Insta-heal potions

[DraQ]

I expect you'll find that keeping any system human-legible is going to greatly increase the chance of it making sense and being properly balanced. Humans do work on these things, you know.

(...)

Anyway back on topic. DraQ how do you propose to make a more 'realistic' game non-arbitrary? I mean on the system level, obviously, so don't say 'the player uses good tactics' like I suspect you're going to anyway.

Common sense and some knowledge. It suffices to make sense of real life which any RPG system will probably fall short of in terms of incomprehensible complexity.

If something happens in game that would kill a person IRL, chances are it will kill a character in game. If something in game would cripple a person IRL, chances are it will cripple a character in game. Things without RL counterparts are still human comprehensible if you can describe them to someone by the means typically employed by non-game fiction. Throw in as much sufficiently advanced technology/magic as you need to make the game light and soft enough to be playable (a temple of :insert_deity_here: in the capital, accepting donations of 10000GP or more per single miraculously restored missing limb, for example and infection curing potions). Then you're set.

 

[Johannes]

If something happens in game that would kill a person IRL, chances are it will kill a character in game. If something in game would cripple a person IRL, chances are it will cripple a character in game.

But just how reliable are those chances?

 

[Lord Rocket]

Yeah that's pretty much what I asked you not to do. In game locations etc. aren't really system elements.

OK, here's a situation for you: the player makes a mistake, they've been ambushed. Which system (we'll assume there's only two extremes available here: everyone has 10000000 ablative HPs and ultra realistic almost anything can fuck you up) allows you to fight your way out of that shit without unacceptable losses and probably invoking the F9 key*?
Fundamentally the problem with a realistic system is that the margin of error is much lower and as such there's actually less room for variety in fights. Since everything is so lethal you'll need to use the optimum tactics for an encounter pretty much straight away, or reload and try again. As a general rule this is tedious - getting some good ebb and flow helps keep the tension high - although of course you may disagree.
Fun fact: I remember Black Cat saying she likes that sort of thing in reference to some SMT game or other, so if you do disagree, you must be a weeaboo.

* That's quickload in Doom, I know other games use different keys so feel free to subtitute another if you prefer.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Wat.

Starting combat and losing the game before you do anythnig because the enemy rolled a 20 is stupid. Being shot in the brain without fighting back doesn't constitute combat, it's assassination.

But thematically, there's nothing wrong with allowing it in an hp system like fallout does.

If you keep highest potential HP lower than highest potential damage of weakest effective weapon, yeah.

I was referring to instant kills ignoring remaining health entirely actually. I thought FO had crits like that? Maybe it just seemed that way because eye crits were so overpowered.

It makes for a poor damage model, since it lacks any actual detail, but it's at least mostly correct - it simply uses HP to calculate the chance a hit from given weapon will take you down and accounts for this chance rising if you're already wounded. Not if you know you *can* take a hit, because a probability of a hit, even from an airgun or the rustiest of daggers killing you should never be zero.

Why not? While a small dagger might be able to kill me, one stab is never going to finish off a whale. You could stab it in the eye and not reach the retina, let alone the brain. And even if you hit the brain, it wouldn't be enough damage for a kill. Likewise a dart shouldn't be capable of killing some massive barbarian. Everything aside from that is a matter of odds, but mapping out a possible instant kill for anything with less than 5% chance to kill you seems silly. Might as well add death by lightning storm while travelling.

In any case, even with relatively low HP range, such model is still very lousy due to lack of detail which makes for a boring combat and makes it largely a game of chance. As I said, good for a strategy, where you have hundreds to thousands of troops, excessively bad for an RPG.

There's no reason Hp and detailed wounds should be exclusive. They are in most RPGs because reloading every time your character loses and eye and might as well be dead would suck. But other shit can be included. It's no different than any other status, like poison, paralyisis, slowed, whatever. You can also be bleeding, have a broken arm, or damaged left testicle if you want. At some point the detail is too small to give a fuck. Nobody needs to know when their warrior breaks a nail.

This kind of enemy is special, because it doesn't really have any parts that could be lethally critted. Actually it's the very thing about such enemies that should make them scary - it may be quite horrifying if you have to methodically break or cut them apart till they are physically incapable of doing you harm. And they don't tire.
It also doesn't quite work if they have HPs like everything else, rather than sharply contrasting from everything else on grounds of the combat mechanics. Yeah, I know that they can be blahblah immune to criticals, but it's still not the kind of the impact they should have.

How special that enemy is depends on the game. How many weak points do the undead have? Especially incorporeal undead. Demons? Do trolls give a fuck if they're stabbed in the heart? Werewolves? Plant monsters? Elementals?

And what if the PC doesn't know the enemy has a weakness? Critting a golem and destroying the magical talisman that animates it shouldn't be possible if the PC has no idea such a thing exists.

Ever heard of saying nec Hercules contra plures?
Because it perfectly describes such situations. It also helps balance high level heroes out, without retardedly high level town guards, numerous, but easily defeatable (in mechanics) force making heroes surrender and such.
If you're alone or with small group against an army, you try to bottleneck them and hope you can hold them one-on-one in sequence. And that they don't try to flush you out.

50 enemies one after another amounts to the same thing as 50 at once if the player can't heal in between fights. It's one very long fight where the player will die if he makes more than one mistake, if the player only has room for 1 mistake in a fight. If he's got more room than that, anything less than this kind of thing becomes trivial.

5th one - skill, tactics and avoidance of derping it out, if possible.

