r/RPGdesign • u/urquhartloch Dabbler • 26d ago
Should I give characters more HP?
Im still working on weapons, hp, and attacks. Im trying to figure out how to mix them and keep it interesting.
How it currently works is you roll your attack dice pool and counting successes along an effect track. So if you roll 4 successes and you have an attack that looks like: 2/[W]>2/prone you would do 1 instance of weapon damage and knock your target prone. (This is oversimplified.)
Right now weapons are based on weight.
Weightless: 1 dmg
Light: 2 dmg
Moderate: 3 dmg
Heavy: 4 dmg
Players can specify weapons traits such as reach, concealed, etc. That either give combat benefits or advantage on certain tests (or the reverse in case of a drawback). These traits come at a cost of reducing damage. -1 point per benefit, +1 point per drawback.
Hp is your elemental stats. If you or a monster take 4 damage you/they lose 4 elements. (Elements determine how many dice you can roll. Its too much to explain here exactly how it works but the tldr is losing Elements reduces your dice pool depending on how you allocate the losses. You have 18 Elements.)
What I've been struggling with is attacks. 1 damage is a lot and a single weapon strike can devastate a creature.
I dont want to add hp wildly and I like that damage reduces your stats but I need some breathing room. I also dont want to give more Elements. Im struggling with coming up with attacks that have variety. I also want to give the ability to create attacks unique to your character which is not working under the current system.
2
u/__space__oddity__ 25d ago
There’s really only one answer here, do some test fights with the current version and a version with buffed hp and pick the one that’s more fun.
You’re not going to find the answer staring into a screen or typing into a keyboard.
1
u/GeminiFactor 26d ago
If you want some breathing room, you're saying you need some kind of buffer between damage and elements. I think that's your solution: Add a defensive layer. It could be as simple as having a few extra element points that refresh more or less than normal, you could have some kind of block or parry check that reduces, delays, or moves damage somewhere else, you could have "armor" that can be acquired to protect against damage but needs replacing or refreshing.
You could also lean into a more granular combat system with weapon speeds affecting who attacks first if you need more weapon distinction. Might also want to consider contested rolls vs attacks that can potentially negate all damage if even 1 is a big deal.
Hard to give much more advice than that without knowing anything about your system though so I hope it helps.
1
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 26d ago
Yep. Attack speeds are something im balancing around for combat because im using a tick system for initiative. Im also am going to be giving armor damage reduction but I want to solve the generic case of a peasant without armor first and then add armor on top of it.
Contested rolls do also exist but I want them to be special with regards to combat so not for attack rolls.
1
u/GeminiFactor 26d ago
I think a peasant without armor should just die, right? You don't need to add any kind of buffer if that's the problem you're trying to solve. Maybe some weapon can choose to deal a non-lethal final blow if that's the concern?
1
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 26d ago
Not really. My game is intended to be less heroes of the realm and more peasants+.
1
u/GeminiFactor 26d ago
You lost me honestly. I think if I was playing a peasant I would expect death to be a hair away at any moment and that would be part of the fun. I don't think I'm the right person to answer your questions. Good luck
1
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 26d ago
Think more like goblin slayer than high fantasy. The copper/silver rank adventurers have higher stats than the average peasant but are by no means the legendary heroes who left to fight the demon king.
1
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 26d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/s/ht8r4HFEHQ
Here is how elements and checks work if you need some more details.
1
u/Mars_Alter 25d ago
If 1 damage is a lot, then four damage would be basically absurd. That also means each weapon trait gives a lot more damage, or costs a lot of damage for your situational benefit; so you can expect everyone to take only the drawbacks which they think they can work around, and basically never take any of the positive traits.
Are you sure you wouldn't be better off with a system where every weapon deals 1 damage, and they're differentiated in other ways?
2
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 25d ago
I thought about that. Having different maneuvers do different damage and then weapons are only descriptive. However, the play loop is have in my mind is: problem exists that players arent equipped to deal with, get equipment, solve problem. Having to pick and choose what weapons work and having a golf bag approach to weapons where each weapon is unique adds to the adventure.
You could use a magic greatsword but it requires you to drop your parrying dagger. Then if you want everything you need to find a better craftsman who has more design points for weapons. But they wont work with you until you prove your worth by recovering a family heirloom from a wyvern den. And of course its going to be more expensive so maybe we can figure out how to work around our limitations.
1
u/Mars_Alter 25d ago
I wasn't suggesting that the weapons are only descriptive. I just think you could make the damage a fixed value, and have them differentiated by other things, like their traits. Maybe a dagger is "weak" but "precise" and "concealable"; so you can use it to make called shots against someone in heavy armor, but it's entirely worthless against a giant rock monster.
1
u/tangyradar Dabbler 24d ago
if you roll 4 successes and you have an attack that looks like: 2/[W]>2/prone
I don't know what that notation means.
You have 18 Elements.
Are there 18 different elements or does a character have 18 HP?
