A multi-layered "hp" system

[Mangoose]

I've been thinking about a more radical departure from the typical whittling-down-hp model. It's slightly inspired by what I remember from the Riddle of Steel system. In my hypothetical system, the attrition aspect would be represented by whittling down a different value, called 'initiative' or 'stamina' or 'energy' or whatever. If you get "hit," you don't actually lose HP but you lose a bit of initiative. Thus, the system seems a bit more realistic in implementation.

Of course I'm not just changing 'hp' to 'initiative' and calling it a day. That's dumb. I would put hp/wounds/health on another abstract layer that is affected by the 'initiative' stat. How? I dunno. Maybe initiative is a protective layer that, depending on your current amount, reduces or avoids damage (e.g. if your initiative is at 50%, you have a 50% chance to dodge or something). Something like that. It's really just an abstract idea in my head at the moment.

The advantage of having such a multi-layered system (which, on a side note, I might have unconsciously drawn from my Operating System design class this semester) is that it's less straightforward than just having a single-layered HP defense and thus allows you to "metagame" a bit more. The player has the choice of whether to focus on decreasing the opponent's initiative, or trying to directly get at the opponent's hp, and as long as the two elements 'initiative' and 'hp' work differently mechanically (as in, not just two identical pools of energy), then there is some tactical variety involved.

 

[Falkner]

How do Operating Systems inspire a multi-layered HP system?

Sounds a bit like the stagger system from the JRPG that shall not be named.

 

[Destroid]

Puts me in mind of white wolfs 'bruising' and 'lethal' damage. They would stack for penalties in some fashion (I don't recall the specifics) and if you reached the end with bruising you were rendered unconscious, with lethal comatose or dead.

 

[Mangoose]

How do Operating Systems inspire a multi-layered HP system?

Mostly just that it taught me to think in abstraction layers, and thus combat does not have to let attacks directly affect health but rather through a higher abstraction layer (the 'initiative' resource).

 

[Shemar]

Well, first of all, HP does not necessarily have a direct conetion to health, at least assuming it stands for "Hit Points" and not "Health Points". It is itself often an abstracted quantity of the creature's (spaceship's, tank's, building's) capability to keep functioning as intended.

Second, there are plenty of games that affect combat capabilities based on the amount of damage a unit has taken. Most RPGs do not as most RPG combat involves two or more dudes whacking at each other with pointy implements, so short of just being lucky the player does not have the capability to completely avoid damage, making such a penalizing system not too viable.

But games like JA2 have significant combat performance penalties for damage.

 

[Mangoose]

Well, first of all, HP does not necessarily have a direct conetion to health, at least assuming it stands for "Hit Points" and not "Health Points". It is itself often an abstracted quantity of the creature's (spaceship's, tank's, building's) capability to keep functioning as intended.

Good point. However this only addresses the 'realism' point I made but not the advantages of a multilayered system...

Second, there are plenty of games that affect combat capabilities based on the amount of damage a unit has taken. Most RPGs do not as most RPG combat involves two or more dudes whacking at each other with pointy implements, so short of just being lucky the player does not have the capability to completely avoid damage, making such a penalizing system not too viable.

But games like JA2 have significant combat performance penalties for damage.

Simply having damage affect combat capability is not the crux of my idea, though. Essentially, 'initiative' is a protective layer over 'health.' You must 'damage' your opponents' initiative in order to do actual wounding damage to the character's health.

Actually it's kind of the opposite of what you're saying. Instead of losing health resulting in decreased combat capability, the objective in my system would be to decrease the opponent's combat capability in order to decrease the opponent's health.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

Sounds like... Halo. No, seriously. Damage shields (which regenerate) -> damage health (which can only be regained with health packs) -> death. Therefore you can shrug off most light damage, and need to be more careful when your shields are low. In my opinion, this is actually more interesting than just stocking up on health and armor throughout a level, and definitely better than regenerating health and shields.

The other game this reminded me of was Ninja Gaiden 2, actually, although it worked differently from your "protective layer" concept. Instead of 2 kinds of "hp," there are 2 kinds of damage: permanent and temporary. After each enemy encounter, the temporary damage will be regenerated, while the permanent damage will remain until the use of a health item or reaching a savepoint (which will regenerate your health the first time it is used). Temporary damage tends to be things received from smaller enemies, like ninjas or soldiers. You could think of this as glancing blows, small cuts, slashes, some small throws, and so forth. This damage can still kill you, mind, but after the encounter it will recover. Permanent damage tends to be things like special moves by the smaller enemy types, or even normal attacks from a larger enemy. I'm not sure precisely how this works, but it's enough that you have to be very mindful of enemy's special attacks since they will have an impact beyond the current encounter.

Anyway, for an RPG, you would likely elaborate on these concepts and make them more complex. Obvious examples would be with the Halo mechanic, certain weapons may do more damage to shields or armor, certain enemies will be more heavily armored or shielded (or maybe both). Freespace 2 had this kind of a system to a degree, actually. You could equip certain guns that targeted a ships hull, shields, and subsystems (targeting, radar, and so forth... rather similar to your "combat capability"). If you could use the shields to power up a weapon or do a special (basically make the shields or "initiative" more than just another layer of hp or armor or what have you - although then this just get's closer towards it being stamina), but risky attack that could lead to some interesting scenarios.

The temporary/permanent damage system and it's implications is also very interesting. I think they used it in NG2 to make each encounter as tough as possible, while still making it feasible to go from one encounter to the next at a fast pace. This makes sense for that game, because the focus is the frenetic pace of combat, but it could be interesting to design in an RPG as well.

