Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
Twin Axes
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Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Twin Axes »

Since we have the -6 hp safety net now dying doesn't hurt so much anymore. Ok, it hurts one's pride a little. But the autopause practically guarantees that someone has time to heal you before you expire. In effect, we're playing Dragon Age, where you get knocked unconscious and revived, repeatedly. Only TPK equals actual demise.

Which is all well and good with me.

But, since we seem to have a lot of house rules, here's another one: make it even more like DA and let people who get knocked below zero HP aquire some sort of wound. It could be a status effect, a minus to attributes or skill rolls, something like that. This wound might be healed by a successful heal check plus resting, for example. This would make "dying" something more than the minor inconvenience it is now.
Last edited by Twin Axes on Fri Feb 14, 2014 4:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by FoamBats4All »

The auto-pause's intended design is to actually cause more deaths, by reducing the amount of bullshit tech rez requests -- which we get so, so many of. DMs must consciously acknowledge that someone is dying and be aware of the situation. Maybe people might bounce back from unconscious more, but they should remain dead more often.

Since DMs are made aware of dying characters, they can assess the situation and correctly identify later bullshit calls more often.
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Galadorn
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Galadorn »

^^
+1

Please do this, it makes sense (i know magical healing also makes sense to remove the effects also, but there's many arguments that can support and/or counter the whole idea sure), but in fact this also promotes RP.

Wounded condition should also force a PC to only be able to walk. Sort of a forced "Fatigue" state.
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Rumple C »

Maybe being dazed for a few rounds after being restored to positives?
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Ronan
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Ronan »

We've discussed this before; I prefer stat damage as a simple solution. Though the death system code is a mess and any changes may have to wait for a re-write (if that ever comes).

TA, most of the problem will go away when Njall dies.
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Galadorn »

Rumple C wrote:Maybe being dazed for a few rounds after being restored to positives?
yeeeeaa aaa.... i was thinking/hoping more like "under-a-fatigue-condition for a few DAYS" even after being healed. :) Unless the healing was powerful rejuvenative (appropriate) magic, like, Heal spell, Regenerate, Restoration, etc, ...
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Rumple C »

Meh. It's not the rules. I think the -6 floor is silly, but i have been shouted down way to many times to care anymore. Ultimately it comes down to DMA and Tech having buy-in. We'll see.
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Twin Axes »

Ronan wrote:
TA, most of the problem will go away when Njall dies.
But that won't happen until my CMW wand runs out of charges, and there are over 30 left.
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Ronan »

Twin Axes wrote:But that won't happen until my CMW wand runs out of charges, and there are over 30 left.
So three more sessions?
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Zelknolf »

If there was some broad community support, I guess?


I'm really not keen on changing death without a rewrite-- and a rewrite is a pretty significant burden that I'd also want to sweep as much necessary redesign as possible into (ideally so we don't have to change it so many damn times; it was spaghetti when I found it, and trying to keep the 'get out of jail free' tech rezzes from happening has only made that worse).
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kid
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by kid »

Just three rounds of immobility after you come back from negatives would be awesome.
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Ithildur
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Ithildur »

ok, so... reread the topic and it says 'thoughts of death' not 'thoughts of bleeding'... I've suggested making things feel more gritty before by introducing penalties if someone is saved by our houserule of -6 floor, but when it comes to regular bleedout no one (other than Kid) has expressed desire to change things.

If something particularly traumatic happens in a given situation like a PC bouncing back and forth between negatives and positives a ridiculous number of times within a short span of time, DMs can always rule some kind of temporary 'trauma' penalty if they wish, even if the floor was not triggered. 'Today was a really, really bad day having lost consciousness 6 times, even with magical healing (short of a Heal spell perhaps) you may feel lingering effects for a while', drain some stat or two with dmfi or by casting Bestow Curse on them, etc.

3 rounds of immobility for merely dropping into minus without triggering the floor is pretty random and arbitrary. If you want to simulate someone being unconscious/knocked out without bleeding to death, that's already covered under being stabilized at less than 0 HPs. The game simply isn't designed to support '90% hp means you're pretty healthy, 50% means you move slowly and can't use an arm, 10% means you're awake but can't move'. 3.5e DOES have more complex rules than ALFA does for someone with 0 HPs and various other states/conditions, but we don't have a lot of those currently afaik.

