The Creation Forge

Damage Save System part 2

2005-10-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Spells:

Basically, I’ve grouped the damage dice together so: d4s and d6s are in one group, d8s and d10s are in one group, and d12s and d20s are in the last group.

1d4 or 1d6 equals +1 point of damage. So a first lvl magic missile, 1d4, would be a +1 damage bonus (for a total damage score of 16). A flaming sphere or a 2d4 magic missile would both do damage worth of +2.

A spell that deals 2d8 or 2d10 worth of damage would in this system deal +3. So to represent the larger die, it gets a single +1 no matter how many other dice of damage the spell deals in regular D&D.
+1 is a lot more powerful in this system than in a HP system. A spell that deals 2d12 or 2d20 damage, now gets a +4 for the damage roll. +2 Because there are two dice, and then +2 to represent the damage die.

This means that all the dice gives +1 damage pr. die, but if the die is a d8 or a d10, add the +1 bonus too. If it's a d12 or a d20, add a +2 bonus.

For example, a spell that deals 4d8 worth of damage, will in this system deal +5 worht of damage.
16d12 will here deal +18 worth of damage.

When struck by a spell, it works like with regular damage. This means that a person attacked by a spell, can shrug off all of the lethal damage.

However, I think that spells should always cause at least some amount of damage, just as in regular D&D.

Even if you succeed your spell save, if a spell hits you, no matter what, you become bruised. If a spell hits you with a damage of 5 or more, you become dazed.

If a spell hits you with damage 10 or more, you become hurt and if a spell hits you with damage 15 or more, you become wounded.

Things to consider regarding spells:

A +1 to damage in this system is a lot more than in regular D&D. So you might want to limit spells a bit. Spells that normally cause 1d6 pr. caster level, might now cause 1d6 every other caster level.

A different approach is to instead make the DC for spell damage 10 + damage, instead of 15 + damage.

Also, spells like flamesword that does 2d6 dam +1 for every caster level should definitely be changed. The +1 pr. Caster lvl is very, very powerful for a spell that lasts as long as flamesword.

Also, limiting the spells like that might make some of them too weak. For example, if your fireball now deals +1 pr. every other caster level.

To power it up a bit, without making it totally overpowered, you could rule that it sets what it hits on fire.

DC 15 to put out the fire. A character on fire gets +2 damage (Tougness Save DC 17) every round.

Or maybe you suffer fatigue from the blow too.

Healing spells:

Magical healing of course has to be changed too.

All healing spells can be used to stabilize dying characters, and all healing spells gives a +5 to the recovery check.

Cure Minor Wounds: Allows the target to make a recovery check (DC 10) to heal bruised or hurt conditions.

Cure Light Wounds: Allows the target to make a recovery check (DC 10) to heal wounded, dazed or unconscious conditions. Or automatically heal bruised or hurt conditions.

Cure Moderate Wounds: Allows the target to make a recovery check (DC 10) to heal disabled or staggering conditions.

Or automatically heals all bruised and hurt conditions. Or either a dazed or wounded conditions.

Cure Serious Wounds: Allows the target to make a recovery check (DC 10) to heal dying conditions. Or automatically heal one other condition.

Cure Critical Wounds: Automatically heals hurt, bruised, wounded, dazed and unconscious conditions. Or heals one dying condition.

Heal: Heals everything.

Noteworthy spells:

False Life: This spell might instead give a +1 pr. every other caster level to your Toughness Save for the duration of the spell.

Mage armour: Half of the bonus stacks with regular armour when determining Toughness Save.

Holy Sword: Can be a real killer. Regular weapon damage +2 (2d6) +5 is a lot. You might want to limit it to the +2 only.

Inflict spells: You might want to get rid of the +1 pr. caster level, or only keep it as +1 pr. caster level.

Protection from Alignment: Gives a bonus to the Toughness Save.

Maybe also to the Defense Bonus.

Vampiric Touch: You damage one condition, and heal one.

Other things to consider:

Natural Armour: A lot of creatures have some pretty powerful natural amour. Add half of the bonus to the toughness saves, instead of all of it.

Damage Reduction: Just keep it as it is. You might want to half it down though.

Regeneration: A creature with regeneration may make recovery check for it’s worst condition every round. It cannot do this if damage by fire or acid.

Temporary HP: Might give a bonus to Toughness Save, or perhaps makes your next Toughness Save an automatic success.

Power Attack:

Power attack become way to powerful, change it to this:

Subtract a number up to 5 from your dodge bonus and add the same number to your attack roll. You cannot lower you dodge bonus below 0 nor more than double your attack bonus.

Combat Expertise:

Shouldn't add to the toughness save, but the defense bonus. I'm not sure if this is balanced. Also, it probably shouldn't stack with fighting defensively.

