Tink-Tink-Boom vs. the Death Spiral: The Damage Mechanic in RPGs

Broadly speaking, every traditional role-playing game has some sort of system for tracking the health and well-being of its characters. Classically, as in Dungeons & Dragons, these are expressed as Hit Points. Other systems such as Savage Worlds or Vampire: The Masquerade use some sort of qualitative wound mechanic. For the purposes of this article, which will compare the relative merits of each approach, we’ll call the former approach Tink-Tink-Boom (or TTB for short) and the latter the Death Spiral.

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Photo by Simon Connellan on Unsplash​

Regardless of the particular gloss, all systems with a damage mechanic fall into one of two categories: an attritional model (TTB) where you are fine until you aren’t (either falling unconscious or dying) or a system of gradual decay (Death Spiral) whereby accumulated wounds seriously impact your ability to function.

The biggest advantage of the TTB approach is simplicity. You (generally) have a bank of Hit Points. Things do damage to you that deplete that bank. When you hit zero Hit Points, you die. Some systems, like those derived from Basic Roleplaying such as Call of Cthulhu or King Arthur Pendragon, introduce a tripwire point that triggers unconsciousness prior to death—if your character takes enough damage to reduce them below that threshold, you simply pass out. Other systems, such as the Palladium Books family of games, Champions, or Dragon Heresy, break Hit Points into two categories representing mere shock or bruises on the one hand and life-threatening injuries on the other. (Often in these systems, characters have far more “shock” points than “vitality” points.)

These elaborations on the basic TTB system were presumably introduced in an effort to add a dash of “realism” to the mechanic, as that is the fundamental downside of the classic Hit Point arrangement: in real life, people who suffer repeated injuries tend to feel the effects well prior to expiring.

And thus the Death Spiral.

Whether as a result of wanting to treat injury more realistically or (somewhat paradoxically) to move the system in a more narratively-focused direction, qualitative wound categories have been around for decades. Early White Wolf games like Ars Magica and Vampire: The Masquerade helped pave the way with their hierarchical wound categories. More recent systems such as Apocalypse World and its many offshoots use variations on this approach as well, albeit often through ticking off boxes or filling in a track on the character sheet.

What these systems all have in common is that, as more boxes are ticked or wound categories are marked off, more and more penalties accrue. Perhaps in a dice pool system you lose dice out of your pool; in a system that relies on single dice rolls, you likely suffer a penalty to your roll. You might also suffer shock effects, lose actions, etc.

The point is: getting wounded slows you down and makes you a less effective fighter. It also tends to speed up your headlong rush towards the final curtain as the penalties accrue—hence the term “death spiral.”

Although there’s much to be said for the increased realism of this approach, it also must be said that it comes with an increased burden of modifiers and conditions to keep in mind. Although this may not weigh too heavily on a player’s shoulders, I can say from personal experience that keeping track of NPC wounds is often an onerous imposition for already-harried GM brains.

What do you say, gentle reader? Is the simplicity of the TTN system not worth the loss of realism? Is the Death Spiral too brutal, or is it grimly satisfying? And is that grim satisfaction worth the extra variables required of the players and GM to track?

On a final, personal note, this will be my last UGC article for EN World. It’s been a lot of fun writing these game theory articles, as well as the Storyteller’s Vault and Statosphere Roundups, and I’m looking forward to continuing to read the excellent output from UGC contributors both present and future!

This article was contributed by David Larkins (sirlarkins) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program.We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us!

 

[talien]

Who wrote this? talien or sirlarkins?

as a player and dm, the idea of added realism appeals to me but as the article mentions, prefer the simplistically of TTB.

Unfortunately the way the tool currently works I publish the articles first and then edit them after they're published to the appropriate author. If I don't get to it right away, it can cause some confusion, sorry about that.

 

[tomBitonti]

I think the article is based on a false dichotomy. It leaves out the possibility of a third way, which is the way Rolemaster and MERP went. It has hit points, but more often you die of a wound. But these wound's aren't necessarily a death spiral, where the player gets progressively worse; a wound can instead result in instant death, even at full hits.

I don't think that is what death spiral means.

Death spiral is when damage causes a penalty which makes a character less effective. Absent a corresponding penalty to an opponent, failure becomes much more likely. In particular, additional damage becomes much more likely, which will make the character even less effective, and hence we have the death spiral.

Death spiral does not mean that a character, upon receiving damage, is on a timer to die in the immanent future due to ongoing effects of the injury (for example, by bleeding to death).

At least, that is my understanding.

