Seeking some feedback on a possible ED4 change

[Mataxes]

So for those who care to think about and contribute to such things, here's a situation that I'm looking for some feedback on with regard to Fourth Edition; specifically, death/unconsciousness ratings, and possibly a new way of handling them.

There are a couple of aspects of this. One is looking at simplifying the dual-stat situation of DR/UR and the other is the possible inclusion of a stamina pool for strain.

One of the first ideas was to split damage into two pools; physical and stun, with strain (and attacks to stun, and probably most illusionary damage). Hitting your health rating on the stun track meant you were unconscious, hitting it on the physical track meant you were dead.

Testing found that didn't work -- there are too few sources of stun type damage, and it eliminated the buffer that was in place that allowed characters to be taken out of combat but not killed, and added another resource to keep track of without adding anything really significant or interesting to game play. So that has been scrapped.

Something we're looking at now is dropping the two ratings, and just going with a single damage track. When your current damage reaches or exceeds this new health rating (currently set around the same level as Unconsciousness) you are down. If you aren't suffering any wounds, you are simply unconscious and will recover normally. If you have wounds, you are dying, in danger of death; a successful Toughness test against a DN of 5 times the number of wounds will keep you alive. The Physician skill, if administered in time, can provide a bonus to this test, or possibly an additional test. Healing aids and talents that interact with this (like Life Check) would be looked at in terms of how they interact with this new approach to damage.

One of the goals here is to try and reduce how much damage needs to be thrown around to take down an opponent -- especially as we get into higher circles and are looking at adepts and tougher creatures. Combat can be a bit of a slog, taking people down through death by a thousand paper cuts, scaling back on these numbers to some extent can speed things up in that regard.

The other idea is to create a "stamina pool" (that's what we've been calling it) that strain damage is applied to first. There are players out there who are, in general, reluctant to use talents that cause strain because if gets them closer to being taken out of the fight. If you use up this pool, then Strain starts going on as normal damage. The pool would refresh after each combat. This is one that I am less sold on. It also adds another resource to keep track of, and I'm not sure it adds enough to make it worthwhile. Testing has come back with some positive feedback (especially from high-strain characters like Swordsmasters and the like), so I'm putting it out there. The pool would be based on Toughness, the working number being equal to the Toughness score, but that would be flexible based on how that balances in relation to the amount of Strain Disciplines use.

And that, in a sense, is my problem with it. Some Disciplines use a lot more strain than others, and so this is a mechanic that would, largely, only be applicable to a portion of the characters. Is it worth adding on another mechanic/resource? I'm not really sure.

So I turn to you -- I like the current direction of the single health rating (as opposed to DR/UR), but am looking for some additional feedback and thoughts on this issue to make sure there isn't anything obvious that we're missing.

Thanks for your help -- and please try to make your opinions and such constructive.

[etherial]

[Henghyoke]

Thoughts/feedback/call it what you will:

Drop UR.
Treat Strain as non-lethal and track in a separate box (stun damage or similar can add to this total).
Lethal damage => DR = dead baby
Combined damage => DR = unconscious baby

There's a little math involved (adding the totals), but not a lot. It's not much different from how things work now. This is actually how I run my own games, so while it's a house rule, it's how I've been running since '93.

For healing, you can use the standard Recovery rules. Or when healing non-lethal damage, Recovery Teats always heal at least Recovery Step points of non-lethal damage (minimum = step). There's rules in the ED1 rulebook for adding WIL, etc., but I keep things simple where possible.

Blood magic works as usual (reduces DR). Strain can't kill you (you will pass out before you die). Because there is no UR, there is a small "extra" pool of points that Disciplines can risk if they want. Character choice and all that. And if player math ability is lacking, sometimes you get heat of the moment situations when you realise that characters are past thresholds and are dead or unconscious -- fog of war and all that.

No idea if this helps but you asked for feedback. I don't like the idea of a separate additional pool just for Strain, however.

[yog-sototh]

For me single health rating is to much like D&D. I don't like this.

With lower damage that character can take (one damage rating equal UR) they will be quicker dispatched from battle/fight. There is no buffer like DR. Character is out of combat and dying simple and to dangerus. There is no room fore imprisonment unconcious hero's or to one last standing PC to help the others just weaking them up if he dosent know physician skill nor he have healing potions.( In starting circles there is more likely that PC will get some wounds ).

