I did play a great RPG once, I think it was Skies of Arcadia on the Dreamcast, anyway, it had an item called "panacea" that would cure anything, even death. It was an incredibly rare item, and you got it early on in the game. I finished the game without using it though, because the pack rat in me just didn't want to part with it, and I did almost anything to avoid using it. But it was there to bail me out if needed.
But, I don't think that is necessarily the answer either. Most games will allow the player to have some kind of affordable item to recover health. This item might be something the player always has lots of on him. In the poisoning case, make him use it - a lot of it - but let him get out of the situation and face the pain of spending a lot of money to replenish his supply. Or, in the case of luck/skill/force/character points or whatever it might be - those are always prized and difficult to come by, so using one always hurts. Even it just hurts pride, you always try to not use them if you can help it. So, the lack of planning is punished, a challenge is maintained, a price is paid, but the player wasn't completely screwed. That's all I mean by flexibility. This can be adapted to almost any circumstance, even the internal bleeding senario, where health is being rapidly lost, there shouldn't only be the one way to save the life, but there should certainly be a price to be paid if the most expedient method isn't used or the player failed to properly equip/plan for situation.
I just don't know about allowing a situation like the player getting shot in the eye by a sniper. All games, regardless of genre, are meant to reward player skill. In a completely realistic game, yes, anyone could die at any moment just like in real warfare, but how is that fun? how does that reward a player for the time invested to master the game? Does that really encourage heoric actions and add something to the game? Or will you lose a long time player who just says "screw it" after a pointless and possibly unavoidable death?

Some thoughts:

Type1 - One-time decisions (Preparations):
1) selecting a landing location
2) selecting crew members to go with
3) selecting items for their inventories

Type2 - On-the-fly decisions (insert single word description here):
1) deciding whether to use an inventory item or not
2) moving on or leaving a crew member behind
3) (Please insert other decisions...)


Both types of decisions are fun. I am not putting one as more important than the other. But my gut feeling is that Type2 is more important.


In your grenade example, deciding whether to bring a surgery kit belongs to Type1. Several questions regarding the specific example:
- Does the surgery kit get consumed once it is used?
- How often will you need to use the surgery kit?
- If you get grenaded again, can you use it again?
- Is it a no-brainer to use the kit if you have it? (Thus eliminating Type2 decisions)
- What else can the surgery kit be used?


The above questions all lead to the following:
In a fantasy RPG, when you cast heal, you are making a Type2 decision, because the resource (MagicPoint) could have been used for other spells (assuming that MP doesn't regen like it is free in some RPG). In other words, what is the opportunity cost of using the surgery kit, given that you already have the kit?


Do you think that the new feature will add more to Type1 or Type2 decisions? If it is adding to Type1, will that eliminate some Type2 decisions or add more Type2 decisions?

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Original post by Estok Some thoughts: Type1 - One-time decisions (Preparations): 1) selecting a landing location 2) selecting crew members to go with 3) selecting items for their inventories Type2 - On-the-fly decisions (insert single word description here): 1) deciding whether to use an inventory item or not 2) moving on or leaving a crew member behind 3) (Please insert other decisions...)

Wow, great analysis and breakdown. Thanks!

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Both types of decisions are fun. I am not putting one as more important than the other. But my gut feeling is that Type2 is more important.

There will certainly be more type two choices, so that at least makes them more important in terms of defining your overall play experience.

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In your grenade example, deciding whether to bring a surgery kit belongs to Type1. Several questions regarding the specific example: - Does the surgery kit get consumed once it is used?

No, but in this case it'd be a bulky backpack one crewmember would have to carry around.

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- How often will you need to use the surgery kit?

If I used the more detailed combat model, it would depend on the type of attacks you faced and how well armored you were. Is the level an old military base with lethal defenses? Are there monsters with monofilament tentacles? Pirates with plasmacasters?

Above all, what are you wearing in terms of armor? If you were fighting something that could do 60% of your HP in one single hit (breaking past all armor) you'd be receiving near fatal wounds which would have attendant status effects (60% over time, however, works like normal HP loss in most games). The field surgery kit would restore the character back to full health in maybe 3 to 5 real-time minutes, meaning you'd have to guard it while a doctor used it to operate on the battlefield.

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- If you get grenaded again, can you use it again?

It would depend on the seriousness of the wound (light, moderate, severe, traumatic) and the tech level of the kit. Characters have both a Health and a System (a second set of HP reflecting internal health). Wounds reduce both, but while the field surgery kit restores Health, it only partially restores System (more the higher the tech level).

