Injury systems, a.k.a. "hitpoints"

During the "Death in RPGs" thread I began pondering about the usual injury system in RPGs, namely the hitpoint system. Hitpoints are not a bad system, no, they are good for measuring your character's constitution in numbers and makes for some easy combat rules. But especially in the later stages of a game it gets quite unrealistic. "Oh shit, I just got about twenty blows by that sword on my chest... but whatever, I still have half of my hitpoints left!" No normal human [neither elf nor dwarf] could survive this. But with hitpoints they can.

So, there must be a better way of showing the character's injuries and current state of health. We could just reduce hitpoints, so they won't go up to the hundreds at the end of the game. But that doesn't solve anything, really. Instead, we could totally throw away hitpoints. We still have a stat for bodily constitution, however, and this is, logically, constitution itself. Then we should introduce a system of injuries. This can only work really well in a combat system that allows for aiming at different body parts, like Fallout's turn based combat system or any 3D first or third person RPG [Oblivion had the chance to do this, but it didn't... every body part just recieved same damage. Dark Messiah did this, maybe, well at least you could cut off a head/arm/leg with your finishing move]. Now, let's say, I take my bow and aim for the eye. There will be a huge damage bonus, sure. But there will also be an injury to the eye, and the character that has been hit gets blind on that eye. This might seem overpowered, but hitting eyes is hard, so there's a low chance to hit it. So let's see it as some kind of intended critical hit [I know I only got a 20% chance of hitting the eye, but I also know it would be a critical hit when I get the blow, so I'll try it].
Now, let's say you hit an enemy's hand with your sword. The enemy is wearing no gauntlet to protect the hand. And you landed a very mighty blow. So the sword severs his hand from his arm. Without this hand he can't wield any two handed weapons, can't use any shields nor can he fight with two weapons at once. He sustained a serious injury which disables some of his skills, until he gets that hand to a very skilled magical healer and lets it be fixed on again, for a hell lot of money.
Now, let's be less fatal: You get a blow on the leg by a warhammer. Your bone breaks. Thus you cannot run anymore, and your walking speed is severely slowed. Now this makes for some serious disadvantages in maeuvring during combat. Or you get a deep cut on your bizeps. This arm will strike much weaker now, and you will lose blood.

Now this system would add a lot of tension to the gameplay, and make you more careful during combat. One careless move, and the consequences could be devastating. But if you plan your tactics well and manage some fatal blows, you are rewarded with a severely weakened enemy.
It adds lots of consequence to the game if you are able to lose a hand, or to get blind on one eye. And it would add lots of personality to the combat, every battle scar has its own story.
Now, as good as it sounds, it is hard to implement [at least it's hard to think of a good system that is well balanced enough]. Let's say every body part has a seperate amount of hitpoints. Yes, this brings hitpoints back again, but in another way. Let's say the hitpoints equal your constitution. When this body part gets hit, it loses some of these hitpoints, so it is injured. Get your hand injured and endure reduced effectiveness in combat. If the hitpoints fall to zero, the body part is severed, or broken, depending on the type of weapon [or just rendered useless, getting hit by an arrow into the hand won't sever it neither would it smash the hand, but the hand would become limp].
Now, every open wound you get will lose blood. This will substract from your "blood points", another value based on your constitution. Now, if you don't bandage such a bleeding wound, you will lose one blood point per wound every turn or every half a minute, depending on turn based or real time. If you lose all your blood points, you firstly fade out and get unconscious. There should be some constitution check being made, and if it succeeds, you stay awake and can take time to treat your wounds [ot to take cover if you are in a fight and hide]. If you lie unconscious, you keep losing blood. If the blood points reach, say, minus the half of your constitution, you die. So while you are unconscious, you must hope that somebody will bandage your wounds, or that you have done so yourself before passing out, or that the wounds stop bleeding [depending on how fatal they are, it is possible that they do]. If the wounds stop bleeding one way or another, your blood points are starting to regenerate again. After they reached 1 again, you wake up.
Now, what happens if your head gets below 0 hitpoints? It gets crushed or severed, you die. Easy as that. More interesting are the possibilities of the torso and the abdomen. If they get below 0 hitpoints, and then hit again, an internal organ will be damaged. Some injuries there are fatal, some not so. A hit in the heart kills you. A hit in the lungs severely decreases your fatigue and increases the chance of passing out because of blood loss. A hit into the stomach reveals yesterday's food and fills your abdomen with acid. And it's very likely to be fatal. You can imagine the possibilities.

