Too Much Life for The Living: March 2011 Blog Carnival
One more article for the Blog Carnival! Next time, I’ll get back to the series on Pulp Genre Conventions, if everything goes according to plan…
A Variant Combat System for D&D 3.x
Is healing too easy in D&D? Sometimes it seems like Clerics are little more than magical drip bottles, especially in more tactically oriented campaigns and adventures, like the typical dungeon. Only when adventures move beyond this restriction and begin to explore themes of theology and the nature of divinity do Clerics contribute more to the party than being a source of healing and a second-rate fighter.
Worse still, other characters can come to take this instant total recovery for granted, giving them a sense of invulnerability, which expresses itself as a disrespect for the capabilities of the creatures encountered.
Nor can the GM counter by using the principle of “what’s fair for the PCs is fair for the NPCs”; doing so means that the combat will last long beyong the point at which it is interesting, becoming tiresome and exhausting, and taking entirely too much game time. Slowing the game to a crawl is not an acceptable solution!
The Value of Healing
There is also an arguement to be made for an answer of “No” to the initial question. The characters are supposed to be exceptional, after all, and the chutzpah that comes from having sufficient healing available enables them to act that way. This is the same line of arguement that led me to introduce a ‘quick healing’ technology in my superhero campaign.
A second line of argument runs that reducing the game to an exercise in bookkeeping drains the fun from it faster than anything else around, continually dragging the players out of immersion in the roleplay and back into the metagame.
Finally, there is a third arguement that if clerics are less effective at healing, the value of the character type is weakened, reducing the variety in party composition, and that the risk involved in taking anything other than a high-hit point character class becomes disproportionately high. Having a reasonably high level of healing available makes variety more accessable as a choice.
The Delicate Balance
With as many reasons for having ample healing available as there are reasons for limiting the benefits of healing, it’s clear that there is a delicate balance to be maintained between too much healing and not enough.
Which still leaves the initial question itself to be unresolved. My answer is that it depends on the nature of the campaign.
Dungeon Campaigns
In dungeon-oriented campaigns, there will be more combat per day, and the number of healing spells available to a cleric will quickly be consumed; since this is the type of campaign that the designers of the game clearly had in mind when they wrote the rules, it was for this style of campaign that the availability of healing is balanced.
I would include in this category combat-heavy campaigns that take place above ground, as well.
Storytelling Campaigns
The answer is not so positive when it comes to campaigns that are more about roleplaying and less about frequent combat for its own sake. In these situations, where many game days in a row can be completely combat-free, I find that healing is too readily available, and that players can generally assume that they will enter each battle fully healed. The inevitable side-effect is that combat is not as thrilling as it could be – for anyone.
What’s Needed
What’s needed is an optional system that the GM can invoke. It must be compatable with the game as it operates normally, so that if a campaign enters a phase in which the ‘normal’ game balance is appropriate, the system can be ignored. The arguements, both pro- and anti- healing restrictions, can be viewed as design restrictions.
Standard vs Dramatic Combat
TORG had such a system, one of many worthwhile innovations that were either invented in that game’s rules or intruded apon my awareness for the first time when I read the system. They divided combat into two types: Standard combat, and Dramatic Combat.
If we designate the rules as written as “standard” combat, and the variations on healing effectiveness as “dramatic” combat, then requirement #1 – compatability – is assured.
When to use Dramatic combat
The goal of dramatic combat is to make both sides aware of every blow, to make the combat feel more knife-edge life-and-death dramatic. It follows that it should only be used at certain times:
- when the prospects for more combat in the near future are lower than they would be in a dungeon setting;
- when the outcome of the battle is unusually significant;
- when the GM has some specific reason for desiring the participants to feel every blow more keenly than usual;
- when the GM wants a more dramatic or epic flavour to the battle.
We’ll talk about this question again, once the mechanics are ironed out.
The Drama Of Dramatic Combat
By retaining the existing rules as “Standard combat” for compatability, certain choices are barred. We can’t reduce the effectiveness of healing spells, for example, or reduce the number of hit points a character has. We can’t increase the amount of damage inflicted, either. In fact, NONE of the standard paramaters can be altered at all; what we need is something “on top” of the existing rules.
Some sort of damage or combat effect that can’t be healed with the administration of a healing spell.
Wounds
Every blow that lands on a target inflicts a certain amount of damage on the target. We don’t want to mess with that, it’s fundamental to the operation of standard combat; so it follows that we are talking about an additional kind of damage, which I shall call Wounds (unoriginal but it gets the point across).
