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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9150240" data-attributes="member: 7040941">I think what matters more than anything is internal consistency. It doesn't matter if you're going full Nintendo aesthetic or gritty grimsouls suffering sim; if theres an inconsistency, and in particular one severe enough to come up in play either regularly or in a pivotal moment, then it doesn't matter what your aesthetics or mechanics are like, the gameworld isn't going to be as effective as it could be. This was something I had to tackle with my game's take on HP; I started out renaming it to Composure, and positoning it as not being any sort of actual, significant physical wounds. Composure, as the name implies, is simply your basic capability to defend yourself and keep up the fight. While minor wounds can be a part of what happens as Composure dwindles, no character is considered to have taken a "true" wound just because they lost their Composure. As such, when one drops to 0CP mechanically, they are not dead and are still able to act...mostly. Dropping to 0 will cut your speed down to 1 Hex per turn in Combat, and halve your party's Pacing (travel speed) if they can't carry you or put you on a mount. Additionally, you lose the ability to react, making it nearly impossible to defend yourself (there's actually a growing rigmarole you can go through if you're going hyper offensive, but thats pretty niche), which leads us into the next solution. Now, while this nixes the whole HP=meat problem, as well as disincentivizes yoyo healing, it does leave open the question of how death is threatened and how actually getting hurt is represented; ie, that internal consistency where danger actually makes sense and correlates to how it would be in real life, if abstracted through mechanics. Solving that conundrum actually came about as the confluence of solving a few different concurrent problems. The initial root problem was weapon diversity. I was starting with the assumption of the 3 basic damage types that DND uses, and I needed a way to make weapons feel differentiated at a base level (I was already assuming my extensive Crafting mechanics, but I wanted something more core as a foundation). So what I came up with was expanding the damage types into damage type combos. Ie, Blunt/Slashing is its own damage type. That started the ball rolling, and as I kept thinking on it I came to the conclusion that physical damage needed to, as Magic is going to do, enable different Status Conditions tied to the damage types. (Ala Pokemon basically) With that, it became pretty easy to flesh out weapons at a core level, and now before Crafting is even taken into account Weapons have become about as indepth as spells (which to be clear are not the same kind of spells we see in DND; mine are much simpler). The issue with this though was that, initially, I was having trouble coming up with different conditions I could tie to all these damage types. The solution there is what ended up looping in the Composure problem: Status Conditions are now called Wounds, and just by contextualizing them in that way, I not only opened up the design space for both weapons and magic, but also restored the necessary physical damage that the game had removed.So now how it works essentially is that Wounds can potentially happen at any time depending on how a fight goes (they're primarily inflicted through my Momentum system, but some are saving throw based as well), and when one drops to 0CP, they automatically take a Wound if they get attacked, with the wound correlating to whatever kind of attack, weapon, or spell they got hit with. Most Wounds deal damage over time, in addition to their other effects, and those that don't usually have pretty big damage coming with them. If the character at this point takes an amount of damage equal to their normal max CP, they then die. However, when a character has dropped to 0CP, any attacking individual has the option to take a Killing Blow against them, and kill them immediately. And with how its been run thus far, its proven good practice for the GM to, in general, never assume a monster will assume a Killing Blow as part of their attack, whereas PCs are assumed to unless they say otherwise, even after the fact. Which all makes sense; my game is fast paced and can be pretty lethal (in both directions), so giving the PCs a reprieve against getting one-shotted against most enemies is just good sense, as by the time that glove comes off the PCs are presumably going to be on top of keeping themselves in fighting shape, and if they aren't, well, sucks to suck as the saying goes. So long story short, while how my game models this isn't necessarily close to real life (or may be it is; i haven't really given it much thought), it is internally consistent. Between the above, as well as the fact that Composure is a saving throw type in of itself, that characters use not just as a modifier to make throws, but as a sliding DC for any Composure throws they make other characters do, its never really going to feel like Composure is this abstracted thing that doesn't make sense, at least in the context of the gameworld. And those are just the two big mechanical things that contribute to this. In a more meta design sense, Ive also got some useful symmetry going on. Composure and Stamina are already essentially paired; they make sense together, alongside Wounds, as a collective representation of how worn down and out a character has become physically. Mana however didn't initially have a pairing, and while you can squint and see it make sense pairing with Composure, it doesn't really. At least not in a satisfying way. Eventually, I came up with the new Energy Acuity, which was a result of needing to expand my Attribute list and give myself more room for Skills. This not only gave me a synergistic pairing for Mana, but also solved a bunch of neat problems. Acuity for instance is your Passive Perception, and also serves as your essential "power" to utilize your Charisma and Intuition (the new attribute) skills. It also gave me a way to firmly root Summoner and Psionic characters (as opposed to Martials and Casters) in the same general character development loops as other character types. And all of this together, among other things Im too tired to recall atm, all contribute to that internal consistency. All of this incidentally is also a great big example of my design philosophy that focuses on integration. All of these things I described are pretty tightly bound together with the expectation that they'll be feeding back on each other as the gameplay loops kick in. While it sounds convoluted to explain a greatly interwoven web of mechanics and aesthetics, in practice its been a dream, or so my playtesters say anyway, given its incredible they stick with it with how radically the system has diverged and diversified in scope from where I started.</blockquote>

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