So, that's what I've thought about.
Tell me your thoughts, please, and also try coming up with some of your own systems.
It's time to finally recycle that old hitpoint system and replace it with something more thought out.

It's a little too complicated for something on PC Games. Heck if we're doing this on PnP It'd be a little cumbersome and how would you deal with gigantic monsters like Dragons and animals?

F2 aim system was very shallow and probably would benefit most from this sort of system but not sure about other RPGs.

Way to complicated IMHO , the implementation of such a system would probablly be bad at best , and i am not sure of the fun factor of such a game , maybe limpness would work ok but severd limbs would mean 3 unlucky combtats youd end up a handless 1 legged man?

OsirisGod said:

Way to complicated IMHO , the implementation of such a system would probablly be bad at best , and i am not sure of the fun factor of such a game , maybe limpness would work ok but severd limbs would mean 3 unlucky combtats youd end up a handless 1 legged man?

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There's still the possibility of magically fitting it back on.
Sure, the system seems complicated and might have some too bad consequences, but with a bit of tweaking it could turn out as something really nice.

Uh...dude?






and that's just off the top of my head, without mentioning some of the more obscure titles I've enjoyed over the years.

Good idea though. I find games with that mechanic are usually good ones.

PS: In games like BGII for example, you *could* roll a low health character, and then go about wearing strong armour on certain places, weak armour on others...kinda makes it more "challenging" if your bracers (+1) don't take as many whacks as your shield (+5). Sadly, the game doesn't really support this...plus it requires the use of IMAGINASHUN, which is directly contrary to cRPGing.

JarlFrank said:

OsirisGod said:

Way to complicated IMHO , the implementation of such a system would probablly be bad at best , and i am not sure of the fun factor of such a game , maybe limpness would work ok but severd limbs would mean 3 unlucky combtats youd end up a handless 1 legged man?

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There's still the possibility of magically fitting it back on.
Sure, the system seems complicated and might have some too bad consequences, but with a bit of tweaking it could turn out as something really nice.

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You just skilled the whole ideea with this qute , why have the option to loose limbs if you can magically attach it back , just to frustrate the player ?

A good ideea for half of it , the HP distribute to body parts is a great ideea though , maybe instead assign DMG modifiers to body parts would be a bit less of a hassel , say eyes hit does 250% dmg , torso 100% , limbs 50% , head 200% , because realistically speaking you can take less hits to the eyes head then torso , anyway we should all spit ideeas here maybe something will come out in the end that is also fun and usable.

As i said , limpness is ok for me , severed limbs kinda beats the point of the game , in the end we play computer games to have fun , i think to much realism in them can spoil it for me for example , just like photorealistic CG does , if i want to get my nose broken i can get in to a bar fight :twisted:

BTW - I really like your idea of targeted strikes, as it would allow for some *very* interesting combat. Die by the Sword had this (of course) but the implementation was ATROCIOUS.

I think - to date - the best system has been JA2.

Now, if you combine some of the ideas from martial arts (eg: Arnis - limb destruction, defanging the snake: Grappling arts - throws, immobilizations, joint locks, strangulation: Projection arts - distance throws, pressure point strikes, force redirection, pain compliance etc) then you could get some really nifty stuff going on.

Don't see it happening outside of a rogue like though. For some reason, the cultural norm seems to be Rogue-like=sophistication. Decent graphics=dumbed down. Here's hoping AoD and other shining stars of 2007 (Echelon, Dhargul etc) change this.

Shit: If I had any skills at all...nah. Fuck the Codex

The way I've seen HP described is as a characters ability to avoid damage, rather than as a characters ability to absorb damage. That way if you have 2 characters, say Lucian with 5 HP, and Maximus with 100 HP, and both are shot with 10 arrows, Lucian is certainly a pincushion and drops dead while Maximus probably has half his HP left because he was able to dodge about or deflect incoming missiles to minimize the damage. In this way the increase in HP represents your increase in defensive fighting ability.

Perhaps for more realism you could just express health as a percentage of maximum HP. Then it could be assumed that the character's level is what will lessen the HP percentage loss. Then players won't think of HP as a sort of heat-sink for damage.

For targeted attacks you could use something like the critical tables from Warhammer Fantasy RP, or maybe something even more intricate like Hackmaster. Because these are such a pain to roll they're only used for natural 20's, but it'd be no problem no have a CRPG roll them every time for hit locations. Hackmaster then breaks down the damage by percentage (e.g. 100% HP for head and torso, 15% for ankle, 1% for finger, etc) and then you can calculate specific damage (puncturing, crushing, hacking) for that target when the HP for that area is reached. This then results in the target losing specific abilities -- movement penalty, fighting penalty, decapitation, whatever.

