Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Programming => Topic started by: Snargleplax on June 21, 2012, 03:14:33 AM
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I'd like to exchange some ideas about designing a health system not based on the HP abstraction, and furthermore not reliant on a continual supply of healing magic to keep adventuring viable. The HP mechanic is so widespread, I think it has become a conceptual crutch; certainly its popularity is not due to being a perfect solution.
HP has (have?) just never rung true for me. In how many great adventure stories does the intrepid protagonist chug away at red potions every 20 minutes, just to stay topped up? How anticlimactic would it be to read a dramatic fight scene in which the hero is gravely wounded and all seems lost, and then suddenly he pops a potion and stands up for round 2 (of n, presumably)? Heroes seem brave to us because they stand tall even knowing that they are vulnerable, that they possess human frailty,* can hurt and fail and die. Why can't a roguelike tell us that story?
* (or elven frailty, or dwarven frailty, or goblin frailty, or what have you. Just don't tell the dwarves I called them "frail.")
There are other problems. Being down to 1 HP means you're at death's door, sure; but in how many games does this affect your prowess? I anticipate an objection: "it wouldn't be fun that way." Well, I'm not sure; I haven't seen it done,** though I imagine it's at least been attempted. I suspect there's a way to do it right, but we may need to peel away some conceptual layers to figure out what kind of system it would make sense in.
** (the closest thing that occurs to me is the ability to throw your sword in The Legend of Zelda, which you lose as soon as you're injured. This shows how a "penalty for being hurt" is also a "bonus for staying healthy".)
Okay, so if we take away their healing magic, we need to make sure they still have a chance. Survival can't continue to be about "making sure the bar doesn't get too low." Every goblin has a dagger that can cut your throat, and you'd better not forget it: that's peril, friends. That's how you make level 1 interesting.
So how do heroes do it? With amazing skill, naturally! Picture a barbarian wading into a roomful of rabble, tearing them apart by the dozens. In an HP system, if you balance an encounter like this to be challenging, the barbarian will be near death by the end -- his toughness is represented by the width of that bar. But how does he do it in your mind? He throws tables, he smashes enemies' heads together, he ducks a blade by a hair's breadth and then breaks the wielder's wrist for his trouble. He wears armor that deflects blows and keeps damage away from his vital areas. He doesn't suffer just few enough injuries not to kill him and then magically recover; he does apply his skill and resources to his survival at every moment. To me, that's a lot more interesting than playing a "tank."
Alright, here's the part where I talk about the system I'm actually working on, to save myself the trouble of wording things too abstractly.
Firstly, attacker and defender skills of different kinds (strike, dodge, strength, toughness, etc.) play into multiple rolls, any of which can influence the severity of injury. The attacker first rolls and determines how good the strike is, on a qualitative scale including e.g. "Excellent," "Terrible," and "Mediocre." The defender makes a similar roll to dodge, which if not successful outright may turn the blow somewhat less effective. Assuming the blow still makes contact, there's a roll against armor based on strength and weapon power. Whatever number on that qualitative scale makes it through is converted onto a scale for wound levels and applied to the character.
Individual wounds are kept track of in buckets by severity. In order for lesser wounds to be meaningful, it must be possible to "die the death of a thousand cuts;" the cumulative effect should eventually prove overwhelming. My first idea here is to simply promote injuries when a bucket gets too full. You get a too many "minor" cuts, maybe you convert the next one into a "not so minor" cut. Another way to go, which I'm also considering, is to penalize toughness rolls based on degree of injury (measured by high water mark, I guess -- when you're bleeding out your guts, nobody cares how many papercuts you have).
I don't think healing should be done away with altogether, just made less effective and readily accessible. Wounds heal naturally over time, especially minor ones. There's no reason the system can't track all that. First aid should matter, and I'm not against some healing magic that's not dramatically more potent than first aid. Some injuries would be too severe and require the player to retire to town for the attention of, say, a surgeon. I see no reason for any injury to be ultimately incurable, though -- that would be anti-fun.
Well, that's about it. I have some more thoughts on how this system would impact the game overall, how it would affect balance and pacing and so on, but I think it's time for me to shut up and see what anyone else has to say. So, do you? Love it? Hate it? Commentary, suggestions, or alternate models? Know of games I should check out where things like this have been tried (and succeeded/failed)? Let's hear it.