This is a copout answer. It basically means it's entirely possible to beat the entire game without ever getting hit. Some tension that would have. 'I almost got hit this one time but I went before the enemy like the other 20 times and killed him first. So exciting!' It's like playing X-Com and being 'skilled' by never leaving your ship and raping every alien that walks out of cover with reaction shots. Because the challenge is in never conceding to your total boredom and looking around a corner.

What it boils down to is this: What are the odds of the enemy hitting the player?
What are the odds of an enemy hit killing the player?

Multiply those two, you now have your difficulty. If the first is too low, the player isn't interested because he'll just reload on the fluke chance something hits him. If the second is too low, he won't care about individual hits. If both are too high, the game is unplayable. So you want a balance between the two. 1 in 20 chance of getting hit with decent skill with a 9 in 10 chance of dying from that hit seems to be what you want. It'd make for shit gameplay where you die without any fear of dying beforehand and without feeling like you fucked up much.

I can't think of a single combat focused game without in combat healing of some sort that kills you in under 3 hits that had any sort of tension at all. Can you?

 

[torpid]

I expect you'll find that keeping any system human-legible is going to greatly increase the chance of it making sense and being properly balanced. Humans do work on these things, you know.

(...)

Anyway back on topic. DraQ how do you propose to make a more 'realistic' game non-arbitrary? I mean on the system level, obviously, so don't say 'the player uses good tactics' like I suspect you're going to anyway.

Common sense and some knowledge. It suffices to make sense of real life which any RPG system will probably fall short of in terms of incomprehensible complexity.

If something happens in game that would kill a person IRL, chances are it will kill a character in game. If something in game would cripple a person IRL, chances are it will cripple a character in game. Things without RL counterparts are still human comprehensible if you can describe them to someone by the means typically employed by non-game fiction. Throw in as much sufficiently advanced technology/magic as you need to make the game light and soft enough to be playable (a temple of :insert_deity_here: in the capital, accepting donations of 10000GP or more per single miraculously restored missing limb, for example and infection curing potions). Then you're set.

Giving gold to restore missing limbs through direct divine intervention strikes me as far more harmful to suspension of disbelief than healing spells or potions.

Also, in your realistic system with realistic crippling, any significant wound would probably lead to a reload, if it doesn't kill you outright. Wound penalties, added to the already increased lethality, would quickly make a fight unwinnable. As Lord Rocket said, the player's character/party would be heavily straitjacketed in the way it fights, and even a small mistake in a minor encounter would lead to a reload.

 

[JarlFrank]

While I mostly agree with DraQ's want for realism, I'd limit it a little. Make it more forgiving than real life, but still add critical hits to organs that are very likely to be lethal and locational damage.

But still, getting critically hit in the head would still royally fuck you up. Solution? Obviously, headshots have a smaller chance to hit than torso shots. Oh, and you can also wear a helmet to protect yourself. Same goes for every other body part: wear armour. There's a reason people invented such nifty things as chainmail, full plate and kevlar vests; if you wear one of these, a hit that would otherwise have been lethal isn't anything more than a bruise. Another cool feature added by locational damage is locational armour. You might want to only wear a breastplate and helmet for more mobility, but then your limbs are less protected and can be wounded more easily. Armour choice actually becomes more than simply adding up numbers to get max armour value. Also, armour should have some kind of HP, since it can get damaged and fall apart. Chainmail especially is very likely to get holes. Now make different armours piercable by different weapons (chain easily gets penetrated by arrows and spears, while plate gets more easily damaged by maces or raven's beaks) and armour weight effects on dodging ability/fatigue and armour choice becomes much, much more complex and interesting than merely wearing the armour with the highest AC.

Also, it would make defensive magic much more interesting and valuable in a fight. Magical shield? Deflection spells? Stoneskin? They'd be some of the most valuable spells around, especially if cast on lightly armoured characters (including the mages themselves).

Also, combat doesn't have to be over after one or two hits. Criticals don't have to be that common. Most hits lead to cuts, which bleed (how much depends on the depth of the cut) and should be bandaged or closed by magic healing (although minor cuts that don't bleed much will stop bleeding naturally). A stab in the stomach doesn't have to be lethal, or hit any organs at all - it'll still be a bitch that should be closed ASAP since it will cause quite a lot of blood loss. Coupled with stamina and the loss thereof leading to lowered combat effectiveness, this can lead to interesting tactics in a game with 6 or 8 characters: there's actually a point to keeping one of your fighters in the reserve so his stamina stays up and he doesn't get wounded, so a wounded and exhausted fighter can pull back and get healed while the fresh guy goes to the frontline and has an easy time with the already weakened enemy.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Going for realism is pretty pointless without removing the reload exploit.

Wat.

Starting combat and losing the game before you do anythnig because the enemy rolled a 20 is stupid. Being shot in the brain without fighting back doesn't constitute combat, it's assassination.

You mean something like the "Enclave Patrol" encounters in Fallout 2? It's a "your soup was poisoned, you die"-style encounter. It should be avoided in games.
One thing that could be done in storyfag games is making the game calculations biased towards the player character. As long as you don't take too many risks and won't do anything stupid, the game won't instant kill you or something like that.
It's not like Drizzit or the Witcher gets killed 10 times in every novel, while still effects of hits are represented in a more believable way than in most cRPGs.

 

[bhlaab]

I think it's a sound gameplay system... you're giving up a resource in order to heal. Problems only arise when these potions stop being a valuable commdity.

 

[Johannes]

I think it's a sound gameplay system... you're giving up a resource in order to heal. Problems only arise when these potions stop being a valuable commdity.

I think worse than that often is, if the time to use the potion is too insignificant.

