🦸Main Character Status

Have you ever wanted to write an epic story for a character you made? How they survived a bloody conflict, went through incredibly rigorous training to become the best and brightest mage, was chosen by god or some other equally astonishing development. Then the game says "you die in one hit to a goblin."

While not entirely unrealistic, it doesn't make for very satisfying gameplay to have your character feel like they are made out of paper and are one stray crit away from instant death. A game like DnD 5e remedies this by making KO'd a state your character falls in and out of multiple times as a result of "le nat 20," spammable low action healing and a lack of negative hit points.

If you want the player characters to be invincible compared to monsters of a similar level, I say skip the pretense. Player characters are of a different breed and are hardened by their previous adventures, granting the following benefits…

HP - Your hp is increased by 10. Defeat - You do not have a chance to instantly die when you fall unconscious, instead you receive a stacking debuff called doom. You also accumulate afflictions.

With this change, a measure of how worn down you are can be more easily tied to how much hp you have. There are obviously other factors, but you can't ever keep adventuring without hp. Mana is the general resource system tied to using special abilities, and it naturally recharges when not used.

In general healing that keeps you at full HP all the time is intended to be more scarce, and usually come at the cost of reducing your max mana until you rest.

In general, only PCs will have this buff. But BBEGs, legendary creatures and other major bosses intended for use at the end of major story beats could also receive a similar version of this buff. Then you can get the juicy "phase transition" threshold to give your big boss encounters more punch.