[MUD-Dev] Alternative Hit Point Systems?

[Travis Casey]

Wednesday, July 31, 2002, 5:09:08 PM, Trickey, Rob wrote:

> One system I starting work on was accruing Danger Points rather
> than reducing hitpoints.  I was considering movie-style combat,
> which has the common rule that lethal weapons almost never hit
> until the final killing shot/blow.  The exception is the "ouch"
> hit to the shoulder, leg, etc that's just for drama.  This pretty
> much holds true in most action movies, whether its a sword or a
> machine gun.

Note that in theory, this is how AD&D hit points work.  When a
character has plenty of hit points left, any hit is just a scratch
or a minor "flesh wound".  When someone has only a few hit points
left, a hit that does the same number of damage points is a more
serious hit.  And when a hit does enough damage to kill, it's a
lethal hit... even though it might only be a one hit point damage
roll.

Parts of AD&D hit points are luck and fatigue -- a character doesn't
take a lethal hit until his/her luck has run out, and he/she is too
fatigued to dodge enough to make it "just a flesh wound".

Unfortunately, other parts of the system don't interpret things in
the same way -- e.g., items that give good luck never add to your
hit points.  Healing spells don't heal varying amounts of hit points
depending on whether those hit points represent just a scratch or a
more serious wound.  And so on.

> So the idea is that attacks don't immediately deliver hitpoint
> damage, but rather increase the target's Danger Level, which is a
> measure of how close the character is to getting struck with that
> final lethal blow (or one of the threshold "ouch" blows).  There
> were quite a few special cases in it (like the strange fact that
> throwing a punch in the middle of a gunfight is invariably a GOOD
> thing), but that's the central point.

There've been a couple of different attempts to make systems sort of
like that on the rpg-create list on Yahoo groups.  Rather than
having each target have a "danger level", though, they've used an
"advantage".  Only one character in the fight has the advantage at a
given time.  When you make a successful combat roll, you can choose
to either do damage immediately, or gain/take away advantage points
(which you can do depending on whether you have the advantage, of
course).  Advantage points can be spent to make an attack more
likely to hit, make it do more damage, avoid someone else's attack,
etc.

The idea, then, is that when you make a minorly good roll, you can
either make an immediate attack for lower damage, or you can save up
that advantage, trying to build up for a single attack that can take
your opponent out.

This sort of method can work very well with a non-cumulative wound
system -- the kind I described in my previous post where a light
wound doesn't have any effect if you already have a worse wound.

--
Travis Casey
efindel at earthlink.net


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