P.S. I know there was another thread today about health systems, but my point is really not about wound locations at all, so I wanted to start a fresh discussion.
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I love it, but I honestly think it's not right for a rogue-like in the NetHack or old Rogue terms. Rogue-likes, by definition, are like the game known as "Rogue," and Rogue has hit points. If you're going for a "true" rogue-like, you basically need to have HP, just by tradition. It keeps things simple and lets you focus on item/monster/player interactions, rather than spend time on a complex combat mechanism.
Would I love to see it in a less "rogue-like" rogue-like? Sure! It'd be great in a gladiator or tournament style game, where the entire point is combat, or in a hyper-realistic-survival-type game, where the entire point is complexity and realism. But not in the simple/elegant games like Rogue, where the point is strategy and complex reactions.
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I love it, but I honestly think it's not right for a rogue-like in the NetHack or old Rogue terms. Rogue-likes, by definition, are like the game known as "Rogue," and Rogue has hit points. If you're going for a "true" rogue-like, you basically need to have HP, just by tradition. It keeps things simple and lets you focus on item/monster/player interactions, rather than spend time on a complex combat mechanism.
Would I love to see it in a less "rogue-like" rogue-like? Sure! It'd be great in a gladiator or tournament style game, where the entire point is combat, or in a hyper-realistic-survival-type game, where the entire point is complexity and realism. But not in the simple/elegant games like Rogue, where the point is strategy and complex reactions.
What? There are plenty of roguelikes that do away with health all together (don't let DGrey see your post!). It is not even remotely on my list of things important to roguelikes. Additionally, contrary to what you might think, roguelikes are NOT like rogue. It is a genre defined by the original roguelikes and not by rogue itself.
As far as the system in this post, I have to admit it doesn't sound very ground breaking to me. It sounds like you still have health and an hp pool, you are just creating a complex system to hide it. You can still abstract this system into a numerical quantity. You might be giving the player more information, in terms of how the progression is affecting their skills, but it's still there.
In terms of alternative healing systems, Epilogue doesn't allow you to heal above 50% health without outside aid, from healing shrines or potions. It makes you a bit more vulnerable, especially later in the game. It also has limb injuries, some of which the player can mend, some they need a shrine or limb potion as above. Another system is Dungeons of Dredmor, where you very slightly heal while time passes, but eat food to heal quickly.
I think incurable injuries can add a lot to a game. I also like the possibility of the player realizing they are too injured to continue fighting, forcing them to retire or face certain death.
Anyway, in terms of removing health, I think you should either go with DGrey's 1HP model or keep the health points. Adding complexity just to hide the simple underlying facts does not add to a game in my opinion. I don't want to have to examine a bunch of numbers for how many cuts I have to figure out how close I am to death. And if you cover that up by already displaying a general status, even using something like "Poor", "Excellent" etc, I would still prefer the number.
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I'd like to exchange some ideas about designing a health system not based on the HP abstraction. The HP mechanic is so widespread, I think it has become a conceptual crutch; certainly its popularity is not due to being a perfect solution.
Being down to 1 HP means you're at death's door, sure; but in how many games does this affect your prowess?
What, did I step on your toes with this post? ;D
I like the abstraction of hit-points actually (In an action-oriented Roguelike/RPG), and I like that your performance doesn't degrade with them.
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I love it, but I honestly think it's not right for a rogue-like in the NetHack or old Rogue terms. Rogue-likes, by definition, are like the game known as "Rogue," and Rogue has hit points. If you're going for a "true" rogue-like, you basically need to have HP, just by tradition.
Oh, don't be so boring! There is no such tradition. Rogue was it own game, many games are inspired by it, but we are not constrained to some silly shopping list of features to be a roguelike. And if we were then screw them! Game design is about making elements that are good and fun, not about sticking to some rigid definition.
There are some systems already like the OP suggested - Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode and IVAN in particular (though IVAN still uses HP). I don't think it works very well, but maybe it just hasn't been done well so far. I think it would end up in a system where fights are about dodging or deflecting injuries rather than absorbing damage.
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As far as the system in this post, I have to admit it doesn't sound very ground breaking to me. It sounds like you still have health and an hp pool, you are just creating a complex system to hide it. You can still abstract this system into a numerical quantity. You might be giving the player more information, in terms of how the progression is affecting their skills, but it's still there.
