[MUD-Dev] Alternative Hit Point Systems?

[Peter Harkins]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 11:17:05AM +0100,
Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> This made me think of Halo's life system, which I think is a
> beautiful mechanic. For those who have missed out, you have two
> health bars in Halo, one is physical health, and the other is your
> shield. Physical health can only be regained from health packs,
> shield health recharges after about 10 seconds of no damage to the
> player. All damage is applied to the shield first, so you only
> take physical damage with a fully depleted shield. The beauty of
> this mechanic is that you can be in a dire situation with no
> physical health, but with skill and tactics you can survive thanks
> to the shield.

Daniel goes on to describe that he's found this useful for breaking
the save-try-reload cycle that some FPS games suffer from, but I
haven't played Halo's single-player, only multi-player.

The effect I've found this to have is that it gives a huge advantage
to the quick-thinking tactical player. Playing online, it's enabled
teammates and I to defeat more skilled but less intelligent
players. If I'm attacking, I can often manuever myself under cover
for the time needed for my shield to recharge. If I've got a
teammate with me and an unthinking opponent attacks the most obvious
target, it allows us to goad and bait them into giving us time to
recharge our shields. As defenders, we know to concentrate fire on a
single opponent even when others may momentarily present better
targets (often a good idea in these types of games, but especially
important in Halo). As an extreme example, my team was able to win a
game of capture the flag "pacifist style" - without attacking our
opponents[1] - by sharing damage between teammates and using
delaying tactics to regain health.

It's a very simple mechanic, but it has the profound effect of
baising the game against beginners. Knowledge of the level and rules
of a particular gametype become much more important. Instead of a
group of newbies being able to 'wear down' a better player, the free
health recharge allows the expert to just keep killing. In Quake,
the largest ratio of kills between experts and newbies I've seen is
around 10:1 - in Halo I've regularly accomplished 20:1.

I'm not really meaning to argue for or against this mechanic, just
present information about its effects. I personally love it because
I'm able to out-think the opponents I can't go toe-to-toe with. I
think it tends to frustrate a lot of players, especially
beginners. It's an interesting application of the law of unintended
consequences - this small change radically changes the way the game
is played and won.

This topic always reminds me of two articles on Quake gameplay. The
designers of a mod called "Expert Quake" want to tip the game away
from what they call "shallow skills" like knowledge of level layout
and tactical positioning in favor of combat skills ("deep
skills"). It's not my cup of tea (as I mostly get my wins from
tactical thinking rather than combat skills), but they've got some
interesting points.

  http://www.planetquake.com/expert/GameDesign.html
  http://www.planetquake.com/expert/LevelDesign.html

[1] Though we did accidentally run over one with the jeep once.



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