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Tink-Tink-Boom vs. the Death Spiral: The Damage Mechanic in RPGs
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<blockquote data-quote="AmerginLiath" data-source="post: 7756176" data-attributes="member: 777"><p>Like others here, I prefer TTB to Death Spiral simply because how it ends up working. The idea of systematizing injury in a game is appealing and has long been sought after (look back to all the critical hit tables in late-70s games and magazines meant to be grafted onto Hit Point systems, long before any Damage Track systems came about), but there will always be a debate on how granular to make it, how tight to zoom into reality and how any injury effects the character (likewise, tighter damage tracking demands more detailed determination of how damage is done, creating an odd juxtaposition in games with abstracted combat systems but detailed damage trackers).</p><p></p><p>TTB to me is like Strikes and Out (or Downs and Turnovers), it’s the game mechanism that cleanly marks a character’s movement in and out of play without overly complicating the paperwork. Just as three strikes means the team is out and the other guys go to bat, X number of HP damage means Bob the Fighter is dead and Bob 2 the Thief enters the dungeon in his place. It’s elegant and allows the folks at the table to focus on other things (just like simple turnover mechanisms in sports allow players to focus on their game and not what constitutes whose turn at bat).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AmerginLiath, post: 7756176, member: 777"] Like others here, I prefer TTB to Death Spiral simply because how it ends up working. The idea of systematizing injury in a game is appealing and has long been sought after (look back to all the critical hit tables in late-70s games and magazines meant to be grafted onto Hit Point systems, long before any Damage Track systems came about), but there will always be a debate on how granular to make it, how tight to zoom into reality and how any injury effects the character (likewise, tighter damage tracking demands more detailed determination of how damage is done, creating an odd juxtaposition in games with abstracted combat systems but detailed damage trackers). TTB to me is like Strikes and Out (or Downs and Turnovers), it’s the game mechanism that cleanly marks a character’s movement in and out of play without overly complicating the paperwork. Just as three strikes means the team is out and the other guys go to bat, X number of HP damage means Bob the Fighter is dead and Bob 2 the Thief enters the dungeon in his place. It’s elegant and allows the folks at the table to focus on other things (just like simple turnover mechanisms in sports allow players to focus on their game and not what constitutes whose turn at bat). [/QUOTE]
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Tink-Tink-Boom vs. the Death Spiral: The Damage Mechanic in RPGs
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