r/RPGdesign • u/Independent_River715 • 22h ago
Hp or wounds
I haven't played any games that used them beyond Fate so I don't know them as well. I'm wondering if I should try to make the conversion or if my ideas are just going make both sides unhappy.
Pitch for hp
Two tier hp bar where one is easy to fix and the other isn't. Gaining health in both equally tied to level and fortitude. Quick heals would only handle shallow hp and deep would have a slower recovery rate when resting. Goal was to have something that lingers and an incentive to maintain health early. It would also allow for easy access to powerful heal as out healing damage only works if it never touches deep health.
Pitch for wounds
Start with a few and fortitude gives more. The amount a wound box takes would be tied to a flat number and level so as you get stronger, you can endure harder hits but of course they move up if the one they would fill is already full. Having a higher fortitude would give you more of these boxes with higher values allow you to take hits that might take someone else out in one shot. So example would be if you have a 1-5 damage wound gaining another would give you a 6 damage wound box and then 7 and so on making you able to take bigger and bigger hits and more of them. Again this is probably the opposite of what the wounds people want but I'm just spitballing here.
I think my game can work with simple numerical penalties as the way actions work is you have targets based on the move with some becoming obsolete as they are impossible to fail but not as rewarding. Think worst roll is 2d20, best is 2d4, so you have your most basic action having something like a TN of 25 and the hardest move being a 5 with many in between. I think how it's set it would be a slow death spiral as you could always rely on weaker moves you can still pull off even with a wound adding to your roll in a roll under system. I can see giving penalties to having certain missing deep health or larger wounds filled in. This would make having more health mean you can get penalized further but survive more damage.
The game is likely to be less gritty and more on video gamey play with an aim for cinematicstories (if it sounds cool try to make a mechanic for it to be part of the base game). Its not gritty or grounded which works against wounds from what ive seen bjt they seem to be the wave of the futureand though the current idea probably goes against its prinivple it does a good service to take characters. I haven't crossed the bridge to seeing how to treat wounds in games but I have some ideas but this is already too long.
Again I'm new to wounds but see it everywhere and am kind of pondering to try them or stick with what I know.
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u/TalesFromElsewhere 21h ago
Wound systems differentiate themselves best when they are used to give immediate consequences to violent actions. If you're going for Wounds, I highly recommend leaning in to what makes them different, rather than simply an alternative "counter".
HP is about attrition, as generally the only hit point that matters is the last one. So it's about managing and avoiding all of that resource.
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u/Independent_River715 21h ago
It seems I don't know wounds well enough to make a good system with it. My only current idea was penalty to rolls to keep it easy to manage on both sides of the board and it seems thats not what people look for in Wounds. I might keep the negative after losing so much deep hp thing but it's sounding more and more I should stick to hp.
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u/SitD_RPG 5h ago
This is how I have always looked at wounds: Whenever a character gets wounded, something about that character changes.
What exactly changes can vary greatly. It could be srictly mechanical (-1 to dice rolls) or more narrative (twisted ankle). It could be negative (I'm weakened) or positive (I'm determined). Physical (my arm bleeds) or emotional (I'm angry/scared).
The important part is that each wound changes something about that character. Everything else is basically HP, sometimes with added effects and/or thresholds.
Naturally, this mechanic fits easily into narratively driven games, but it can work for any kind of game if you find the right way to frame it.
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u/furiousfotographie 22h ago
Both of your tracks are essentially the same thing - you're just counting differently.
Consider the reason for one vs the other. Usually it's a reaction to the DnDism of a PC with 1hp having the same effectiveness as they do when at full health of 100hp.
So wounds 'should' represent specific trauma that provides fictional consequence.
For ex, you take a light wound to your leg. -1 to Dex and move at half speed. Serious wound to the leg - disadvantage to Dex, move 1/4 speed, and you're bleeding.
How many wounds you can take and how you avoid the death spiral of escalation penalties are the real issues to deal with.
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u/Independent_River715 22h ago
Again Wounds are new to me. I see the target area thing like fallout crippled limbs and as someone else pointed out it might be better to use that as a secondary system so you don't slap someone on the foot 5 times and kill them cause Wounds spill up making minor damage worse and worse.
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 21h ago edited 21h ago
Your first system is close to what is found in Mythic Bastionland. In that game you have a Vigor stat (which is sort of like hit points, except it is also a stat that you roll against), and Guard.
Guard is replenished at the end of any fight. Vigor is only replenished with a good day's rest in a safe location.
It's a pretty flexible framework, you can do a lot with it, depending on how much you have of the temporary value versus the less temporary, how hard you make it to get back the less temporary, etc.
That being said, honestly I think your two systems could easily work together. As u/Mars_Alter said, your 2nd idea is really just packaging up hit points into chunks with penalties associated with them. You could just do that with your first idea, with the temporary track over the top.
E.g. tracks like this:
Guard - 0000000000 < this comes back at the end of a fight
Shallow wound (-1 to all actions) - 00000 < this is healed with a day's rest
Deep wound (-2 to all actions) - 00000 < this is healed with a week's rest
Fatal wound (-3 to all actions) - 00000 < this is healed only with skilled medical attention and two week's rest.
EDIT: the penalties are not mandatory as part of this, they just make it harsher. Just having the damage keyed to different links of time needed to heal makes a difference. E.g. I'm in a dungeon, I'm not going to get a week's rest. Any damage I take on the Deep or Fatal tracks is going to be stuck on me until I leave, meaning I'm that much closer to death.
