Damage Systems in RPGs?

[Wanderlust]

Wow, so, I used to lurk here. A lot. But, I've been gone for a good long while. August '08 was apparently my last login. Anyway, I've been getting back into gaming lately, and I've found that I'm really interested in making a game.

I'm really curious to hear about people's preferred damage systems in RPGs. Specifically, I'd like to hear about non-hit-point-pool systems. It's all good and well if you toss your bones to the hit-point clones (god knows I like to get my D&D fix from time to time), but that's not what this is about.

Awhile back I set about making an rpg, and I'm finding the damage system to be problematic. Currently, I'm thinking of doing a dual system of Stamina and Wounds:
-Stamina would be similar to your hit point pool, except the abstraction that it would be representing would be similar to a boxer getting knocked down/out. Basically, a little rest and you're pretty much good to go.
-Wounds would be more serious. Right now I'm thinking that all damage will go to Stamina unless you beat an opponents defense by a certain amount, in which case you will cause wounds. Wounds will give minuses to rolls and take time to heal.

Part of the idea here is that there will be more yielding and a little less death once combatants are drained of Stamina. However, I recognize that I'm a bit biased by having played and loved Deadlands back in the day, and this idea is somewhat reminiscent of that system.

All of this being said, I'd like to hear thoughts on interesting/fun damage systems that are different from this or the norm because I'm feeling like I may have allowed my bias to keep me from seeing other way of handling this. Also, criticisms of this idea are also welcome.

 

[Desdichado]

That sounds almost exactly like the Wound and Vitality point system, first debuted in d20 Star Wars. You can read the D&D version of it here. I'd check it out before I went too far reinventing the wheel.

Stock commentary on the VP/WP system vs. HP--it's nice in a setting that has no magical healing to allow folks to get up and be on the run again in no time flat. However, depending on how you attack the Wound points (same terminology for both your systems there, curiously) you might actually find that lethality is increased rather than decreased. And without magical healing, recovering WP damage is slow and tedious.

 

[Dausuul]

I also am working on a design involving a wound/vit system, although I refer to them as "hit points" and "soak."

IMO, Star Wars made one big mistake in its implementation of the system--namely, allowing crits to go straight to wound points (or hit points in my formulation). Ablative hit point systems suffer from verisimilitude issues and other problems, but they have one signal advantage: They provide a buffer against random sudden death. If crits can bypass the buffer, you've just re-introduced random sudden death, and you're accepting all the verisimilitude headaches to no purpose.

It's okay to have things that bypass the buffer, such as undead whose merest touch leaves the victim pale and drained, or falling damage (a perennial favorite). But it's important that anything which bypasses the buffer, should do so all the time--no element of luck involved--and be balanced accordingly.

 

[Wanderlust]

What about non-d20 systems of dealing with damage?

 

[Wanderlust]

I'm thinking that the wound system will hopefully not be a death system. Basically, I want death to be mostly determined by the GM. Sure there may be some death threshold, but for the most part it'll be a system of penalties and recovery periods.

 

[Ringlerun]

I am currently working on my own rpg and i am using a base damage for weapons and having the characters make resist damage roll. I have 5 wound levels before death

 

[FreeXenon]

IMO, Star Wars made one big mistake in its implementation of the system--namely, allowing crits to go straight to wound points (or hit points in my formulation). Ablative hit point systems suffer from verisimilitude issues and other problems, but they have one signal advantage: They provide a buffer against random sudden death. If crits can bypass the buffer, you've just re-introduced random sudden death, and you're accepting all the verisimilitude headaches to no purpose.

Just a quick thought about this... depending on how you put it together, perhaps a crit could do "normal damage" or "max damage", however that is defined or works for you, and additionally, it does 1 wound point too to show that some serious damage was done.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I'm generally a fan of vitality/wound (or stamina or whatever you want to call it). I have wound points go into negatives, and you die at -(Con score) which seems to increase survivability. I also rewrote healing magic to make wound damage slow but possible to heal. The last major change I can think of is that wound damage causes fatigue, and later exhaustion if a PC is at less that half wound. I'm working on an injury system for rules-lite d20, but I think it would be too practically difficult to implement in D&D.

All those things being noted, I think the idea of this sort of thing is to at least make some cursory acknowledgment to the fact that wounds actually cause harm and are not merely a health bar. It's much better at that than the core system. There's still plenty of room for improvement. Survivability is more a function of the size of the "death window" (distance from unconsciouness to death).

The other big thing here is that it generally helps monsters more than PCs. Big monsters get wp multipliers. Weak monsters have their hit point totals tripled or more. Monsters in general can disable you with a lucky crit. I like this, but some don't.

 

[Desdichado]

It's okay to have things that bypass the buffer, such as undead whose merest touch leaves the victim pale and drained, or falling damage (a perennial favorite). But it's important that anything which bypasses the buffer, should do so all the time--no element of luck involved--and be balanced accordingly.

Curiously, I think that that's one of the advantges of a VP/WP system, that it can bypass the buffer due to bad luck. Not enough to get me to abandon HPs, which I think are only problematic if there are too many of them (i.e., I'm more concerned with how you generate and accumulate HPs than I am with how they operate in game) because HP are just too simple for me to really turn away from them. But I'm curious why you think bad luck is lacking in verismilitude. In my experience, that's actually quite realistic when mapped to real people and real injuries. There's all kinds of "luck" or chance or whatever you want to call it... randomness, at least... involved in how serious an injury is from almost any type of source.

What about non-d20 systems of dealing with damage?

Most games I'm aware of aren't all that different than d20 in that regard. Plus, that option is almost exactly what you were specifically asking about. What else did you have in mind? Mutants & Masterminds damage save is a fairly interesting alternative (and if I recall, that SRD link has an option for something very similar to that in there too) and it comes with a built in "death spiral" type of affair. A lot of folks like death spirals for supposed verisimilitude, but I've always found them to be more trouble than they were worth.

 

[billd91]

Curiously, I think that that's one of the advantges of a VP/WP system, that it can bypass the buffer due to bad luck. Not enough to get me to abandon HPs, which I think are only problematic if there are too many of them (i.e., I'm more concerned with how you generate and accumulate HPs than I am with how they operate in game) because HP are just too simple for me to really turn away from them. But I'm curious why you think bad luck is lacking in verismilitude. In my experience, that's actually quite realistic when mapped to real people and real injuries. There's all kinds of "luck" or chance or whatever you want to call it... randomness, at least... involved in how serious an injury is from almost any type of source.

For me, the main danger of luck bumping over into WP from VP is the amount of damage, not verisimilitude. Star Wars d20 (pre-SWSE) kind of showed this to me. Damage ratings meant to ablate VP, particularly when VP grows with level as in SWd20, really wreak havoc on WP when the crit is scored, particularly if the range of crit numbers increase. It simply becomes too deadly to match the style of action that WP/VP is really trying to capture.

If the luck factor bumps over just a few points (perhaps 1 or 2 per die in the initial attack's damage rating), that would probably be enough to be significant. Maybe a set fraction of the rolled damage.