Potion drinking in RPG is fucking stupid

[odrzut]

Hit points are fucking stupid. So potions increasing hit points are stupid too.

Maybe hit points are good mechanics for cutting tree with an axe, but for piercing armor, or killing people hit points are stupid. In sword fight you are most probably either bleeding on the floor, or fully alive. And armor either protected you, or not.

I think system where there are no hit points, but a few distinct states of characters would be better. Like unconscious, bleeding, blind, immobilized, poisoned, burning, dying, dead. Each person can be in any combination of these states. So one can be bleeding and poisoned for example. Or unconscious and dying. No effect == character is fully healthy. Each attack has some chance of inducing each effect, character attributes, weapons and armors changes the chance of each effect. Also current effects that the person has changes what person can do (unconscious person can't do anything, blind person won't be able to attack at distance, etc), and what chance of success person has. Also - each turn the effect is on, there is some chance it will enable another effect. For example each turn person is burning, there is 20% chance it will become blind, and 40% chance it will become dying. And each turn person is dying there is 30% chance it will become dead. Something like that.

Fight in this system will be much less forgiving (one good hit and you are out of fight), so there is need for parrying mechanics (maybe in form of chosing stances before each turn - maybe paper-rock-scisors like).

This system also has the adventage, that if you won fight decisively (without injuries), you don't need to head back to town or rest to health that 5 hit points out of 80 each person is missing. Only when sombody got seriously hurt, healing is needed.

In strategy games hit points are even more stupid - see cave man destroying stone building by hiting it with his club 2000 times.

 

[curry]

Potions are magic so they don't have to make sense

 

[sea]

Hit points are fucking stupid. So potions increasing hit points are stupid too.

Maybe hit points are good mechanics for cutting tree with an axe, but for piercing armor, or killing people hit points are stupid. In sword fight you are most probably either bleeding on the floor, or fully alive. And armor either protected you, or not.

I think system where there are no hit points, but a few distinct states of characters would be better. Like unconscious, bleeding, blind, immobilized, poisoned, burning, dying, dead. Each person can be in any combination of these states. So one can be bleeding and poisoned for example. Or unconscious and dying. No effect == character is fully healthy. Each attack has some chance of inducing each effect, character attributes, weapons and armors changes the chance of each effect. Also current effects that the person has changes what person can do (unconscious person can't do anything, blind person won't be able to attack at distance, etc), and what chance of success person has. Also - each turn the effect is on, there is some chance it will enable another effect. For example each turn person is burning, there is 20% chance it will become blind, and 40% chance it will become dying. And each turn person is dying there is 30% chance it will become dead. Something like that.

Fight in this system will be much less forgiving (one good hit and you are out of fight), so there is need for parrying mechanics (maybe in form of chosing stances before each turn - maybe paper-rock-scisors like).

This system also has the adventage, that if you won fight decisively (without injuries), you don't need to head back to town or rest to health that 5 hit points out of 80 each person is missing. Only when sombody got seriously hurt, healing is needed.

In strategy games hit points are even more stupid - see cave man destroying stone building by hiting it with his club 2000 times.

There's nothing wrong with status effects, but explain to me how you would build progression into such a system, or determine how much damage a blow does? How many injuries can you accumulate before death? Is there such a thing as instant death? Are some injuries more severe than others? How do you measure how close you are to death to begin with?

Hit points aren't really a flawed system, it's just that the whole "1 HP = fine, 0 HP = dead" thing is pretty ridiculous from a realism perspective. Injuries and status effects are totally fine but there needs to be something a bit more nuanced, not because it's realistic but because it's needed for good gameplay.

 

[flabbyjack]

OP -
You don't carry glass-bottle potions around in a god damned backpack! If you can afford the potions you can probably afford a Batman utility belt or something to hold the phials.
PS - Great sig, X3 was such a batshit insane game

Everyone else -
Potions are 100% grade A hobo urine bottled at the peak of fermentation when those pungent tannins are replaced by mystic agents

 

[Disconnected]

I think system where there are no hit points, but a few distinct states of characters would be better. Like unconscious, bleeding, blind, immobilized, poisoned, burning, dying, dead. Each person can be in any combination of these states. So one can be bleeding and poisoned for example. Or unconscious and dying. No effect == character is fully healthy. Each attack has some chance of inducing each effect, character attributes, weapons and armors changes the chance of each effect. Also current effects that the person has changes what person can do (unconscious person can't do anything, blind person won't be able to attack at distance, etc), and what chance of success person has. Also - each turn the effect is on, there is some chance it will enable another effect. For example each turn person is burning, there is 20% chance it will become blind, and 40% chance it will become dying. And each turn person is dying there is 30% chance it will become dead. Something like that.