It'd be pretty fun to charge into a group of kobolds, say, and have the computerized system model bones being crushed and kobold limbs being strewn about in detail.

I hate the hit-points system and also the 'round' system during combat. A real sword fight should be over in five to twenty seconds maximum and after recieving a few 'hits' you should not be able to get up and fight again. If you get badly injured it should take weeks, or months to recover and many wounds should cause permanent penalties.

Long-term survival should be much more a question of luck (never being hit) or cowardice than 'attributes'.

Of course if you adopt the realistic system you have to change the way you role-play. The AD&D style of role-playing is 85% combat and to get to level ten a (psychopath) character is expected to massacre hundreds or thousands of enemies. If you take out the stupidly unreal combat then you have nothing left to play for. You would have to role-play with the focus on a goal and as if fighting is the last available option (like in real life), not some fun activity to break the boredom between talking to quest NPCs.

Or you should expect your characters to last a very short time.

I also hate the HP system, but it's easily the most adaptable system for different game mechanics. However, it's kind of misleading (and maybe retarded as well) that it's been named "Hit Points". Any game to do completely away with HP system would be special to its own, with special game mechanics, game type (controls, RT/TB) and even the story maybe. We can come up with nice to great ideas and if that's the aim then it's great, but they will be limited in applicability.

Here's just one from the top of my mind: Skill-based HP which dictates what kind of critical situations you can survive and for how many times in a given period. Let's say, as a fighter, experienced/advancing in close combat, you're better able to survive fatal encounters of close combat and the HP translates into a number of dodge, block or counter-attack bonuses, as well as simple unlucky moments for the opposition (foot slips, opponent lose control of his swing for a moment etc.), with a diminishing rate of success or efficiency and increasing difficulty and penalty to hint the player how he's doing with each failure.

Enter a deadly situation involving skills you aren't familiar with or experienced enough, your option is to run away with least damage received. If you decide to face it, you may receive permanent penalties or even die. Contrast of such bonus and penalties increase as you advance greatly in a number of skills -ie. your proficiency- as opposed to skills you have neglected or which are simply out of your proficiency. The outcome of failed encounters also become more drastic as you keep failing despite impossible or very hard situations.

Outside death situations, drastic social ramifications for attempted actions despite low skill. These might come in the form of being ridiculoud in public, disrespected, hated, untrusted, being ripped off etc. Now tell me if this is a system applicable to any game? But then one might ask the question why there are so many stupid shit-ass games devoid of substance and anything different or really original, and why there's need for flexible systems catering specifically to mainstream?

At this point, the hit point system is completely engraved into pretty much everybody's brain. From a developer standpoint, its already designed, and easily implemented. And, with so many people already familiar with it, they can quickly jump in. For those who have never seen it before, there's virtually no learning curve. I can certainly appreciate a more complex system, but there are benefits to using a well-established system. Complicating combat, probably already the most complex portion of a game, can lead to other problems, such as an increased number of bugs, poor balance, and increased development time.

Unfortunately, ramping up the deadliness of combat would seem to further reinforce the constant save/reload mentality, simply by virtue of probability. Over the course of a game, the player will undoubtedly fight a certain number of enemies. There's a pretty high probability that one of these enemies is going to land a critical hit, or at least a severely crippling one, no matter how much time the player spends planning. It doesn't really matter much for the player's opponents, since they only have to worry about that single combat. The player's party, on the other hand, will likely be going through several combat situations, if not many more. Odds will catch up with them, sooner or later.

Also, when the characters are very low level, a broken leg or severed hand is probably going to mean death. At this point, the party isn't going to have the resources to recover (either in spellcasting ability or wealth to pay someone to heal the wound). They will be worn down after each fight, until they're to the point where they simply won't be able to survive. So, the player is probably going to find it necessary to save before every combat, and if they've taken too much damage, they'll reload and try again.

The system also seems to only hamper the combat oriented character. Unless you're adding significant difficulty to the other means of handling problems, those types of characters are going to be at a severe disadvantage.

All of this isn't to say that I wouldn't like to see more complex combat handling. However, you can't simply throw 'realism' at it, and expect everything to work properly. There are a number of other concerns that need to be taken into account.

Take away HPs and/or extensive combat and you're left with an adventure game. Combat is pretty much the only great difference between the two.

kingcomrade said:

Take away HPs and/or extensive combat and you're left with an adventure game. Combat is pretty much the only great difference between the two.

