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“I’ve still got 1 Hit Point! Come on, you coward – fight!” |
Starting to draft Beta RPG, the evolution of my homegrown roleplaying system, has thrown up a few headaches but none quite so acute as the question of how to model injury.
You’d think that this matter would be easy to resolve. Given the multitude of solutions that have been proposed over many years, and through many RPG systems, I have to admit that I’ve yet to find one I really like.
This post is my attempt to outline what I’m not looking for… and perhaps suggest some pointers towards what I do want.
In the beginning…
Decrement Stats
Damage Tracks
Bleeding
Critical Charts
No easy answer?
- Simple
- Increasing injury limiting the options of the player
- Characters who are not too frail but not too tough
- Minimal book-keeping
- Simple
I recommend looking at the damage system from Inquisitor, the narrative skirmish game from GW (you may recall that I wrote the Inquisitor campaign for the Dark Stars event that you ran, Che). Each character had a damage increment that had too be exceeded in order to increase the severity of the effect on each hit location. For a skirmish miniatures game, it was very complex, but ideal for an RPG.
Thanks, I’ll go and refresh my memory… although I do remember it being complex. 😉 Mind you, I do remember that I enjoyed the game immensely.