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View Full Version : Bad Idea? HP, Health, Sanity and Spirit



GaelofDarkness
2018-09-25, 06:09 PM
So I have this idea that is almost certainly terrible - but it's sticking around in my mind. If anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them, I'm really interested to see if there's any way of making this a workable mechanic just in general, and if not then that's OK. Because it's for a homebrew system that's fairly crunchy already, I don't think describing the whole thing is practical so we can keep the discussion pretty system-independent if possible. I'll just say that the main rule is 3d8+mod vs. fixed amount or opposing roll, we use turn based combat and it's made for high fantasy.

Relevant Background:
For my homebrew system, my group and I have discussed dividing up damage types between physical, psychic and ethereal. So physical damage would be cutting, fire and lightning damage. For psychic damage I'm thinking dread (causing panic and extreme fear), despair (effectively shutting down the will to live) and ecstasy (targeting the mind's pleasure centers) damage types or something like that. Ethereal damage is your holy, curse and chaos damage types (Not an exhaustive list, just a few examples). The original idea was to have each of the three categories affect a different defensive stat - armor for physical, protection for psychic or warding for ethereal. This way a mage could have strong warding and be better able to handle ethereal attacks than a martial character who can handle physical blows far better. We thought it'd be an interesting tactical aspect to try and incorporate.

My (Probably) Terrible Idea:
I was thinking that in addition to - or maybe instead of - these defensive stats we also have different hp-type stats for each, kind of inspired by the idea of sanity in some games. In addition to hit points, a character would also have health (physical), sanity (psychic) and spirit (ethereal). Whenever a character takes a certain damage type - they lose hit points as normal, but they also lose a single point from health, sanity or spirit - depending on which is relevant. As these gauges fall below certain thresholds, it triggers certain effects. The exact nature and thresholds is absolutely open for discussion but here's the general gist:

Below half health, you become shaken. Taking more sophisticated actions becomes more difficult for you - so picking locks or analyzing a situation for tactical advantage - but you have the option of using "desperation attacks". These are less likely to hit but do more damage when they do. I don't see why this wouldn't be expanded to other abilities - you might use a desperate plea to try and sway the merchant and if it works you get a great price, but it probably won't work.

At zero health, you are in shock. You fall to your knees and just don't have the energy to get back up. Essentially, you are stunned and defenseless. While in this state, on your turn, you have a small chance to rally and get back up with one health but a larger if still small chance to gain a lasting ailment - be that a limp or a cold that lasts several rests or something else. The longer you are in shock the worse the potential ailments you can get would be. Take to long and even without losing further hit points you could die. If you do not rally - regardless of whether you took an ailment or not - you remain in shock. An ally can attempt to get you back on your feet if they use their actions on you but a healer might be able to do this more easily and effectively - restoring you to more than one health for example.

Below half sanity, you become unstable. You are less able to communicate, persuade, deceive or discern motives of other characters - though not all social skills are affected because you could probably still really creep them out or intimidate them effectively. Each turn you can choose to be more aggressive or defensive or neither. Being more aggressive, you lash out more effectively, hitting harder with attacks and abilities but also be more susceptible to the same from others. Being more defensive you are letting a touch of fear or paranoia take the wheel and become harder to hit or affect but are less able to land hits and use abilities. If you choose neither - everything continues as normal.

At zero sanity, you become mad. You fall to your knees gibbering and screaming. You are defenseless and certainly not hidden. Each turn you will most likely do nothing, but there is a chance that you'll lash out at the enemy, your allies or do something random (no powerful spells or attacks while mad, to avoid risking the mage fire-balling everyone to death). As with being in shock, you have a small chance to rally and regain a sanity point but also a chance to gain an ailment - an insanity, an obsession or a tick. The longer you stay mad, the worse these get and you risk dying. Again, an ally can attempt to slap you out of it with their actions but it's more of a healer thing.