Thx!
TomB

 

[malco]

I've often tried to find ways to shoehorn in death spiral mechanics into my games. The issue is how to make them simple and elegant. I mostly play 5E these days, and love the simplicity of the system, but sometimes the abstraction makes it very hard to suspend disbelief. One of the most elegant parts of 5E, in my mind, is the Advantage/Disadvantage system, and I think this could be employed to add a Death Spiral element to the TTB hp system.

An idea for a homebrew rule could be, for instance, when a PC/NPC/Monster is at 25% or less of their total HP they get disadvantage on all rolls which can represent the strain their accumulated wounds have put on them. This has a couple of benefits in my mind. One, it puts even further impetus on the players to role-play and be tactical in a way where the can negate a disadvantage situation, and at higher levels of play it could speed up combat.

I can foresee, however, ways where it would nerf some class abilities like a rogue's sneak attack, or a barbarian's reckless attack and really unbalance some things. And you don't want to get in a situation where you have to start balancing homebrew rules with more homebrew rules.

 

[Dausuul]

IMO, one of the big weaknesses of the death spiral approach is that designers get too hung up on realism aspect and fail to think about the game impact.

What I would like to see is a death spiral which cripples your offensive abilities, but leaves intact your ability to defend yourself and to run like hell. This is not quite as realistic as a traditional death spiral, but it's more realistic than tink-tink-boom, and it encourages injured PCs to look for ways out of combat instead of sticking it out and dying.

 

[Celebrim]

That's certainly one way to do it...and works fine once 10% becomes a meaningful number. Just not sure how to work it at very low level when most PCs still have single-digit h.p. - maybe the staggered point is the greater of 10% or a flat number... 2? 3?

Fractions are rounded up, so a hypothetical PC with single digit hit points would be staggered at 1 hit point remaining, potentially unconscious at 0 hit points remaining, and potentially unconscious and dying ('bleeding out' as my players call it) at -1. However, in point of fact, single digit hit points in my game are extremely rare if you aren't playing something like a Pixie. That's because everything gets a bonus to maximum hit points based on its current size, and the bonus for medium sized creatures is 8. So, a typical 1st level human fighter with 14 Con has 20 hit points, and even a Wizard would have 12.

At first level, most foes are doing only 2 to 3 damage on at a hit, so despite the narrow range you can only be staggered in before worse things happen, it still comes up relatively frequently. It changes the dynamics of combat significantly, because there is no 'partial evasion' action in my game, so once you get staggered it's too late to run away. The best you can do is try to turtle up and hope for help, and parties really need to cooperate to rescue players that have had bad luck or gotten themselves in over their head, because a 'wounded' player can't self-rescue an there is a broader range at which they are 'wounded'. You also need to decide to fall back before you get in trouble.

As for the questions about why can't you adopt your procedures of play to accommodate rules that would make injuries more lasting, you could, but then you wouldn't be playing the same game.

For example, assumption #3 "There are such a large number of players that it is not functional for the gaming group to insist that everyone be present in order to game." is at some level the underlying assumption behind assumptions #1 and #2. It's not a necessary assumption for #1 and #2 and many people played with assumptions #1 and #2 without considering why, solely because the procedures of play presented to them through the examples of play had those assumptions stated or unstated, but #3 actually creates and requires #1 and #2. For example, the existence of the 'Haven' is predicated on there not being a proactive villain that will pursue the party back to the Haven. If that happens, it's no longer a Haven. But if you have assumption #3, then you have a process of play problem if the villain does pursue the party back to the Haven, and that is that at the Haven there are a bunch of PC's who by virtue of being at the Haven can be assumed to be out of play, but if the proactive villain enters the Haven then there is no clean separation between the dungeon where the game takes place and the haven where down time takes place. This is a headache.

If you examine the game described in the 1e DMG, it's filled with assumptions about clean separation between game time and down time. But as you note many and if not most groups abandoned those procedures of play. Depending on what game they started playing, it isn't necessarily functional to say that regardless of the mechanics the game adopted with respect to injury, they could keep playing the same game by simply introducing down time. The game they are playing might not include downtime and adding it may violate the setting that had been imagined.

The only things that can prevent injury recovery are:

in-game: a severe time crunch in the plotline, where the PCs just don't have time to recover and still beat the deadline (an overused trope IMO)
out-of-game: impatient players and-or DM.

