Debilities, frailty, critical damage, permanent injuries - this concept is quite common in many RPGs. D&D does not have that because of it's war-gaming background.

This is Right Arm, he's a warrior that uses an axe. This is Left Arm, she's a heavily armored tank that uses a shield. This is Torso, it's a red barrel that can explode and kill everyone.

Reminds me of Darkest Dungeon, where there is a grace period instead of getting 1 shot you land on deaths door and subsiquence attacks have a change of killing a character rather than instantly dying at 0hp so you can come back from the brink. However landing on deaths door stresses the character out and if they reach a high stress threshold their resolve is tested, sometimes they are revitalised and full of hate and purpose to defeat the foe, but more often the character suffers a breakdown causing him to have a negative effect on his own and the other parties stress and would increase the chance of them gaining negative traits after that mission that do negatively impact them in the future. Damn just saw someone else suggested darkest dungeon.

So, my thoughts on the whole thing. The fewer hitpoints a person has, the more impactful each one is. If a level 1 character has 1000 health who just took 500 damage, you have a very different feel than a level 1 character who has 2 health and took 1 damage. 2nd, minimizing the amount of slots a character can equip stuff makes each card more valuable. having a left arm, right arm, left hand, right hand, torso, head, legs, feet. Lots to keep track of and hard to care about as much. Similar to health really. 3rd. Do NOT forget about sound. Sound carries SO much in video games. It makes a much much bigger impact than people realize. So if a person is hit, make sure the sound played enhances what you want out of it. A meaty CRUNCH when a person loses an arm makes far more impact than "Dink" and finally 4th. Savage Worlds is another TTRPG game heavily emphasizing speed. and one of the things they do is separate units into two classes. "mooks" and "Aces"(Or whatever fits better for the campaign) To keep things going quick there is VERY little to keep track of and easily done using the miniatures themselves.. Mooks only have "healthy" (The miniature is upright), "Shaken" (knocked down) and "Out" (Removed from board) Heroes have a little more. Healthy, shaken, and then 3 wounds. (-1, -2, -3) each wound level means you roll that much less. and then finally "out" (removed from board) Only the heroes and notable enemies get that "ace" status and everything else just has the basic health to track. Figured you might like that idea for inspiration at least.

The mordheim tabletop game had a table for rolling for serious injuries on your downed characters at the end of the battle. Like instead of outright dying they might end up with a missing eye or a lame leg or whatever. I always thought that was kind of cool for both storytelling and gameplay.

In my game, which I build in RPG maker so I'm absolutely not an authority on any of this, I have opted to link things like crit chance and counter-attack to states and HP. Which means that the lower your health gets, the higher your critical chance becomes. This counter-acts the snowballing effect, as the more damage the character takes, the more damage they deal statistically. Secondly, I have traits that inflict wounds like broken arms or bleeding, which radically increases the counter-attack rate. The end result of this was that I was losing a fight while exploring a dungeon, a goblin got the better of my character and I was bleeding to death. Then as the goblin struck its killing blow the stars aligned, and both mechanics kicked in; my character countered the incoming blow and struck back with a massive critical hit that killed the Goblin in a single blow. It felt amazing. On the note of making damage impactful, I've opted to have reminders of characters being in pain or how they're feeling. For example "John's wounded leg aches" or "Jenny had a bad dream, the feeling of unease sticks with them". In essence what I do is narrative, there is not necessary a mechanical effect of characters feeling a certain way or there being an ache but it's there. Likewise, the death of a fellow character nerfs your character, and frequently reminds the player that the character is indeed feeling sad or troubled. This lasts for quite some time, but when that goes away with the message "is not so sad anymore" or something like it, it really feels cathargic. The point to all this is that while it is important to mechanically represent what is going on with the characters, it is equally important to offer your player the ability to put their feelings into the pixels on the screen. It's like when Tarn Adams (I think it was Tarn) spoke on people telling them about mechanics in Dwarf Fortress that aren't even in the game. Give the players sufficient complexity, and they will fill in the blanks with their imagination.

I like this. Blades in the Dark’s injury system was cool to see in TAZ Steeplechase so I like what you’re attempting here.

when it comes to limb based damage I recommend looking into Kenshi for inspiration

Most devs avoid permanent injuries for the reasons you listed. Death spirals are real and serious problem that are very hard to correct for. Plus, it tends to make the game less fun. Players tend to want to become MORE powerful as they play, so its a hard sell to say "most of the fun and power is at the beginning, you'll be weaker the longer you play". It inverts the effort/reward curve pretty hard. Not sure what the scope of you game is, havent checked the backlog of your video yet, but theres a reason you only see injury mechanically in PvP games and horror games (where disempowering your players IS the point). That said, if you can find a way to make losing power fun for a player, id love to see it. Not trying to discourage your exploration, just pointing out why it hasnt been done before. No one figured out how to make it fun. Realism can be a tool, but a far more important one is immersion. Players want to feel a part of the world, doesnt matter if the grass is green or purple, as long as you sell it. Realism isnt actually that helpful in game design.

Also reminds me of the damage system in NEBULOUS : Fleet Command This is a game about spaceships, but it is kinda similar. Each ship is divided into different parts, where individual guns, compartments, and modules / machinery can take damage. Each ship has some damage control teams that will try to repair damage, but damage control can only repair a very limited amount of damage (which in game is lowest HP value of a component + 10%) If a component is destroyed, you can expend a 'Restore' to bring it back online, however Restores are very limited with small ships typically either not carrying any or just 1-2 at most, and bigger ships carrying around 5-12 depending on size and makeup. Restored components are only brought back to the minimum amount of HP needed to function and can break again very fast if it gets damaged. Eventually as your ship takes damage, you won't be able to restore everything and some components will be left destroyed, and in some circumstances your damage control teams may not be able to keep up with all damages, so it's up to you which ones you prioritize to repair / restore. Each ship also has a separate hull integrity value, this is sort of the 'mental' HP of the ship, where as the ship takes damage to the components, it's hull integrity also goes down, but hull integrity has a much higher value, and it takes much more firepower to bring a ship to 0 hull integrity than it is to simply destroy critical components and force it out of the battle or force the crew to evacuate. A ship with 0 hull integrity....doesn't just explode, instead it takes amplified damage from all sources.

