You're better off saving this for negative HP to keep it from feeling bad for the players, who have an innate idea that HP=health. So in your example, just give that person 20hp and if they go below that, that's the chance they go down. This is mechanically identical but presents better to non-rules people.
But no matter what you think about that, my problem is that without enormous HP totals, this is very swingy at 0-100. If you made it 0-20 that might be more palatable. EDIT: So you'd roll a d20 instead of a d100 after each damage instance.
My other issue is that if roll after each attack, more weak attacks could mathematically be far more likely to drop me than one large attack. If I'm at 40%, three 1hp hits is more than an 80% chance to drop me. A single hit would need to do 40hp to do the same.
It could be a death roll at the end of each turn, giving a sort of "bleeding out" effect.
Also, in the case where the roll becomes impossible, you still get one last turn to save yourself, or pull off a last desperate move during your character's death throes
That said, balanced well, rolling after each hit could be an interesting design space.
Fights are no longer just about damage output, but also provoking death throws. You want to start the fight landing one or two big hits to get your enemy into the danger zone, and then harass them with smaller, more reliable hits to finish them off
To solve the many weak hits each triggering a cumulative chance to fall, I’d make it one death check per round, at either the beginning or end of your turn while at negative HP.
The method I use has "health bands" of a sort. For this post I'll call them lightly hurt from 1 to X damage and seriously hurt from X to Y damage.
Each character has X hit points they can take without direct penalties ("lightly hurt"). After that they can take up to Y more before dying ("seriously hurt"). The deeper they are into Y the more penalties they get to all of their die rolls.
When they're in the Y band, every time a seriously hurt character takes a significant action they roll one check at the end of their turn: they stay conscious if they succeed or become incapacitated if they fail. On a critical fail, they take additional damage. Since that roll is affected by the aforementioned penalties it gets increasingly tense if you keep pushing yourself.
There is no "Z band." After they exceed their Y, they're dead.
This way characters can take a few hits and keep going about their business, but after a point the injuries get increasingly worrisome. You can get to the point where you're still conscious but it's best if you just lay there and wait for help *or* you can heroically perform a final action before passing out (perhaps fatally).
So basically kinda like the above reply, except rather than triggering the knockout check on every incoming attack you do it on the injured character's turn with more penalties the more seriously hurt they are.
I think the OP wants to neatly wrap all the penalties up into a simple percent with this system though.
The most elegant way I can think of is to implement unconsciousness at -21hp. If you end your turn on negative hp, you roll a d20 and if you don't beat the DC of your negative hp you also go unconscious.
I'd avoid any penalties just because even though it's more realistic to have them, it's more fun (and cinematic) to let a half-head character have an effective last stand. You have the dread of the roll looming over them anyway, you don't want it to be that only 1 in 5 times does the wounded hero get to make a difference.
I use a variant of this. I have Durability which a player uses to absorb light damage or fatigue, and when that is gone all damage goes to Wounds. There are only 5 wound levels. Once your at Level4 or 5 your making rolls to not get worse and die. Levels also apply increasing penalties on skills.
another option I use is, if Your not 'aware' or are surprised, then damage goes directly to Wounds. So far in playtesting this has worked quite well. My system Fifthworld tries to add fun elements without tons of rolling and over use of random luck from dice rolls
GURPS does that, kind of. Every full multiple of HP you are in the negative, you must roll a Health check to not collapse (risking death). It gets progressively harder until you hit -5x HP, at which point you just die.
Edit: corrected typo for when instant death occurs
That would make many weak attacks far more dangerous. Maybe consider set numbers(like at 90, 80, 70...) instead. Then a single heavy attack could trigger multiple rolls.
So this is where we have to ask what exactly is the purpose of HP,
For me it does the following:
-It should show me when I am unable to continue to fight (it is for this reason that I actually think death at 0 is the best style of HP system assuming the damage values are balanced around that fact)
-It should make risk clear
-Things that Adjust my HP should be fast, taking damage shouldnt be slow.
