Latest revision as of 14:13, 15 February 2018

Just some stuff.

Injuries

One of the main complaints about 4e style healing - which is what we're using, basically - is that it can't sensibly model long-term injuries. You heal completely after a long rest: you get all your hit points back, and all your healing surges, and it's like nothing ever happened.

In the course of our games since implementing this particular approach to hit points, one thing I've noticed is that - with the exception of regen - players don't seem to look for healing until they're down. While this may be a function of our current game being filled with only casters, I've also noticed a general trend of not looking for ways to mitigate damage.

I am hesitant to remove regen because it feels thematically important to how Trinity works: we've got a significant undercurrent of FF feel going on, and I feel that messing with that would be to our detriment. So I don't want to get rid of it.

But at the same time, it's done weird things to our approach to healing and handling wounds and such. So, I think we may try to rectify this.

Overview

Hit points are a weird abstraction of your ability to avoid an attack, dodge or otherwise juke around to turn a serious blow into a less lethal one, and just general combat endurance. That we have the bloodied condition should tell you something about this: basically until you're below 50% hit points, you are essentially untouched. Maybe got a few scrapes and bruises, but you're not actually hurt in any real meaningful way. That said, the LM saying things like "the cure spell invigorates you and closes your wounds" is just as valid if you are 25% of max HP or 75% - you still have wounds while not bloodied, they're just not dangerous or impairing you in any real way.

Injuries are intended to change this.

So basically what happens here, is that after a long rest (or every 24 hours if you're being cheeky and trying to avoid this nonsense), you have to make a check. If you suck, you go down the track (from 1 to 2, to 3, and so on). If you make the check, you get better, and go up the track (from 2 to 1, to 0).

The real question is - when would you get these? How do you mitigate them?

Getting Injuries

So I've got a few thoughts on when or how you might get these.

First, though, I want to specify - I don't think players can cause these to monsters. These are intended to model long-term effects, and that's an awful lot of book-keeping for the LM to have to deal with if players are causing broken bones and what-not all over the place. That said, these may have "neat effects" that players want to cause - if you're fighting a jerk who's using a two-handed weapon, being able to break one of his arms so that he can't use it anymore is a neat thing to do that players may want to have as an option. So I'm not ruling it out, but in general, as a player, you can maybe somehow cause the initial effect of an injury, but I'm not going to expect the LM to track it any further than that. Narratively, maybe, but certainly not mechanically.

Anyway. So, there's a couple options for causing these.

• Crits. Rather than taking more damage from a crit, you take an injury instead. I'm not sure if this would be a choice deal - for instance, as a player, you could say "oh, this guy crit me... I'll take an injury instead of the extra damage" sort of thing - or if it's a hard point of getting crit'd. Making it a guaranteed thing feels... overly random and potentially very punishing, though, so I'm not sure.
• Dropping to 0. Part of the goal here, I think, is to make players wary of dropping to 0 hit points. It's not a good thing, you don't want to do it. So if we give an injury upon hitting 0, that may encourage players to avoid this happening. That said, it has some issues - it might lead to a death spiral of sorts, which is not cool. That and let's say you get back up with a few hit points after hitting 0, then get smacked again - do you really need another injury?
  • Trading injuries for death saves. As an addendum to this idea, maybe you can accept an injury instead of accepting a failed death save. This is... really weird, from a narrative standpoint, and basically says "in retrospect, that hit from that hammer hurt a lot more than you thought it did." I'm not sure how okay we are with this kind of retroactive stuff, though.
• Some fraction of hit points. Perhaps if an attack does an overwhelming amount of damage to you, it gives you an injury. Say the threshold is your healing surge value - any attack that does more damage than that causes an injury.

Healing Injuries

Normal effects that heal hit points don't fix injuries. You need dedicated effects, or to make the checks to get over the injury.

Keys

I am still sometimes disappointed by the limitations of the D&D xp model. We've tried to work around it, but... at the end of the day, combat gives you guaranteed xp, and the LM sometimes give you story rewards.

We need to fix this.

Overview

What are keys? Keys are a small game mechanic that inform your character's ability to gain xp. If you have no keys, you cannot gain xp.

Keys come in many flavors. Races (which really here means "cultures") can give you keys, and your class always gives you a key. You can pick up keys over the course of an adventure, and you might select - or be given - a key at the start of a campaign or adventure, to help give your character motivation.

In play, the purpose of a key is to encourage behavior. For instance, the Key of the Barbarian gives you xp for using your berserker Provoke class feature, and punishes you for willingly taking on the fade status (which makes creatures unable or less likely to attack you). This is intended to encourage a certain style of play: in this case, the key makes you want to try to take on foes head-on, while avoiding abilities that would prevent them from engaging you.

The original system that presented keys was a bit too... unfocused, though, and made weird assumptions about how many keys you could have and when you could gain them. I think those assumptions held the idea back. The idea is very much tenable - we just need to work out the kinks.

Keys and your Ring

I don't know if a keyring would actually be a mechanical construct in this layout, but it's a concept to keep in mind, just in case.

I see characters as having, at 1st level, at the very least, three keys:

• A class key, given to them by their class
• A background/culture key, given to them by their race, or their background
• A story key, chosen from a list of keys appropriate to the adventure at hand

This would be an example of a class key...

These next three I like less, but... well, important to keep ideas flowing.

...while this might be a story key...

Yeah... maybe. Might need some work, though.

Motivation and XP

One thing I'm sort of thinking about is that keys are an abstract representation of your character's motivation: adventurers are supposed to be sort of rare, and most people in the world don't rise in level nearly as quickly or as high as PCs. We need to have an in-world explanation for this.

So my idea here is basically that PCs - and some select NPCs, those who get to high levels - have a stupidly significant amount of motivation. This isn't meant to be like... destiny, or anything like that, the idea here is that adventurers are driven in ways that normal folk aren't.

So there might be some abstract measure of your motivation, call it a number. Let's pick 5. You can't have more keys than your motivation at any given time - this includes quest keys (called story keys, above). Over the course of an adventure, you'll pick up quest keys and lose them when they're complete, which doesn't count against your motivation - you're getting stuff done.

But say you lose a background key. Those are supposed to represent significant parts of who you are as a person, what drives you to succeed in the world (hence why acting in accordance with them gives you xp). If you abandon something that encouraged you to adventure, that gave you the drive and will to succeed, it naturally follows that you're probably questioning yourself a lot, internally. Your drive is reduced.

I'm not really sure how to implement that, but I also want to make sure that characters can change - that is, you may transition from hating robots to being a friend of Technology, to try to handle character story arcs.

So really we're just spit-balling here.

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Exactly what it says on the tin.