As a person who doesn't listen to devlogs much, this video was pretty entertaining, also the editing surprisingly good for a small channel. I'm looking forward to seeing more content you add to the game and i hope it turns out well

Looks great!! I really agree about the 'HP as a number vs wounds' idea, it feels so much more grounded

I am making a scifi rpg with some friends. We implemented a system known as lethal injuries. When taking damage that would put you below 0, you roll on the lethal injury table scaling with your strength and the strength of the hit. Each lethal injury also has a minimum of causing fatigue, a stacking penalty that also makes further injuries worse. You take a lethal injury whenever you take 1/3rd of your max HP in a single attack as well. All in all it's a very satisfying system, but causes a lot of lag when applied to enemies. Originally we had hit locations too, but that just made turns take forever, so we simplified it to this. Definitely helps to make damage feel more grounded when your arm gets blown off. Also, like what you said about healing, this sort of punishment is kinda okay because it ISNT permanent - yeah the fighter might have just lost his sword arm, and now you need to weigh whether or not returning to town to get him healed is needed right away or if maybe the rest of the party can finish off their objectives without retreating and potentially giving their enemies time to regroup

I like how dungeon meshi handles healing, where it’s not so much healing as it is accelerated recovery, so instead of an injury taking months to recover with minor pain throughout, you make a full recovery instantly but are in agony for a few seconds

You can try a variant of the Team Fortress 2 approach to item slots: in TF2, you have 3 cosmetic slots to which you can assign various clothing, but there's upwards of 20 different location tags that each cosmetic item can have. For example you can wear earbuds with a hat because hats go on top of your head and earbuds go in your ears, but you won't be able to wear either with a motorcycle helmet on because the motorcycle helmet's head slot conflicts with the hat, ear, glasses, moustache, beard, etc slots on the head. If it's for the sake of game balance, you can limit the slots arbitrarily to like 10 while still allowing a huge degree of freedom with what items are compatible with each other.

1:25 got DAMN that has gotta be the slickest titlecard animation for a game I've ever seen!!!!!

First I wanna say I like your idea of a scifi deckbuilder and your art style is great. Into the midth of things: Don't overcomplicate it! Imagine the GMs mom coming down into the basement and telling them: Hey, I brought your cousin Steve. He want's to play a round of your space DnD with you and your little friends, is that OK, honey? And watch the eyes of GM slowly lose their light (while the rest of the group roll's theirs), as the GM frantically tries to explain to Steve weapon mods, fractal slots, individiual health pools, in addition the probably already not trivial deck building in 15min or less. I'm not saying "dumb it down" I'm saying "only make it so complicated as you must to make it complex". So for your concrete examples. 1) I would absolutely only do one slot each for right hand, left hand, head, torso, legs & feet, plus utility. The utility slots were a great idea there. Obviously, not every card can go into utility though. An AK47 goes into a hand, no matter if it would make a dope hat. So is utility really meant as an active inventory for buffs, like medipacks, or as extra armor slots? Depending how cyberpunk you want to make it, a special case would be to lay a "robotic arm" into utility. That card would literaly say "you can place a card on top of the robotic arm, as if it were a hand slot". But I digress. 2) Multiple separate damage counters are a hassle. They'll drag on rounds. Instead, I would go with a wound system. Give PCs a damage threshold, that can be modified by armor and such. Damage below that only goes to a "stun" track. That'd be the mental health track in your example. Not sure if mental health is really the right framing for that. Mental health has me thinking more of eldritch horror and Call of Cthulhu, really, but whatever. For every overflow damage over your threshold, a character takes a wound. Example: Bob the PC is shot at for 5 damage. His damage threshold is 1 for his fiber-mesh armor plus 1 for his quantum shield plus 2 base resistance equals 4. Bob takes 4 stunning damage but that leaves 1 overflow damage. Bob must take one wound. Bob's player decides, which of his active slots the wound goes to. He decides, Bob takes the shot to the legs and turns around the card, that is currently laying in the leg field. This is unusable now, until Bob has been treated. This is your foundation. On top of that you layer a) called shots; pretty much a penalty that an attacker can choose for targeting a specific slot / body part, b) special injuries, c) weapon mods. Both b) and c) are handled in the card text of weapon or ability cards. Example: A gun shoot's non-lethal gel rounds. On the card it says "when this gun applies a wound to any body part, the affected body part is 'bruised'. Put a bruised card over the affected body part. The bruised card remeains there for one day after which the body card becomes usuable again. This does not require a succesful recovery roll but can be reduced to 12 hours by such. If 'bruised' is applied to the head, triple the stun damage taken from this attack." Equally, you can have 'burned', 'dislocated' and whatnot condition cards, as you had shown in the video. Just don't make that the standard but reserve it for special guns or mods or it become's too cumbersome. For weapon mods: I'd stronlgy recommend not going with multiple cards laid out next to each other. I have two ideas. Make the mod cards semi-transparent so you can actually place them on top of weapon cards and they overlay certain stats, while the main weapon is still visible. More game engineering but cool looks. Easier solution: Make it chips. You can still have a card that you play that says "you can put a rapid fire chip on an assault rifle in one of your hands" but the actual weapon mod is a yellow chip you put on the assault rifle then. You create a handful of mod types that always do about the same, if not stated otherwise on the affected card. Yellow 'rapid fire' chips always double the firing rate, except on that AK47 where on the card it says "when a rapid fire mod is placed on this card, triple the firing rate instead of doubling it", while on on the flame thrower, rapid fire might not make sense and it could say "can't be combined with the rapid fire mod" or "when the rapid fire mod is applied to this card, double the area damage instead of the firing rate" (symbolizing more gasoline pumped out). You can have an extra ammo mod, a stabilizer, a scope, a sniper scope, piercing ammo, burning ammo, self-propelled ammo (hey, scifi), gel ammo... you'll come up with more. But they can be combined with almost any weapons and if certain combos don't work, you can put it on either the mod card (that you play but then discard and put the counter on the actual weapon) or the weapon card. These are my ideas. Hope they help. Good work overall, keep it up!