After that, the personality of the character comes into play: All are combat ready after light wounds, most after moderate, bezerker / heroic types after serious, and cyborgs (accessible when NPCs are of extreme loyalty) and one mercenary race after traumatic. For those not ready, it takes in game days to regenerate System.

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- Is it a no-brainer to use the kit if you have it? (Thus eliminating Type2 decisions)

This I'm not sure about. You never want to include a default decision that be stupid not to take, because what kind of choice is that.

I think the field surgery kit's purpose would be to stabelize an NPC, remove progressively debilitating status effects and stop an any NPC you come across from dying. It would be an encumberance tradeoff. Rather than a backpack full of ammo or gear, the NPC would be lugging this thing around plus some light gear and maybe a scanner or weapon.

You might decide not to use it if you had some other healing means (say if you were fighting aboard a ship and were right next to the medlab). Med packs heal surface HP damage and take care of light wounds automatically, and can work wonders for moderate and even severe in skilled hands IF there are no special status effects along with the wound (concussion, internal hemorraghing, nanophage, etc.) But Moderate and above wounds with complications require a medbay or field surgery kit.

If you didn't carry one an alternate strategy would be to rely one highly skilled (and thus more expensive and high value) NPCs to modify the effects of more mundane items like health packs and stims; have easy access to medical facilities, either aboard your ship or near an allied civilization; or have serfs and clones you just really don't care about.

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- What else can the surgery kit be used?

It can be deconstructed for base nano (basically item creation points). It could be used as a battery to solve environmental puzzles (maybe powering a door or laser drill). Or it could be cannibalized for parts, like all equipment, in this case yeilding a few monofilament knives, a bioscanner, a battery, container of nanites and a drug fabricator.

It could be bartered, used as a pressure trigger on floor switches or to block a closing door. I hadn't planned on this but just thinking right now I do have an Unarmed (Improvised) skill, so maybe you could throw it at someone or use it as a weapon or shield.

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The above questions all lead to the following: In a fantasy RPG, when you cast heal, you are making a Type2 decision, because the resource (MagicPoint) could have been used for other spells (assuming that MP doesn't regen like it is free in some RPG). In other words, what is the opportunity cost of using the surgery kit, given that you already have the kit?

Again, excellent question. I THINK it might be NPC time more than anything else. Operating the kit would take a skilled team member who isn't getting hit by enemy fire or some environmental challenge like hard radiation. This is one less person shooting or hacking or engineering or whatever. It could also be energy points, which power weapons, suits and equipment.

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Do you think that the new feature will add more to Type1 or Type2 decisions? If it is adding to Type1, will that eliminate some Type2 decisions or add more Type2 decisions?

Adding a more complex combat model I think would increase attention on preparation and information gathering (Type1), but it will also enhance tactical positioning and making the decision of which NPCs currently equip guns or scanners , which would be on-the-fly decisions (Type2).

Not having the kit would mean that you'd need to either create a crew of meatshields you don't care about, get better equipment, or keep your avenues of retreat open for medivac. Having it would mean that you'd save NPCs, and possibly return them to combat right after highly debilitating wounds.

Wow, the one after the other cool idea pops out. And like most of the others it sounds like music in my ear. And I hear others say making it more realistic takes away the fun, this aint entireley true, it all depends on how the creator of the game implements the idea he has.

I can imagina this being a great feature for being more immersive and making the experience more fun, and it creates again more situations the player can strand in and making the game more diverse, by adding options like this.

In one word :

Saweeettttaaa !!!

Well i will summarize some of the possibilitys i see for second choice.
1)you stop the mission to return to the ship.
2)second you treat him while on battlefield
3)You leave him behind to return later
4)You split up your group(somenone for example could guard the wounded or bring him back)

Choices of treatment:
a) you give somebody a full treatment healing him completely,
this might take a long time thus endangering your group to be attacked
or endanger the mission success.
There might also might be treatment which itself only takes medium time however the treated person might take a long time of rest to recover. Such you could go on to choice number 3) or 4).

b)giving someone incomplete treatment . You patch up somebodies wound so he will be still in weakened condition but can go on
or you give him a drug something delaying/slowing the effect of a poison.( sometimes he might be still unable to move on but in every case you gained time)

c)Tranquilizer might temporarily restore somebody however if he exceed his limits to much or the effect wears of before real treatment can be given it might even turn worse than before.
(you might also modify some power enhancing suit to
compensate the decreased abilities, however the suit might run out of power)

choices of leaving someone behind:
a)you go on without caring about your teammate.
b) you set up defensive mechansim like fighting drones, robotic weapons etc
c)you give him some basic treatment
d)You camouflage your comrade and hope he will not be discovered
e)You go on to possibility 4) and live someone behind to guard your comrade.

