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Thursday, July 16, 2015

I HAVE OPINIONS - Vitality from Unearthed Arcana

(The "I Have Opinions" feature is when I talk about other people's custom work. Unearthed Arcana, other people's work, etc. This time I give an aid to an old Unearthed Arcana article on Variant rules, specifically to make the Vitality rules a lot easier.)

One of the reasons that I preferred 4th edition over 3.X/PF is temporary ability damage. I really didn't like Con damage, because one could lose 1 point and lose their level in hit points, and another could lose 1 point and be roughly fine. Also, I didn't like the shortcut of going down to a minimum of 1 hit point per level. If I rolled hit points, and I got 6 hit point for my first level and 1 hit point for the next level, losing 1 to my Con modifier shouldn't drop my hp by 2.

Well, the people at Wizards, with their Unearthed Arcana playtest rules, indirectly introduced Con damage again. Basically, you have vitality that takes damage when you're taking 10 or more damage or a critical hit. You calculate your hit points off of vitality instead of Constitution, and you're supposed to recalculate your hit points based off of your vitality in the middle of a fight.

Now, I could call this not-for-me, but I want to give this a fair shake. I made a chart for people to try it out without the annoying recalculations or the bad shortcuts. I set the chart with instructions on Dropbox and Google Drive so people can try it out.

Anyway, there are still some ability-damage effects out there, but they're an exception, not the rule. If I run one, I'm probably going to replace it with a penalty on the ability modifier.

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