Let's Talk About Health, Damage, Wounds, Death and Related Mechanics

[Blue]

Your brother being missing or the road being slippery can certainly be consequences, but they would be fairly unusual as consequences of engaging in combat.

Depends on the game system. I played in a Blades in the Dark game and one consequence that came up in combat was that the opposition had hired my rival, a sniper, as reinforcements. IIRC, Consequences are not required (or even regularly expected) to flow from the action. In other words: it's not the action that causes the consequences, consequences are a meta thing.

OK, well, if you're assuming the brother was there at the start of the fight, but is now gone, that makes more logical sense and is connected to what's going on. There's a big difference to me, between, "If you start a fight, any consequence is possible; you might even find out your brother (who you thought was at home baking bread) is actually missing," and, "If you enter a fight with your brother nearby, he might not still be there when the fight ends."

But this is actually a great consequence. You've annoyed a criminal organization who knows who you are, you bust down the door, wack the guard with a success+complication, and the big bad reveals that they have your brother.

The latter makes perfect sense, whether it's the result of a specific challenge resolution method or just part of a chain of events in a finer-grained task resolution or traditional combat system. For me, those types of consequences are always possible, in pretty much any game, just because logic and the reality of the gameworld dictate they're possible outcomes of events. Not being a PbtA person, I don't expect those sorts of consequences to be directly linked to the resolution system, though.

Again, consequences in some systems aren't consequences of the roll, they are at a meta-level.

 

[pemerton]

About a year ago I started a thread about one of my favourite RPG healing rules:

Here are the healing rules from Greg Stafford's brilliant Prince Valiant RPG (pp 25-26):

All physical damage is taken to Brawn, in increments of one or more coins lost. . . . If your Brawn is reduced, you throw that many fewer coins for Brawn until recovered. The loss represents damage: fatigue, cuts or bruises, a bad headache, etc. . . .

If Brawn is reduced to zero the results are more serious. The character is temporarily helpless and incapable of further successful action. He is out of the story, for a long time or a short time depending on the circumstances, and may have suffered a serious injury.

Usually being brought to zero means the character is simply stunned or exhausted, not seriously wounded, but the Storyteller decides this. Serious injuries should only occur when a deadly weapon has been used, or the character has taken severe damage (impaled by a lance, bitten by a scorpion).

The Storyteller is also in charge of determining the long-term consequences, if any, of injuries. Use common sense, and refrain from maiming characters. . . .

If a character has not been brought to zero, he has suffered only trivial injuries, even if stabbed or poisoned. He will recover all points of Brawn lost after a brief period of time determined by the Storyteller, usually a few hours. Any success with the Healing skill permits full recovery after a few minutes rest.

Characters brought to zero have taken more significant damage. The Storyteller determines the extent of the damage. They may be able to recover on their own, or they may need the Healing skill for any improvement to take place.

A use of the Healing skill in cases where a character has been brought to zero returns one Brawn point for each head thrown. . . .

If Healing is not available, resting can bring recovery from zero Brawn. Recommended recovery times from zero Brawn are: one week of game time, if the Storyteller feels the injuries are serious, or one hour; if the injuries are from bruising or other less permanently damaging effects, such as minor smoke inhalation.

The Storyteller may need to determine partial, progressive recovery from zero without Healing. Follow the usual rule of awarding half the character’s coins for partial recovery. Thus for serious injuries, restore half of the character’s initial Brawn after three and a half days. Restore half the character’s Brawn after thirty minutes for trivial injuries (rounding .5 Brawn up).

The Storyteller may reduce these times to keep the story going, or increase them for the sake of realism. For example, if the character refuses to rest, greatly increase the time needed for recovery. . . .

If the Storyteller feels it necessary, he may state that a character at zero Brawn is severely injured, not just exhausted or stunned. The character may even be dying. This is where the Healing skill becomes critical.

A character who is badly injured may be in danger of heart failure, suffocation, or bleeding to death, and is obviously at risk in terms of shock or infection. Normally any success with Healing will stop bleeding or infection, but the Storyteller must assign a Difficulty factor if the character has been lying on the field of combat for hours or days, or is in a hazardous environment, such as a filthy dungeon.

Seriously injured characters who gain no Healing may still recover. A Brawn throw with a Difficulty factor of at least 3 can be made to see whether the character dies or survives by nature of a hardy constitution. Bad conditions for recovery such as being left in the hot sun for days, ought to make the Difficulty Factor even worse. As in real life, only the strong will survive such an ordeal.

Death may be inevitable under certain rare occasions. For example, a fall from the highest tower of Camelot is fatal to any character. . . . The Storyteller always decides whether or not death occurs in a given situation (and it should only occur when absolutely necessary). If the Storyteller wishes to kill your Adventurer, he has the power to do so, but this sort of behavior violates the cooperative spirit of the game. Normally death is not an important part of Prince Valiant.

