Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

If you have a character with high ST/HP and they use Vampiric Strike, do they heal more than the 1/3 normally acquired?

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Referring specifically to the case of Vampiric Strike imbuement, and character with 20+ HP

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I don't know what Vampiric Strike is nor do I know what you mean by "heal 1/3" as that makes little sense in normal GURPS terms where healing is otherwise alwasy measured in straight HP.

BUT. I will refer you to the rule for "High HP and Healing" in Basic p.424. It might help out.
Basically if an effect normally heals 1 HP, someone with 20 HP heals 2 for the same effect. Someone with 30 HP would heal 3 HP and so on.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I would rule that it works exactly as stated. This isn't an inborn regeneration advantage, etc. Just like a healing spell I would only allow to work as written, you still only get 1 hp per 3 hp "drained", unless you take the penalty to skill outlined in the description.

Now, if a Power that Be comes along and tells me I'm wrong, then so be it. :)

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

According to basic every type of healing for people/things with over 20 HP the healing rate is doubled. We want to get some clarification on the issue. Healing spells heal double HP from what's rolled at 20-29 HP as well.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Huh.. well, after reading B424 again, I have to agree.. double the effect if using it to heal HP.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

By RAW yes. Yes they do. The GM may wish to change this certain circumstances. The vampiric strike, vampiric bite, and other leech powers are particularly weird since they allow for a character to stab himself to heal up with enough HP. Or even just 20 HP and the versions that normally heal at 1 to 1.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I'd close that loophole with an iron gate.

With spikes.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I did some searching to see if this has been addressed in regards to Leech, since they're the same sort of thing. Found an opinion from Kromm here. He basically says that yes the high HP rules should apply.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

It just strikes me as weird that the amount of healing could thus easily exceed the amount of damage actually done

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

That's the benefit for spending a lot of points to get that high HP.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

You can of course always rule the other way for your game. In particular in a game where extreme HP totals are common, it might be a good idea to nip this in the bud.

My main concern would be the loops that could be created my multiple characters with high HP and Leech-like attacks. Not just allies intentionally exploiting it, but also enemies who could never defeat each other.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Healing HPs doesn't restore lost limbs however, and someone who is stunned/misses an attack doesn't get the healing that turn. As such, clever use of attacks and defences can easily make all the difference in such a fight, in GURPS very few fights (in my experience) come down to two foes just whaling on each other until the other one drops down dead.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

HPs aren't some universal currency of injury, they are a very abstract game statistic. If you do ten points of damage to normal person that's proportionately a lot of damage but if you are Godzilla with 300hp, that's not even a scratch. If a giant vampire leeches a person, the High HP and Healing rule means that the vampire heals basically proportionately, which makes at least as much sense as the alternative.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

In keeping with that, it might make sense to reduce the HP stolen in proportion to the target's HP total. For example, if you stab a HP 10 human and an HP 20 ogre for the same damage, you'd heal only half as much from the ogre, because it's a smaller fraction of his total HP.

However, a simpler solution would just be to exempt Leech attacks from the normal scaling for healing effects. It would just be a campaign option, since it's contrary to RAW.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

A perfectly valid argument, this would enable an HP 20 ogre stabbing a HP 20 ogre to get the same gain as a HP 10 human against a HP 10 human if you kept scaling before and after. This would mean that once you scale up creatures they wouldn't gain trivial amount of restoration when fighting things similar sized, however larger creatures would gain more from stabbing smaller creatures - which might not be intended.

Which ever way you choose to rule it, it should be clearly laid out at the start of the campaign (or at the inclusion of any leech based mechanic) so that it's handled consistently and everyone know what to expect. Everything else is just setting toggles to keep things in line with the game you want to play, really.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Another solution is that creatures with high HP take "-X% magical/supernatural/whatever healing not increased".

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

So instead of scaling healing you're suggesting to add even more math into the process by reducing a percentage of damage taken by high HP creatures?

