Are there any systems out there with interesting health systems? I don't care if it's locational or whole body.
Things like seventh sea's cuts and wounds or shadowrun's physical and stun damage tracks, I mean. I'm getting tired of games where all characters and monsters are just HP sponges whose actions are a switch between CAN DO ANYTHING AT ALL TIMES and DEAD
any games out there* i mean
shit
>>43550756
I'm in a Dresden Files RPG campaign (based on FATE. I'm not sure quite HOW much of DFRPG comes from it though). In it, you have physical, social, and mental STRESS tracks. They're like health bars in that they soak up damage, kicking you out of combat once it overflows. HOWEVER, if an attack is going to overflow your stress track, you can take a consequence instead. This can be used by your foes to help in their opposed rolls. Mild consequences can be healed in about a session. More severe ones may be leave a permanent disability on your character (which is still preferable to death).
How the stress tracks work:
Let's say your physical stress track goes up to 4. This is represented by 4 circles. If you are hit by an attack that does 1 damage, fill the leftmost circle. If hit by an attack that does three damage, fill the third circle. If hit by another attack that does 1 damage, (oh no, the first first is already filled in, so go to the next one) fill in the second circle. Then, if it by any other attack, the fourth circle will be filled. One more attack and your stress track will overflow, taking you out of combat. Alternatively, a single 5 damage attack could have OHKO'd you from the start. You can reduce the damage of an attack that hits you by taking a consequence (as described above).
In Shinobigami, your character takes damage directly to their skill list, locking out one of the columns for each point of damage you take. Since the game uses a defaulting system based on how far apart different skills are, it means that it potentially becomes harder to succeed on rolls the more damage you take, as more and more of your skills become locked out due to damage.
>>43552054
that's a nice and simple death spiral but do they ever die?
>>43552142
If you take damage to all the different groups, you're effectively removed from combat. The game has narrative death; you can choose to have your character die for reals, which lets you either make one last attack (without any of the skill penalties for damage) or gift another character something as your dying action. Otherwise, you're "out", but you can still choose to have the character come back later.
Legends of the Wulin has a cool damage system, Copying from a post in the general >>43551210
Damage in this system is handled through Ripples, an abstracted system that just serves to illustrate that shit is getting real. Every time you get hit, you get a Ripple, sometimes multiple. The more Ripples, the realer the shit.
Ripples are used to create Chi Conditions, usually Injury Conditions but not always. Chi Conditions are just mechanical sticks that beat you if you don't act a certain way. For example, if you have the Wounded Knee Chi Condition, you take a penalty to any circumstance that would imply you're acting *despite* a Wounded Knee. Moving around, trying to put on a cool facade through the pain, or something like that gives you a penalty to any relevant rolls you have to make. How much of a penalty you have depends on the degree of the Chi Condition.
>>43550756
Tenra Bansho Zero has Vitality and Wounds.
Whenever a character takes damage, they can choose whether to lose Vitality or Wound boxes.
Vitality recovers quickly, but if it drops to zero, they're out cold.
Wounds come in three levels, the more severe the wound, the longer it takes to heal. In exchange, your highest level wound gives you a bonus of up to 3 dice for critical wounds.
Then there's the "Dead" box. It's technically a wound, but if you tick that box, you negate all damage from that attack and increase the wound bonus to 4 dice. But if you drop to 0 Vitality in that state, that's it. You're permanently and irrevocably dead.
>>43550756
There's a system called Dominion Rules that assigns health to a Withstand Injury skill. Your positive HP is the level your Withstand Injury skill is at and every time you take a hit you make a Withstand Injury roll. Once your health goes into the negatives your health becomes a difficulty penalty to all your actions and you finally go down once it becomes impossible succeed in a roll.
>>43552323
>gift another character something as your dying action. Otherwise, you're "out", but you can still choose to have the character come back later.
Can you explain more indepth about this? I'm not understanding.
>>43550756
Star Wars d20 revised.
You have Vitality, which is like your classic hit points. Vitality represents your ability to dodge otherwise deadly attack, and to take glancing blows. Your plot armor, basically.
