Winning without killing

[tj333]

I am working on an anime based game and I want the character to be able to win and lose fights without anyone dieing.
In many of the animes I have seen they deal a lot with the mental part of the fight. How the character is feeling, are his friends watching, can the opponent beat him mentally before he does so physically, and at what point does a fight stop?
Also in most games where killing the opponent is the only way to win and dying the only way to lose I find myself reluctant to win a fight against the players even when its the player's fault that they will die.

Naturally the physical part of the fight is still a big part of it but I think there needs to be something more then most games have.
Currently I am working on a system where each character has two health pools, Mind and Body, and two action pools, Physical and Mental. The action pools are derived from the characters stats and are typically between 2 and 7.
For a character to act he must remove at least one of the dice from the action pool. A Physical pool die can only be used for a physical action and a Mental pool die for a mental action. To perform both a physical and mental actions in a round they player must remove both a die from both pools, with only one counting, to perform the first action of the other kind.

When an action is taken skills are added to the dice removed from the action pool used. Skills like Intimidate will be treated the same as Martial Arts in how they are used and the damage they do to the target.
Each attack does damage equal to the successes is scores minus the success the defending player gets on his defense and damage resistance roll. Both Mind and Body damage pools have a sort of soak, or damage resistance stat to represent the character resistance to that kind of damage. For each 3 of the 10 health levels from either Mind or Body that are damaged the character suffers a -1 die penalty to both action pools. When there are no more dice in the action pool the character can no longer perform actions of that type that need to be rolled. Most character will have only taken half of the possible damage in Mind and Body before at least one action pool is depleted.

The character will also have Fears and Drives that can increase or decrease penalty to the action pools. This will let a character stay standing longer in a fight that is important to him, but he will go done faster in a fight that he does not want to fight.

Any thoughts and criticisms? Other system that do this? Are they better? Worse? Or have I completely missed another thread on something like this?

[Bankuei]

Hi tj,

Several systems do this, and some better than others.  Notably the big thing that many of these games share is that their resolution systems encompass the physical, mental and emotional and treat them in the same way.

Trollbabe and Heroquest are the first two that come immediately to mind.  In either one, you could be in a physical fight, and debate, intimidate, even seduce your opponent instead of beating them down.  Even violence isn't defined as necessarily lethal.  If your goal is to knock someone out, or tie them up, you won't "over-succeed" and accidentally kill them.  Other games which use this:  Universalis, the Pool, Dust Devils, etc.  Also check out Fulminata's social rules for some interesting options as well.

Many games have "mental damage" rules that rarely are applied to social or raw mental conflicts like they should.  So far the closest one I've seen is the original Hong Kong Action Theatre's rules for injuries, in which a "physical" wound, may not have actually hit or really hurt a character, but instead shook them up, perhaps even going as far as breaking their will.  Most games that have a mental damage rating could also track stuff like folks intimidating each other, or breaking their wills with a few tweaks and modifications, although the games listed above handle this issue a lot more elegantly IMO.

Chris

[simon_hibbs]

Bankuei's post is spot-on and all the references are worth checking out.

I'd just add that an important element of making this work is that the objectives of the character's aren't actualy to kill each other. They have much higher-order goals such as 'rescue Cyberbabe from Deathotron'. Firing guns at Deathotron is only incidentaly intended to kill Deathotron, what they're actualy doing is trying to neutralise an obstacle to their goal. So if you shift the focus of resolution from actions (shoot this gun at that traget) to goals (rescue Cyberbabe), you can solve a lot of the problems you may be hitting.

Appologies if I'm preaching to the choire.

Simon Hibbs

[Callan S.]

Well, what is loosing?

I think it was the sim/gamist incoherance in D&D that lead to the gamist 'death' equals loosing.

I mean, as a gamist, what else can you construe as loosing (so you can conversely define winning/doing well). Certainly not loosing a HP or two, only cry babies cry about that. Out and out death had to be it...when it happens, your out of the game (till you respawn/ressurect...but never mind the re-entry time). It works for games like monopoly and it worked in D&D.

The incoherance in it though is that the D&D books never tried to define any win state, or support that.

What would be radical is to just define a win state in the book. Yeah, state one. Sure, put system rewards for it and perhaps give it game world supporting reasons. But actually define a winning/doing well state, rather than the default of survival equals winning.

tj333, I appreciate your trying to give some impact to failure by reducing dice they have until they have none. But I think this is worse than D&D death, player input wise. The 3.x D&D books recognise that players hate their PC's being subdued more than they hate their PC's being killed. Part of the reason is that when a PC dies, the player doesn't have to sit around the table...he can walk off if he likes. When his PC is subdued, he has to be at the table, but can add nothing to play. Asking a person to be at activity but then excluding them from participating in it = retarded. It's a terrible thing to do and best avoided as much as possible. Penalties are sort of okay (though its just a more limmited exclusion of player input), but out right cut off is way bad. Can I suggest that after a certain point, the penalties don't increase and instead game rewards are reduced instead?

