RPG gameplay elements/habits you don't understand

You know, I'm very curious...What happen if you cast stone to flesh on something that is legit a statue? Does it turn into a critter-shaped blob of quivering, undifferentiated meat, or does it actually become a body of the thing that the statue was of, with structural components like bones, muscles, and organs? Is it alive but braindead, or merely just dead? How dead? Could the organs be sold on the black market?

 

It becomes a corpse. Part of the spell description IIRC.

 

The stuff that bugs me in a lot of games is so called "realism" when you had to eat, drink and sleep and have meters for all that stuff. Instead of adding "realism" it's just adds constant annoyance to have food and drink items. And while we're at it, why not add defecating meter as well? If you have to eat you have to take a shit also. Add a fecal meter that goes up as you eat stuff and you had to defecate to lower it. If you fail to lower it you shit yourself and gain "shat yourself" penalty applicable until you wash yourself. This penalty will prevent you to talk to NPC and enter some places - "You reek of shit man, I won't talk to you!". Much realism, very immersion

 

For some, a corpse is fine too.

 

Hitpoints.
It's a relic of the past when computation was too limited to model health and trauma. Games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld are heading in the right department

 

No, hit points on body parts are hit points, and if you use numbers there's no reason not to use hit points.

EDIT : Also, about body parts and injuries, wether each hit you take making you less and less efficient enhances the experience is at very least questionable, it's much more fun to try and get rid of a situation where you're low on life than simply waiting three more turns for your unavoidable death because your characters took the first hit, winning the initiative roll should allow you to try and benefit from strategic good crowd control and such, not simply always make damages and you won because there's no way for enemies to get back from getting hit once.

 

But per body part injuries can be very nice. One hand damaged - can't use rifles or other 2h weapons, hope that you have a dagger/pistol handy. Leg crippled? No jumping or running for you, and it's easy to knock you back. System like that needs some balance though, so that people don't automatically start going for the head each time.

 

Fallout 1 does this so well. I’m currently in my first playthrough and I have 120 in Small Guns and I always aim for the eyes (just like Boo) and I miss fairly often, but when I hit, it’s usually a hit that knocks them to the ground, or kills them instantly.

And on a critical hit to the eyes, the combatant is blinded, so they are unable to use their gun anymore and they typically end up running away.

 

Another good example is Stone Shard. Still in early access, but it does model different body parts, with various effects if you hit (no groin/eyes unfortunately). Opens up for a nice healing system, where you can either try to weather it out, or use splints, bandages, and salves to cure much quicker.

Single HP value for your char does seem kinda basic in this day and age.

 

UnReal World went much farther with its injury system and long before that. It treats each injury as a separate condition that progresses with time, depending on what you do, either towards healing or killing/crippling you.

 

Health is always going to boil down to some numeric value in a CRPG since we're dealing with computers storing hard values. But I'd prefer the granularity of it like HP for body parts rather than a heuristic of some general HP. As a health system gets more complex, HP starts to disappear and it starts to get more interesting: -50 HP becomes a damage right hand, loss of blood, pain, a growing infection, and the difficulty to swing a battle axe properly.

If done right, it opens up combat more rather than the dull simplicity of DPS bringing down an HP bar.
General HP is comfy and convenient, but I'd like to see developers push past this old mechanic.

 

It was taken from GURPS.

 

The worst case scenario:
Get Stone to Flesh cast on you after you were petrified, but only after your "statue" has been converted into a bust.

second worst (open) second worst (close)

Have some prude cretin attach a fish tail to your dick using a screw while statued

"Everything is hitpoints because deep down everything is 0s and 1s on computer and that's just numbers. See that 3D model? Hitpoints! That texture over there? Also hitpoints!"


Jesus Fucking Christ.

Let's add cover system and health regen to everything!

 

Fallout does it poorly because there is rarely a reason not to try and be Boo.

 

Yes, but to what extent does it become a corpse? Does this corpse have organs in it? Is the corpse "fully functional"? What if we're not dealing with a whole statue of a person, but, say, just a bust, or a sculpture of an organ? What if the sculpture is not of a real creature at all, but something entirely fictitious? Is the matter of a plant considered flesh? If I cast it on a statue of a plant, do I get a dead plant, or what? If I cast it on a formless rock, what manner of flesh do I get? Is it edible? To everyone? What nutritional value does it provide if eaten? THESE ARE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS, like "what happens if you collide with a wall of force endwise?"

If you've been converted to a bust, without functioning organs, you will expire very quickly. It could be worse: Your arms could have just fallen off like the arms of statues typically do.