For injuries, the cards could be double sided (face up = healthy, face down = wounded) so that a player who "loses" a limb just uses the wounded side (this is still punishing but significantly less debilitating than losing the limb outright). Any further injuries to wounded locations could spread to different locations or cause more damage somehow (potentially in the aftermath of a fight when injuries get resolved). Any wounded limbs could have a chance for permanent damage which can be discovered after a combat or after rest/when the character normally heals.

NGL honestly very impressed with your content. I was expecting nothing after the generic 5e story, and then you blow me away instantly with an MWO reference. For reference I'm presently working on a mech TTRPG so damage is very much something I'm working through myself ATM, knowing that might help you see were I'm coming from. I'm also quite forward with ideas with game design so just pick out what you find useful and ignore the rest. So I like your different damage for areas etc. but its all feels a bit meaningless right now, and basicly different levels of the same system. I would have the location damage be tied to the cards in that location. Have each card in a hit location take damage from left to right. Have each card have an HP total and when it takes enough damage you lose it before getting to use it. The result being damage taken = loss of options. For working out hit locations, let the defender choice by default or have a common action available to let the defender chose. Makes things faster and more engaging for the defence, and allows for cool talk RP like blocking with a shield without the shield even needing a special rule, just a high HP card in one slot. As a balancing factor I'd recommend having empty areas take damage to your global HP (or mental damage as your calling it), it means its a valuable resource for those calling behind is useful cards, so you can tank a little with your global HP to get some more defence/offence out to use on your next turn. I'd recommend combining this with laying out your cards to use at the end of your turn, you get to defend with them until your next turn, and then what you have left you can then consume to use or hold onto for a future turn.

One of the things Beam Saber does is let players exhaust a gear item to mitigate damage/consequences. That means players spend resources that would give them boosts for some moves, but it doesnt cut off access to any moves. In general i like the idea of activating gear or features to block damage, because its more engaging decision making, and it has anime-clashing-weapons or split-second-countermeasures vibes. You could communicate exhausting gear by flipping over the card, and then there could be some risk players must take to une-exhaust a gear.

I'm really happy this showed up on my recommendations. It's neat to see you tackling the game design

In Dungeon and Dragons specifically - as Gary Gygax described - I think it was for Adnd, but may misremember the exact source, HP of the players isn't really their physical health. It's more of your evasion, protection, luck, divine intervention, compressed into one stat. So if the Dragon attacks the hero with a claw and deals 20 damage to them, it's not that the dragon tore out only a little bit of your arm, it's more of that you just barely managed to dodge out of the way, or just barely blocked it, or maybe even the gods caused it to just barely miss, but it put a great stress on you and your HP stat going down represents how your luck is being used up. So in his vision, it didn't make that much sense for a hero to be tanking hits from a dragon, only when your hp goes down to 0 the character would actually be hit and go down in one landed hit. And with that approach it also does make sense that a hero on full HP is functionally the same as hero on 1 HP But yeah, more interesting ways to handle damage are always nice to see. I have spent a lot of time thinking about my own HP system and making it more interesting, and I arrived at something in between Gary's interpretation and what you are going for

I dont know if your gonna read this but in a game called kenshi there is health for each body part and if a part takes enough negative damage it gets severed. there are robot limbs in kenshi so It actually ends up as an upgrade but its still cool and it makes negative damage quite impactful

I suggest you look into Blades in the Dark. It has a stress bar for pushing yourself extra, using special abilities, or resisting negative consequences. If your stress goes to high, you gain Trauma, which has a permanent affect on your character's personality. If your character takes damage and doesn't resist it, they take a certain level of Harm, which basically acts as a long lasting status affect that may make some of their actions less likely to succeed (exhaustion), prevents them from taking a certain action (broken arm), takes them out of a fight (bullet to the gut), or even outright kills them (electrocution). I personally love it, and it never gets complicated when you actually start playing it.

dude this was awesome! I've never seen anyone work on a deck building game in tabletop, im super invested already

There is a ttrpg called "Mutant Chronicles" that has a limb-segmented health system that I find rather elegant. I've played that game for many years and have greatly enjoyed it's health mechanics. One of the neat things in that game is that you roll a D20 to determine which body part, with some parts being easier to hit (For example, to hit the head you need to roll a 20, but you hit the chest or stomach if you roll 1 through 5)

I really like how you're coming at this from a narrative and character aspect instead of a mechanical one! Most system I see that use this focus heavily on making it a difficulty increaser rather then a fun enhancer. I was going to try to figure out a way to implement this sort of system into my wip TTRPG, and this video helped a lot in inspiration. That and the reminder that Table Top Sim exists.

Battle brothers had a nice system for impactful damage. In that game you have 3 bars, 2 for armor (head and body) and 1 for hp. Appart from chip dmg and attacks that ignore armor, you only take hp dmg once the armor of the part that got hit is gone. Taking hp damage has 2 major downsides. The first is that your brother's morale will begin to waver and could even start fleeing (usually getting themselves killed in the process). The second is that they can get injuries (scraped shoulder, pierced arm, broken leg etc.), long lasting debufs that take days to heal and affect their performance in future battles. And there are also permanent injuries (missing ear, nose, eye). If one of your brothers goes down he has a chance to cheat death at the end of the battle, but he will get a permanent debuff as a result. These could be so bad that you might have to retire him and train a new one in his place.

In the system I'm designing for a video game I do something like Mutants & Masterminds' system. In that game, you take injuries based on how much damage the enemy rolls above your defense roll. More serious injuries give you status conditions. In mine, you have petty, minor, major, serious, and critical injuries. Petty injuries (things like ant bites and paper cuts) only cause pain. Minor can inflict some small debuffs or status effects, like bleeding, etc. Injuries will also have a location, and will hinder your ability to fight or do things outside of combat based on where they are. If you take more injuries than you Constitution (1d6 for the RPG version) then it counts as one the level higher. At 1 critical injury you pass out. At CON critical injuries you die.

I developed a limb system as well because I thought going unconscious was boring. (And I wanted healing food/medicine/items to be more impactful) Most of the time I'd use a 1D6 to determine Head Torso Arms and Legs, once a limb is at 0 you lose some power (like reduced movement speed if it's a leg) and when it goes the players max HP X2 into the negative the body part is destroyed. This could mean death if it's the head or torso but so far I've not destroyed any players limbs yet lol.