You also have Wounds. Wounds are equal to your constitution score, and once you've taken wound damage, you become fatigued, and have to make a fortitude save to prevent falling unconscious. Wounds are your meat points.
You take Wound damage when you've run out of Vitality, or when you take a critical hit.
Also, armor in Star Wars d20 revised is treated as damage reduction, but damage reduction only reduces damage done to wounds.
Technoir wounds can cancel out successes but they're also the only way you can improve skills or dish out damage.
>>43554717
I don't know the system, but it seems pretty simple.
If you choose not to die, your character is just incapacitated/no longer able to act (ie, knocked out or doubled over in agony).
Sounds like babby mode until you consider that D&D has had raise dead in the core rules forever. Same-ish thing except you don't have to cram magic that brings people back from the dead into your setting.
>>43554867
Fantasycraft also uses this system btw.
>>43554867
Having played this, the system is not really that interesting. It's just hit points with a buffer.
As for OP, I like the toughness save mechanic in True20/Mutants & Masterminds. You don't roll for damage; attacks have a fixed DC and the defender rolls a special kind of save. The more you fail the roll, the worse the consequence you get, and smaller wounds eventualy accrue enough a penalty that you are going to fail by a lot and die.
Something like this, you mean?.
>>43550756
Mongoose Traveler is interesting because damage is done directly to your stats. Physical damage affects your physical stats, mental damage your mental stats, and you have three each. When you take damage you choose which stat takes the hit. When all three hit 0 you're dead. So it's pretty interesting. You have to decide whether to let one attribute take all the hits, thus making you useless in that attribute until you heal, or spreading the damage out over all three at the risk of gimping your ability to fight back or run away.
>>43550756
L5R's is fun. Thresholds for wounds that impose penalty as you go past them, the thresholds being adjusted by your stamina and willpower and depending on which school you use adjusting the penalties. It also has a few different damage scales ranging from animu as fuck to depressingly real where you die in one or two solid hits.
>>43550756
The Warhammer 40k RPGs have a system where a character has a specifc amount of HP, called wounds. Level 1 characters will have between 5 and 12. And once they hit 0 they start taking "critical damage" goes up to -10, and each time they take damage you look on the chart for that body location and it'll say like "the blow numbs your arm, drop any item held in that arm, take fatique damage (negative modifier)". Depending on the damage type (Impact, Rend, Energy, Explosive) you get different flavours, for example it turns out Rend lops off limbs a lot sooner than the other types. The higher the crit value, the more severe the effect. Usually 9 and 10 are lethal values, where 9 is "just dying" a 10+ in for example Energy damage means you cook and explode dealing area of effect damage.
>>43557201
(cont.)
Forgot to mention, you don't get HP through simply leveling up, you have to spent XP on it. Appart from that the system works mostly through mitigating damage through armour rather than than soaking it with HP.
Health system in Polish system called Neuroshima. Three wounds of lower level are equal to receiving one higher level wound.
Honestly, I get why people would WANT Death-Spiral Systems, but having played quite a lot of them: I just don't think they are all that fun. They might seem more "realistic", but in reality, they usually get really fucking annoying and devolve combat quickly into "Get hits in as quickly as possible to cripple the enemy enough, so you autowin the battle". Which, again, might seem more "realistic", but isn't necessarily more fun.
That being said, Riddle of Steel and Burning Wheel both have non-HP-pool systems.
I quite like the way it's done in SLA Industries
>>43554717
Part of the game revolves around individual secrets, like secret missions, secret techniques, etc... So if you choose to permanently "rip up the character sheet and never play the character again" die, you can give another character some piece of secret knowledge, so even if you can't succeed at your mission, maybe they can, for example, by learning the secret technique of whoever killed you so they can neutralize it and avenge you. Or maybe your last act is to give them the item they need to complete their objective, for example.