And that's right, I just brought two console games into the workshop. Further, they're not even RPGs. Hey, at least Freespace 2 made it in too.

 

[Shemar]

Actually it's kind of the opposite of what you're saying. Instead of losing health resulting in decreased combat capability, the objective in my system would be to decrease the opponent's combat capability in order to decrease the opponent's health.

Again, you are mixing up the terms HP/damage with Health.

But beyond that, I unless you can provide a deeper example, it just reminds me of EVE online where first you take down the shield, then the armor then you start hitting the hull. Is that what you mean by "multi-layered"? Because that is really not that different from saying at 30% damage effect A happens, then at 60% damage effect B comes into play. Then you just take the top 30% of HP and call it "Initiative", then the next 30% call it "Health" and so on. That is not really layers.

The poster above me has a similar view, so I won't elaborate further.

 

[Mangoose]

Anyway, for an RPG, you would likely elaborate on these concepts and make them more complex.

Definitely. Right now it's just a high level abstract idea that's been bouncing around my head.

Again, you are mixing up the terms HP/damage with Health.

I'm not. Health = 0 results in dead character. Initiative = 0 results in alive character that has very little defensive capability.

Now, I didn't say that you NEED to move through the layers sequentially.

Read:

[How? I dunno. Maybe initiative is a protective layer that, depending on your current amount, reduces or avoids damage (e.g. if your initiative is at 50%, you have a 50% chance to dodge or something).

...

The player has the choice of whether to focus on decreasing the opponent's initiative, or trying to directly get at the opponent's hp.

Actually, reading Occasionally Fatal's writing more in-depth, the Freespace 2 example is very similar to what I was thinking about.

You'd have a wide variety of combat options:
A) Use attacks that damage initiative, and THEN use attacks that damage health. The straightforward way.
B) Use attacks that damage health in the first place, and ignore initiative. Riskier, but perhaps quicker.
C) Any combination along those lines. Perhaps you want to focus on both equally. Perhaps you want to focus on initiative and then switch over at a certain point due a changing tactical situation.

What I'm trying to do is give players more resources to fight over and control.

 

[villain of the story]

I like the following from this thread:

(1) Pscyhological aspects and challenges involve the urges one could resist or submit to perform premature moves, the ability to maintain one's attention span and the ability to maintain initiative. For example, imagine an opponent who is trying your patience by stalling and feinting or keeping the initiative (that is, having you submit to his domination by making you wait for him to attack and to give you a reason to respond) while not using it and waiting for you to lose your patience and act prematurely, opening yourself to master strikes, ie. one hit one kill deals if you don't counterattack properly, with very little room to break off and retreat if you don't know how to respond. At the end of each turn and based your actions or inaction, you get cumulative increases (or decreases) to a few derived stats dealing with these.

...

(4) Initiative is a little more than physically being in the offence or defence. One can hold the initiative while letting the opponent act. I explained this a little in the example above. When holding the initiative, you are in the dominant position, leaving the opponent in an uncertain state of mind, making guesses and trying to figure out how to win the initiative back from you.
...

For instance, every character has an Impulse pool that fills up at the end of every turn without a real engagement and further up when subjected to weakly performed single engage-and-breakoff attacks (which don't count as a real engagement) intended to probe or harrass. It's derived from a Will Power attribute (in the same league as Strength and Endurance) and experience. Larger the pool, more patience and self-controlling a combatant is.

...

When an encounter drags on in uncertainty, several turns passing without a real engagement and with lots of probing and harassing, these pools fill up, obviously. When you have a full pool, you must roll against the impulse at the end of every turn to stay focused and to refrain from making premature, "impulse" attacks. At that point, your mental fatigue increases whether you pass or fail an impulse roll at the end of a turn, bringing penalties to observation and Indes. Thus, you need to stay sharp. If you have the initiative, this is softened up a little bit (one of the reasons you'll want to have the initiative).

 

[Destroid]

A little reading about the MMA fighting game UFC undisputed reveals they have a system in place in which your fighter (in career mode) has a variable 'condition' (to represent how much endurance the fighter has). Entering a competition with low condition results in your character being easier to beat as it will not be able to continue operating at a high pace for the duration of the match/take as many hits/etc

Kind of similar to what you are thinking?

 

[DraQ]

How? I dunno. Maybe initiative is a protective layer that, depending on your current amount, reduces or avoids damage (e.g. if your initiative is at 50%, you have a 50% chance to dodge or something). Something like that.

Focusing on damage reduction is just dumb, but probabilistic damage avoidance sounds about right. The concept is called fatigue and has been used in many games to a varying degree of success. Wizardry, TES, Arcanum, you name it. In Wizardry 8, all hits, even non-penetrating ones, as well as active dodges and pretty much all actions deplete fatigue which in turn causes character to accumulate offensive and defensive penalties.

In Morrowind fatigue also affeccts performance dramatically including application of all passive and active skills.

In all three games mentioned having 0 fatigue means incapacitation and dire risk of death while in combat.

It's really just an abstract idea in my head at the moment.

I think that starting thinking about what is ultimately a simulationist mechanics from abstraction is malpractice when it comes to game design.
You aren't devising some cool abstract shit here - you're trying to portray what relevant happens when a guy hits another with a sword in a possibly neat, elegant and efficient manner codeable. You shouldn't start with abstract layers and wondering what you can use them for - it's just ass backwards - starting with combat and wondering what kind of abstractions may come in handy is so much more sound approach.

Of course, I'm not saying that layers won't be useful here, but typically you want to ask the question first before you attempt to formulate an answer.