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Splicer posted:No, being at 0 hit points paradoxically both means you're three stiff breezes away from the long sleep AND that the most bargain basement 1hp paladin bump means you can help set up camp and take third watch.
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Jan 23, 2022 14:20
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Splicer posted:If you want long term care as a thing you need to remove or alter the existing rules that render long term care unnecessary. I feel like this is much more complicated than it needs to be, if someone wants to have their character be badly injured or whatever instead of being killed just let them. Problem solved, they can come back when it's narratively convenient.
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Jan 23, 2022 14:50
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It's a pretty simple change to say that if you hit 0 hp you're badly injured and at some sort of mechanical penalty until you get the appropriate treatment, whether it be a good night's rest, or a doctor, or whatever.
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Jan 23, 2022 15:22
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I favor heavy abstraction; at the beginning of combat you establish the stakes and what each side is trying to accomplish, and then you use that to interpret the significance of falling to zero HP (or whatever). More reading tea leaves than strict simulation.
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Jan 23, 2022 15:24
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Tenra Bansho Zero is very good at making death something that's only on the table if you are willing to let it be on the table, and also very good at coming up with reasons why you would.
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Jan 23, 2022 15:49
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Andrast posted:I feel like this is much more complicated than it needs to be, if someone wants to have their character be badly injured or whatever instead of being killed just let them. Problem solved, they can come back when it's narratively convenient. Siivola posted:Why bother? If they need time to recuperate, they're as good as dead and the player needs to roll a new character anyway. Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Jan 23, 2022 |
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Jan 23, 2022 16:04
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Bringing someone back from the dead is a central element of stories and mythology through the ages and it would be negligent to leave it out of your "tell your own story" hobby. but also: in those stories it usually goes terribly wrong.
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Jan 23, 2022 16:29
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My Lovely Horse posted:Bringing someone back from the dead is a central element of stories and mythology through the ages and it would be negligent to leave it out of your "tell your own story" hobby. Splicer posted:If you're going to have rare, plot important resurrection as a thing in your game it should be several pages of GM advice outlining how to integrate a once-off return from the dead adventure into your existing campaign and mythos, not... ...something you can just take as a levelup benny.
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Jan 23, 2022 16:38
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My Lovely Horse posted:Bringing someone back from the dead is a central element of stories and mythology through the ages and it would be negligent to leave it out of your "tell your own story" hobby. I loved the part of Orpheus' myth where he had to gather 100000 drachmae in random loot in order to pay a 9th level priest of Hades to cast True Raise Dead on Eurydice but only at the cost of half Orpheus' level and three of his Bard spell slots.
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Jan 23, 2022 16:59
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I dunno, to me resurrection is just a gamist element that supports a particular style of play. Personally I prefer to just make the PCs nearly impossible to kill and easy to heal, but I've also never had much issue just handwaving the implications of resurrection.
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Jan 23, 2022 17:11
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Lemon-Lime posted:I loved the part of Orpheus' myth where he had to gather 100000 drachmae in random loot in order to pay a 9th level priest of Hades to cast True Raise Dead on Eurydice but only at the cost of half Orpheus' level and three of his Bard spell slots. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 23, 2022 |
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Jan 23, 2022 17:20
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Colonel Cool posted:It's a pretty simple change to say that if you hit 0 hp you're badly injured and at some sort of mechanical penalty until you get the appropriate treatment, whether it be a good night's rest, or a doctor, or whatever. You can even do that with a slight modification to the existing rules of 5e: A common houserule I've been implementing is that players come back from 0 HP with a level of exhaustion. It's worked pretty well in practice (It helps that I also use the 15 minute short rest house rule as well) and changes up how the players treat healing and resource management.
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Jan 23, 2022 17:34
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Leraika posted:Tenra Bansho Zero is very good at making death something that's only on the table if you are willing to let it be on the table, and also very good at coming up with reasons why you would. TBZ gets brought up every time we talk about death or injury mechanics here, but honestly yeah TBZ is a really good one to bring up right now because of how it specifically deals with risk and healing. TBZ has a Vitality point counter, which is standard HP, and it has the Wounds boxes. The Wounds work similar to Blades in the Dark's Harm levels but they're voluntarily taken on the player's side, up to and including checking the Dead box. And even that box isn't a guarantee that the character will die. Checking that box negates/absorbs all of the incoming damage from an attack coming at them, but it means if their Vitality hits 0, they die. If a character manages to end a fight and not hit 0 Vitality, they survive. However, those Wounds boxes still need "treatment" (similar to Harm in Blades again) to be removed. And it can be a challenging recuperation process depending on what resources the players have available to heal someone.