Below half spirit, you become grim. You become resistant or immune to various effects - like those that would frighten you or confuse you. You become more vulnerable to being charmed. When you become grim you can choose to become more uncaring and ruthless or more despondent and apathetic. This decision stands for as long as you are grim. If you choose uncaring and ruthless then you press your advantage against others - having the same chance of succeeding but a better chance of a critical hit, though others will have this same leverage over you. If you chose despondent and apathetic, you forego the chance of landing a critical hit at all in exchange for making it harder for others to land on you.

At zero spirit, you become crushed. You once more fall to your knees completely uncaring of your surroundings. You are defenseless and essentially stunned. Each turn you have your small chance to rally or gain an ailment. For spiritual ailments I was originally thinking of adding character flaws but maybe hindrances to certain skills or specializations - so you might be less charismatic in some respect or not be as good at making alchemist's fire at your workshop because your heart just isn't in it - and maybe also/instead you have a risk of having buffs and healing be less effective on you - as your mystical energy fades with your spirit. An ally can attempt to encourage you with their actions but a healer would have the best chance at doing so and doing it better.
Other abilities and features might be triggered by the shaken, unstable or grim conditions, either in oneself, their allies or their opponents. For example, frost wolves might instinctively target prey that shows physical weakness, so the pack leader can cause all frost wolves to move towards a shaken character for free. Maybe certain abilities let you trade health, sanity or spirit for significant effects. I was also thinking that falling to zero in any one of health, sanity and spirit leaves you more vulnerable to the corresponding damage type.

You restore your health, sanity and spirit gauges as you would your hit points, with rest and recuperation or help from a healer character or healing items. Though maybe it's harder to restore points above the threshold. So after a night at the inn, you can get your sanity back up to half-full+1 but getting any higher is a slow process over multiple rests unless there is some manner of intervention. To give a sense of scale, I'd be thinking that a character starts off with say 30 max hp and would have an average of maybe 4 in health, sanity and spirit. Maybe you'd expect a distribution like 5, 4 and 3. The hp value might go up by 5-ish points per level and the average for health, sanity and spirit might go up by one point per three or four levels. So a character with 100 max hp would have maybe 10 health, 7 sanity and 7 spirit or something like that. Getting up to 5/10 health is easily done but each point after that would be more gradual.

To make it more a bit more workable, I was thinking of dividing physical damage up between the standard damage types (that you get from weapons and claws) and more elemental damage types. Otherwise, health would go down reeeally quickly. So, for example, in my system that would make the division:

standard - blunt, cutting and rending
elemental - fire, cold, thunder, lightning, radiant and noxious(acid and poison)
Both standard and elemental damage would be defended against using the armor stat, but only taking elemental damage would cause you to lose a point of health. How I'm justifying this in my head is that there's a big difference between the effect of an injury like a cut, bruise or fracture compared to the body-wide effects of extreme heat, cold, electrocution or exposure to toxins. I should also point out that the system is designed so that there would be features, maneuvers, items and/or buff available so that martials have access to non-standard damage types in combat.

I'm really worried about this being just too many stats to track easily and unreasonably causing confusion or frustration. Tracking the loss of health, sanity or spirit is just marking an extra dot on the character sheet after getting hit with a damage type - but that can make a big difference in the minds of players. I don't intend on mooks having health, sanity and spirit stats that the GM would have to track. Instead, they're reserved for PCs and significant enemies like the BBEG or mini-bosses. I'd also say that the inhumanly powerful enemies can probably recover from being in shock or mad or crushed after one turn, jumping up to half-full in that stat maybe? When encountering these enemies, I wonder what people think health, sanity and spirit add or take away from the fight. It could be an interesting choice to try and deplete a single stat to zero in order to stun the foe for a round while risking them getting bonuses on their attacks and abilities OR to use a mix of elemental, psychic and ethereal attacks to prevent the enemy benefiting from the shaken, unstable or grim conditions - or any features that get triggered by those conditions.

Goaty14
2018-09-25, 06:24 PM
System/Edition?

ngilop
2018-09-25, 06:49 PM
If this works how I think it does, it is much to complicated to keep track of easily.


Somehow in addition to Hit Points, you have Health which while being a separate entity is reduced when you take physical damage such as getting stabbed by a sword or set on fire.