 

[SkepticsClaw]

Having read all this, I'm intuitively on the side of realism, but in practice it would be difficult to actually make something that's not a real boring chore to play.

In real life, you have fine and minute control over every second of the experience, so if you get your brains smashed out by a mace it's at least in your control. To represent that level of control in an RPG would either require real time with the most absurdly complicated control scheme known to man (separate buttons for head, body, arm and leg movements? yeah, right) or make it all turn based, slow and intrictate like Toribash. With good mechanics I could actually see that working out, but it would be nice to hear some more specific ideas.

A more abstract system is IMO unacceptable, because it's simply not fun to be instakilled without any player control. Oops, Death Knight gets lucky and smashes my head in with a mace? I'm dead. Reload and try again until the rolls favour me. You can't make a combat-focussed game like that; in a game of such incredible danger, the emphasis would clearly be on running away from combat, sneaking, backstabbing and in general not fighting as much as possible. This would be cool (and I'd love to see a game following this pattern), but what it would not be is a replacement for current combat-based RPG mechanics.

As for potions, I don't see anything inherently wrong with them. If it breaks the game, it's been implemented wrongly. Conceptually, in a game in which mages can conjure objects from thin air - a feat requiring such prodigious amounts of energy it would probably wipe out a continent - I don't see potions as absurd. Potions could work by speeding up metabolic rate a hundred fold, or by temporarily creating substitute flesh to fill in wounds, or really in any other way no more inherently stupid than any other 'magical' effect.

Of course if your game does not contain that kind of magic, that's cool. In the kind of ridiculous superhero fantasy D&D represents, potions are just fine.

 

[DraQ]

If something happens in game that would kill a person IRL, chances are it will kill a character in game. If something in game would cripple a person IRL, chances are it will cripple a character in game.

But just how reliable are those chances?

I have always figured typical RPG players to be more intelligent bunch than your typical FPS fans, and FPS fans are usually smart enough to figure out stuff without exact mechanics being handed to them on a silver platter.

Guess I was wrong.

Yeah that's pretty much what I asked you not to do. In game locations etc. aren't really system elements.

OK, here's a situation for you: the player makes a mistake, they've been ambushed. Which system (we'll assume there's only two extremes available here: everyone has 10000000 ablative HPs and ultra realistic almost anything can fuck you up) allows you to fight your way out of that shit without unacceptable losses and probably invoking the F9 key*?

If you're so bent on giving player a margin of error at all cost, why not just give player a perma-godmode? Some margin of error is necessary, but too big margin of error destroys the incentive to care and pay attention.

Fundamentally the problem with a realistic system is that the margin of error is much lower and as such there's actually less room for variety in fights. Since everything is so lethal you'll need to use the optimum tactics for an encounter pretty much straight away, or reload and try again.

This can be counteracted by minimizing filler combat, having non-lethal combat play greater role, good encounter design, and, amusingly more complex mechanics, that while not of much help in itself, can allow for greater player control - persistent die->reload cycles that don't want to go away are indicative of games with little control, that basically turn into a game of chance.

Starting combat and losing the game before you do anythnig because the enemy rolled a 20 is stupid. Being shot in the brain without fighting back doesn't constitute combat, it's assassination.

Maybe you should think about it before starting combat?

There are many situations when you can see the combat coming, in those you cannot, you can still identify things like probable ambush spots.
I do agree that the game shouldn't rape you with no warning (though a subtle, easy to overlook warning you have to specifically look for is perfectly sufficient) but you're overblowing the problem.

In Wizardries there is shitload of things that can autokill or even auto-TPK. Yet the games are perfectly playable and good, with many codexers playing them - even in ironman mode.

Similarly, in other genres there are things that will kill you in one hit, with little warning and no possibility to dodge. Even discounting ultra-realistic military-sims, take something like STALKER - an unlucky headshot will off you rather reliably and you don't get to dodge the bullets.

tl;dr
Quit. Fucking. Whining.

I was referring to instant kills ignoring remaining health entirely actually.

In a system I described instakills can happen regardless of health and weapon. Health and weapon only affect how likely they are to happen.

Why not? While a small dagger might be able to kill me, one stab is never going to finish off a whale.

Hence the "effective" part. Dagger is not an effective anti-whale weapon under normal circumstances. You're not going to kill a whale with your first stab, but also not with your thousandth one, although it may die later of infection, blood loss or some other aftereffect of your long stabbing session.

This kind of system falls apart when considering ineffective weapons, but it's as good as a HP-system can get, and gives acceptable results when considering only effective weapons and not to different combatants (roughly human sized organic beings with things like centralized nervous system and such).

Likewise a dart shouldn't be capable of killing some massive barbarian.

Because unpoisoned darts, shuriken and such weren't generally designed as effective weapons. Their main purpose was always to hurt and distract allowing user to crit the target dead using another weapon.

Everything aside from that is a matter of odds, but mapping out a possible instant kill for anything with less than 5% chance to kill you seems silly.

Which is probably why there are weapons in Wizardry with no more than 1% chance of instakill.

And depending on mechanics, you might not even need to explicitly define chance of instakill. It should be a function of what weapon can reach and how badly can it fuck it up.

Might as well add death by lightning storm while travelling.

Which, amusingly enough, has been actually implemented.
In fucking BG, of all games.

There's no reason Hp and detailed wounds should be exclusive.

There is - a detailed wound system will make HPs redundant. Some vestiges - like blood points - may linger, but they will likely have to get split into separate scales reflecting different things, like blood loss or exhaustion, that can kill you while acting on your whole organism.

Nobody needs to know when their warrior breaks a nail.

