As I work on my homebrew system, I've come to an impasse. My goal in designing this system is to strike a balance between realism and simplicity (two things that d&d is hit-or-miss with) in a setting where characters can become truly heroic.
I've designed a hit point system that allows higher level characters to be heroically tough. It involves five injury categories (from Healthy to Dead); if your character is in any of the middle three categories, they loose a small amount of HP each round to represent blood loss. Every time a character goes down a category, he/she has to make a progressively higher Con check to remain conscious.
Now here's my problem: I've gone to a lot of trouble to make this HP system simple and yet lend the game a semblance of realism. But is it really worth it? When you play an rpg, does it lend to your excitement if your character could end up dying just from bloodloss? Or do questions like "why do I need a special feat/magic item to cause my enemy to bleed?" not hinder your game experience? Have you ever found a system that struck a good balance between the two? (I've played using vitality/wounds, but I felt that it took away most of the characters' heroic-ness while only lending a small amount of realism)
TS
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blood loss is neat, but it doesn't always make sense...
does magic missile make you bleed
does a club
how about the relative bleed rate of a great axe wound to a great sword wound
hp works great for some things...
injuries work great for other things...
trying to pick and choose the best features of both causes problems, mostly in the complexity. If you take more than n damage, you get a critical hit, and then you have an extra thing to keep track of
the best example ever quoted to me was how many times has Jackie Chan broken a bone in a movie, vs how many times he has broken bones while filming movies
Keepiong track of every bleeding wound, every missing tooth, every broken bone is tedious, not fun. Then again, if there is no system in place, how do you end up with a character picking up a hideous scar or eye patch along their career.
Amusingly enough, the best system i have seen is for the necromunda "board" game. basically if you are brought down in a fight, you roll on the injury table (d66 yes sixty-six) and some results are you die, others are other things. In a d20-like system, maybe every hit that does more damage than twice your constitution, or every time you are knocked below zero you roll on a table. And leave the bleeding off the character sheet
blood loss is neat, but it doesn't always make sense...
does magic missile make you bleed
does a club
how about the relative bleed rate of a great axe wound to a great sword wound
I'd say that any physical weapon causes bleeding, even if it's internal. Though you do bring up a good point with the magic missile. I can't imagine one of those making you bleed, and I don't want to work out different bleed rates for different damage types...ugh.
PS What does a d66 look like?
For the most part, ralism and heroic are mutually exclusive.
They both have their place, it really depends on the players involved.
The best balance I have found between the two has been L5R (1st and 3rd editions). But even the writers admitted that they had to put realism aside in order to keep the game playable.
And personal, I think bleeding sucks. It is too much to try and keep track of. But that is just my opinion.
Hope this helps some.
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Cyberpunk rpg was realistic as all getout, from a combat perspective. In any combat, just about any character at any time could bite it, no matter how skilled they wer. In Cyberpunk, you can get shot with a 9mm round and probably walk away, but a good axial hit with a fn-fal is GOING to WHACK YOUR CHARACTER.
The more "realistic" the game gets, the higher the character deathtoll. That's just the way it goes. Campaigning becomes a question of multiple replacement characters. Sure, fantasy genre gaming MIGHT provide more healing spells than Cyberpunk, but one good hit from a battleaxe is a pretty gnarley thing to survive.
But combat sure is a nailbiting experience.
Well if push comes to shove, I'd rather have a heroic game than a realistic game. That may be a big reason that I'm not into cyberpunk and well, pretty much anything not fantasy.
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Also, in Chaosium system games, you don't end up with a gadzillion h.p. as your character improves. You have a Constitution stat and a Size stat; the average of the two is your hit points. If you get hit a few times, you're toast. Armor works like damage resistance somewhat, and you can parry or dodge, both skills which improve with experience, so you don't get "hit" as much as in D&D. You can also do hit locations, but I always chucked that part as it led to long drawn out bookkeeping.
It's the system of Call of C'thulhu and a few other games such as Runequest and Stormbringer/Elric. It's pretty tight, but again, for instance, Call of C'thulhu can have a pretty big body count and/or a few characters do go insane...
...and then there are Storyteller games like Ars Magica, Vampire etc. which have disposed hitpoints, there is category system like the one you described. Of course those systems don't really model things like blood loss convincingly...
I do not believe Hit Points are realistic to begin with so the title seems silly to me. Hit Points are merely an abstraction of damage. I believe the question you are really trying to answer for yourself here is: "How much abstraction do I want in my game?"
I prefer my games more cinematic, so fun and speed are more important to me than realism. Detailed tracking of blood loss will bore me and turn me off to a game.
Contributor
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Pacesetter Games had a few games once upon a time that had a wound level track with five or six levels of damage, instead of hp. I really liked the system, but it did not include bleed rules that I recall.
Basically, you had two damage slots at each level of damage (something like minor, light, moderate, serious and critical). You resisted damage based on how tough you were (basically damage rolls were opposed on a sliding scale by some toughness stat). Every hit gave you one wound of a set level, and you would check the appropriate box. Once you had checked both boxes at a given wound level, any further wounds of that type moved up to the next level.
You got penalties based on your worst wound, and if you got both of your critical wounds checked, you died (although I think they were actually called mortal wounds).
Now that I think about it, I think that if you had serious or critical wounds, you 'bled' for 1 or 2 minor wounds per round.
It sounds complicated, but it was actually really easy, within the context of the system, especially because the wound tracker with all the effects was on the character sheet.
The games I played that used this were "Chill" and "Sandman." I'm pretty sure "StarAce" and "Timemasters" (or something like that) used the same mechanics.
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I prefer cinematic games, and IMO, hit points do a very good job at mimicking that, especially when you add in action points and whatnot. I prefer to run my game like an action movie. I call it the Bruce Willis style of gaming.
You know how in an action movie where Bruce is the hero he can get beaten, shot, sliced, stabbed, etc and still be okay? That's him using up his hit points. And then that one shot from the badguy drops him, and you start worrying about him dying (he named the freakin Diehard feat, after all!!)... that's going below 0 hp.
Works just fine for my players, especially when you make sure your descriptions of combat are reminiscent of that style.
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There is also the old star wars d20 system of wounds and vitality. instead of surviving until you hit -10 hp, you survive until you reach 0 wounds.
You lose vitality first, except in specific cases such as critical hits.
Wounds = your constitution
Vitality = normal hp
blah blah blah yackity schmackity
it is all in the SRD
Thanks for all the input and suggestions! I've decided to drop the injury categories and all related complication.
TS