Der PigDog's PigBlog

Famously, your ability/competence doesn't decrease as you lose HP. Lots of games have tried to model injuries and death at low/zero HP; here's my shot at it. We'll add a new stat to people and monsters, Injury Points, or IP, scaled to their size. System assumptions HP doesn't represent physical durability or martial fitness directly; it represents protagonism in a genre that privileges those things. Thus as we increase in HP (via leveling) we normally improve our attack bonus, but we also improve our ability to ignore various harms and annoyances. If I've got high HP, it'll take me ages to starve to death, not because I have secret caloric reserves, but because, holy mackerel, when was the last time you read a good pulp fantasy novel where the hero starved to death? Similarly, I'll last for ages in combat, taking many more hits than a normal man, and it's not because I'm more physically durable, but because I am a hero, and heroes don't die in pi...