I've been thinking about damage systems a lot lately, and how to do them differently than the standard HP model. I like damage to still be damage; that is, if something gets hit with a Great Axe, I would want it to hurt more than getting hit with a little dagger; so I don't like things to be too abstract. Nevertheless, I'm tired of the video game style number crunching.

A random Nobilis character sheet fluttered by my vision the other day and got me thinking about the way damage and health works in it. For those of you that don't know, in Nobilis you play god-like characters that are very hard to kill (and even if you die, your story's not always over). To represent how tough these guys are, Nobles have a few Surface Wound levels, a few Serious Wound levels, and a few Deadly Wound levels.
There's a list in the book of what Noble X with [this] much physical trait and [this] many defensive Gifts considers Surface wound worthy, Serious wound worthy, and Deadly wound worthy. A moderate Noble might consider standard melee weapons to be a beneath their notice, handguns to be Surface wound worthy, machine guns to be a Serious wound, and a tank shell to be Deadly.
Now, because they're so tough, if they're in their prime health and someone starts shooting them with a handgun, they're not even going to notice it. Even if they break out the heavy machine guns, the Noble might feel it, but they either brush the wounds aside or heal them up quickly--no need to mark anything on your sheet. It is only when a Noble takes damage from something they consider Deadly that their abilities start to suffer. Once all their Deadly wounds are marked off, now they're hurtin'. Besides the penalty to their actions, now machine guns (Serious wounds) are a more dire threat, because they've already been weakened by the Deadly wounds. (Of course, Deadly wounds still hurt them, too). They're still not noticing hand guns, but anything about that is now putting a hurting on them, too.

So, in other words, damage works a little backwards in Nobilis from the way it works in most other games. While I'm not sure that type of system would work very well in games where PCs are average mortals, I think it is a very smooth system for representing those with the power of the gods (the type of games I like to create ^_^).

Nobilis is very generalist, however; a major compaint against the game is just how broadly many things are left up to interpretation. I'm wondering (here comes my question at last): Do you guys think there could be a happy medium between the backwards moving, god-like health/damage system of Nobilis, and the more standard "Weapon A does 5 damage and Weapon B does 10 damage" type of system? Has something similar to Nobilis' style already been done before, perhaps in games you've created?

I'm open to any suggestions and thoughts, but please don't ask me something like "Why are they fighting?" or "What kind of world is it?" This is just the First Thoughts forum and I'm just having me some first thoughts about different ways to track damage.

Thank you,
John

I'm aiming toward this in my game Tales.

While this isn't immedoately apparent in the core rules posted so far, I've generated something along these lines.

Everything basically comes down to a comparison of weapon strength versus armour strength and a d6 roll.

At it's simplest level, weapons that hurt people are rated basically from 1 to 10.

Weapons designed to kill people with single strikes are rated from 5 to 15, these weapons will also damage small vehicles and supernatural beings.

Weapons designed to damage vehicles are from 10 to 20.

And so on, the scale goes up exponentially to a point that's just ridiculous. Level 30 basically has double the damage potential of level 20, which is double that of level 10, etc.

Armour works on the same scale, but reduces a weapons damage capacity. Light armours might reduce damage by 5, heavy armours by 10, sitting in a car reduces damage by 15, sitting in an armoured truck reduces it by 20. Supernatural beings have innate armours thrown on top.

Add the weapon, subtract the armour and roll a d6 to determine the result. The d6 determines where the person is hit and what health level they are reduced to (light, medium, critical, unconscious, dead).

The system stays relatively simple at all levels, but is capable of using the exact same type of single die roll for one-on-one combats between house mice (who might have effective armour and damage scores of -5 each in this exponential scale, a rough match for each other but fairly insignificant compared to the humans around them), or epic struggles between star destroyers in the depths of deep space (each of which may have armour and damage scores of 40+, capable of obliterating smaller ships with single blasts, and ignoring all but the luckiest shots from fighter pilots, or taking minor damage from smaller star cruisers)..

http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vulpinoid/TCRP_wPictures_.pdf

I'm working on an alternative "WW2 with Supernaturals" setting for these core rules now which should hopefully expand theses ideas.

V

Hmm, at first I didn't understand how what you were talking about related to my question, but then I took a look at your PDF and it made a lot more sense.

That's quite a neat little idea, there, for rolling the d6 and allowing a choice between losing hit points or sacrificing your abilities (I think is what that meant?). The only thing I wonder is whether all those charts and numbers might bog things down or get a little confusing. Have you playtested it much? Had other people playtest it? What where their reactions?

I'm going through a series of playtests now.

The first one of which will be written up and posted on the playtesting part of the forum, while I'll write up some of the later ones for the actual play section of the forum.

I should be done writing up the first playtest over the weekend.

You've got the right basic idea, all of the characters get hit points which they use to absorb the wounds, armour is also used to reduce the severity of the wounds.

It's a bit of a different way to look at things, and it makes more sense to complete newbies while more experienced gamers have to unlearn their previous mind-sets before getting into it...but it seems to be working.

I was also getting sick of the heavy number crunching found in certain games, versus to vague abstraction found in others, and this was simply the compromise I came up with.

V

Indeed, as an experienced gamer I do find it a bit difficult to wrap my head around the system, but it seems, on the surface, to be a very innovative system and a welcome relief to those other more classic systems I refrenced.

So, in your playtests so far, do your players help with interpreting the dice rolls, or do you keep the chart in front of you to quickly refrence what each attack does, since you wrote it? And, if they help, do they feel the added complexity to dealing damage adds to the enjoyment of the game or does it bog down combat with extra calculating?

Once a player has put in a couple of hits, or has taken a couple of hits it's actually seemed to go fairly quickly.

At least as quickly as any other game where you roll to hit, then roll to damage. Certainly more quickly than those games where the attacker determine modifiers to see how their chance of hitting changes, then rolls to hit, the defender gets the chance to roll for blocking the attack, the attacker then calculates dice to roll for damage, damage is then absorbed by a roll on the part of the defender....etc.

I've been giving each player a single page "cheat sheet" with a basic overview of what the difficulties mean (easy, hard, just plain stupid, etc.), the combat chart, and a few other basic references to help gameplay.

It's certainly not a 1 page roleplaying game, but it's most of the information needed to play without having to reference through the pages of the core rules. I'll be including the same thing in the full game when I release it next year.

If anyone else comes up with alternative answers to the "classic hit point model", I'd certainly be interested in seeing what they might be. My system's not perfect, it was just the system that seemed to work best for me.

I've tried to ensure it works in such a way that allows a weak opponent a slim chance of surviving something catastrophic (but the odds are they'll still be badly wounded), while a powerful opponent has a chance of taking damage from much smaller foes (though usually only minor damage and often only when outnumbered dramatically).

V