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bullshit

Sigh. This doesn't need to devolve into a pointless debate on what is required for a game to fit into a specific genre. The discussion is about establishing a reasonable metric for representing an individual's health, a means to deal out injury, and a method for representing these injuries.

Blood pain and physical injury, you can pass out from blood loss, get slowed down by pain, and get crippled limbs. Linked yet again.

I don't know if limb removal would be great for the player because it would require magic to fix, and regrowing twenty limbs seems lame, or having the player reload a lot even when they didn't die. On the other hand it would be really unique and bad-ass.

Though you must admit that it would be finally a good opportunity to include some cripplling tools for the crippled. Something around the rocket weelchair of shrieking doom perhaps? Or the legendary white cane 'Death's Touch'? Nothing against some good pulp fiction now and then.

But more on-topic I would think that it ultimately depends on the type of gameplay and scenario that the game creators have in mind. If you want the player to reconsider about every second step he/she takes, chose the 'realistic' approach. That is, to put it blant, simply trying to kill him/her for every chance you get. But I guess that's not news. Some P&P systems evolve around the idea like Cthulhu with its no-rising Hitpoints and quiet lethal weaponry. In conclusion it slows things down quiet a bit and is more suitable for calm and non-combat focused games (seldom in the RPG genre as far as I can remember) with presumably hesitant exploration (for crawling through dark tunnels can mean game over very fast and will be avoided for a time until there is no chance for a delay no more).

On the other hand there are the rather combat focused games like some D&D spawns which take a complete different approach. Those often rely heavily on exploration and (partly massive) battles. It is the perfect playground for epic tales which means leading the PC from one climax to the other with foes one more powerful than the other. Those stories which are, the way I see it, impossible from the sole idea anyway. But to present at least an ounce of reasoning it is early settled that if you gotta face the great antagonists you must be powerful yourself thus gain magic loot, skills and HPs. It is an easy to pick up system which can also ease the balancing of difficult settings for areas+monsters.

Though Hit-Points really isn't the best kind of name. Call it something like fate and use it as a metagaming element for example as it was suggested sometimes before me thinks:
While you progress in your heroic affairs the PC starts to become more persistent and stubborn to reach his goals. The rising FPs represent this determination (or sometimes keen luck) and will regenerate itself either in combat (action focus) or after (tactic focus or defined by difficult setting). Since a man is easier to dispose than a local legend his/her acts seems to become more unbelievable on every turn of the adventure until it even can cast some negative effects on the enemy. But basically I thought FPs to be more of a damage absorber than anything else. No matter if you go for a hit zone or abstract HP sytem with all its painful consequences (although I would presume that they are determined by attributes and won't be rising for the rest of the game. So the realistic setting). If you've been hit and seen the results you can choose to sacrifice FPs to completely avoid or at least decrease the impact of the attack (by entering a number or choose in a more abstract fashion like 50% and so on) or you can even increase your own damage to a great risk. In that way the Player gains a little more control about the combat procedure until he runs out of FPs and then either dies, escapes or succed.

I liked the locational damage system in Deus Ex. They did have something of an explanation for why your character could take more punishment than a normal human.

OsirisGod said:

...but severd limbs would mean 3 unlucky combtats youd end up a handless 1 legged man?

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I think you mean 2 unlucky combats and one incredibly lucky combat.

JarlFrank said:

...We could just reduce hitpoints, so they won't go up to the hundreds at the end of the game. But that doesn't solve anything, really...

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Doesn't it? It solves all the problems you've outlined.

I'm not seeing how a system with severed limbs etc. is going to work much better. Using area specific damage and wounds is worth a thought; having arms and legs flying about half the time is either going to seem stupid (if you can simply keep magicing them back), or incredibly annoying (if you can't).

That's presuming we're talking about a game where the intention is for the player to play through with one or a few characters who survive most of the way. If it's a game where the player might go through say 50 characters, with many dying, then by all means sever away.

I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to talk about what would make a good system without first making clear how many characters the player is controlling, and how many (if any) are expected to survive.

A system which promotes instant death for the players is going to inherently necessitate a game where either players are not expected to actually beat the game, or a game where individual characters are inherently expendable. This is certainly a valid way to design a game, but it would seem to run against the currently popular modes of play. The first requires that you convince the player that the game should be played without saving and reloading, because otherwise this is all that dying will represent, and the second requires that you convince the player that characters are expendable.