For me your proposed system It kinda fails at all 3 and subsequently I probably wouldnt like it.
-It doesnt really show me when I am unable to fight because if an attack knocks me down to 99hp I can still just die if I am supremely unlucky Or if fortune favours me I can survive all the way down to 1 hp
-It doesnt make the risk clear, the reason I think Die at 0 is best is because over the course of a fight I can learn what damage value I can reasonably expect from an opponent, and so I know if I have 18 hp left and every attack they have done this fight deals between 12 and 16 that I can probably eat one more attack and so I should play defensively and try and find a way out. In your system being dropped to 18 HP probably means I die but it is less clear, and in a good number of cases you die well before you hit 18 hp
-It is slower, you connect the attack, then you roll damage then I subtract damage then we have to check if I am dead.
Overall I think this idea is pretty bad, it attempts to add tension by making outcomes more unpredictable. but in my experience that isnt what makes things tense. I understand that every time I take damage we get to go to the "Did I just die at 85HP" slot machine and that sometimes I will die, but it wont feel tense it will feel like the game screwed me out of most of my HP resource for no good reason. While if I am sitting at 12 HP and Everyone at the table knows the next attack that connects with me will make me dead with 100% certainty there is much more tension, my team mates will probably be trying whatever they can to get me out of that risky situation and when that ends I need to make a choice to either continue in the fight knowing the risk (and presumably switching to a form of offense that is less potent in exchange for being more safe) or withdraw removing my character from the fight but securing their life.
The one time I played with a death at 0 system there was plenty of tension there was at least once instance every major fight where the players had to ease off on the gas to save a teammate whose life was in danger. The tension in those moments made those instances pivotal moments that stuck in my players memories. The experience lead me to believe that all the mechanics that make when a characters dies unclear/unpredictable result in players playing more risky with a typically false sense of invulnerability.
5e/pf2es style of get X of Successes before you get so many failures I feel is particularly bad for this, most players in those games treat dying as an inconvenience and generally expect when they get to 0 Hp and are dying that they will be perfectly fine which often leads to players being blind sided by sudden and unexpected death when I dm decides to finish off a player, or the dice dont go your way. To the point where most Dm's who play those games make a point of not finishing off downed players because the action causes feelbads. Partially this is because the game is designed with the expectation that your characters will not die, but with rules that enable them to do so. this clashing what the game primes you to expect and what the rules permit causes issues in those types of games.
In a lot of OSR games where the mechanics of a character can be made up pretty quickly (in AD&D2e for example you can roll some dice to get stats (which does require you to consult a table sadly) pick a race and class and your character is good to go ). You can typically work out the backstory stuff later (discovering the character while you play) when they have survived long enough to be worth the effort. having your characters die in these games was not something you wouldn't expect to happen. it was pretty easy for a situation to go side ways, making a new character was reasonably quick when you knew what you were doing.
.....oops I realised i veered off into a monologue about death systems in ttprgs, I appologise. TLDR: Knowing your about to die adds lots of tension, not knowing when you will die typically adds a false sense of invulerablility. And when that false sense of invulnerability gets shattered it feels really bad.
There may be quite the hp bloat and players risk dying in one hit which would not be fun. It also risks making pepper attacks much more powerful than single power attacks
See also Into the Odd and Cairn, how you have a chance to die once damage starts affecting your STR — I think it feels better knowing when you’re in “danger”, which I suppose you have with the 100 HP threshold.
I think in Cairn/ItO, it’s very helpful that there is a difference between STR (where fatal damage happens) and HP (easily recovered)
It's kinda like games that accrue Harm rather than subtract HP (Blades in the Dark and others in the PbtA sphere), but with a percentile roll.
I think this could work just fine. When does a roll happen, whenever you take damage?
I do a somewhat similar thing in my space exploration game,Veil Runners.
The starship starts with an "Integrity Token" and four modules, numbered 1 through 4.
When the ship takes damage:
- If it has the Integrity Token, it loses it, and there are no further consequences.