The problem with arbitrary tweaks to major parts of the system is that you get a ripple effect that can throws off balance/feel of gameplay in unexpected ways; it's why I'm not a fan of max HP for PCs, because there's ripple effects that broadly impact various elements related to survivability when PCs automatically get 150% - 200% or more HPs than the rest of the game was designed for, as well as flavor/feel being 'off'. Honestly, a lot of our efforts to make the game feel 'grittier' make little sense to me while we retain the completely unbalanced monstrous absurdity of grotesquely mutated max HP PCs.


Summary: I support prioritizing stuff that really breaks our game first, somewhere down the line considering tweaks/house rules if they make sense within the context of the system AND improves flavor/fluff. imo people bouncing up and down from -6 and Death magic due to our friendly houserule 'floor' arguably does break our game in terms of both fluff and crunch; regular bleedouts of people hitting say -4 HPs otoh have never felt like a problem; 99% of the time people seem to understand what's happening and are fine with it.
Last edited by Ithildur on Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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kid
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by kid »

While triggering the floor. Of course. I thought that was the topic.
In last night's session I dropped twice, and twice I RPed stumbling while others were fighting.
Just felt a bit stupid to rush back in there.
Anyways, I'd love a few rounds of immobility, would like increase deadliness of the game.
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Ithildur
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Ithildur »

My mistake, I thought you meant merely recovering from negative HPs.

Immobility after hitting -6... yeah, I hear you, it does feel odd to get back up and jump back into the fray after being hit with something that was nasty enough that it should have killed you; I remember being torn during the Zorran fight balancing the RP of being staggered/dazed/whatever and yet not wanting to completely stay out of the fight while party members were fighting for their lives. As far as being immobile, that complicates things when the rest of the party's running for their lives, since it'll often mean a PC emotes picking up and carrying you which is fine with a DM on, but without a DM...

otoh, if someone healed you with a low lvl healing or two you're up now with barely any HPs; that is (in DnD terms) representing a character in pretty bad shape. Then if you cast maybe Heal or Cure Serious wounds or drink potions of such, well that's MAJORLY powerful magical stuff that just healed you, you get back to half of full HPs and fight on still not in very good shape, that doesn't seem unreasonable.

The real issue that's being brought up seems to me the silliness of multiple bouncing up from the floor/what should've been lethal; if it's just once then the floor's not so bad.

What if we scripted the floor to catch you only once per combat session, or only once per day, etc? And hit with stat penalty -2 to everything when you get up from near death via floor, requires either passage of time or full rest, heal, restoration etc to recover from?
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Re: Thoughts of death

Post by Zelknolf »

Presumably, such a rewrite would want to do away with the concept of a "floor" and instead regard the OnDeath event differently to account for the various grumps people have about the existing system (which can crudely be divided into the "ALFA's death system makes it too easy to get back into the fight after a character meets the pen and paper conditions for death," "ALFA's death system removes any sense of consequence after a character fares poorly in a fight," and "ALFA's death system is incredibly difficult to follow, and often requires that someone from tech explain what just happened"). Or, at least, we'd want to do away with the floor and the "standing -> dead" handling to take care of the last point. A lot of people get lost in that, and there are some pretty inaccurate explanations floating around as a result.

And we'd want to keep in mind the goals that the system had in the first place: we force characters to endure about a fifty times more violence to advance in ALFA when compared to plain Dungeons and Dragons, so we need to either make that combat less lethal or make recovering from those deaths less consequential to make our game work at a basic level. ALFA seems unlikely to go the route of 'easier returns from the dead' (would have to be something on the order of "lose 100xp per character level, and raise dead costs 500 gold, resurrection 1000, and true resurrection 2500" -- I'd rather not be able to ransack a couple goblin villages to make enough money to bring someone back from the dead who's been gone 200 years), which is how we got onto 'try to make people die about as often per level as they would in PnP' in the first place.
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