But otherwise, if you choose not to "rip the character sheet and never play the character again" die, then you're just removed from combat and you fail at whatever you were trying to do. Maybe you get dumped into the ocean and wash up on some beach somewhere barely conscious later on, maybe another member of your ninja clan shows up and drags your nearly-dead body back to somewhere you can recuperate, etc...
>>43557422
I see where you comming from, and agree that death spirals aren't realy fun to play with (although Mutant: year Zero made it work), but its a bit jarring when a system, like OP put it, "switch between CAN DO ANYTHING AT ALL TIMES and DEAD". I personally prefer when you can loose most of your HP with no consequences, but have some stage between "alive and well" and "dead/KO'd", like >>43556982
>>43550756
I'm very fond of Nechronica's system, where every point of "HP" is a body part representing something you can do. For example your Bone(s) down in your Legs hit location are how you (generally) move, and if they're damaged you'll have to crawl using Shoulder in Arms instead. The parts are all arrayed on 4 different hit locations of Head, Arms, Torso, and Legs; each has 3 basic parts to start with and then you pick 3-7 more depending on exactly what you grab during chargen. Where you have parts can matter: too few, a hit location is easy to destroy by normal damage, so important parts are always vulnerable; too many, and a single failed Dismember check (Essentially a save-or-die for the hit location struck) can be disastrous when half a dozen or more parts go up in smoke at once. When you hit 0 parts you're out of commission and your viscera is scattered across the battlefield, but if the rest of your team defeats the encounter, they can get you shoved back into some of the more intact chunks lying around. The only way to actually die to damage is to have everyone hit 0, or hit 0 and have everyone else retreat. It's not really a mutable system, fluff-wise, since it presumes something like decapitation being merely a hindrance, but for what it is trying to do it's absolutely lovely.
>>43557975
Addendum: Madness also counts as an HP system of sorts, so it's worth explaining. How it works is each character has a number of fetters, anywhere from 1-6, that represent important ties in their unlife. They help the character cope in generally stressful times, essentially giving them reasons to live. You start with 1, Dependent on Treasure, indicating what few important sentimental items you have. From there you get an additional fetter per party member and can bond with NPCs to form fetters with them, until you hit the cap of 6. Each fetter can hold up to 4 madness upon itself; from 1-3 it's fine, if strained, but at 4 it is in a state of madness and causes penalties based on the type of bond. The madness for someone you're Friendly with, for instance, causes you to break parts until you have the same number of broken parts as the fetter's target; as a point of interest there's no cap on the number of parts you'll break, so it's quite possible to simply kill yourself for your friend out of empathy.
There's four major ways to acquire madness: being in combat causes one madness per round; seeing horrific sights and having horrible things happen can require a madness check to tough it out; enemies can have attacks that strike at your sanity instead of parts; or, if you're an absolute madman, there are a number of abilities, parts, and actions which require payment in your sanity. If these sources cause all fetters to be in a state of madness you become broken hearted, retreating into yourself and generally losing the will to live. As with parts however, it's not game over until everyone's heart is broken: because the cure for madness is, most generally, talking. The GM awards conversation checks as he sees fit for, well, holding conversations. So long as there is just one stubborn asshole that refuses to crack there's always the chance they can pep talk everyone back to the brink of sanity.
>>43557271
Would that happen to have any connection to NeuroshimaHex?
>>43560350
In a way, the designers are the same people and NeuroshimaHex's "setting" (well, the factions and all the post-apocalyptic flavor) are directly from Neuroshima, but Neuroshima is a RPG and Hex is a board game with completely different mechanics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroshima
>>43550756
Burning Wheel - You have physical tolerance greyscale and you suffer different classes of injuries, which cause different penalties and heal slower more severe they get.
Torch Bearer - Your character conditions such as afraid, exhausted, sick, injured. When you all conditions apply to you and suffer one more you die. Very simplistic and most likely not what most are looking for but interesting take.
Then there is Song of Swords but I don't remember it works exactly. I recall there are different types of damage like trauma and bleed.
>>43560773
Song of Swords has, last I checked, three types of damage. Stun, pain, and bleed, I think?
But really, we both know it's about fatal pike wounds to the groin.