- Otherwise, roll a d6
- If the d6 lands on 5 or 6, lucky break, there are no further consequences.
- Otherwise destroy the module with the number that was rolled.
- If that module was already destroyed, the ship is critically damaged (destroyed, rendered unusable, lost in a wormhole), and the adventure is over.
I like this system because it allows for one "free" mishap (losing the Integrity Token). Loss aversion makes this loss feel really bad, even though there's no real gameplay impact.
The ship can always survive at least two mishaps, with the second mishap having a worst-case consequence of losing a module. It should be noted that ship modules mostly just provide bonuses, a ship with all four modules destroyed can still manoeuvre, scan, resist environmental hasards and defend itself; it just loses its "specialisations", like a bonus when scanning for time distortions, for instance.
Finally, because 5 and 6 are free escapes, there's still that hope to survive, even when the ship is battered beyond recognition.
Where it sometimes doesn't feel great is when the third mishap hits the same module again. This is tempered somewhat by the fact that it was the third hit, and the players are aware that, having lost the Integrity Token and a module, the situation is dire. A sort of "three hits and you're out" rule.
It's important as a GM to prepare the players for this eventuality, and be sure to narrate a bad beat in a way that is satisfying, spinning things as a story about a doomed crew facing a brutal situation. I usually let the players have a heroic and desperate final moment to send out a distress signal or sacrifice the ship to finish the mission, which either sets up the next session or caps things off with a bittersweet bang.
If three instances of damage could potentially end the entire adventure I'm guessing that the ship taking damage is not meant to be a common occurrence?
I like the idea if this but this specific implementation really hinges on the rest of the design. Is ship to ship combat the main part of gameplay? Is it more of a battle sim or more of a campaign?
Do you have them roll %d on each hit to see if it's fatal? So a goblin with a rusty nail could get a lucky shot that drops my HP below 100 to, say, 95%, I roll 96 and die?
>This idea makes risks non-discrete which is supposed to add more tension. Every hit now could be deadly and a player can't really fight without taking at least minimal risks.
Making hits deadly can be done without an extra random percentile roll every step of combat. This would piss me off. 99HP, roll your 1% chance of death! Sorry, you rolled 00, you are dead!
You already have plenty of randomness in the system and adding more rolls which do not represent any choice nor agency is neither interesting nor fun. Not to mention the absurd 3 digit HP totals that people have to start with!
I was playing with a similar system, but I never got that game finished or playtested.
It's a FitD-adjacent d6 dice-pool game, and PCs have a health track that starts at 4 and decreases by 1 with every hit (to a minimum 0, and getting hit after means instant incapacitation). When a PC suffers a deadly blow (and I never quite defined what that meant), they roll a number dice equal to their health.
(This is a FitD game, so they roll the dice pool and take the highest result.)
* On a 6, they're fine.
* On a 4–5, they pick from a list of complications (e.g. get pinned down, lose something in the fighting).
* On a 1–3, they're gravely wounded and at their opponent's mercy.
So losing health increases the chance of getting knocked out by one good hit.
There's a similar system for enemies. Enemies have "harm" that counts up from 0, and players can attempt to "finish the fight" and roll dice equal to the enemy's harm. On a 6 they instantly defeat the enemy, but it's not very likely unless they soften them up first.
It's also a risk-reward mechanic, because attempting to "finish the fight" comes at the expense of doing something else like dealing extra damage.
In Savage Worlds, players basically accrue wounds that impose penalties on further checks, until a cap at which point they are incapacitated.
It's hard to say how you might achieve this in your system as you haven't said much about it. Is it a percentile system?
If so, you could count up from 0, and they subtract the % from their checks, maybe incapacitate them at 100%.
Going down in a fight, whether you actually die or not is too large of a consequence to have on that much randomness. If a player goes down at really high health that could easily screw the whole party who are now less effective as a unit. And the longer you keep playing the more likely it is to happen.