Wound Capacity
Next, we need a quick way to measure wounds, one that differentiates between combatant combat capabilities. The obvious device is the size of a character’s hit dice, plus their CON modifier. If the character’s hit dice is a d6 and they have a class modifier of +2, then every 6+2=8 points of damage would inflict one wound. The character has a wound capacity of 8.
If an attack does less than 8 points of damage (in this case), the character doesn’t get wounded by it – it’s just a scratch (to them). If an attack does 25 points of damage, the character suffers 3 wounds (because 25/8=3-and-a-bit).
Compare this with a Mage (d4 hit dice) and a CON modifier of -1. That’s a Wound Capacity of 4-1=3. So the 8-point attack would do 2 wounds, and the 24-point attack would do 8 wounds. Such characters might well end up with a negative BAB. What’s a mage doing in melee, anyway?
The Effect Of Wounds
Third, we need some sort of effect for these wounds to have on the game. How about:
- -1 to the character’s AC, or
- -1 to the character’s BAB, or
- -1 to either of the above, player’s choice?
The characters with a lot of wound capacity – those with a large-sized hit dice and high CON modifier – are also the character types with lots of BAB and AC to lose, and so are the most likely to feel this effect on combat. With BAB going down, they will slow with each nick and slash – but so will the enemies that they are attacking.
These effects apply ONLY in Dramatic conflicts.
The best choice, in this case, is the first one, because I have another trick up my sleeve for BAB.
Fatigue
Why not use a similar mechanism to track the effects of repeatedly inflicting damage? In effect, each blow of sufficient magnitude would inflict a “wound” on the character inflcting the damage.
Fatigue Capacity
Fatigue should not accumulate as quickly as Wounds, so let’s set Fatigue Capacity to 150% of Wound Capacity (round up). Our Fighter example had a Wound Capacity of 8, so he would have an exhaustion capacity of 12.
However, exhaustion should not be determined on the basis of counting only extraordinary blows; instead, it should be a reflection of the total accumulated damage handed out. If the fighter lands three blows in a round, doing 6, 12, and 15 points of damage respectively, they have inflicted a total of 33 points of damage and have suffered two points of exhaustion and are working on a third.
Effects Of Fatigue
It should now be obvious that Wounds have been applied to AC so that Fatigue can affect BAB. Every 5 points of exhaustion costs the character one attack a round, until they are reduced to a single blow.
This effect applies ONLY in Dramatic Conflicts.
Undead
Undead need to be treated as a special case. Since they don’t get a CON bonus, they are disadvantaged by this system. To compensate, Undead have their Wound Capacity doubled, and do not suffer from exhaustion. This actually reinforces the flavour of Undead – even when hacked to ribbons, they keep coming.
Regeneration
A creature that regenerates can remove 1 wound each round for every point of regeneration. This again acts to emphasise the fact that they remain whole more readily than normal creatures.
Healing
A Cure Wounds spell can heal 1 wound for every Wound Capacity of healing, up to a maximum of 25% the wounds currently suffered (round up). This reduces the Healing amount by Wound Capacity. Once a character’s HP are fully restored, the character’s Wounds cannot be healed by spell or by potions of healing. These spells have no effect on Fatigue.
So if a character with a wound capacity of 10, who has suffered 8 wounds, receives 60 points of healing during or after a battle, he can either take all 60 as HP recovery, or up to 20 points of it to recover 2 wounds – the maximum permitted. If the character still has damage to recover, he may receive a second dose of healing, and another 2 wounds (25% of 6, rounded up, is 2) may be recovered.
Not only does this reduce the effectiveness of healing, it CAPS it. The character is unlikely to fully recover all wounds, and recovers no Fatigue.
Resting In Combat
A character can take the option of resting during battle as a Standard Action. This removes one point of Fatigue, but the character risks taking Wounds during that round.
Resting Out Of Combat
At least eight hours of continuous rest permits a character to recover half his accumulated Fatigue (round up) and 1 Wound. This can only take place once per day – it doesn’t matter if the character does nothing but lie in bed all day, he only gets this much recovery. If the character has no Fatigue to recover, he may recover a second Wound.
The effects Of Negative AC
If a character experiences so many wounds that their AC is reduced below zero, that simply means that attackers (effectively) receive a bonus to hit their opponants.
