The Ghost/Let's Not Play Rocket Tag v1

The Rule in a Nutshell: In normal Exalted one good hit often means death, which makes me wonder why they bother having things like dying health levels at all. With this rule variant your Health levels actually become a meaningful track of taking injuries and you can take a hit from a sword and live. I use this rule in my games to both slow down combat so it is not a matter of 1 hit KOs so much and to make paranoia combat builds less of a requirement.

The Core Rules

In Core exalted you have 7 health levels to start with, 1 -0, 2 -1, 2 -2, 1 -4, and 1 incapacitated. You also have 3 dying levels but I have never seen those used.

Ox Body can provide a maxiumum of 4 extra levels, which with damage ratings of +16 on some weapons is nearly meaningless.

Extras get it even worse with 1 -0, 1 -3, 1 incap and then instant death. This bothers me.

The Issue

Put simply, it is too easy to kill people with a single hit. Exalted is supposed to be about larger than life heroes and one important trope of that mythos is 'bloodied but unbowed', where the hero takes a beating at the hands of the enemy and emerges triumphant anyway. Especially since the 2.5 errata this is not possible, as you cannot use your willpower and essence as an HP bar in place of health levels by using perfect effects to shed attacks like water. Something needed to change.

The Goal

Obviously what needs to be done is make combat significantly less lethal yet still have perfect effects be something that you don't have to use against every hit, but HOW? The answer has to be simple, something that anyone can do without mucking up the game too much, but which never the less solves the problem. A secondary result of the change should also be to make Ox Body a worthwhile charm for the dedicated combatant, since as it stands it's effects are not strong enough to be considered a good pick by most players.

The Rules Changes

Like knocking over a row of dominoes fixing the first problem meant I had to fix a few more, but in the end I think I got a fairly simple system worked out which is functional and feasible.

HP

The Answer to the problem is simplicity itself: Increase the number of health levels.

With weapons that can deliver a point of overkill with a single strike at the current health ratings the answer is clear: have more HP that they have to eat through in order to kill someone.

After a few private simulations I settled on tripling the current HP bars as the appropriate degree of change, with 21 health levels fatalities are much less likely from a single hit even with charms and high damage weapons.

This left me with the secondary question of how to improve Ox Body so it was not considered a waste: that proved fairly easy as well: Instead of triple HP Ox Body's levels are multiplied by 5 per purchase from the base rules. So a solar exalt taking max HP gain get's 15 extra levels of health for one charm pick: kinda hard to sneer at THAT as improving your chances to survive a fight!

Damage

OK, so characters don't get 1 hit KOed as easily, but this presents a problem of it's own: fights now take way too long! Well we have a rule that helps with THAT easy enough already: Essence Ping.

Under 2.5 they did away with essence as minimum damage dice, but that was when we still had only 7 levels of HP, if we are playing with numbers up in the double digits why not pull that back in? It means the Exalted can now plink at each other effectively even with Ox Body: not an instant kill even at essence 10 but definitely a noticeable hit.

Extras

Now these rules are all good, but they make extras a bit less 'extra' then they were before: which is GOOD, we WANTED to do that, but it leaves us with another problem, there are a lot of charms which key off killing extras for special effects, and extras are now pretty hard to kill. (9 health levels is not easy enough to chew through...) So we have to nerf extras back down a bit, and this was perhaps the hardest part to model.

The fix came to me when looking at the stat blocks: Extras get a -3 health level: they are the only ones that do, what if we extrapolated off that a bit?

Everyone else gets -0, -1, -2, -4 and Incap levels, extras get -0, -3, and incap: so why not blend that into a continual slide?

As we have established 7 levels is still easy to kill: so here's what we do with extras: they get one health level each of -0, -1, -2, -3, and -4, then 2 levels of incap: and once they take lethal in that last level they die. Boom, still quite kill-able but not quite as instantly fatal from any real hit, which means you have the ability to throw extras at the PCs as a realistic threat.

Bleeding

Now all this leaves us with a question: with 21 health levels of damage that you can take before going down how do people get killed at all? The Answer: as in real life, they bleed out.

Starting when you take your first -1 health level of lethal damage you begin to bleed. At an interval determined by what minus level you are at you take an additional point of lethal damage. However, each tick you make an automatic stamina + resistance roll at dif 2 to 'clot' and stop bleeding.

At -1 the interval is one minute: your eventual success is almost automatic if you are not mortal.

At -2 and -3 the interval is on each of your turns: the chances you die from this have just gone WAY up without charms.

At -4 the interval is once per ACTION, you had better stop moving around and try to staunch the bleeding.

At incap and dying the interval is once per TICK: incap and dieing levels are now functionally identical for lethal damage: if you don't have a buddy to help you you are almost certainly going to die.

Stopping someone bleeding from an outside source is a pair of rolls, first Wits + Medicine to figure out how to stop it, then Dex + Medicine to perform the procedure. The first roll is a reflexive speed 1 action, the second is a simple speed 6 action all of which can benefit from appropriate charms. All of these rolls can benefit from partial cooperation, which is why field hospitals and ORs have 3-5 doctors and nurses working simultaneously. The difficulties of each roll is equal to the patient's current wound level or 4 whichever is less.

Staunching bleeding temporarily is much easier, as it is 1 Strength + Medicine roll each round. By keeping pressure on the wound you can keep the blood from escaping and keep the bleed damage from occurring for that interval. Unfortunately the difficulty is equal to the current wound level and it only works if there is a single wound that's bleeding. If the person has taken several hits you need one person to hold each wound closed and a maximum of 6 people can help. It must also be noted that through and through shots such as sometimes happen with arrows and bullets count as 2 wounds.

Internal Bleeding

When a person has their whole wound track full of bashing damage and takes their first -1 level of lethal a special bleed effect comes into play. The pummeling they have taken ruptures internal blood vessels and they start to bleed inside their body. This kind of bleeding cannot be staunched with pressure to buy them time to clot, and an aditional roll to recognize the bleed with Perception and Medicine is required. Furthermore in order to stop the bleeding with Dex and Medicine the doctor will have to inflict at least 1 level of lethal damage with a scalpel or other cutting instrument to get to the site of the bleed in order to suture or cauterize the bleeding area. Internal bleeding however is slower than normal bleeding due to the autonomic processes of the body, and happens at half the rate of normal bleeding. This ceases to be the case when a doctor cuts open the are to attempt to suture or cauterize the wound.