Midnight

So far, my Midnight D&D game has been going very well. The first session and ½ were all cut-scenes of the backgrounds of the characters. Then came the character creation during the later half of the 2nd session.
We had our first official game before, and while it was good, I’m still establishing many things.
This weeks session was…different. I have, if I may boast, a great deal of experience in GMing but little in D&D. D&D is new territory for me and that comes with it’s ups and downs.
I am not a big fan of D&D combat. At least from the book. I find that too many fights become: “I attack.” Over and over again. Because D&D, while tactical, tried to keep things ‘fast’ by limiting the form of attacks. Smashy characters can use Feats to mix things up, but not until they take those Feats during their character. And the Feats out of the main book are pretty simple. Power Attack is the most common one, allowing you to take a negative to hit and a bonus to damage. Not what I would call exciting.
What I noted in the combat was that I managed to give just enough choices for the players. Armour in my Midnight game doesn’t make it harder to hit you but makes it harder to hurt you. And while that allows the heroes to hit the enemies more often, they do a bit less damage. But…there is a way to take a negative to hit to circumvent some or all of that armour. So ultimately you can either chip away at your enemy bit by bit (hitting frequently but doing a bit less damage than normal) or you can choose to hit less frequently and do ‘normal’ damage. The choice, however, is up to the player. And I like that.
Another change is the use of Vitality and Wounds (from the Unearthed Arcana). I love, love, love this much better than Hit Points. They function in nearly the same capacity but the flavour is different and important. I would use this for any D&D campaign I ever run (but I announce my retirement here and now, cuz I can’t see myself running anther D&D game after this one).
Vitality are equal to HP’s. It’s your level times your Hit Die. Pretty standard there, but again, it’s the flavour. HP’s are a combination of taking damage, being tired and getting lucky. It’s the luck part that I never understood because how does a healing spell ‘cure’ your luck. Anyway, Vitality represents, more or less, your fatigue level. D&D still has the Fatigue and Exhausted conditions, but Vitality represents a character’s natural energy levels. When you chip away at Vitality you are not really being hit. You’re blocking, dodging and using all your effort to avoid the attacks. And with each narrow miss, you are getting more tired. And this is a very visual thing for me as a GM who insists on seeing their combatants sweaty and tired after a fight, with aches and pains, pulled muscles but still alive.
Vitality returns quickly, much more than HP’s do, 1 per hour (so long as you’re not doing strenuous things). So healing, which happens to be limited in Midnight, isn’t always necessary.
Now Vitality by itself isn’t much more of a HP like mechanic. So why do I love it so? Because I’ve added rules to it (shocker, I know). What I’ve added is that characters can push themselves harder, making a Surge as it’s called. They can get a bonus to hit and/or damage. And this can be done before or after the dice roll. But each Surge requires the player to spend a random amount of their Vitality (1d6 all the way up to 2d10).
Now I am a huge fan of putting the choices of the characters in the players hands. The d20 mechanic is horrifically random and I’ve spent many a combat where I miss all my attacks and wait, kinda bored, often reading until my next action. I am so limited in what I can do as a player, in a standard D&D game, which is why I have limits on how much I enjoy D&D combat. So here, I’ve developed a way for players to decide for themselves when something is important and when they can just ‘let it go’. They can spend their own Vitality to do better in combat. And I like that because as a pile of HP’s, it’s just a static pool (only affected by the enemy hitting you). But if you can use Surges that spend your own, it’s now dynamic. Both you and your opponent can chip into your Vitality (oh and just wait until I start doing that back to the players). Now I can see combat very clearly in my head. The exhaustion that comes from whirling around your opponent, from pulling a muscle to avoid that sword swing and then to push yourself beyond your normal limits to delivery a killing blow. Love it.
After Vitality all characters (who have classes or are semi-important monsters) have Wound points. Wound points are equal to the Constitution of the character. And these are WOUNDS. When I start getting into a character’s Wound points, they are cut and bleeding and badly damaged. Wound points heal very slowly naturally and with limited healing in Midnight, this makes things pretty brutal. After a character chips away at all their Vitality and starts taking Wound points, I can still see the visual clearly. The character is just too tired to get out of the way. They are just too slow to block it properly. Or even they blocked the shot, but the bruise under their shield splits open finally and blood starts to ooze from their fresh gash.
Oh and Criticals? Well attacks that Critical bypass Vitality and go straight to Wounds. Criticals are brutal in this system and I love it. Even at 15th level, the Rogue is only going to have 12 Wounds (unless he raises his Constitution). Even at 15th level, every hero and villain is vulnerable. Which requires both sides to think things differently. Regular D&D gives you the benefit that you’ve got your meatshield who can take the front line attacks. My own Ravenloft character has 71 HP at current. I have the confidence, while walking into combat, that nothing can ‘one-shot’ me. I would expect nothing more than 50 HP in a single round, inflicted upon me. But with Wounds? There’s always that unlikely chance that it would be possible to take any character out.
Combat was very good. I enjoyed it, and I didn’t think I would. The last time I ran D&D was 4th edition and I was bored stupid by the combat. The players had lots of stuff to do but the monsters I was using was boring to the extreme, no matter how many powers they had). I enjoyed running the monsters (undead orcs) and they were quite simple. They didn’t use their Feats, shields, tactics and had no wounds, so they found without performing Surges. And yet, I was quite satisfied with them.
The players got around 3 Critical hits, which outright killed three of the undead orcs. Very nice. The others had the standard chip away at their ‘HP’ (again, Vitality in this case). The party released quickly that it was easy to hit them but scoring much damage was harder because of the scale mail that the orcs wore. So many of them resorted to using a combination of circumventing the armour (taking a negative to hit) and Surges. The damage Surge was used to great effect, especially by the Pact Mage (wizard type) in the group who was able to use Burning Hands on three of them. She only rolled 1 point of damage but because of the Surge, she inflicted +5 to each for a total of 6. (This might come to bite me on the ass later but we’ll see).
For my part, I critical one character (and confirmed that critical). Now we got to try out something that I was eager to see. Because I’ve altered Criticals to allow players to inflict ‘special effects’. Think of cinematic things done in combat. In this case, I choose the Pin option, so the Rogue was pinned by one of the orcs. Again, very easy to see an orc bashing down their opponent and then thrusting his sword to pierce and pin their opponent. It was a moment of real worry for the party. The rogue had no Vitality left and was down to about 2 Wound points…it was a dangerous and potentially bad situation. But he was aided and saved.
The party, was beaten to shit by the encounter and that was perfect. By D&D standards, a party should exhaust 40% of their resources on an equal level encounter (I shit you not, it’s in the book). This is nonsense as any good GM knows. A standard CR 1 creature should be an equal level encounter for a party. Now granted I’ve done a lot of changes, but I hit them with 7 CR 1 creatures. They were in peril, spending more than 40% of their resources, but it was a good fight. I feel very good about the flow and that I didn’t completely overwhelm them. The point of Midnight is that the enemy has won and you’re in occupied territory. I’ve failed the moment combat is blasé and orcs are just XP train rides.
So only because I used a lot of optional rules, do I feel good about my budding D&D campaign. It fits my GM style more because it’s gritty and brutal. More than I was finding the Warhammer RPG (with it’s loosy goosy healing rules).
Here’s to a great start and a long future.