Questbird

As Atgxtg said, the HP of a character are already factored in as the Resilience roll. The higher your HP/Resilience, the more likely you are to stay in the fight after a blow. So on average a person with high Resilience will be able to take more blows before being knocked out (mirroring the normal system with hit points as much as possible). Being knocked out is a little bit like being reduced to 0 hit points in your system, except that the hitpointless system separates ability to keep fighting from degree of injury.

Looks great, thanks. Love a good Sword and Sorcery adventure. Have downloaded, will likely play.

My justification for it is that I based this system on Ray Turney's Fire and Sword, and he has given some thought to it already. From his (gold) design notes for the game: I'm using this system in a science-fantasy setting, so the magical healing in combat doesn't apply. I haven't yet adopted it for my fantasy game, but even there it is a low-magic setting where healing spells are uncommon.

Hard to base it on hit points in a hitpoint-less system! The heal spell as written heals 1d6 HP per 3 MP expended. So it is roughly equivalent for an average human (Resilience 10). The average roll of 1d6 is 3.5. Let's call it 3 to get a rough equivalence to the hit point system. 3/10 hp -- minor wound (walking wounded) 6/10 hp -- major wound (badly wounded) 9/10 hp -- unconscious (dying) 12/10 hp -- dead (dead) If you found it was a problem healing larger creatures, you could certainly scale up the magic point cost, relative to the hit points or resilience of the creature. I don't think this would come up in my games. I would simply say that healing is applied after the battle only; therefore the problem of bringing large creatures back into the fight wouldn't occur.

I would say Heal or first aid would be applied after the fight, before the injured person makes their recovery roll . Successful first aid roll improves the recovery roll success level by one, up to a maximum of 'success' (Walking Wounded). Therefore a successful First Aid means that a character can avoid immediate death. A special success first aid roll improves the success level by one; a critical success by two (in each case to a maximum of 'Healthy'). A Heal spell automatically improves the injury level; it costs 3 power points for each wound level, up to 'Healthy'. 12 points for a 'Dead' character (only possible with immediate attention after the fight) 9 points for a 'Dying' character 6 points for a 'Badly Wounded' 3 points for a 'Walking Wounded' Of course you could partially apply the Heal spell if you didn't have enough MPs to get someone to 'Healthy'. * based on Heal spell, BGB p. 98, also similar MP cost to Heal Wound in RQ3, p.118

Well that was an omission on my part if it wasn't clear. The CONx5 roll at the end of the fight is only for those who have failed a Resilience check and been knocked out of the fight earlier. Everyone else is assumed to be healthy enough, though they might have taken a scratch or two.

Maybe it was an enchanted sword -- the guy was fighting a dragon, after all!

How injured are you? At the end of the fight, make a CONx5 check: critical or special success – Healthy (knocked out by pain only) success – Walking Wounded failure – Badly Wounded special failure (failure with 1 or 2 on the units die) – Dying fumble – Dead Yes, you could die with one blow in this system. But first you'd have to: get hit by attacker fail to parry or dodge take the blow and fail a Resilience check and then roll a fumble So if all of that goes wrong for you, I guess it is literally Bad Luck. You can also die in one blow in the normal combat system with hit points. Since you roll after the fight I would allow successful First Aid rolls and so forth to help by raising the roll by one success level. In some ways this makes the system less fatal than the normal one. Remember that if you need to roll a Resilience check you have been hit by a weapon, and most likely injured in some way -- if you fail the check it means that you have at least been knocked unconscious or semi-conscious. The hitpointless system just triages these injuries into 'still able to fight' or not. All but the most bloodthirsty characters won't really care if their defeated opponents bleed to death on the battlefield or crawl away later to live out their lives quietly on a farm somewhere.

There's also the Ice Gnomes, the Invisibles of Stardock, and of course the Rats of Lankhmar below. -- Thanks to http://www.scrollsoflankhmar.com/rpgguide:nehwonmonsters

White magic is basically magic which avoids the hateful energies which make black magic more powerful and effective. In my campaign, different regions are more or less 'magical'. Divine magic (black or white) works better as you go further south.

I had no intention of being patronising. I've used chunks of Spider God's Bride in Nehwon (using Elric! rules) already (most recently 'Eidolon of the Ape' in Lankhmar city). It doesn't all translate but it's pretty good. I think the non-human races in Nehwon aren't really playable as characters. Having said that, I have had PCs in my campaign playing an elf, a centaur and a Quarmallian over the years. No Simorgyans though.