You're completely right that I've only replaced one quantitative abstraction with another, in terms of wound tracking. I don't think my approach quite boils down to a single number, but I suppose it remains to be seen if I can develop game mechanics around it that really expose the nonlinearity in a way that feels meaningful. And those mechanics do include dodge and armor as mentioned, the balancing of which is a major factor in minimizing healing.
Well, I've got a lot of playing to do with it still; most of my effort so far has been on level generation rather than play mechanics. If it's not fun, I'll change it.
There are some systems already like the OP suggested - Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode and IVAN in particular (though IVAN still uses HP). I don't think it works very well, but maybe it just hasn't been done well so far.
I would say DF ventures too far into realism here, and furthermore the combat is just too weirdly balanced so far to seem right to me. I guess it does have some of the properties of what I'm talking about, but I think it can be done better if the emphasis is on providing the heroic feel I'm talking about above.
I haven't tried IVAN yet, but I guess I'll have to now.
I think it would end up in a system where fights are about dodging or deflecting injuries rather than absorbing damage.
Exactly what I'm after. It does present a user feedback problem to be solved; I'm thinking about perhaps using floating text or something to show wound magnitude right by the action. I also like the tactical combat stuff from Laik's 7DRL's; perhaps there's a way to make all this dodging and such more of a concrete tactical subject.
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The abstraction of hit points isn't really that terrible. If you've ever read the old D&D game books, they have a nice description as to what HP represents. It's primary role is to abstractly represent injuries and stamina. The 'critical hit,' is literally a strike that actually hits the body. Everything else is this sort of attrition-esque abstraction of fighting. The addition of some rules (particularly epic levels and tumbling) to D&D contradicts the role of HP-- characters with ridiculously high dexterity/evasion, for example, simply never lose HP.
This is, imo, a misuse of the idea. If HP is an abstraction of combat, it should represent how long one is able to last in battle. Different character builds lose HP in different ways-- a fencer might lose HP on a poor parry, but even more HP if forced dodge. An acrobat might lose a small amount of HP on a successful dodge, but more if forced to parry.
The only time you really should get into 'health' relative to body parts is with critical hits- where 'real' injuries are sustained. This too can be abstracted to HP, but it's typically more interesting if it forces combat decisions to change. HP should probably be a cost-component to abilities as well. In a general sense, ensuring that the synergistic use of abilities creates a net HP advantage is the strategic burden placed on each player. You could even have spells 'cost' HP- and simply have wizards lose particularly large amount of HPs when in melee encounters. If all creatures had 20 HP or so, and we just let their class/skills determine how much HP is lost when an ability is used or when struck, then you might have something more sensible and equitable.
Especially if damage output isn't arbitrarily scaled-- If, say, a skill requires X minus Skill Level HP to use- a low-skilled opponent could use it, just at a higher cost. This gives more options, more strategy, more risk-reward scenarios.
Problem with this style is that the game becomes something like a turn-based fighting game. You're making actual combat decisions and employing combat strategy instead of making tactical choices.
The other way to do it is to make HP represent mistake forgiveness. In Zelda or Spiral Knights, perfect play results in no HP lost. You only lose HP on a mistake, and it's just a way to forgive mistakes.
One mistake I find in a lot of games is this unnecessary obsession with trivial damage information. If attacks and targeting is random, the only thing that limb damage tells us is how unlucky we are. It literally has no real meaning to the player-- apart from requiring some fed-ex quest to reattach their limb. If we have a skill that revolves around dismembering our opponents- that could be interesting.
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So how do heroes do it? With amazing skill, naturally! Picture a barbarian wading into a roomful of rabble, tearing them apart by the dozens. In an HP system, if you balance an encounter like this to be challenging, the barbarian will be near death by the end -- his toughness is represented by the width of that bar. But how does he do it in your mind? He throws tables, he smashes enemies' heads together, he ducks a blade by a hair's breadth and then breaks the wielder's wrist for his trouble.
The difference is the hero in my mind is protected, invulnerable and their victory is assured by script, whereas I assume in a game we want the hero to have a chance of dying in the fight even if they are against lowly creatures.