But if he gets his testicle mashed into a pulp, it will certainly put him out of commission.

How special that enemy is depends on the game. How many weak points do the undead have? Especially incorporeal undead. Demons? Do trolls give a fuck if they're stabbed in the heart? Werewolves? Plant monsters? Elementals?

Humans, humanoids animals, etc.?

And what if the PC doesn't know the enemy has a weakness? Critting a golem and destroying the magical talisman that animates it shouldn't be possible if the PC has no idea such a thing exists.

Even by accident? If the talisman is hit and breaks, does it matter if the attacker knew of it? Character knowledge should affect ability to actually aim for such points, not to hit them.

50 enemies one after another amounts to the same thing as 50 at once if the player can't heal in between fights.

...
I would really like to explain, but I'm not in the mood since I nearly broke my fucking nose by facepalming so hard.

Maybe someone else will be more forthcoming and actually attempt to explain why getting gangbanged by 50 enemies is infinitely worse than fighting them all in sequence, which is the kind of thing even the most impaired of retards should at least grasp instinctively. Maybe.
Right now - sorry, but you're a moron.

Giving gold to restore missing limbs through direct divine intervention strikes me as far more harmful to suspension of disbelief than healing spells or potions.

I see you share my dislike for direct divine intervention and divine magic somewhat distinct from arcane one. Good.

So let me rephrase it:
What if mages capable of performing this kind of healing, of inducing and guiding regeneration of an eye or a limb, while maintaining concentration for days in deep trance, using rare, otherworldly ingredients are fucking rare and, understanadably, few can afford their services?

Better - what if you can have a character that will achieve this kind of mastery if they neglect pretty much everything else, but study of restorative magic?

In any case, the difference is between regrowing limbs being costly, difficult and time consuming process and regrowing limbs taking seconds and being available in idiot-friendly, bottled form that works even while you keep swinging with your right hand while you regrow the left one. Because having some limbs to regrow is what tends to happen when someone axes you multiple times and into near death.

Also, in your realistic system with realistic crippling, any significant wound would probably lead to a reload, if it doesn't kill you outright. Wound penalties, added to the already increased lethality, would quickly make a fight unwinnable. As Lord Rocket said, the player's character/party would be heavily straitjacketed in the way it fights, and even a small mistake in a minor encounter would lead to a reload.

Not necessarily, fantasy worlds can have sufficiently advanced magic to make them softer, SF worlds - sufficiently advanced technology.

The problem is not that games don't cripple PCs 4life so that we could laugh at puny raging gaymers.
The problem is that some kinds of things are just logical and that games don't provide long term consequences that would inconvenience players for long enough period for them to try to avoid them next time.

I wouldn't be very happy if game informed me that I contracted a disease few saves ago, and that this disease is incurable and I will die.
I was, however, delighted (well, after the fact), when Daggerfall informed me that I contracted a lethal disease few saves ago, and that this disease will kill me in about a week, so I had to drop my current quest, travel to the nearest temple in great haste, discover that I don't have enough money, travel to the nearest city and sell my newly acquired cuirass of distilled awesome so that I could afford not dying horribly.
Makes shit more real, and more involving, you know.

THIS.

Also, one more thing - making healing more of a hassle is not just something that would inconvenience the player. What about harrassing much stronger enemy group for days without engaging in actual battles, till they run out of healing supplies and their arcane healers get saturated, and the troops start to die?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Whatever. I mostly posted to this thread to see what Jarl thought about things. I've no interestin responding to yet more out of context strawmen of 1/10th of what I wrote.

 

[zeitgeist]

Just a brief comment about the realism/crippling/reloading issue. The main problem I see with a character being, say, crippled, or horribly scarred, or what have you, is what it means in the context of a typical combat-oriented game (they will most likely perform poorly for the rest of the game, effectively killing them off - especially if you can replace them with another character).

On the other hand, if one of your characters loses a limb, yet is still able to function without it in some other capacity (diplomat, merchant, etc), there will be less reloading. If one of your character gets his eye gouged out by a dragon but still manages to kill it, and this massively increases his reputation as "that one-eyed guy who has a lower perception stat now but is instantly recognizable as the dragon slayer", there will be less reloading. If specific characters are not essential to the story (the party makeup being based mostly on the player's emotional attachment to some team members - for example: X-COM red shirt syndrome), there will be less reloading. And so on.

It should be possible to design a game that discourages reloading organically instead of outright forbidding it (or even worse - building the game mechanics around the "everyone will reload all the time anyway" assumption).

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Starting combat and losing the game before you do anythnig because the enemy rolled a 20 is stupid. Being shot in the brain without fighting back doesn't constitute combat, it's assassination.

Maybe you should think about it before starting combat?

There are many situations when you can see the combat coming, in those you cannot, you can still identify things like probable ambush spots.
I do agree that the game shouldn't rape you with no warning (though a subtle, easy to overlook warning you have to specifically look for is perfectly sufficient) but you're overblowing the problem.

In Wizardries there is shitload of things that can autokill or even auto-TPK. Yet the games are perfectly playable and good, with many codexers playing them - even in ironman mode.

Similarly, in other genres there are things that will kill you in one hit, with little warning and no possibility to dodge. Even discounting ultra-realistic military-sims, take something like STALKER - an unlucky headshot will off you rather reliably and you don't get to dodge the bullets.

tl;dr
Quit. Fucking. Whining.

This.

I just "love" how people suddenly forget about autokills/auto-TPKs in old RPGs like Pool of Radiance, Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Fallout, Fallout 2, etc. and suddenly start talking about some imaginary RPGs without reloading when realism of combat gets brought up.