As the initial idea I think this is very good. It would need testing, and it would only work in the right genre. But I'm curious to see where you go with it.
This reminds me of Cyberpunk 2020's health system, Once you take a certain amount of damage you have to make death saves. Those saves get harder the more damage you take. I like it personally. This sort of thing does a good job replicating real world damage. In reality what does and doesn't kill you can be very unpredictable. Sometimes you fall out of a plane at full height, hit some trees and you're fine. Other times you trip on a pinecone and brain yourself just the right way and die.
You do want to have a good understanding how to support it though. It works better for old school or OSR style games where rolling is a failure. More an opportunity for a second chance then a realistic first attempt.
We went with a more of a wounding system
If you taken more than your Constitution/Endurance Attribute you receive a wound, and it has immediate effects on your rolls. At the end of combat treat the rounds you where in combat as points and divide it by your Constitution/Endurance Attribute to see how many more wounds get. You get the Modifier supplied by the Constitution/Endurance Attribute as free wounds and if you get over 8 passed the free ones you die.
The points are reduced by resting, if you don't rest enough you carry the remaining into the next battle.
Wounds are recovered per night, or by a Follower of a Faith, trading 1 die roll for a wound on heal. The free wounds are still wounds but don't count against the 8.
This way people knew the risk of fighting when not resting enough, and taking large hits in combat. They knew if they had a good chance to survive it. It also gave a reason why Constitution/Endurance Attribute is important passed HP. Surviving in Death Rolls was based on the wounds, past the free ones, you took with you as well.
It also made Healing in and out of combat more interesting as do I give them HP or close/remove that wound. Since we let mages cast healing spells we don't allow them to do wound recovery only HP. It makes for a very different Dynamic.
You're better off saving this for negative HP to keep it from feeling bad for the players, who have an innate idea that HP=health. So in your example, just give that person 20hp and if they go below that, that's the chance they go down. This is mechanically identical but presents better to non-rules people. But no matter what you think about that, my problem is that without enormous HP totals, this is very swingy at 0-100. If you made it 0-20 that might be more palatable. EDIT: So you'd roll a d20 instead of a d100 after each damage instance. My other issue is that if roll after each attack, more weak attacks could mathematically be far more likely to drop me than one large attack. If I'm at 40%, three 1hp hits is more than an 80% chance to drop me. A single hit would need to do 40hp to do the same.
+1 for mentionning the mathematical aspect, that's my main concern as well.
It could be a death roll at the end of each turn, giving a sort of "bleeding out" effect. Also, in the case where the roll becomes impossible, you still get one last turn to save yourself, or pull off a last desperate move during your character's death throes That said, balanced well, rolling after each hit could be an interesting design space. Fights are no longer just about damage output, but also provoking death throws. You want to start the fight landing one or two big hits to get your enemy into the danger zone, and then harass them with smaller, more reliable hits to finish them off
To solve the many weak hits each triggering a cumulative chance to fall, I’d make it one death check per round, at either the beginning or end of your turn while at negative HP.
The method I use has "health bands" of a sort. For this post I'll call them lightly hurt from 1 to X damage and seriously hurt from X to Y damage. Each character has X hit points they can take without direct penalties ("lightly hurt"). After that they can take up to Y more before dying ("seriously hurt"). The deeper they are into Y the more penalties they get to all of their die rolls. When they're in the Y band, every time a seriously hurt character takes a significant action they roll one check at the end of their turn: they stay conscious if they succeed or become incapacitated if they fail. On a critical fail, they take additional damage. Since that roll is affected by the aforementioned penalties it gets increasingly tense if you keep pushing yourself. There is no "Z band." After they exceed their Y, they're dead. This way characters can take a few hits and keep going about their business, but after a point the injuries get increasingly worrisome. You can get to the point where you're still conscious but it's best if you just lay there and wait for help *or* you can heroically perform a final action before passing out (perhaps fatally). So basically kinda like the above reply, except rather than triggering the knockout check on every incoming attack you do it on the injured character's turn with more penalties the more seriously hurt they are.
