Still working on part of the system idea I had. Apocalypse World got me thinking in a certain direction and I wanted to see if it looked viable to you all.

Without getting heavily into the rest of the system, damage will be a fixed number for the weapon (generally from 1 to 8 for person-portable weapons) with an extra 1-3 from how well you hit the target. When you have figured out how much damage you do to the target, you tell them the result. They may spend a story point to reduce it by 2 if they wish, then they must 'pay off' the remaining damage with injury effects. Each effect can only be taken once per wound. Some effects, like blindness, can only ever be taken once. If they end up with damage unpaid or are unwilling to add any more results to the wound (for whatever reason) then the character is either killed (if the damage was normal) or knocked out (if the damage is nonlethal). I may also require that at least half the damage is taken as one single effect, so if you get hit by 10+ damage in one attack (something like a 0.50-cal sniper rifle) you would need to pick at least one effect from the 5pt category.

Sample Effects:
1 pt:
Bleeding wound (no immediate effect, but causes blood loss) - Blood loss system not worked out yet, but causes eventual unconsciousness and death.
Ugly Scar
Staggered (lose next action)
Knocked down

2 pts:
Painful wound (-1 penalty to all actions)
Stunned (halve next defense roll)
Badly bleeding wound (twice the blood loss of the one above).
Afraid (-1 penalty to confront that attacker)
Lamed

3 pts:
Knocked out
Very painful wound (-2 penalty)
Temporary stat point loss (until healed)
Partial deafness/blindness (permanent)
Lamed (permanent)

4pts:
Deafened (permanently)
Lose a limb
Minor chronic pain (permanent, but not constant. Basically triggered by the GM spending a story point)
Terrified/Demoralized (temporary paralysis in combat)

5 pts:
Permanently blinded
Permanent stat point loss (could be re-bought, however)
Coma (until receives medical treatment)
Major chronic pain

This list isn't finalized yet, as I'm still working out what would happen. If someone wants to make up an effect, they could, then the GM would tell them how many point it was worth. You would write the effects of the wound down on an area of the character sheet, then as you spend time healing, mark off effects as they heal. Maybe 2 points of effects for every day healed, or something like that. The player chooses what gets healed.

Does this look too slow? To complicated? Too abuseable? Too wonky?

Pat

pretty sure that there will be "the best" effects to take and everyone will take them

also looks like it will take a long time

What if instead you have hit points.  When hit you take damage - but you can choose to take an effect instead of the damage.

So take 6 damage from the attack, or choose to be stunned and only take 3 damage

Gryffudd, Would you enjoy working out this result - and I mean in the short term, enjoy it right at that moment of play and not just creating a statistical result that at some point in future would be fun somehow?

If it's not fun in the moment of play to you somehow, even if only a little bit, I think it's pointless talking about what you've written. It's not covering any whole thing that in the moment of play will be fun.

Also, if your GM'ing you wont get to calculate this for a character of your own, so missing out on that fun?

If you enjoy working out the result, that's a solid start. But it's a question not often asked, ironically.

Also in terms of 'the best' effect, it might be the case - if two effects were randomly determined and the player choses one of them, that'll vary things more but also include player choice.

dugfromthearth wrote:
pretty sure that there will be "the best" effects to take and everyone will take them

also looks like it will take a long time

What if instead you have hit points.  When hit you take damage - but you can choose to take an effect instead of the damage.

So take 6 damage from the attack, or choose to be stunned and only take 3 damage

Callan wrote:
Gryffudd, Would you enjoy working out this result - and I mean in the short term, enjoy it right at that moment of play and not just creating a statistical result that at some point in future would be fun somehow?

If it's not fun in the moment of play to you somehow, even if only a little bit, I think it's pointless talking about what you've written. It's not covering any whole thing that in the moment of play will be fun.

Also, if your GM'ing you wont get to calculate this for a character of your own, so missing out on that fun?

If you enjoy working out the result, that's a solid start. But it's a question not often asked, ironically.

Also in terms of 'the best' effect, it might be the case - if two effects were randomly determined and the player choses one of them, that'll vary things more but also include player choice.