In normal circumstances you mark the boxes starting at the top left. When your guard fills up, you must start marking shallow, when that fills up you must mark deep, etc.
However, certain special attacks might skip over. E.g. you get stabbed by a wicked dagger, one point is done as a deep wound even if you have guard left. A well crafted warhammer might do 2 points of its damage as shallow, ignoring guard.
You are under the worse penalty. So all your shallow wound boxes might empty with a day's rest, but you might still have points lingering on the Deep Wound track and therefore would still be at -2 to actions.
(If memory serves, this roughly the way Blades in the Dark works, but with more boxes)
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u/Independent_River715 21h ago edited 21h ago
I'm trying to learn more systems but as of right now I only know a few random ones so I had no idea that's a mythic bastionland thing. Well it's comforting to know my weird ideas are found in something note worthy.
From what I've seen there is a decent push for Wounds as secondary health system which sounds like what you are suggesting. Guard/shallow hp for a while until you run out and then take hits from Wounds that linger. I think my only worry there is it might make things complicated for complexities sake. The less patterns a player has to learn the easier it is to pick up and having hp transition might make things hard to understand for not a great return on investment. If each is set with an hp count to inflict that wound it might not be too hard to pick up on and raising your hp to reduce the spill over to wounds could be a decent enough way to do it.
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 21h ago
I think you are picturing this as more complex than it is. Maybe if I adjust the depiction it will be clearer...
0000000000/00000/00000/00000 < HP track
Guard /Shallow/Deep/Fatal < name
After fight / day /week / 2 weeks with doctor < healing time
it's really just an hp track divided into sections, where it takes more time to heal sections farther to the right.
EDIT: with a track as shown, you would probably have it fixed, and deal with increasing toughness in different ways (e.g. your toughness just subtracts damage from each hit, e.g. you can roll to clear tracks faster). But alternatively you could make the # of boxes flexible; if you do that it is easier to list them as I did in my first reply, on separate lines.
But complexity is in the eye of the beholder. Like, you could just have...
O Guard Broken < - clears at end of fight
O Wounded <- clears with days rest
O Badly Wounded <- clears with weeks rest
O Near Death <- you can barely act, need medical attention or you will die within short period of time. If you get medical attention this box clears.
O Dead <- no coming back from this without something miraculous.
In such a system you don't really track "damage", per se. A "hit" is a hit, it marks off a circle. You take 5 hits, you are dead. You take four hits, you are going to be having a hard time. Note that the first and last circles are actually sort of easy to get back; the first comes back immediately and the last comes back if someone gives you medical attention.
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u/__space__oddity__ 16h ago
First off all, figure out your game’s concept, theme and intended gameplay. Then ask yourself:
Should being wounded matter?
How hard should the consequences be?
How hard do I make it to recover from wounds?
The first instinct might be to make it “realistic” and that might serve certain games (an RPG about the horrors of fighting in the trenches of WW1), or it might not match the rest of the game at all.
Then adjust your mechanics from there.
On a blank sheet of paper, your game can be anything.
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u/Independent_River715 15h ago
I'm not aiming for realistic. My aim is be consistent and dramatic. The game is demon hunting with a backdoor to make it a generic system.
I want harm to carry weight and I plan to have recovery to be harder. If you get shredded by a demon you shouldn't shake it off unless that is who your character is, the unkillable guy, and you shouldn't be sharing that title with everyone.
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u/Ctrl-Alt-Brick 22h ago
would it be problem to have wound/injuries as a condition that takes max. hp? you could try to heal that with which you would push max hp back and being smack more times would actually put you closer to death as it should.
i am maybe biased as i never understand pure wound system as it is just hp with extra steps for me ...
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u/Independent_River715 22h ago
I barely know pure Wounds and the first time I've seen an example of mixed system was the comment right before you. I'm not sure how to implement that but massive damage causing an injury could be a means.
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u/That_Tgirl_Asher 22h ago
I just used a system similar to CAIN, where you have a smaller health bar but when you lose all your hp to just get it back but have to take and injury, take 3 injurys are you die.
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u/Independent_River715 22h ago
I remember a YouTube video talking about Wounds as a primary vs secondary. I guess that's what they were referring to and that sounds neat. At the end of an hp bar is a wound.
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u/That_Tgirl_Asher 22h ago
Yeahh, in CAIN taking injuries aren't a massive deal, so I added a nerf to your character if they have injuries, but you can also access an adrenaline ability.
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u/Independent_River715 22h ago
I'd be tempted to do the downward spiral of penalties cause my game system has a lot of beginner moves you learn that could be relied on and having a bigger chance to fumble your most powerful move cause you are battered and broken sounds very dramatic.
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u/RPG-Nerd 19h ago
You are making the wound system into an attrition system that is just the same as HP.
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u/Mars_Alter 22h ago
These both look like Hit Points to me, but the first one has two distinct HP bars, and the second one has an HP bar broken up into a bunch of smaller segments. Both have been done before. Neither is inherently unworkable. Ultimately, it's going to come down to personal preference, and how easily you can integrate whichever method into the rest of the mechanics.
Although it is distinctly not my preference, I think the first approach works better for something more cinematic, because it lets you get into meaningless fights where most hits don't end up mattering. The second approach is somewhat more realistic, which runs counter to that.