The effects of Negative BAB
If a character experiences so much fatigue that his BAB is reduced to 0 or less, this simply means that it becomes harder to successfully attack the enemy. In effect, the enemy is receiving an AC bonus because their attacker is Fatigued.
Consequences
This mechanism would dramatically alter combat in many ways. Creatures with different ratios of damage inflicted, number of attacks, and Hit Points would necessarily adopt different tactical styles; in some cases, battling several targets at once, in others focussing on a single target until it is down and then moving on to the next. Melee with a large number of opponants becomes more dangerous because a character will accumulate Wounds and Fatigue, then confront fresh opposition in a weakened state. Numbers alone can eventually bring down the strongest combatant.
Healing becomes less effective, and two Dramatic conflicts in close succession become far more difficult; the character is unlikely to be fully recovered from the first when he enteres the second.
The psychological impact of becoming more vulnerable as a critical combat continues, and becoming less able to inflict damage apon the enemy, should be equally great. For the first time, there is a cost to inflicting massive damage on the enemy, and a player will FEEL his character’s wounds accumulating in the course of battle.
Spellcasters are unlikely to suffer Wounds (unless they are silly enough to enter melee) or they are attacked at Range. However, their most potent spells are likely to severely deplete their Fatigue; while this may make Touch Attacks more difficult, it will have no effect on Area Effect spells such as Fireball. That means that tactical spell use acquires a new and different parameter, one that will alter slightly with different types of opposition.
At the same time, properly utilised, this system permits the details of enemy’s nature to impact on their style and behaviour on the battlefield, giving colour to what is otherwise simply “more of the same”. Even without special planning in the way of Tactics, this will have an effect on the flow of combat. The uniqueness of each combatant becomes more emphatic and larger than life – exactly what you would hope to achieve with a “Dramatic Combat” system variant.
When Should You Use Dramatic Combat (revisited)?
That’s up to each GM. An arguement can be made for using it all the time, no question. As a general rule of thumb, if the EL is two below the average level of the party, I would always use Standard Combat, if the EL is two above the average level of the party, I would always use Dramatic Combat.
Wandering Monsters would almost always use Standard Combat, except when the EL indicates Standard Combat as defined above. Encounters that are designed to advance the plot or nudge characters in a different direction would almost always use Dramatic Combat, regardless of their EL.
There are a couple of downsides. There are more numbers to track in battle, and that’s a big one – though the bookkeeping is relatively straightforward. Combat might take a little longer as a result – and that’s another big one. The role of Clerics would shift somewhat away from being walking Healing Potions, and for characters who have been optimised to deliver the maximum Healing punch possible, that can be another.
For me, the key question to be asked in each encounter is: What would you rather have: a better combat or a faster combat?
Mike is now on Twitter! You can find him as @gamewriterMike. Why not stop by and say Hi? And, of course, you can always leave a comment if you have something to add to, or say about, this article!
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March 18th, 2011 at 2:56 am
Hey Mike,
i like this idea. Reminds me of the wounds you receive in Savage Worlds combats. A few additions striking my mind right now:
– Critical Hits: A critical could maybe inflict an extra wound or one extra point of fatigue. This emphasizes criticals (and all related stuff) a lot, though.
– Sneak Attacks: Similar to critical hits, one could think of doing at least one wound, even if the dealt damage is not enough.
– Feats concerning wounds: In Savage Worlds are feats, which let you ignore the effects of up to a certain number of wounds.
– Subdual damage: In “dramatic” bar fights one might want to change the rules a bit. Wounds could be subdual too, or maybe transormed into fatigue.
– Barbarian Rage: One could think of letting the raging barbarian ignore the drawbacks of wounds and fatigue. Nonetheless adding a rather large amount of fatigue after raging. This makes the decission of raging a very tough one: You want to rage to end the fight. If the fight continues your barbarian is unlikey to hit an opponent again. Imagine the situation of a long combat players got some wounds and fatigue, but working fine, since their opponent did also, and then you start explaining how the opponent is growing into its rage, going for all or nothing!
a lot of rules and variants can be added to dramatic combats, but i think one should watch out for making it too complicated. But you put it already in the right words: Better or faster combat?
March 18th, 2011 at 4:40 am
Wow, some really good suggestions there, Michael! Some of them I had thought of, and some I hadn’t.
