Well, I've been ruminating on a narrativist superhero game and have hit a creative doldrum. You see, I'm working with the central metaphor of superheroes being "Power comes from Suffering" and I'm trying to put together a damage system that will convey real heart-wrenching, gut-twisting suffering, rather than being an exercise in arithmetic. One thing I often do when I hit one of these dry patches is go to my bookshelf and review how this sort of thing has been done in other games. Thus, my cursory analysis of damage systems across my RPG collection. I've hit upon some ideas for myself, but perhaps someone else will benefit from this, as well.

A few caveats: 1) I use the terms "player" and "character" rather interchangeably, but I trust everyone can keep them straight. 2) I wrote most of this from memory, so if I've misclassified something, please let me know.

Hit Points This is exemplified by *D&D, but also found in Eden's Unisystem, GURPS and CoC's Sanity. They work like a gas tank: A character has a finite number of points. So long as there's gas in the tank, the car works fine. Generally, hitting empty (or -10 or whatever) means the character is out of play. Damage is expressed by reducing the number of points. Healing powers serve to refill the gas tank, so to speak. Bleeding mechanics often manifest as a leak in the gas tank--mandated point loss at given intervals. Hit Points are notorious for their lack of flavor (mostly due, I think, to the delayed impact of damage) and plagued by the need to balance the number of hit points per character against the amount of damage done by various attacks within the game world.

In one interesting example, Puppetland uses visual hit points with its coloring-in of puzzle pieces. In this case, hit points overcome their usual lack of flavor to convey a sense of creeping, inexorable doom.

Wound Levels Found in Shadowrun, WW's Storyteller, West End's d6, Torg/Masterbook, 7th Sea, Unknown Armies' Madness Meters, Theatrix, Orkworld and Nobilis. Similar to Hit Points, but fewer in number, Wound Levels are often identical for all (or almost all) characters in a game. What differentiates one character's "toughness" from another is how likely Wounds are to be taken. You see, Wound Levels are often coupled with "Saving Throws" of some sort--also called "Soak Rolls" or "Wound Checks"--to determine whether a successful hit does damage and, if so, how much. Many Wound Level systems are coupled with Effectiveness Penalties, so that the more a character is hurt, the greater the penalty applied to future rolls. These can set up a "Death Spiral" situation where initial penalties make later damage more difficult to resist. A number of these systems have special points--such as "Hero Points" or "Willpower"--that can counteract the wound penalties, altough how many of these points one has is usually either constant, or determined at character creation.

Nobilis is an interesting example in that the "toughest" wound levels are removed first, but only if the wound is sufficiently damaging. For example, a standard knife attack against an unhurt Nobilis character would be ineffective; however, if the character had already been subjected to a massive explosion, the knife would be potentially lethal. In this case, the "inverted" wound level structures works to reinforce the distinction of being divine that is at the heart of the game.

Effectiveness Penalties Often combined with Wound Levels in more traditional systems, many newer systems give us our Effectivenes Penalties straight--skipping the middleman of the Wound Level, so to speak. Games include Sorcerer, Extreme Vengeance, InSpectres, Dust Devils, My Life with Master (insofar as Weariness is almost always subtracted from other Effectiveness Values). Most of these games also offer immediately-available effectiveness bonuses that, if earned, can offset the penalties of damage. This sets up a dynamic whereby a damaged character is all-but-forced to play in a method that will garner the most bonuses, in order to retain any level of Effectiveness. Many of these systems also have a "penalty floor" which prevents Effectiveness from being completely negated (e.g., in both Sorcerer and MLwM, a player can always roll at least one die).

Level Drain As found in *D&D, this is actually a variety of Effectiveness Penalty. Not only does a character's Effectiveness drop, but they are now driven to regain the lost levels by pursuing the rewards offered by the system.

Critical Hits We have Rolemaster and The Riddle of Steel to thank for these, primarily. They are pre-written text describing the generally gory nature of a blow--often coupled with Hit Point and/or Wound Level systems to give numerical ratings to the described damage. I don't have much play experience with these, but it seems to me that they may be prone to boredom-through-repetion, as well as the potential to forget the flavor of the wound as play continues.

