Let's discuss HP, damage, and healing!
What is your favourite system for keeping track of health? Any cool mechanics you've come across? How do you balance fun, realism, and practicality?
What about healing? Magical, medical, or over-time? How do you make it fair and reasonable without losing the 'drama' of being injured and dealing with the repercussions of combat?
Savage Worlds is pretty cool.
You basically roll damage to beat Toughness and if you exceed it, the guy is stunned, or is eliminated if you beat Toughness by 4+.
Very simple and no bookkeeping. Initiative is with playing cards so I don't have to write down shit to run combat. I want to steal the system for my own homebrew because Savage Worlds is kinda broken, but it's hard to pull off well without exploding dice.
What I'm currently thinking is, have a 2d6 core mechanic and a 2d6 damage mechanic. 2d6 - 2 for fists, 2d6 for longswords and pistols, and 2d6 + 2 for rifles and shotguns. This is against a Toughness of 8 + armor - 1 to +3 for Fortitude stat. I would have to VERY carefully bound things though because otherwise someone could upgrade to new armor and become undamageable.
I actually really like the OpenD6 and MiniSix systems. Detailed in pic related.
I'm really not a fan of their alternate Body Points rule, because it's basically hit points that happen to make it harder to do things the less you have, and I really don't like hit point systems.
What about hitting certain areas, getting weaker as you're more damaged, etc? What do you guys think of those concepts? Obviously they make sense to some degree, but they make things more complicated.
I like the idea of stat penalties of some kind when at low health (logically you are not going to perform your best with a bunch of broken bones and your organs hanging out) but I can see why it might be frustrating to play so i would expect a bunch of play testing to reach a good balance.
See in regards to getting weaker as you're more damaged.
Literally everything you do is done with d6 pools of skills (which are based on your attributes--what's used if you don't have a skill). The more wounded you are, the higher number of d6 are removed from your pool no matter what you're doing--including resisting more damage.
Getting hurt is dangerous, because people who are wounded are easy to further wound, and they're less capable of doing things like fighting back or dodging. Momentum is quite a thing.
Fate of the Norns (1st edition) has a system where you hit the same armor location and it loses some amount of protection.
While cool in concept, it was very cumbersome
I was thinking of doing something similar, but with attacks trying to stack "advantages" onto a roll rolling 1d6+1d6 for each advantage versus toughness + armor (fantasy system). So two guys easily take out one guy, a skilled guy gets an advantage over less skilled, etc.
It was spawned from savage worlds and blood bowl and works pretty well in team combat.
Balance is not the problem. The speed of combat is. Have the combat too slow and the downward spiral becomes incredibly frustrating because you're going to fail at everything for several rounds due to the penalties involved.
Too fast a combat and the penalties don't get noticed much, because everyone dies too quickly.
I like low, well defined HP pools like RineQuest. I also like trying to "injure" opponents to create advantages and meta currencies used to put players over NPCs. It works really well.
I think I could like D&D style HP pools if AC wasn't a target number. If the situation set the DC and armor affected HP (and HP is lowered) it would represent the abstraction more.