 

[Sceptic]

In any case, the difference is between regrowing limbs being costly, difficult and time consuming process and regrowing limbs taking seconds and being available in idiot-friendly, bottled form that works even while you keep swinging with your right hand while you regrow the left one.

May I suggest DAO as having a pretty good answer to this problem?

... have I got your attention?

OK before you kill me, let me clarify: I'm thinking of a milder form of what you're suggesting - honestly I don't like the "fail to dodge, lose a limb" thing, too hardcore for me. But "fail a dodge, break a bone" is fine. The immediate end result is the same (that limb is useless for the time being) but the long-term effect isn't as crippling: you still need to haul your ass back to town OR have an experienced healer in the party who can set the bone back (with say a lesser penalty, but still a small penalty that'll last for X amount of time, depending on the limb and the severity of the blow), and in both cases the system can be designed around making sure it's a setback: if you have a dedicated healer this means you don't have a dedicated fighter/nuker in this spot, or if it's a classless system it means you've invested precious skill points into healing instead of swords/destruction/whatever. Of course you could attempt to fix it with a low healing skill... at which point you'd make things worse or give the wounded tetanus (BoD sends its best). As for hauling your ass back to town? what if when you come back to the dungeon, feeling just slightly annoyed at the inconvenience, you get to your destination in the dungeon and find that the map piece you were looking for is gone? (Wizardry 7 sends its regards) The choice of whether to a) haul it back to town and potentially complicate getting that plot coupon, b) try and get through the dungeon with a crippled character or c) avoid this situation altogether by sacrificing precious skill points is still more meaningless and interesting than Miracle Cure Healing Potion. Of course there's always d) reload all the fucking time, but that's best reserved for that Reloading thread we had some months back (and I honestly don't want to get into this).

I also like JF's ideas. A combination of what he said (especially regarding armor protecting and turning what would be a "lose a limb" situation into "break a bone") and what I've outlined above would be cool. And it wouldn't be that hard to have something in-between a "total HP" system and a "no HP at all" system - see Elvira 2 for some ideas. Or Robinson's Requiem. Or a whole bunch of games released 20 years ago. If they could experiment with this, why can't modern developers?

And you can do all this without even touching on the permadeath and all that stuff that makes whiners rage and rage. As long as the penalties from wounding are bad enough (ie not like in Dragon Age), you don't have to have a hardcore permanent limb loss/death/whatever mechanic to STILL make things more interesting and exciting than "drink this poultice for insta-heal!"

 

[DraQ]

In any case, the difference is between regrowing limbs being costly, difficult and time consuming process and regrowing limbs taking seconds and being available in idiot-friendly, bottled form that works even while you keep swinging with your right hand while you regrow the left one.

May I suggest DAO as having a pretty good answer to this problem?

... have I got your attention?

Better be fast.

OK before you kill me, let me clarify: I'm thinking of a milder form of what you're suggesting - honestly I don't like the "fail to dodge, lose a limb" thing, too hardcore for me.

But how often would that happen? If the game was party-based you'd probably want to keep well armoured dudes in the front, tanking, precisely because they'd be highly resistant to this crap, possibly supplemented with inhumanly adept dodgers AND adjust tactics to enemy, environment, resources and party composition.
If the game was solo, you'd have to adjust your tactics and approach (including discretion being better part of valour) to enemy, environment, your build and resources.

If you play well you won't be charging a muscled guy clad in full plate and wielding a nasty looking sword or axe with an elderly dude in bathrobe or a shady type with a dagger. You will try to exploit his weaknesses and your own strengths, just like in a HP based game. And like in a good HP-based game you won't take much beating if you play it right.
If the game is also not XP-based, and makes hauling around everything you can rip off the bodies impractical, there might not be much of an incentive to actually fighting the guy if you have an alternative.

But "fail a dodge, break a bone" is fine. The immediate end result is the same (that limb is useless for the time being) but the long-term effect isn't as crippling: you still need to haul your ass back to town OR have an experienced healer in the party who can set the bone back (with say a lesser penalty, but still a small penalty that'll last for X amount of time, depending on the limb and the severity of the blow)

I think both are necessary. Sure, an armour or good dodge should greatly reduce the risk of limbs flying away even if you fuck up, but such things should still happen and here's why:

1) It's logical that where large blades are swung, limbs may flay and heads may roll. Making shit hardcore and realistic, then softening it up to make it conductive for intended gameplay through addition of sufficiently advanced technology/magic seems a better idea than coming up with semi-soft, not very sensible hybrids.
2) Mechanics shouldn't be one sided, and it's beyond awesome when you, as a player decapitate, disembowel or dis-arm (literaly) some poor fuck. If you get to do such stuff, so should enemy.

and in both cases the system can be designed around making sure it's a setback: if you have a dedicated healer this means you don't have a dedicated fighter/nuker in this spot

It also means that you're essentially dragging around a guy that is basically a walking liability most of the time (since he can't get badly fucked characters back on their feet during the fight), except that you can count on surviving shit hitting the fan more than once with him around.
Which is good - modern RPGs don't play it nearly rough enough for too much hardcore stuff to be of any concern.

or if it's a classless system it means you've invested precious skill points into healing instead of swords/destruction/whatever.
Of course you could attempt to fix it with a low healing skill... at which point you'd make things worse or give the wounded tetanus (BoD sends its best).