But no-one wants to be killed without warning which is a reason lots of people question a 1HP model. But I like the idea of 1HP and death is just around the corner, but at the same time I want death to be because of player mistake rather than the RNG.
The solution I think Darren has pointed out (and I hope I have got this right/am representing it right) is to use combat skills. Transferring the skills from the hero to the player. Instead of the hero having 0.01% chance of screwing up now screwing up is in the hands of the player. The player must use various combat skills to avoid death and any death that does come will be because the player stood in the wrong place or forgot to use some skill that could have saved them. This reduces the RNG side of things.
For my game I am going to be using 1HP model, but I am lucky because my theme has guns and no ranged enemies and so a big part of the skill is keeping distance from enemies (and conserving ammo). I will have skills like if you have your "back to the wall" you do more gun damage and if you are "cornered" (in a corner tile) you deal even more ranged damage.
I don't want to have completely zero melee though, especially as a last resort, so I will also have a warning system. the first time the player is hit they "miraculously dodge" the attack and are warned something like "you feel death is close" or "that was close! you don't feel so lucky the next time". Now the player is warned they are about to die and they can choose to risk battling on or trying to escape or resorting to dropping a flashbang or something to quickly finish the battle. It at the very least offers them a decision rather than them just dying and having to restart.
After a certain amount of time outside combat the game will lift the vulnerability with a suitable eg "you feel safe again" message.
Of course mechanically this is just 2HP with auto-heal where all monsters can only do 1HP damage, but from the player's point of view their hero doesn't just suddenly die in melee because of the RNG.
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Oh, don't be so boring! There is no such tradition.
I don't know, sometimes being boring is the way to go. :D There's a reason the entire genre is named after one game, and that's because it was a fun game! I'm sure there isn't any sort of "set in stone" tradition about HP, but to me, if it isn't broken, make it better! In my opinion, 1-HP (sorry, Darren) or "wound" systems are not the way to make it better.
In my mind, Health bars are representations of a wound system, and we don't need the player to have to keep track of that by themselves. If a "light" wound takes away 1HP, while a "medium" wound might take away 5, I don't want to have to think, "Ok, I have 4 light wounds and 2 medium wounds, so if I take 5 more light wounds or 1 more medium wound, I'll die, so I need to heal my wounds somehow," I'd rather think, "Ok, so I have 5/19 HP, I need to heal."
Additionally, contrary to what you might think, roguelikes are NOT like rogue. It is a genre defined by the original roguelikes and not by rogue itself.
Well, the name itself states that rogue-likes are "like Rogue." Of course this doesn't mean that if you don't have everything Rogue had, your game isn't a rogue-like, and of course the genre has evolved dramatically, but the roots are still there. Pretty much all of the original rogue-like games had strong roots in traditions Rogue set in place.
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Copying features is boring. Make new features, fuck around, screw definitions, invent cool things. We have enough games "like Rogue". Rogue itself was original and creative - if we want to really be like Rogue we should be original too.
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Copying features is boring. Make new features, fuck around, screw definitions, invent cool things. We have enough games "like Rogue". Rogue itself was original and creative - if we want to really be like Rogue we should be original too.
Surely this depends on the developer? Two aspects of Roguelike development I see are:
1) Pushing the boundaries of the genre and taking it to new places. For this I completely I agree with what you said above.
2) You enjoy making something close to the classic(s), functionally and aesthetically. This is like someone with a love for trains tinkering with a railway model in his basement. But I suppose this aspect is a bit self-indulgent :D
Personally, I'm striving for a mix of both.
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Well we could have called them "Beneath-Apple-Manor-likes", but that doesn't sound as good :).
When I think of roguelikes, I don't think Magic, Goblins, or Hit-points. I think of turn based games in worlds made of tiles in which you control a single character. Some people might want to create a game to be as similar to Rogue as they possibly can. I'm ok with that, everyone can do whatever they want. If the game is fun, I don't care if it's a roguelike or not. If all roguelikes were set in dungeons with the same health system with only a few variations in weapons and enemies, then I wouldn't have gotten into them ;).
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I think Project Zomboid does the whole specific injury thing well. That being said, I don't feel punishing the player is fun. If the legs are damaged then the player should be subjected to some movement penalty. Basically, punishing the end-user for a random dice roll that says the Xorn hit his legs. Not fun.