Instead of have multiple types of life pools, I feel just having different damage types and the special ones who something in addition to just straight up hit point damage.

For example have dread and despair halve healing done to the individual suffering form that damage. or Chaos damage make the target act in strange ways while under the effects of the damage type.

Deepbluediver
2018-09-25, 07:27 PM
Health-systems have always been a bit abstract, and exactly what they represent and how people interpret them can differ wildly between groups. Personally, I've long been a fan of the idea what you suffer some penalty for being at low HP. The conceit that you are, for the most part, just as effective at 1 HP as you are at 100% HP has always struck me as a little odd.

I don't know much about other systems, but I believe WotC tried something like this with 4th edition. Unfortunately 4E wasn't well received, and I think a lot of the new mechanics that were introduced were tainted by association, so you might face pushback from people who have been around a while.
One of the most common arguments that is made is that if you are losing, and then you take penalties that affect your combat prowess, you're likely to KEEP losing. And I acknowledge that that is a legitimate concern, but I see it as something that increases the importance of in-combat healing, which was largely poo-poo'd in the 3.5 optimization community, and even today isn't well looked-on by many people.


Anyway though, to respond to your idea directly- yes, tracking multiple health-guages is a little complex, but I don't necessarily think it's a dealbreaker. D&D (3.5 at least) already does that in a kinda-sort-of-maybe-not-really way, with stats. If any of your 6 main ability scores (Constitution, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, & Charisma) reach zero, then you're either unconscious or dying. There weren't usually a lot of creatures that dealt ability damage so most people probably don't think of it that way, but it's there, and it could come up from time to time.
Like, there's some low-CR monster, maybe a Ghast or Alip (I can't remember exactly) that deals Strength damage and is (in)famous for TPKing low level groups that can't restore the drain and don't have enough magic damage to deal with them. And there are a few cheesy builds that target something like Dexterity or Int that high-level monsters often have low scores in and basically paralyzing them after a round or two so that the party can finish off the monster at it's leisure.

So tracking 3 health scores isn't to-complex IMO, provided you aren't also tracking additional stats that have some effect if you fall to low, or are otherwise needing to continuously update your character sheet. In this sense, maybe your Spirit/Sanity HP meters replace standard ability damage.
Also, consider how your non-health HP gauges are going to be restored. There's usually lots ways to restore physical health because that's the easiest kind of metric for people to picture, even if we are operating in a high-magic fantasy world. Do you recover Spirit and Sanity over time? Is there something like a first-aid kit or skill-check to restore them? Is it only magic that can heal non-physical damage? What about class abilities or feats (or whatever your system uses) that let you recover or assist others? etc etc etc

Another option to consider is that rather than 3 meters with separate numbers, which might lead to players mixing things up occasionally, is to represent Sanity and Spirit with condition-tracks. For example, the first time you fail any sort of fear effect you become Shaken, then a second failure is Scared, then Terrified, then Panicked, then Comatose etc. It might be less flexible but easier to track, and depending on what penalties those statuses inflict, it might represent most of the same overall effect.

GaelofDarkness
2018-09-25, 07:27 PM
System/Edition?

Like I said, it's a homebrew system. This group has used homebrew systems since before I joined so this is more an iteration on another homebrew rather than inspired by another system - and I'm not going to write out the entire rule set anymore than I would expect you to read it. I understand that means I'm asking for very, very broad strokes advise, but that's all I'm looking for - general ideas and criticisms. If I had to pick, I'd say it's something like a d20 game similar to maybe Pathfinder in the sense that it makes a lot of the assumptions that style of game does, but doesn't use a d20 - instead using 3d8+modifier, which is more like GURPS I guess (though I never played, I just know they use 3d6 to get a bell curve-ish distribution).


If this works how I think it does, it is much to complicated to keep track of easily.

Yeah, that's what I was worried about... *sigh*

I was hoping that just having three counters you could move back and forth under the hit points on your character sheet wouldn't be too much but it probably is. EDIT: On re-reading that sounds sarcastic - it isn't. Depending on the group, people can mix up hp or forget initiative orders - so three counters is probably a bit much.


