Some quick ideas

[danny]

There are a few avenues to accomplishing your goal, I think. One, as you mentioned would be to lower HPs. I’ll have to see how that fleshes out. Take a warrior and level him up, showing the HPs as time passes from Level 1-20.

Another would be to try and link the skill level with each attack. As it stands, a character’s class/level/weapon skills pushes up the attack bonus.
Perhaps also altering the damage caused would help.EG:

Attack Bonus [total*]// Damage (eg, sword, D8)
1 // d8
2 // d8
3 // d6+2
4 // d6+2
5 // d5+3
6 // d5+3
7 // d4+4
8 // d4+4
9 // d4+4
10 // d3+5
11 // d3+5
12 // d3+5
13 // d3+5
14 // d3+5
15 // d3+5
16 // d2+6
17 // d2+6
18 // d2+6
19 // No roll --8
20 // No roll --8
*Total includes level, wpn skills, magic…
This would be an easy removal of some of the damage randomness. Also adding additional damage would make sense. A level 15 fighter should do considerably more damage per swing than a level 1 guy. But you would have to dig into the numbers to decide how much. Perhaps it could even be an additional point every other "Attack Bonus" point. I donno.



Other easy tweaks could include something like:

Attack Roll Damage Mod
17 +1
18 Roll at least top half of damage, +2
19 Roll at least top half of damage, +3
20 Roll at least top half of damage, +4 + standard Nat 20 rolls



However, if you were to step into the realm of Active Defense (“pull downs”) then you could do something similar to what I had in 5th Age where the sum # = the damage dealt to the body. But this requires lowering HPs.

[JordanMercer]

so a fighter and a paladin gets a d10+ con (max at first):w/ 14 con lvl 1:12;2:20;3:33;4:44;5:52 etc. it gets out of hand fast. my guys with 30th lvl fighters are into 300 some.
barbs get d12, rangers, monks, and clerics are d8s, rogues, aristocrats and some others are d6s, and casters are d4s.

my new system as i said would severely reduce this advancement, but not cripple the balance. starting hp would start the same, max hit dice at first level plus con. then d6 and d4 get only their con modifier per level after that. d8 get 1+con per lvl, d10 get 2+con per lvl and d12 get 3 plus their con per level.

a fighter with a 14 con looks more like this: 1:12; 2:16; 3:20; 4:24; 5:28; 6:32; 7:36; 8:40; 9:44; 10:48

so you can see it really limits it. it still doesnt provide a lot of threat at higher levels. i would cap off hp at 10th, after which gaining con mod or taking feats would be the only ways they could increase their hp after that.

on top of this, each hit causes shock, a physical jolt. the person makes a Fortitude save equal to the damage dealt. if they succeed no penalites other than the damage, if they fail they lose actions. failing by 1-5 means you lose a move action (meaning you cant still atack on your next action, or move but not both and cannot do a full attack), failing by 6-10 means losing a whole round, losing by 11 or more means that the character goes unconcious and falls to 0 hp.

i've waffled on whether or not this would be for cumulative damage in the round, or for only each attack.

on top of this, for evry 1/4 of their total hp they lose they take -2 to all checks.

this stacks up quickly and makes combat very dangerous. i dont know how to do bleeding in a simple way yet

[danny]

yeah- I suggest starting with paper-n-dice... sketch out the ideas on paper and see how they start looking. BTW- do you have gamers lined up to play this with?

[JordanMercer]

I've played most of this out, it works pretty well, but there are bugs to work out and some balance things to consider. when i've done this system, little to no supernatural events occurred. so idk how that will go.

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