What occurred to me was that, in order to balance out the overpowered PCs, WotC just lumped a ton of hit points on the monsters. In essence, if you think about it, hit points are just little hour glasses for each baddie. And combat last only as long as those hour glasses do. So, if you take some of that sand out of the hour glass, it stands to reason combat will go quicker.

I haven’t play-tested this theory yet, mind you. But it seems logical enough to me. And the system presented above seems to me to be one of the best ideas I’ve heard to incorporate that theory into.

I also wonder what input anyone would have for the DM side. To me, only running this system on the monsters inherently unbalances combat. Meaning, if the PCs still take regular hit point damage, then combat is nothing more than a battle of attrition the DM will never win. While I understand it isn’t about the DM “winning” the battle, if there is no threat by the monsters (e.g. if the PCs will inherently win every encounter), then there’s really no point to even having combat in the first place.

What makes this idea _work_ is the fudging factor – the “Okay, that big whammy that you poured all your oomph into actually counts as 5 “hits”, whereas that nimble little octopus who’s been stabbing 6 times around actually needs to hit TWICE to count as one “hit”". Which means that, really, you’re just making it up for dramatic pacing. Which is fine and good, but you need to admit that that, really, is what you’re doing and that the “hits” are just a vague scale to help you along, and not a “system” that can be codified into rules at all.

Though if I had to try, what you’re -really- trying to do here is create a system where a given enemy lasts a given amount of time. So what you _really_ ought to be giving them is “X rounds in which they take sufficient damage”. It’s up to you, still, how much damage is “enough” to take a round off their life counter, but if the goal is timing, you really should be counting TIME and not some sort of highly fudgable “hits”.

This isn’t a mechanic that has to have hard and fast rules applicable to every group and every system. It strikes me as a pacing control mechanic that can be easily adapted to each group and system.

As the last few commenters pointed out this system favors the two weapon agile fighter over the one big hit bruiser. It also devalues damage buffs in general.

This works best with a system where whatever you do you only apply damage once per round and were most of the minor damage buffs have been removed and major ones have bee converted to counts as +1 good hit.

Some of that can be saved by having wound levels (“every 5 points counts as a good hit”), but then your back to a hp system without any of the advantages of character specificity or speed and timing.

My only question,what about pc’s that use weapons with multiple attacks (like a bow) or even a higher level pc with multiple attacks? It might be good to decide to count each individual hit for the smaller enemies, but for the boss count each successful round as a hit. That way players with “deadly octopus style” don’t reduce the boss to a quivering mass within a couple rounds.

I am so down for trying this on the player end, and hearing how it goes for others.

It also reduces the problem with high-damage characters landing all the killing blows all the time. If you ask me, every character should have a shot at delivering the final blow on a relatively equal basis, and if it would be more dramatic for a certain character to have the final blow, he should get it no matter what.

One thing this can help with is the grinding scenarios of many combats, that i haven’t seen yet, but I am already getting ready to counter.

What you’ve outlined really is a hp system, just at a coarser scale. I believe the newer Chainmail or D&D minis rules did something similar. Dividing hp by 5 or something like that and just counting a hit as 1 instead of rolling damage. It’s been a while since I read those rules, though, and I never did play them.

@Scott Martin – White wolf was definitely one of the systems I looked at for similarity. It is kind of similar, but not really. WW still has armor rolls and modifiers, from what I remember. Then there is the fact that everything has 7 hit levels. I don’t know how the new W.o.D. works, my friends being old school W.o.D. fans and not wanting to give a game a shot.

@snej – I’m going to have to check those out. Do you know of any quick-starts or basic rules sets so I can check out the rules? I know fate is based off of fudge, but I haven’t heard of PDQ (thought it sounds like it would be up my alley from the 3 minutes research I just did.).

@Target – Part of this came from thinking through a new system of damage for the “Huge” enemies system in Silvervine. Think Shadow of The Colossus or God of War type fighting. While I’ve run that system with the regular hit point system, it felt different. If I gave the enemy a HUUUUUGE number of hit points, only the tank or magic character were part of the fight. Too few hit points and it went down like a punk. I might be testing this with the next game I run like that.

I like the idea, and it is inherently scalable… sounds like it’s time for playtesting.