Mechanically, Secrets of sha-Arthan began as a variant on Moldvay/Cook Dungeons & Dragons, because I'm a big fan of that version of D&D, which is easy to learn and to play. However, as I've worked on it and playtested bits of it, several elements – for example, the magic system – have diverged more and more from B/X, to the point where it's becoming more of its own thing. I'm fine with that, since, at the end of the day, my first priority is to make a game I like. However, I do hope that, when I'm done (whenever that might be), it'll also be something others might enjoy, too.
Lately, I've been experimenting with some ideas related to the combat system. Most significant among these ideas is that player character hit point totals are mostly static and equal to one of the character's ability scores. So, for example, if the character's score in relevant ability is 12, he has 12 hit points. This makes beginning characters quite a bit tougher than a typical 1st-level D&D character, who might have half that many hit points to start. However, I don't envisage those 12 hit points ever really increasing with experience, except perhaps in small ways here and there.
This is a big change from D&D and its derivatives, though very much in line with games like RuneQuest and other members of the Basic Role-Playing family. Having played many BRP games over the years, I do appreciate the benefits of non-inflationary hit points. For one thing, combats are generally much more dangerous, since a single lucky hit is capable of knocking a character out of a fight, if not outright killing him. That means players have to think twice about rushing into battle and, when they do so, they have to rely on planning and superior skill, not simply bags of hit points, to achieve victory.
On the other hand, precisely because of combat's deadliness, BRP games include a lot of ways to potentially mitigate that deadliness. For example, the combat rules include active defense maneuvers, like dodging and parrying. The rules also include ablative armor that lessens any damage that makes it through those defenses. These are welcome aspects of the combat rules, but there's no question that their inclusion slows down play in a way that D&D's relatively simple and abstract combat rules do not. As a guy who usually finds combat the least interesting aspect of most RPGs, fast and simple better suits my preferences.
Yet, I'm still playing around with ways to keep hit point totals low and combats quick and deadly in Secrets of sha-Arthan. It's proving to be harder than I thought it would, for some of the reasons I've already mentioned. Though BRP-style combat historically grew out of early attempts to regularize OD&D combat and make it more "realistic," it did so at the cost of speed. Finding a way to thread the needle between the elegance of D&D's combat system and the perilous nature of BRP's equivalent is tough, or at least I'm finding it so.
Consequently, I'd love to hear more from people who have long experience with BRP in any of its forms. Is there a way to have your cake and eat it too? Can I get the best of both worlds? Fast, simple combat that nevertheless has some tactical depth, with lower hit points and active defense? Or is this a fool's errand and I should just abandon the attempt? I'd love to know your thoughts.
we did a variant of it (even published a free retro clone at the time) - Hit points are the same as the CON ability (but never lower than 10) . As the character progress by acquiring XP, for each level gained, the player may choose one ability and roll the die…if the result is higher than his current score in that ability, the player may add a point to it (except charisma).
ReplyDeleteAs the character gains a new level, he may add his CON bonus (if there is one) to the maximum HP. Negative modifier of CON is not used in that situation.
now this satisfied the whole "zero to hero" advancement but it also created a different side problem: monsters became boring in a way I can't really put my finger on. it opened up a rabbit hole of more and more tweaks (the effect of having only 1 HP left, parrying, etc) and suddenly the game within the game (combat) demanded more attention in the rare occasion combat happened. it wasn't until 2019 when we started a campaign of Forbidden Lands that we felt we reached home so to speak.
In the game I'm working on, my combat model is built around the idea that getting run through by a sword is pretty much lethal no matter who you are, and so the focus is on not getting hit. The idea is that not getting hit requires the players to exert themselves, thus building up fatigue, until they reach the point where they are exhausted and then overcome. I add tactical depth through an action ecocomy, where players can choose how (and how far) to exert themselves every round, balancing effectiveness in the short run against long-run staying power.
ReplyDeleteIn my Fate of Aurora game, which is currently undergoing playtesting, we decided to rely on the BRP OGL, since we liked its granularity and were shying away from the concept of gold=experience. We almost immediately noticed that, even in a setting that seldom pushes PC into unavoidable combat (the first two adventures have been more mystery-solving solving + exploration), the HP quota was so low that we had a Cthulhu-like mortality rate. This is fine if you're a mere human confronting terrors coming from beyond-the-stars but not really if you're a wannabe hero in a high-fantasy or sword & sorcery setting. That's why we're now experimenting with this rule: every time I call for advancements (that would be in between adventures) PCs make a Stamina check, if successful, they add a certain amount of HP (usually 1d3) to their maximum threshold, which is race-based (usually no more than 35). Let's see if it manages to give some breathing space without turning them into tanks .....