Being brought to zero Brawn in personal combat or battle never means death, but if a ruthless enemy is around and actively takes the trouble to finish the helpless character off, death logically results. Storytellers are advised to give enemy characters more important tasks than going about finishing off helpless Adventurers.​

When I first read these rules, I wasn't sure about them. Most RPGs I'm familiar with have stricter rules for determining severity of injuries, recovery time and the like.

But in play these rules actually turn out to work very well. Injury and recovery just become more tools the GM can deploy in the management of consequences and pacing.

But I play other RPGs too. For instance, I find Classic Traveller quite interesting, because (if they survive the first hit) a player can allocate the dice to their physical stats (which are the "hp" reservoir for a Traveller character) as they see fit; and so can opt to go down early (but with only a light(ish) wound) or to stay up (but risking the next hit being death).

 

[Blue]

It's interesting where the "Health/Damage/Wounds" mechanic goes beyond combat. There was some great examples earlier from Spire and Heart among others.

I want to use Masks: A New Generation as an example as it's one I enjoy personally. It's a teen superteam game, with focus from heroics to drama. In many superhero subgenres death of a super isn't on the table as a regularly possible event, and the health system reflects that. This isn't Invincible, it's Young Justice or Teen Titans.

You have five conditions you mark off when you "take damage". But that "damage" could be getting hit by a thrown mailbox or getting shot down by your crush when you ask them to the prom. Each of the conditions: Angry, Afraid, Guilty, Hopeless, and Insecure, have penalties to certain types of Moves (think a palette of umbrellas of actions) until you deal with them.

And each has tailored ways to clear them, usually in bad/poor decisions/self-destructive way that feed back into the drama of what's happening.

I think one of the points about consequences that some who play mostly traditional games are missing is that a big part of these games is "Play to find out", and that includes the GM. Consequences being spawned drive plot, not just are adjacent to it. Clearing consequences causes actions which take the game in unexpected ways. Proactive players choosing what to do, be it pushing against something bad that will happen if they don't act or furthering their own goals, inform much of what traditional DMs have plotted out ahead of time. Not thinking you need the consequences to help is probably true -- you probably are running games with traditional plot instead of a play-to-find-out. It's a very different style.

 

[thefutilist]

I think one of the points about consequences that some who play mostly traditional games are missing is that a big part of these games is "Play to find out", and that includes the GM. Consequences being spawned drive plot, not just are adjacent to it. Clearing consequences causes actions which take the game in unexpected ways. Proactive players choosing what to do, be it pushing against something bad that will happen if they don't act or furthering their own goals, inform much of what traditional DMs have plotted out ahead of time. Not thinking you need the consequences to help is probably true -- you probably are running games with traditional plot instead of a play-to-find-out. It's a very different style.

Eh there’s at least four common approaches to plot creation.

One: The GM has the plot planned out

Two: The GM (maybe + players) create a situation and the plot emerges from that

Three: The GM has vague notions of beats they want to hit but otherwise improvises the plot to make it dramatic and exciting.

Four: As three but the GM doesn’t have any notions of the beats they want to hit.


Play to find out, can mean two or four, and distinguishing between them can be difficult. As a general rule, if the GM is improvising dramatic facts off the back of failure, then we’re in zone four.

So if we’ve established that the NPC has captured your brother and the in scene resolution is dealing with whether you can free him, who lives and dies, then maybe we’re doing two?

If we haven’t established the NPC has captured your brother but a resolution consequence means that he has (and it establishes that he did so retroactively), then we’re probably in four.

Anyway you'll see PbtA games run in style two and four. You'll see a lot of trad games run in styles one, two and three.

 

[Tonguez]

To me, those things are still "consequences of damage". If you have a twisted ankle (damage), you're slower, more likely to trip rushing down stairs, and may have to leave behind a wounded friend or heavy treasure in order to escape -- no special resource is typically required to make those things true in my games.

But some more narrative version, along the lines of what you describe, is indeed the what I initially thought people may have been referring to when they spoke of consequences, although I also wondered if it included things totally divorced from injury. For example, being humiliated by your foe's superior skill, giving in to taunts or losing confidence so that your magic sword no longer responds to your needs.

yeah consequences dont have to be Physical. Social and Mental impacts can be modelled too so a combat could result in the consequence of "Socially humiliated", "driven by rage" or "arrested by the city watch"

some optional rules allow consequences to be applied to the environment eg you manage to dodge the fireball but now the area is "abalze and spreading", in superhero combat you might shift your consequence to the environment as 'collateral damage' - (later invoked by the GM as falling debris)

 

[Fenris-77]

One of the things like a lot about the Resistance Engine that Rowan, Rook, & Decard use for their games is how it bakes this idea right into the core mechanics - all sorts of things get hurt, not just your body.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's also the take Storypath takes on its effects; even physical effects don't just automatically translate into damage levels, or not damage levels alone.