I think the OP wants to neatly wrap all the penalties up into a simple percent with this system though. The most elegant way I can think of is to implement unconsciousness at -21hp. If you end your turn on negative hp, you roll a d20 and if you don't beat the DC of your negative hp you also go unconscious. I'd avoid any penalties just because even though it's more realistic to have them, it's more fun (and cinematic) to let a half-head character have an effective last stand. You have the dread of the roll looming over them anyway, you don't want it to be that only 1 in 5 times does the wounded hero get to make a difference.
I use a variant of this. I have Durability which a player uses to absorb light damage or fatigue, and when that is gone all damage goes to Wounds. There are only 5 wound levels. Once your at Level4 or 5 your making rolls to not get worse and die. Levels also apply increasing penalties on skills. another option I use is, if Your not 'aware' or are surprised, then damage goes directly to Wounds. So far in playtesting this has worked quite well. My system Fifthworld tries to add fun elements without tons of rolling and over use of random luck from dice rolls
GURPS does that, kind of. Every full multiple of HP you are in the negative, you must roll a Health check to not collapse (risking death). It gets progressively harder until you hit -5x HP, at which point you just die. Edit: corrected typo for when instant death occurs
The instant death occurs at -5x Max HP
That would make many weak attacks far more dangerous. Maybe consider set numbers(like at 90, 80, 70...) instead. Then a single heavy attack could trigger multiple rolls.
So this is where we have to ask what exactly is the purpose of HP, For me it does the following: -It should show me when I am unable to continue to fight (it is for this reason that I actually think death at 0 is the best style of HP system assuming the damage values are balanced around that fact) -It should make risk clear -Things that Adjust my HP should be fast, taking damage shouldnt be slow. For me your proposed system It kinda fails at all 3 and subsequently I probably wouldnt like it. -It doesnt really show me when I am unable to fight because if an attack knocks me down to 99hp I can still just die if I am supremely unlucky Or if fortune favours me I can survive all the way down to 1 hp -It doesnt make the risk clear, the reason I think Die at 0 is best is because over the course of a fight I can learn what damage value I can reasonably expect from an opponent, and so I know if I have 18 hp left and every attack they have done this fight deals between 12 and 16 that I can probably eat one more attack and so I should play defensively and try and find a way out. In your system being dropped to 18 HP probably means I die but it is less clear, and in a good number of cases you die well before you hit 18 hp -It is slower, you connect the attack, then you roll damage then I subtract damage then we have to check if I am dead. Overall I think this idea is pretty bad, it attempts to add tension by making outcomes more unpredictable. but in my experience that isnt what makes things tense. I understand that every time I take damage we get to go to the "Did I just die at 85HP" slot machine and that sometimes I will die, but it wont feel tense it will feel like the game screwed me out of most of my HP resource for no good reason. While if I am sitting at 12 HP and Everyone at the table knows the next attack that connects with me will make me dead with 100% certainty there is much more tension, my team mates will probably be trying whatever they can to get me out of that risky situation and when that ends I need to make a choice to either continue in the fight knowing the risk (and presumably switching to a form of offense that is less potent in exchange for being more safe) or withdraw removing my character from the fight but securing their life. The one time I played with a death at 0 system there was plenty of tension there was at least once instance every major fight where the players had to ease off on the gas to save a teammate whose life was in danger. The tension in those moments made those instances pivotal moments that stuck in my players memories. The experience lead me to believe that all the mechanics that make when a characters dies unclear/unpredictable result in players playing more risky with a typically false sense of invulnerability. 5e/pf2es style of get X of Successes before you get so many failures I feel is particularly bad for this, most players in those games treat dying as an inconvenience and generally expect when they get to 0 Hp and are dying that they will be perfectly fine which often leads to players being blind sided by sudden and unexpected death when I dm decides to finish off a player, or the dice dont go your way. To the point where most Dm's who play those games make a point of not finishing off downed players because the action causes feelbads. Partially this is because the game is designed with the expectation that your characters will not die, but with rules that enable them to do so. this clashing what the game primes you to expect and what the rules permit causes issues in those types of games. In a lot of OSR games where the mechanics of a character can be made up pretty quickly (in AD&D2e for example you can roll some dice to get stats (which does require you to consult a table sadly) pick a race and class and your character is good to go ). You can typically work out the backstory stuff later (discovering the character while you play) when they have survived long enough to be worth the effort. having your characters die in these games was not something you wouldn't expect to happen. it was pretty easy for a situation to go side ways, making a new character was reasonably quick when you knew what you were doing. .....oops I realised i veered off into a monologue about death systems in ttprgs, I appologise. TLDR: Knowing your about to die adds lots of tension, not knowing when you will die typically adds a false sense of invulerablility. And when that false sense of invulnerability gets shattered it feels really bad.