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, a realistic combat system is slow at its best. You need to check the penalty any heavy armor gives to different skills, weapons give bonifications against other weapons and some armors, etc. It is totally right to play with a realistic combat system, and it is very reconendable if you want to play a historix campaign, like Romans against Huns. But if you want a fantasy world where everybody can have any weapon or armor, I recommend an abstract and fast system.
ReplyDeleteI don't think ablative is the word for it, as the armor doesn't degrade (I'm no BRP expert tho).
ReplyDeleteMaybe the cluncky term damage-reducing is all we got.
Sure. I have Twilight: 2000 in my head right now, whose vehicle armor does degrade with damage.
DeleteYeah, ablative definitely isn't quite the right term, despite the fact that shields and weapons can lose AP if they're hit hard enough. "Resistant" might be a reasonable way to say that, sonce it both resists damage and can be whittled down gradually when taking enough penetrating hits.
DeleteIt might be worth looking at the first edition (pre-RIFTS) Palladium Fantasy, which is more like a simplified Runequest than AD&D in some ways. Hit points barely go up with level, and leveling is rare anyway. Very simple active defenses (dodge, parry), armor points but they aren't ablative, they're really just extra hit points, etc.
ReplyDeleteAlso consider that many MMORPGs have ablative armor (the computer does the work) but it's heavily level-locked, so the "extra hit points" you get are level-based, like D&D.
Arduin Grimoire volume III. The revised hit point system. It also made it into the free Ruins of Arduin game out on the web that is built on S&W White box. I've been using it for the last few years. lower level characters are stout but thats what I wanted. I never much cared for zero to hero and low level grinding through characters. It makes for much more interesting mid and high level combat where they can get wrecked if they don't play intelligently (which is the bigger issue with D&D combat, by far IME/IMO)
ReplyDeleteWas literally just here to mention Arduin, and now read your comment and heard about Ruins of Arduin for the first time. As a massive Arduin devotee since the late 70s how have I never heard of this before??
DeleteI've always had a Love/Hate affair with the original Arduin Trilogy since 79 or 80, but for me RoA is the core coolest bits of Arduin, from a rules standpoint. Everything you need and nothing you don't . Great product. Glad I was able to help you find it by accident!
DeleteI think it's a fool's errand, unless you're okay with something like the Stormbringer or Elric! BRP variants: skill levels of 800% and damage bonuses of 10d6, but with HP in the ~13 average for PCs. I have experience with both BRP and D&D, and the two are just at opposite ends of the heroic spectrum, IME.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to making BRP faster, removing hit-locations greatly speeds up combat. Also, making the defense and dodge two entirely different categories should be applied as well. Simply put, in combat the idea of “dodging “ an opponent’s attack, is in theory, already baked into your defense roll, but in a situation where your PC is not fighting but trying to avoid something dangerous ( like a giant bolder or a wall of firing poisoned darts) is when the dodge roll comes into play.
ReplyDeleteI'm working on my own fantasy heartbreaker, currently stalled due to other projects, and went through a lot of this, as Moldvay is also my inspiration.
ReplyDeleteHere's what I've come up with for hit points so far. It is inspired by one of Arduin's system, but is its own thing:
Hit Dice & Hit Points
A player character’s Base Hit Points are equal to their Constitution score plus their class primary ability score; multi-class characters use the highest of their two or three primary ability scores. Base Hit Points increase or decrease along with their constituent Primary Ability Scores.
Base Hit Point Ability Scores by Class
Class Base Hit Point Ability Score Hit Die
Cleric Wisdom 1d3
Druid Charisma 1d3
Fighter Strength 1d4
Scout Constitution 1d3
Thief Dexterity 1d2
Wizard Intelligence 1d2
Characters also gain 1 hit die each level, 1st to 15th level (Constitution adjustments do not apply to these rolls). Multi-class characters use the highest of their hit die types.
A character’s Maximum Hit Points are equal to their Base Hit Points plus the maximum roll of all of their hit dice.