Critical Hits: Doubling the damage for a critical would automatically double the fatigue the attacker receives and the wounds that the target experiences. I thought about only doubling the wounds and not fatigue, but that seemed unbalanced; on the other hand, my proposal seems a little too extreme in that respect, I’ll admit. Your suggestion (slightly tweaked) of determining the extra fatigue, plus one, before the damage gets increased by the critical multiplier, sounds like a solid improvement in retrospect.
Sneak Attack: I like this suggestion.
Feats for Wound Management: I would go further and add the same feats for fatigue management as well. It’s my philosophy that the more options a character has to choose between as they develop, the more distinctive that character becomes.
Subdual Damage: I think that Brawls would almost always be in standard combat mode and not dramatic. But if you were to use dramatic mode, I would halve the number of wounds received (but not the Fatigue) unless a weapon of some kind was involved.
Barbarian Rage: This is something that I had completely overlooked, good catch. I think that permitting the character to ignore as many wounds as they want to until after the fight, at the price of matching those ignored wounds in extra wounds, would work. So if the Barbarian chose to ignore 10 wounds during the fight, at the end of the battle, he would receive those 10 more for his trouble. The Barbarian would have to nominate how many wounds and fatigue he was going to choose to ignore at the start of combat, so even if the Barbarian only received 4 wounds in the battle, and had chosen to ignore 10, he would still receive a total of 4 (ignored at the time) +10, for 14 wounds total. This simulates someone who is so far gone in battle that they ignore damage that should be crippling them, and who is so far gone that they don’t defend themselves properly during the battle.
Some great ideas. Thanks for sparking them!
March 18th, 2011 at 3:44 am
I really like your idea. Especially that this kind of fatigue effectively slows down the character by reducing his BAB…
But I have to admit that it took me some time to remember how this BAB system worked in 3.5. It’s not that long since I switched to 4th edition, still have forgot much of the basics of 3.5…
Tobias Wichtrey recently posted..twoDDr launched
March 18th, 2011 at 3:52 am
Yes, it’s surprising how quickly you can forget the rules if you don’t use them for a while. It only takes 2 or 3 months and it all starts getting fuzzy, the same again and it’s like trying to wrestle smoke. Glad you liked the idea.
Fatigue didn’t appear in the initial idea at all, but as soon as I thought of it, the notion was enticing. I have to admit that having fatigue act like the character was getting tired is a big appeal to me as well. It just feels right, and at the same time, it’s not too arduous a game mechanic that it is impractical.
March 18th, 2011 at 7:43 am
“Only when adventures move beyond this restriction and begin to explore themes of theology and the nature of divinity do Clerics contribute more to the party than being a source of healing and a second-rate fighter.”
Second-rate fighter? Dude, Clerics are among the 5 best classes in 3.x (along with Wizards, Druids, Archivists, and Artificers). Look up the DMM Persist Cleric builds, which make them 2x better fighters than Fighters, or any other optimized build, and you should see what they are capable of. Does that mean they SHOULD be played that way? Not by any means (in fact in all the games I have played in, the Clerics have been played as healbots), but the point is the Cleric is such a powerful class that with even minimal effort you can be a melee powerhouse better than basically anything but a polymorphed Wizard or shapeshifted Druid and still have epic healing capability.
Now that the shock of reading that statement has worn off… I tried to do a similar system before. It didn’t do anything about healing (we had no healbot on the party anyway), but it tied BAB, AC, and movement speed to HP total. Using percentages (current HP compared to max HP) I created brackets and had all 3 of the previously mentioned stats drop as your current HP passed into lower brackets, then raise again on the way up. It worked fairly well, and was balanced out enough because the same thing was happening to the enemies of course. It did change combat tactics a bit: hitting first and hitting hard became even more important since if your enemies are taking penalties and you are not, you got an instant advantage. However, we dropped that system after 2 sessions because it was just too much bookkeeping to be worth the effort.
Which brings me to your final question: You can easily have both, it all depends on what your definition of “better” is. If your definition of better is more simulation then I can see where you might have a problem having accurate AND fast combat. My definition of better is simply more fun, with simulation and realism way at the back of the list of my considerations. It’s easy to have a fun and fast combat system, as evidenced by basically every rules-light game out there.
March 18th, 2011 at 7:54 am
well, i have to thank you here. The concept of wounds and fatigue comes around very naturaly. The thing i like the most about it (and maybe not emphasized enough) is that describing battle becomes almost as easy as keeping track of hit points. If a combatant has wounds you can describe these and how it results in being more clumsy, which in turn results in less AC. If the combatants accumulate fatigue you can describe how their blows become slower and less aimed, which results in less BAB.