Wound Descriptors Found in Universalis, Wound Descriptors play off the idea that a character that is hurt may very well be more interesting (and therefore more important) than one who is not. So a description of the wound is added to the character. For my own purposes, taking damage will have to be rewarded in some way (in order to encourage players to take damage), and enhancing the character seems like a good idea. This also opens the door for a list of "battle scars" that a character might carry with him. Now that I think about it, these are similar to Critical Hits, except created extemporaneously rather than pre-written.

Automatic Failure John Wick proposed this in one of his "Play Dirty" columns. It works as such: When one player does , place a black die in a bowl in the center of the table. Later, when another player has succeeded at an action, pick up the die, show it to them, and say "you fail." Although Wick proposed it as a sort of Social Contract enforcer, I think it does have potential for use in a damage system.

My questions for discussion:

1) Did I miss anything? Are there types of damage systems that I've overlooked or am unfamiliar with?

2) Have I mischaracterized anything? Can you give specific examples of systems that give different results than their general types would indicate?

3) Is this kind of across-the-board survey useful? I can't help but do them when I find myself stymied, but does anyone else find this helpful?

What about damage saves? First seen (IMHO) in Unsung and later widely popularized in Mutants and Masterminds for d20, when one is hit, you just roll to see if you shrug it off or not -- and if you don't, you drop. A version of this is also seen in the "soak" system in White Wolf.

Admittedly, both systems I mention use a sort of "Effectiveness Penalty" system in combination with this, but I think the Damage Save is different enough to be worth mentioning.

Robots & Rapiers uses a combination saving throw and effectiveness system. The saving throw is based on any attribute the attacker wishes to target, and failure results in an impairment to that attribute.

I think you could probably split your effectiveness category into those that assign penalties and those that directly reduce scores. I believe original Traveler did this, and if I'm not mistaken Tunnels & Trolls and Twerps also assign damage by the direct reduction of scores.

I do recall that GURPS, while it has the 'finite tank' kind of hit points, also assigns penalties to skills based on damage; I've seen this ignored in certain games, especially cinematic ones, so I'm not entirely sure if it's an advanced or basic combat option, but it is there. Also potentially interesting is the way you roll for consciousness at certain points, as well as death; while the immediate tank is limited, you potentially get even more if you have other qualities (such as a high HT, or particular advantages) that let you stay awake longer, stay alive longer, or ignore the penalties to skills (like High Pain Threshold).

Of course, its core is still the basic Hit Points type, but it's probably worth noting that even that simple mechanic does allow for a lot of variation beyond "Mark off the points, when you're out you're dead".

I'm not certain where (or whether) this fits in one of the above categories, but Charles Franklin has an article in the first issue of The Way, the Truth, and the Dice entitled Hitting Them Where It Hurts, in which he takes analyses of combat wounds and systemetizes them into a GURPS supplement. Franklin has been playing games since the mid seventies (he was at Origins when the original D&D game was introduced) and has extensive experience in the military (a retired career marine), and does good work integrating the two. In a later issue of the same e-zine he discusses mechanics to reproduce "the fog of war", as I recall, and his insights are well worth examining.

--M. J. Young

Hero War's (now HeroQuest's) Action Points deserve a separate mention from hit points, I think. Like hit points, they are flavorless in themselves (asking for the GM or players to describe them) and nothing happens until you hit zero. However, they are temporary for each combat -- and HW has a separate wound track mechanic.

Hit locations make a significant change from standard hit points, since they generally allow that you can be impaired or disabled in various body parts. So you could be impaired in the chest, disabled in the left arm and right leg, but still scraping along.

Michael S. Miller wrote: Well, I've been ruminating on a narrativist superhero game and have hit a creative doldrum. You see, I'm working with the central metaphor of superheroes being "Power comes from Suffering" and I'm trying to put together a damage system that will convey real heart-wrenching, gut-twisting suffering, rather than being an exercise in arithmetic.

Even though it is not directly roleplaying, I think a damage system from FASAs "Interceptor" (Game for Space-Combat between small fighters like X-Wing vs. Tie) is worth mentioning, because something similiar could be done for normal combat.

