Still Flying

We played another session in our ongoing Serenity RPG this weekend. Several hours were spent hanging out in saloons, hanging out with drunk miners, shmoozing with small-town high society, gambling, and best of all, getting paid four times for the same job. (Captain Tagon would be proud.)

We were all very surprised at the end of the session when there was actual combat. We'd somehow managed to convince the townsfolk that we were trustworthy folks who could handle transporting the mine's payroll from the station to the bank... or at least that we weren't stupid enough to try to make off with it with an Alliance fleet in orbit. At any rate, while we were fighting off the desperados who were stupid enough to think they could get away with it, I noticed a mechanic that I like a lot.

First off, let's compare to D&D. In both systems, you've got a total amount of health, and there are two damage types: subdual/stun damage, and lethal/wound damage. If a character takes enough total damage of both types to fall below zero health then they fall unconscious, and if they take enough pure lethal damage then they're dying or dead.

In D&D, the vast majority of damage is lethal, and either attacks hit or they don't. So damage can be pretty spiky, and characters fall below zero pretty frequently. As a result, there's a safety mechanism: between 0 and -10 they're not dead, but rather bleeding to death, and they lose another point of health every turn.

In Serenity, the more accurate you are with your attacks, the more damage you inflict. This is already good - you can pick between having inaccurate weapons that do lots of damage, or accurate ones that make up for their low damage by getting lots of bonus damage from accuracy. (Daggers always sucked in D&D because of this - their damage is poor, there's no accuracy bonus, and you can't attack any faster than you could with a bigger weapon. The only reason to bring one is if you need to conceal your weapon, or to use as a throw-away ranged attack.)

The thing about the accuracy bonus damage is that it's 'basic damage', which is half wound and half stun. Since everyone's doing bonus damage this way, there's a lot more stun damage being thrown around than in D&D, so it's pretty common for people to be knocked out but not dead. Thus there's no -10 rule - you're dead if you go below 0 from wound damage, but you'll almost certainly have stopped fighting before then.

I was thinking about how hard it would be to adapt this for D&D, and basically gave up. You'd have to scale up the health of everything to make up for the fact that everyone's doing more damage, but by how much? A mid-level fighter with a greatsword can be rolling 2d6 + 9 or so for damage and regularly beat the AC of some enemies by 10 or more - so, what, a 50% health bonus? What about spellcasters, who tend to not have to overcome enemy armor but also aren't as accurate? Then there's magic missile, which always hits; how would that stay effective? Bump it up to 1d6 +1 per missile instead of 1d4 + 1?