poker chips to represent damage suffered by the players and I quite enjoy handing out a large stack of chips to the players showing how much damage they just took. But I've found as the players get higher and higher in levels they need more chips. So I thought about putting forward an idea where instead of having a large Vitality/Wound total they could have a damage track with conditions and a damage save similar to NPCS.

I also hardly roll any dice, my players do all the rolling.

I'm only toying around with the idea so any feedback on the viability of this idea would be welcome.

Players would need to have a new 'Damage Save' this would be based on their Vitality Dice. I think a progression similar to BAB would work well, so d12 would be Fast etc. This would of course be adjusted by Con Mod.

Next you'd need a number of boxes to record the damage. I was thinking that this could be the number of wounds a player has. This way if you are small or smaller you'd have less boxes and large or bigger characters would have more boxes.

The damage save would then be adjusted by any DR or Damage Resistance according to the damage type.

So then after being successfully hit a PC would make a damage save vs the damage and any AP could be added too.  I'm not too sure about Keen quality yet though.

Then the difference between the save and damage would be the number of boxes to cross out (or in my case number of tokens to hand out).
With a successful save you'd take a subdual.

Critical Hits are something I'm not sure on maybe you'd take double damage...

This idea could also be extended to Subdual and Stress tracks, with the threshold equal to the number of boxes. Then everytime you take a subdual you'd roll a check adding the number of boxes to see if you fall unconcious etc.

How does that sound?

[spinningdice]

What I'd be inclined to do, is reverse it around, wipe out the W/VP distinction, and turn Health into a threshold system like Stress/Subdual.
Hit CON wounds and make a damage save or suffer x.
Fail 1 of these saves and you suffer Wounded I conditions, 2= Wounded II, 3=Wounded III & then Unconsciousness & Finally Death.
As to what Wounded conditions do, I'd have to think about, but probably penalty to checks, concentration and rolling on table of ouch at end of scene should you be Wounded II/III or worse.

[Krensky]

What I'd be inclined to do, is reverse it around, wipe out the W/VP distinction, and turn Health into a threshold system like Stress/Subdual.
Hit CON wounds and make a damage save or suffer x.
Fail 1 of these saves and you suffer Wounded I conditions, 2= Wounded II, 3=Wounded III & then Unconsciousness & Finally Death.
As to what Wounded conditions do, I'd have to think about, but probably penalty to checks, concentration and rolling on table of ouch at end of scene should you be Wounded II/III or worse.

Well, the simple thing would be a -2, -4, -6 to everything, including initiative count.

[MilitiaJim]

This seems a decent idea if you're trying to be gritty and keep the PCs from being unconcerned about people trying to kill them at high levels.  That said, this seems to remove one of perks of being higher level. 

[spinningdice]

Not necessarily, it being Save based means that your Fort increases will keep you going with quite a bit of damage. It certainly wouldn't be as harmful as some of the grittier campaign qualities.

Alternatively you could go the M&M route (I'm not sure if 2nd ed does the same) and translate your Vitality progression into a 4th save (following the traditional s/m/f route) if you wanted to keep the disparity between Fort and soaking up damage.

Doing some very quick and dirty math, average CON (for a decent agent) 12, average weapon damage around 6, can take 2 shots before even having to roll a save. Even after that point the DC would only be 12 (using the tables for Stress/Subdual.

I was a little rusty on the Stress/Subdual damage rules, but looking at it, you'd need to suffer in excess of about 60 damage to die (though critical hits could cause quicker escalation).
I'd use the stress table replacing Shaken with Wounded and Drained with Death.

[Medwyn]

That is some good ideas.

I like the idea of a damage save for the PC's but the system needs to scale so higher levels characters don't feel too shafted.

I was thinking of PC's having a number of boxes (thresholds?) equal to their say half their Wounds and a save like progression based of the Vitality. Then every second box would give an increasing penalty, maybe I'd throw the fatigued & exhausted into the mix as well and of course the last box would be dying not dead to allow for a dramatic last save etc.

But I'm not sure on critical hits still, maybe that is where you can add in Fatigue/Exhausted and perhaps you get 2 boxes of damage.

[MugMug]

What I'd be inclined to do, is reverse it around, wipe out the W/VP distinction, and turn Health into a threshold system like Stress/Subdual.
Hit CON wounds and make a damage save or suffer x.

That would eliminate subdual as a distinct damage type. This isn't necessarily a problem, but you'd have to rework the subdual damage concept if you wanted to keep it around. This would also remove one of the balancing elements between classes, which is a more significant issue.

You could use the vitality die itself as a threshold (i.e. 8, 10, or 12). That would keep a certain class distinction and also not completely obviate subdual (subdual using Con rather than VP die as the threshold). I'd probably for the sake of simplicity use whichever threshold is applied the most given the class levels selected, with the larger threshold used in case of ties. For example: a Sol 1 would use 12; a Sol 1 / Adv 1 would use 12; and a Sol 1 / Adv 2 would use 10. It's worth remembering the only difference the threshold value makes is how quickly the DC ramps up on the damage checks. All the real meat in the check is based on the damage (presumably Fort) save bonuses.

Feats or other effects which add to max VP or WP (i.e. buffs rather than curative effects) instead adds an unnamed bonus to damage saves equal to half the stated VP/WP increase, rounded down (min 1). For example, Great Fort adds a +1 to damage saves and +3 to the base Fort save bonus; Toughness adds half (rounded down) your base Fort save bonus to damage saves.

Of course, this is without checking the numbers first. I suspect we'll see a flattening effect to the power curve, where 1st level chars are more powerful than normal and 20th level are less powerful that normal. The problem being under the current idea a 1st level character can't die until he reaches 5x his VP (or whatever other) threshold, and the 20th level character won't have an easy time surviving at that threshold.

But let's see what the numbers tell us. We'll assume:
* no feats that adjust Fort, VP, or WP
* Con 12

The numbers in the "% Success" column are success percentages at each instance (i.e. the chance of making that one die roll at the point the threshold is crossed).

Example 1: Scout (fast Fort; d12 VP)
Lvl 1
Threshold   % Success
1 (12)       60%
2 (24)       40%
3 (36)       20%
4 (48)        -
5 (60)        -

Lvl 10
Threshold   % Success
1 (12)       85%
2 (24)       65%
3 (36)       45%
4 (48)       25%
5 (60)        5%

Lvl 20
Threshold   % Success
1 (12)      100%
2 (24)       90%
3 (36)       70%
4 (48)       50%
5 (60)       30%

Example 2: Sleuth (slow Fort; d8 VP)
Lvl 1
Threshold   % Success
1 (8)         50%
2 (16)       30%
3 (24)       10%
4 (32)        -
5 (40)        -

Lvl 10
Threshold   % Success
1 (8)         65%
2 (16)       45%
3 (24)       25%
4 (32)        5%
5 (40)        -

Lvl 20
Threshold   % Success
1 (8)         80%
2 (16)       60%
3 (24)       40%
4 (32)       20%
5 (40)        -

So low level characters start automatically failing beyond the first couple thresholds, and even high level characters have a hard time succeeding (or automatically fail) at higher thresholds.

Walter

[MugMug]

As I think more about it, modeling the lethal damage system on the stress damage system would slow down combat. Every time the character takes damage (after the first bit, anyway) would require a roll by the player.

Walter