This change lead us to more fragile characters especialy magicians. If let say ilusionist have 12 toughnes score (5 step) he has 9 Wound treshhold. With avarage PD of 7 and PA of 4 any more hard or precise strike will cost him a wound.

What with creatures or other opponents that don't want to kill characters only criple them. Not stun but criple. With wounds they certeinly die.

If you want to have only one health rating i will go fore bigger one (DR) and when you die you die (or you have cheat death amulet/last chance salve/life check or something similar)

DR and UR are fragile balanced with healing and damage capabilities of creatures and PC/NPC. Disturbing this balance will have far reaching effect.

[Flowswithdrek]

My initial reaction is go with the one track. I've always seen strain as damage inflicted on yourself and I've imagined it to be no different than what you might get from a bout of combat, anything from bruising, pulling muscles to maybe mild internal bleeding. Wounds of course are when you take much more than just a simple knock in combat. So I would go with damage is damage and wounds are wounds.

[Stormcrow]

[Kasbak]

On the strain portion, it seems like this is really only an issue with combat oriented Disciplines, those regularly taking multiple strain each round. Why not simply use the advantage from dropping Durability as a Talent and put something else in its place that handles this effect for you? Say you set it up as a ritual that you do before combat and have it give you a strain pool equal to your result for rank hours. You can't do another until the duration expires or the current pool is used up.

For that matter, you could also possibly use it to tack on additional temporary points for your D/U ratings, similar to Talents like Temper Self and Wood Skin. I think that would settle a lot of this debate on removing Durability as a Talent. You have your normal Durability as a baseline increase each Circle, but instead you get a Talent to give a repeatable temporary boost, and you can raise that rank as you please.

[kosmit]

I like the buffer that UR gives to players. If they are not careful losing councious could actualy save their lives.
Even DnD got two status but UR is 'hidden'. You reach 0 you are unconcious and dying, you reach -10 you are dead. The difference between DnD and ED is that DnD has fixed value between UR and DR in ED) I would stay with two stats. It's not slowing things down and has more pros than cons. If you want to go with one rating go with UR and make the Toughness Value the buffer between during and being unconcious. Test with DN Wounds x5 is far to lethal in my opinion.

In my games players are not afraid of getting Strain so the concept of Stamina pool would be another thing to keep track during combat and would be unfair for some Disciplines.

I would recommend adding graphic damage track on character sheet (I made separate card for it - It's in Polish but I'm planning English version) http://www.kosmitpaczy.pl/3/post/2013/1 ... do-ed.html
With that kind of graphic tracking you can see how close you are to UR, how much stun or Strain you have.

[LouProsperi]

Hello,

I don't see how either of these changes actually *improves" the game play experience (but then I guess you probably knew I would say that).

The intent of the UR/DR rating was to provide an easy way to indicate when a character is unconscious or dead. Isn't that still something useful in game play?

Also, your description of the new rule leads me to a question: If a character is wounded and his total damage received reaches this new health rating, the character is dying. At what point does he die?

If the design goal is "reduce how much damage needs to be thrown around to take down an opponent," (and I'm not sure that I agree that that's an desirable design goal, but that's a different discussion) how does this change help achieve that goal? It seems like a simpler approach would to be lower the health ratings overall.

The separate strain pools seems to me an unneeded complication. It does little more than add more one thing for players to keep track of.


Take Care,

Lou Prosperi

[Darth Quiris]

Honestly I wouldn't have a clue without being able to truly playtest it. That's the only real way to determine if the changes you are proposing would work well or not.

First gut reaction is to keep DR/UR as it is especially if Durability is no longer its own Talent, so if Durability is Circle based and not Talent Rank based and then you also change it from DR/UR to just DR than this would really be no different than D&D at all for all intents and purposes (DR would simply be Hit Points than) and the closer you make this game to D&D (in any way whatsoever and no matter how minutely the changes are) the more and more I will not buy it.

Maybe if we could see combat examples of what you are talking about and see the system in action. I don't want my blinders to cause me to simply say no because of what looks like a part of Earthdawn being like D&D.

What's wrong with how the system has worked for 20 years and why the changes?