Monsters

It’s pretty simple to convert creatures into the damage save system. The biggest problem is that the CR of the creature might be a bit off, but that’s not that big a deal.

Use the constitution and armour to determine their Toughness Save. You might want to give them a +2 pr. size greater than medium too.

Undead: Make the Undead use their Charisma modifier, instead of their Constitution modifier when calculating their Toughness Save bonus.

New Feats:

Precise Attack*

Prerequisites: Dex 14

You can subtract a number up to 5 from your attack’s damage bonus and add the same number to your attack roll. You can’t lower your damage below 0 nor more than double your attack bonus.

Great Toughness*

Prerequisites: Con 14

You gain a +1 bonus to your Toughness Save.

*A fighter can take these feats as bonus feats.

Damage Save System part 1

2005-10-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

D&D Damage Save System

There's been some confusing about this. This system is INSTEAD of Hit points. When using this system, your character does not have any hit points, instead we use the damage chart (hurt, staggered and so forth).

Combat rolls:

Attack Bonus: Base attack + dex mod + size mod + misc.

Defense Bonus: 10 + Base attack + doge or parry bonus* + size mod + misc

*Doge bonus = dex bonus

Parry bonus = strength and shield, doesn’t work against ranged weapons.

Damage Bonus: weapon damage + strength*

*Unless it says otherwise, strength only works with melee and thrown weapons.

Tougness Save: d20 + Constitution mod. + armour bonus* + misc.

*Armour bonus: Does not include dex modifier or shields. It's the armour you are wearing, natural armour or deflection bonuses.

Combat:

You use your Attack Bonus to hit. The DC to hit is the targets Defense Bonus.

If you hit, the target must succeed on a Toughness Save, DC 15 + Damage Bonus. If he fails he suffers damage, if he succeeds nothing happens, and the hit is just a scratch, a bruise, the armour takes it, or he simply shrugs off the hit.

Suffering Damage:

Just as in regular D&D there’s both lethal and Non-lethal damage.

However opposed to D&D, there are no Hit Points and weapon damage is a fixed amount. For example a Longsword deal +3 damage and a Greatsword deals +4 damage.

For this system we use a “Damage Track” to see how wounded our characters are. This track has four steps for non-lethal damage, and five steps for lethal damage.

Non-lethal

Bruised: If you receive non-lethal damage and fail your Toughness Save you become bruised. You can become bruised any number of times, each bruised result imposes a -1 on further Toughness Saves against non-lethal damage.

Dazed: If you fail your Toughness Save by 5 or more, you become dazed. You receive a -1 to your next Toughness Save.

Staggered: If you fail your Toughness Save by 10 or more or you’ve already become Dazed and receive additional damage (except for bruise hits) you become staggered.

You lose your dodge bonus to defense and get an additional -2 to defense for this round. In the following rounds, staggered characters can only take a standard or a move action, not both.

Unconscious: If your Toughness Save fails by more than 15 or more, or you’ve already become Staggered and receive additional damage (except for bruise hits) you fall Unconscious.

If you receive additional damage after this, check of the first available lethal box.

Lethal Damage:

Hurt: Works exactly like bruised, except it is lethal damage.

Wounded: If a character fails his Toughness Save by 5 or more he becomes wounded. You suffer a

-2 on all checks including attack rolls and Fortitude, Reflex and Will saves. This penalty persists until all wounded conditions are eliminated.

Additionally the character is stunned for one round. You loose your dodge bonus to defense, and have a -2 penalty to defense.

Disabled: If a character fails his Toughness Save by 10 or have already become wounded and receives additional damage he become disabled.

A disabled character is badly hurt, if he chooses he can take one standard action but then fall unconscious and starts dying on the following round.

Dying: If a character fails his Toughness Save by 15 or more or has already become disabled and receives additional damage, he falls unconscious and starts dying.
A dying character must make a Constitution checks (DC 10) every round. If he fails he dies. On a successful check the character lives another round. If the check succeeds by 10 or more (DC 20) the character becomes disabled and unconscious.

Alternatively you might want to make death work like in D&D, so when you drop, you got 10 rounds or so to recover. If not, you die. This makes actual death less random, and gives the other players an idea on how long you got left.

Recovery

Recovering from damage requires a constitution check (DC 10). A successful check erases the damage condition, while an unsuccessful check does nothing.

You can make recovery checks once per minute for staggered and unconscious characters, once per hour for wounded, and once per day for disabled.

You need at least some sort of treatment before you can recover from hurt and worse conditions.

This could be a skill check (Heal) DC 15.

Bruised and dazed conditions automatically fade at the rate of one per minute. Hurt conditions fade (with treatment) at the rate of once per hour.