Fight in this system will be much less forgiving (one good hit and you are out of fight), so there is need for parrying mechanics (maybe in form of chosing stances before each turn - maybe paper-rock-scisors like).

Hehe, you're running into the two problems we've struggled with the last decade or so in our homebrew system; pace and lethality.

Pace is less of an issue in CRPGs, but you still can't have a system so complex players can't understand and guesstimate outcomes easily. On the tabletop it's a massive problem. System operations have to be fast, and preferably involve more than one person, or the game becomes boring.

Lethality affects both more or less equally, I guess. The problem of lethality is that RPG combat can't be realistic. Player death can't be a high-likelihood outcome, and things like massive warehouse firefights between a small group of PCs and 20 of Evil Cartel's minions, or a small group of PCs and a big, fat dragon, can't be guaranteed TPK scenarios. Because if they are, the system isn't any fun to play.

Our solution (at this point, we've tried a bunch of different things over the years, and will undoubtedly try many more) is partly to tone down the severity of injuries, and partly to make combat actions spend dice from a per-round dice pool. It's a very, very abstract way of doing things, but it's fast and mostly not so lethal that PCs would rather do anything other than engage in combat (the 20 minion gunfights work, dragons not so much).

 

[Neeshka]

First off video games and movies aren't supposed to be real life simulators.
Games do things differently in the interest of fun.

This is why 1 bullet in an fps will rarely kill you but in real life even a stray bullet ricocheting and hitting your stomach can cause gangrene septicemia and a painful death over the course of a few days.

Anyway back to the topic:

Health is basically just another resource management mechanic utilized in video games; like ammo, mana, power up mushrooms, gun heat, lives, speed, timers and so on.

Generally, the idea behind the resource management mechanic is that the player has some resource that is slowly drained over time and must be replenished before it runs out. If the resource expires, the game may become harder, or the game may be over.
Replenishing the resource usually involves the player playing the game skillfully; loss of the resource is often a punishment for not playing the game deftly enough. This mechanic has been a game design staple since before there were video games.

Early video games often had time limits as a resource mechanic.

Health works in a very similar way. The point is though that ways to replenish health should be limited; and you should not be able to just buy and spam click pots to heal up and play shittily.

You mentioned skyrim but that's just an example of bad game design, where "difficulty" just means pausing more and clicking more potions.

A lot of recent RPGs have dealt with this a lot better. Usually potions are very expensive and difficult to come by; or they have a long cooldown on their use. Damage prevention is done with more skillful gameplay. Turn based/DnD did this in a similar way with rounds limiting potion use and improper use of attacks/potion could lead to death, naturally.

Recent FPS games also have a health bar (which regenerates lol). If you play like shit and take open fire you will die. IF you play intelligently and take cover, you won't. Health packs are also not common.

A nice article on health as a resource mechanic on game design:
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/article.php?id=182

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I prefer using people as a resource .

 

[odrzut]

... but explain to me how you would build progression into such a system, or determine how much damage a blow does? How many injuries can you accumulate before death? Is there such a thing as instant death? Are some injuries more severe than others? How do you measure how close you are to death to begin with?

Hit points aren't really a flawed system, it's just that the whole "1 HP = fine, 0 HP = dead" thing is pretty ridiculous from a realism perspective. Injuries and status effects are totally fine but there needs to be something a bit more nuanced, not because it's realistic but because it's needed for good gameplay.

Character progressin will be the same like now, only attributes will have range 0-100 %, and will mean base chance for success in something. Like dexterity of 55% means that when you attack somebody with your mediocre +5% sword with no status modifiers, he have +10% armor, and his dexterity skill is 30%, you have 50%+(55%+5%-30%-10%) (equation may be different - that will need balancing of course) chance of hitting him. If you hit, there is roll what effect it makes - most probably he will start bleeding, he can also be unconscious.

When somebody is bleeding, each turn there is roll if he becomse dying, with chance 100%-constitution attribute or sth like that). So with constitution of 75%, if you are hit and start bleeding, you have 25% chance of dying in each next turn. Player don't know how close to death is his character, because with luck he can bleed for 5 turns and not die, but most probably character will die in first few turns after starting bleeding. That's to player to estimate, how long this character can keep fighting.