Stumbled across this video and I have to say it's something I've been thinking quite a bit about lately. I'm currently working on some homebrew rules for an upcoming modern 5e campaign, with combat inspired by tactical shooters. The main two rules I've added as far as damage goes are wounding and Lingering Injuries from the DMG (which has a chance of activating every crit). The way wounding works is for every hit a creature has taken, they take 1d4 damage at the end of the round (this can be healed relatively easily). The idea was for my players to see every hit as not only lost hp but also lost time and lost healing. Also, while I'm sticking with 5e's system for wearables, I've already got a whole system set up for scopes and other firearm attachments.

Sounds like a great system for a starting idea can't wait to see it worked out. Also great video.

if you're interested in impactful, location-based damage, i'd recommend checking out Mythras. in that game, you have separate health pools for head, chest, abdomen, and each arm and leg, and if any of them reach 0, you have to make a save or be stunned for a certain number of rounds. if they reach the negative of their max hp, they're gone, forever, and you have a pretty good chance of dying. you also heal damage to limbs at negative hit points a lot slower than positive hit points, so while characters are, on paper, pretty tough, you'll always be working to keep yourself from getting hit. it seems like a high-lethality type of system, and it it, but since you can be taken out of the fight by failing on a save, the actual death toll isn't usually that high.

Miscellaneous thoughts about systems that I'll try to organize the best I can: -For damage/injuries, you mentioned wanting them to have narrative weight as well as mechanical weight. You could keep the full paper doll (leaning into the MWO damage tracker) for players, but instead of rolling for players' hit locations you let them choose. Now this does lend some ability for players to "game" the system by trying to spread damage to avoid losing limbs, but if they do that, they set themselves up for losing parts one after the other quickly as the fight drags on. Giving certain baddies' attacks short-term rider effects can also help spice up those choices as well. Elite enemies can have some ability to target specific parts, but letting players choose for the most can also lend itself to them roleplaying out where and how they take the damage. -For the equipment configurability, you can help limit the number of cards needed (and technically slots) by just limiting the number of cards usable. Each equipment card, or could go by slot, has a max number of modifier cards it can hold. Light equipment and body slots can hold one, while heavier equipment can hold two. You can also have an overall total of some arbitrary amount, I'll say four in my example. So, you can have 1 modifier on your laser pistol, 2 on your energy lance, and 1 one on your torso armor. Then there's multiple ways you can handle growth of this number. If your characters level up, this can be a number that increases directly as a result of levelling up, ensuring that players won't start with too many modifiers though as they get more comfortable with their character and the system, they'll be free to dial in how they want their character to be. You can have a "soft cap" in that players can go above the total count, with a sacrifice to, say, concentration, as their character has more and more things to keep in mind (with an appropriate boon for running under the cap). You can also just have equipment cards that just increase the cap, either for specific slots or as a whole. -In the intro you mentioned characters KO'd and coming back not being phased by it seeming a bit strange. This, I think, really comes down to a role-playing thing, but also down to the flavor of the game. In something like 5E, the characters are supposed to be larger than life heroes (at least base game rules as written), so having a hero get smacked by a goblin club a couple times and then be terrified of setting foot in a cave ever again, would be antithetical to the normal themes of the game. That works more in something like Call of Cthulhu or other RPGs where your character is supposed to be an everyday person wrapped up in something bigger than them, a fish out of water kind of situation. So, with having an injury system in your game, alongside the narrative and mechanical weight, you'll want to make sure that the system also fits the tone that you're wanting to set.

Another thought to combat the snowballing effect is by adding certain cards or effects that can only be activated in certain situations. Like things pertaining to how people can become more desperate and even stronger when they or someone they care about is hurt. There's actually something called Hysterical Strength which is when people display rare feats of strength in life-threatening situations. I think that could be a cool addition. Another thought is making sure your characters are in big parties and correctly leveling out your enemies so that even if one character gets beat up the others should be able to step in and defeat the opponent.

Incredible video! I love the editing style, and the script is great! Keep up the good work, you've got +1 sub from me!

This is a really cool idea, but I'd honestly say that the best thing to do would be figuring out how the base slot mechanics work before adding in modifiers and attachments. Once you have the bones of the game working, you can understand how the modifiers might adjust the game. The game might not even need the customizable weapons, just adding cards with modifications built in (like special weapons or junk weapons) Keep up the good work though, I'm confident you'll be able to craft an awesome game.

My dm: "You re firls level cleric, a pack of wolves attack you" *5 minutes later* *gets right hand, left leg ripped off, blood lose and impact for overusing spells*

You would have to make healing and self healing way easier and better to compensate. Maybe look into darkest dungeon system of buffs and debuffs when a character has a near death experience.

One way to use cards, is that you can rotate them do represent 4 different states. Health states could be like: Energized(buff), Healthy(normal), Hurt(temporary penalty), Wounded(limb penalty to movement, aiming etc)

This halth mechanic reminds me of Rimworld simce It has exactly what you described. The way it works is that, instead of just a health bar, all living things have body parts instead, like limbs and orgains, and all their stats are affected by the condition and quality of each part and even if it's with a scar or just entirely missing. This machanic also allows to a very interesting game mechanics related to health like bleeding, infections, medical treatment, addictions and health conditions related to age, and even progression with bionic body parts, because a pawn who is blind, has asthma due to smoking a lot, is missing an arm and has 2 peg legs will obviously be way less efficient than a pawn full bionic bodyparts and under the effect of go-juice (tge best combat drug in the game). So it would be nice to have a look at what Rimworld did and work with that in your own game, cuz it's brilliant.

For the hit locations you could allow some abilities to modify the location roll by +/- an amount (maybe vital points are on higher numbers so increasing the location die is better for the attacker while reducing it is better for the defender) This allows for all sorts of variety for items, skills etc. (a defensive stance may reduce the value while a sneak attack or aimed shot increases it)

As someone who's dabbled in board game design and video editing... GREAT use of Table Top SImulator.