As for hauling your ass back to town? what if when you come back to the dungeon, feeling just slightly annoyed at the inconvenience, you get to your destination in the dungeon and find that the map piece you were looking for is gone? (Wizardry 7 sends its regards)

Or quest timer running out. (Daggerfall sends its regards)

The choice of whether to a) haul it back to town and potentially complicate getting that plot coupon, b) try and get through the dungeon with a crippled character or c) avoid this situation altogether by sacrificing precious skill points is still more meaningless and interesting than Miracle Cure Healing Potion. Of course there's always d) reload all the fucking time, but that's best reserved for that Reloading thread we had some months back (and I honestly don't want to get into this).

I also like JF's ideas. A combination of what he said (especially regarding armor protecting and turning what would be a "lose a limb" situation into "break a bone") and what I've outlined above would be cool. And it wouldn't be that hard to have something in-between a "total HP" system and a "no HP at all" system - see Elvira 2 for some ideas. Or Robinson's Requiem. Or a whole bunch of games released 20 years ago. If they could experiment with this, why can't modern developers?

But do we *need* HPs if we have a detailed system describing character's health?

Personally I would appreciate a system where character dies because of getting damaged not because they run out of abstract points. WYSIWYG - character doesn't have his head lopped off because he ran out health bar and finisher animation played, he does have his head lopped off because a nasty looking blade just sliced all the way through his neck and he didn't even wear a gorget. It would have an effect of making player focus on noticing stuff with own eyes rather than having information spoon-fed, for example by game informing that such and such sword makes 2d6 damage and has 5% chance of decapitation. If you can see flesh, you can hit it, if your blade is sharp enough (can be given as a part of item description - "blade seems extremely sharp, able to cut a man in twain with relative ease" is much more informative to a player than just raw damage stat, not only because it doesn't reference abstract HP, but also because it provides natural reference) you can cut it and if head is attached to it it will fall off and this tends to make people die.

And you can do all this without even touching on the permadeath and all that stuff that makes whiners rage and rage. As long as the penalties from wounding are bad enough (ie not like in Dragon Age), you don't have to have a hardcore permanent limb loss/death/whatever mechanic to STILL make things more interesting and exciting than "drink this poultice for insta-heal!"

Just a brief comment about the realism/crippling/reloading issue. The main problem I see with a character being, say, crippled, or horribly scarred, or what have you, is what it means in the context of a typical combat-oriented game (they will most likely perform poorly for the rest of the game, effectively killing them off - especially if you can replace them with another character).

On the other hand, if one of your characters loses a limb, yet is still able to function without it in some other capacity (diplomat, merchant, etc), there will be less reloading. If one of your character gets his eye gouged out by a dragon but still manages to kill it, and this massively increases his reputation as "that one-eyed guy who has a lower perception stat now but is instantly recognizable as the dragon slayer", there will be less reloading. If specific characters are not essential to the story (the party makeup being based mostly on the player's emotional attachment to some team members - for example: X-COM red shirt syndrome), there will be less reloading. And so on.

It should be possible to design a game that discourages reloading organically instead of outright forbidding it (or even worse - building the game mechanics around the "everyone will reload all the time anyway" assumption).

Obviously.

Game has to be built around such possibilities and encourage keeping playing (and/or discourage reloads ).

For example, if a game is party based with many potential party members (meaning no "waaah! I lost someone important *reload*), it could, for example reward you with reputation bonus for taking a badly wounded or crippled comrade and going lengths to nurse him back to health (meaning not only having to leave a lot of treasure including invaluable rare or unique items, but also spending much time and money just to help the guy), give you severe reputation hit if the guy just vanishes, especially if someone learns that you just left him in wilderness/dungeon to die and give you milder rep hit if you ditch him back in town.

 

[JarlFrank]

Also, good opportunities for quest rewards depending on your performance during, say, a quest to catch someone alive (I wanted that bandit leader alive to hack off his hands for his crimes - and you bring him to me without hands? Of course, this lessens the reward greatly!) or protecting someone (The Queen is ambushed! Protect her at all costs! Don't let her be wounded!).

It would make for much more interesting and, yes, realistic, variations in quest performance in these cases, and would make much more sense than setting an arbitrary HP threshold for each reward scaling ("You were supposed to protect the Queen from damage! She's still alive, so I thank you, but look what they've done to her... she's missing half of her HP!!" is very derp, while "Look what they've done to her, she's missing a hand!" is much, much better). It could also be a nice motor for providing additional quests if you slightly failed part of your mission. Protected the Queen, but she lost a hand in the fray? It makes her and her husband very, VERY angry towards the people who did this. Much more angry than they would've been if she hadn't been harmed. A couple of new revenge-focused quests open up, because they want the same thing to happen to the people responsible for the attack.

A wound system like that where limb loss and survival thereof is possible also allows for some truly badass characters (I am Ragnar Onehand, greatest warrior of the northlands. I lost a hand in battle long ago, yet even with one hand I am unmatched in combat!).

As for "OMG LIMB LOSS IS SHIT I WOULD RELOAD ALL THE TIME WHEN THIS HAPPENS" whiners, I would make limb loss relatively rare. It would happen when in, say, a shooter with locational damage getting hit in the leg kills you. In this system, a sword slashing at your leg wouldn't kill you. It would just slice that leg off. Losing a limb and being able to go on after that is a lot less harsh (and makes more sense) than dying because someone repeatedly slashed that limb, isn't it? You can reload if you want and just consider limb loss the same as death, if you want. Or you can go on and try play a cripple - maybe the game will even comment on it.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

If you can see flesh, you can hit it, if your blade is sharp enough (can be given as a part of item description - "blade seems extremely sharp, able to cut a man in twain with relative ease" is much more informative to a player than just raw damage stat, not only because it doesn't reference abstract HP, but also because it provides natural reference) you can cut it and if head is attached to it it will fall off and this tends to make people die.