I agree that playablitiy is more important than being realistic, but I think hit points and potions makes RPG too easy, and fights too predictable. I think hit points became the only considered option, because it's easier to balance game this way, and it's sad, because there probably are many better options, but developers became lazy and just copy the same mechanics over and over. Also players demand the same mechanics over and over

Pace is less of an issue in CRPGs, but you still can't have a system so complex players can't understand and guesstimate outcomes easily.

I like how Battle for Wesnoth (turn based strategy) solves this - when you attack somebody, game shows you probabilities of each possible result. Player don't need to calculate everything, but can predict outcomes and optimize strategy.

My draft of system was only a draft, maybe it would need aditional status effects (broken arm, broken leg, infected wound). I think it's better for immersion to show player meaningfull information (like bleeding, poisoned, etc), that have big impact on character abilities, than to show some abstract value "hit points", that only serves one purpose.

 

[Heresiarch]

About HP, I think the D20 Star Wars has a good system. In it you have two different stats called something like Health and Stamina/Endurance/Powah or something. When you are "hit", your "Powah" is reduced, and in a roleplaying sense, it means you have succesfully dodged, blocked, parried an attack with your heroic skill (thus why only players and important NPC have that stats, while normal grunts and civilians don't have it). When your Powah is zero, any further hit will be on your Health, which means you're actually getting damage on your flesh.

That's a bit out of the range of today's concept of HP though.

 

[Disconnected]

The "any damage can kill" thing is a dead-end idea. Combat isn't exciting if there's a perfect solution, and your proposed level of lethality is much, much too high when there's no perfect [as in PCs can resolve any combat encounter with no chance of them taking damage] solution.

Even when resolved as close to perfectly as possible within the system, PCs have to suffer damage regularly, or players grow bored. And if the system results in PCs regularly suffering injuries, the baseline for damage must be less severe than potentially or outright fatal. Because if it's not, PCs will drop like flies and many combat encounters will become unresolvable through no fault of the players.

In our homebrew system, common injuries have 0% of killing PCs before they've been injured 3 times. We do use locational damage and all damage stacks, but we also have a "wounded" state, which basically means that any 3 injuries can disable human-like critters, and (depending a bit on how tough the PC is) any 6-11 will.

Of course, our system doesn't really have instant, permanent healing. Our equivalent of a healing spell just enables you to ignore some of your injuries, for a limited time. It won't actually heal you.

This keeps combat very, very dangerous, but not so much that entering any combat is suicidal. And since it came up: we don't have much of a power curve. For example, the toughest PC can only take twice the damage of the weakest PC, and it doesn't take much XP to build the toughest possible PC. Instead it prevents your PC from being good at certain other things. And incidentally: no, our system isn't level or class based. And yeah, I hate both of those concepts just as much as I hate HP and the "only possible states are perfectly healthy and perfectly dead" thing.

 

[Renegen]

Hit points aren't really a flawed system, it's just that the whole "1 HP = fine, 0 HP = dead" thing is pretty ridiculous from a realism perspective. Injuries and status effects are totally fine but there needs to be something a bit more nuanced, not because it's realistic but because it's needed for good gameplay.

Careful there, because if you open pandora's box on realism, you never know where you'll end up.

Drakensang had a cool system where if you took more damage than your constitution, you ran the risk of getting 1 injury. Each injury set you back considerably, once you hit 4 injuries you died. So I guess the whole Dark Eye PnP system works like that and has a more realistic hp system.

And really RPGs are derived from PnP which leave a lot unwritten and instead up to the DM's discretion. If a giant stomps on a halfling and does big damage, the DM could say the halfling dies instantly, or the DM could add color to a 2 damage sword blow by saying you failed to dodge it completely. The stats were more a synthesis on what went on in a combat and an action was always meant to be filled with imagination. With time, once cRPGs left completely their PnP trappings, they kept this simplistic HP system.

The problem now becomes, what kind of realism do you want? Simple HP system or more realism? Because if you go for the realism, you find yourself square in with those that dream of the day when RPGs won't have any stats anymore.

 

[sea]

Careful there, because if you open pandora's box on realism, you never know where you'll end up.

