Health, Damage and HP (xD6h)

As the attentive reader of previous posts might have noticed, I don't like mechanics that are arbitrary. As such, it will probably come as no surprise that i really dislike HP (Hit Points, not the company). A system like Dungeons and Dragons, that allows you to get hit and damaged multiple times without any effect, and then suddenly kills you off outright when you cross that magic threshold that is your last 1 point of health, just rubs me the wrong ways. It never made sense to me. An abstraction yes, but of what? Many other rpg's and skirmish games do the same thing. Some try to make the abstraction more meaningful by renaming it from hit points to morale. This helps a bit on understanding that we are not talking about actual health. But in those systems you still hit with your great-axe, and you still roll for damage. Hitting someone repeatedly with your axe just wont have an effect until that last drop of blood/morale.

The good thing about hit points, from a design perspective, is that it creates a way of prolonging combat, while still letting people actually hit stuff. Without something like hp you would have a system that is either very fast and lethal, or where people miss a lot. The other thing that HP affords is that it allow the player to know when they are in dagger. Getting low on hp? Time to get out out of harms way.

I think it all boils down to the balance of player expectation, realism and what is fun. Even though, in real life, combat is fairly brutal, it isn't all that fun to get one-shot. At the same time it isn't much fun to miss most of your attacks either. For expectations and realism, even tough you would need to call an ambulance if someone stabbed you with a dagger, most players do not expect their characters to go out of play when stabbed in a game (everyone knows a dagger only deals 1d4 damage, right?). A good health/damage system will need to balance all these things.

For Blight, health is handled as part hit points, and part injuries. "But I thought you said you hated hit points!?" Well yes and no, what I dislike is the abstraction. But this can be fixed. In Blight all characters have a small amount of hit points, allowing you to take multiple small cuts and bruises, but not enough that you can survive a full on swing of a great sword (most characters have 7-8 HP, a two-hand weapon deals 3-8 damage). Instead of abstracting the small cuts down to a single damage score, players are asked to note down damage as separate wounds. In this way you can actually see how many cuts and bruises your characters have.

The last part of the Blight damage system is Injuries. 1-4 damage wounds (which are the majority, especially so for fights between skilled models) are simply recorded. However when you suffer a wound of 5+, you also take an injury. This ensures that players do not have to roll for injuries all the time, but when hit hard it has consequences. Injuries are thematic and hamper the model in some way, like severe bleeding, concussions, wounded legs and arms etc. All things that needs to be patched up, and might linger from game to game, underpinning the feeling that combat is real, and not just something you can brush off.

A note on complexity budget: The first iterations of Blight had much more injury. I really liked the idea of a brutal and real game feel, where warriors where bleeding and and limpering forward, desperately fighting on despite their wounds and pain. The problem however is that the complexity of it got in the way of playing the game. It did so in two ways; First was that having to roll on the injury table all the time, and then record injuries on your character sheets takes time, pausing the game for both players. The other problem is that having most of your units injured with different effects, becomes a mess to handle and remember. Both leading to a more balanced outcome of only the worst of wounds leading to injury.

The last part of the damage system is death and deadly wounds, but that is a whole field of discussion in itself, and so will be the subject of the next post.