Correlating Player Satisfaction, Combat Speed, and HP / Damage Modeling

innerdude · Nov 6, 2016

aramis erak said:
Really, only three kinds of systems exist:

Hit points; When X points of damage cumulate, Y happens
Damage steps: If damage is X+, level Y occurs; strictly speaking, damage doesn't cumulate. (In pure systems, lesser damage steps usually provide a bonus to achieving higher damage steps.)
Damage saves: Make a save vs Damage to avoid effect.

pretty much everything else is combinations of these.

Any cumulating damage step system is essentially a hybrid of pure damage steps and hit points.

WEG Star Wars, WWG's Storyteller, and several others use Hit Points combined with damage steps with hit points, in that if you've been hit for X-level damage, and step X is full, fill step X+1.

Damage saves aren't all that common, and most of the ones I've seen (about 5 different systems, but the names don't come to mind). More commonly, they are mixed with HP to avoid certain effects: GURPS combines them with Hit Points, as does Feng Shui. WEG Star Wars combines them with Damage Steps... by using them to determine which damage step is taken (and combines with HP because they cumulate).

Marvel Heroic uses damage saves and cumulative damage steps, too.

This is a coherent, concise summary. Nicely stated.

Savage Worlds is a combination of options 2 + 3 ---- Hit X damage in a single attack to move up a damage step. The player has the option of spending a healing surge / "hero pool" to make a vigor check (i.e., CON save) to negate the damage.

It's clear now that the issue I'm having is that SW is that it's combining damage step + damage save with no hit points to be found. In light of this basic modeling, hit points are the only way to do "accumulation" type damage without simply setting a damage step threshold.

The One Ring is hitpoints + damage step, albeit only a single, binary damage step (wounded vs. not wounded).

Psikerlord# · Nov 7, 2016

You might consider Low Fantasy Gaming damage mechanic - hit points, but at zero make an "all dead or mostly dead" check after the battle ends and the body can be recovered. If save, alive but roll on the Injuries & Setbacks table (which linger, albeit 17+ just a scar), if fail = dead.

tomBitonti · Nov 7, 2016

Where do mechanics such as from Alternity or from the WarMachine RPG (the newer edition, not the 3E edition) fit? Or, say, from Warhammer 40K?

I always thought the Alternity system was elegant, but haven't gotten a chance ever to use it in play.

Thx!
TomB

innerdude · Nov 7, 2016

Which, then, of the hypothetical combinations posed by @aramis erak produce the kinds of gameplay a certain group might be looking for?

For example, which model(s) would a group looking for ultra-realism choose? Obviously no model will be perfect, considering human physiology is one of the most complex sciences we know of, and would would be dependent on what it was trying to model as well. An RPG trying to model a U.S. football game is going to model damage much differently (bruising, fatigue, and debilitating but non-lethal wounds). Whereas trying to model people fighting with guns will be entirely different.

If I were to guess, I think hit points + damage step offers the most potential for realism (please note I'm making no judgments on playability, I'm merely trying to evaluate them categorically), as it seems to be the best way to represent the broadest possible set of in-game fictional states. You can model fatigue, resolve, "mojo," while also having distinct "break points" where actual "hurting" comes into play. This also allows for modeling particularly devastating attacks which can bypass hit points entirely and move an opponent directly down to the next damage step. It actually makes me wonder why D&D has never gone the route of adding damage steps --- though the whole concept of "bloodied" from 4e seemed to be a move in that direction.

Damage steps also have the potential benefit of making combat quicker, since combat becomes "swingy." Having had loads of experience with Savage Worlds' version of damage step + damage save, I can say that it does produce a very "cinematic" flavor of combat, where you're doing everything in your power to maneuver, position, and use every tool at your disposal to set up enemies to deliver a killing blow. The problem comes in the "swinginess" of the proceedings. If the dice aren't in your favor, combats can go from "cinematic" to downright tedious. Imagine a fight scene in a movie that just goes on far too long, with no meaningful change in state to the outcome. Fists are flying, weapons flailing, but nothing's really happening for say, 5-6 minutes of extended screen time. Eventually you start to tune out and go, "Okay, can we just end this?"