After posting this last night I got to thinking about the lower end of the list, the permanent stuff. Most of it isn't very 'fun' generally-speaking (character getting permanently blinded, and such). I'm thinking of compressing the weapon damage ranges a bit, so that it's only necessary to take a 5 point effect if you really want that effect story-wise, or if you really want your character to avoid death and can't take anything else.

Has a system similar to this been used in other games? If so, how do they do it?

Pat

Much more fun than most, if I can make it simple enough and fast enough to use that it doesn't interfere with the flow of the game.

It's possible there isn't a problem. I just wanted to see if any of the minds here saw some problem my own point of view was missing.

Thanks muchly, guys. Now back to rewriting.

hiya

im new here and working on a damage system isnt easy. 

I like your ideas though, but would put that into a randomized roll rather than asking the pc to "buy" off their wounds.

alternative is to have the hitpoint side of things, and then employ critical hits which means they must take x amount of wound effects

all in all, speeding it up is hard work.

Hiya westpcw, thanks for the comment. I've only been here a few months myself.

A random roll could be used for it, but I want to give players a bit more narrative control over things. One of the ways is to let them decide the exact effects of the wounds their characters take, which would make including a random roll difficult.

I'm not a huge fan of hit points for damage systems, though there are a few systems that used the idea in interesting ways. If the character takes damage I want them to know what is happening to their character rather than just counting down points.

Yeah, speeding up combat isn't easy. It's usually a compromise between detail and speed. I'm just trying to find a happy medium. :)

Thanks again for commenting.

Pat

Hi Gryffudd,

Your ideas bring to mind two other games. Both of which I designed, but I'm not shilling them to you -- at present :). I'm hoping that they'll give you some insights and spur you into ideas. (You're also free to appropriate anything from them that you like; just gimme a shout-out in your acknowledgements or something.)

In The Rustbelt, damage works like this:
A damage number is determined based on the weapon used, and a few other factors, but it's mainly set up such that if you get hit with a deadly weapon, you suffer potentially deadly damage.

Once a character takes damage, the GM offers an option or two for what form it takes, and the player of the damaged character chooses. This can inlcude broken bones (and other injuries from the most minor to the most catastrophic), unconsciousness, momentary stunning, the loss or ruination of equipment, profuse bleeding, or any combination thereof. In addition to any such concrete forms offered by the GM, the player can choose to take it in Blood and/or Sweat. Blood is an abstract resource pool that basically indicates how close the character is to the point where the story demands that he dies. Sweat is an abstract resource pool that indicates how close the character is to going down from exhaustion. The maximum points of damage that can be taken as Sweat loss is determined by how physically Tough the character in question is.

Here's the important thing: only Blood and Sweat are numerical. Injuries and losses of time or equipment have no set point values. What this means is that, in the course of determining what form the damage takes, the GM is essentially negotiating that either bad thing X happens, or bad thing Y happens, or you pay for it in Blood and Sweat. What the GM has to do is balance the severity of the concrete damage effects (injury, loss) against the cost in Blood and Sweat. He can't make it nice enough that the player will swallow the injuries happy rather than spend his resources, and he can't make it so horrible that the player will happily spend his chips rather than take the injuries. He's gotta make 'em calculate.

This means that concrete damage effects are only meaningful and have value only in terms of their story impact -- without the designer having to try to arbitrarily assign points, which won't work in practice because what's valuable in one story at a given moment isn't going to be valuable in another, or even in the same story in a different given moment. The play groups will arrive at their own standards on this, and this rule allows them to do so.

The other game is Badass City, which isn't finished and is slightly broken, but the damage rules work.

In BC, when you get hurt, your "Harm level" goes up. It doesn't matter what it was -- a punch in the face, a knife in the gut, getting blown up by dynamite, being hit by a train; it's all Harm, it increases your Harm level by 1. (If that sounds weird, just imagine as drawn by Frank Miller. See?) Then the player controlling the guy or thing that harmed you gets to pick one consequence from the Harm Table.

The Harm Table is split up by levels -- you gotta pick an effect that correspond's to the victim's new Harm level. For instance, at level 1, the worst that can happen is inconsequential scrapes and bruises -- the first one's free. As it goes up, the harmer can choose to inflict things like profuse bleeding, terrible pain, disfiguration, physical impairment, and so on. By the time you're up to Harm level 5, the only choices are maiming, a deadly wound, or putting you out of commission (i.e. incapacitated, but not lastingly harmed).