Blade doesn't have to be sharp to allow decapitation. Also, when it comes to catastrophic injuries, skills of wielder and of target are most important.
I suspect it can't be simulated in your dream FPP physics-based system.

 

[DraQ]

If you can see flesh, you can hit it, if your blade is sharp enough (can be given as a part of item description - "blade seems extremely sharp, able to cut a man in twain with relative ease" is much more informative to a player than just raw damage stat, not only because it doesn't reference abstract HP, but also because it provides natural reference) you can cut it and if head is attached to it it will fall off and this tends to make people die.

Blade doesn't have to be sharp to allow decapitation. Also, when it comes to catastrophic injuries, skills of wielder and of target are most important.
I suspect it can't be simulated in your dream FPP physics-based system.

Why?

Such a physics based system wouldn't obviously go all the way down, at some level it would have to hit abstractions again, except they would be smaller, more fundamental abstractions making more 'physical sense' - like using mass, momentum and sharpness rather than some static, ass-pulled damage, hardness and structural integrity rather than ass-pulled AC and so on.

Skeletal animations can be parametrized, their speed changed, another animation or randomized noise added to them, they can also be aimed at some target in 3D space (at least they could in 1999 ) allowing for called attacks and parrying. Animations can also be replaced based on circumstances and skill level (to a degree). If a weapon has a cutting edge or piercing point (edge or vertex with specified base sharpness), this value can fluctuate depending on skill of the wielder to reflect striking at bad angle or bad technique, with base value being the max one. If a wielder is unskilled he will not strike nor parry as fast, tire faster and be more susceptible to being thrown off balance (again, we are back in abstract layer). If the wielder is unskilled or weakened, there will be more random error added to his attack and parry animations.
If the wielder is weak, weapon too heavy or hiss technique shit, his grip on the weapon won't be good enough to prevent easy disarmament (low pin strength in terms of physical engine).

One cannot eliminate abstraction layer completely without creating a fucking universe, but one can shift the abstraction down at it will be better, same as going 2D iso, or 3D allowed for potentially more tactics to combat than in grid-based FPP dungeon crawls.
Room sized grid was high abstraction, very coarse and crude. Character sized grid or pretty much continuous space (discounting variable precision limits) is finer, lower abstraction and it allows for precise positioning.

 

[JarlFrank]

While I would still use damage and armor stats, I'd do it similarly to DraQ's idea. Armour and weapons should have stats based on type and material. Why does iron sword X do more damage than iron sword Y? Just because it's a higher level weapon? That's bullshit.

An iron sword always does the same kind of damage: cutting if you strike with the edge, piercing if you stab, you can even give it some blunt damage for striking with the flat of the blade or the pommel. Different kinds of damage that have different effects. Also different damage values: striking with the flat of the blade doesn't do much damage and striking with the pommel is also much less devastating than using a proper mace. Damage values are, I believe, needed to simulate some attacks being more or less effective than others. Sure, you could simulate all of that with momentum, mass and sharpness, but it's going to be a lot of programming work, and the calculation of damage could be wonky, especially when considering mass. If you strike someone with the flat of the blade, does it count the full mass of the blade or does it count only the mass of the area of the blade that actually connected - which would be the proper way, otherwise hitting someone with the flat of a large two-hander would do more damage than hitting someone with a mace with a small but thick head. You also have to factor in deflection, so it gets real complex real quick.

Yes, it probably can be done, but it'd be a lot of work to get it right. Using damage and defense values that are affected by material, mass, hardness, sharpness, type of damage (cut, pierce, blunt), etc is much more viable and would be the first step towards a system as DraQ describes it. And I think that for a party-based isometric RPG it's better than DraQ's system, which is better for first or third person games with manual aim. The basic effect would be similar, though - bronze spear always does less normal damage than iron spear, even if it's a super enchanted über bronze spear of death. It may get several bonuses due to enchantment, but the basic stats are exactly the same. It would also add the cool feature of different materials being differently useful for different items. Mithril sword? Fuck yeah, it's a hard material that's great for cutting. Mithril mace? Nah, while it's an incredibly hard material it's also lighter than steel, which means that steel is better for blunt weapons because of higher mass.

 

[Johannes]

Decapitation is damn hard to pull off in a swordfight no matter what. Compare to how even some executions required multiple swings to behead the victim. Straight losing your arm doesn't seem very probable either, though too bad wounds might necessitate amputation. Though magic swords and fantastic monsters etc. might alter this.



But really what are you even arguing about in the end? Just seems you're just saying that you like realistic games, and you don't like HP bars. Over and over again. It's not like you can prove it to be inherently inferior to something else, or if you can, please point us to this system. Sure you can do things otherwise too, and you'd like it, but I think everyone got that already.

/edit: hmm, nevermind, the latest posts are more sensible again (i wrote this earlier already and only forgot to post, then stumbled on its browser tab and posted), more about fleshing out some wannabe-realistic system than just arguing about if hps are shit or not

 

[Lord Rocket]

Yeah that's pretty much what I asked you not to do. In game locations etc. aren't really system elements.

OK, here's a situation for you: the player makes a mistake, they've been ambushed. Which system (we'll assume there's only two extremes available here: everyone has 10000000 ablative HPs and ultra realistic almost anything can fuck you up) allows you to fight your way out of that shit without unacceptable losses and probably invoking the F9 key*?