I've been tinkering with individual body part damage, and the issue that the attacker might want to target the same part over and over, and there's less incentive to change to the other parts that are still armored, but had this realization that: it's the defender that decided what part to put forward and what part to keep away. Let's say the defender has armor knocked from the right leg, and it's hurt too, he will move it back and puts the left foot forward instead. The attacker can still target the right leg, but the chance of success is reduced by the distance penalty, the higher block chance and the chance of a counter attack. Applying this to your set-up, the slots don't need names, and the player decides what goes in the front and what to keep back.

This sounds like a fantastic system! I’d be interested to see what long term effects might exist

If you're worried about snowballing or making the game too punishing - I'd make it so that surviving extremely dangerous situations, even when they lead to permanent injuries, increase your maximum mental health. Like the old adage "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". It'd also add an interesting narrative level, where the more successful a player ends up being, the less prepared they are to handle crippling defeat if it ever comes their way. Whereas the player who overcame adversity broken and bloody is more capable in the long run - lending the story a much more positive vibe than most games that try to include this sort of mental mechanic.

Letting injuries having a lasting impact reminds me of the ancient game Robinsons Requiem. There you HAVE to take care of every injury, or you can f.e. bleed out, or lose your arm and leg. That game monitored your whole metabolism, and reacted to pretty much everything. If you lose an eye, then the game literally darkened one half of the screen to show you, that you just lost one of your eyes.

Heya there! Always happy to see someone giving ttrpg making a go (which i am also doing). As some have pointed out many players don't like to become weaker and not be in control of why it is happening, which is difficult when you use a randomizer like dice, but i haven't seen any other videos of your system except for this one so i might be missing some key info. That said i wouldn't just throw this in if i didn't have something to share, an idea you could say, and it actually leans pretty close to what you talked about. What about rolling/chosibg injuries after combat? That way you can have the injury matter storywise and you can simply say something like "your left arm gets crushed, you can no longer use that arm until it is healed." In combat and have a mechanical effect as well. You mentioned that you didn't feel like getting downed seemed to matter in dnd, well have you looked at the Daggerheart system? They have a mechanic that gives players choices should they get knocked down, and while i don't remember all three rules i think i remember two of them. One is to roll to see if you get back on your feet, but the other is the interesting one. A player can choose to die, but they get to go out in a blaze of glory, interrupting the current monster's turn to get an auto hitting, auto critting hit in before they bite the dust for good. These are just the first thoughts that came to mind though.

I’ve changed up how we treat HP in our dnd game. Thematically, HP is a combo of one’s physical health and willpower to keep pushing. This explains how someone can keep fighting even on their last legs. The idea the one’s HP hits 0 is simple either their body or mind finally failing to keep up. Also explains that while one fully heals after a long rest. Their wounds don’t exactly heal, but their body and mind is ready to fight at full force again. Licking wounds comes after when time has passed. We do have a seperate system for limb damage and scarring, but that’s something else entirely. I also allowed an ability called “Last Stand”, a concept I’ve seen from the a KZfaqr KeyTheLich, where once you hit 0, roll a CON save. Similar to something like Death’s Door from Darkest Dungeon, you’re dancing with death on the edge, leading to some amazing climaxes to fights.

I really like the Resistances system used in Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: the City Beneath by Rowan, Rook, and Deckard.

I would also like to add to the TTRPG health system discussions. I really enjoy how Traveller handles health. You have 3 main stats which are Endurance, Strength, and Dexterity. You start losing health off your endurance stat first. When Endurance hits 0, you have to start taking points off of either Strength of Dex, and it affects your rolls until you are able to get healed. If Strength or Dex goes to 0, you get knocked out, and if they both go to 0, your character dies. I really like how that system adds a lot to the narrative of combat.

First of, great video, it got me thinking about health and its low consequences. Do you plan on a physical release? Your customizable weapons can otherwise combine in to a single card. So you can go back to the 1 card per slot. Else the customizable cards can be in pieces that you play together to create one whole card. If you get a weapon and it has 2 slots the feeling of finding stuff to fill the slots will be rewarding to the player.

Some thoughts while watching without knowing the details of your game: - regarding weapon customization, those add-on cards could be layered under the weapon in a staggered fashion, thus keeping it to one field but making the mods visible nonetheless - regarding which body part is attacked: you could also give certain weapons or modifications limitations (can only attack chest) or boni (+x Damage when attacking Hands). - regarding punishing gameplay / negative feedback loop: you could also tie the loss of a bodypart to some sort of temporary benefit, such as "adrenaline rush" that say gives you only 25% of the damage you would take for the enxt three turns

So the way I'm designing my TTRPG is that your vitality is how many wounds you can take before going down. Your armor reduces damage. Thresholds of damage will create Minor, Major, or Mortal wounds. Mortal wounds generally only happen when you take more damage than vitality. Major wounds can come from a high burst of damage, usually cost more in vitality & have more severe effects. Wounds can be Staunched through healing skills which greatly reduces the effects & cost to vitality, but additional damage can reopen them. There are optional rules for mortal injuries to have permanent damaging effects. Currently in early pre-alpha though, haven't gotten a ton of testing done yet. It is a generally low numbers game, using a d6 system where 5 or 6 gices you +1 & all else is 0 with points in skills giving a reroll or eventually an additional die while having a minimum based on the core stat. It also has crits as an opt-in mechanic where you roll the Die of Fate which can do moderate improvements at 4-5, moderate detriments at 2-3, but explode at 6 or 1 as additional die are cast to see how positive or negative the crit is. I think this gives a lot of stability to feel mostly fair & put the RNG in control of those playing the game.

I agree with you 100% It's so weird, when games incentivise you to ignore all but one enemy because an enemy at 1HP does the same amount of damage as any other. If I ever make an RPG-like game I'll have to mess around with permanent status effects, not just on the player but enemies too.

Thank you very much, I will see if I can add this to a game I'm making also!