The idea is that the harmer picks an effect that benefits him personally -- either immediately or in the long term -- because the game is all about badasses in competition to be the biggest badass in Badass City. For instance, the optimal choice between maiming, a deadly wound, and putting somebody out of commission is going to vary from situation to situation -- they all have different consequences, so depending on the circumstances, certain ones are going to be more profitable. The harmer has to consider these circumstances and make a strategic decision.

Does all of that make sense? Just ask any questions if you got 'em. I hope this helps!
-Marshall

Hi Marshall. Thanks for the ideas. They're both quite interesting and you've given me an idea. A slight change to the current idea. Basically, the initiator of the attack gets to choose one damage effect with a point value no greater than half the damage total. They then tell the target what effect they take and how much damage remains to be 'paid off' with wound effects. The victim's players then chooses the remaining effects. The attacker gets to guarantee an effect of some sort, while the defender gets to control the remaining effects.

Thanks for the response. Can't wait to see your games come out.

Pat

I personally think that your idea of being able to "buy off" wounds is an interesting one, and I've seen it done in a couple of other games (including as a houserule for Shadowrun), but I think that one problem that you might have to address is what I call the "Black Knight" problem. The black knight problem is a cousin to the problem with death spiral mechanics, and basically what it means is that characters who elect to pick up injuries are going to be less effective, and then pick up more injuries, and then pick up more injuries.. until they absolutely can't take a single additional injury. This can (depending on what sort of injuries you put on your table), strain disbelief a little bit, when someone keeps on getting hit by damage value 4 attacks and keeps on taking the absolute minimum injury result that they possibly can, transforming their character into something still capable of action, but looking in every way like our over-eager warrior friend from Monty Python.

Your idea of specifying that at least half the damage must be taken as a single condition is a good one, but it still might might be able to be abused by a cunning player if you have enough injury conditions for them to choose from, particularly with the middle range injury levels. A low caliber gun like a .22 might cause 4 damage, and enable a player to take a hail of gunfire before going down if there's a wide enough variety of injury conditions for him or her to choose from, which might or might not fit the style you have in mind. If it doesn't, then perhaps you can declare a limit on the total "value" of injuries that a character can have at one time, before they're knocked unconscious or killed? Perhaps based on Stamina, Constitution or some other relevant toughness statistic?

Just some thoughts and observations-I really like your idea.

Thanks for the comment, johnthedm7000.

Yeah, I've had that problem in a lot of wound-type damage systems. It's one of the advantages hit point systems have, since they can set a hard cap on how much damage you can take. I'm not too concerned with player characters surviving a lot of damage, the system as a whole isn't made to be very lethal to player characters. It's more in the Indiana Jones mode of getting hurt/injured/scarred, but surviving, though there should certainly be a limit at some point. That could be abused by a GM, though, keeping NPCs alive and not allowing a combat to end. It's certainly one of the worries I have. I'm hoping to test the system out over the next month or so, so I'll get to see if it becomes a problem. The GM section could probably use some of the 'always be ready to let your NPCs die advice from Apocalypse World,' though.

There could be something like a lethal injury stat, something like Endurance + X, where if the damage of the weapon is over that number, the character just dies. The way the system works, it shouldn't be easy to get hugely random damage totals, so it would only come into play with attacks over a certain power level.

Thanks, something more to think about. :)

Wouldn't it make sense to simply limit the amount of injuries of a certain level a character can tally up? After a character has X number of the lowest effects, they can no longer sublimate damage with those effects, etc?

This way, players still have the ability to buy injuries rather than take damage, but it's less likely to run into a Black Knight situation.

Alternately, you could say that after a certain number of injuries, the next time someone wants to buy an injury rather than take damage, it must be from the next highest category. That way, maybe someone can get by with taking three (for argument's sake) injuries of just getting scraped up a bit, but after that, they receive a more grievous injury.