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I don't think it's possible to escape from HP. Everything you do or come up with will boil down to "abstraction for proximity to death".
The Madou Monogatari games didn't show any numbers at all; 'healthyness' was shown by facial expressions, from happy (full health) to less happy, somewhat troubled, distressed and knocked out. But that's really just an invisible HP value where a picture changes depending on what range it is in.
The NICE thing about HP is, for me (us?), being very familiar with the concept/system due to familiarity with DnD, DnD-based games or just games-that-adopted-HP-in-general is that it's understood on a basic level. Low HP bad, no HP dead.
Firstly, attacker and defender skills of different kinds (strike, dodge, strength, toughness, etc.) play into multiple rolls, any of which can influence the severity of injury. The attacker first rolls and determines how good the strike is, on a qualitative scale including e.g. "Excellent," "Terrible," and "Mediocre." The defender makes a similar roll to dodge, which if not successful outright may turn the blow somewhat less effective. Assuming the blow still makes contact, there's a roll against armor based on strength and weapon power. Whatever number on that qualitative scale makes it through is converted onto a scale for wound levels and applied to the character.
So first you roll the damage+accuracy, or just the damage? Followed by a dodge roll that reduces damage if it fails but doesn't fail too badly? And then you roll the damage that got through all that against non-static damage reduction, right?
Sounds like standard DnD to me, except they'd just roll the hit chance against a dodge chance, followed by rolling the damage if it hits and then subtracting according to damage reduction if the one being hit has any. They usually don't. Damage reduction is pretty rare, because the damage sources are usually not big enough to merit it being a standard occurence.
Sure, skeletons would have 5 resist to piercing/slashing (backed up by lore), but that's a monster. I'd LOVE to have 5 resist to piercing, then I could just wade into 5 million goblin archers and watch as their arrows have to roll to hit, then roll 1d6 against my 5 damage reduction...
I've played around with the idea of taking standard DnD (3.5e and up) armors and just reversing everything. The lightest leather armor usually gives 1 armor class and the heaviest platemail gives 8 armor class, AC being the abstraction for 'being harder to smack dead'. Of course the low AC armors have a high allowance for the player's dexterity-based AC bonus (being easy to move around in) while the high AC armors don't have this (even having a penalty to the player's dex-based AC bonus due to being cumbersome). This gives you a situation where a warrior with two left hands (clumsy, no dex) in plate mail and with a tower shield has more AC than a nimble thief in leather armor; he'll get hit less often, but if either of them get hit, they take THE SAME AMOUNT OF DAMAGE. What the hell?
So I usually think about making light armors giving high AC and player DEX bonus allowance while having the heavy armors give low AC, player DEX bonus penalties and damage resistance. Therefore a warrior in plate will be more likely to get hit than a rogue in leather, but he'll take a lot less damage. (Though I'd have 3 damage against 5 damage reduction come out as 1 damage taken instead of 0 damage taken, bowing to the death-by-1000-cuts idea)
Individual wounds are kept track of in buckets by severity. In order for lesser wounds to be meaningful, it must be possible to "die the death of a thousand cuts;" the cumulative effect should eventually prove overwhelming. My first idea here is to simply promote injuries when a bucket gets too full. You get a too many "minor" cuts, maybe you convert the next one into a "not so minor" cut. Another way to go, which I'm also considering, is to penalize toughness rolls based on degree of injury (measured by high water mark, I guess -- when you're bleeding out your guts, nobody cares how many papercuts you have).
So you're tracking a bucket per limb, stacking wounds untill they promote, and then repeating that untill the player collapses? But what's the effect of each wound, in damage? How does 5 nicks compare to 1 gash? Aren't you just abstracting HPs (which are already an abstraction) at this point?
I don't think healing should be done away with altogether, just made less effective and readily accessible. Wounds heal naturally over time, especially minor ones. There's no reason the system can't track all that. First aid should matter, and I'm not against some healing magic that's not dramatically more potent than first aid. Some injuries would be too severe and require the player to retire to town for the attention of, say, a surgeon. I see no reason for any injury to be ultimately incurable, though -- that would be anti-fun.
So a giant HP pool with innate regeneration, where a percentage of the giant pool gets "blocked off" if the wound is too serious untill the wound is fixed. :P (Also, having to go back to town because bucket X got filled too far instead of bucket Y getting a promotion or two is anti-fun in the extreme.)
