HP, Health, Wounds, and Damage

What are some interesting methods of tracking character health that you've seen over your years of gaming? Is there one that stood out to you as being especially clever or easy to use? Is there one that you just can't fucking stand and think is dumb as hell?

For me, while I'm most used to old-fashioned HP, I'm interested in methods that are more granular and keep track of individual wounds. While death spirals (get worse at shit the more wounded you are) can be fun, I'm actually partial to reverse death spirals, where things escalate and get more serious as wounds accumulate.

what if you had a little body silloutte chart, and if you take a hit to an arm or chest etc, you write a line on it, but if you get hit again in teh same spot, you make the line into an X, then each body part has a simple stat debuff based on if it's lined or X'ed and if you get too manyXs you get taken out

I'm a big fan of Into the Odd's combat engine. It's based on old school D&D

>three ability scores
>no attack rolls, just roll for damage
>once your small pool of hit points is gone, physical damage is applied to STR, with increasing chances for accumulating wounds
>in theory, mental attacks (ie sanity-blasting encounters, or even social humiliation) could damage your other abilities.
>armor soaks a small amount of damage

It does have a bit of a "death spiral" effect, but it's striking how much variety and emergent behavior it creates with only five essential numbers (three abilities, HP, and a damage die).

Not sure about you but as things get worse, then things escalate and get more serious.

It's all fun and games until you have -3 to all actions.

Please don't do this.

Yeah, but then you struggle to action succeed at anything, and you're better off hoping your allies can carry your weight while you just try to stay alive, and can't actually contribute.

>reverse death spirals
Tell me more. Im working on a reverse death spiral system at the moment.

You would need to be very unfortunate to be at -3 while your enemies are perfectly healthy.

The system I use that has wound penalties also has luck points. Very useful to get the edge in a fight if you are looking worse for wear.

I can't remember exactly how it works, but Tenra Bansho Zero has something like that, where the more wounded you get, the harder you can push, but the closer you get to death.

iirc their system was that you have a checkbox.

Your character is 100% immortal (in the sense that the GM has to come up with some bullshit reason your character lives) unless this box is checked. In exchange, you get bonuses to your rolls.

Tenra Bansho has a great system. There's several boxes that, if you lose all your health and they're ticked, determine what happens to your character. Ko'ed gives you a little boost. Seriously wounded is a significant boost, but Death makes your character ultra strong, but if they lose all their health, they die. It's all about how much your character is willing to risk themselves to win that fight.

Nechronica is another fine example. Your health, inventory and skills are all by and large the same thing. As your beast-legs and gun-limbs are blown off, it starts to limit what you can do in battle as the damage starts to rack up.

That's pretty fucking rad.

Got the pdf?

Did you make that up just now? I like it!

Riddle of Steel and its successor systems (Song of Swords, Band of Bastards/Sword & Scoundrel, and Blade of the Iron Throne) have always done wounds well

Here's what Phoenix Command/Living Steel does. Bullets have a PENetration value and a Damage Class (DC) based on the gun they're shot from and the distance the bullet travels. When you get shot you roll for location, then see how bad it is based on the PEN and DC. You've got three different levels of detail you can use, like how in GURPS you can use a really basic system or add on complexity to your liking. Bullets deliver an amount of Physical Damage (PD). Based on how much you get shot, you roll to see if you're Incapacitated. Your PD total is modified by your character's health stat to get a Damage Total (DT) which is used on the last table here. Whether you survive is based on a d100 roll, based on your DT and the level of medical care you receive. You can bounce up in medical care; you're intended to deliver first aid to stave off the death roll, giving you some time to get to a higher level medical care facility to improve the roll's odds of success.
There are optional rules throughout Phoenix Command books that add more detail to virtually all of these steps.
Sword's Path Glory had a similar wound system to the most advanced one here but there are no scans online of its full wound tables.

