The Gaming Den

The original Vitality and Wounds system was in 3.5's Unearthed Arcana and the d20 version of Star Wars. In this version your character's hit points where replaced by vitality points, which where lost whenever an attack connected, to represent the extra expenditure of effort to moving out of the way. A character received wound points equal to their constitution score, these where lost after you ran out of vitality point, except if you got critical hit in which case you lost wound points first. The giant glaring problem with this is monster wielding a weapon like a keen falchion had a very good chance of killing your character with one shot, regardless of level.

In my idea a character has half his hit points replaced with the same number of vitality points and the other half with wound points. Critical hits do their normal damage but it is applied to the vitality points first, a critical hit is fluffed as an exceptionally dangerous attack, to get out of the way of a critical hit requires a lot of stamina. All of a character's vitality points can be recovered by resting for 10 minutes. A Fighter type character could also spend some vitality to make special attacks.

• Sample Special attacks
  Whirlwind Slash: Gain an extra melee attack, can not attack same target twice.
  Mighty Bash: Free trip attempt on a successful melee attack.
  Lunge: As an immediate action extend your reach by 5 feet.

Nothing too game changing, but should make melee combat a bit more interesting.

• Upsides of this change:
• The party should be less dependent on healing magic to get through an adventure, they can just stop to catch their breath and continue on.
• Fighters are given a resource they can spend to do something other than just make another vanilla attacks.

• Downsides:
• More book keeping
• Probably requires new fighter feats for the special attacks to work well

FantasyCraft did it.

It's basically a giant test case for many of the Den ideas, all at once.

No, FantasyCraft did not do this. You did not get to spend hit points on maneuvers, and weapon crit damage bypassed vitality points exactly as Juton indicated he doesn't want.

Juton, deciding to not increase hit points at all, just splitting them into two sequentially drained piles and then not allow anything to bypass the first pile makes me wonder why you even have them at all. By not being able to bypass the pile you already eliminate one of the reasons the split was put in. Your way also means that people hitting the fighter makes him less able to do the fightery stuff you want him to do, so he spends less time on the front lines if he can avoid it.

Just keep it as one pile, recover a maximum of 50% of your hp at the end of the fight (to a maximum of your max hp or whatever you had going into the current encounter), and let the fighter kill himself all the way if he wants to in order to do stuff . Less bookkeeping, same basic functionality, more fightery stuff happening. And yes, you do need to write new special attacks to make this work. Just not feats (unless this is intended for the Tome fighter, in which case go do something else); it's not like the core class doesn't need a boost as well as something to fill in dead levels. Give them these attacks on odd levels, fill out the class or something.

This is almost identical to an idea I had, but I only got a chance to test it in two sessions. I'm in the process of testing it again.

The only difference is I didn't change any mechanics around, but rather, said that half the damage you take is nonlethal damage, and crits always do lethal damage. Also, if you have resistance to a damage type, a like amount is converted to nonlethal first. I added in a second wind mechanic to let someone heal all their nonlethal damage.

I tried this out for somewhat different reasons though. It was more because at this point, I tend to run and play in solo games, so this helps reduce the need of having a healer in the party.

@Tarkis

I wanted to have the pools split so recovering vitality points by resting is more understandable to the average gamer. Putting all your HP in one pile as you suggest doesn't really cut down on book keeping since you have to keep tabs on the HP you have at the start of a battle.

Also I think you might get into odd cases where you drink a potion in combat, in my system that can go straight to the wound points. In your system I think a player would have to increase the notation of how much HP they started the battle with if they hadn't lost 50% of their health already.

I think you're right in that a player should have the option of using wound points to fuel special attacks, it's pretty cinematic to summon up your last reserves of strength to use your desperation move. Increasing total HPs may also be in order, but I am functioning under the understanding is that the problem with high level fighters isn't that they die of HP damage too quick, it's that they can't really contribute to a battle.