I think that a system like this is great as long as you keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to make it fun (but you already know that Wav :P

You mentioned a "miracles" system in some other thread... it applied to engineering miracles, but it could also work here. Someone mentioned a game where you had limited life-saver items. Maybe you can make it so that even the most unprepared and unluckiest of all parties can still use up one of its "miracles" to save one of their comrades (oh and what about when you have only 1 miracle but 2 people to save? interesting decisions :)

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Original post by Wavinator This is strictly in regards to NPCs or PCs in a multiplayer environment... In the combat system I'm cooking up for a science fiction RPG I was looking at adding an assortment of interesting status effects. It would be based on the percentage of damage you or the NPCs had taken in any one hit and depend on the type of weapon. Some choices, such as a bleeding status which constantly drained hit points, seemed acceptable since gamers have seen them in other games. Others, like being internally injured, were much more suspect. I could imagine having an NPC ally with special conditions attached to their injury might pose enormous strategic tradeoffs, particularly if there was an integrated personality and morale system governing the party's reactions. For example: You're in some alien ruins when your group is attacked and your most developed and beloved NPC ally is hit with a grenade weapon. But because he took massive damage in one shot, rather than being able to just heal him, you can see that he's got something like "Injured (Internal) -5% if moved" status over his health bar. Theoretically, the status would tell you that the NPC is internally injured and if you move him without treating him with a field surgery kit (which takes time) and a medic you'll injure him even further, possibly even kill him. So in this situation you'd maybe pause the game (and talk to your mates if it were multiplayer) and decide whether or not you can hold off the onslaught while he's patched up. If you skimped on a field surgery kit to hold more grenades you might find yourself in a Black Hawk Down situation, waiting for a medivac with enemies all around. The upside is that you could get into some intense situations and have to make really hard tradeoffs, especially if morale depended on who was left behind. The downside is that the interface would have to be crystal clear and it would be a real shift from what most RPG gamers are used to. I think the toughest thing we normally deal with is poison or paralysis type effects which can be remedied with a single recovery item. The player would never get such a status effect in single player because I don't think being debilitated is very interesting. What do you think?

I think you should avoid permanent effects.
If a character you care about gets some permanent injury, a true gamer knows the only way to react. "Load a savegame and avoid this situation".

Not much point in that, is there? ;)

I like the idea if it can be treated later on (after the mission, back on your spaceship. It's sci-fi after all, so why shouldn't they be able to fix serious injuries without any permanent penalties?)

The temporary part, like bleeding, or just risking death if he moves around too much are cool ideas, and forces the player to react to the situation. Just don't make it a permanent thing.

Just thought I would add props to that idea in the original post... can imagine that being a good mod for sommit - Ghost Recon would probably suit that kind of thing pretty well.

Someone asked why an NPC getting debilitating injury in FMV was more acceptable than someone getting it in game. The simple answer is becuase when it happens in an FMV you are sure you can still win becuase it was meant to happen. When it happens in-game the player may be left unsure as to whether he has already failed the mission and it is pointless to continue or not.

Like you said you should never put the player in a position where they feel they are already doomed due to a decision they made eons ago. E.g. at the beginning of the mission they decided to carry two health packs. Just one room away from thier goal a major NPC is badly wounded and you've already used both. You don't have the ability to take him with you and not enough men to leave a guard with him and complete the mission.

This is frustrating becuase the NPC is not dead, so you can't just forget about him and go on or reload your last save, but you're not sure you can keep him alive. A subconcious idea that keeps us going through a hard game is the belief that there is a way out. It can be very frustrating when after dozens of tries and hours of play you find out the wasn't one.

IMO a couple of possible ways to deal with it are-

>Every member of the team must be able to perform first aid, ie stabilise the condition of the wounded, as long as you're willing to invest a small amount of time(After all, your highly skilled medical doctor may be the first to go down).
>Injury should never totally paralyse a character. It could slow them down greatly, it could make them less accurate and efficient (ie. cost more attempts or more resources to parform same action) but if they are not dead they should still be functional.
>The injured party should always be able to move and keep up with the team (at worst slow them down just enough so they notice it, but not enough to make them sitting ducks).

