I've made some changes to the health mechanic a little but to try and give characters a bit more longevity. I have been using a mechanic similar to Cairn, where damage gets applied to a character's stats and when that happens they have to make a saving throw to see if they are still up. After a couple of playlists from a few months ago, I felt that characters were going down too quickly, in some cases after a single hit. I think for a game like Cairn that is fine, but for my game where players may be in the wilderness for days or weeks without a way to heal, going down that quick may be a bit too harsh. 

I've instead added a wound mechanic, inspired a bit from Mothership. What will now happen is that a character will make a saving throw when they take damage to one of their Characteristics and if they fail they will take a wound based upon how much damage they receive. I'm keeping the wounds very open to interpretation here so the players at the table can determine what makes the most sense based upon the damage received. 

I have to play test this still, but hopefully this gives some more longevity to characters and also a bit more role-play drama to an adventure. Characters will not become Incapacitated when their damage received equals their Characteristic. Here's an example: I have a strength of 11, I will be incapacitated when I've taken 11 points of strength damage. This also effectively makes my DC 0 and my ST 20 for that stat. 

When Incapacitated players are not yet dead, but they are effectively dying. They will then continue to take damage after combat as companions rush to try and get them to safely. If their damage then tools double their Characteristic number, they are then dead. I've actually used this mechanic in a similar way while playing Cairn and it worked quite well, so this modified version might make sense. Here's a full example. 

You can read the full information on the GitHub doc for Combat: https://github.com/masupert/BeyondTheTorchlight/blob/main/09.0%20-%20Combat.md

I'm getting close to my first draft of the character creation mechanics and I think it is worth outlining some of my ideas around "health", skills and traits in my system. 

Breath (Health)

The characters in BTTL won't have a hit point or health counter as you might see in other rpg system. A player's overall "health" is instead tied to a stat called Breath and their Characteristics. 

Breath is  your character's  ability to act during intense situations. Damage taken by the character is first applied to their Breath before it is subtracted from the appropriate Characteristic. Characters may choose to spend their breath to take more drastic actions during combat, use combat abilities, or to cast spells. 

Once a player reaches zero (0) breath, any additional damage is applied to the appropriate characteristics. 

At the conclusion of combat or a strenuous activity, characters may rest for ten minutes to "Catch their breath" and restore their points.

Characteristics

Characteristics represent a character's innate abilities, their physical capability, and mental acuteness. Characteristics are comprised of two numbers, which when added will total 20. If you are familiar with games like Call of Cthulhu or D&D, then this would be the closets representation to a Skill in one of those systems. 

The purpose of the two number system is to be able to establish a Difficulty Check (DC) score for characters to roll against yours as well as a Saving Through score for a character to roll against themselves. Characters will only roll dice if they are the ones taking an action. They will either roll to beat another character’s DC or roll a ST roll if there is a risk to themselves.

You might be asking why, for these two numbers? The reason is to maintain a "roll above" system while maintaining some sort of target number that is directly tied to the character in the challenge. I could have kept the math simpler by having players roll under for one type of stat and roll above for another, but while doing a quick survey with my personal play groups, my players just didn't like roll under systems. They wanted to "roll 20" for success. 

The example below will exaplain a common example of how the system is expected to work. 

Example

Player 1 rolls 3d6 for their character Elsa's Strength, Dexterity and Fortitude with the following results: 11, 13 and 5. 

A thief is trying to pickpocket Elsa, but Elsa is pretty dextrous meaning that she has a high chance of detecting the thief trying to pickpocket her. The thief will roll 1d20 and must beat Elsa’s DC of 13 in order to be successful. The thief rolls a 9 and is caught by Elsa. The thief turns and makes a run for it sprinting across a roof top and jumping to the next building. 

Elsa pursues the thief and makes a jump across the gap between the buildings. This is a dangerous jump so Elsa will need to make a Saving Throw to see if she makes it. She needs to roll a 7 or higher on her Dex to successfully make the jump. She rolls an 11 and successfully jumps over the gap.