I’m going to be honest, I was NOT expecting this level of depth and quality from a devlog, and I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be a devlog about a TTRPG! It looks like you’ve been working on this a long time, and I’ll be excited to see more of your ideas for the future of this!

this sounds good! looting would be great in this system and i love the status cards. if you want to avoid overwhelming players then you could have them gain slots as they level up. you could also mitigate the helplessness feeling by allowing players to a flipped card one last time at the cost of permanently losing it - perhaps doing so activates it at full power (for dice roll damage etc) or be applied to another player for a turn (for static number bonuses)

This was very interesting, I'm trying to make a game where you can injure and capture your enemies to directly increase the capability of your base, (think Rimworld, or Metal Gear Solid V kind of style), so I've been wondering a lot about health systems and the best way to proceed. (I don't like the monster catcher genre's way of, get health low, lob "capture item" until RNG works, so trying to avoid that) As for your dilemma, it sounds like a tone issue. D&D bounces back quickly because it's a heroic game about epic larger than life characters. Something as measly as being inches away from death shouldn't stop your characters! (which is why only the last hitpoint matters) You can always add the aftermath in as a Game Master or Player, but overall it's not meant to inflict things on you. If you want a more grounded story, where taking severe injury should have lasting consequences and/or mechanical effects then yeah you'll want to bake it into the game somewhere. You could have some kind of "consequences deck" that thresholds of damage force a player to draw from. They don't do anything in the moment, but you resolve them at some later point. (after the current conflict, session, some specified downtime period) It's a idea I came up with on the fly, so I imagine it'd need a lot of refining. It may or may not help with the negative reinforcement loop problem.

Heres a little custom dnd rule I made that you can use as inspiration:Negative health When you're knocked down and take extra damage than the health you had left (IE:You had 9hp and took 13 damage) You get knocked down to -4 health,to heal you up,another player needs to heal at least 5 health to bring em back into the positive.And if monsters continue attacking the KO player,it knocks their health more and more in the negatives,making it harder to heal.If their negative health equals their max health,they die.If they succeed their death saves or get stabilised somehow,their negative health is reset to 0.

My first system (which was very flawed, take it with a grain of salt) had life points for limbs. What made me leave it was the case of characters seeing their leg constantly broken over and over when facing a strong monster These days, many iterations later i have a wounds system. Hp tresholds are noted on the sheet, if a character gets below it they get a wound, if they get below another treshold it gets worse or another wound appears Each degree of wound adds a general debuff to everything, minor wounds can be ignored, further are more of a problem. If you get healed back up, you can ignore the wound, but straining that part of your body or getting hit again can reopen the wound, putting you back to the health treshold (+ eventual additional damage). Wounds take multiple days of magical treatment to completely heal too. Note that armors are extra hp in my game and there are skills to reduce damage taken, to be a fighter of trade *Example: you get a big sword hit to the leg. You're below 50% health, that's a medium wound. All your actions have -2, note medium leg gash (d10 system, flat bonus from +1 to +10 roughly). You get a magical heal that gets you back above 75% (minor wound treshold) health, it doesn't hurt anymore. You go full sprint twice in a row? Constitution roll. Failed? You lose half your hp because the wound has reopened. An enemy noticed the limping and attacks your leg? Constitution roll failed, you get down to 50% hp, the wound reopens, then the baddie damage is applied. Be careful with the fights you pick, especially if you're wounded. Don't pick every fight if you're not very much prepared for it* It's a narrative driven, harsher game. You're a talented person, not a superhero in my game so it might not be your thing, like in real life a guy with a knife can be dangerous, multiple goons against a single hero are deadly, a big monster is a terrible threat here, even though i came from a same place of being a very chill, easy win no pc death dm I wanted stakes to exist though, no more "*rolling eyes* today we kill a dragon" but rather "oh shit that's a dragon!". I wanted my pc's to consider battle like real characters would, and enjoy victory the same way That's my experience and where i ended up going with a similar train of thought

Catacomb kids got a nice idea, some big hits can cut off limbs, and since you use limbs to hold two items in the game, as well as to move and jump, it hinders your character somewhat. Regeneration is a thing there too as well as grafting monster parts or peg legs or implants in that

The banner saga did real good job making damage impactfull. Your HP is your damage. Done. Or to quote the game itself: Every participant of the battles (either from your or enemy's party) is described by two important factors that affect their effectiveness in attack and defence, i.e. Strength and Armor. In offence, Strength affects the power of attacks, so characters with high Strength deal more damage. In defence, it works as a health bar. That means that losing all strength points causes death (enemy) or faint (ally). Armor in offence affects the enemy's ability to avoid losing strength points, while in defence it works like that for your unit.

Minor debuffs are amazing at generating a sense of realism. But the best implementations I've seen work as limitations rather than weaknesses. For example, rather than giving a player who's been concussed a flat accuracy penalty, you might have an accuracy penalty that only applies when switching between targets. There's something almost empowering to players when they have an injury they can just shrug off by not taking an action it would affect. Sometimes it leads to great moments where it takes a few rounds between when a player takes an injury and when they're finally forced to confront the consequences of it. When a DPS debuff is thematically required (e.g. damaged arm for swordsman), make it small. Roughly speaking, PCs operating at about 80% power and NPCs operating at about 60% power feels about right for being notable but not demoralizing. Bleed debuffs are always great, especially in combats where range and line of sight are important. Forcing the player to duck out of the fray for a second to mend gives them one more interesting choice they can take with their turn.

may i recommend playing Fear And Hunger or Rimworld for more concepts of limb dismemberment and damage to a body part affecting it's capabilities? you could also dabble with the idea of prosthetics. the idea of someone clawing their way to victory with a broken foot, missing arm, and prosthetic leg whom is battered and bloody and on the brink of insanity is super cool! also if you want to counter the snowballing effect then you could add something like an adrenaline meter so they go faster and deal more damage or whatever..

