Damage Systems in RPGs?

[dagger]

I love the way its done in Warhammer FRP/Dark Heresy.

 

[Niccodaemus]

I've got my own system I use, and have been using for years. Basically, it is all "vitality" or "fatigue" points.

As I have a distain for magical healing by clerics, they are restored at the generous rate of 1/2 your missing points per hour. So say your normal hit points are 53. You take a total of 39 points damage, reducing you to 14 points.

The first hour of rest restores 19 points, bringing you up to 33. You are still down 20. The next few hours heal 10, 5, 2, 2, and 1, bringing back to your total in 6 hours of rest. Beware going back after the same foe however, as they are likely to have rested as well.

Actual wound damage does not occur until you drop below 1 fatigue point. Any blow that reduces you below 1 point causes real damage against your constiution. You die or receive a mortal or critical wound a negative constitution. I also use a location hit table.

Example: You are at 4 hit points, and have a constitution of 12. You are dealt a slashing blow of 16 or greater hit points to the forearm. Your lose a limb if it is slashing, or have to have it amputated if it is crushing. Piercing severs an artery.

The results of blows to the torso are mortal wounds that kill you in 1d20 hours -1. So anywhere from instant death to 19 hours of agony.

Head wounds that bring you below neg constitution are instant death.

I put part of my combat system up on my blog. It includes armor, weapons, and damage charts and a character sheet.

The basic gist of the system is that less armor makes you harder to hit, but armor makes you take less damage.

Shatterworld: Behind the Scenes: Alternative Combat Rules

 

[Wanderlust]

A lot of folks like death spirals for supposed verisimilitude, but I've always found them to be more trouble than they were worth.

Agreed. I want to keep things simple, but at the same time I'm debating things like Stamina and even wound locations. I want simplicity, but at the same time I want the system more representative than HP.

 

[Plane Sailing]

What about non-d20 systems of dealing with damage?

Two other ways of dealing with damage:

more abstract than classic hp: Mutants and Masterminds damage save - on any attack that hits the target rolls a damage save - DC depends upon the power of the attack, save bonus depends upon how tough the target is. How badly you fail the save determines how badly you are affected.

less abstract than classic hp: Runequest (certainly RQ2) have hp actually represent amount of physical damage. It has separate hp for each body location, armour per location and damage is done directly to the location hit. Impales and critical hits do additional damage. total amount of damage is also recorded.

(The latter is still my favourite damage system in RPGs to date)

Cheers

 

[Wanderlust]

Niccodaemus, how much do you feel that your system slows down gameplay?

 

[Wanderlust]

Plane Sailing, did the Runequest system feel slow at all?

 

[Dausuul]

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.

Ah - you've got my argument backwards. It's not bad luck or bypassing vitality that's lacking in verisimilitude. It's the hit point mechanic itself.

WP/VP is a tweak on the standard D&D hit point system. The standard D&D hit point system has issues with verisimilitude, and involves more bookkeeping than most. Its one big advantage is that it provides reliable but limited protection from sudden random death. If reliable protection from sudden random death is important to you, it's hard to do better than a hit point mechanic (with or without a vitality component). If not, it's hard to see why you'd bother with one.

If you allow bad luck to bypass vitality, then you no longer have reliable protection from sudden random death. At that point, why use a hit point mechanic at all? There are simpler, cleaner ways of handling injury, with less arithmetic and more believability.

 

[1Mac]

Hobo mentioned damage saves, which I like a lot, though I think as written they need some tweaking. Some day I might publish or publicize my variation on the damage save concept.

I'm not aware of how WarHammer handles damage, dagger. Care to elaborate?

 

[Niccodaemus]

Niccodaemus, how much do you feel that your system slows down gameplay?

Combat is an exception in my game, not the rule. I focus on fewer combats with fewer participants. So all in all, I would imagine my combats each take up less time than anyone else's, and leaves a lot more time for other roleplay options.

My system also indicated huge amounts of damage under certain conditions, so in that sense, combat can be greatly shortened. This is particularly true for surprised opponents. A thief can slit the throat of a guard who is otherwise wearing leather armor. The dagger to the unarmored throat can do 5 to 15 points damage. Doubling that for the surprise attack, the victim is automatically stunned for at least one round. (A single blow stuns for 1 round per 10 points of damage done). The guard is pretty much toast.

 

[Desdichado]

If you allow bad luck to bypass vitality, then you no longer have reliable protection from sudden random death. At that point, why use a hit point mechanic at all? There are simpler, cleaner ways of handling injury, with less arithmetic and more believability.

Like what, he asked with genuine curiousity. I don't pretend to be a roleplaying connoisseur, but I've seen my fair share of systems. Most of the ones I've seen either have some variation on the damage save mechanic, or the hit point mechanic. In fact, I'm struggling to think of any that weren't conceptually either one or the other.

(For the record, I consider VP/WP to be little more than a minor variation on the HP mechanic to allow for quicker healing of most damage without magic, and to allow for the possibility of "headshots" even against higher level characters in combat. While it doesn't "solve" the problem of hit points not making sense in the first place, it does add a layer of believability to the game, particularly at higher levels, because of that. I also like how it eases play for games that don't have magical healing readily available. Curiously, since it was introduced in Star Wars, I don't think it necessarrily promotes a more swashbucklery feel. I think it's a decent variation on the hit point, and has its place, but the game in which the concept debuted was probably the wrong one for it.)