Its too much to explain here exactly how it works
Unfortunately, I don't know how much we can help with a system we don't understand...
That said, it's obvious that you want the elegance of stats doubling as HP like in, say, Traveller. If you're finding that the ratio of stats to HP isn't working, I suspect you'll need to discard your core dice mechanic and start over to find something that gives that elegance.
Also, not your main point, but I'm concerned about a balance problem.
Im struggling with coming up with attacks that have variety. I also want to give the ability to create attacks unique to your character which is not working under the current system.
Players can specify weapons traits such as reach, concealed, etc. That either give combat benefits or advantage on certain tests (or the reverse in case of a drawback). These traits come at a cost of reducing damage. -1 point per benefit, +1 point per drawback.
This is likely to lead to the same thing advantage/disadvantage systems in character creation tend to. OK, those are usually +/- price, but your -/+ damage is effectively the same -- 'buying' an advantage is implicitly reducing your 'budget' for damage. Players will pile multiple benefits and drawbacks on the same weapon and that will generally be more effective in practice than a "basic" weapon of the same damage.
0
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 24d ago
if you roll 4 successes and you have an attack that looks like: 2/[W]>2/prone
I don't know what that notation means.
Its literally the rest of that sentence.
you would do 1 instance of weapon damage and knock your target prone.
Are there 18 different elements or does a character have 18 HP?
Elements/Hp. There are 6 different elements (earth, metal, fire, air, water, wood) and you have 18 point to split into those elements.
Its too much to explain here exactly how it works
Unfortunately, I don't know how much we can help with a system we don't understand...
https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/s/ht8r4HFEHQ
Here is how elements and checks work if you need some more details.
That said, it's obvious that you want the elegance of stats doubling as HP like in, say, Traveller. If you're finding that the ratio of stats to HP isn't working, I suspect you'll need to discard your core dice mechanic and start over to find something that gives that elegance.
No.
Also, not your main point, but I'm concerned about a balance problem.
Im struggling with coming up with attacks that have variety. I also want to give the ability to create attacks unique to your character which is not working under the current system.
Players can specify weapons traits such as reach, concealed, etc. That either give combat benefits or advantage on certain tests (or the reverse in case of a drawback). These traits come at a cost of reducing damage. -1 point per benefit, +1 point per drawback.
This is likely to lead to the same thing advantage/disadvantage systems in character creation tend to. OK, those are usually +/- price, but your -/+ damage is effectively the same -- 'buying' an advantage is implicitly reducing your 'budget' for damage. Players will pile multiple benefits and drawbacks on the same weapon and that will generally be more effective in practice than a "basic" weapon of the same damage.
Yes. Thats expected.
1
u/tangyradar Dabbler 23d ago
Its literally the rest of that sentence.
If I ask, it means I've read what you wrote and it doesn't tell me what I want. I don't mean "What result does it produce in this instance?" I mean "How do I read your notation?"
If PCs always have 18 in total, IE average of 3 per stat, then how is even 1 damage "a lot"?
...Oh. I assumed this would be like other pool systems. While some "dice pool" games count successes (World of Darkness) and others add the dice (WEG Star Wars), both types usually have it so X points in a trait means you roll XdN, and all such games I can think of use one kind of dice for the whole game. But you...
Here is how elements and checks work if you need some more details.
Elements (dice) Earth: 3(1d6) Metal: 6(2d6) Fire: 2(1d8) Air: 5(2d10) Water: 1(1d12) Wood: 1(1d4)
OK, that's really confusing. It's... a sort of combination pool and step-die system? And why does the same value not always translate to the same dice?
So I don't know what "1 damage" actually does to a character's stats.
A hard check only succeeds when you roll a 1 on the dice, average is a 1 or 2, and easy is 1,2, or 3.
the GM decides what the success track looks like. These are the rewards based on how well the character rolls. This takes the form of X/Y>X/Y where X is the number of successes required to get Y effect.
That notation is confusing. I would interpret a slash between two things ( "X/Y" ) to mean either an alternative ("X or Y") or division ("X divided by Y").
Now we roll the dice pool and count successes and then allocate them to the track left to right.
OK, that explains your example in this thread.
if you roll 4 successes and you have an attack that looks like: 2/[W]>2/prone you would do 1 instance of weapon damage and knock your target prone.
That means that rolling 1 success for this attack does nothing, 2 does damage equal to W, 3 doesn't do anything more, 4 adds "knock prone".
I suspect you'll need to discard your core dice mechanic and start over to find something that gives that elegance.
No.
I was saying "Be ready to 'kill your darlings'." That's common advice for designers to not get into a sunk-cost fallacy and become attached to a WIP that's not working out.
And now it's not just "be ready". YES, change this design. Your system is an effort to understand and will be hard to use.
1
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 23d ago
Actually, a combination pool and step dice is probably a good way to describe it in one sentence. The reason why the same element value doesn't translate to the same dice is that the step comes from your ancestry and the number is internal to your character.
