Taming Resilience

We have been contemplating whether Resilience might be too powerful of a stat in our current system.  It basically works like Damage Reduction in D&D.  There is a minimum hit of 1 in our system when a hit makes contact, so for a Warrior who had +3 Res, almost every hit against him was only scoring a single point of damage.

Our new idea is to give the characters Endurance Points (EP) instead of Resilience.

They might work in the following way:

PROPOSAL #1:

Endurance Points are spent by performing a physical action or by taking a blow.  Usually 1 point each.  EP can never drop below zero.  At the beginning of every turn, you recover 1 EP automatically (unless a status effect is preventing this.)   Therefore, you always have a minimum of 1 EP to work with in most cases when it is your turn to act.

If your EP is nonzero, it will absorb 1 damage point for you (after armor) when taking a blow (the way resilience used to, but limited to 1 point per hit.)  So +2 Armor, and 3 EP, if I am hit for 5 points, the armor takes it down to 3 points, the EP absorbs 1 (and is reduced to 2EP), and I take two points actual damage.   The cool thing about EP is that it wears down.   If two or three enemies attack you in one round, by the time the third gets to you, your EP is gone so their hit is more effective.

Ok, that is too complex.  It requires another set of counters to keep track of things--things that change rapidly--and we really don't want to keep track of more things.

Here's an attempt to simplify the concept and keep the same flavor:

PROPOSAL #2:

After each action is complete you get your full endurance points back.  Every blow you take during the next round reduces your EP by one.   Whatever you have left-over when your turn comes around is usable for any action requiring a certain number of EP to perform.

The downside to this is that if you have 3 EP and don't get hit, you could perform a 3 EP action on one turn, then immediately repeat it on the next turn.  That's kind of contrary to the whole idea that it would track physical exertion when performing difficult feats.

PROPOSAL #3:

The non-hit-related version.  You start out with full EP.   You spend EP as you use it.  You gain 1 EP at the beginning of each turn (unless a status effect prevents this.)

If you have 3EP, you can use all 3 points to do some amazing thing on your first turn.

Your next turn, you will recover 1EP.   If you attack, this will reduce to 0, so you decide to wait.

Next turn, you recover another and now have 2EP.   You decide to do a 2 EP action rather than wait it out one more round.   You're back to zero again.

Next turn, you recover 1EP.   You use a regular attack, and finish off the opponent.

This seems to be the simplest solution, by far.  The only downside is that enemies gain no particular benefit over you when your EP is at zero, and you have to track EP, but the EP doesn't change as frequently as in Proposal #1, so it should be much easier to track.

I think it would be easy to add a few rules to make up for the downside mentioned.  For example, when your EP is zero, maybe shields are ineffective, or maybe attackers gain a +4 bonus to Advantage against you.

OR...

Resilience works as it is now, except that you only get 1/2 Resilience protection against hits.

Tough Calls

During the playtest, we ended up having to make a couple of tough calls.

The Ninja's SecondStrike feature states that any attack which "makes contact" can be followed by a SecondStrike.  What if someone is in Full Defensive Posture, and the stike hits but hits for zero hitpoints?  Since it wasn't a "Miss," it still made contact, so the SecondStrike is still effective.

The Mage had a spell which added a small amount of Heat Damage to any attack made by a single ally.  The Heat Damage is combined with the other Potential Damage before subtracting off resistances.  The Heat Damage is also considered Weapon Bonus (even if the Weapon is fists) so it increases the Potential damage of a Light Hit as well as a Heavy Hit.  Also, we contemplated what would happen if the Damage Types had differing defenses working against them, which they could have in this case (but didn't, as no armor was being worn.)  We set it aside, since it didn't apply in the situation, but I will take up that question here.

The damage types in this system are:  Physical Damage, Direct Damage, Mystical Damage, Heat Damage, Cold Damage, Electrical Damage, and Chemical Damage.  Each of these has something unique.  Physical Damage is reduced by armor worn and a person's own resilience before it affects HP.  Direct Damage bypasses the armor, and is only reduced by resilience.  Heat, Cold, and Electrical damage bypass Metal Armor only (because it serves as a conductor), and is reduced by other Armor and resilience.  Chemical damage is the opposite, only being reduced by Metal Armor and resilience, as it is strong enough to burn through cloth, leather, or wooden armor.

A situation with combined damage types is quite complicated, and I'm not sure under what scenario the combo that I'm about to describe would happen, but lets pretend there were two damages being inflicted in a single blow.  4 Points of Chemical Damage and 3 Points of Heat Damage:  If the target was wearing +2 Metal Armor, it would deflect 2 points of Chemical Damage, but it wouldn't work against the heat Damage, leaving us with 2 Points of Chem Damage + 3 Points of Heat Damage, or 5 points of making it through the armor to the Resilience.  If the Resilience was 3, then 2 points of total Damage would be taken.  But which 2 points?  What if I had an ability where every point of Heat damage I take is transmuted into a Magic Point?  That's a good question.  Before answering it, lets look at another scenario:

What if it was 4 points of Mystical Damage and 3 points of Chem Damage?  Mystical Damage is (generally) unaffected by armor OR resilience, so 4 points would pass through to MP.  If there were only 3 MP, it would absorb the 3 MP and leave 1 point of HP damage.  The other 3 points would have the possibility of being absorbed by armor and resilience, according to the normal rules.  It seems that in the case of Mystical Damage, it is always very clear how much of the Mystical Damage remains.

So we are left with the question of how to find out which type of damage is left after all the reduction has been taken into account.

First of all, Cold and Heat damage cannot happen simultaneously.  If they do, they cancel each other out and only the balance remains.  i.e., 4 Cold plus 3 Heat = 1 Cold.  Not a very effective battle strategy.  This canceling happens before the attack makes contact.

So I'm making a ruling that resilience reduces damage in the following order:

Physical Damage (Because it is the easiest to deflect.)

Heat or Cold Damage

Electrical Damage

Chemical Damage (Because it leaves residue which continues to burn for some time.)

Where to put Electrical Damage (before or after Heat/Cold) is kind of arbitrary, but I needed to decide something, so this is what it will be until I find out a reason why it should be otherwise.

This is also the same order that standard armor absorbs damage in, and the same order that armor absorbs damage in after its namesake is absorbed.  i.e., Heat Resistant armor would absorb as much Heat as it can first, then it would absorb things in the usual order as just given.