[anonymouse]

I'm going to come back to this later with a more detailed response (mention an anime- or manga-inspired game, and mouse is sure to pop up), but I will say off-the-cuff, that you should try BESM 2nd Edition (the original TriStat version, NOT the d20 version).

Its combat has the oddity of it being incredibly hard to actually kill someone. Or land much damage at all. Big, long battles, where eventually, for story-reasons, someone's likely to just give up and retreat.

Since you want an anime-style game anyway, this should be something you check out before getting super-carried-away with your own design. Might do what you want.

[SlurpeeMoney]

Seventh Sea played with a nonlethal dramatic system; one takes damage, and then rolls an endurance test with the difficulty equalling the damage taken. If the endurance test is successful, the wounds don't really affect you. If the test fails, you take a Dramatic Wound (which affects you abilities a bit). If you take a number of Dramatic Wounds equal to your Resolve (willpower), you collapse and find yourself knocked out. The only way to kill another character was to, after the character was knocked out, commit a coup de grace.

Since when does "Zero Hit Points" have to equal dead, anyway?

Let's take a look at a system in which one does not die from lack of hit points. I'm making this up off the top of my head, mind, so it hasn't been polished at all:

We'll go with three attributes: Body, Mind and Soul. Each of them is rated according to a universal point system (same points are used to buy Attributes, Skills, Advantages,  Backgrounds, Relationships, whathave you). Your total of Body + Mind + Soul equals your total Hit Points.

Contested rolls (since we are dealing entirely with combat, I'll not worry about non-contested rolls), are made by adding an Attribute to a Skill, and adding both to a Die Roll (let's say a D6). The result is compared to that of your opponent, high roll wins, with the difference equalling base damage in combat. Weapons add damage to the Base. So do comrades, each comrade equalling one additional point of damage.

Relavent combat skills would begin to be things like "Taunt," "Intimidation," "Confuse," etc. Anything that might cause a person to be less likely to fight. How a character decides to step out of a fight is a result of the whole fight. Has the opponent been more intimidating? You run. Has your opponent beaten you to a pulp? You're unconscious. Has your opponent confused the hell of you? You make a strategic retreat to get your bearings.

I could see this working especially well in a game focused on gang-warfare. Intimidation, Taunts, Homies; it'd be magic.

Kris
"Still on the cuff, but dangerously close to the edge."

[M. J. Young]

If we're looking for examples of non-lethal combat, Original AD&D's Oriental Adventures had the psychic duel. It was envisioned essentially as a staredown between two fighter types (Kensai were best at it, but samurai practiced it commonly). As I recall, saving throws were rolled for each side until one lost and the other didn't. That character broke his concentration and "lost" the psychic duel. He could honorably withdraw and concede defeat to the superior opponent without ever having drawn weapons, or he could attack at a disadvantage.

--M. J. Young

[timfire]

You know, something I've realized about RPG design: If there's something you want to happen... just put it in the game, it's that simple! If you don't want your characters to die... don't add injury mechanics! You can easily rename Hit Points something like 'Endurance' and just say that when you run out of Endurance you become too tired to fight.

[tj333]

Good responses. A lot of it seems that I need to get my mind away from DnD win conditions of everything else is dead more then I have been.
Just keeping the story away from the must kill everyone to win and get max XP type of game play would do more then a hell of a lot of rules on non-lethal combat.

Not that the rules won't help as well. At least I am hoping they will.
I think I got the same mechanics for physical and mental contests in the game as was mentioned.
Currently I am thinking of having maneuvers for both mental and social (Mind damaging) types of combat.
And a more defined/specilized type of mental combat like the psychic dual might be a good thing. Seems kind of like the zanshine battle in The Riddle of Midnight now that I am thinking about it.

One thing I think that was misunderstood is that when you run out of action pools due to damage penalties you are not unconscious you just can't do any actions that take rolls. So you can still do some actions but you are out for any kind of combat, you are down to helping/retreating. Hopefully not quite as annoying as being subdued.

As suggested a victory state may be a good idea. I keep liking it the more I think about it. Maybe instead of health rating have a victory/defeat rating, hmm maybe not as health. Perhaps have to cash in a success point when you raise a stat. The character would define a short or long term goal and then his he would consider himself done the quest when his goal has been achieved.
This could be a good way to have inter-party interaction when different team members have different goal. Such as one might want to rescue the princess, the other fight the captain of the guard, and the third just wants a shot at stealing x item. So now they each want to take different approach to the mission of being sent to rescue the princess.

[Doctor Xero]

I am working on an anime based game and I want the character to be able to win and lose fights without anyone dieing.
In many of the animes I have seen they deal a lot with the mental part of the fight. How the character is feeling, are his friends watching, can the opponent beat him mentally before he does so physically, and at what point does a fight stop?

If you're trying to replicate specifically the feel of Japanese anime' (as opposed to European imitations of anime'), you might want to include an Honor Pool or Reputation Pool as well.  I imagine that number of witnesses would have a significant impact upon the Honor costs of losing a fight and the Honor gains of winning a fight or of making a good show even when losing.

I've noticed that, in many anime' battles, wins and losses of Honor often matter far more than wins and losses of blood and of skeletal structural integrity.

