Optional Strain Rule
Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2019 1:24 pm
I've recently picked back up on Earthdawn, because my daughter is finally old enough and interested in playing the RPG's I enjoyed in my youth. I'm not ready to invest in 4th edition yet, mostly because I have all the books for 1st and 3rd, and most of the books for 2nd, even though I never actually played it. Anyway, as I started digging back in, I started finding a bunch of my old rule changes to make the game more playable. And I've come across the changes I made around strain and I wanted to bounce them off the group. Basically the standard problem with strain is that when you do a bunch of complex actions involving strain, your character ends up burning through most of their durability before they are hit. That's a player's over dramatization mind you, but it did take a good quarter of the average players available hit points per fight, which made it fairly dangerous.
Originally, I created a talent knack off the Durability talents that allowed characters to create a strain pool. I tried two versions, first was just a flat, your durability rank was subtracted from all the strain that you took per round. Which was way too OP, but it did allow for more thematically pleasing battles. But every combat round became an insane long set of chained events, which is normal for mid to high level characters. The second version, I made it a static pool that could be subtracted from until it was gone or until the next recovery test at which time, it was immediately reset. Combat focused classes felt that they should get more than the base because they had more strain causing talents in their disciplines, I've gone through varying levels of generosity with the multiplier, but it was usually somewhere around 2 or 3 times their durability level.
After I stopped playing regularly, I was going over the 3rd edition rules in detail and I came across the stun damage rules. They'd existed before that, I'd just never dug into them very deep because I wasn't overly interested in those kinds of affects. Anyway, the critical part was the notion that stun damage is different from regular damage. Basically it doesn't allow you to die from stun damage. And that got me to thinking about the nature of strain. Basically strain is pushing your body beyond health limits trying to cause an affect. It seemed like to me that is almost the same sort of damage as stun itself. So I came up with this new rule.
Rule: Treat all strain damage the same way you treat stun damage in the game.
Requirements:
You have to note strain and stun damage separate from the regular damage the character takes. But the total damage taken is still subtracted normally.
If a player takes damage that drops them below the Unconsciousness or Death rating, they are knocked into a coma if the difference between the total damage minus the stun damage is higher than the death rating they are still alive. Per the normal stun rules.
I also changed the stun damage recovery rules slightly. The current rules say if you focus on eliminating just stun, you get to roll a recovery test, plus your willpower step to it to heal just stun damage. Which seems a bit restrictive to me, if the damage is so easy to recover from why shouldn't you get that bonus on any recovery test. So I altered the rule that says anytime a player uses a recovery test to heal damage to themselves, they get to roll their willpower step to heal only stun/strain damage that they've incurred.
Example: 1st Circle warrior has a Toughness of 14, giving him a 36 Death rating 26 Unconsciousness rating. He goes into combat, a combination of 4 aggressive attacks (1 strain), 2 jump ups because of knockdown (2 strain), 5 uses of Avoid Blow (1 strain) and 3 rounds of Air Dance (1 strain). So he's collected about 16 points of strain damage in combat against say a couple of Cadaver Men. So he's setting at 10 hit points from unconsciousness and 20 from death. Under normal circumstances, lets say he scored a wound on one of the Cadaver Men and took 25 points of damage from the frenzy. He'd be just dead. But in this case, he'd still just be in a coma and after a minute, he would get a recovery test to see if he could wake up. At which time with my new rule, he'd roll his Step 6 toughness to recover which would be the 1d10 per normal. Probably wouldn't wake him up most likely but would definitely put him going in the right direction. But with the Step 5 willpower, he'd get an additional 1d8.
So what do you guys think about this rule? Am I on the right track here? Has anyone else experimented with ways to make strain more balanced?
Originally, I created a talent knack off the Durability talents that allowed characters to create a strain pool. I tried two versions, first was just a flat, your durability rank was subtracted from all the strain that you took per round. Which was way too OP, but it did allow for more thematically pleasing battles. But every combat round became an insane long set of chained events, which is normal for mid to high level characters. The second version, I made it a static pool that could be subtracted from until it was gone or until the next recovery test at which time, it was immediately reset. Combat focused classes felt that they should get more than the base because they had more strain causing talents in their disciplines, I've gone through varying levels of generosity with the multiplier, but it was usually somewhere around 2 or 3 times their durability level.
After I stopped playing regularly, I was going over the 3rd edition rules in detail and I came across the stun damage rules. They'd existed before that, I'd just never dug into them very deep because I wasn't overly interested in those kinds of affects. Anyway, the critical part was the notion that stun damage is different from regular damage. Basically it doesn't allow you to die from stun damage. And that got me to thinking about the nature of strain. Basically strain is pushing your body beyond health limits trying to cause an affect. It seemed like to me that is almost the same sort of damage as stun itself. So I came up with this new rule.
Rule: Treat all strain damage the same way you treat stun damage in the game.
Requirements:
You have to note strain and stun damage separate from the regular damage the character takes. But the total damage taken is still subtracted normally.
If a player takes damage that drops them below the Unconsciousness or Death rating, they are knocked into a coma if the difference between the total damage minus the stun damage is higher than the death rating they are still alive. Per the normal stun rules.
I also changed the stun damage recovery rules slightly. The current rules say if you focus on eliminating just stun, you get to roll a recovery test, plus your willpower step to it to heal just stun damage. Which seems a bit restrictive to me, if the damage is so easy to recover from why shouldn't you get that bonus on any recovery test. So I altered the rule that says anytime a player uses a recovery test to heal damage to themselves, they get to roll their willpower step to heal only stun/strain damage that they've incurred.
Example: 1st Circle warrior has a Toughness of 14, giving him a 36 Death rating 26 Unconsciousness rating. He goes into combat, a combination of 4 aggressive attacks (1 strain), 2 jump ups because of knockdown (2 strain), 5 uses of Avoid Blow (1 strain) and 3 rounds of Air Dance (1 strain). So he's collected about 16 points of strain damage in combat against say a couple of Cadaver Men. So he's setting at 10 hit points from unconsciousness and 20 from death. Under normal circumstances, lets say he scored a wound on one of the Cadaver Men and took 25 points of damage from the frenzy. He'd be just dead. But in this case, he'd still just be in a coma and after a minute, he would get a recovery test to see if he could wake up. At which time with my new rule, he'd roll his Step 6 toughness to recover which would be the 1d10 per normal. Probably wouldn't wake him up most likely but would definitely put him going in the right direction. But with the Step 5 willpower, he'd get an additional 1d8.
So what do you guys think about this rule? Am I on the right track here? Has anyone else experimented with ways to make strain more balanced?