What I'm getting at is that you're using HPs, you're just calling them something else and pretending you're not using them. There's no getting away from HP untill you find a simpler abstraction for health; anything that's more complicated is just HP with some smoke and mirrors.
I do very much like the idea of blocking off parts of the HP pool though. It's pretty common in some fighting games. Here your character takes damage to his hp bar in 2 ways...
First you lose HP due to getting smacked, let's say you lose 10% HP. That 10% HP lost is lost temporarily and starts regenerating immediately. You've got 90% HP remaining, but your maximum potential HP is still 100%. If you avoid taking damage or tag out, it can regenerate back to 100%. Further hits you take are subtracted from BOTH your regular HP and your maximum potential HP (some types of attacks taking more from one or the other) leading to situations where a character could have 20% current HP remaining with 70% maximum potential HP. He COULD regenerate all the way back up to 70%.
Compare that to a character with 40% current HP and 50% maximum potential HP. There's less pressure here to play safe/defensive since he's close to his maximum current HP.
It's a really nice system for health. Of course, there's not that much room to enjoy the nuances of it in the breakneck pace of fighting games ;D
So how do heroes do it? With amazing skill, naturally! Picture a barbarian wading into a roomful of rabble, tearing them apart by the dozens. In an HP system, if you balance an encounter like this to be challenging, the barbarian will be near death by the end -- his toughness is represented by the width of that bar. But how does he do it in your mind? He throws tables, he smashes enemies' heads together, he ducks a blade by a hair's breadth and then breaks the wielder's wrist for his trouble. He wears armor that deflects blows and keeps damage away from his vital areas. He doesn't suffer just few enough injuries not to kill him and then magically recover; he does apply his skill and resources to his survival at every moment. To me, that's a lot more interesting than playing a "tank."
That's the magic of flavor text. You can have mundane dice rolls with mundane results to your mundane HP pool, but if the message log says you cartwheeled into an axe kick which discombobulated the were-elephant, it's still awesome.
I think it would end up in a system where fights are about dodging or deflecting injuries rather than absorbing damage.
Exactly what I'm after. It does present a user feedback problem to be solved; I'm thinking about perhaps using floating text or something to show wound magnitude right by the action. I also like the tactical combat stuff from Laik's 7DRL's; perhaps there's a way to make all this dodging and such more of a concrete tactical subject.
I like Jeff Lait's 7DRLs too, even if they're tough love. If you want to make combat more interesting than
You hit. It hits. You hit. It hits. You hit hard. Victory, quaff potion, move on.
then it would certainly be awesome if you could take a look at [skills/attacks/movements/defensive abilities] that use a (non-)regenerating resource or cooldowns (or both!).
Take a look at DDRogue or PrincessRL too, the input-based combat moves are a great way to spice up combat!
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The important part, really, is making sure that HP plays a role that is interesting to the player.
If the winner of combat is determined by the difference of initial HP, that can get really boring unless it's a game about evasion and diminution. Even if you have items and equipment and different monsters, they all just vary the relative difference in HP. Even stamina/Mana and special attacks, in the scope of HP difference, serve to provide a range of possible HP difference- the maximization of HP difference is the primary goal of the player.
When considered in the scope of multiple enemies, it's more or less the same- just more variety on how to maximize that difference. Even with the RNG, there is a min-max tree that describes the possible game-states as a result of each action. The player that applies the right heuristic increases his chances of progressing.
HP is interesting when the heuristic the player must apply involves different decisions when faced with different challenges OR when there exists multiple heuristic paths of equivalent value. These decisions, however, tend to be more interesting when it isn't obvious what the best heuristic is.
Special attacks can make this interesting, but this can devolve into a turn-based fighting game- which can be a bad thing in that players must be making a lot of decisions all the time. It also feels somewhat artificial unless 'timing' is a factor in move selection, but breaking up the passage of 'turns' into 'sub-turns' gets complicated.