The problem is, nowadays, you can't really sell a game where players aren't supposed to beat it, so they're just going to save and reload unless you make it impossible, and then they'll just decide our game sucks. The other answer arguably produces a game which is not really an RPG, and you instead get something like X-COM or JA, where all the characters are functionally expendable to some degree and permanent casualties do not necessarily render the game unfinishable.

Well, some good points there.
When you think about it, losing a limb so often is annoying, yes. But still, it is harder to hit a hand as it is to hit the torso. And you can pull your hand out of harms way easier than your whole body. And stuff like gauntlets can really help that, too. The effect of a sword slashing your hand really depends on if the hand is armored or not. If it is armored with a chain gauntlet, the sword won't cut through it, merely break the handbones. If it is unarmored, the sword will easily slide through the soft flesh and also through the bones.
So, another part of this system would be that armor is very important. Armor can save your life, like it does in reality. Chainmail for example was developed just to minimize cutting wounds. If someone struck you with a sword on your chainmailed body, you'd still recieve some impact damage, but it won't cut into your flesh. So you won't lose any blood through open wounds. But if you go out adventuring armorless, be afraid. Be very afraid. If you get hit, you will bleed. And you are in danger of losing limbs.
And, as I said, every limb has its own hitpoints. Sometimes you will be glad you just lost your hand - and didn't get that blow into your torso, which could have meant death. In any other game with the usual hitpoints system, a beat on the foot can kill you. And, of course, if you play defensive and make regular use of your shield you survival [and limb retaining] quote gets considerably higher.
If you look at the usual action RPG there's not much difference, you CAN easily die if you are careless, but if you play defensive and block often, your chances stand much higher. Just the fact that you CAN lose limbs doesn't mean you WILL lose a limb everytime. Not if there is a way to protect it.

Pussycat669 said:

But more on-topic I would think that it ultimately depends on the type of gameplay and scenario that the game creators have in mind. If you want the player to reconsider about every second step he/she takes, chose the 'realistic' approach.

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Excellent point. A "realistic" damage system wouldn't work in a setting with lots of monsters roaming everywhere (any D&D one). Simply because you would get ripped apart very fast. Unless, of course, it's aimed towards high difficulty gameplay.

Maybe it could be done like this: a difficulty meter. Simple, Infinity Engine-like. Moderate, Fallout. And Hard, full of realism.

I like the Stun/Wound/Mortal system that Alternity used, although it's basically a modification of HPs. Although not as elaborate as the system that Human Shield linked to, S/W/M does provide a balance between simplicity and more realistic combat damage.

Afterfall seems to get a nice injury system which is a lot more interesting than hitpoints. We'll just have to see how it turns out to be in the actual game.

4. How will the damage infliction system look?

First of all, we’re not going to use the primitive, unrealistic Hit Point system. Second of all, every attack will hit a specific part of the body – of course the attacker will be able to choose the body part. Every organ will have a variable describing the amount of damage taken. Additionally, every organ will have an attributed function. If an organ gets badly damaged, then its function stops. This means that if your brain gets a bit damaged then you might loose consciousness, but if you take a really strong hit in the head, you might die. On the other hand, if your limb gets badly damaged/crippled it won’t cause much problems, except for when you lose that limb. Aside from organ damage, attacks will cause bleeding. Damage to a limb won’t cause as much bleeding as damage to the heart or bowels. Losing much blood will cause the PC to react slower and become weak physically and mentally. Also, when a character loses enough blood he/she will become unconscious and die in the aftermath, if not helped.

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OsirisGod said:

Way to complicated IMHO , the implementation of such a system would probablly be bad at best , and i am not sure of the fun factor of such a game , maybe limpness would work ok but severd limbs would mean 3 unlucky combtats youd end up a handless 1 legged man?

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Complexity is only a problem when you're rolling dice and adding numbers in your head. On a computer complexity is not an excuse. In fact CRPGs have no excuse for not implementing all the realistic combat systems that haven't made into PnP.

Why isn't there a Rolemaster RPG? What would be the problem with that? Are RPG fans really so moronic that they prefer the 20-year out of date D&D system?

As for realistic combat being too 'deadly' - that's only a problem for shitty RPGs where a lot of combat is not the only way the advance. Combat in a good game should be rare and deadly and only be worthwhile when the stakes are really high.

Don't know about you but I don't enjoy having to kill rats to get to level two.

I'm coming back to this later, but for now I will only sat this:

As far as I know, your hitpoints in the D&D universe depends on your constitution (and maybe also what class you are).

The higher a CON stat you have, the more hitpoints, you will have.

I like the idea being able to hit the enemy & monsters in certain target-able areas, though.