 

This is autism and I approve of it.

 

So, The Sims Dungeonman. Although they have yet to add shitting to the Sims. Only pissing. I guess that's how you know it's not German.

 

It's important for weaponization. There are animals which are capable of exploding very violently.

 

Real life has hit points because physics uses numbers!!

If you die from blood loss it's because your body has lost X liters of blood.
If your bones break it is because an object met your body with X amount of force, leading to a fracture.
Etc.

Deep down everything is numbers in computers, but that applies to real life too. Realistic tank simulations where every part of the tank has different armor thickness and different armor sloping and the angle of a bullet hitting the armor determines the likelihood of penetration also use basic numbers.

Everything is hitpoints!!

 

Please, that's not what I'm talking about. Granular HPs (general or on body parts) are hps and you roll for damages to hps, these systems are the most common because they work better, unlike systems where you rarely get hit (the attacker needs to roll for damages superior to your armor or something) then you roll to determine which injury you get and you only have a set of injuries with the maluses which come with it.

Granularity is good, hps are good. Body part hps that when they hit 0 you're dead or you lose the member if it's not vital or something like that are fine, with or without direct targetting, but they do not change the game much.

Now about lost of efficiency directly based on remaining hps, fundamentally it has nothing to do with body parts, in The Banner Saga your damages depends on your hps, and the game uses general hps. Now coupled with the initiative system of The Banner Saga it's ridiculous, a damaged character is worse than a dead character, but even without a retarded initiative system you must be aware of the dead man walking aspect of it when implementing such things, the induced vicious circle that when you get hit by an opponent then the next time it's harder for you to hit him and easier for him to hit you is not really a good thing, I think the worse part of it is that when you're almost dead then you're basically dead, that's not really exciting, on the contrary what's exciting is winning a fight with your party almost totally dead (knocked-out), which is also why hp systems are superior to systems without hps, I think possible injuries based on critical hits on a body part something like that (body part targetting is not even mandatory) is a better idea than directly basing efficiency on body part hps.

Sure lost of efficiency directly based on remaining hps is better with body parts than without body parts. The maluses are different depending on the damaged part, so at least in theory you may often be almost dead without being basically dead. There are different chances to hit depending on the weapon, monsters have different protections to different body parts and armors offer different protections to different body parts, body parts have different max hps. Therefore you may at least sometimes want to target different body parts, which adds some choice. That's cool but in practice the dead man walking aspect still exists at least to some extent so you can't totally exclude it from the equation.

 

If reductionism was that perfect in the physical world, then resurrection and necromancy would be no-brainers (pun intended); just pump a corpse full of X liters of blood and add a little electricity to jolt it back to life. So I subscribe to the notion that the metaphysics of life is a more complicated than the pile of cells that constitute it.

If you keep modeling life like computing, you're going to have a very soulless model.

 

See, this part is somewhat less solid. It is clear that people eventually die of blood loss, but there's not a single hard point at which you die. You're not alive at X.001 liters of blood and dead at X. Being dead isn't even a really solid thing. People who apparently have died have managed to somehow reboot again.

This isn't quite so well-defined either because bones aren't a homogenous material with a uniform composition, but yes. A discrete injury like this is somewhat more easy to model than something as vague as "death".

I would argue the opposite, that nothing is "hitpoints", and hitpoints only enter the equation when you hit a level of detail you no longer wish to model. When I shoot a car with a gun, the bullet interacts with the various materials of the car where the bullet happens to impact and travel. The car does not "lose hitpoints". There isn't a moment in which I fire the Nth bullet and the car abruptly ceases to exist. In fact, cars generally continue to exist long after they cease to function as usable vehicles, because I shot out something important, not because it "lost hitpoints". Modelling an entire car as "a bag of hitpoints" results in the absurdity where you shoot a car N times and nothing happens, but on the N+1th time, it explodes in a fireball of flames. Anyone who's played GTA knows this, and probably comes to realize exactly what the value of N is for a given model of car.

Everyone also more or less instinctively realizes that the world does not actually work this way.

 

Since when do horny teens have access to 6th level spells?

 

Looks like this thread doesn't need a proctologist for a change, but more of a general practioner of medicine.

 

If you don't like HP just make everyone get down in one hit (or a couple of hits in case of really tough foes) and make harder opponents harder to hit. A dragon is not more dangerous because you have to whack him longer, but because it's hard to reach exposed parts or penetrate the armor. Smaug got killed by one arrow IIRC.