I think that limb loss, however, makes for a good narrative. If a person has a leg injured, they need to start walking with a staff, lance, cane, or walking stick. There are improvisational fighting techniques with these weapons that can actually be advantageous to the gimpy hero-- a skilled swordsman who has never fought an equally skilled but gimpy cane-fighter is likely to be duped and lose (esp. if the gimp has worked on his ground-fighting techniques). There is something very romantic about this notion that can help create an emotional bond with our hero. Zatoichi, a character in a series of japanese films (27- one of the longest full-length series of films ever produced), is a self-taught blind swordsman and masseur that specializes in Iai and gambling tricks. He finds numerous ways to incorporate his handicap into his advantage- like removing light sources, sniffing out human intent/fear/lies, and bumping into walls to get opponents to underestimate him.
The narrative of losing a limb can make a game very interesting so long as there are mechanics that don't punish the player in an absolute way. If permanent injuries are the result of determinism, this can be especially neat. Of course, we don't want a player intentionally mangling himself-- but if the character discovers in a tome of the dark god that self-inflicted blindness is the only way to escape his maddening miasma, the cost-benefit analysis of blinding oneself can become interesting.
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Some great points have been made, more than I can do justice to individually. I think the criticisms of the system I described are fair, and I'm thinking about what to do instead to achieve at least some of what I want. I like the idea of having a secondary pool that you dip into when seriously injured, and also using this pool to limit max HP. So if you run out of "primary" HP and then take another 30% of your bar in damage, your HP will only heal up to 70% until your secondary pool refills.
Seems like this approach gives a good balance of short-term and long-term considerations in managing character health. The speed of the fast pool should make healing potions unnecessary in routine situations, so healing magic that fills the slow pool could be more of a rare and special thing.
I'd also like to use this system for fatigue, which will determine spellcasting capacity. A fast and a slow pool would mean you could crank out minor spells without worry, but call on your deepest reserves when faced with a critical moment. To me this feels like a better model of how exhaustion works than a simple linear scale.
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I'd also like to use this system for fatigue, which will determine spellcasting capacity. A fast and a slow pool would mean you could crank out minor spells without worry, but call on your deepest reserves when faced with a critical moment. To me this feels like a better model of how exhaustion works than a simple linear scale.
Again, to me you are just using a linear scale and obscuring it for no purpose other than added complexity. It still seems to me like minor spells cost less mp (or whatever) in comparison to major spells. Calling out your reserves at a critical moment is something that people already do with a linear scale. I just don't see any difference in what you're describing, other than possible annoying constraints.
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Again, to me you are just using a linear scale and obscuring it for no purpose other than added complexity. It still seems to me like minor spells cost less mp (or whatever) in comparison to major spells. Calling out your reserves at a critical moment is something that people already do with a linear scale. I just don't see any difference in what you're describing, other than possible annoying constraints.
I really do think it adds a dynamic that's not present with a linear scale. The problem I see with a single scale is that any recovery mechanism will apply uniformly across that scale, so you can't differentiate levels of injury qualitatively. I'd like to let players recover quickly from minor injuries once they have a chance to catch their breath between fights, to keep the action brisk. However, it's unrealistic to be injured near death over and over and just bounce back to 100% like that.
Think about what this does for the feeling of risk as you're adventuring. When you can heal from anything quickly, all risk is binary -- either it kills you and the game is over, or you move on unscathed. Games rarely present truly deadly threats around every corner; that would make them too difficult, so there are many boring enemies as filler. Like poker, roguelike play can consist of "hours of boredom punctuated by brief moments of extreme terror." Isn't it a problem that it's boring so much of the time? How many stupid deaths are due to the boredom of everyday enemies that present no mortal threat? Wouldn't a game that keeps you on your toes more, be more exciting?
When I fight an acid mound in Brogue, I often have to fight it barehanded and naked to spare my unprotected weapon and armor. Thus weakened and made vulnerable, I often find that the though fight is still basically easy (I'm in little danger of dying), my health gets pretty low by the time I've finished it off. It's a pretty formulaic situation, the results are pretty consistent, and I do it all the time. To me this feels very gamey and artificial, not to mention uninteresting. If those fights carried with them the possibility of lingering injury, I'd have to pay closer attention and work harder to avoid serious injury. An enemy that can't kill you, but can wound you badly, can mean something besides more nutrition lost due to resting up after the fight.
I believe giving the player that longer-term level of risk to manage and mitigate will make for interesting gameplay. I'm feeling interested enough in this to implement it, so I guess it won't have to be an entirely theoretical discussion. I hope you'll give my game a try when I get a version out for download.