The first geame mechanic is about armor: You get a layer of 10 lines of boxes, where the width denotes the strength of the armor like this:

OOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO

stronger than
OOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO

A hit with a weapon results in crossing of some of these boxes, the shape of the hit area depends on the kind of weapon used. A Laser goes in straight lines relatively deep, some Blaster hit might be more broad in effect, like this:

Laser hit:
OOOXOOOOOO
OOOXOOOOOO
OOOXOOOOOO
OOOXOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOO

Blaster Hit:
OOXXXXXOOO
OOOXXXOOOO
OOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOO

The point is, that the next Laser hit could go nearly directly through, IF hitting into the same location (chance 1 to 10) But it could also be, that the vessel is hit 10 times by a laser, before being seriously damaged. The Blaster however will normally get through with the third or fourth shot, and when ist does, the damage is greater (it crosses of 8 instead of 4 Boxes).

Second Rule mechanic: Actual Damage
Every X which is not used to cross off armor is a point of Damage. But the way Interceptor deals with that damage is quite interesting as well. There is a flow chart, where you can determine what the effect of that damage is. First you roll on a simple table, which basic system of the ship was hit (I think there where systems like Weapons, Drive, Lifesupport, Sensors and whatever) and then you look up the system on the flow chart, which is an abstract visualisation of the way, the energy takes through the fighter. I.e. Systems located on the outside are hiit first, more important systems are only hit, when the outer ones are destroyed. Each system gives a number of boxes, telling you how much damage points it can take and also features a description of what effect a hit has. For instance hits in drive systems make the ship less maneuverable or slower (depending on which part of the drives was hit), hits in weapon systems disable some of the weapons, or make targeting more difficult. This flow-Chart is not linear but on some points there are random choices, where the damage goes, e.g. in the drive it might go on 1d10: 1-2 OverlightDrive, 3-6 BrakeRockets, 7-9 UnderLightDrive, 10 Steering.

3) Is this kind of across-the-board survey useful? I can't help but do them when I find myself stymied, but does anyone else find this helpful?

xiombarg wrote: What about damage saves? First seen (IMHO) in Unsung and later widely popularized in Mutants and Masterminds for d20, when one is hit, you just roll to see if you shrug it off or not -- and if you don't, you drop. A version of this is also seen in the "soak" system in White Wolf.

John Kim wrote: Hero War's (now HeroQuest's) Action Points deserve a separate mention from hit points, I think. Like hit points, they are flavorless in themselves (asking for the GM or players to describe them) and nothing happens until you hit zero. However, they are temporary for each combat -- and HW has a separate wound track mechanic.

Michael S. Miller wrote:

John Kim wrote: Hero War's (now HeroQuest's) Action Points deserve a separate mention from hit points, I think. Like hit points, they are flavorless in themselves (asking for the GM or players to describe them) and nothing happens until you hit zero. However, they are temporary for each combat -- and HW has a separate wound track mechanic.

Yet another reason I've got to force myself to slog through Hero Wars. I don't know what it is about that game, but everytime I pick it up, my brain tunes out and I can't find any of the cool stuff everyone says is in there.

The Hero Wars rules model combat as it is almost invariably portrayed in popular fictional sources. You rarely see or read about the combatants in a fight delivering a succession of permanent wounds to each other until one of them finally keels over. Instead, the combatants jockey for a favorable position, ducking, dodging, knocking each other over, tossing each other around, and smashing up the furniture. With the exception of the final blow, when the combatants do make contact with each other, they generally deal out minor bruises and cuts.

Michael S. Miller wrote: Is this kind of across-the-board survey useful?

If I understand what you are saying, you want a system where physical wounds are emotionally painful.

I suggest looking at InSpectres for this, as a matter of fact. Treat every significant wound (you can describe this as you like) as essentially a Confessional that allows the aggressor to describe how this made the victim's life suck later:

And as the fire engulfed my hands, I recalled all the things I suddenly could never do again: run my fingers through the hot sand at a beach, write a poem, play the harp, feel the little scar on my wife's shoulder from that time we went snorkeling and she cut herself on coral... instead of fire and pain, what filled my mind was a profound loss. But I still had my feet, and so I fought on.

Shreyas Sampat wrote: If I understand what you are saying, you want a system where physical wounds are emotionally painful.

Michael S. Miller wrote: John, I think Shreyas' point about the emotional impact of damage expresses what I meant by "gut-wrenching" more than detailed hit locations and graphic descriptions of wounds. I'm certain this is a YMMV thing, but as I don't have a lot of first-hand experience with physical trauma, describing that "third degree burns result in charred flesh, intense pain and even exposed bone in extreme cases" doesn't wrench my gut as much as the example text in Shreyas' post. Thanks for you continued input, though. It has helped me to focus my thinking.