Makes me remember TTRPG Cyberpunk2020. There damage was incredibly visceral and impactful. The more damage you take the more all of your stats drop. Light wounds? You ok. Serious wounds? Now your reflex (what is rolled for attack), INT (Perception and haxx) and body value (How much damage you deal) are halved. Critical wounds? -2 to everything on top of that. And in mortal wounds you need to roll every turn not to die. Every time you get hit in mortal state you need to roll again and it gets more difficult. Got a certain amount of damage to the limb? It's gone now. Make a death save. And you better spend those monies on the surgery and a new arm (assuming you live). It is always incredibly visceral, actually seeing how your character loses more and more of their characteristics with each wound. Also incentivises ambushes and otherwise getting that first hit in - if it hits and pierces armour and enough to deal damage? Rest of the fight is more of a mop-up

In Kenshi, getting beaten down is the way you become stronger, developing toughness. This trait determines how much of a beating you can take before passing out. However, it's not just about getting beaten and then coming back. If you get too injured, you won't be able to get back up and will bleed to death unless assisted by someone. Additionally, if a limb suffers too much damage, you might lose it, if in the middle of a sword swing you arm gets broken, you will drop the weapon on the ground, and if you forguet to go back for it, its on you.

Kenshi is a great example of limb damage done well.

Have you played Kingdom Death: Monster? In that game, when you take damage, you roll a die to determine what body part is hit, and if the same part is hit multiple times, you roll for permanent disabilities. This is how characters are built. Also, players don't need to control the same character on each mission, since between missions they go back into the pool of survivors. That way nobody's stuck with a really bad character.

Hi, it's a great video! I'd suggest you look at Phoenix Point (albeit not a great game), it also has a limb damage system, and the smaller the limb, the harder to hit it. Also you have to break the armor first, but when limb is destroyed (and unoperable), you can freely shoot it for overall damage

I feel it could work in high tech fantasy if permanent injuries can be dealt with AND won't impact too drastically. For example, supression medicine, which would make penalty weaker for a while, or skilled medic, which could do field surgery (If he has tools to) to push it to almost insignificant debuff.

Good inspiration to look at is Fallouts limb damage system, along with VATS

yeah, when my group plays, we don't even really track health (we use wounds) so most kills are insta kills. And this time when I played a near indestructible character, which I've only done once before, I played with little regard for their personal safety, in spite of the fact that they still feel pain.

Tl;dr: Maybe a less complex system would be by correlating specific health values into "breakpoints" that either directly debuffs the player, or indirectly makes the player more worried. I don't play DnD, not do I really know much about Sol, so this may be completely irrelevant, but I find that collectible card games do sort of have a solution which I think is widely applicable (which is ironic because I think I hear the phrase "the only life point that matters is your last one" in CCGs the most) in the form of burn damage. If your opponent is aggressive, he likely has burn damage which can directly reduce your life. A game I used to play called Buddyfight had this group of cards called "Impact" cards, and while its identity has become a bit muddled, the most iconic ones are probably ones that say something like "Can only be played when your opponent has 4 or less life. Deal 4 damage to your opponent. This damage cant be reduced or nullified." Burn damage can create various breakpoints. Obviously 0 life is a breakpoint since you instantly lose, but in the previous example, 4 life would also be a breakpoint because reaching that low means a high chance of dying. Against combo decks that can't OTK, its damage threshold would also be a breakpoint. For example say a control deck has a finisher that deals 14 damage, then 14 damage is a breakpoint. But let's say that the deck also runs a spell that deals 3 damage. This would allow them to increase the breakpoint to 17. Note that, of course, you're never 100% dead here. You don't want to be at 14 life because you don't want to risk the chance that your opponent drew the finisher. You're slightly more comfortable at 17 life, but would still rather have more, just in case. How this relates: I think that the easy way out would be to correlate certain %HP loss with debuffs. Arknights's (a tower defense game) roguelike gamemode does this. Each fight where you take any bit of damage in, your stuff gets weaker, then if you're at less than 50% health at certain times, your stuff get weaker. Albeit, Arknights's reason for implementing this is different. Another way would be to implement enemies that have very hard to avoid damage instances. For example, maybe the enemy will occasionally "go into a frenzy" over smelling the critical wound of your character and try to finish him off for good. Or maybe you can implement cards that use some kind of move that is typically easily countered by just blocking with your left arm... but if it's too heavily injured, then your arm moves too slowly to protect you. And of course, having some element of burn like I mentioned earlier

Great video! I'm curious how you plan to approach damage between encounters. by which I mean how in DnD a player can go from on the brink of death to literally nothing wrong with a single night's rest. a counterexample might be blades in the dark where harm and stress are semi-permanent until a player uses enough downtime activities to successfully recover from them. Do you have any plans for how players will recover from their own damage?

Hi, I enjoy making TTRPG (Among other rarer stuff) and what I normally do for damage is a hit location table (Similar to yours), depending on the amount and type of damage the body part could just be bruised or decapitated. For my simpler games I normally just have Fatal and Non-Fatal damage, depending on what weapon your using (Fists, Clubs, Tasers for Non-Fatal. Firearms, Swords, Pointy Sticks for Fatal) you can choose to either kill or stun the enemy when they reach 0 HP. Normally I leave it up to the player to role play mental trauma and shell shock but your idea is tempting, my play testers are gonna hate me soon :D

I've been thinking about a game idea where you have 'mostly robot' combat teams. Instead of getting knocked unconscious or instantly killed; your robot emergency ejects its core which keeps most of the core traits about the unit. Allows crits and bad situations to occur regularly without everyone dying. Perma death for characters still occurs if the core gets destroyed; but evacuating the cores is generally easy at the beginning with drones coming to pick them up. But if you play too reckless in say caves; you might end up with the last unit running for its life while carrying all of its comrades cores. Similar to how the entire body can be lost and replaced; each limb can be destroyed, including the head (which is really just there for more advanced optics and analyzation). This occurs quite regularly as cover is used, exposing only the weapon, optics and limbs holding the weapon. You can always have a unit carrying spare parts, but that is space you could have saved for more grenades or other tools. Also body and limbs end up gaining a resonance with a core over time, getting small buffs that can be lost when replaced; and quick replacement of limbs or whole bodies ends up with a calibration debuff. Certain veteran characters used to messy situations, can end up with traits that allow faster calibration of limbs or body. Or a less lucky new recruit might need to stay out of combat for a bit due to poor calibration and whiplash from having to replace their body repeatedly in quick succession. You can end up with a veteran robot with a durable torso that has seen a lot of battle damage but hasn't needed replaced. A right arm that was replaced a long while ago, with teeth marks in it from some alien creature. A left arm that seems fairly new and thus has less shielding due to lower resonance than the right arm. A right leg with clear shrapnel in it from an explosion to the left, and a shiny brand new left leg. Returning back from a mission holding the core of its old pal with a quip about how he had to save them again; while the core gloats about how it took out more enemies and is going to get a whole new shiny body again.

