System grab-bags:Damage

System_grab-bags > Damage

Damage Generation

Roll determines damage

The amount by which a character succeeds at an attack determines the amount or type of damage dealt.

Example System; World of Darkness- A player rolls a pool of 4 dice for their attack and obtains 2 successes. The target then suffers 2 wound levels of damage.

Separate damage roll

After succeeding at an attack succeeds a separate roll of one or more die is rolled to determine how much or what kind of damage is inflicted.

Example System; D&D- A character wielding a dagger rolls a D20 to hit, having obtained a successful strike they then roll a d4 and add any other modifiers to determine the amount of damage done. If they were using a different weapon they may have rolled a die with a different number of sides or possibly multiple dice.

Tracking damage

Overall Health

Often referred to as Hit Points though other terms (Vitality, Life, Wounds) are also used. This simply tracks the character's health level from full to zero (or below).

Example System- D&D

Health levels

Characters have several health levels, such as Healthy - Lightly wounded - Heavily wounded - Incapacitated - Dead. Typically, pushing the character to the next wound level requires an attack to exceed a certain threshold of points. Each wound level causes different kinds of penalties.

Example system- World of Darkness

Setting / story consequences

This form of ”damage” is often pretty straightforward - if the character loses the conflict, then the setting or storyline is affected in some way he didn't want to happen. It's possible to make this more formalized, however. A character in a debate may need to make concessions each time he takes damage (Burning Wheel), or a god's realm may be transformed for the worse each time the god is injured. In Universalis, the winner of a conflict gets points which she can then use to add, remove or alter existing story elements.

Statistic damage

Some of the character's attributes are increased or decreased (depending on which one makes them worse), either temporarily or permanently. Some statistics that typically take damage are: hit points, attributes, experience points or levels, clones.

Wounds

Each attack may cause different kinds of wounds, each causing separate penalties (a wound on the right harm harming attack rolls and a wound on the leg slowing movement, for instance).