Doctor Xero

[tj333]

Stuff to think and and things to do. I will try and have a redo of the above with incorprating some of your suggestions.

Just one thing, I am having trouble getting alok at some of the suggested games. Does anybody know if any of them have online starters that I can look at or some more information about their systems?

[M. J. Young]

One thing I think that was misunderstood is that when you run out of action pools due to damage penalties you are not unconscious you just can't do any actions that take rolls. So you can still do some actions but you are out for any kind of combat, you are down to helping/retreating. Hopefully not quite as annoying as being subdued.

I'm curious as to how you achieve this without being really annoying to your players. "You can run but you can't fight" is a statement that most players find incongruous--if I have the strength to run, why can't I fight?

Care to enlighten us?

--M. J. Young

[tj333]

So now we have something else that was overlooked. How to keep being defeated but not dead not only fun, or at least not a piss off, for the players but also believable.
It is a good thing that I am still gathering requirements or I would think that I caught a bit of feature creep here. :)

Now to make it more believable we will have to make the penalties from the damage to be wider reaching. Such as not only can you not make rolls, you are limited in the none-rolling actions as well. Things that somebody injured as bad as you can not do such as fast movement or highly coordinated skills would be disallowed. This would more accurately reflect their injured state.
Now that leaves the character in a state of not being to do much at all.
I have been trying to keep this to a minimum amount of restriction to the character so as not to take him out of the game entirely.
Also with the Drives the character can raise his action pool again so he can act again when it is important to his character. This can let the character get back up in a fight and keep going at time. But waiting for this to happen for the next fight would likely be just waiting to get your ass kicked if the opponent is in good health.
Perhaps having a minimum of one die in the action pool until you are dead/unconscious.
But getting the right mix of penalties and keeping fun may be a bit tricky.


      So now you know my thoughts and where I am trying to go with this. But it is too late tonight for making game mechanics to do this. I'll try and have those Saturday.

[tj333]

New to the game would be Goals and Ideals. Goals are what the character is working towards. A Goal can be short or long term but its achievement must be worth while. It can be anything from rescuing the captive, learning a new technique, or succeeding on a set of moves in a fight. Achieving a goal increases the characters Mind pool and allows faster advancement (XP bonuses). Ideasl are how the PC/NPC achieves his goals. This is the code of honor or personal philosophy of the PC/NPC. Unless the character follows his Ideal in achieving his goal it is a hollow victory and he gains none of the rewards.

The Body damage pool would remain the same. As it is damaged it lowers the action pools. The amount of damage done also determine how well the character is able to act. The limits to the characters actions would depend on how many action dice are left after penalties.
I think that the range of -1 to 1 should be the penalty range. This should work since 2 in the lowest the character can have his action pool can start at. I'll work on the exact effects later.
Still, the penalties and how they should work are something that I am having troubles with. I want to have some kind of injury penalty mechanic since in the shows character are slowed down from injuries. Perhaps rather then just flat penalties to actions have the character need to stop between actions, for an amount of time determined by the injury level. The pain of the wound just gets to him as he tries to act. What does everyone else think?

Now for the Mind damage would work differently then before. It would have a positive and a negative range. The negative range would subtract from the action pools and the positive range would add to the action pool. By default it returns to 0 as the character rests.
Both Mental and Physical attack actions subtract from Mind first. Mental attacks can take the Mind damage into the negative but Physical damage goes to the Body health pool rather then Mind once Mind is at 0 or below.
I like this mechanic since you must defeat your opponents spirit before you can defeat him.
Sufficient Mind damage from Taunts/Intimidation can take you out of the fight or at least leave you easily dropped in one blow. To me this adds to the not wanting to kill/no need to kill part of the game. Also a nice touch for the desired genre.
Mind can be increased/healed by achieving Goals. The more significant and difficult the goal was to achieve the greater the bonus. Failing to achieve Goals lowers the Mind pool.
With the ability of Goals to be such things as succeeding at combat maneuvers the condition of the fighters can be raised and lowered throughout the fight.
To me this can lend an anime type feel to the game since as the players succeeds on rolls, has his friends show up, becomes more emotionally involved in the fight, or other things happening the character can go from being beaten to being active again. The more dynamic nature of the Mind pool will allow the character to get back up from being out of the fight faster to help over come the boredom of being "subdued" since trying to keep his character active in the game can lead to his character having his mind damage healed by being involved in other character's successful goals.

This new arrangement helps prevent fights to the death by encouraging the PC/NPCs to retreat after he has lost his goal as he is now fighting at a disadvantage.
I think that having goals that do not have to be the death of all that oppose him that will give as much or ore XP the players will be rewarded by not killing the opponent.


Doctor Xero: Hopefully the Ideal for the character will have the effect that you have mentioned. Because if the character does not follow his type of honor he gains little from having won.

Everyone else: I know it's not a lot different from what I had before but does it seem like it is getting there to you?
The only problem is that the system does not have any none damaging confrontations. I think I will look into that later.

[tj333]

Any last thoughts about this before I go on to the next part of the system?