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Arcade 06-27-04, 10:10 AM

The injury system, as has been pointed out here, is not great at high levels where fortitude saves are so high that the only posible failure is on a 1. I'm working on different ways of reworking this. The problem is that most mlee and ranged attacks do moderate damage individually, but you have more of them occurring at high levels. Spells do a lot of damage, but you only cast 1 per round (quicken spell being the exception) so it's not as much of an issue. Take disintegrate with a 20th level caster. It will do 40d6 damage or 140 damage on average with a failed save. This is a DC save of 43 - your high level characters will need better than a 2 to save against this. Now take a 20th level barbarian or fighter. They can quite often deal out 100 points or more of damage in a round. But this damage is split up among three or four attacks of 30-40 points each. Four saves at DC 23 fall into the only fail on a 1 category. So the solution is to not make the save until after all your attacks are done. So instead of making three saves at DC 23, your target would only make 1 save, but at DC 39. This makes the injury save more exciting since it is not all guarunteed successes, but should keep the damage thresholds about the same. I would also suggest using the variant rule in the Epic handbook about rolling 1's and 20's. On a natural 1, roll again and add the result to -21. This would make natural 1's not automatic disables, but they will still end up as a very bad roll. Finally, I would also suggest that creatures which act on the same initiative (most monsters, but possibly characters who work together), resolve all their attacks before making the injury save. So a group of 8 orcs will add up all their damage before making their opponent roll their injury save. Pros: Less dice rolling- 1 injury save for each string of attacks or attackers Results other than a natural 1 will be a failure Less injury rolls means fewer chances for hits which means even less bookkeeping than the normal injury system Cons: Fewer injury rolls mean fewer chances to take hits, which means the injury saves don't go down quickly A character will likely need to commit all his attacks on one target, which could mean overkill and loss of attacks for other targets (but making cleave that much more useful) This is untested, but as far as I can tell, it should solve the high level issues for the injury system. All comments and criticisms are welcome.