 

[aramis erak]

I like several methods...

CT/MT/MgT1/MgT2 and some YZE games damage as temp reductions in the physical atts.

I like also L5R (1e-4e) HP in rows, penalties for each row. Several others do likewise: Decipher Trek, Arrowflight 1E... but it's cumbersome in practice for large skirmishes.

FFG Star Wars, L5R 5e, Alien, T2K4e: small pool of HP, crits when you exceed it.

Prime Directive 1e: low double digit att-derived LDC (lethal damage capacity); penalties at ½ and ¼ max. SDC (stun) works the same. death occurs by going over capacity... and then not being stabilized in time. We houseruled that double SD is chunks; the math works that double means immediate surgery (starting that round) is needed to save them, we had a case where the repeater phaser lethal crit sent the zoolie target from 7 of 8 to 28 of 8... We ruled him vaporized.

 

[SableWyvern]

I think one of the points about consequences that some who play mostly traditional games are missing is that a big part of these games is "Play to find out", and that includes the GM. Consequences being spawned drive plot, not just are adjacent to it. Clearing consequences causes actions which take the game in unexpected ways. Proactive players choosing what to do, be it pushing against something bad that will happen if they don't act or furthering their own goals, inform much of what traditional DMs have plotted out ahead of time. Not thinking you need the consequences to help is probably true -- you probably are running games with traditional plot instead of a play-to-find-out. It's a very different style.

Just because consequences aren't generated directly by the mechanics doesn't mean the consequences don't occur.

If the King forbids the PCs from taking his daughter into battle, and they disobey, they may suffer the consequences of the King becoming vengeful, especially if his daughter is killed or injured. I don't need the system to tell me that the players suffer "success with consequences," -- the PCs engage with the daughter, then with her father, they then get into a fight (who knows why?) and we see that the daughter is injured. The consequences follow naturally from the decisions that have been made and the outcomes of those decisions. None of that is predictable in advance; one die roll indicating one slightly different reaction or response or outcome at any given point could have driven the entire game in a different direction.

My games are full of unexpected consequences -- but they emerge from the interaction of various moving parts that can't possibly be predicted in advance. Nothing that's happened in six months of play has been anything I've even been able to guess at more than a few sessions in advance, and I have absolutely no idea what the players will be doing or what the state of the world will be six or twelve months in real time from now. And that will all be due to decisions and consequences -- without a single die roll ever giving the result, "you succeed, with consequences."

One of the biggest draws of RPGs for me is emergent story and the fact that I, as GM, don't know what's going to happen and can be just as surprised as the players, if not more so.

 

[Blue]

Just because consequences aren't generated directly by the mechanics doesn't mean the consequences don't occur.

Very true, but absolutely irrelevant to the conversation about consequences feeding plot in play to find out RPGs.

If the King forbids the PCs from taking his daughter into battle, and they disobey, they may suffer the consequences of the King becoming vengeful, especially if his daughter is killed or injured. I don't need the system to tell me that the players suffer "success with consequences," -- the PCs engage with the daughter, then with her father, they then get into a fight (who knows why?) and we see that the daughter is injured. The consequences follow naturally from the decisions that have been made and the outcomes of those decisions. None of that is predictable in advance; one die roll indicating one slightly different reaction or response or outcome at any given point could have driven the entire game in a different direction.

Sure, not sure why you are bringing it up in response to play-to-find-out RPGs. Natural consequences of play exist in all RPGs and don't have anything to do with consequences generated mechanically.

My games are full of unexpected consequences -- but they emerge from the interaction of various moving parts that can't possibly be predicted in advance. Nothing that's happened in six months of play has been anything I've even been able to guess at more than a few sessions in advance, and I have absolutely no idea what the players will be doing or what the state of the world will be six or twelve months in real time from now. And that will all be due to decisions and consequences -- without a single die roll ever giving the result, "you succeed, with consequences."

Yes, you are running a traditional GM style RPG. Which again, isn't germane to the conversation.

Your experiences, and the types of RPGs you run, are not some universal constant that there cannot be other types of games that espouse other GMing styles.

One of the biggest draws of RPGs for me is emergent story and the fact that I, as GM, don't know what's going to happen and can be just as surprised as the players, if not more so.

And yet you seem to be pushing again RPGs that have rules and resultant playstyles that provide mechanical support for exactly what you claim to enjoy. Everything you describe still exists in play to find out RPGs, and in addition there is mechanical support for twists and turns in your emergent story.