Good point, John. I'm not sure if I made this clear in my first post - in InSpectres, a Confessional lets you not only narrate a little vignette of the future, but also assign a Trait to the relevant character.

Both of these are important to the idea - you get the immediate impact of the narration, and the lasting effect of a freeform trait that (theoretically) you can use either as a bonus You ruined my musical career! DIIEEE! or as a penalty Ohmygodidonthavehandsimcrippledwhatwillido... as you please.

Clearly, the idea's undeveloped, though... it needs some thinking to get it to work properly.

I've been gone for a while (thus the lateness of this addition to the thread), but wanted to mention another damage system: triangular hit points. I first saw it mentioned on Usenet a few years back.

Characters have a certain number of hit points, as in standard hit-point-based systems. When a character runs out of hit points, he/she is dead. However, individual wounds can also have effects... and these are governed by the hit point triangle.

So, what's the hit point triangle? Well, you start off with one row of one box:

o

Then you add a second row, this one with two boxes:

o
oo

And so on, each row having one more box, until you have a number of boxes equal to the character's hit points. E.g., for a character with 13 hit points, you'll have:

o
oo
ooo
oooo
ooo

Now, if the last row is "short" (as it usually is), you "bubble it up" to put it with the other row of the same length. So you get:

o
oo
ooo
ooo
oooo

in the above example.

Now things start to get fun. When a character takes a hit, you mark off a number of hit points boxes equal to the damage taken. The boxes have to be marked off from the row that will come closest to being filled without going over, if possible. If there is no row that can take the damage without going over, then the extra damage is treated as if it were another wound... and the character is required to make a save against a difficulty equal to the "overflow". This is a damage saving throw, as in M&M and other games, with different possible effects depending on how badly it's failed.

The basic idea is the same as a damage saving throw system, but with the addition that there is an absolute maximum amount of damage that can be taken, and that the "size" of a hit that a character can take without having to make a saving throw varies depending on current wound status.

Note that many different variants on this can be created, by changing the shape of the "damage triangle". E.g., one could go with a "rectangular" system of two-dimensional hit points -- so that two characters could have the same amount of hit points, but one is more resistant to individual strong blows than another.

A couple more notes...

- Multiple kinds of hit points. This can be done in a couple of different ways. The Hero System, for example, gives characters multiple "hit point" pools, which are tracked separately. Bushido, on the other hand, has only one kind of hit points, but two kinds of damage, both of which come from the same "hit point pool".

- Multiple interacting methods of damage tracking. Chill has both a wound system and a hit point system, with "stamina points". Penalties to actions come from wounds. When a character reaches zero stamina, he/she either falls unconscious or dies, depending on wound status. Of course, many games combine "critical hits" as Michael defines them with another system.

In re critical hits:

"We have Rolemaster and The Riddle of Steel to thank for these, primarily."

This is just a historical quibble, but Rolemaster is years and years after The Arduin Grimoire and numerous optional crit systems in Dragon Magazine. Also, WFRP and now HackMaster have tables with flavor text and gruesome penalties of a very high caliber. This is an old and time-honored idea...

...I see a lot of these inaccurate historical statements on the Forge and don't comment, because it seems irrelevant to the issue being discussed, but the Arduin critical hit tables were such a 'moment' in gaming back around the U.S. Bicentennial that it seems a shame to see them supplanted by Rolemaster as a 'leading mention'. Rolemaster is a very, very late 1st generation RPG from the perspective of an old fogey like me.

I return you now to substantive discussion on the question, one in which I have keen interest but little to add that hasn't been said by others already.

I actually did have a substantive thought about damage systems to add, after I slept on it.

One thing that Donjon got me thinking about was maybe using a more regimented 'fact-stating' system as a way of adjudicating combat. So if you had a Sorcerer/Donjon type resolution system with a multi-die damage roll you could translate your successes into various degrees of gruesome wounding. Sort of like a 'players option' critical hit system.

1 fact would establish that you hit
A second fact would get you a bleeding cut, or a lasting bruise
A third fact could get you an artery or a bone break
Fourth fact would get some internal organs

etc. It could be multi-dimensional too, so that you could take a fact on hit location to get the head for really debilitating injuries, or take a fact to nail the hand and disarm that bastard, etc.

This could be really fun if you enjoy this sort of thing, which I do...

