[MUD-Dev] Alternative Hit Point Systems?

[Ammon Lauritzen]

On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Jack Britt wrote:

> I'm trying to find alternatives to the AD&D-style of hit points
> but I'm not having much luck. Couldn't find anything on google,
> and can't seem to come up with anything on the mud-dev archives
> (although this is probably due to my inability to do a decent
> search.)

> I was wondering if anyone had any ideas or concepts for a
> different way of doing hit points?

Apart from storing health in some sort of number or set of numbers? 
I don't think there is any other way that could be implemented in a
computer game.

However, I do have a few thoughts, many of which have been said
before me by other people in different forums, but I can't recal who
said what, and as such am going to just continue this sentance as
long as I can, stringing in as many commas as is possible, until I
run out of ways to stall.

This is not meant as a single idea, but as a great jumble of
randomness that might hopefully help you bounce in the right
direction.

First off, it would be possible to drastically limit the range of
hit points. Say 2 is average and 5 is godlike. Any time you suffer
an injury that is actually life threatening, you take one or two
points of damage.  Otherwise, you just ignore the hit.

If you want, you can incorporate some sort of endurance system to go
along with this. Endurance would be spent whenever doing something
strenuous, but would also be reduced when you take non-threatening
hits.  So, it is possible to wear somebody out to the point where
they can no longer defend themselves or walk or whatever. Then they
take a telling blow.

Now that I think about it, this is similar to how the Palladium role
playing system works. They use two separate numbers to determine a
person's health. One is their actual life energy, the other is a
measure of structural damage capacity (I think that's what they call
it, I can't quite remember). Whenever you get hurt, both numbers are
likely to be reduced.

With HP regenerating slower than SDC, your body may be fully
functional and may not show signs of injury, but you still wind up
nursing a week-old wound that could re-open at any moment and
suddenly cause you a lot more distress than you had anticipated.

The other extension that I can think of is to divide the SDC up
among the different body parts. This has been done to death, but an
interesting twist might be that healing the external body parts
takes away from the internal HP regen, or possibly feeds off of
nearer, stronger body parts to some extent or another - the body
diverting blood flow or somesuch.

The implications for one-shot assassination, diseases, and poisons
as means of inflicting injury in this sort of scenareo become a lot
more interesting. Also, the image of two knights in platemail
whacking each other with swords until one falls over a few hours
later is also an option.

Shrug, just my thoughts.

--
Ammon Lauritzen
http://www.simud.org/


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