Sometimes at our table it is hard to reason how the fighter can absorb hit after hit loosing dozens of HP without effect on his abilities to combat. Especially when the loss of HP reults from ranged attacks, like arrows. I assume we havn’t been the only ones imagining a fighter walking around like a hedgehog, but with full fighting capabilities.
Adding the concept of wounds and fatigue makes this more realistic and easier to describe for the GM, without adding to much complexity. I will definitely try this ruling in my running campaign.
March 18th, 2011 at 11:18 am
@Robert: I think you misread me – I wasn’t saying that Clerics can’t or shouldn’t be more, I was lamenting the fact that all too often they WEREN’T more. You then prove my point – unless you were trying to argue that a cleric is better at Melee than a Fighter? – by showing that Clerics can be more than the Healing + middleweight Melee Weapon Delivery System if they move beyond that narrow definition of Cleric!
What’s the DMM? I’m not familiar with that abbreviation.
The problems you describe with your variant are exactly what I hope this variant avoids. I havn’t tried it myself, so I can’t say how successful it is, only that this was the goal. In particular, I wanted to avoid the situation in which a massive first strike permits a party to slay something with no effort penalty whatsoever. The Fatigue system at least permits them to suffer a little tiredness afterwards!
@ Michael: As I just wrote, I havn’t tried this variant myself. It looks like it would work, especially if you can get the PCs to track and calculate their own wounds in the course of battle, but that’s just theory, so if you do use it, be sure and stop by to let me (and our other readers) know how it worked out.
March 18th, 2011 at 11:25 am
DMM = Divine Meta Magic. It lets you apply metamagic to your spells via expending turn attempts. When combined with feats and items that grant extra turning attempts, this can lead to some cheesy stuff. A lot of that cheese does in fact make the Cleric better at melee than a Fighter. Persisted Divine Power alone is usually enough, and it just goes up from there.
The 5 classes I mentioned as being the best classes in 3.x are considered as such because with enough foresight and planning (even if you keep to just core, in the case of the Wizard, Druid, and Cleric anyway), they can not only do everything, they can do it BETTER than the classes that specialize in that specific field. Of course at this point you are entering powergamer/munchkin territory, which is ONLY a good thing if you are playing in a group with only others just like that…
March 19th, 2011 at 1:15 am
What’s that from, Robert? It’s certainly not in the Core 3.x rules!
March 19th, 2011 at 8:08 am
Complete Divine, page 80.
March 19th, 2011 at 8:50 am
I really like the idea. (Apart from the fact that you only use it in dramatic combats)
But I have a comment
Mike wrote:
– The best choice, in this case, is the second one …
I think you mean the first one.
March 19th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
@Jocewyn: Whoops, quite right Jocewyn! I was chopping and changing between making it Wounds to AC + Fatigue to BAB, and vice-versa, or even giving players choice over one or the other, right up until I pushed the “publish” button. I guess at some point in these moments of indecisiveness I failed to upate the text in question. Good catch, and thanks for bringing it to my attention! (For anyone else, the error will be corrected within seconds of this comment going up).
As I said, there can be an arguement made for using it all the time; sounds like you’ve bought into that line of thinking. By all means, try it that way!
@Robert: Okay, that’s a supplement that I don’t yet have. But it raises another question: Is it fair to expect game designers (including independants like myself and Johnn) to ensure compatability with every published game supplement? The answer is obviously no. Personally, I don’t like the ‘trade turn attempts’ notion, as it takes a power that is only useful some of the time and lets players use it all the time in other ways, enhancing the capabilities of the one class over the others. Unless that class is demonstrably handicapped relative to the general standard (I’m looking at you, Bards!), that would only replace one problem with another. That the result can produce clerics who can out-fight Fighters shows that mechanism to be fundamentally flawed in my book! Nevertheless, unless you resort to some such shennanigans, a Cleric will never be as good in melee as a Fighter.
March 25th, 2011 at 3:46 am
Just a concept I thought was interesting. I participated in a 3.5 SRD game once where magical healing was still very effective, but required some time and attention and dressing of wounds. Still doable within a few hours, but completely impossible in combat unless the injured party was rescued and defended while the doctor/cleric/healer did his work. If they were wearing armor, it would have to be partially removed to allowing the wound to be dressed.
I liked the added dynamic it added to difficult encounters, since it involved the idea of being “downed” to more than just being in the 0 to -10 hp range.