Correct, race generally equals species in many RPGs, but in the Sword and Sorcery genre (term coined by Leiber I believe) eg. Lankhmar, Conan or Elric, race often means different human cultures because humans dominate, and those cultures are given very stereotypical features which can translate to RPG mechanical differences. For example the Stygians in Conan are an old decadent sorcerous 'race'; the Pan Tangians are crazy Chaos worshippers (very boorish and crude ones according to the Melniboneans whose culture they try to imitate). RPG examples are Xoth from The Spider God's Bride and OpenQuest's The Savage North (these two are modelled on Conan). Some of the 'race'=culture stuff comes from the time these works were written, when skin colour and culture was regarded as unbridgeable differences between humans, the ultimate 'other'. In Nehwon, non-humans are very rare. Even the Quarmallians and Ghouls are described as very weird and isolated but mostly human societies. Fafhrd had a Ghoul girlfriend for a short while (Kreeshkra). Remember there's also the decadent Eastern empire of Eevanmarensee, where even the cats and dogs are hairless; the people of that kingdom are human but still weird and different from other Nehwonians. The Simorgyans may look human (?) but they are true aliens, and inimical to humankind. The flip side of all this is that there aren't any 'baddie' races like Orcs, the point being that in a dark and gritty world humans are bad enough.

It's more of a sword and sorcery setting, with different human races, rather than non-humans. Off the top of my head: Lankhmarts/Eight Cities folk, most common humans Mingols, wild horse (or sea!) raiders Northern barbarians, tough viking like warriors Easterners, Arabian/Asian cultured empires Quarmallians, tunnel-dwelling sorcerous race, former overlords Ghouls, transparent-skinned desert warriors You could add Simorgyans -- ancient watery nemesis race (Atlanteans/Deep Ones) To the distaste of some purists, I have elves in my campaign, a remnant of its D&D origins. However I treat them as an ancient, xenophobic semi-human race like the Quarmallians, with whom they are engaged in eternal cold war. They don't associate with humans and are unknown in Lankhmar or the northern lands.

A Resilience roll of 01-05 for named characters only is always successful (could make it 01 for anyone else). Success means keep fighting, failure means they are out of the fight at the end of the current combat round. A fumble always fails. So even big monsters can be felled that way. The rules as I wrote them say that a critical attack ignores armour; resulting Resilience check is also Difficult. But maybe halving the Resilience target would be better. Example The classic RQ3 Dragon (CON 35 SIZ 70, POW 20), it would have 53 hit points in RQ, and a Resilience of 42 faces a warrior with a long sword (damage 14*). The warrior scores a critical hit on the dragon A critical hit ignores armour and the long sword is an impaling weapon so it does double damage (24) Resilience roll for the dragon: As written: A difficult resilience roll. 50% + ((Resilience – damage) x 5%) half of 50 + ((42 - 24) x 5%) = 70% chance the dragon is still able to fight. OR A standard resilience roll with half the dragon's resilience 50% + ((half Resilience - damage) x 5%) 50 + ((21 - 24) x 5%) = 35% chance the dragon is still able to fight. Obviously the second way is more devastating. By contrast a normal hit from the warrior would be unlikely to do anything as armour would count so Resilience check would be probably be about 220%; only a fumble would bring the beast down. It looks like halving the target's Resilience on a critical might be a better approach than halving the Resilience roll. * calculated from max sword damage 1d8+2 plus max damage bonus, in this case 1d4

Yes, that is an effect for large critters - hence the huge thread about it. I think some sort of cumulative damage thing might be necessary for them -- which is annoying because it defeats one purpose of the system (to minimise bookkeeping). There needs to be some way of handling them though. I don't mind the 'cumulative damage for the combat round' approach I guess, though not overjoyed. However the system is modelled on human scale so for human vs. human it's quite possible to drop an opponent with one hit, and I'm happy with the way that works.

Yes it's not too bad. There is also an upcoming Lankhmar release from Goodman Games, who have recently crowdfunded a huge Lankhmar thing. Their system is 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' but I like to collect any Lankhmar-related RPG material.

BRP doesn't use hit locations by default. Neither does Magic World, and neither do I. This formula might work if you want to apply this system to hit locations though.

