Borglike damage model

[ekolis]

So, I've got this idea for an unusual damage model - when I mentioned it to someone, he said it reminded him of the Borg!

Basically the idea is, your health is a bitmask that starts with all 1's. Enemy attacks are also bitmasks, though they can have some random "noise" applied to them to make things interesting. When you are hit by an attack, you NOT the enemy attack's bitmask, then AND it with your health, to get your new health. When your health becomes all 0's, you die.

The reason this is "Borglike" is that without the random variance, after being hit with an attack once, you are immune to that attack, since those bits are already zero!

[guest509]

  Sounds like a great idea for an immune system themed Roguelike. I had this idea while brainstorming this year's 7DRL. You can play, like, the immune system of a human body. The map is the circulatory system.

  Your job is to send out the correct anti-body, in this case with the correct 'bitmask', to tackle the intruders. A bit of a strategy game I think. Set up immune system nodes in strategic locations to release antibodies in the local area.

  Sounds like a good mechanic. Lots of applications.

[Quendus]

There are still a few days left of 7DRL week - you could do a 60HRL or something

The other perspective on this damage model would be that everything has to be hit once with each of a set of damage types, rather than that they become immune to things after being hit with them.

One way to make it closer to the challenge of fighting Borg would be to manage this bitmask on a team, species, or group level. Everything dies or gets knocked out (if it's tough) in one hit, so long as its group isn't immune to the damage type used. Afterwards the group becomes immune to that damage type (maybe with some restrictions, like the immunity only being gained if a member of their group sees the victim die).

With some kind of progression from single-target to multiple-target weapons, the challenge would then be to use just enough attacks to keep the enemies at bay, without cancelling the advantage that will be gained later on from weapons with big splash damage.

[ekolis]

I was thinking the mechanic would actually make sense in some sort of cyberpunk themed roguelike where you're controlling some sort of digital avatar, and as you take damage, the pixels disappear from your sprite!

[Krice]

It's a nice idea for like totally abstract game. However it's not that different from other themes, you still need to do create monsters and plan how to prevent too random damage (leading to quick death without player being able to escape).

[requerent]

It's similar to HydraSlayer in many respects.


Don't forget to include other binary operators to spice things up (LShift and RShift to change types- for example). You can randomly assign bit-values to different effects, effectively creating a unique catalog of stuff each load-up. This is a simple form of random rules generation-- which can get very neat or very messy.