ACTION POINTS can be used to get an immediate recovery check from non-lethal damage, rather than having to wait a minute.

You can also spend an Action Point to ensure success on a recovery check.

Personally I think I’m going to give the players Action Points with can be used for this. Except they regain one action point pr. day instead of when they level up.

Action point progression: All characters start out with 3 action points; can gain one additional point every third level. So a level 6 character would have 5 action points, a level 12 will have 7 action points and so on.

Critical hits:

You still need to roll a natural 20 to score a threat. And you still need to confirm that hit. A critical hit increases damage according to the weapon or attack.

If unspecified a critical hit increases damage by +3.

A greatsword for example gets a +4 on a crit, a Scimitar still only gets +3 but has a greater threat range (18-20).

Class abilities:

Monks: This system really emphasise what a monk is.
He’s going to dodge almost every hit, but since he’s not wearing any armor, it’s going to hurt when someone finally hits him.

Wholeness of Body
Make this ability work like Cure Light Wounds or Cure Moderate Wounds, and make it improve at lvl 14 and lvl 20.

Paladin:

Smite Evil: Make it 1 extra point of damage pr every two Paladin levels. So it will be +1 at second lvl, +2 at fourth level and so on.

Divine Grace: If you want to make this ability apply to toughness saves too, make it half the charisma modifier instead of all of it.

Lay on Hands: Tricky one. I'd make it work like Cure Minor Wounds except for this:
You don't get a +5 bonus to your recovery check, instead the Paladin has a total bonus pool of Half her Paladin level + her charisma bonus. She can split this bonus over many recovery checks.

Rogue:
Sneak Attack: +1 damage pr. d6

Fatigue Based Spell System

2005-10-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

So, I've tried to adapt the True20 spellsystem into D&D for some time now, and this is what I came up with. I'd like to use it in my Eberron campaing.
With this system, magic becomes much more versatile. The wizard can adapt to a lot situations, and won't waste a spell slot on comprehend languages, when all he sees that day is combat, and that spell slot could have been used on another Magic Missile.

The wizard has to be changed a little though, no more spells pr. day. The Wizard can, in theory, cast an infinite number of spells, although this is very unlikely to happen. Because of the Fatigue Save, the wizard risks hurting himself in the process.

It's a little like the way Raistlin casts spells in the Dragonlance series.

The best thing about this system is that a lot of time in D&D, the wizard has to choose if he wants to get a cool utility spell, like Detect Thougts, or if he wants another Magic Missile to use in the heat of combat.
But no more.

No more parties suddenly going to sleep in the middle of the afternoon so the wizard can regain spells.

Fatigue spell system:

Most spells in the PHB will be causing fatigue. Basically every time a Wizard casts a spell, he'll need to make a Will or Fortitude save (whichever is higher).
The DC for this save is: 6 + 1/2 caster lvl rounded down + spell lvl.

For example. Mira a 7th lvl Wizard casts a 2nd lvl spell. The DC would then be: 6 + 3 + 2 = 11.

The DC increases by 1 for every spell he casts.

The DC goes back to normal when the Wizard has healed one step of fatigue.

You recover one step of fatigue every hour you don't strain yourself, for example fighting or casting another spell.

There are three steps of Fatigue levels.
The three steps are: Winded, Fatigued and Exhausted.

Winded: -2 to strength and dex. Cannot charge.
Fatigued: Cannot charge and -4 to str and dex. Also you suffer a -1 to Will, Fortitude and Reflex Saves.
Exhausted: Near collapse. -6 to str and dex. You move half speed and suffer an additional -1 to Will, Fortitude and Reflex saves. If a character who is exhausted suffer additional fatigue, he falls unconscious.

I'm thinking of doing something like: 10 points in concentration gives you +1 on your will save against fatigue.
I'm not sure if it is balanced, but you could also do like this: when you get 3rd lvl spells, 1st spells no longer increase the DC.
And when you get 4th lvl spells, 2nd lvl spells no longer increase the DC. And so on.

If anyone reads this, any kind of feedback is welcome. Just use the "comment" function of the site.

Green Ronin Rocks

2005-10-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

I love the True20 system made by Green Ronin.
But I think the system still is a bit limiting, it need an update or two to really work. So I've taken some of the parts I really like, and made them work (haven't totally play tested it yet, so it might not work that well) in D&D.

Just so we are clear, I only adapted this stuff, Green Ronin made it.

Welcome

2005-10-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Creation Forge

This is my little Eberron sanctuary. I’ll talk about Eberron products, stuff I create for my D&D game and whatever I feel like talking about.

Basically I wanted a place were people could find my True20 to D&D conversion, so I thought I’d upload them as a “blog”.
That is it for now; I might add other stuff later on.

Over and out