Core Statistics

Advance warning: this post might be a bit hard to follow. I jump around quite a bit, and may not have explained everything fully. If something doesn't make sense, just let me know and I'll take another look at it. I just wanted to get everything down on paper.

Time to talk about some key combat statistics. This is a tricky part; I've made some changes, and might make quite a few more. I'll talk about the more certain bits first, and then discuss the harder sections.

Attack bonus = Strength + experience - size; compared against Defense Value (DV) = 10 + Dexterity + shield + experience - size

Maneuver bonus = Strength + experience + size; compared against Maneuver Defense (MDV) = 10 + Strength + Dexterity + experience + size

Initiative Bonus: Awareness + Dexterity + experience

For anyone unfamiliar with Pathfinder, maneuver bonus incorporates things like bull rush, trip, and disarm. Armor class has been renamed to defense value (DV) because it no longer includes armor (but does include shields). Actually, armor may grant small bonuses to DV in some cases, but Armor is a completely separate value that I'll come back to shortly.

Now, saving throws. First, I want to split Will saves into Will (mental resistance) and Insight (how hard to fool you are). This opens the possibility of certain Perception checks also being rolled into Insight, but I'm not sure about that. The bigger issue is whether to retain rolled saves (as in Pathfinder) or switch to static defenses (as in 4th edition D&D). I'm fairly attached to rolled saves, because for the most part they represent a character actively resisting an effect, and I feel this trumps consistency with the attack mechanics (where the attacker rolls).

So, going with rolled saves, we get:
Save DCs: 10 + relevant attribute + experience
Fortitude: Constitution + experience + size
Insight: Awareness + experience
Reflex: Dexterity + experience - size
Will: Willpower + experience

These should all work well enough. Now, one of the more significant changes I want to make. The two key resources for every character: vitality and energy. The hit point system of Pathfinder is quite abstract, to the point that it becomes really hard to describe in some situations. The most common solution for this issue is to implement some kind of wounds vs. vitality system, which first appeared in Star Wars d20. Such a system differentiates between real injuries and the type of damage normally represented by hit points--close calls, minor scratches, bruises, energy or luck expended in barely not losing your arm. The main difference in these types of damage is recovery--wounds are much harder to heal. Typically in such a system, wound damage is dealt by critical hits or failed saves, and a player has separate wound and vitality scores. This gives a nice clean measure of how much physical damage your character can take, but introduces mechanical problems where hit points can be 'shortcutted'. At first this seems like a feature, but it ultimately places too much emphasis on critical hits. Another issue I've always had with D&D is that hit point totals get excessive at high levels--as a player or GM, I don't want to deal with 100s of hit points. So, all that said, here is the solution I've come up with:

Vitality: function of both level and tier; you receive a small amount per level, and a larger amount when you enter a new tier. I'm not sure yet where Constitution is added--probably at the tier level to keep the totals reasonable. Lost Vitality is recovered after a short rest (5-10 minutes).
Wounds: When you take critical hits, roll a 1 on a save (maybe), or take vitality damage that would reduce your vitality total below 0, you take that damage as a wound. Your total wound damage is tallied up, rather than being subtracted from a score. If your current Vitality is lower than your current Wounds, the combined damage and fatigue overwhelms you and you fall unconscious. Unless you've taken a significant quantity of Wounds, however, you're not in any immediate danger. 

So in theory, you can take at least as many Wounds as your Vitality total; however, at this point you would be in extreme danger of death. I believe this should make a good balance of heroic survivability and believable damage-taking. Healing magic would distinguish quite a bit between them--in-combat healing would mostly be limited to Vitality boosts, while recovering Wounds requires long-term rest or slower, more powerful magic.

Speaking of magic, that brings me to Energy. I've favored spell-point systems, similar to mana systems found in most computer games, for quite a long time. I should note that there are many examples of poorly-implemented mana systems, such as 3rd edition psionics. However, years back I stumbled across an excellent suggestion to fix this problem--instead of giving a massively expanding pool of spell points to draw from, the spell point cost of spells is reduced as your skills increase. So a basic spell that costs 6 spell points for a 1st-level caster might cost only 2 or 3 spell points for a 10th-level caster. In most circumstances, a spell costs at least 1 spell point, so the character's spell point total places a reasonable limit on spells per day, while the sliding scale means that a character can always cast about the same number of their highest level spells. Most importantly, it does away with the awkward restrictions of traditional D&D spellcasting.

As a side effect of working with a classless system, I ran into the problem of how to handle limited-use abilities. This includes spells, but also abilities such as a barbarian's rage, a bard's song, or any ability that grants X uses per day.  All of these abilities are physically and mentally taxing, and so I decided to have them all run off of the same Energy pool. A character's Energy points will be determined similarly to Vitality--boosts by both level and tier, with bonuses from Willpower. My only issue here is linking it permanently to Willpower--it doesn't make quite as much sense for something like bardic music or barbarian rage as it does for spells (arcane or divine). One thought I had was to define a 'key attribute' for each ability that uses Energy, and have Energy determined off of the highest applicable attribute, but that seems a little convoluted.

Finally, to backtrack a little, I need to talk about armor. I intend to significantly rework the way damage types, resistances, and other related abilities are defined. There are two major types of damage--physical and energy. Physical damage is subdivided into bludgeoning or impact, piercing, and slashing damage, while energy damage divides into fire or heat, cold, electricity, and acid or chemical. A character can gain resistance to any of these damage types through various means, the most common being physical damage resistances from armor. I'm considering different armor types granting different amounts of resistance to each damage types. This seems complicated, but it would be simple enough to have a small box on the character sheet for resistances to each damage source. In such a case, weapons or effects that deal multiple types of damage would target the lowest resistance (at least within the categorization of physical or energy). So, for example, a spiked club that deals both piercing and bludgeoning damage would only be affected by the lower of the defending character's piercing and impact resistances. This mechanic replaces DR/- and DR/any weapon damage from Pathfinder; DR related to special materials (silver, adamantine) and related abilities like fast healing and regeneration will be reworked.