Alternate Rules for Taking Damage below Zero Hit Points

[VanGo]

So, this seems quite complicated for what you want to accomplish and there are some strange choices in there, which indicate your lack of experience. The first piece of advice that every newcomer gets from me: Don’t mess with a system that you haven’t played yet.

Let’s start with the oddities:

@ronwisegamgee

Whenever a PC or NPC created via a complex build reaches zero hit points, make a Toughness resist roll vs. CR 10 + any excess damage remaining from the attack that brought you to zero hit points.

There is no such thing as a Toughness resist roll. Either it’s a resist roll, which is a flat d20 roll, or maybe you meant a Fortitude roll, similarly to the finishing blow rules.

@ronwisegamgee

If you fail, you take one level of the Fatigued bane for every 3 points you failed the roll by.

This part adds an aspect to the game that was omitted on purpose: Potentially one-shotting PCs. Exploding dice can be fickle and this removes the only fail-safe.

@ronwisegamgee

If you want to represent the effects of lethal damage as presented in the core rule book with this house rule, make it so that when a character is not in combat, they don’t have access to their hit point pool (making them effectively having zero hit points). Taking damage outside of combat, then, should go by the rules of taking damage at zero hit points listed above.

This is by far the most baffling idea to me, and I’m not even sure that I’m understanding it correctly or what its purpose is. This doubly punishes lethal damage outside of combat, by a) reducing the overall HP and by b) potentially adding Fatigue on top of that. That seems quite unnecessary.

@ronwisegamgee

The inspiration for this house rule came from the way The Expanse RPG dealt with taking excessive damage that you couldn’t cancel with Fortune Points. The Fatigued bane seemed like the perfect bane to emulate compounding injury, so it seemed like the best existing rule to integrate.

I have no knowledge of that system, so I have no clue what “Fortune Points” are, etc. but there are two much simpler ways to accomplish something along the lines of what you propose:

• Being reduced to 0 HP inflicts a level of Fatigue.

• Excess damage reduces your overall HP, just like Lethal Damage would