I also want to mention that while the dying breath rage thing works well for fighting games (due to years of being conditioned by kung fu films) you might needs a couple of extra suspenders to hold up disbelief of the same concept being used in a laser pistol, grenade and etc scenario.

one of my most memorable moments in DOOM (yeah, yeah, FPS! idea is the same though).
I was cowering in a corner of a room at 3% health a shotgun with about 2 bullets and what looked liked 20 assorted monsters waiting round the corner. It was obvious I couldn't make it (not at my puny skill level), didn't mean I wouldn't try though!
I run right into the pack of monsters (screaming the ancient battle cries of all those snowballs who didn't make it to heaven) bobbing and weaving, fireballs zooming past in every direction (hopefully hitting other monsters and starting fights). Out of the corner of my eye what do I spy? a healthpack... spin, duck, *blllrrriiinggg!* , ...feel the rush of life flow into your bloodstream, more boxes...,*blllrrriiinggg!*...,*blllrrriiinggg!*..., ...a corner, ...spin..., ...take cover..., brrreeeaaathee!!
I am Schwaznegger!! I am Rambo of First Blood!!! I am quicksaving even as we speak!!!!!
Fear Me!!!!!!!

Of course this moment would have been totally impossible if it was a Res Evil like system where damage slowed me down.
I'm not against the injury model, I just think that it's so much more exciting if the player always has the chance (no matter how small) to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

For those still following this I just wanted to say thanks and pardon the late reply, I really had to give this some thought.

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Original post by Jotaf You mentioned a "miracles" system in some other thread... it applied to engineering miracles, but it could also work here. Someone mentioned a game where you had limited life-saver items. Maybe you can make it so that even the most unprepared and unluckiest of all parties can still use up one of its "miracles" to save one of their comrades (oh and what about when you have only 1 miracle but 2 people to save? interesting decisions :)

Great point. Miracles ARE actually to either remove a status or increase or decrease any stat in the game, like move speed or armor. So they could work here.

I had not thought of making them like luck points, but rather specific solutions. However, I'm starting to see a need for a "get out of jail free card" given that there are alot of situations you could get into. While I don't quite like the idea of a magic restore that comes from nowhere, I have to appreciate that it's totally unfair to expect people to plan for events in the game with the same level of attention they would if it were real life (and people still fail to plan and DIE in real life).

I'm going to have to revisit the miracles system and see if I can wedge this in, or else create some sort of luck-based system.

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Original post by thelurch Someone asked why an NPC getting debilitating injury in FMV was more acceptable than someone getting it in game. The simple answer is becuase when it happens in an FMV you are sure you can still win becuase it was meant to happen. When it happens in-game the player may be left unsure as to whether he has already failed the mission and it is pointless to continue or not.

Good point, I do see what you mean, although I think its slightly less applicable in open-ended scenarios where you can often come back if you don't have what you need.

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Like you said you should never put the player in a position where they feel they are already doomed due to a decision they made eons ago. E.g. at the beginning of the mission they decided to carry two health packs. Just one room away from thier goal a major NPC is badly wounded and you've already used both. You don't have the ability to take him with you and not enough men to leave a guard with him and complete the mission. This is frustrating becuase the NPC is not dead, so you can't just forget about him and go on or reload your last save, but you're not sure you can keep him alive. A subconcious idea that keeps us going through a hard game is the belief that there is a way out. It can be very frustrating when after dozens of tries and hours of play you find out the wasn't one.

What's very difficult for the design of the open-ended game, and for a situation like this in general, is getting the player to accept a loss. We want to win, mainly because games don't provide us with any alternatives or dramatic support for defeat. Nevermind that in stories and movies the good guys sometimes lose a team mate, get captured, botch the plan or even get into seemingly hopeless decisions. We've been conditioned to think that such situations are reload time.

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>Injury should never totally paralyse a character. It could slow them down greatly, it could make them less accurate and efficient (ie. cost more attempts or more resources to parform same action) but if they are not dead they should still be functional.

I like this because it puts the burden on you to train your people. However, characters are limited to only x skill slots, based on intelligence, so if the combat model is lethal this might become a dominant choice you'd be a fool not to take. Viewed otherwise, it could be a fair risk you take as well.

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>The injured party should always be able to move and keep up with the team (at worst slow them down just enough so they notice it, but not enough to make them sitting ducks).

What if I could figure out some way to always have one character carry another character? This would at least satisfy this requirement without having situations where someone gets grenaded and loses both legs but can somehow (hopping on hands????) still keep up.

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I also want to mention that while the dying breath rage thing works well for fighting games (due to years of being conditioned by kung fu films) you might needs a couple of extra suspenders to hold up disbelief of the same concept being used in a laser pistol, grenade and etc scenario.

You might be right, but wouldn't this be the difference between ripping clips of ammo and being more aggressive vs. being more cautious. And there's also the concept of being in the zone, which we accept for athletes.