Calithena wrote: I actually did have a substantive thought about damage systems to add, after I slept on it.

Calithena wrote: One thing that Donjon got me thinking about was maybe using a more regimented 'fact-stating' system as a way of adjudicating combat.

Thanks, MSM!

I just wanted to clarify something about my history post: when I said "around the Forge", I didn't mean to suggest that the Forge was in any way especially bad about RPG history, or that there was any sort of conspiracy of obfuscation, or anything like that. In fact, the gamers here are amazingly smart and well-informed, and there are far fewer errors here than you tend to see on other boards where RPG history gets discussed. It's just that they are more jarring here, just like it's jarring when you discover how little some modern biologists know about Darwin's actual writings, or how little some modern philosophers know about Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibniz. One expects brilliant practitioners to be better informed about the history of their subject than ordinary citizens, and in general they are, but when they aren't, it strikes you harder than it might in other contexts.

A curious thought about fact-based damage allocation...

One could set out quite a short list of "relevant facts" about a wounding strike, to pick and choose from.
- Existence of the hit
- Location of the hit
- Immediate advantage (knockdown, knockback, numbed hand)
- Postcombat trauma (bleeding, shock)
- Direct impairment (fracture, agony, one eye blinded by pain or blood, etc)
- Lasting impairment (scars of all stripes, or make a Direct Impairment into the sort which won't be cleanly healable [assuming no magic]).
- Massive impairment (upgrades a Lasting, Direct Impairment to truly horrible - severment, full blindness, death).

Let the attacker choose one of these per success; the defender gets to delineate all the rest, minimizing them as much as he likes. Run them in the above order. To deliberately cut off your sword hand, I'd need six successes (though with five I could still sever whatever the defender had chosen as the Location); to knock you down, I'd need only two. If the attacker passes on the Immediate Advantage point then the defender is likely to describe things agin him - his blade could be caught or he might end up off-balance at the end of the blow.

Adding the specified list ups the rule-complexity even if it does not increase the play-complexity, so I'd use it only if wounding was a game focal point. On the other hand, this list could help inform some good examples for a more freeform Donjon-style fact allocation.

- Eric

Great, Harlequin. This is the sort of thing I had in mind.

Some people who play traditional fantasy games are heavily focused in part on the erotics of massive physical damage. This is the perpetual allure of the great critical hits tables (Arduin, Dragonquest, Rolemaster, WFRP, Hackmaster, etc.). I think at the very least a system along these lines would make a great optional system for Donjon. Let the player take their fantasies of foe-mutilation to the limit....why leave them hanging on the DM or on a random table for their thrill?

Why, indeed. Thank you, by the way. If one were to make this a core mechanic in a game, then I'd recommend a structural addition: put those labels (Location, Direct Impairment, etc) on cards, so that the attacker/defender can share them out between them. But again that's increasing visual/kinesthetic/informational weight... at this point I'd say it'd work best in, let's say, Donjon Duel - Getting Personal, a one-on-one variant for handling duels in great detail, where more things than just the wound system used those cards. You could overload the function of the cards and maintain just one set of physical cards, if all actions had exactly (seven?) fact-types to be provided by one player or the other.

Say:
-= Second Slot =-
Maneuver: Advantage Gained
(Height, Flanking, Distance, Prop)
Psychology: Type of Mindgame
(Deceit, Confusion, Charm, Fear)
Damage: Hit Location
(Head, Torso, R/L Arm, R/L Leg)
-====-

Something like that. Win the roll by X points, define X facts of your choice by taking those cards - but the remaining ones are decided by your opponent. Facts are always stated in the order of the card titles. Winning by a little becomes a tradeoff game, where you define less facts overall than the loser but you get to pick which.

- Eric

Hi Michael,

Another two types of damage system which you could include in your review:

fixed hit points per location as used in the original Runequest. Characters have a relatively static number of hit points, and a lesser number per location (head, arms, chest, legs, abdomen). Because damage is done to individual locations you can easily end up with maimed limbs or even amputations. This is less anonymous than the standard fuel tank of hit points used by systems such as D&D.

Attribute damage as used in the original Traveller RPG. Damage from a weapon was applied directly to the physical attributes of the character. IIRC it was a little like backgammon dice in that each specific die result from an attack had to be applied against a specific attribute so it couldn't merely be optimised easily by a wounded PC.

Cheers
Alex White