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Jan 23, 2022 18:32
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Yeah, it's usually me bringing it up 
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Jan 23, 2022 18:38
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I remember hearing about some japanese ttrpg whose name escapes me that had a "Death Die" mechanic that in normal combat you could get taken out of commission but always nonlethally, but there was a special die you could add to rolls for a bonus but using it signalled that if you were taken out, your character was dead-dead. That always felt like a neat trade-off that getting KOd and easily revived was the norm, but dramatic real death was always a possibility if a player wanted to live dangerously.
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Jan 23, 2022 18:47
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That's Tenra Bansho Zero.
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Jan 23, 2022 18:49
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Colonel Cool posted:It's a pretty simple change to say that if you hit 0 hp you're badly injured and at some sort of mechanical penalty until you get the appropriate treatment, whether it be a good night's rest, or a doctor, or whatever. For what amounts to balance in 5e, the game is simultaneously built with the mechanical expectation that you'll just ping-pong at 0hp, and narratively that you definitely will avoid getting knocked out. Adding "Actually going to 0hp is real bad for reals" just breaks a lot of the mechanics.
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Jan 23, 2022 19:04
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Nuns with Guns posted:TBZ gets brought up every time we talk about death or injury mechanics here, but honestly yeah TBZ is a really good one to bring up right now because of how it specifically deals with risk and healing. TBZ has a Vitality point counter, which is standard HP, and it has the Wounds boxes. The Wounds work similar to Blades in the Dark's Harm levels but they're voluntarily taken on the player's side, up to and including checking the Dead box. And even that box isn't a guarantee that the character will die. Checking that box negates/absorbs all of the incoming damage from an attack coming at them, but it means if their Vitality hits 0, they die. If a character manages to end a fight and not hit 0 Vitality, they survive. However, those Wounds boxes still need "treatment" (similar to Harm in Blades again) to be removed. And it can be a challenging recuperation process depending on what resources the players have available to heal someone.
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Jan 23, 2022 19:14
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Leraika posted:Yeah, it's usually me bringing it up I have brought it up, too, to be fair. I just meant since we're discussing healing and resurrection as verisimilitudinous (I don't know if that's actually a word) in-world mechanics.
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Jan 23, 2022 19:55
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My Lovely Horse posted:13th Age does something with the general idea:
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Jan 23, 2022 20:23
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None of the effects are permanent though? With the obvious exception of death on the fifth casting but you need to do something mighty special to even get to cast it five times.
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Jan 23, 2022 20:39
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Losing a spell slot for the next X games until you level is still pretty steep.
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Jan 23, 2022 20:42
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That it certainly is. But Bob the Barbarian is a valued friend. Just in this case not valued at thousands of GP that will be gone from your wallet forever and will never go into a sweet permanent +1 item Reading it over it occurs to me that it doesn't specifically cost you the spell slot you cast the spell with and you could conceivably choose to lose a lower level one, if the table is fine with it (I as a GM would be).
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Jan 23, 2022 20:59
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Speaking of death and resurrection... the way I handled it last I made a homebrew was that a single character that "died" in a fight never died, they were just beaten unconscious. They'd eventually recover next time the party made camp, but pick up an "injury," some sort of temporary debilitation. If not treated, said injury eventually became a "scar," a sort of sidegrade based on their randomly rolled injury(like having a poorly-healed leg wound might make your walk an odd hobble that made you move slower but made it hard to predict so it was a permanent passive defensive buff), which it would require expensive medical care or magic to unfuck. I do also think that having very expensive, but largely reliable, resurrection works if someone's doing a more "game-y" game, a resource management hex crawl or something. Or it could be a Cruelty Squad thing where the upper classes all have access to extremely reliable resurrection for themselves(and key employees/favoured torture targets) and part of the plot is about turning off their resurrection faucet to allow meaningful change to happen...