Hurrah! Another who recognises the wonderful nexus between Lankhmar and Magic World! (Well, in my case, Elric! MW's progenitor but the idea is the same.) I've been running a Nehwon campaign using these rules for more than 20 years. They are perfect for a 'low-but-powerful' (I like your phrasing there) magic, swords and sorcery campaign. My latest campaign notes are on Obsidian Portal if you are interested: https://nehwon.obsidianportal.com/ I've not yet run ghouls as either PCs or NPCs in my campaign, which has mostly taken place around the southern Lankhmar Continent and the Inner Sea, so I can't give any insights there. As for sorcery, I've always thought that Nehwon allowed for many magical traditions, but my game has boiled down to three: 1. basic 'battle magic' spells as written in Magic World 2. a freeform magic system based on the Maelstrom magick system, which I've talked about elsewhere on this forum and am always happy to go on about 3. an adaptation of RoleMaster's Spell Law, where players acquire aptitudes for spell 'lists', one per skill. This allows for very different magicians who nevertheless have a number of spells at their disposal. As for Allegiance, I use it as is with Law, Chaos and the Balance, albeit with less direct interference from those forces. However rather than awarding Chaos points for every use of magic, I do so only for particularly Chaotic reasons. However the accumulation of Chaos points is like the corruption gained from using black magic. This is sword and sorcery after all. I have had two characters in my campaigns achieve apotheosis: one for Chaos and one for Law. The Chaos one has basically become an NPC evil sorcerer villain. The Law one has reclaimed a kingdom from the Quarmall Barrens in the south.

Resilience (as opposed to HP) is the average of (CON + SIZ + POW); super huge creatures might not have high POW and therefore not as high Resilience as you might expect. Dragons, I suppose are the exception here, being traditionally tough, large and powerful. But dragonslaying has always been difficult in literature.

You and I discussed exactly this problem: And you came up with many useful ideas. Ray Turney, who designed the basis for this hitpointless system in his Fire and Sword game, said that he didn't particularly care about large creatures and how they would work with this system. Unfortunately I do, because my players had to fight one and I didn't want the thing to be invulnerable. Some of the ideas you came up with were: 1. make an 'aimed shot' to hit a vulnerable area, which would make the Resistance roll harder. Trouble is, for truly massive creatures they are just off the chart of the resistance table vs. normal damage. Good idea though. 2. allow cumulative shots against large creatures, by doubling the resistance target with every 10 points of damage inflicted during the round I think I kind of fluffed the actual battle, and basically allowed cumulative damage. The Terax died. Next time, I think I would do a combination of the two things in a simple (and easier to remember on the fly!): If you can make a difficult shot, you concentrate your fire on one part of the beast. All the damage so concentrated during the round counts as the Resistance target. In other words, the monster makes a Resilience check vs. the cumulative total of such hits for the round. If your shot is a hit but greater than half your chance, your shot hits elsewhere and the monster makes an immediate Resilience check against only that hit.

The Star Wars comment was a throwaway line. I don't fudge the rolls or make it harder for the NPCs to hit. The hitpointless system just means that someone might be out of the fight but not necessarily dead.

I find it hard enough to track NPCs' hit points, let alone PCs' as well. I have used this system so far in my Swords of Cydoria campaign, as a way to encourage a swords-and-blasters approach which rarely worked in the real world (in the 17th-18th century when handguns were so unreliable and slow to load it helped to have a claymore handy too). With this system you can be knocked out of the fight, but not necessarily dead and obliterated. BRP gunfights can be quite dangerous (especially with hit locations) and gritty. I wanted to encourage a more pulpy and guns-blazing approach (like Star Wars stormtroopers blasting away with their laser guns but never hitting anything, then being taken out by one shot by one of the heroes).

Don't forget Asterix and Obelix More than half in jest, but the comics are beautifully illustrated and give you a sense of not only Rome itself but the provinces. Most fantasy 'Empires' (including Glorantha's Lunar one) are modelled on this particular historical European empire.

It seems that H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos stuff is everywhere; in comics, books, board games, RPGs. It is mainstream. At least some of that must come from Chaosium and Call of Cthulhu. Some also came from Doom, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Mike Mignola and various comics authors. As for making money, sure World of Darkness might have made more in the 90s, but where is it now? Chaosium managed to stay in business (just) because of its multiple similar editions of Call of Cthulhu. It must have made some cash to do that. Maybe Call of Cthulhu is more like a ubiquitous mixer drink like bitter lemon or tonic water -- more common than you think.

Observations of the hitpointless system in practice One thing I like about the hitpointless system is applying it to weapon breakage. In Elric!/Magic World weapons have a certain number of hit points and they gradually get chipped away on critical parries etc. This has the effect that you just repair or replace your weapon if you've had it a long time. It's so ho-hum that most people don't bother about it. Using the hitpointless system, a critical parry causes the attackers weapon to make a Resistance check of (maximum damage of parrying weapon) vs. attacking Weapon HP. Weapons are durable (usually have 20 HP) but can unexpectedly break. Because the system is probabilistic rather than connected to fixed points, you just never know when you'll need that backup weapon.