fools-pyrite

computer toucher; RPG enjoyer


Recently thinking about this sort of thing, and I always like to take a look at prior art! This is obviously not comprehensive, and the touchstones I’m using are just the ones I’m familiar with. Would love if folks could contribute any more I missed!

  • Don’t care: Lots of games don’t need any mechanical support for fights! I don’t think any Ben Robbins games (Microsocope, Kingdom, Follow) or most No Dice No Masters games (Dream Askew, Orbital, Wanderhome) have much need for mechanics in this area
  • Just play it out: Not so much a mechanic as a lack of one. No abstraction, just shared fiction. Approach taken by 2400, Lasers & Feelings, and many other rules-light games 1
  • Hit Points: Taken from naval war gaming, this is the most venerable (and boring) option. A number that goes down until you die, or fall unconscious, or whatever. Approach used in: D&D and its derivatives, half of all video games, Apocalypse World 2
    • Bonus! Hit Protection: In Into the Odd and its descendants, HP (renamed "hit protection") represents your ability to avoid damage entirely. Once your HP is depleted, you start risking actual injury and death
    • Bonus! HP-and-then: I’m not sure what to call this mechanic, but both Mothership and Lancer make good use of it. Your HP is a countdown to taking some kind of mechanical wound. Each time you lose all your HP, something bad happens and then your HP resets back to a higher number. Way less boring!
  • Conditions: A specific set of delimited things that can be wrong with you. Can be physical (exhausted, poisoned, blinded) or emotional (angry, afraid, lonely). Approach used in: MASKS: A New Generation, Avatar Legends, Modern D&Ds (as supplementary status effects like fatigued, blinded, etc)
  • Stat Damage: When harmed, damage is routed to one of your character's stats, either decreasing it or putting the stat into a disadvantaged state. Approach used by Into the Odd, Fellowship, and The Brightest Things We Know
  • Blades Harm: Similar to stat damage, Blades in the Dark (along with the many Forged in the Dark games that take this mechanic) represents damage as escalating tiers of impairment (starting from "your actions are less effective" and ending at "you are dead or dying").
  • Fallout: In Spire: The City Must Fall, Heart: The City Beneath, and other Resistance games, your character builds up abstract stress, culminating in a concrete event called Fallout. They can range from physical injury to social consequence to the weird and metaphysical.
  • Wounds: Not quite a top-level mechanic in its own right, Wounds are rollable tables of bad things that happen to a character. Many games combine them with HP, either as the result of hitting 0 HP or as part of HP-and-then (where HP resets once a Wound is taken). Features in Errant and Mothership
  • Tags: Disadvantageous adjectives or statuses inflicted on characters to represent their state. Often can be taken advantage of through some mechanic as a weakness later. Approach used by Armour Astir: Advent, Monsterhearts 2e, and Tecnhoir

  1. While "just play it out" is very similar to "don't care", I think there's a distinction in that some games will be handling violence & danger at the level of the game, and others at the narrative. "Does that alien's ray gun hit me" is a pertinent question in Lasers & Feelings, whereas "what is the interesting outcome of this gunfight" is a pertinent question in Fiasco or For the Queen.

  2. A harm clock is just a round HP bar


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