When the party meets at the tavern for their next adventure after having spent all their ill-gotten wealth in debauchery and carousing, the player rolls all their hit dice and adds the sum to their Base Hit Points to determine their Current Hit Points. This might be modified by various “downtime” events, such as carousing, curses, training, and the like.
Wounded & Death’s Door
When a character has been reduced to 10 or fewer Current Hit Points they are wounded. A wounded character suffers a penalty of -2 on all to hit rolls and saving throws until they are healed to 11 or more Current Hit Points.
When a character is reduced to 0 hit points they fall to the ground, unconscious, at death’s door – either unconscious or dead, but nobody knows which until the body is checked.
At that point the character makes a saving throw versus Death; failure indicates they are dead. A successful save indicates they are alive and stable and awaken with 1 hit point.
If not checked before d6xd6 turns, the character must make a saving throw versus Death with a -4 penalty; if successful, they are alive and stable and awaken with 1 hp. If the save fails, the character dies.
A character who has been at death’s door is debilitated, and suffers a penalty of -2 on all to hit rolls and saving throws and deals only half damage with physical attacks, until they have regained at least half Maximum Hit Points, rounded up.
A character who is still recovering from being at death’s door and is still wounded (with 10 or fewer Current Hit Points), is gravely wounded, and has cumulative penalties of -4 on all to hit rolls and saving throws, deals only half damage, and moves at only half their normal movement rate, until they are no longer wounded, and are again merely debilitated.
A gravely wounded spellcaster must make a saving throw versus Spells whenever they wish to cast a spell. If the save fails, they fail to cast the spell, though the spell is not lost, and can try again later.
The system gives low-level characters sustainability, but with the debilitating and wounding functions, gives characters a reason to choose to bug out and avoid combat other than merely low hit points (and you generally do not have to deal with unconscious companions, though there are spells and poisons that do that).
ReplyDeleteSo combat is deadly, but low-level characters don't have glass jaws. Hit points on average range from about 25 to 30 at 1st level to 60 to 45 to 75 at 15th level (max level), with an absolute maximum of 96 for a 15th level fighter (18 STR + 18 CON + 15d4 (60)) so not as grossly overpowered as in other D&D based systems at high levels (1E AD&D 15th level fighter could have up to 144 hp).
Probably far afield of what you want, but I always preferred a wound level system like James Bond 007 or Ars Magica. After a successful strike (overcoming a defense rating that would include things like parrying/dodging) damage that overcomes a toughness rating (armor + endurance) would inflict one or more wound levels, which would have a negative effect on player's future rolls until healed. In play I thought it worked quite speedily, while still keeping a bit of verisimilitude.
ReplyDeleteQuick and simple BRP?
ReplyDeleteKing Arthur Pendragon
It's not BRP (at all) but I'd suggest anyone to try to get a look at Silhouette/Silcore.
ReplyDeleteYou have the precalculate some stuff at character creation, but after that it's blazingly fast, can scale from man vs man to man vs dragon to squad vs squad, has no hit points but wound levels, armor "absorbs damage" but not the way you'd expect ... I never used it for Fantasy but ran 1930s pulp stuff for almost two years and it's extremely elegant.
My experience with BRP-family games is much greater than with D&D-family ones, but my impression so far has been that neither is "objectively" faster or simpler than the other. To me, D&D is clearly the more cumbersome and draggy and bizarre approach -- but that's because I'm newer to it, I'm pretty sure :)
ReplyDeleteIf your target consumers of sha-Arthan are D&D players, which it sounds like it is, don't worry about this, go with what you've got -- it's what you like, it's comfortable, and they'll likely find it so too. The rest of us will just pick up the setting and strip out the rules for something else, anyway ;p
I think I remember this from d20 Modern/Star Wars. Con is equal to your HP/BP. As you increase in levels, you get additional points. These can reflect non-lethal damage. A critical hit causes damage to the main HP/BP. So, it's possible to have a pc dead/dying at zero HP/BP bit still have the other points to stay active. Running on adrenaline or bleeding out.
ReplyDeleteI've long looked for such a solution myself.
ReplyDeleteUsually moving away from hitpoints results in a system ill-suited to combat-heavy games. It is no coincidence that while RQ started as a dungeon crawl game, it moved away from it. Ironically the more realistic the combat rules, the larger a part of the rules they become, yet at the same time the smaller a part of the actual play they are.