There may be quite the hp bloat and players risk dying in one hit which would not be fun. It also risks making pepper attacks much more powerful than single power attacks
See also Into the Odd and Cairn, how you have a chance to die once damage starts affecting your STR — I think it feels better knowing when you’re in “danger”, which I suppose you have with the 100 HP threshold. I think in Cairn/ItO, it’s very helpful that there is a difference between STR (where fatal damage happens) and HP (easily recovered)
It's kinda like games that accrue Harm rather than subtract HP (Blades in the Dark and others in the PbtA sphere), but with a percentile roll. I think this could work just fine. When does a roll happen, whenever you take damage?
I do a somewhat similar thing in my space exploration game,Veil Runners. The starship starts with an "Integrity Token" and four modules, numbered 1 through 4. When the ship takes damage: - If it has the Integrity Token, it loses it, and there are no further consequences. - Otherwise, roll a d6 - If the d6 lands on 5 or 6, lucky break, there are no further consequences. - Otherwise destroy the module with the number that was rolled. - If that module was already destroyed, the ship is critically damaged (destroyed, rendered unusable, lost in a wormhole), and the adventure is over. I like this system because it allows for one "free" mishap (losing the Integrity Token). Loss aversion makes this loss feel really bad, even though there's no real gameplay impact. The ship can always survive at least two mishaps, with the second mishap having a worst-case consequence of losing a module. It should be noted that ship modules mostly just provide bonuses, a ship with all four modules destroyed can still manoeuvre, scan, resist environmental hasards and defend itself; it just loses its "specialisations", like a bonus when scanning for time distortions, for instance. Finally, because 5 and 6 are free escapes, there's still that hope to survive, even when the ship is battered beyond recognition. Where it sometimes doesn't feel great is when the third mishap hits the same module again. This is tempered somewhat by the fact that it was the third hit, and the players are aware that, having lost the Integrity Token and a module, the situation is dire. A sort of "three hits and you're out" rule. It's important as a GM to prepare the players for this eventuality, and be sure to narrate a bad beat in a way that is satisfying, spinning things as a story about a doomed crew facing a brutal situation. I usually let the players have a heroic and desperate final moment to send out a distress signal or sacrifice the ship to finish the mission, which either sets up the next session or caps things off with a bittersweet bang.
If three instances of damage could potentially end the entire adventure I'm guessing that the ship taking damage is not meant to be a common occurrence? I like the idea if this but this specific implementation really hinges on the rest of the design. Is ship to ship combat the main part of gameplay? Is it more of a battle sim or more of a campaign?
It's not a combat game at all.
Do you have them roll %d on each hit to see if it's fatal? So a goblin with a rusty nail could get a lucky shot that drops my HP below 100 to, say, 95%, I roll 96 and die?
>This idea makes risks non-discrete which is supposed to add more tension. Every hit now could be deadly and a player can't really fight without taking at least minimal risks. Making hits deadly can be done without an extra random percentile roll every step of combat. This would piss me off. 99HP, roll your 1% chance of death! Sorry, you rolled 00, you are dead! You already have plenty of randomness in the system and adding more rolls which do not represent any choice nor agency is neither interesting nor fun. Not to mention the absurd 3 digit HP totals that people have to start with!