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[...] I like the idea of having a secondary pool that you dip into when seriously injured, and also using this pool to limit max HP. So if you run out of "primary" HP and then take another 30% of your bar in damage, your HP will only heal up to 70% until your secondary pool refills.
Seems like this approach gives a good balance of short-term and long-term considerations in managing character health. The speed of the fast pool should make healing potions unnecessary in routine situations, so healing magic that fills the slow pool could be more of a rare and special thing.
I'd also like to use this system for fatigue, which will determine spellcasting capacity. A fast and a slow pool would mean you could crank out minor spells without worry, but call on your deepest reserves when faced with a critical moment. To me this feels like a better model of how exhaustion works than a simple linear scale.
That actually sounds really good. A system where hitting/going below 0 doesn't end the game, but lowers your maximum for the rest of the run, is it? Sounds like it'd allow plenty of room for new players to make mistakes while at the same time being punishing for those trying to ascend.
I like it for mana too, rather than the ADOMesque system of calling on HP once your mana reserves are drained.
I really do think it adds a dynamic that's not present with a linear scale. [...] I'd like to let players recover quickly from minor injuries once they have a chance to catch their breath between fights, to keep the action brisk. However, it's unrealistic to be injured near death over and over and just bounce back to 100% like that.
I agree with the sentiment, though you might want to consider having healing potions heal OVER max HP (but not restore max HP) so the player doesn't just stop playing once his max HP hits 3 or something because "it'd be hopeless to win".
Think about what this does for the feeling of risk as you're adventuring. When you can heal from anything quickly, all risk is binary -- either it kills you and the game is over, or you move on unscathed. Games rarely present truly deadly threats around every corner; that would make them too difficult, so there are many boring enemies as filler. Like poker, roguelike play can consist of "hours of boredom punctuated by brief moments of extreme terror." Isn't it a problem that it's boring so much of the time? How many stupid deaths are due to the boredom of everyday enemies that present no mortal threat? Wouldn't a game that keeps you on your toes more, be more exciting?
Reminded me of Andrew Doull's article "Windshields and warriors".
http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.nl/2012/05/windshields-and-warriors.html (http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.nl/2012/05/windshields-and-warriors.html)
(And some other articles that don't float to the top of my mind as easily :P)
Feel there has to be a balance between the sweet boredom of bulldozing and the terror of having to bring out my A-game to survive/thrive.
I'm feeling interested enough in this to implement it, so I guess it won't have to be an entirely theoretical discussion. I hope you'll give my game a try when I get a version out for download.
Gladly ;D
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I agree with the sentiment, though you might want to consider having healing potions heal OVER max HP (but not restore max HP) so the player doesn't just stop playing once his max HP hits 3 or something because "it'd be hopeless to win".
Yeah, I think occasional healing would be fine, probably a good thing even. Providing a health fountain right before a boss encounter, for example, would avoid the 3hp problem. Though perhaps even a health fountain only gets you to, say, 90%, and if you want 100% you've got to keep your hide untarnished the whole way down.
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Again, to me you are just using a linear scale and obscuring it for no purpose other than added complexity. It still seems to me like minor spells cost less mp (or whatever) in comparison to major spells. Calling out your reserves at a critical moment is something that people already do with a linear scale. I just don't see any difference in what you're describing, other than possible annoying constraints.
I really do think it adds a dynamic that's not present with a linear scale. The problem I see with a single scale is that any recovery mechanism will apply uniformly across that scale, so you can't differentiate levels of injury qualitatively. I'd like to let players recover quickly from minor injuries once they have a chance to catch their breath between fights, to keep the action brisk. However, it's unrealistic to be injured near death over and over and just bounce back to 100% like that.
I think maybe your problem is identifying current healing systems with the scale itself. If, for instance, you made it so healing increases your health by 1/9, you could achieve what I think it is you are looking for without operating on a complex multiscale system. 1 turn of healing at 9% might get you up to 10% while a turn at 90% would fully heal you. This seems like a more intuitive thing (specifically in that taking 5 damage always means the same thing). I also think it works better than having multiple pools of mana, etc.
Another option would be to have a waiting period at e.g. 30% before getting to the point where you can continue healing.
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The negative feedback loop of permanently reduced HP probably isn't a great idea.