Don't get me wrong, realism over all else is dumb as anything. Still, depending on your game, realism can be a big asset. Something like Red Orchestra wouldn't be what it is without dedication to realism most other shooters lack, and I'm convinced you could make a more realistic RPG that's a lot of fun too. Of course you'd also be massively limiting your potential market, but that's the price with anything niche.

 

[DraQ]

Hit points are fucking stupid. So potions increasing hit points are stupid too.

Maybe hit points are good mechanics for cutting tree with an axe, but for piercing armor, or killing people hit points are stupid. In sword fight you are most probably either bleeding on the floor, or fully alive. And armor either protected you, or not.

Well, you might be damaged or partially crippled, but still fighting.

I agree that HPs are the shittiest of abstractions unless we're talking of 1Dn HP ranges like in lvl1 DnD. Then one hit with anything can kill a person, but with different probabilities and subsequent hits are more likely to kill.

It's a decent enough abstraction, but for an RTS or TBS, where you control hundreds or thousands of units and fate of a single one doesn't matter all that much, not an RPG where you control a party of six vital characters - it's way too simplified and random for that.

Good system should have organs and regions with small HP ranges (so destroying or disabling them with a single hit would be real possibility), armour on top of that and dodge/block/parry on top of armour.

In a modern game it could be realized with physical engine and hit detection for multiple hitboxes, combined with parametrized movement and adapatable animations plus decent RNG. For example if you could have mesh of your helmet with visor also play the role of a hitbox, you wouldn't have to ponder the effect of this visor on probability of getting critted in the face or eye, as the engine would handle it implicitly.

More conservative approach would be to explicitly randomize outcomes and states rather than let them be generated by mechanics.
Of course there should be multiple options in combat.

Also and wood chopping analogy.

 

[Disconnected]

Good system should have organs and regions with small HP ranges (so destroying or disabling them with a single hit would be real possibility), armour on top of that and dodge/block/parry on top of armour.

If you're going to go into that much detail, you may as well simulate the events properly. How to do it is very well understood. People have been doing it with extreme accuracy since before they had computers. And skewing the values towards RPG-friendly outcomes wouldn't be all that complicated.

The only real problem is that even the minority of people capable of performing that kind of operations, can't do it anywhere near fast enough for gaming purposes. Which means the uncertainty when trying to predict events will be so huge as to make predictions useless.
But that applies whether you simulate events or approximate that level of detail with a more human-friendly abstract system.

Personally I'm all for simulation in wargames. In RPGs, no thank you. Operations have to be simple and fast enough that I can do them backwards, instantly, when I'm blackout drunk.

 

[CreamyBlood]

I'm going to go with Disconnected here. You have to make it fun for the PC and/or his party.

If the game you are trying to make is a realistic battle simulator then it could be a good time for some people but if it's an RPG perhaps you might want to 'streamline' it a bit. I think the concept of Hit Points works, you can see when you're fucking up in a battle. Does it matter if fucking up is a head wound, pierced liver or sliced off leg?

Everything here can be done with computers, but is it fun? Or does it make the game a headache? Balance isa difficult thing to do as the pnp people will tell you. As has been said, the DM balances things for the situation to make things a good time, yet challenging.

It would be a neat experiment to code out some of these system and see how they end up working in play. I wonder how many of them would make the game better or tedious. As it is, the old die-hard HP system, as 'fucking stupid' as it is actually works for the most part.

 

[DaveO]

The problem with potion drinking is the same problem with healing in general in RPGs. You could say that any sort of healing is BS and remove it entirely with all player deaths permanent. You could also ramp up the difficulty of combat to real life where any hit could kill you. Players have been spoiled for far too long with easy games. But that would go against the grain with people expecting the character they create to be like a hero in a legend.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The main problem with taking hp out of combat is it leaves you with no resources to manage, which makes all your decisions really REALLY fucking simple. You just pick whatever maximizes yours odds of WIN!.

Giving the player a pool of something that can be whittled down partially during a battle and over the course of a dungeon, adventure, or whatever, engages the player by forcing them to weigh probably loss of that resource vs risk of outright loss. If you're only going to have one fight before being completely healed, it's obviously the best choice to deal 100% of your enemy's health at a cost of 85% of your own as a sure thing, as opposed to dealing 50% of his health at a cost of 0-70% of your own, which, repeated twice, might kill you. Over the course of 10 battles before you can heal though, with the damage to you divided by 10, the second option is more attractive, since it's less average damage per exchange and better in the long run. Now add in a factor like automatic loss for losing a certain amount of health in quick succession, or partial decay/regeneration of health per battle and things get a lot more interesting.