Damage saves are the outlier, and the reason to me seems pretty apparent---they're naturally and intrinsically a metagame/dissociated mechanic. In thinking about it, I'm not even sure how you could even make the attempt to associate a damage save to in-game causality. Savage Worlds makes no bones about its damage save mechanic; it's a choice made by the player to change the fiction within the game state. "I don't actually want my hero to get hurt, so I'm going to spend an action point to roll and see if he actually wasn't damaged even though the GM's attack says he should be."

From a simple gameplay standpoint, it's easy to see why Gygax stuck with straight hit points. It's an easy concept to digest from a player's perspective (even if the in-game fictional positioning rapidly becomes untenable). And it eliminates the "rocket tag" syndrome of straight damage step. Straight hit points is probably the most easily "playable" system, but on its own is certainly the least "realistic," at least as historically implemented in D&D.

Celebrim · Nov 7, 2016

What you are describing is a combination of two problems that are inherent to particular systems. There is no perfect system. If you maximize one thing, you are giving up on something else.

Savage Worlds has a particularly low granularity wound track. So naturally, there is very little obvious progression except through random chance. Wound tracks make for comparatively unpredictable pacing and challenge. Think of each 'wound' as being 1 hit point, and monsters typically having 4 hit points. Wounds have to be comparatively rare when you only have 1 hit point, and so being rare, they tend to come 'out of the blue'. And being a small number, groupings of hits and misses have a much larger impact on the pace and challenge. This is one of the reasons cRPGs have historically rarely adopted wound track mechanics and stuck with the familiar hit points.

But the other issue you are talking about sounds to me like you are dealing with the limits of the fortune mechanic. Any system starts breaking down when the numbers (targets, modifiers, etc) involved start getting close to the range allowed by the fortune mechanic. Your comparison to GURPS is apt, in that GURPS (without a lot of house ruling) typically starts breaking down when you reach a point where the only failures are critical failures, and the only successes are critical successes. When a target's active defenses get so high that it can reliably block everything that isn't a critical, combat gets boring and very swingy and arbitrary. Likewise, in D20, when the modifiers to the roll start getting close to 20, the game starts breaking down for a similar reason. In both cases, granularity is failing. The useful differentiations when the modifiers were a smaller portion of the total range of randomness start going away, and typically you start ending up with a lot of cases where characters have specialized to the point that what is trivially easy for one PC is impossible for the other ones. All games start breaking down at that point.

I would argue that in general, a low granularity wound track isn't any more realistic than hit points. You might be able to conceptualize what's going on from the language better, but in terms of realism you haven't gain much. Truly realistic systems have to track what sort of wounds were inflicted, and were, and what consequences that they have. You have to go from a wound track system to a condition/status inflicting system. And in doing so, you gain a good deal of realism, but you also gain all the problems that go with that - death spirals, sudden and random deaths, unheroic combats, fiddliness, and complexity of resolution. (Of course I say this, but to the extent that it even has a combat system, when I tried to make a really simple game system for my 4 year olds to play, I used a condition/status based system. Of course, it's pretty far from a realistic condition/status system.)

Celebrim · Nov 7, 2016

aramis erak said:
Hit points; When X points of damage cumulate, Y happens
Damage steps: If damage is X+, level Y occurs; strictly speaking, damage doesn't cumulate. (In pure systems, lesser damage steps usually provide a bonus to achieving higher damage steps.)
Damage saves: Make a save vs Damage to avoid effect.

pretty much everything else is combinations of these.

That seems fair, but I'd also argue that systems can be differentiated by whether they make 'wounds' abstract or concrete. Both D&D and Savage Worlds tend to have fairly abstract wounds. Something like Rolemaster or WHFRP tend to have fairly concrete wounds, although RM has both an abstract system (concussion) and a concrete system (critical hits).

Argyle King · Nov 7, 2016

It's worth noting that GURPS does give options for addressing the problem cited in the OP.

Yes, there are active defenses. However, in my experience, that encourages using tactics (i.e. flanking) rather than discouraging them. I also like that HP matters. Specifically, a wounded opponent is less likely to dodge.

aramis erak · Nov 7, 2016

innerdude said:
Which, then, of the hypothetical combinations posed by [MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION] produce the kinds of gameplay a certain group might be looking for?

For example, which model(s) would a group looking for ultra-realism choose? Obviously no model will be perfect, considering human physiology is one of the most complex sciences we know of, and would would be dependent on what it was trying to model as well. An RPG trying to model a U.S. football game is going to model damage much differently (bruising, fatigue, and debilitating but non-lethal wounds). Whereas trying to model people fighting with guns will be entirely different.

