Publication:Unearthed Arcana/Combining Massive Damage Variants

Combining Massive Damage Variants
The massive damage variants given above can be combined in a number of ways.

To combine the Constitution based threshold variant with the simply use the character’s Constitution score in stead of 25 to determine the character’s massive damage threshold. For example a 3rd-level character with a Constitution of 14 has a massive damage threshold of 20 (14 + [3 &times; 2]). In most cases this calculation results in a threshold lower than the HD-based threshold but still higher than the Constituoin based threshold&mdash;retaining the “grittiness” of the Constitution-based system for low- to mid-level characters while allowing higher-level characters to become braver in combat.

You can easily combine the HD-based system with the size based variant: use half the base value for size in stead of 20 to determine the massive damage threshold. For instance, a 1st-level human fighter (a medium character) has a massive damage threshold of 27 (half of 50 is 25, plus 2 &times; 1).

You probably shouldn’t combine the Constitution-based system with the size-based variant, since the threshold is already low enough that reducing it for Small or smaller characters unduly punishes them.

The save failure results variant can be combined with any of the alternative threshold levels.