For example, if you get hit in the Neck/Spine with a tiny DC 2 bullet with 2 EPEN, you take 7H (700) damage. If you have average health, this PD of 700 is unaltered, and you have a DT of 700. On the medical aid table, with 700 damage and no aid, you have 6 minutes until you have to roll 00 or lower on d100 to survive. (Phoenix Command is weird because it treats 00 as zero, not as 100.) If you're given First Aid, that time goes from 6 minutes to 8 days, but the survival chances remain at 1%. With more extensive care, your chances go way up.
You may or may not be Incapacitated, or get Incapacitated and then recover from it, during that time.

I guess so lol.

What if they hit first?

I always think stuff like this is really cool, makes a lot of sense, and feel like great improvements over things I try to incorporate into my games...

Then I think about how long it would take, and getting 5 other people to agree to doing stuff like this every combat. Doesn't it get bogged down?

I made a system with locational damage. Once a limb was out of HP additional damage flowed over to the chest. Once the chest was out of HP damage flowed over to the head. A character died when their chest and head were out of HP.

At half HP the body part is injured, at zero HP the body part is crippled with a more severe penalty.

Additionally, each time a character is hit they add one to their "wounds" count, each time you use a healing ability you remove a wound. If you have no unhealed wounds the only way to recover damage is by resting. Additionally, resting does not restore you to full health, so it could take several days to fully recover.

What's the simplest most straightforward form of non-HP tracking (via wounds, or stamina, or energy or whatever) that you've seen?

Well designed death spirals make sure that you don't drop too far too fast. I'm working on such a system and you generally won't drop more than -1 at a time (and even that, only from a really hard hit) unless your opponent FAR outclassed you.

The simplest is going to just be a !notHP, with a numeric value, where you die or are knocked out at 0. As far as true alternatives, the more abstract, the simpler it will be. I'm a fan of the Exalted system of wound boxes at different penalty levels, for how it elegantly allows for different individuals with nuanced resistances, different levels of damage, varied healing difficulties, and so forth.

Thats the inherent problem with any system. Its not that we cannot perfectly simulate combat; we can. Its that doing so is not fun. No one wants to calculate complex physics equations in order to hit an orc.

All systems are somewhere on the spectrum between Storytelling and total simulation.

Everyone has a basic defense stat, everything else is player modified adjustments to kit out their play style. Weapons/spells do a set damage, if you want you can use character stats that allow for a slight increase or decrease in the damage and attack as modifiers. All you do is roll a die or multiple dice for your attack, compare that to your opponets defense stat, if you roll higher you hit. If your opponet has armor deduct the armor modifier from the damage done.

I use something like . Characters have hit points, which represent morale and determination rather than physical condition. Getting knocked to half your maximum gives you a Wound, getting knocked to 0 gives you a second Wound. Wounds directly subtract from rolls and it's a d10 + stat system so that matters a lot. Characters can 'Rally' in battle regain half their hit points (and other resources) by suffering aWound, BUT when they do so Wounds turn into a Reverse Death Spiral and start giving them a bonus instead! However if they do this they put themselves in mortal danger, because if they get reduced to 0 they're straight up dead. There are very few ways to kill a PC aside from them rallying in this fashion, so it's a serious gamble if they go for it.

So they have 2 wounds and they are dead?

4 Wounds kills you. You get a Wound when you:
- Get reduced to half hit points
- Get reduced to 0 hit points
- Rally yourself (but Wounds become plusses instead of minuses)
- Get reduced to 0 hit points after rallying yourself

Wounds persist between battles and can only be removed by very limited healing and resting effects. Important to note is that you can't get a Wound from the same 'trigger' twice. That means that if you're reduced to 1/2 hit points, then are healed, then are reduced to 1/2 hit points again, you don't suffer another Wound. Wounds get restored in priority from bottom to top, so if you have 2 Wounds you can't get any more by losing hit points. You also can't rally yourself if you already have 3 Wounds, you're too injured to push your body any further.

that sounds cool but what stops a player from being effectively immortal if they choose not to rally other then the threat of sucking.

Savage Worlds?