Quote from: Mishihari on March 19, 2025, 11:39:39 AM

Quote from: blackstone on March 19, 2025, 10:56:49 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on March 19, 2025, 10:29:59 AM

Quote from: blackstone on March 19, 2025, 07:46:14 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on March 18, 2025, 02:59:46 PMI suppose for those insufficiently cultured

You lost me right there. Way to go with the underhanded insult.

Video games as culture?  That was humor, not an insult.  Lighten up man.

Ok, very well..

To answer your question: everything you've mentioned can be found in the 1st ed DMG, the Wilderness Survival Guide, the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. I'd check those to see if they fulfil your needs.

If not, just make something up. As long as you are fair and consistent with your group, it's not a problem.

I tried to use the WSG back in the day.  The ideas were good but it was boring to use in play.  Same for the rest.  I'd like games where survival, stealth, and movement challenges can have as great a focus as combat.  The systems I've seen are too simplistic to spend any time with and have the play be interesting.

Sounds like you want a complex system. IMO, give Hackmaster 4e a try. Despite it being a parody, it's very playable. You can easily look past the parody aspects. Most of the parody is in the text. It was my group's game when I DM'd up to a few years ago. I've changed to a more simple system. My best friend however is still using it for his campaign.

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 19, 2025, 11:06:46 AMI can only think of a few games where there's a significant chance of a lucky shot taking an experienced character from full health to dead in one go.

Hackmaster 4e is one of them. There's a game mechanic called threshold of pain. Any creature or PC has a threshold of pain, or ToP for short. Not everything does: if it lacks a nervous system, blood, etc. The ToP is 50% of your current hit points.

If a creature or PC loses 50% or more of their current hit points in a single combat round, you must perform a ToP check. The ToP check is a save vs. Death. If you fail your save, the difference between the failed roll and what the minimum target number to save vs death, is how may rounds your character or a creature is incapacitated.

BTW, every monster and PC has a 20 hp "kicker" added to your hit points when created.

Say for example you character is fighting a goblin. The goblin has 24 hit points, and your character hit it for 14. The DM rolls a save vs death for the goblin (the ToP check), and the goblin missed it by 5. That goblin is falls to the ground unconscious for five rounds. After five rounds, if the goblin is still alive, the DM rolls again to see if he saves vs death again.

That's just ToP. The critical hit rules are insanely complex. I needed an Excel spreadsheet for crits with macros running in the background designed by somebody to quicken up the pace of combat.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 19, 2025, 12:16:27 PMscale slower.  That is, a very high level character has something like 4 times the total "health" of a low level one, not x10 or more.

Strangely enough, removing the equivalent of the Con bonus to hit points helped a lot, in getting this to work.

Totally agree that a slow scale is key, and somewhere between 4x and 5x is what I use.

I use the Con equivalent, but take it out of the progression: double bonus at first level, and none thereafter (my HP scale maxes out around 30 at epic levels).

Quote from: Zalman on March 19, 2025, 11:42:19 AM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 19, 2025, 11:17:35 AMPersonally, I think the old school technique of hit points being a buffer, however one that can realistically get ground down, is one of the better ways to handle the issue.  Of course, the infamous "save or die" stakes out another piece of territory.  You can't be killed in a single shot, absent save or die.  You can be ground down to the point that a single shot will take you out.  When you start, you've got no real buffer. The buffer grows as you do.

In my experience, a sweet spot is possible where the HP buffer (before being ground down) still allows a single really good shot to take you out -- with an increasing chance of being taken out by a lesser single shot as the buffer is whittled away. All without "save or die" mechanics. It's just a matter of finding the right balance between the system's swinginess and the characters' HP totals.

I think the problem is 80% the insistence of a unified HP pool. The instant you split a character' health into multiple health pools, this problem goes away because just because one pool is large doesn't prevent another from being small.

One of the neat tricks I've adopted is tying your attributes directly to your health pools, meaning each attribute has an attached health pool and each click of the character advancement system gives you extra health for the attached health pool. This means that your build will automatically determine your health pools.

The tradeoff is, of course, that this is crunchy and involves adding bookkeeping, but it also makes tuning one hit KOs relatively easy, and provides a built in way to make sure that the GM has perfect control over when a one hit KO is on table.

Quote from: Fheredin on March 20, 2025, 03:58:45 PMI think the problem is 80% the insistence of a unified HP pool. The instant you split a character' health into multiple health pools, this problem goes away because just because one pool is large doesn't prevent another from being small.

Multiple pools is one way to split a single pool that's too large, but a single pool doesn't have to be too large. Split or single, the problem goes away when the pool being used is the right size.

QuoteThis means that your build will automatically determine your health pools.

Sure, and this is true of any system with fixed, not rolled, HP.

Quote from: blackstone on March 19, 2025, 01:47:47 PMSounds like you want a complex system.

Well, yes and no.  I want interesting and meaningful choices and consequences for stealth, movement, and survival challenges, which means more complex than anything I've seen.  But the simplest system that achieves that goal is the best one.

Quote from: blackstone on March 19, 2025, 01:47:47 PMIMO, give Hackmaster 4e a try. Despite it being a parody, it's very playable. You can easily look past the parody aspects. Most of the parody is in the text. It was my group's game when I DM'd up to a few years ago. I've changed to a more simple system. My best friend however is still using it for his campaign.

Thanks for the suggestion