Somehow in addition to Hit Points, you have Health which while being a separate entity is reduced when you take physical damage such as getting stabbed by a sword or set on fire.

I always thought of hit points as an abstract measurement of whatever's keeping you conscious - health sure, but also willpower, alterness, etc. - that gets worn down through combat. I'm not one to care about realism too much - I like games where you can face a dragon and be up and about with max hp the next day - but I do think that being able to fully recover from wounds inflicted by a hulking, winged, fire-breathing monster overnight does strain the verisimilitude a bit. So I don't think of hp as reflecting wounds inflicted - damage isn't really bodily damage anymore than psychic damage is.

So here health is more specifically about your body's heartiness - and, as I said, I think it shouldn't be affected by standard weapon damage but just elemental types of damage representing the difference between the injuries a person gets from a fight and the illnesses they incur from poison, radiation, hypothermia or heatstroke. From a mechanical design perspective, this also helps prevent health from declining too quickly, especially at low levels where I could otherwise see a wolf pup leaving your mage in shock with ease... then again that's hilarious and could be worth the inclusion just for the look on the player's face :smallwink:


Instead of have multiple types of life pools, I feel just having different damage types and the special ones who something in addition to just straight up hit point damage.

For example have dread and despair halve healing done to the individual suffering form that damage. or Chaos damage make the target act in strange ways while under the effects of the damage type.

See, I thought of that too, but it raises two issues for me.

1) I'm not convinced that's an easier thing to track. Instead of having a counter you adjust when you take damage you have a bunch of floating conditions affecting characters and having different periods of effect or different things the characters have to do in order to overcome the status effect. I'm not opposed to that - status conditions are a thing in my game - but I don't think it's simpler.

2) I like being able to take different status effects and tie them to characters or at least have the freedom to tie them to different damage types. Why wouldn't there be a fire spell that causes fear or a psychic attack that causes a character to act weird? This also means that things like damage resistances are free to be their own tactical or thematic choices distinct from status effect immunities.



Edit to reply without double-posting:


Health-systems have always been a bit abstract, and exactly what they represent and how people interpret them can differ wildly between groups. Personally, I've long been a fan of the idea what you suffer some penalty for being at low HP. The conceit that you are, for the most part, just as effective at 1 HP as you are at 100% HP has always struck me as a little odd.

I'm inclined to agree.


One of the most common arguments that is made is that if you are losing, and then you take penalties that affect your combat prowess, you're likely to KEEP losing. And I acknowledge that that is a legitimate concern, but I see it as something that increases the importance of in-combat healing, which was largely poo-poo'd in the 3.5 optimization community, and even today isn't well looked-on by many people.


Good point - I think the shaken, unstable and grim conditions get around this a little bit by offering some potential bonuses - like being able to hit harder or play more defensibly than you normally would. Mind you, they're just a first draft and this is good to think about if it's iterated on.


Anyway though, to respond to your idea directly- yes, tracking multiple health-guages is a little complex, but I don't necessarily think it's a dealbreaker. D&D (3.5 at least) already does that in a kinda-sort-of-maybe-not-really way, with stats.

I had forgotten that ability damage was a thing, glad to hear there may be hope yet! I never mess with character ability scores save through magic gear they find to enhance them or via a curse from the Dark LordTM that feels appropriate for the story.


Also, consider how your non-health HP gauges are going to be restored. There's usually lots ways to restore physical health because that's the easiest kind of metric for people to picture, even if we are operating in a high-magic fantasy world. Do you recover Spirit and Sanity over time? Is there something like a first-aid kit or skill-check to restore them? Is it only magic that can heal non-physical damage? What about class abilities or feats (or whatever your system uses) that let you recover or assist others? etc etc etc

This is absolutely stuff that needs to be ironed out. Right now I think I'd allow any character to make a check to revive character from being in shock, mad or crushed. If they're in shock, I'd treat it as a medical/first aid type thing. If they're mad I'd treat it as them trying to shake them out of it, using reason or persuasion maybe? If they're crushed I'd treat it as them trying to encourage or inspire them, using their leadership or force of personality. I'd definitely have them recover over time - even most of the ailments they'd get after being at 0 in one of the gauges could be restored in due time as long as it wasn't death. For sanity I see it as them getting over the effects of a mind-altering influence, it takes time to get out of their system but it happens with enough rest and relaxation. For spirit I see it as more of shaking off the funk they got that dampened their spirits. There'd also be class features and potions that help - how readily available or spammable those'd be I'm not sure yet.