Anything that violates the assumption that you have downtime and can handwave that downtime prevents you from having 'injury recovery' in the sense you mean it. That can include:

a) There is no Haven where downtime takes place, because story and threat still happens at the haven. That is to say, even if a player takes 'downtime' there may be no procedure of play at the table that endorses hand waving away this time and producing an outcome outside of the process of play. If a player says, "I spend the week wenching and gambling", a DM might have good reason for not resolving that as a hand wave, which means that play goes on with only some players removed as participants.
b) Villains are proactive and will take meaningful action during the down time, punishing players who could otherwise be active for waiting for their colleague to improve. This is true even if there are no hard deadlines. You neglect the possibility that the PC will have in game reason to be impatient.
c) As you stated, a deadline, such as for example the end of the world Next Thursday unless the PC's defeat the BBEG, or even 'by tomorrow night the bandits will be clean across the border', or 'they are going to sacrifice the captives to their dark god on the New Moon'. You call this an overused trope, but in doing so you are saying that any plot where the protagonist does not need to be an active participant for the antagonist to be thwarted is overused. On the contrary, AD&D created a world that overused the trope of a nearby, untouched, static adventure site in order to support its preferred structure of play which was one with no time pressure. The prevalence in D&D of static, untouched, virgin adventure sites populated by beings that seem to have no real motivation, industry, or impact on the outside world is weird, and the more you think about it, the weirder it gets. The longer you go in D&D's history, the more diversity you see.

Or in short, having no time pressure is intimately connected to the desire not to remove a player from the play, and D&D both mechanically and in its procedures of play reinforced that goal. As the procedures of play changed, the meta-goal of 'everyone gets to play and have fun' was retained, and it was only because mechanically down time wasn't necessary (and anything that made downtime necessary mechanically was ignored) that D&D could be a rules set that supported that.

Also, in true old-school gaming you'd always have a hench or three with you anyway, so you could - if your PC really was down for the count - play one of those. Same thing you'd do if your PC died a half-hour in.

Sure, been there, done that: but you'd be amazed I think by the percentage of tables where henchmen aren't a thing and never were a thing. For one thing, henchmen are a pain, since the presence of 2-3 per party member quickly bloats even a small group with only 4 players into a wandering army with 14 combatants that have to act each round, and neither the DM nor the player tends to be actually prepared for the mental overhead of keeping track of all of that. So again, the answers here for what to do should the game mechanically impose downtime on a PC in the form of 'injury recovery time' are fine for certain procedures of play, but are not general answers.

 

[Celebrim]

I think the article is based on a false dichotomy. It leaves out the possibility of a third way, which is the way Rolemaster and MERP went. It has hit points, but more often you die of a wound. But these wound's aren't necessarily a death spiral, where the player gets progressively worse; a wound can instead result in instant death, even at full hits.

The definition of a 'death spiral' is that when you are injured, it imposes a condition on you that makes it easier for you to get injured again. Or, to put it another way, the first side of the combat to get wounded, tends to be the side that looses, because each time you get wounded it gets harder and harder to win.

For example, an injury might stun or incapacitate you for a certain time, or it might leave you at a penalty to attack or defend yourself, or it might limit your movement rate, or you might start bleeding. Any system that does that implements a Death Spiral.

Any system that attempts to model wounds as something that realistically hampers further action implements the 'death spiral'. Rolemaster is preeminently such a system. It's not a third way; it's one of the archetypal examples of 'Death Spiral'. You absolutely do not function at full capacity in Rolemaster after you've been hit.

 

[Garthanos]

Another method that hasn't been mentioned here is a kind of reverse death spiral.

That is, when the PC approaches some threshold on the way to death, they start getting a bonus, representing an adrenaline surge or some other thing.

I don't know any rpg that has this system, but I heard they exist.

In theory it sounds gimmicky and awful, but in play I would imagine that it would push players to make their characters into heroes that fight right down to the wire. I also imagine it would create more situations where it seems that all is lost for the group, but they manage to survive against all odds.

Certainly wouldn't work for horror or grim campaigns, but for heroic high fantasy I think it would work quite well.

When the going gets tough the tough get going.. can be the back end of TTB... Plus aggressive boost. 13th age has a bonus the longer the fight.

 

[Lanefan]

Fractions are rounded up, so a hypothetical PC with single digit hit points would be staggered at 1 hit point remaining, potentially unconscious at 0 hit points remaining, and potentially unconscious and dying ('bleeding out' as my players call it) at -1. However, in point of fact, single digit hit points in my game are extremely rare if you aren't playing something like a Pixie. That's because everything gets a bonus to maximum hit points based on its current size, and the bonus for medium sized creatures is 8. So, a typical 1st level human fighter with 14 Con has 20 hit points, and even a Wizard would have 12.