If I were to guess, I think hit points + damage step offers the most potential for realism (please note I'm making no judgments on playability, I'm merely trying to evaluate them categorically), as it seems to be the best way to represent the broadest possible set of in-game fictional states. You can model fatigue, resolve, "mojo," while also having distinct "break points" where actual "hurting" comes into play. This also allows for modeling particularly devastating attacks which can bypass hit points entirely and move an opponent directly down to the next damage step. It actually makes me wonder why D&D has never gone the route of adding damage steps --- though the whole concept of "bloodied" from 4e seemed to be a move in that direction.

Damage steps also have the potential benefit of making combat quicker, since combat becomes "swingy." Having had loads of experience with Savage Worlds' version of damage step + damage save, I can say that it does produce a very "cinematic" flavor of combat, where you're doing everything in your power to maneuver, position, and use every tool at your disposal to set up enemies to deliver a killing blow. The problem comes in the "swinginess" of the proceedings. If the dice aren't in your favor, combats can go from "cinematic" to downright tedious. Imagine a fight scene in a movie that just goes on far too long, with no meaningful change in state to the outcome. Fists are flying, weapons flailing, but nothing's really happening for say, 5-6 minutes of extended screen time. Eventually you start to tune out and go, "Okay, can we just end this?"

Damage saves are the outlier, and the reason to me seems pretty apparent---they're naturally and intrinsically a metagame/dissociated mechanic. In thinking about it, I'm not even sure how you could even make the attempt to associate a damage save to in-game causality. Savage Worlds makes no bones about its damage save mechanic; it's a choice made by the player to change the fiction within the game state. "I don't actually want my hero to get hurt, so I'm going to spend an action point to roll and see if he actually wasn't damaged even though the GM's attack says he should be."

From a simple gameplay standpoint, it's easy to see why Gygax stuck with straight hit points. It's an easy concept to digest from a player's perspective (even if the in-game fictional positioning rapidly becomes untenable). And it eliminates the "rocket tag" syndrome of straight damage step. Hit points is probably the most easily "playable" systems, but on its own is certainly the least "realistic," at least as historically implemented in D&D.

I've seen two methods that do it fairly well...

RQ3/BRP - HP by location AND central HP total. And penalties for damage to locations. (Needs a penalty added for damaged locations that aren't incapacitated. But otherwise...)
CORPS (by BTRC - not the 3rd party setting rip) - each location has an unlimited hit point total, but the penalty is "Worst hit plus number of hits". Each hit also imposes a consciousness save (which may be autopassed if stats high enough or damage low enough), and an "eventually fatal" check, (which if failed, starts the bleedout-clock, and if failed by a lot, instantly kills; again, if stats high enough and damage low enough, auto-pass). Further, the worst location penalty plus +1 for each additional location involved is applied on all actions, including death and consciousness checks.

Psikerlord# · Nov 7, 2016

Johnny3D3D said:
It's worth noting that GURPS does give options for addressing the problem cited in the OP.

Yes, there are active defenses. However, in my experience, that encourages using tactics (i.e. flanking) rather than discouraging them. I also like that HP matters. Specifically, a wounded opponent is less likely to dodge.

This does tend to result in death spirals though - ala Shadowrun. I mean I liked SR combat generally, it is quite deadly. But it does make things hard to turn around once you are significantly wounded (which if you're looking for more realism is good).

Argyle King · Nov 7, 2016

Psikerlord# said:
This does tend to result in death spirals though - ala Shadowrun. I mean I liked SR combat generally, it is quite deadly. But it does make things hard to turn around once you are significantly wounded (which if you're looking for more realism is good).

In my opinion, that only tends to be true if you approach things with the mentality of fighting until the last HP.

While being hurt does more to hamper you, it's also been my experience that active defenses often makes difficult situations more survivable than some D&D scenarios. I don't feel as though I'm being hit by a high level monster who can easily roll over my AC without any options available to me to do anything. I suppose it depends upon how you view things though.

On the other side of the coin, I like that life threatening situations feel like life threatening situations. An easy example is the classic hostage situation. When the BBEG point blank shoots someone in the face, I feel as though that should (typically) lead to death or catastrophic injury.

Correlating Player Satisfaction, Combat Speed, and HP / Damage Modeling

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