[MUD-Dev] Alternative Hit Point Systems?

[Zach Collins {Siege}]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Ammon Lauritzen wrote:
> 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.)

Since Ammon mentioned the Palladium system, I'll mention
Storyteller.

> 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.

Under Storyteller, characters all have the same low number of HP
(5-10, depending on which edition of LARP or P&P books you're
using). However, more powerful characters have a greater ability to
inflict or avoid damage, and different weapons or abilities affect
these by only one or two points/dice.

[cut description of Palladium: SDC (Structural Damage Capacity) vs HP]

> 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.

And Storyteller has three different "kinds" of damage: bruising,
lethal, and aggravated, which have different effects.  Bruises cause
stunning and unconsciousness, lethal and aggro cause weakness and
death; aggro is much harder to heal.  Ordinary humans only recieve
bruising and lethal, because they can't regen or insta-heal; each
point of bruising takes a day to heal, lethal takes a week.
Supernatural types heal much more quickly, of course.

> 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.

This would be the sort of system used in Twilight 2000, which based
a character's HP on their constitution score, multiplied by ratios
over different areas of body mass.  Also the Albedo RPG used a
similar system, though each limb was a separate item rather than a
"mass group".

Of course, I've also seen mention here of an injury-based health
system, where a character's body parts could be separately damaged,
and each type of injury had to be healed in its own way.  Thus, a
serious combat might leave you with a broken arm, slashed gut, a
cracked skull, and several bleeding leg wounds: these would require
appropriate binding, splinting, medication, and time to heal
cleanly, and can provide for lingering wounds such as a badly set
arm or infected/scarred cut.

Searching the archives for this list might yield even more answers.

--
Zach Collins (Siege)


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