BRP's parrying and armour rules have little effect on deadliness - in fact they have little difference in the outcomes compared to treating armour as making you more difficult to hit=damage (which, ironically, seems to be a better model for armour than damage reduction - i.e. usually hitting plate does nothing, you need to hit a gap in the armour).
It seems any system which is hit points based suffers from the problem that more deadly attack => more hitpoints damage => a hit will one-shot a PC.
The solution is, of course, to move to a wounds system. Many claim that any such system is always just hitpoints by another name - that it is smoke and mirrors - but that is clearly not the case.
However the danger is that it adds a lot of overhead for little gain.
Have you considered a two-stat system for tracking health? Something like Injury and Exhaustion points, with BRP-style resistant armor acting to turn what would be injuries into exhaustion unless it's penetrated by either overwhelming damage or a very precise hit. Go to zero exhaustion and you're at massive penalties to go on fighting and future hits score equal amounts of both exhaustion and injury. Go to negative max exhaustion and you're unconscious. Go to zero injury and you're dying without help. Go to negative max injury and you're instantly dead.
ReplyDeleteInjury points would be impossible to improve naturally. Exhaustion might be something you can level up very slightly, or train to improve alongside physical attributes. Some drugs might offer significant benefits to exhaustion scores, with drawbacks when they wear off.
With this, you can still have your active defenses and damage-soaking armor but you can set the odds of successfully shrugging off an attack a bit lower since your PCs will be inherently more durable. You should also wind up with fewer kills and more KOs or dying-but-treatable bodies on the field, which is good for taking (or being taken as) prisoners. Fighting unarmored or in very light gear will still be very dangerous unless your defensive skills are very high, but I assume that's as desired.
If you're going to modify the combat from Moldvay, please consider some sort of rules for subdual/knockout damage. So much of Sci-Fi/Fantasy fiction has the characters being knocked out or captured, and I've always been a little frustrated that this mechanic is not a bigger part of most RPG systems I've encountered. It's been a looong time since I looked at BRP. If that's a part of the system, then go for it! Otherwise, modifying the combat to make it more realistic or more deadly just doesn't seem worth the change to me. I think the goal in any mods should be to make it emulate the combat in the source material. Interested in others thoughts on this. Maybe people just hate this kind of thing and feel it makes the game less "old skool"?
ReplyDeleteYES, very yes. This is the kind of rulesmongering I actually want in games (new or old). I'm not going to plug here what I've found works for me, but it made a big difference to me in keeping involved in RPGs -- I really, really do not want more game systems that are carefully and meticulously engineerined to simulate a particular kind of _gaming_ experience (whether retro, or experimental, or whatever). Way too self-referential-to-full-on-solipsistic for me.
ReplyDelete"Subduing", whether it's losing consciousness or becoming completely exhausted or psychological defeat/collapse, is sorely lacking, in my experience. And I think you're right that people hate it because it's not Old School, because it has a wishy-washy 'narrativist' or whatever aura.
(Sorry, my comment above was meant to be a reply to the one by lore suto, immediately previously.)
DeleteI know Palladium Fantasy is a system that people don't use to love, but it is a derivation from D&D and it has some good ideas, even if you don't like it (for me it is too crunchy). For example, they have two different hit points. One is for superficial wounds, other is for serious damage.
ReplyDeleteI think this is the post-Rifts version. Characters were given armor points even when not wearing armor. These are like luck/exhaustion points but are still called "structural damage" since that's what the armor points were called. Confusingly, after this change, the original hit points now reflect actual "structural damage" to the body and you can get injuries if taking a lot of hit point damage. There are also a lot more combat options. It's not a bad system but the naming conventions are confusing and the explanations of many things are scattered throughout the text.
DeleteIn these later versions of Palladium Fantasy, the characters have much more survivability than Runequest/BRP. Maybe even more than AD&D.
I think most B/X, 1e, 2e D&D players question the major systems at some point, from the simplistic combat to the wonky spell memorization to the lack of defined skills. In my experience though, deeper combat, spell point systems and skills may add to the sense of realism, but lose some of the fun along the way. So, my simple advice is to playtest the heck out of any changes you are considering.
ReplyDeleteTales of Argosa, the second edition of Low Fantasy Gaming, uses CON as HP, and so far, it plays really well. It's actually CON plus a multiplier of level, with different classes having different multipliers, but the total is still pretty low. This is offset by the 'martial exploits' available to the players. Keeps Cindy really risky but also fun.
ReplyDelete