You can throw in 'stamina' or some shit in place of hp, but then you're just replacing one abstraction with another and being smug about the semantics.

A system needs to be flexible enough to allow Bruce Lee to murder one hundred thousand unarmed, untrained women without ever being injured, if he can rest when he wants, while also having him be worn down and killed if he has to fight the same number of women without a moment's rest. Likewise, the fantasy equivalent involving the best swordsman in the land vs a horde of goblins should put out the same result. This generally doesn't mesh well with chances of death/serious injury being a given for any dumbass with a pointy object.

The solution for the retarded 1 hp=fine 0 hp=dead is obvious (and already implemented in DnD and other systems since like, forever): Have real injuries pile up at some threashold near death. Make healing from 1 to 10 hitpoints take incredibly powerful magic or a year of medical attention, while healing from 10 to 20 takes about a week and 20 to 50 takes a good night's sleep and 50 to 100 takes a few minutes time to catch your breath. DnD uses the much simplified version of a 10 hp buffer between unconscious and dead, but this shit isn't hard to house rule, and the only thing stopping it from going in most video games is the fact that resting for a week, never mind a year probably means you're dead anyways at some point in the story line, if anything interesting ever happens to the party.

 

[Drakron]

You could say that any sort of healing is BS and remove it entirely with all player deaths permanent.

That is not the problem.

If you do that in tabletop players will get fed up having to constant create new characters and even the DM will get tired of his scenario reaching a dead end due ti players death.

In a cRPG it just leads to savescumming unless you disable it as well.

Worst, the system was designed with the idea health potions exist, if you remove then ... the system is no longer working as designed.

Also the one that brought up Strategy Games ... guess what? units can be replaced and many players are quite willing to send some units to be destroyed if they can win ... do not apply those games logic were unless you have a finite number of units you cannot replace they are always expandable, in a RPG a character is not expandable and even if the player can create a unlimited amount of characters, it simply does not work when you are sending then into the grinder, there is no attachment to the character or even a interest in interacting with the game world because the character is now a "unit".

 

[SCO]

I'm going to go with Disconnected here. You have to make it fun for the PC and/or his party.

"Make it fun" is at the root of everything that is wrong with rpgs today.

 

[Davaris]

Hit points aren't really a flawed system, it's just that the whole "1 HP = fine, 0 HP = dead" thing is pretty ridiculous from a realism perspective.

What you are talking about, is what Fuzzy Logic was created to deal with.

 

[xemous]

there should be an animation where the guys stops to drink a potion and wipes his mouth and go 'ahhh' then resumes combat, if you get hit during this time you can never dodge the blow and it'll have a high chance to interrupt the drinking of the potion.

so you should have some stun skills or spells or traps to allow u the time to drink the potion, then it just adds to the tactics.

 

[Redeye]

About HP, I think the D20 Star Wars has a good system. In it you have two different stats called something like Health and Stamina/Endurance/Powah or something. When you are "hit", your "Powah" is reduced, and in a roleplaying sense, it means you have succesfully dodged, blocked, parried an attack with your heroic skill (thus why only players and important NPC have that stats, while normal grunts and civilians don't have it). When your Powah is zero, any further hit will be on your Health, which means you're actually getting damage on your flesh.

That's a bit out of the range of today's concept of HP though.

AD&D hit points counted physical health along with luck, stamina, divine favor, etc. as a single pool.

This was explained in both the PHB and DMG.

 

[Tycn]

Dwarf Fortress injury system should be used in every game.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I'm going to go with Disconnected here. You have to make it fun for the PC and/or his party.

If the game you are trying to make is a realistic battle simulator then it could be a good time for some people but if it's an RPG perhaps you might want to 'streamline' it a bit. I think the concept of Hit Points works, you can see when you're fucking up in a battle. Does it matter if fucking up is a head wound, pierced liver or sliced off leg?

Everything here can be done with computers, but is it fun?

Of course. Thrusting someone through a visor and penetrating brain is a lot of fun. Why do you ask?

 

[Roguey]

I'm going to go with Disconnected here. You have to make it fun for the PC and/or his party.

"Make it fun" is at the root of everything that is wrong with rpgs today.

Nothing wrong with making things fun, it just depends on whom they're making it fun for.