Seems like you've missed the entire point of the discussion.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Come on, just declare that the maximum healing gained cannot exceed injury dealt. Quick and reasonably sensible. (This is more a matter of sensibility than balance.)

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

My suggestion was, if you're going to scale the healing based on the attacker's HP, you should also scale it on the target's HP - if it's 1-for-1, inflicting 10% damage would heal 10%. If you're not going to scale by both the attacker and the victim's HP, you shouldn't scale at all.

I never thought that excessive math was the point of the discussion.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

The point was I couldn't see a point to what you were saying to start with in relation to the question. Its not 1:1 to start with; with a standard roll for Vampiric Strike (which is an Imbuement) you heal 1 HP for every 3 Damage dealt to the target.

My question was did HP scaling affect this healing - which is a form of magical healing. Seems that per Kromm's post on leeching attacks it does. We'll have to test it in game to figure out how precisely to deal with it in our games.

Likely we'll cap possible healing at the amount of damage like Molokh suggests.

I'm not sure why you think it should be scaled based on both the target and the attacker's HP in the first place; should healing spells then be scaled on the HP of the person casting the spell and then the targets? That makes no sense to me - especially since you'll be generating a new mechanic contraindicated by the existing rules.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Sorry. I was trying to clarify the issue by using the example of 1-to-1 Leeching instead of the normal 1-to-3, but I see that it just confused it more. If I were more eloquent I might be able to explain better, but since you've already found a solution that works I guess I'll drop it.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I don't see this one. Vampiric strike allows you to heal 1/3 of the damage you do- so the most you should be able to heal is 33% of your source under any circumstance.

Further creatures that have more HP, tend to also have more ST, and thus do more damage, and thus get more healing- so basically a creature with vampiric strike and extra ST is being rewarded twice; they do more damage healing more, and they heal more because they have more HP.

When godzilla with imbuements eats a normal person he heals 20 HP (assuming godzilla's bite completely obliterates an ST 10 human right down to -50; for 60 total damage).

If you scale that damage, then godzilla completely regenerates every time he eats a person (regardless of how many hit points he actually has; because if you scale that up, then he is hitting complete regeneration no matter what- he could have 100,000 hit points, and if you are scaling healing he goes from 0 to 100,000).

Further, while vampiric strike does heal you, it heals you in relation to the damage that was done- so it has more in common with say absorptive DR then it does with leech- I don't believe absorptive DRs healing scales with HP, it scales with damage absorbed.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Somehow I doubt you're going to run into Godzilla with Imbuements - and if a GM threw one at me I know I wouldn't be playing with him for much longer to start with but that's neither here nor there.

The main issue is; it seems all healing for 20-29+ HP critter scales and its now come up in game play whether or not Vampiric Strike's healing scales as well...

*shrug* I can only hope Kromm or someone else on the totem pole stops by this thread to clarify at this point. Or just extrapolate from his post on leeching and discuss amongst the gaming group from there. One way to deal with it would of course be to ignore the scaling entirely and go with Vampiric Strike's wording with the assumption that it supersedes the other rule.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I don't know, envisioning godzilla as a stupid but natural imbuements based martial artist seems to be actually somewhat in line with the movies of my youth, but that is neither here nor there.

There are lots of big things that might get imbuements and take it to quite the extreme, an easy one that could even come up in a DF type game is to have a mystic knight get his SM increased by a wizard- Now you have huge mystic knight doing super high damage strikes with every blow and fully regenerating all of the arrow wounds he's taking due to scaled vampiric weapon (The threshold for HP healing/stirke is 30 damage, doing 30 damage swings is not that difficult once you start getting size buffs involved).

Maralith demon + imbuements actually did come up in one of our games (even if she was dispatched via TK), I am sure I would not have liked her to be doing 30 damage and healing to full.