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Jan 23, 2022 21:06
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Toshimo posted:For what amounts to balance in 5e, the game is simultaneously built with the mechanical expectation that you'll just ping-pong at 0hp, and narratively that you definitely will avoid getting knocked out. Adding "Actually going to 0hp is real bad for reals" just breaks a lot of the mechanics. And also strikes me as bad for at the table play for the experience most people say they want now. I ain't putting in more effort than "This is Melf, the male elf. Ok my 2nd character is Melf II, his son" if we're making dropping to 0 HP cumbersome, or including dice penalties for damage. I'm also curious, are the folks advocating for more system penalties for HP crossing thresholds talking about things they want to navigate at a table, or have we become the nerds who primarily interact with RPGs as a reading excercise and theorycrafting, now?
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Jan 23, 2022 23:41
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Wound penalties exist in a bunch of games and they're fine? I don't know that it would work in D&D, but "you get hurt and it impedes your performance" isn't a thing that only a deranged theorycrafter that never actually plays games would think is ok.
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Jan 24, 2022 00:37
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EthanSteele posted:Wound penalties exist in a bunch of games and they're fine? I don't know that it would work in D&D, but "you get hurt and it impedes your performance" isn't a thing that only a deranged theorycrafter that never actually plays games would think is ok. Wound penalties can work in games designed for it, they also suck in a bunch of other games when they're thrown in 'for realism' and don't actually match what play at the table is supposed to be. This conversation isn't about whether Blades in the Dark works with its health system and penalties (it does), or if the injury penalties and mundane healing time derail oWoD if you're not playing things with supernatural healing (they do) It's specifically about d&d and d&d-alikes, so I think it's valid to call it out that wound penalties, healing times, and extra costs to going below 0 HP or getting resurrected undermine the current flavor and goal of heroic action and detailed characters with backgrounds.
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Jan 24, 2022 00:50
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Been thinking of “what’s a good fail-state for PCs beyond permadeath without removing death’s impact in the setting”, and one solution that emerges is the option of the fail state (0 HP or whatever) always be some kind of permanent, significant change instead. That change could be death (the option for a player who wants to start completely fresh) but you always have the option of having the PC return with a significant mark (serious injury, visible scar) or come back but changed (reincarnation, undead, cyborg, body-switching, etc.) or even the old soap opera “you killed my twin” approach. Establish in-setting that death is permanent, but whether or not PCs die is always in the hands of their players.
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Jan 24, 2022 02:52
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I find people unwilling to put any effort into a character if the game has any real chance of permadeath baffling. It's really not very hard to make a compelling character. It might be a little cumbersome to write a ten page backstory, but that really isn't a prerequisite for making an interesting character.
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Jan 24, 2022 03:38
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I kinda wanna see a game that has resurrection to ameliorate the penalty of permadeath, but only rich folk get True Resurrection and murderhobos like you get the back alley doctor bootleg version where you come back all hosed up and weird and also you might have a giant lobster claw for an arm now.
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Jan 24, 2022 03:45
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Colonel Cool posted:I find people unwilling to put any effort into a character if the game has any real chance of permadeath baffling. It's really not very hard to make a compelling character. It might be a little cumbersome to write a ten page backstory, but that really isn't a prerequisite for making an interesting character. I find that my ability to invest in an activity is inversely proportional to the prominence of random reset-level consequences. Which I think more about in video games than in RPGs because my RPG group just kind of doesn't play games where there's a significant chance of just randomly having to make a new character - like it's certainly possible to flat out die in BITD/AW, but it's some significant work and you can usually weasel your way out well before its on the table. But if I'm playing a Crusader Kings in Iron Man mode I'm basically alt tabbed half the time and choosing things at random. Similarly in an RPG I tend to make thin, gimmicky joke characters if there's no good reason to believe they'll make it past session three or four. May as well go out getting a punchline or two in. I don't think it's death strictly because like I find Polaris an extremely easy game to make compelling characters in, and Polaris is always a tragedy, your character is not going to make it out alive. But it's extremely not random.
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Jan 24, 2022 04:21
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Gatto Grigio posted:Been thinking of “what’s a good fail-state for PCs beyond permadeath without removing death’s impact in the setting”, and one solution that emerges is the option of the fail state (0 HP or whatever) always be some kind of permanent, significant change instead. That change could be death (the option for a player who wants to start completely fresh) but you always have the option of having the PC return with a significant mark (serious injury, visible scar) or come back but changed (reincarnation, undead, cyborg, body-switching, etc.) or even the old soap opera “you killed my twin” approach. Establish in-setting that death is permanent, but whether or not PCs die is always in the hands of their players.
