[MUD-Dev] Re: [rpg-create] HP triangle (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

Travis Casey adds more depth:

------- Forwarded Message
To: =?ISO-8859-1?B?S2xhdXMgxi4gTW9nZW5zZW4=?= <rpg-create at egroups.com>
From: Travis Casey <efindel at earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 11:55:16 -0400
Subject: Re: [rpg-create] HP triangle

Wednesday, September 20, 2000, 8:08:28 AM, Klaus F. Mogensen
<klaudius at get2net.dk> wrote:

> "Troy Gustavel" <troy_nevermore at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> I have, several times, on this list seen reference to a hit point
>> triangle, or health triangle, or something like that. What is it
>> and where can I find the write up on it?

> There's several versions, but the general idea is something like
> this:

> Your hit points are not arranged in a lime, but in a triangle,
> e.g. if you have 17 hits, you arrange them like this:

> *
> * *
> * * *
> * * * *
> * * * * *
> * *
> (1+2+3+4+5+remainder).

> When you take a number of hits, you decide which row you cross
> them from (all from same row, left to right). If you are forced to
> cross out an entire row, you are stunned, and any additional hits
> are carried to a second row (if two rows are crossed out in a
> single blow, the result may be more severe, e.g, KO).

One variation is to add blowthrough -- i.e., if a hit takes out an
entire row, you don't mark off anything beyond that row.  However,
the overflow might be used in another way -- e.g., as a penalty to a
check for avoiding being knocked out.

> As I said, there are several variations. Some use a vertical
> treshold line somewhere down the middle, where bad things happen
> if damage cross it.

The general principle is that the triangle establishes a sliding
threshold, which is used to determine whether a hit is heavy enough
to cause some negative effect.  Thus, when a character is "fresh"
and uninjured, he/she can take a heavier hit without ill effects
than after having been banged on for a few rounds.

If you don't like the sliding threshold, you can rearrange it into a
hit-point rectangle.  Actually, you can do all sorts of shapes if
you want to... you could use a truncated triangle, for example, with
a minimum on how short the shortest row can be.

The effect of an "overflow" need not be fixed -- you could roll dice
on a table to see what it is, possibly using the number of points by
which the row overflowed as a modifier.

There are lots of possible variations on the basic idea.  :-)

> A nice feature of this is that tough characters can take heavier
> hits than not-so-tough one without getting stunned -- at least for
> a while. Heavily damaged characters can be KO'd by attacks that
> wouldn't have fazed them when they were fresh.

> One bad thing is that there may be some skill to placing damage
> the optimal way, which makes a character played by skilled players
> better able to handle damage than teh same character played by an
> unskilled player.

All the versions I've written up, and the original version that I
saw, have specified how damage is to be placed.

- --
       |\      _,,,---,,_    Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)   

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--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
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