Another option to consider is that rather than 3 meters with separate numbers, which might lead to players mixing things up occasionally, is to represent Sanity and Spirit with condition-tracks. For example, the first time you fail any sort of fear effect you become Shaken, then a second failure is Scared, then Terrified, then Panicked, then Comatose etc. It might be less flexible but easier to track, and depending on what penalties those statuses inflict, it might represent most of the same overall effect.

What about treating all three as just boxes on the character sheet with a counter to move back and forth. That way there's still only two conditions they need to worry about - and I don't have to come up with the effects of a bunch more :smalltongue:. Though seriously it is something worth considering.

Knaight
2018-09-26, 05:51 AM
There's no particular reason this shouldn't work - as described it seems a little heavy on book keeping, but this sort of thing comes up all the time in horror systems with various sanity tracks, and it works just fine there. Iron Kingdoms also has something similar here, represented as a health spiral with three arms. It's functional.

Iron Kingdoms indirectly brings up an important point though. This is much easier to do if you have a good way to track it, and coming up with a useful visual and sticking it on the character sheet is really helpful.

GaelofDarkness
2018-09-26, 08:46 AM
There's no particular reason this shouldn't work - as described it seems a little heavy on book keeping, but this sort of thing comes up all the time in horror systems with various sanity tracks, and it works just fine there. Iron Kingdoms also has something similar here, represented as a health spiral with three arms. It's functional.

Iron Kingdoms indirectly brings up an important point though. This is much easier to do if you have a good way to track it, and coming up with a useful visual and sticking it on the character sheet is really helpful.

I've looked up Iron Kingdoms and the life spiral seems really awesome. It works mechanically pretty differently - in that when taking damage the damage seems to be randomly applied to one of the branches of the life spiral as opposed to damage being type-dependent, so that's something worth considering.

The game already has some metaphorical gimmicks related to trees. For example, we've taken to calling the primary, secondary and tertiary attributes boughs, branchs and buds respectively. May health, sanity and spirit could be the roots of the tree? Lose a root and risk being felled? I'll have to have a think on that and make sure it's something I can actually mock up and have workable. Thanks for the suggestion!

Nifft
2018-09-26, 11:46 AM
Could work, but I'd suggest some changes.

Sanity may not be a good word for your purposes because it's got a lot of history as a horror game mechanic, in which it's strictly decreasing over time and you can't get it back -- or you do get it back, but only with great difficulty. Also, insanity can be very difficult to RP, especially when it's applied on a temporary basis. There's just not time to do the research necessary for any kind of sensitive treatment, and insensitive treatment is usually just bad character comedy. (And that's a potential landmine if you have any players with any kind of mental disorders.)

Instead, I'd suggest splitting Spirit into Composure and Morale. The former is your social / emotional HP; the latter is your conviction.

In that same vein, I'd remove Shaken from the physical track, and use Bloodied instead.



Health -> Bloodied -> In Shock -- remove the emotional "fear" aspect

Composure -> Unstable -> Hysterical -- these are "emotional HP"

Morale -> Shaken -> Crushed -- these are "spirit" HP


Anyway, it's certainly possible to play with multiple HP tracks. D&D 3.5e had many such tracks -- damage to any of the six ability scores could take you out, for example, but so could fatigue, or fear, or even HP damage.

GaelofDarkness
2018-09-26, 12:46 PM
That's a really good point. I think most of the psychic damage is the kind of thing that targets extreme emotions anyways - so it would not be much of a change to switch out sanity with composure and spirit with morale fits just as well. Those sound like a nicer fit too.