We actually have a martial arts dragon PC- tough if I recall correctly the dragon form does not fight; we have a few large RPM users- if using RPM to give yourself 'imbuements: vampiric strike' and then crushing a donkey is cheaper/easier then using RPM for direct healing, I think that might be as good an identifier of the problem with having it scale as there is.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I have no problem with 300 HP imbue godzilla healing oodles, he paid for those 300 HP with CP just like anyone else why shouldn't he get full benefit of them?

I just had a bit of conceptual hangup on the idea of healing more than you dealt but the discussion has cleared it for me

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I think Kromm's post is very clear:

Anywhere the rules say you *heal* HP (specifically that verb!), "High HP and Healing" should apply.

He even addresses the issue of two players "abusing" the rule to get more HP from each other than they're losing and says it's fine. They've paid for that privilege by buying up their HP or ST and by buying the advantage that enables healing.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

The problem with this is if you're willing to award people higher healing due the expense of buying up all of those HP (or ST), then why are you not awarding them higher healing from buying a higher exchange rate for leech?

At a 1:3 ratio then yes capping maximum gains to injury dealt means that only 40+ HP characters would suffer a "loss" on potential healing received, which limits builds specifically designed around this 'combo'. But if you've spent the extra cp to buy a 1:1 ratio of injury:healing then suddenly even a 20+ HP character "loses" out on potential healing received! Why would anyone with 20 or more HP ever invest in what is clearly meant to be an upgrade if said upgrade does nothing at all for them?

I'd just say you can't stab yourself to gain HP, and its 'taboo' or at least has negative social repercussions if you stab friends/slaves for HP (even if you then heal them back up or only do paper cuts) - and otherwise leave it as written but with HP scaling.
Its the least rule changes and has the fewest edge cases where things degrade into illogical outcomes - even if Leechy-Godzilla can restore massive chunks of HP from eating one human. Clearly Leechy-Godzilla is tapping into the power of the souls of the things its eating or something, it is a magical (chi/necromantic/etc) power after all!

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

This is a solution solely for GMs who feel that there must be a 1:1 maximum ratio. Personally, as someone who's seen all sorts of rules abuses, I don't think Leech is particularly scary, even with HP. In general, DR, HP and Innate Attacks combined are Just Better than trying to rely on Leech.

We don't even know for sure whether a given case of Leech is a 'HP transfer' or a 'Regeneration only while hurting others'. It could be the latter. (IIRC the Bloodthirster in Dawn of War is kinda like that - losing HP out of combat, regenerating in combat.)

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

A fair point, and I'm aware of other potential abuses, limiting any ability is subject to GM whim so capping the ratio at 1:3 (or 1:2) is fine - just as limiting HP gain from 1:3 ratio to being most useful at less than 40 HP is. Even so, RAW gives options, and those options should be considered if you're wishing to discuss things in full.

I also feel leech (and its derivatives) are more 'HP transfer' rather than Regeneration "only whilst in combat", as its an easy enough build for the latter. I guess the fluff for the ability is quite flexible though.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Another solution is to allow characters with HP 20+ or 30+ to buy down Leech efficiency back to 1/3.

That is indeed the default assumption, but we've seen weirder stuff. Anyway, Regeneration is generally a much better deal, given the price. Leech is basically useless as a method of drain-tanking in combat (IA + DR is just better for staying alive), and is inferior to a Regeneration with a few limitations out of combat (e.g. 1/second regeneration with Temporary Disadvantage: Sessile is better than Leech in almost every way, and costs just a bit more; add a few more limitations and you are golden).

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

IMO leech is rather good to combo with special recharge ER. You aren't supposed to get regeneration for that. If you slap extra time on it, and FP only then its only 5 points and helps a lot with the ER.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Yeah, probably. But I meant in terms of HP gain. Or maybe even FP.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Yeah, for HP based "drain tanking", slightly convoluted constructions based on attacking, Regeneration, and/or Trigger or an Energy reserve or DR with Absorption and Reflection are a more effective foundation.