Ah. Round here a PC can theoretically start with as few as 3 h.p., most 1st-level back-liners start with about 6-9 and front-liners with maybe 9-15. With rare exceptions everyone starts with 2-5 body points, then the class-based and con-modified h.p. (fatigue points) roll goes on top of that.

At first level, most foes are doing only 2 to 3 damage on at a hit, so despite the narrow range you can only be staggered in before worse things happen, it still comes up relatively frequently.

Again a bit different than here; I give the foes the same damage output as the PCs based on weapon, strength, etc. A Kobold with a shortsword does d6 damage; a typical Orc with an axe or a longsword will do d8+1 with the +1 coming from strength.

It changes the dynamics of combat significantly, because there is no 'partial evasion' action in my game, so once you get staggered it's too late to run away. The best you can do is try to turtle up and hope for help, and parties really need to cooperate to rescue players that have had bad luck or gotten themselves in over their head, because a 'wounded' player can't self-rescue an there is a broader range at which they are 'wounded'. You also need to decide to fall back before you get in trouble.

We have a similar condition where you're below 0 h.p. but - having made a con-based check - still conscious; where you can fight on at more or less significant penalties based on your current negative h.p., or you can stagger or crawl clear, or down a potion. Casting a spell is very risky; you need to make the same consciousness check again or pass out in the attempt, thus interrupting the spell and risking a wild surge.

As for the questions about why can't you adopt your procedures of play to accommodate rules that would make injuries more lasting, you could, but then you wouldn't be playing the same game.

Whether I'm playing the same game as Gygax played stopped being a concern of mine a very long time ago.

For example, assumption #3 "There are such a large number of players that it is not functional for the gaming group to insist that everyone be present in order to game." is at some level the underlying assumption behind assumptions #1 and #2. It's not a necessary assumption for #1 and #2 and many people played with assumptions #1 and #2 without considering why, solely because the procedures of play presented to them through the examples of play had those assumptions stated or unstated, but #3 actually creates and requires #1 and #2. For example, the existence of the 'Haven' is predicated on there not being a proactive villain that will pursue the party back to the Haven. If that happens, it's no longer a Haven. But if you have assumption #3, then you have a process of play problem if the villain does pursue the party back to the Haven, and that is that at the Haven there are a bunch of PC's who by virtue of being at the Haven can be assumed to be out of play, but if the proactive villain enters the Haven then there is no clean separation between the dungeon where the game takes place and the haven where down time takes place. This is a headache.

Yes, if assumption #3 is in play; but this is a very rare situation.

And here's the odd thing: while Gygax put forth all these ideas of how play would proceed based on how he did it, his own style of play in the end pretty much became a corner case by maybe 1981. That some of his ideas can also apply quite well to play at most other tables both then and now is something of a happy accident, I suspect.

Anything that violates the assumption that you have downtime and can handwave that downtime prevents you from having 'injury recovery' in the sense you mean it. That can include:

a) There is no Haven where downtime takes place, because story and threat still happens at the haven. That is to say, even if a player takes 'downtime' there may be no procedure of play at the table that endorses hand waving away this time and producing an outcome outside of the process of play. If a player says, "I spend the week wenching and gambling", a DM might have good reason for not resolving that as a hand wave, which means that play goes on with only some players removed as participants.

Sometimes true, other times a result of table-level impatience.

b) Villains are proactive and will take meaningful action during the down time, punishing players who could otherwise be active for waiting for their colleague to improve. This is true even if there are no hard deadlines. You neglect the possibility that the PC will have in game reason to be impatient.

This is just another version of time crunch or deadline.

c) As you stated, a deadline, such as for example the end of the world Next Thursday unless the PC's defeat the BBEG, or even 'by tomorrow night the bandits will be clean across the border', or 'they are going to sacrifice the captives to their dark god on the New Moon'. You call this an overused trope, but in doing so you are saying that any plot where the protagonist does not need to be an active participant for the antagonist to be thwarted is overused.

I see a significant difference between "the world will end Thursday if mission x isn't completed by then" and "evil Baron Sutrich has been this way for years, letting him stew for a few more weeks won't likely matter much". Of course the bad guys aren't always static, and for all that neither are the non-party good guys.

And depending on the DM there can sometimes even be an advantage to waiting: more information might come to light.