I had thought of calling it bloodied, but I was thinking that a lot of the time people are going to lose health from effects like poison or extreme cold where bloodied is maybe a bit of a misnomer... how about haggard instead? Or maybe ragged (as in to "run somebody ragged")?

Nifft
2018-09-26, 12:50 PM
I had thought of calling it bloodied, but I was thinking that a lot of the time people are going to lose health from effects like poison or extreme cold where bloodied is maybe a bit of a misnomer... how about haggard instead? Or maybe ragged (as in to "run somebody ragged")?

Poison which reduces you to the Bloodied condition might make your eyes / ears / nose bleed, or make blood run from your fingernails, or make you cough up blood -- the real challenge is applying the term to Constructs / Undead / Plants and such.

I found the term Bloodied very easy to communicate in 4e games.

But ragged / tired / fatigued might work there too, if you mean health to be about stamina rather than injury.

GaelofDarkness
2018-09-26, 01:47 PM
Another excellent point. I think calling it stamina makes more sense then - since the image I have in my head of someone who's at half health/stamina is a warrior backing off from their opponent to catch a breather - but able to push themselves that bit harder with a rush of adrenaline if they need to because of the heightened stakes. I think it has a nice dramatic/rp element to it.

So you've now got me to change the stats from health, sanity and spirit to stamina, composure and morale. That's actually a much better trio. I have to go change the name of stamina ability score now.

EDIT: Actually how about endurance instead of stamina? That'd save me a rewrite of a few rules.

Nifft
2018-09-26, 07:09 PM
Another excellent point. I think calling it stamina makes more sense then - since the image I have in my head of someone who's at half health/stamina is a warrior backing off from their opponent to catch a breather - but able to push themselves that bit harder with a rush of adrenaline if they need to because of the heightened stakes. I think it has a nice dramatic/rp element to it.

So you've now got me to change the stats from health, sanity and spirit to stamina, composure and morale. That's actually a much better trio. I have to go change the name of stamina ability score now.

EDIT: Actually how about endurance instead of stamina? That'd save me a rewrite of a few rules. Aim for maximum clarity if you ever intend for someone else to read these rules. If Endurance is the best word, use it. If it's not the best word, don't use it.

Don't spend ten years explaining to players why you decided to skip half an hour's worth of editing.


You may also want some kind of injury or wound system, if combat & adventuring are intended to carry that as a risk.

GaelofDarkness
2018-09-26, 09:54 PM
Aim for maximum clarity if you ever intend for someone else to read these rules. If Endurance is the best word, use it. If it's not the best word, don't use it.

Don't spend ten years explaining to players why you decided to skip half an hour's worth of editing.

Apologies, I was being flippant, but I do think keeping the stamina stat as stamina and replacing health with endurance aids clarity. They are synonyms, but the statmina stat is used to determine if a character can maintain an activity for longer than they normally could. For example, if you continue to travel into the night instead of camping as you normally would you would roll a stamina check to see if you can avoid taking exhaustion. OR you might use your reflexes to grab an ally that's fallen off a cliff, leaving you clinging to it's edge taking their full weight - something you can only manage for as long as you can make successful stamina checks. I think that's what most people intuit stamina to mean in a game, so since such a system is in place I'll leave that name alone.


You may also want some kind of injury or wound system, if combat & adventuring are intended to carry that as a risk.

Yes, I've been looking at different injury and wound systems for inspiration and there are some interesting things I could throw in - but nothing at all decided yet. For now, I'll leave it so that when you fall to zero endurance, composure or morale, you risk taking on long-lasting or permanent setbacks, but I'm confident that will change on iteration.

Knaight
2018-09-27, 04:55 AM
Actually how about endurance instead of stamina? That'd save me a rewrite of a few rules.

Compliments of the magic of the find function (I'd avoid automatic find and replace) these rewrites usually go pretty quickly. I just did one where I realized some restructuring and new terminology would clean up some rules, and while I'll admit to procrastinating it a bit due to dread it ended up taking only about 15 minutes. Hardly a major rewrite, but bigger than swapping a term.