Spendy, but frankly drain-tanking should be spendy - GURPS doesn't assume all non-player creatures "of your level" have 10 to 1000 times your HP total, so a drain high enough to negate incoming damage as reliably as DR is doing double-duty as a target-obliterating attack.


(Absorbtion+Reflection actually isn't a bad idea for passive "draining", even if it's counterintuitive)

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

The problem is, Leech in such builds is not double-duty. It's half-duty. It costs (very roughly) twice as much as equivalent-effect DR+IA, and unlike DR/IA, requires more special circumstances to be useful at all.

And yes, properly managed Absorption is very, very good.

Vampiric Strike at least can be very useful for high-ST characters.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

I'm not talking about Leech-based drain-tanking, I'm just noting that Regeneration (10/s) with a Trigger and a short Duration still isn't going to be cheap, and it shouldn't be either. Neither is interesting amounts of DR Absorbtion/Reflection, really. Adding on an innate attack increases the cost and overall it's not cheap.

Ignore Leech, I'm not talking about it in this context :)

Vampiric Strike seems completely acceptable in price, as long as you're not buying Imbuements just to get it. If you're making an Imbuements based character (focused enough that you've got, say, 4+ levels of relevant Talent, as a good benchmark), it's a rather reasonably priced upgrade you can tack on.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Between Maximum Duration and a big Temporary Disadvantage like Sessile, you can get to 30 points, right? Not cheap, but awesome.

Oh, Vampiric Strike is quite good for an Imbuement character, indeed.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Whatever ended up doing (if anything . . . I'm now feeling nothing is best) would not want to remove the incentives to try and eat the penalties for superior vampiric strike that does better than 1/3

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

We seem to have strayed into leech territory here; which is kinda missing the point on vampiric strike. Leech is of note because you have to pay for every point of damage that it does; if the healing did not scale then larger stronger individuals would never benefit from it

The reason why is that Vampiric strike is a damage modifier on regular attacks.

That means if you have high HP (through having high ST) you are ALREADY healing much more then a person of more normal strength due to the increased damage you are dealing. If you allow damage scaling for high ST AND you allow healing scaling- then you are double dipping your reward for having high ST/HP.

Lets assume that we have an ogre PC with enough strength and a big enough weapon to do 4d on a swing, and has 30 hit points and a regular individual who does 1d on a swing and has 10 hit points

If they are both using vampiric strike the regular person will deal 4 point of damage on average, and heal 1 point.

The ogre will do 16 points of damage on average and heal 5.3 hit points.

The ogre is already healing 5.3 times as much health as the regular person, they are already being rewarded for there high strength.

If you then triple that healing amount due to the fact that the ogre has 30 hit points, then the ogre will heal 16 points of damage every successful strike; a full 16 times more then the 1d swing individual- that seems radically out of scope (and/or means that picking up 'one skill' imbuements just for vampiric strike should be something that every large strong PC does- because it will be the cheapest way to recover health in a hurry).

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Just remember that HPs are not everything. Okay, yes, they keep you alive but they're just a measure of if you are alive - they are not a measure of if you're fit for combat!

If you find the weaponified vampiric meatsack too much of a burden due to them never coming close to death and fearing no foe due to their ability to simply heal back any damage taken, there are a few simple things that can keep them from doing too well.

1) If you cant injure it, you cant heal. This is the most important, injury (and preferably lots of it) is required to get decent healing. High DR and various types of injury tolerance are great at just reducing injury and therefore limiting healing. DR specific to their favoured weapon can help make it less of a pain for the rest of the group (skeletons vs impaling weapons etc).

2) If you cant hit it, you cant cause injury. Easy enough, if they're mostly a melee fighter then throw flying or ranged foes at them to minimise their ability to close and hit. If they're quite an all rounder then insubstantial helps, as does darkness to hide in (or just soak high skill with hit penalties), small size and good dodge also help with just simply not being hit.

