One thing we ran into during the first official set of duels in the Emirikol game was that duels to first blood in D&D - if you count any loss of HP as first blood - are based way too much on initiative. We saw this in the first dual the PCs had where Bard 2 with improved initiative beat Ftr 2/Ari 2 because he rolled higher on initiative and a modest attack roll for 1 pt of damage. But technically damage! Or is it?
This is where the highly abstracted nature of D&D combat comes into play, and the perpetual question of “what is a hit point?”. To my mind Hit Points are all the characters combat skill in avoiding injury. They’re the dodging and parrying and leaping away injury. But since it is applied AFTER armor class in the flowchart of action, and that Armor Class is modified by dexterity, it can be hard for people to wrap their brains around that. And there were not yet in system game mechanics for “Bloodied” as there would be in 4E and 13th Age that gave a clear mechanical point for me to say “this is first blood.”
I could have just stated something but I instead put in front of my players that we use the flexible concept of hit points to instead work with fractions of the character HP.
• First Blood is actually 'drawn' when the character has taken over 1/3rd (round up) of his HP total. Since Cyble has 10 HP she actually gets cut or bloodied once she's taken more than 4 points of damage. Deitrich, with 17 HP isn't actually cut until he's taken more than 6. This might not mean much now, where a single hit with a sword is enough to take a 12 HP character past their 4 point first blood, but it would have extended Hiram's fight with his 18 HP opponent past that first rapier touch.
• Second Blood, or the desire to fight "until one is well blooded, disabled, or disarmed" is generally set at taking more than 2/3rds of your HP (round up). Cybele is well blooded once she's taken more than 7 HP of damage, Deitrich can hold out until he's at more than 12 points taken. This is the level of fighting Melas and his adversary were engaged in, which means his critical hit was needed to push the fellow up over the 2/3rd HP mark.
• Fighting to the death is often considered 'concluded' once one of the opponents is at 0 HP. Of course, the terms of the duel can stipulate that no healers be present at the match but can be called later, which gives you a pretty narrow window between 0 HP and being dead. Unless it is specifically stated in the terms of the duel that one of the duelists will not leave the field alive it is ungentlemanly to strike an opponent who's already down (and such a duel is technically illegal anyway).
This got a surprising to me amount of pushback.
One of my concerns for wanting to manage it this was to protect the Rogue character class in duel, since their sneak attack if they have initiative in the first round ability was a big source of their damage potential, so I wanted to keep the rules for being flat footed before your first action. Tom playing the Rogue, said he was comfortable dropping flat footed for duels only, due to the formalized ritual of the event. Fair enough.
Dave (as well as other people on Livejournal) were pushing for the 1 HP equals blood rules. Tom and Jim both pointed out that sticking with as written left Improved Initiative as the critical dueling Feat, followed by anything that was going to boost AC.
Of four duels only Melas' got that effect, and that was because having seen the others I had his opponent make bad tactical decisions (using all his Expertise + fighting defensively) to boost his AC and reduce his chance to hit. As a result Melas scouted out holes in his enemies armor, leaped from ground to bench, watched his foe do the same, parried and dodged, saw his foe jump to a nearby table and ultimately landed a telling blow. That's what I want to see - if I hadn't done that his opponent's initial attack would have been at +5 to hit rather than -2, and he would have scored first blood right after the initiative roll. If we had made first blood equal to more than 1/3rd Melas HP that initial attack probably wouldn't have done enough to count, and the duel could have continued.
Ultimately the rules for any changes other than abstraction of hit points would have had too many long spillover effects across combat, and I settled on those. But we also never had any more one on one duels to first blood so it didn’t matter. This is how game mechanics change and are never used….
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