Health and Limbs

[Alex E]

If you are going to do limbs you might as well do organ too. Damaged brain from being hit on the head and damaged liver from drinking too many unknown potions.

Of course . The more detailed the better in my case.

[requerent]

One of the main problem - apart from the domino effect which leads to almost inevitable death because of the negative impact losing limbs has on your fighting performance - is that limbs, in a realistic combat system à la DF, are a resource that doesn't regenerate. It's similar to a system where every critical hit reduces your max HP. If there's no way to get them back somehow, it almost inevitably leads to you losing them ALL at some point in the game. You may consider this too punishing or still interesting, but it is a system in which the character will over the course of the game accumulate disadvantages. The question is whether it's still fun for people to play.

In DF i see this as a problem because the game has no end.  However, in most roguelikes the game has a finite size and you have a goal to achieve.  I personally think it is great gameplay to accumulate disadvantages, where the game actually gets harder the further you get (or not, if you have played carefully/strategically).  I think this really comes out in epilogue, where the player is really losing the arms race and enemies start dealing damage to your skills towards the end Of course, not all players will enjoy this type of thing.

It would be nice if these advantages weren't so explicitly disadvantageous. Not having an arm, for example, makes you ever so slightly harder to hit! From a historical point of view, a very skilled warrior simply finds ways to use their handicaps to their advantage. Some handicaps aren't so 'fortunate,' but if you're going to implement major injuries, it'd be rewarding if they just 'changed' the game, as opposed to making it specifically harder.

[flammanj]

This might sound stupid now, but why not make an advantage out of loosing limbs? Many people adapt to lost limbs by improving their skills on the other limbs.
Maybe a system that needs some time to recover from the shock, and then slowly adapting would be fun (you wouldn't want to give advantages in the very moment when you lose a limb)
Example: HeroX loses his right arm during a fight with some weak little goblin (critical hit). The goblin is slain, the arm is gone. Some time later, the Hero gains skills with one-handed weapons and can evade better. (his left arm and his legs grew stronger)
Example with legs: get some crutches. With extensive use of crutches, you will start to get faster than without, but you cannot evade very well.

I know these are very poor examples, and it doesn't really solve the problem of having the protagonist look like the black knight in Monty Python's Holy grail (no legs no arms...). The point is: once the character has lost one limb, make him sturdier and more cautious towards future attacks.

I do like Dwarf Fortress limb system. Yes, it is very frustrating at some point, and no matter how careful you are (except when completely avoiding combats), you will always at some time lose some part. I have been thinking about a health/damage/limb system since I first wanted to make an own RL. What I will probably be trying out is some kind of prothesis system, where single limbs can be used and exchanged just like armor parts, but of course this does not fit to every theme.

[requerent]

Check out IVAN, Iter Vehemens Ad Necem, if you haven't yet. It has an interesting limb system where, if your wisdom is high enough, you can use scrolls of 'change material' to change your body parts to ridiculously strong materials. Similarly, losing limbs doesn't even effect the game too much. You can even get strong enough to use two-handed weapons in one hand. You'll eventually get a new limb or your limb back either through Gods or through some other mechanism. However, there is no advantage to having lost that limb (it may effect to-hit calculations, haven't looked into it). It's a game that does a lot of things very well though.

I put IVAN in the top 3, but I personally like a more permanent damage/curse/corruption/mutation system like the one you suggest and mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

A paradigm I've been looking at is one in which abilities and stats take the form of equip-able powers. To use the powers and to, more or less, level-up those powers, you have to enter into a contract with that power. The contract requires that you arbitrarily change the way you play the game to fulfill the contract. One contract may be to murder 7 young and innocent girls. Another may be to throw a rock into every stream of the land. It isn't quite the same as limb damage, but the obfuscation of fortunes and maladies, imo, is something to strive for in a general sense.

IVAN, for example, becomes more difficult the more powerful you are. If you find a lot of epic weapons or permanent invisibility, the game's reactive difficulty will send some impossible threats your way. If you happen to find the most powerful weapon in the first dungeon, it isn't wise to take the stairs down with it, as that will cause the next level to generate with that weapon's strength in mind. It's exploitable, but only to a point.