Do computer RPG'ers even play any PnP RPG's anymore?

Not meaning to knock anyone, but there's a whole wealth of game design theory and ideas for the roleplaying world already out there in the form of pen and paper RPG's.

Hit Points are a very archaic form of modeling damage that generally is not used anymore.

One system I'm currently working on deals damage on many levels (and this is something I'd only do for a computer based or aided game design). It has the following elements:

Integrity: Measures the structural damage of an object. Example, broken bones, torn ligaments, stress fractures in hull
Shock: Measures the systemic reaction to system failures. For example, going unconscious, cardiac arrest or having a core dump
Critical: Measures damage to systems which are traumatic to the nature of the system. For example, direct hits to heart, brain, poison, fuel or ammo hits
Support: subsystems which are not immediately system threatening but which can be. Example: Blood loss, hunger
Neurologic/Control: Measures the disruption of neurological or I/O processing systems. Example: Pain, disorientation, access problems
Neuromotor/PowerTrain: Measures the disruption of the pathway to motor capability. Example: Paralysis, nerve damage, steering or axle damage.
Fatigue: Loss of Physical Output
Will/NA: Loss of Mental Output

Other than integrity, all Status Systems are systemic...they are not location specific (but rather effect specific). Integrity however is measured location by location. Notice that my system is intended as an abstracted and generic damage system that works for both animate and inanimate objects (which is why you see the slash, and another term).

Each Status System carries with it some consequences to the object. For example, for the Integrity Status, if a certain threshold is reached, that part of the object is no longer functional at all. At slightly lesser points, performance using the damaged part will carry a penalty. For example, if you break your arm, you can't really use it can you? But if you just sprain it, you can use it, but not very well.

Also, the system is not ablative or entirely cumulative. The different systems are based off of different traits. For example, in a human, the Integrity is normally measured by the character's Health and mass, Shock by his Health, and Neurologic by his Focus. When damage is inflicted, it's rating is compared to the target's appropriate Trait, and a Damage Level is calculated. If the same system is hit again, the new damage is not totally cumulative. For example, if you are already heavily in pain, then stubbing your toe is going to send you over the edge into unconsciousness. Anything under half the highest damage done is ignored, and if it is over half, then half of the new damage is applied [ in pseudo code....if( Damage*.5 <= Wound Level) then Wound Level = Wound Level; else Wound Level += .5Damage ]

Anyways, hopefully this gives you ideas. Hit Points are not just unrealistic, they also detract from the game experience. Moreover, I've found in my roleplaying games that hiding the quantitative wound level from the players makes combat much more interesting. Hit points tell you nothing about different damage effects (like being stunned, or being in pain), they tell you nothing about whether something is broken or not, they tell you nothing about blood loss, and saying that you slit someone across the throat means nothing in a HP based system.



[edited by - dauntless on March 30, 2004 4:38:20 AM]

I always liked the bushido blade system. Have know idea how it worked inside but if you managed to hit someone in the head with your sword you killed them. It really was great.

I like the idea of using a percentage to represent your physical condition. You could use that as an overall effectiveness modifier, perhaps tying it into stamina or endurance, while individual injury events would adjust things like dexterity or speed.

The problem with accurately modelling injury and stat penalties is that players have become used to surviving gunshot wounds and axe blows. I remember a huge outpouring of rancor when Rainbow Six offered one-hit kills on both sides of the fight. Especially in an environment of fantasy and whimsy, you will seriously harm the "hero" feeling if you let some jerk with a knife slit an uberPaladin''s throat.

An advantage of HP is simplification. Unless you develop a way to make the player know his complete status(unless you don''t want him to) without looking away from the center of the screen you maybe should stick to a single variable.

I know its tiring and feels old, but old doesn''t means that it isn''t still good.

A complex system like the one Dauntless proposes could be nice but definitly not always. I would get tired of so many variables to count if every game was totally realistic.

So there are alternatives to the HP system but that one is just the most widely known. I tought the same way before comming to this forum Even tought I don''t know why big game companies don''t use different systems more often, they should.

Having at-a-glance status reports is critical in an FPS or other action genre, but in an RPG it might be less essential to the gameplay. After all, if you can manage to model injuries in such a way that a player can "take inventory" by looking at either the character or a simple graphic (The Urban Terror mod for Quake 3 springs to mind), then you''ll still have all the pertinent information readily available.

In fact, in the context of an RPG, I''d rather be able to say, "Okay, my guy has an axe wound to the left leg and his ribs are bruised up pretty badly, but he can still swing a sword pretty well and his healing talisman will have him running again in about twelve seconds," than to say, "He''s got 476 HP left." Accurate wound modelling can make an RPG character even more immersive.

I agree with Iron Chef Carnage.

Damage should be revealed to the player only as a subjective rating. Afterall, when you are injured or sick, do you exactly know how much health you have? If you do, you can sure save a lot on doctors visits by just not going when you know its not serious.