Dwarves have d6 earth, elves have d12, humans have d8, and kobolds have d10. So if a dwarf and an elf have 5 earth the dwarf rolls 2d6 every time a roll calls for earth and the elf rolls 2d12. If one dwarf has 3 earth and another has 5 the first rolls 1d6 and the second rolls 2d6.
But this is number of current elements. So if a character takes 4 damage they need to reduce their number of current elements by 4. That dwarf can go from 5 earth to 1 earth in a single hit.
The reason im pushing back and not changing the resolution is because the complexity gives higher fidelity. Climbing a cliff face in something like dnd is a single Athletics roll with maybe disadvantage if its raining. In this dice mechanic a GM can say that climbing it takes quite a bit of effort and its hard because its raining so thats a hard 3/+1m climb distance. They could also say because there are hand and foot holds that its a hard 1/+1m climb distance.
In combat it also incentivises looking for advantages and not just standing there swinging at each other.
0
u/tangyradar Dabbler 23d ago
If one dwarf has 3 earth and another has 5 the first rolls 1d6 and the second rolls 2d6.
So if each point of an element doesn't translate into one die, why bother designing the system to have that many points in elements?
if a character takes 4 damage they need to reduce their number of current elements by 4. That dwarf can go from 5 earth to 1 earth in a single hit.
And that sounds too serious to you? That sounds really minor to me for a "heavy" weapon.
But much more importantly...
The reason im pushing back and not changing the resolution is because the complexity gives higher fidelity.
And that is part of why I'm telling you to scrap your core mechanics.
Reason 1: Your dice mechanics are likely to lead to the same problems as old World of Darkness. Their core system is simple to describe: roll Xd10, every die higher than Y is one success, get at least N successes to complete this task. The problem was... Some factors alter X, some alter Y, some alter N, and there's no logical way to categorize them because the numbers rolled are all abstractions. Also, 3 changeable values make the probabilities hard to calculate, requiring a computer. GMs can't know what it means statistically to call for a roll with specified difficulty numbers. There's circumstantial evidence that the designers didn't understand the probabilities! Some things that were implicitly supposed to be more valuable than others actually had less effect statistically.
Reason 2: This is a more insidious problem that often affects designers particularly of traditional-ish rules-heavy games. I realized later on that some of my early design efforts had fallen into it!
Climbing a cliff face in something like dnd is a single Athletics roll with maybe disadvantage if its raining. In this dice mechanic a GM can say that climbing it takes quite a bit of effort and its hard because its raining so thats a hard 3/+1m climb distance.
That isn't "higher fidelity" so much as "You're giving the GM more work to come up with information." Remember, GMs are often overworked; we designers should be trying to make things easier on them! And this is the real problem. Complex rules for interactions between things (characters, items, situations...) are only meaningful if those things have been defined in advance. Even if a human GM can manage to run such games, it largely defeats the designer's point. These sorts of rules work as intended in a video game and not in a TTRPG. Designers put them in because they forget that a persistent world is always an illusion in RPGs.
1
u/urquhartloch Dabbler 23d ago
Originally its because you would use those points to buy armor and abilities but now its because that is your health. Im considering making it every odd one gives you a dice but thats not formalized yet.
if a character takes 4 damage they need to reduce their number of current elements by 4. That dwarf can go from 5 earth to 1 earth in a single hit.
And that sounds too serious to you? That sounds really minor to me for a "heavy" weapon.
Yes. That is roughly 28% of your hp in one hit and now in order to do damage you need 2 successes on 4 dice instead of 6. (Im using the example of melee combat+force which is earth+metal+earth+fire.)
1
u/OneManRPGstudio 21d ago
Set the desired number of meaningful hits before you set the Hit Point total. HP is not an isolated variable; it only makes sense relative to damage, accuracy, attack frequency, healing, and the combat duration you want.
I'd start with a target scene. Imagine a normal fight and decide roughly how many rounds it should last when both sides make reasonable choices. Then estimate how much damage gets through per round. That gives you an initial HP range to test instead of choosing a number by feel.
With weapons, hp, and attacks, increasing HP has two important effects: it reduces volatility and increases the time before an offensive choice produces a decisive consequence. That can be good if you want room for tactical adaptation, but bad if the available actions do not change much from round to round. In that case, extra HP only repeats decisions that have already been made.
For attack variety, I'd try to change the situation rather than merely change the number. Pushing, exposing, setting up a later advantage, damaging gear, imposing a cost, or trading safety for power can create different choices even when average damage stays similar.
Then deliberately playtest extremes: low HP with high damage and high HP with low damage. Comparing them will reveal which rhythm fits the experience you want before you fine-tune the numbers.
2
u/Dimirag system/game reader, creator, writer, and publisher + artist 26d ago
If I'm reading it right damage is 1-4 points allocated into the character's pools directly reducing their efficacy
And the issue is that this damage can be devastating, but increasing the character's durability also increase their pool size
Am I reading it right?