A silhouette of a person clutching their head hunched forward while inside the head there is the brain would capture mental composure well.

Pathfinder does something fun, which is that every time you stand back up you basically keep your “death saves” (it’s called the dying condition in PF2e). So getting knocked down too many times can kill you, even if you get healed and bounce back up every time

I for sure didn't expect MWO to be here! So nice knowing someone else knows about this game and actually mentions it as a good example in something :D

Sounds neat. Maybe you could make the available slots manually adjustable (besides a recommendation) so players can choose how much they have to juggle.

Check out Ahoy's damage system. Actions are taken through dice assignment in slots, but damage blocks slots. It is smart, fun, and simple.

My guy really just put the Bionicle logo behind his title card and thought we wouldn't notice.

You could tie adrenaline to mental health. During the combat any new mental damage would first be treated as temporary adrenaline and buffs the character until either a time limit is reached or combat ends (when things calm down), then the adrenaline is converted into mental damage which is longer lasting and would then act as a debuff or equivalent nerf. This would help mitigate the slow decay of a singular losing battle. As for long term wounds/ character damage, mechanics to recover/ regenerate when in a safe environment aren't too hard to implement. Or even giving the player an option to replace lost biological limbs with cybernetic instead of regenerating should they choose.

why not have layers on the equipment cards, a shirt takes the under layer, the bulletproof vest a muddle layer and a jacket a upper layer. This way you could have some items that takes more layers but have a more specialized use. Combat armor for example could take both the middle and upper layer but be better att mitigating damage whilst a bulletproof vest with a vest is worse for mitigating damage butt allows you to take a jacket with social or other bonuses.

If you do go with the dice rolling to hit different limbs, maybe consider something like rolling two d6s, because that way you could assign a 7 to the body, for example, to make it more likely to get hit, and assign something like a 12 and 1 to each of the hands to make them very hard to hit normally.

what could also work out would be to not have slots for the arms, hands, etc but have biger weapons require 2 hands to use think of it like that my guy (humanoid) has -Plasma Gun -Rail Pistol -Sholder mountet Laser the gun would for exsample require 2 hands if 1 gets criticly damaged he can't use it and has to resort to his sidearm (could just be a less powerfull 2 handet weapon) if he losses the other hand to he can only use the Laser or other things that do not require a hand this would probably get rid of needing teen thousand slots as you could also just carry 2 twohandet items if you want for exsample a cqb option with say a longbow

cool project, i think you could maybe use the brain symbol for mental health, then use some sort of sciency symbol for intelligence instead (like an atom or a lightbulb?); idk the logistics but good luck with sol!

Your dice approach to targeting limbs innacurately, while abilities allow you to pick a specific limb reminds me of Cardbots (available as a free PDF and it comes free with your Tabletop Simulator, in the section with chess and checkers.)

I recommend checking out wildermyth, the idea they use is a trauma system, where if a character hits 0 HP, they can choose between stuff like dying in a blaze of glory, losing a limb, etc. really cool stuff

Just wanted to say I like both the 3 Utility slots idea and the tokens idea. They both actually look really simple while also allowing for lots of cool and unique items.

An idea to avoid snowballing wilst keeping tye drama is second wind. they can get back up when their low and get some sort of bonus for a short duration. And to get around them using in all the time is make it a costly for something, like a chance to have your character die after battle, or in less extreme regards a permenant [or semi-perm] flaw.

I like the idea of the health system, can be pretty interesting. However I do agree with the snowball problem. One alternative I thought of was buffs / items to boost mental health. Certain perks could negate mental health damage. Having an ebb and flow of mental health can be a useful balancing act.

I made a system where hp is just your ability to dodge and avoid damage, turning lethal strikes into mild scratches and bruises, but once you get to 0 any time you take damage you roll a lethal damage table. That's where concussions, broken limbs and chopped off appendages come into, giving them debuffs either until short or long rest, rarely longer or never. Still dangerous, but you don't have to keep track of it at all times.

I think you could maybe streamline it about by giving creatures like, a damage threshold that when passed will give an injury: Like, for every 10 hit points lost, roll a d8 and give a condition to a part of the body, like breaking a foot or burning an arm. Then if a creature gets healed over the hp marker for a injury, the injury is recovered.

You may want to look into Rimworld's damage system and how it functions, because it seems that they implement a lot of what you seem to be thinking about (both each body part having a health pool, as well as having an overall mental health / consciousness pool that can be affected by multiple limbs being damaged).

In Tarkov, there is a similar system. You have head, torso, stomach, arms and legs. A destroyed head or torso kills you instantly. A destroyed stomach causes you to groan in pain and constantly lose energy. Destroyed arms make wielding a weapon very difficult, and destroyed legs make walking difficult. On top of that, limbs can bleed causing damage over time, as well as being broken, causing an effect as if you had lost them. I feel like the snowballing can be prevented by teaching players that preventing damage is way more important than dealing damage, and that HP is more than "a resource to spend". You can also be more creative with psychological damage, such as taking psychological damage when taking suppressive fire, being near explosions or being near traumatizing scenes.

I recommend taking a look at the videogame Deep Sky Derelicts

Legs give leg points. Hands give hand points. Spend on equipment.

So, here's a thought. What if you _didn't_ have specific slots for items? Bear with me here. Instead of having specific hit locations for items, you just...have equipped items. Maybe you can't equip two items of the same type at the same time, but--point is, you don't care about whether enemies will hit your feet until you're wearing boots. Instead of rolling to pick hit location...what if players could just _choose_ which item takes the damage? The item cards I've seen in this video have a set of pips under the title that don't seem to be used for anything here--you could use those to represent an item's 'health', and on taking damage, the player has to turn over a number of cards whose combined health is equal to or greater than the damage dealt. This gives players lots of interesting, tense decisions to make when taking damage. Status effects like a dislocated shoulder can, of course, bypass the damage system entirely--maybe they apply to specific types of cards, such as a dislocated shoulder applying to any card of type Hand.