Also, it really doesn't make sense to allows a player who has a huge laceration be able to get out of damage by simply writing off damage as a scrape. So maybe you could institute a rule that once your character has bought a up to certain level of injury, they cannot buy lesser injuries to evade damage until they have a chance to patch themselves up, or some such mechanic.

Hi David. Thanks for the reply.

If the playtest shows a problem of the black knight kind I probably will have to put a limit on things, or perhaps increase the damage of attacks, so people need to take bigger effects (or just accept death). I'm hoping to get it started in a week or so, but the third player keeps getting scheduled for work on game night. I could just do combat runs, but I find it's more accurate to do it as a full gaming session so it gets treated more naturally.

Towards the last comment, there isn't any way to reduce a big damage hit with just a scrape. If it's a lot of damage, every point of that damage has to be bought off with wound effects. You could deal with 3-4 damage with just minor effects, but if a rifle hits you for 10 or so, you're going to need to use the big penalty stuff to 'pay' for it, or else the character dies.

Thanks for all the comments, everybody. It's been a great help.

Oh. My understanding of your system was that you could just use wounds to buy off damage points so if you were hit by a rifle blast for 10 points of damage, you could take a minor wound to reduce the amount of damage your character takes. So if you write it off as a flesh wound and knocked off like 2 damage, then it would reduce the damage dealt to 8, which didn't make sense because from the mechanic, 10 damage is significantly more severe than just a flesh wound, so the lower level wounds shouldn't apply.

If it were my game, I would say that the wounds that you can apply are determined by the amount of damage done by the attack. If it's a high amount of damage, you shouldn't be able to drop the damage down at all without taking a high wound.

On a separate note, you might think about renaming the Damage to something like Severity so that from a semantic standpoint, it would make more sense that you could distribute the Severity of a blow than the actual amount of damage it calls.

So a rifle blast nails your character for 10 severity points, and each wound you can buy take a certain number of severity points, and what you have left is damage.

But it's really only a cosmetic difference, so it barely matters. But I had the thought and figured I might share it.

In thinking about your mechanic here, it made me think of a way I could make rules for damage distribution for my system I'm working on, so thank you.

Here's a potential solution for simplifying it... maybe you could limit the number of effects to a list small enough to put down on the character sheet. That way a player just has to circle enough effects from the right level or the right number of point values to cover the damage. This seems like it would simplify things a lot... no looking anything up, not writing anything down, you take 5 damage, just circle a 5 point wound, or a 2 and 3 or a 4 and a 1 or whatever. By the way... I love this idea, giving the player control of how they take their penalties seems to me to be a way to make being penalized a much easier pill to swallow.

David wrote:
Oh. My understanding of your system was that you could just use wounds to buy off damage points so if you were hit by a rifle blast for 10 points of damage, you could take a minor wound to reduce the amount of damage your character takes. So if you write it off as a flesh wound and knocked off like 2 damage, then it would reduce the damage dealt to 8, which didn't make sense because from the mechanic, 10 damage is significantly more severe than just a flesh wound, so the lower level wounds shouldn't apply.

If it were my game, I would say that the wounds that you can apply are determined by the amount of damage done by the attack. If it's a high amount of damage, you shouldn't be able to drop the damage down at all without taking a high wound.

On a separate note, you might think about renaming the Damage to something like Severity so that from a semantic standpoint, it would make more sense that you could distribute the Severity of a blow than the actual amount of damage it calls.

So a rifle blast nails your character for 10 severity points, and each wound you can buy take a certain number of severity points, and what you have left is damage.

But it's really only a cosmetic difference, so it barely matters. But I had the thought and figured I might share it.

In thinking about your mechanic here, it made me think of a way I could make rules for damage distribution for my system I'm working on, so thank you.

masqueradeball wrote:
Here's a potential solution for simplifying it... maybe you could limit the number of effects to a list small enough to put down on the character sheet. That way a player just has to circle enough effects from the right level or the right number of point values to cover the damage. This seems like it would simplify things a lot... no looking anything up, not writing anything down, you take 5 damage, just circle a 5 point wound, or a 2 and 3 or a 4 and a 1 or whatever. By the way... I love this idea, giving the player control of how they take their penalties seems to me to be a way to make being penalized a much easier pill to swallow.