Today I'm going to quickly talk about HP, as well as the concept of Constitution as an "ability score" or "attribute" as it relates to TNP.
Attributes & Skills
In earlier designs, knowledge skills and performance skills were tied to attributes, the same way all core skills are; much like 4th Edition D&D, knowledge skills such as Arcana, History, and Religion were tied to Intelligence, whereas Nature and Dungeoneering were tied to Wisdom. Now, as I've mentioned before, I wanted classes that typically got Heal (or its equivalent) as a class skill, to actually be good at it -- namely, by tying it to an attribute they would likewise be good at. The idea I had was to move it from being a Wisdom skill, to a Constitution skill; since Heal sort of deals with the health and durability of characters, it wasn't that big a leap in logic to use an attribute that deals in the same things.
I quite liked this solution, at least for this one specific attribute. For the other attributes, it sort of devolved into the same problem that 4e had, where classes that were "supposed" to have high Intelligence end up being better with the Religion skill than classes that were supposed to be religious. Eventually, I decided to pull Knowledge skills away from being a Skillset (with individual skills being the intersection of that Skillset, and one attribute.) With the 2018 Edition of the game, I am going to be likewise removing performance skills from the structure of core skills.
Originally, I had Fortitude as sort of a combined Strength/Constitution attribute, but it began to make less and less sense in my head. Having "Constitution" as the key attribute for performance skills such as singing or playing a wind instrument at first seemed fine, but it ended up pigeonholing classes a little too much -- particularly for something that is meant as more flavour than mechanics. The end result is we can use the term "Strength" instead (and have it be straightforwardly combat-focused) without having to worry about it tying to background skills.
Hit Point Calculations
In terms of HP, in the earlier versions, it was simply a function of your class die. It started out with having your maximum HP be something like, "roll your class die with Advantage and Expertise," and that would be the amount of HP you had. You could also re-roll it at the start of every adventuring day -- sort of to reflect the benefits of a long rest, but also potentially the negative results of a poor rest. 5th Edition D&D similarly leans towards the low end for HP (at first level) so I kind of wanted to take a similar approach -- but to implement and execute it better, within the structures I was writing for my system.
As such, monster damage was made to be very low (typically only 1 or 2 points per "hit") which sort of handcuffed the design. It also meant that a player who rolled poorly could be taken out of a fight easily, particularly if they were focus-fired; even if they weren't "dropped," being at your last Hit Point meant you had to play very defensively. This was particularly true, given that there were not many healing options available to the "original slate" of classes. (Indeed, for quite a while there, I had not intended to have "combat healing" in the game at all.)
My first thought in trying to alleviate this problem was to simply use "maximum value of your class die" for your HP. However, it was quickly pointed out that having d12 classes get triple the HP of d4 classes would be problematic. It proved to be difficult to balance around, and made encounter- and monster-design more unreliable. So eventually, in the Beta 4 version of the rules, the HP calculation became "maximum value of your Basic Roll," i.e. 20 (the maximum value of a d20 roll) + 4/6/8/10/12 (the maximum value of your Class Die.)
Why I like this, is because it keeps with the game's ethos of having everything derive from the dice. What gives it some mechanical validity, is when we compare it to how 4th Edition D&D handles HP, at first level. I went and delved into this math, to see how it stacked up to the new formula for TNP.
In 4e, your HP was composed of your Constitution score, as well as a static value provided by the role of your class. Now, since I didn't want to have ability scores (nor did I want modifiers seemingly drawn from the ether) I couldn't just copy+paste over this solution, hence the need to come up with my own formula.
Your starting ability scores in 4e range from 8 to 20; typically, Constitution would not be lower than 10, but also rarely higher than 15 or 16 (again, at 1st level.) As for roles, Defenders would start with 15 HP, Leaders and Strikers with 12, and Controllers with 10 -- in addition to HP equal to their Constitution score. (Some classes would get bigger bonuses to HP; off the top of my head, Barbarian gets more than the baseline for a Striker. But this is the exception, rather than the rule.)
This gives us a practical range of about 20-30 HP, with the extremes of 18 and 35 still being in the realm of possibility. So with the "max Basic Roll" equation for TNP producing a range of 24-32 HP, it seems like a perfect fit. Narrower HP ranges allow for our monsters to pack a similar punch, no matter which party member they target -- making it so that their design can be simpler, and also less reliant on DMs "pulling punches" to make sure combat feels fair.
Appendix
As I touched on in the previous post, I don't intend to tinker with HP values, for the new draft of the rules. I also mentioned that "doubling" the HP you get from your class die would be a feature for certain classes/subclasses. Generally speaking, I think this will be the tack to take for the melee subclass within certain d4 and d6 classes (for example, the "Monk" subclass for Sage, and the "Martial Artist" subclass for Acrobat.)
Next post will probably touch on some recent changes to Power Sources -- unless I get any amount of strong requests for more deep-dives into the subject of Constitution. Check back on March 3rd for more!
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