Fantasy Heartbreaker - Rethinking Skills and Hit Points

When I read the Black Hack it was eye opening. I liked most of what I read but one thing didn't really sit right, that was the idea that all 'skill tests' were pick an approprate attribute and roll under. Then as part of experience your attributes go up so all DEX related skills go up at the same time. You don't have wilderness skills and urban skills, if you have high INT you figure it out.

Everything in an RPG are abstracted a bit but for some reason I had a hangup on this. I refused to give up skills. I'd inherited a love for skills from my days playing RuneQuest. I liked the limited set of skills in OpenQuest so I was moving in the right direction but I still wasn't really ready to give up on the idea. Why not take the next step and abstract skills one step further, down to the basic attributes. I had already decided to use OpenQuests single Close Combat skill to apply to all weapons. That is somewhat of a step in the same direction, but getting better at picking someones pocket should not make you better at shooting a bow, they just seemed too different. Just because they were both DEX skills didn't mean they were the same.

But I thought about it a bit, and let the idea ferment a bit.

I'd taken the Crypts & Things way of using CON as blood & bone damage while HP were the dodging and fatigue.

If you reduce CON potentially different skills should drop as well. That was a nightmare of paperwork because the skills weren't directly related, but if you used the CON test directly those drops would be represented in every skill test with minimal fuss. As CON went down ENC went down. I liked that.

Then I took the next step. What if we dumped Hit Points had had DEX reduced instead. Then my brain went wild and I thought, what if you had different types of damage that matched the attributes. INT = Concussion, STR = Muscle tears & Twists, CHA = Flesh wounds. You could model all sorts of wound types beyond the simple live/die binary of HP. To make this work I wanted to give each Attribute some value that can be degraded.

, I decided unlike Black Hack I'd use DEX for Melee combat. Also I decided DEX was fleshwounds. The old joke of action movies, it's just a fleshwound written into the rules. After a few fleshwounds one will start to look like Rocky at the end of a fight. Because DEX is used for Melee and Missile combat Fleshwounds reduce your ability to fight, so they are serious, just not life threatening.

CON is blood and guts. I linked CON to ENC as a bodybuilder can lift a ton but may not have the stamina to carry it around a long time. It felt different, and this was as your CON drops your ENC load drops as well. Take a wound and you're gonna have to dump your backpack if you can't find healing. I liked that. The other types of damage leave you unconscious if they drop to zero, but CON leaves you dead. There is no other effect, but because it's life and death you don't want CON damage.

STR is fractures and pulled muscles. Things that won't kill you, but as your STR goes down so does your damage adjustment which plays out nice. You can still hit as well as before but you simply can't hit as hard as before, and take enough STR damage to and suddenly your damage adjustment goes into negatives.

INT is an underused attribute, almost a dump stat, and I wanted it to have some usefulness, so I decided it was quick thinking. Instead of having Number of Attacks and Initiative based on DEX (which made DEX way too important) they were linked to quick decision making. If someone rings your bell and you get a concussion suddenly your losing initiative and attacking only once. A instantly noticeable effect. I liked that.

CHA took a while for me to figure out but I finally decided fire damage. It doesn't heal naturally. It's also horrible to behold. There is no way to model pain but that's just as well.

WIS doesn't really work so I made WIS damage be more spirit/soul damage. You take WIS damage from some magic, and from undead and that sort of thing.

What did I want to do when folks hit 0 DEX, or 0 INT damage? I didn't want instant death or save for death. In some versions of D&D and a lot of house rules you can survive into negative hit points? I decided for some (CON and CHA specifically) reaching 0 is death. For others 0 means you start to take CON damage until the wound is fixed. This seems to work out nicely, we'll see how it works in tests.

So you can raise attributes as part of going up a level, now there is one more factor to consider. You don't want a super-low CHA because then a burn to CHA might knock you out, but you do want a high INT because winning initiative and multiple attacks are very nice perks.

So then I went down the weapons list. Black Hack has damage by level or class or something I didn't really like. I prefer different weapons to have different damage and tactical options. I could have had a different table for each but that would have been too much so I decided some weapons were pointed and some were edged and some were blundgeon and created a short table for each type indicating if they did STR, CON, INT, or CHA damage. Pointed weapons didn't really do INT or STR damage for example. An arrow isn't gonna ring your bell, it's gonna hit a vital (CON damage) or the meat (CHA damage). A mace on the other hand is more likely to do STR and CHA damage than CON damage.

Lastly I wanted to give the Fighter a perk, since everyone with a high DEX will hit the same and everyone with a high STR will do the same damage. So I decided that as part of their training they can choose which type of damage they take from incoming damage (of the possibilities available to that weapon). Incoming Mace blow, they can take STR damage instead of risking the roll that might result in INT damage for example. Sacrificing your arm to protect your head so to speak. Taking a fleshwound in the side instead of blow into the guts from the incoming spear, that sort of thing. This will allow a fighter to stay in the fight and take more hits with the exact same stats as the other classes.

I really liked the way this was panning out. The whole fight becomes far more visceral than simply hit points. Folks start able to take more hits but a really good blow can put them in danger quicker. This will take some play testing to see if it works as well as I imagine.