Café de Nuit

I've recently started playing in a Star Wars game. It uses a system for hitpoints that's a little bit different than the regular DnD 3.5 rules system.

In a Star Wars game, your character has a number of vitality points, depending on your class and level (eg. hitpoints). The PC also has a number of "Woundpoints" equal to the constitution score.

My level 1 character for example has 9 vitality points and 13 wound points. (A d8 hit die + CON modifier and a CON score of 13)

When the PC gets hit by a weapon, the damage score is subtracted from the vitality points. When the PC is out of vitality, the wound points are affected. When you lose vitality, you're not really 'hit' and when you lose Wound points, you're actually fatigued, have less Strength and you're losing blood.

Now, when a weapon in Star Wars d20 scores a critical hit, it doesn't deal double or triple damage, instead it immediately eats away at your woundpoints. This way a level 16 character with 14 wound points could still suffer major consequences from a hit dealt by a simple kobold. (Well, not in Star Wars, you know what I mean.)

This system looks really appealing to me to use in Ravenloft, because of the constant threat of dying.

There's a problem however. In DnD, weapons have different threat ranges and deal different damage increments on a critical hit.
It would be easy to just use the Vitality-Woundssystem, but how would I reflect the fact that a longbow deals more damage on a critical hit than a dagger?

Just tripling (or even quadrupling) the wound damage would mean instant-death, and that's also not what I'm looking for.





I know a lot of people use this system in their Ravenloft games, so if you could give me some pointers maybe? How do you implement it?

In my campaign we use the vit/wound system, and we created the following system for critical hits:

All weapons have a base critical threat (sp?) range of 20, and different critical multiplier. We felt a critical is more effective in a vit/wound system, thus a 19-20/x2 sword would have been better than a 20/x3 axe.

When you score a critical you deal your damage once to the wound points, and eventually once or twice to the vitality points, depending on your critical multiplier. To calculate the critical multiplier of your weapon first of all trade critical threat range points for critical multiplier points on a 1-1 basis (so 19-20/x2 becomes 20/x3, and 18-20/x2 becomes 20/x4), then decrease the critical multiplier by 1 (yes, x1 multiplier do exist).

This way all criticals become 20/x1 (deal 1x damage to wound), 20/x2 (deal 1x damage to wound and 1x damage to vitality) or 20/x3 (deal 1x damage to wound and 2x damage to vitality).

Quick conversion chart:
20/x2 becomes 20/x1.
19-20/x2 and 20/x3 become 20/x2
18-20/x2, 20/x4 and 19-20/x3 (does it even exist?) become 20/x3.

Hope this helps. Have fun.

Unearthed Arcana addressed this as well I believe.

However I haven't play tested this system in RL, I can already see how it would fit.

First off, Undead recieve an upper hand (always good) as they have a chance of killing you quicker, but you don't. Second, this could potentially make firearms much more dangerous, as they are supposed to be.

Lycanthropes may become a bit of a different situation. For instance, you may rule that the fortitude save against the infection only applies to damage against wound points. This takes away some of the fear of lycanthropes the players may have, but it also avoids situation where half the party are afflicted werebeasts.

Here's one thing though: how would sneak attack work? Obviously it would get insane if the d6's were all applied to the wound points, but at the same time by the principle of the idea it should attack it directly, and increase in potency with levels. Perhaps it attacks wound points directly, and gains a +1 bonus to damage every three levels?

Undead Cabbage wrote: Here's one thing though: how would sneak attack work? Obviously it would get insane if the d6's were all applied to the wound points, but at the same time by the principle of the idea it should attack it directly, and increase in potency with levels. Perhaps it attacks wound points directly, and gains a +1 bonus to damage every three levels?

A d2 instead of a d6 might work?


Thank you, Sorti, you.. sorti'd that out quite clearly.

I'd say the d2 is actually a much better call.

This makes cloak and dagger campaigns much more interesting, as a 13th level rogue (a high level in RL) will be dealin 7 to 14 + the damage of the weapon directly to the wound points. This brings some neat realism to game play. A slit throat is a slit throat, nevermind how long you're been training in combat. This also puts less emphasis on the weapons themselves, and more emphasis on how they are used. This, however, does not overbalance rogues, as sneak attack is inheirently disadvantaged in a setting that involves a lot of undead, as well as enemies that require certain material components to damage.

Another thing to consider. Would immunities count towards wound and vitality, or just wound? On one hand, immunity concerns being physically hit, whereas vitality points are a representation of being able to dodge or shrug off hits in combat. On the other hand, a creature with immunity may not even bother to dodge or shrug off a weapon that it is immune to.

Check this puppy out:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adven ... Points.htm