On the contrary, AD&D created a world that overused the trope of a nearby, untouched, static adventure site in order to support its preferred structure of play which was one with no time pressure. The prevalence in D&D of static, untouched, virgin adventure sites populated by beings that seem to have no real motivation, industry, or impact on the outside world is weird, and the more you think about it, the weirder it gets. The longer you go in D&D's history, the more diversity you see.

All true, and while justifiable in some cases I agree it's overdone. Particularly the "virgin adventure sites" - depending on the specific situation I'll often toss in narration implying the site they're exploring has been explored before and has its own history. That said, I'll also sometimes add unexplored bits - a secret door missed by past adventurers, or a new bit that's just opened up, whatever.

Or in short, having no time pressure is intimately connected to the desire not to remove a player from the play, and D&D both mechanically and in its procedures of play reinforced that goal. As the procedures of play changed, the meta-goal of 'everyone gets to play and have fun' was retained, and it was only because mechanically down time wasn't necessary (and anything that made downtime necessary mechanically was ignored) that D&D could be a rules set that supported that.

That meta-goal wasn't only retained, it became the overarching focus in system design - now it's considered bad for a player to have to sit out longer than a round or two. While I don't like people having to sit out, I think the game needs to make it clear up front that there will be times when it will happen, and not to complain about it when it does. The game also needs to point out and emphasize mitigating options for the DM - have party NPC adventurers, encourage henches, allow players to play more than one PC at a time, and so forth.

Sure, been there, done that: but you'd be amazed I think by the percentage of tables where henchmen aren't a thing and never were a thing. For one thing, henchmen are a pain, since the presence of 2-3 per party member quickly bloats even a small group with only 4 players into a wandering army with 14 combatants that have to act each round, and neither the DM nor the player tends to be actually prepared for the mental overhead of keeping track of all of that. So again, the answers here for what to do should the game mechanically impose downtime on a PC in the form of 'injury recovery time' are fine for certain procedures of play, but are not general answers.

We somewhat cover this by allowing players to run 2 PCs at a time. Only becomes a real headache when there's more than 4 or 5 players.

Lanefan

 

[Celebrim]

Again a bit different than here; I give the foes the same damage output as the PCs based on weapon, strength, etc. A Kobold with a shortsword does d6 damage; a typical Orc with an axe or a longsword will do d8+1 with the +1 coming from strength.

Not that different, as I do the strong enforce PCs and NPCs are equal mechanically, but as a procedure of play would consider orcs with axes an extremely dangerous foe for a 1st level party to face and would generally only throw an encounter with orcs in as climatic sort of fight in a projected 1st level adventure. Even kobolds with short swords is IMO a fairly bloody minded encounter for a 1st level party unless it is generally large, rested and well equipped. Typically if you are facing kobolds and you are first level, it's not a kobold with good equipment like short swords, but kobold commoners with obsidian knives and stone darts, or just clinching you and gnawing on you with tooth and claw.

One of the general rules I try to hold to with low level characters is no one hit should be lethal. So for example, you aren't going to run up against a hobgoblin with a great axe (unless you go out of your way to find trouble) because even a normal hit can do 15 damage, and a critical could in theory do 45 and will average in the mid 20's. I don't like putting players into situations where plain bad luck is what kills them, and I especially don't like doing that with 1st level characters where the player just doesn't have a lot of resources to mitigate against luck. Now of course, the old school solution to this is put a large number of PC's through a low level wringer, and take the few survivors that come out the other side. But that has consequences as well, and I generally prefer players earn their character deaths.

We have a similar condition where you're below 0 h.p. but - having made a con-based check - still conscious; where you can fight on at more or less significant penalties based on your current negative h.p., or you can stagger or crawl clear, or down a potion. Casting a spell is very risky; you need to make the same consciousness check again or pass out in the attempt, thus interrupting the spell and risking a wild surge.

Once you are at 0 hit points or less, living creatures need to make a DC 15 fortitude save or fall unconscious. So yes, those 10 hit point kobolds are potentially still not dead at 0 hit points. It is in fact possible to hit a kobold for 15 damage and have it not drop. If you pass your save, you are conscious indefinitely, but you have to make another save every time you take damage. At -1 hit points or less, living creatures start dying, and take 1 damage at the beginning of each round. This triggers another consciousness check. To stop dying, you need to roll under your Con on a D%. However, you start dying again if you take any further injury. The point you die depends on your size. Humans die at -10, but those small sized kobolds die at -9.

 

[Variss]

Minor Nitpick, Ars Magica's contemporary for wound systems should be Star Wars: The Role Playing Game (WEG) as both were 1987 releases. Vampire's first publication was four years later.