If you're so bent on giving player a margin of error at all cost, why not just give player a perma-godmode? Some margin of error is necessary, but too big margin of error destroys the incentive to care and pay attention.

Fundamentally the problem with a realistic system is that the margin of error is much lower and as such there's actually less room for variety in fights. Since everything is so lethal you'll need to use the optimum tactics for an encounter pretty much straight away, or reload and try again.

This can be counteracted by minimizing filler combat, having non-lethal combat play greater role, good encounter design, and, amusingly more complex mechanics, that while not of much help in itself, can allow for greater player control - persistent die->reload cycles that don't want to go away are indicative of games with little control, that basically turn into a game of chance.

1) Straw man. Or excluding the middle. Some sort of fallacy, anyway.
2) 'Minimising filler combat' is bollocks. You can have a very combat heavy game without 'filler' combat - Stone Soup comes to mind (unless you're tooling round on a very low level while being a high level monster yourself). Any good dungeon crawler, where encounters drain resources or are otherwise 'important' to the party, really. Every game should minimise filler combat. Good encounter design is the same thing.
Non-lethal combat is good. Shame it can be modelled just as easily in an HP system compared to a 'realistic' one, and would be no less valuable there.
You're right about the reload cycle, too, but as has been explained to you a system like the one you're proposing is actually more arbitrary than an HP-as-resource system, where control is achieved by providing the player with one easy to grasp number with very clear consequences for depletion. I think what you're really proposing here is more options in combat to weight attack/defence differently, which is good and noble, but, again, need not be confined to a 'realistic' system.

As for "OMG LIMB LOSS IS SHIT I WOULD RELOAD ALL THE TIME WHEN THIS HAPPENS" whiners, I would make limb loss relatively rare. It would happen when in, say, a shooter with locational damage getting hit in the leg kills you. In this system, a sword slashing at your leg wouldn't kill you. It would just slice that leg off. Losing a limb and being able to go on after that is a lot less harsh (and makes more sense) than dying because someone repeatedly slashed that limb, isn't it?

What the fuck is this Monty Python shit? No it fucking doesn't.
Dude your leg has, if I'm remembering correctly, the biggest, most fuck-off artery in your entire body in it. Getting that hacked open is a damn good way to die. If anything, this points to a promblem with locational damage systems: they're not realistic. Your various extremities aren't isolated from one another, you know (hey Jarl you're into Norse shit right? I imagine you've read a lot of the sagas and things. One of the things that struck me about the depictions of combat in those is the way many finishing blows involve dismemberment).

The crushed testicle thing DraQ was talking about can actually be simulated reasonably well in an HP system as well. Let's take BRP (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, et cetera) as an example. You have X HP, a number that is stat based and is unlikely to increase. If you lose X/2 HP at once, then you have taken a serious injury. Depending on the game you may have to roll on a chart to determine the mechanical effect or simply take a set penalty. Roll 67 = crushed testicle. Warhammer Fantasy RP uses a vaguely similar system (you have a small, ablative HP pool and when that runs out you start taking critical hits, which can kill you, maim you, diddly dee. You also take Insanity Points when you receive one, meaning being hideously injured leads to mental trauma as well). These systems already take into account the weapon used and armour being worn - damage roll, reduced by armour - and locational damage (the first BRP variant mentioned does via the injury chart, and WFRP does ) and they do it without being ludicrously overcomplicated. Plus, they allow more room for error - and can be adjusted to taste simply by increasing/decreasing the level of HP granted the character - than a more random system does.

Also I can't help but feel you guys are starting to delve into FPM(eleer) mechanics, rather than RPG ones. And there's more to be said but I'm a slow typist and all this took forever to write already.

 

[JarlFrank]

There is a possibility to survive dismemberment. Still, in most of my posts I have said that in my ideal system, there'd also be blood loss, so losing a leg will quite quickly result in death by bleeding unless the wound is healed.

What's unrealistic is that shooting someone in the leg with a normal pisol 10 times kills him instead of either:
a) crippling the leg
b) causing shitloads of bleeding which in turn causes the death

Except for JA2, I'm not aware of any HP-based systems that simulate bleeding. As in, taking damage by having unbandaged wounds, not just taking damage every time you're hit.

 

[Lord Rocket]

I'm not sure why a secondary subsystem (blood points) is necessary in this case. Death due to loss of HP and death due to loss of blood points has the same ultimate result. Crippling wounds can be applied in a similar manner to my earlier examples. The outcome is the same and it's more transparent for the player.

GURPS has an optional rule for bleeding, which unsurprisingly, is extra HP damage until someone comes and fixes you (or you get a series of lucky rolls). EDIT: mentioned because this seems to be the typical way of handling bleeding in HP-based systems. Pretty sure Runequest does something similar too. Personally I don't find this satisfactory.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Why manage HP if you can manage team members ?

While I would still use damage and armor stats, I'd do it similarly to DraQ's idea. Armour and weapons should have stats based on type and material. Why does iron sword X do more damage than iron sword Y? Just because it's a higher level weapon? That's bullshit.

There is stuff like blade geometry and balance that influence damage.

Yes, it probably can be done, but it'd be a lot of work to get it right. Using damage and defense values that are affected by material, mass, hardness, sharpness, type of damage (cut, pierce, blunt), etc is much more viable and would be the first step towards a system as DraQ describes it. And I think that for a party-based isometric RPG it's better than DraQ's system, which is better for first or third person games with manual aim. The basic effect would be similar, though - bronze spear always does less normal damage than iron spear, even if it's a super enchanted über bronze spear of death.

Bronze isn't worse than iron. It got replaced by iron because bronze is much more expensive.