It''s far more interesting to only give players visceral or experiential clues as to how much damage they''ve taken. The pain meter can let them know how much pain they are in...but pain isn''t always a good measure of how close someone is to death (as anyone who''s stubbed their pinky toe can attest). And it''s quite possible to have internal bleeding and not know it till you go into shock. Broken bones are usually obvious, as are gaping wounds or open cuts. Poison isn''t obvious, nor are certain kinds of neurological damage. Hence why I''ve created my damage system the way I have so that it models how damage affects players, and also determines how a player can gauge how much damage he''s taken.

Hence all the more need to get to a Doc when you''ve taken damage, just to make sure. If there''s one thing I hate, it''s players thinking they can keep attacking because they know exactly how much life they have left.

Thanks everyone for your replies =)
There are LOTS of good ideas there.

Iron Chef Carnage, there''s one thing about your reply. I''m not sure if today''s systems are that good... I mean, all they have is some probabilities, and most of them aren''t even half decent, for example I never saw a game where a line of spearmen has the advantage that it should have (you try charging one of those with a sword or some other weapon shorter than the enemies'' spears - you''d get impaled before even getting close). But you''re absolutely right that we should put the processing power and knowledge we now have to good use.

I had this thought when reading Coz''s comment about Dauntless''s system having too many variables. In RPGs you usually have status reports of everything and know all the risks and probabilities of success or failure. It occured to me that a real adventurer wouldn''t have anything like this. It''s really cool when a hero in a movie, being very experienced in battle, can say if they have a chance against the enemy or not, if someone is going to survive a wound, etc. He''s not counting HPs. He uses his intuition mixed with some rational thought. Both of them were learned slowly after countless battle situations. This is done unconsciously most of the time, and it''s how people get better at anything they put an effort to. By having a simple, linear system like an HP gauge you take away the possibility for the human brain to analize patterns and crack the code. What do you think?

(I''ll reply again when I read some other posts more carefully)

Hmm... I'm going to try to summarize all of this in a kind of a pseudo-system. This is how all of these ideas (and a few of mine too) could get together in a real game it's just cuz I like to keep things organized, and to make further comments easier.

- Stamina, lost with each wound and every attack or defence move. If defence takes a lot of stamina, it would be like, by constantly attacking an opponent, you'd wear him down, until he has no energy left and starts making mistakes when defending.

- A simple counter for blood loss. Small wounds would not increase this at all (wounds that don't lose a significant amount of blood). It's commulative, I guess that 2 medium wounds lose as much blood as a big one. Maybe another counter would slowly decrease according to the blood loss, after a threshold the character passes out, and after another he/she dies?

- Integrity, for each body part. When this is lost in some parts some obvious stuff happen, like losing conscious from a knock to the head, or walking slowly from a broken bone in the leg. I read somewhere (an RPG forum I think) that you can still use an arm or a leg with some slashes, it's impossible only if there's a broken bone or really serious cut (so inability to walk or use a weapon only happens after some serious damage).

- Consciousness? This would decrease with the pain from wounds (some could be particularly more painful than others), knocks to the head, and occasionaly from other stuff like poisoning/drugs. After a certain treshold the character is "stunned" and doesn't perform moves as well (maybe sometimes it wouldn't immediately obey some commands), this could happen more often as the consciousness level decreases. After another treshold the character is unconscious.

I'm sure this is missing some stuff. Maybe stuff like poison or burns could have their own special counters for each character, I dunno. Just the non-fatal combat (losing consciousness) brings up a lot of possibilities, like different tactics and battle moves - and you don't exactly have to kill someone and risk being hanged just to steal his gold stuff like that. Blood loss makes bandages and first-aid very important right after a big battle. Stamina would be a kind of a "shield" that must be worn down until one starts to really hit the other guy. Lots of interesting situations =)

Also, how would a system like this be displayed? I'd love to see a game that displays the individual wounds of each character in the character model's skin, but maybe that's a bit too far away. I don't like numbers, bars are ok. Would it be better if there's a bar for each counter? Or a kind of an "overal status" bar?

[EDIT] Forgot to say, I agree that these stats don't increase like 10 times with character development, and that it would be interesting to see a system that doesn't use counters or keeps track of every wound like TechnoGoth said. Dauntless suggested that a wound smaller than half the biggest wound is ignored, this goes well with any system, it seems interesting maybe there's more to this. Iron Chef Carnage, we can't always stick to what the players are used to and what everyone else is doing, game companies close down all the time because they make carbon copies of each others' games

[edited by - Jotaf on April 1, 2004 1:10:00 PM]

Just a small comment on this, but little scratches should count somewhat. I mean, I''m sure we''ve all heard of the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

I don't think staminia being a shield is good. Rather I prefer to think of stamina as fuel. Each move performed reduces stamania, every hit also reduces stamina. There would also be an endurance threshold when stamina drops below this threshold the characters performance drops. So the character has 100 max stamina, a threshold of 50 and current stamina is 25. Meaning the character's performace is only at 50%, they are dodging slower, their hits a weaker, and so on.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I'm a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project: Ambitions Slave


[edited by - TechnoGoth on April 1, 2004 2:13:29 PM]