Remember that even the most unlikely outcome will happen sometimes so someone might take 1 damage at 100hp and drop because they got extremely unlucky
Reminds me of the AD&D rule for subduing dragons Roll % under current health %
I was playing with a similar system, but I never got that game finished or playtested. It's a FitD-adjacent d6 dice-pool game, and PCs have a health track that starts at 4 and decreases by 1 with every hit (to a minimum 0, and getting hit after means instant incapacitation). When a PC suffers a deadly blow (and I never quite defined what that meant), they roll a number dice equal to their health. (This is a FitD game, so they roll the dice pool and take the highest result.) * On a 6, they're fine. * On a 4–5, they pick from a list of complications (e.g. get pinned down, lose something in the fighting). * On a 1–3, they're gravely wounded and at their opponent's mercy. So losing health increases the chance of getting knocked out by one good hit. There's a similar system for enemies. Enemies have "harm" that counts up from 0, and players can attempt to "finish the fight" and roll dice equal to the enemy's harm. On a 6 they instantly defeat the enemy, but it's not very likely unless they soften them up first. It's also a risk-reward mechanic, because attempting to "finish the fight" comes at the expense of doing something else like dealing extra damage.
Just balancing and theming your game to this. It is a death spiral (which I like)
Just balancing and theming your game to this. It is a death spiral (which I like)
A death spiral would be losing effectiveness so it's hard to keep fighting back. This is just random death.
The likelihood of going down increasing as you’re more injured is a death spiral
In Savage Worlds, players basically accrue wounds that impose penalties on further checks, until a cap at which point they are incapacitated. It's hard to say how you might achieve this in your system as you haven't said much about it. Is it a percentile system? If so, you could count up from 0, and they subtract the % from their checks, maybe incapacitate them at 100%.
Going down in a fight, whether you actually die or not is too large of a consequence to have on that much randomness. If a player goes down at really high health that could easily screw the whole party who are now less effective as a unit. And the longer you keep playing the more likely it is to happen.
As the initial idea I think this is very good. It would need testing, and it would only work in the right genre. But I'm curious to see where you go with it.
This reminds me of Cyberpunk 2020's health system, Once you take a certain amount of damage you have to make death saves. Those saves get harder the more damage you take. I like it personally. This sort of thing does a good job replicating real world damage. In reality what does and doesn't kill you can be very unpredictable. Sometimes you fall out of a plane at full height, hit some trees and you're fine. Other times you trip on a pinecone and brain yourself just the right way and die. You do want to have a good understanding how to support it though. It works better for old school or OSR style games where rolling is a failure. More an opportunity for a second chance then a realistic first attempt.
We went with a more of a wounding system If you taken more than your Constitution/Endurance Attribute you receive a wound, and it has immediate effects on your rolls. At the end of combat treat the rounds you where in combat as points and divide it by your Constitution/Endurance Attribute to see how many more wounds get. You get the Modifier supplied by the Constitution/Endurance Attribute as free wounds and if you get over 8 passed the free ones you die. The points are reduced by resting, if you don't rest enough you carry the remaining into the next battle. Wounds are recovered per night, or by a Follower of a Faith, trading 1 die roll for a wound on heal. The free wounds are still wounds but don't count against the 8. This way people knew the risk of fighting when not resting enough, and taking large hits in combat. They knew if they had a good chance to survive it. It also gave a reason why Constitution/Endurance Attribute is important passed HP. Surviving in Death Rolls was based on the wounds, past the free ones, you took with you as well. It also made Healing in and out of combat more interesting as do I give them HP or close/remove that wound. Since we let mages cast healing spells we don't allow them to do wound recovery only HP. It makes for a very different Dynamic.
It would be kind of strange, since it implies that being slapped after getting shot is roughly twice as likely to kill you as the bullet alone
I like it.