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Jan 24, 2022 04:41
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Hostile V posted:Anyone can try to fight their way out of the land of the dead and will be able to cross back over to the land of the living but they never come back alone and however they come back causes a natural disaster where they're going to re-emerge that forces the other PCs to do damage control and minimize collateral. Yeah some sort of "law of equivalency" would imo be the best way to handle resurrections. Bringing a great good back has to bring an equal evil or requires the death of just as much good. Not to mention there's a ton of people who'd just want to enjoy the paradise they earned -and potentially a stigma on those who keep coming back, since surely that's a sign they lived a terrible life to keep trying to escape whatever dread afterlife they keep going back to.
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Jan 24, 2022 04:49
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I liked Lancer's approach of decanting another bioprinted copy of the character from the archives. It's never a perfect copy and suffers from weird unexplainable traumas and ailments. Player gets to keep enjoying that character, death has consequences, and there's a new roleplaying element to work with.
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Jan 24, 2022 05:54
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I always liked the DBZ gag where heavenly denizens die and the only difference is that they have a halo now. "Does it really matter that you died?" "IT'S JUST DIFFERENT OK"
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Jan 24, 2022 06:01
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Hostile V posted:Anyone can try to fight their way out of the land of the dead and will be able to cross back over to the land of the living but they never come back alone and however they come back causes a natural disaster where they're going to re-emerge that forces the other PCs to do damage control and minimize collateral. Now I want a campaign of reverse Ghostbusters who are like hospitality facilitators for the freshly resurrected, cleaning up all the walls weeping blood and making sure all the nasty boojums that the re-alive brought back with them don't wreck their houses. It could have a whole hungry-ghost management mini-game.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:03
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So out of curiousity, when you frame out a scenario, do you do any planning for when the player characters end up retreating, or do you just wing it?
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Jan 24, 2022 06:06
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Gatto Grigio posted:Been thinking of “what’s a good fail-state for PCs beyond permadeath without removing death’s impact in the setting”, and one solution that emerges is the option of the fail state (0 HP or whatever) always be some kind of permanent, significant change instead. That change could be death (the option for a player who wants to start completely fresh) but you always have the option of having the PC return with a significant mark (serious injury, visible scar) or come back but changed (reincarnation, undead, cyborg, body-switching, etc.) or even the old soap opera “you killed my twin” approach. Establish in-setting that death is permanent, but whether or not PCs die is always in the hands of their players. I mean, you don't even need to do something directly to the players. The villain KO's them and they spend the next week or two breaking out of Bad Hero Jail or slogging out of the Chasm of Very Large Snails that he tossed them into, in the meantime, the villain's plans have advanced, possibly even faster than planned because he now no longer has to worry about the PC's for a bit(or, he thinks, permanently) or because he wants to hurry up and complete them because now he knows someone's aware of his plans. Maybe that advancement of his plans steamrolls Niceville, where the players spent level 1 fighting extra large squirrels and making friends with the townsfolk. Some of them might've died defending their homes, others have had to flee or are now under the oppressive yoke of Big Villain. If your players actually give a gently caress about the setting and some of the people in it, it's entirely possible to "punish" them for failure in ways that aren't just killing or crippling their characters.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:58
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, you don't even need to do something directly to the players. Yeah, HP isn't a measure of the character's blod and guts that still remain inside them, it's an abstraction of the ability to keep fighting and continue the adventure. The failure state of "you can't push on and stop Count Evil's plan" absolutely can be "So you're routed, and Count Evil does the bad thing."
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Jan 24, 2022 08:06
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Siivola posted:So out of curiousity, when you frame out a scenario, do you do any planning for when the player characters end up retreating, or do you just wing it? Following up on the great suggestions on consequences by PurpleXVI, I run my games with the expectation that retreat is always an option. Borrowing another 13th Age rule, the party can vote among themselves to retreat if they’re in over their heads (this rule is mostly for D&D/OSR stuff). Retreat always takes you to a place of safety where the threat won’t or can’t pursue, and all PCs (living/dead/etc) are safe. There is always a consequence in-setting, but that’s agreed upon in group discussion. It could mean a loss of resources (like throwing food or gold to distract a monster) or an advance of the enemy’s plans (ex. retreating from a cult’s hideout means that it’s able to gain a stronger foothold in part of the PC’s home city).
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Jan 24, 2022 09:23
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