Since I''m going to go for as much realism as possible - but not on the expense of fun, I''ve been thinking on how to implement a "realistic" damage system. The classical way is hitpoints. When you reach zero, you die (or faint, or something). So far I just let a character''s different body parts have different health, a percent value of the total health. But even that isn''t really very realistic. Say an average knife slice deals 5 damage, and a bullet from a Desert Eagle deals 25 damage. That would mean that 5 cuts with a knife would do the exact same damage to the victim, as a bullet ripping through his flesh, creating a big hole. So I just thought, why not just have 3 different types of wounds, Small, Moderate and Serious. They would each have a different effect on different body parts. For instance, if you''re hit in the arm, a small wound (knife slice, or a shotgun hit from a long range) COULD give you one or more of these effects Adrenaline rush, Drop Weapon, Worse Aim A moderate (bullet wound) could give you one of these: Drop Weapon, Worse Aim And a Serious wound (high caliber, high speed rifle bullet, or a grenade, or a closerange shotgun blast) could do this Drop Weapon, Worse Aim, Lose Limb How do you think this system would work? The interface could simply give the player an indication on how badly the character felt by color coding (green = healthy, red = not good at all). This would in a way be more describing than the value "10". I''d also like to try and implement different types of damages, for example slice and bullet wound. Why? Because it would make armor more diverse; some might be good against certain types of attacks, and bad against others. But this may be a little overkill.. Thoughts, please?

Another way of fixing unrealistic RPG damage would be simply to lessen the amount of HP gained by characters each level. Some human characters having around twenty times the HP of others is far more of a problem than the HP system itself.

The HP system, in of itself, is far too abstract for most realism freaks. Your technique makes it even MORE abstract, which, in my opinion, doesn''t help a bit.

P.S. Personally, I have no problem with the HP system, as long as it''s scaled down just a bit. If I wanted realism, I wouldn''t be playing video games.

"If I wanted realism, I wouldn''t be playing video games."

Heh, I agree.
That''s why fun, naturally, is the main objective when I design my game Realism is just a tool, and I for one are starting to get tired of the RPGs where you have 100 hit points, and you could technically die from someone punching you on the leg for long enough. (Of course, this is true in real life as well, but... ahh, I''m rambling)

Anyways....

The only way characters are going to increase in HP in my RPG is... well, now I don''t have HP anymore, but before I changed, I had a skill named Body and another named Melee Combat. This was the formula:
Hit Points = 70 + Body / 2 + Melee Combat / 5 .

So,someone who really wanted to be able to take a lot of damage would put skill points in building his body. Of course, even if you had skill value 100 in Body, you''d only have 130-150 HP, which isn''t THAT much more than an ordinary human.

I guess now, Body is going to have to lessen the chance of one of these effects happening.

I think you idea is soo soo. But it worth trying. And maybe youl make an exemple like dungeon and dragon and every one will try to make it like you, It all depend on you.

I like the CyberPunk 2020(paper RPG) Damage system....

1-10 on body location, if head, the damage is 2x

if the damage is above 7, then the body part is neatly trimmed off....

for every 5 points of total cumilitive damage, you encure penalties, the first is a slight decrease in stats, the second is a more severe decrease in stats, the third all stats are down by 1/2, after 15, all stats are down by 2/3, and you continuely take damage until you bound your wounds...(due to bleeding)

its rather easy for a player to understand, and it is more realistic than a "you can take so many damage points and your down" kinda system...

I don''t mean to sound jaded, but I believe you might benefit from a previous conversation on this topic. The good stuff is more towards the middle.

-STC

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-SpittingTrashcan

You can''t have "civilization" without "civil".

ok thanks

Personally, I favour the idea that HP represent, not the amount of damage a character can take, but the amount of damage a character can avoid taking - or at least reduce to non-serious levels - so a character with high HP can dodge bullets - or at least take a bullet in a non-critical body part. You then have some sort of wounds system that runs under the HP - so once HP run out, or when the character isn''t in a position to minimise damage, you get wounds that quickly mount up and which have serious long term effects.

The problem with making your damage system too realistic is that IRL, people get killed by apparently random events - getting hit by a car or caught up in a 9/11 or a Columbine High... If you get a completely realistic system, then griefers will be able to go on PK rampages. If 100s of hours of gameplay devoted to buildng up your character can be wiped out in 30 seconds by some little idiot whose idea of fun is to quick create a character, grab a weapon and go on a killing spree until his character finally gets taken down, then make a new character and do it again, then people won''t want to play your game.

hehe, yes that would be a problem if my game was a MMORPG, but it''s not.

It''s mainly a singleplayer game, I guess, but it would be neat to make a more strategic version of counterstrike or something..

Two HP Bars. One for permanent damage, one for timebeing stamina. Play SaGa Frontier on PSX for an example of this.

The idea basically is that HP is your ability fight and LP is your ability to live. Throughout the course of the game, you get a lot more HP than LP, meaning you''re better in fights and can resist damage better, but you can still be wiped out if you take HP for granted. For the numbers about this... uh... *shrug*. Figure something out.

Actually, this forum has a post about a month back discussing this type of idea and I said something to the effect of "Imagine an MMORPG where all of the oldbies suffer some permanent disabilities" meaning that they would have lost a few LP in this model, which could be associated to multiple limbs or what-not.