Death And Dismemberment
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Why on earth would I want to play with dismemberment rules? That’s a good question, especially when I’m trying so hard to make the game simpler and easier to play! Here’s what it boils down to — I want alternatives to death, and I want PCs to spend more time recuperating between adventures.
There are several posts to which I owe credit, which I will link below.
So, death and dismemberment in a 4e-clone? How would one go about it? I’ll tell you how I would do it, and give you a bit more information about why.
Here’s some basic math — 4e starting hit points (Con score plus class bonus) hover right around 20 on average, while damage tends to hover around 9 for a typical monster. That way, it takes 3-5 hits to bring down the average PC.
In a typical encounter where the PCs face off with an equal number of opponents, enemies would have to gang up on a PC — or get lucky with the critical hits and damage rolls — for anyone to be in danger of accidental PC death.
Why is this important? Here’s the thing — in my experience, players can be kind of stupid during combat. It can take them several combat rounds to realize they’re in serious danger — and under other editions’ rules, somebody usually dies.
This wouldn’t be a problem if the people who died were the ones who deserved it. In other words, the players responsible for the fatal error. No, the PCs who usually go down are the unfortunate souls who try and help, and it’s rarely heroic.
A little padding goes a long way — that extra couple rounds can help the players figure out they’re in over their heads. The smart ones can actually get away.
This may undergo some change while I work on the numbers.
2d6 – Effect
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Here are several links for credit.
Link: Playing With Death & Dismemberment
Source Trollsmyth
Link: Deadlier Death and Dismemberment
Source Troll and Flame
Link: Classic D&D Injury Table
Source Robert Fisher
The realplay that Sky Full of Dust was doing of Against the Giants really illustrated for me the importance of using Death & Dismemberment rules if you wanted to keep a party more or less intact at lower levels. Then again, they were playing ACKS. I think that Dismemberment rules are most appropriate for games that are less forgiving, where a characters have a ratio of being able to take roughly under 1 successful hit per level before being dropped to 0 HP or less. In a lot of those situations, it’s not necessarily a player being stupid, but rather being so unfortunate as to be hit once. The disabilities and dismemberment make for more interesting roleplaying opportunities than simply having to re-roll a new character.
Those number you use right there help illustrate for me what you meant by how 4e characters start at what would be around level 5 in other games; level 5 characters in older editions can take about that many hits.
I think it’s something worth playtesting; if one of the main complaints leveled at 4e is how tough it is to kill a character, d&d tables might exacerbate it, as their purpose is to make characters harder to kill in games where characters die too easily.
Death and dismemberment *prolongs* a character’s life? I guess I hadn’t really considered it from the perspective of a PC already likely to die. Maybe I should give this some more thought.
All I was thinking about was how much I had grown to dislike “negative hit points,” and that something like this would be an effective alternative.
Maybe all I need to do is remove negative hit points.
Take a gander at that real-play I mention. I think I linked it a few posts of mine back.
Essentially what happens is, instead of a 5 HP level 1 character getting wadded up and thrown in the trash when he takes 5 or 6 damage, he gets a cool manglement like losing an eye (penalty to perception), loses a hand (can’t dual wield/use shield), damaged ear (penalty to listen), needs a bit of rest, and can eventually get restored up by a higher level cleric (but gets doom points or something? I don’t know, I’m not entirely familiar with the ACKS d&d table). But it turns character death into an opportunity to play with an interesting handicap.
Yeah, okay. I’ll have to take a look and reexamine what exactly I want “death” to mean from a mechanical perspective.
I think I’m just partial the idea of a one-eyed alcoholic dwarf whose one-eyed alcoholism can be accounted for mechanically :D
Also, here’s a cool post with a list of various ways different editions/systems handle death. http://untimately.blogspot.com/2012/02/varieties-of-fatal-experience.html