3) If you cant attack, you cant hit it. Not to be forgotten, there are many ways to prevent anything from attacking. Crippling limbs is the easiest (though not easy with meatsacks) but draining FP tends to be away around those extra HP (although not always viable depending on the type of leecher you have). Otherwise you have the old faithful stunning attacks or just plain disarming them (with a sticky coating over a monsters skin if needs be, you cant avoid being disarmed if you get your weapon glued whenever you attack)!

4) If you're doing something else, you're not attacking. This one needs to be remembered if you want to throw a lot of hurdles in the way of the character. Too many uses of the situations outlined above might get a bit boring/repetitive/obvious, and they wont always be very good for the group in general and so doesn't help rebalance the specific character. In these cases its always good to remember that combat isn't everything. No not even in DF.

There are many situations where a single character might want to stop fighting and do something else to help, ensuring that these situations fall to mr weaponified vampiric meatsack is obviously down the specifics of the character. Most WVMs have high HP though, so probably have high ST, as such make them push things over, lift up trapdoors, hold up portcullis or otherwise do the things the other weaker characters cant. (In my group the rogue-ish character often ends up on the end of a long bit of rope that the muscle is on the other end of, always ends up being entertaining.)

Ultimately though just making sure there's always other things that might help the fight other than actually fighting will help keep them from always wading in and healing up due to culling swarms of lesser creatures (though do remember to send the occasional swarm at them, it is there shtick after all).

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Well, the Kromm ruling earlier came from Leech, but Vampiric Strike seems like it is based off leech, so it seems relevant to the discussion. Leech however is based off of Vampiric Bite, which IS ST based and is in Characters, and it makes no mention of not scaling with high HP. Vampiric Bite is basically 'Vampiric Strike Brawling, 1 imbue skill (Vampiric Strike), and enough skill that it always triggers with no FP cost' all in a tidy package, with a 'Bite Only' drawback and a No Nuisance Rolls add on

Having high melee damage and high HP need not be due to high ST, Bob the Sith Lord could easily know Vampiric Strike for his lightsabre and have lots of HP, yet have normal ST levels

Also, HP are part of ST, but they are a different part of ST than the 'makes me hit you harder with a melee weapon', someone who buys Striking ST X and HP X should heal more than someone who just buys Striking ST X, because they have a whole other power they spent CP on

Anyway, Imbue 3 (Vampiric Strike only) is 8, at least 1pt for the skill itself is 9 . . . . so 9pts to get it for healing, though this requires you to have stat+talent high enough you can make it work (its a VH skill, so 1pt gets it at Stat -3) . . . . . if you do, sure, it can be a great investment for the high HP character, provided the character is indeed a worthy meleeist capable of dealing out the pain

Of course, once you start smacking people around to regain health, then people are going to A - try to avoid getting smacked around so much, and B - try to go for hurting you in ways that arent just straight up HP ablation (lopping off limbs is always a good thing), or C - try to hurt you hard enough you dont get a chance to use vampiric strike before you die

Of course, those 9points can almost knock you up a wealth level (for potions, which also benefit from high HP), or if you have the stats to support it get you in the door with RPM (which an RPM conditional healing spell will also benefit from high HP), or perhaps other things, both of those examples though are things which while less effective in the toe to toe slugging match at healing up are more effective general utility wise and get your healing on

Or for that matter, Quick Alchemy (No Invention) is 10pts, and 1pt in alchemy skill (again if you have the stats to support it) is 11pts and gets you in the door to making your own healing potions and other fun things

High HP is good for healing, period. Doesn't matter what method the healing comes from

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Nwer? It's not ST based.

The only part that's ST based is biting through DR, and everyone can bite.

Re: Vampiric Strike and High Health
 

Oops. I completely misread that, for some baffling reason I thought it was based on your bite damage