TOASTER_TEAM'S PROFILE

400$ to make a game is ridiculous. Sorry to break it to you.

Here's a breakdown of my own costs for my own project:

1. Title screen art: 115$
2. Music track x1 (that's just one track): 40$
3. Programming 400$ (for about 25% of systems in).

So I'm already at 565$ and that's just the foundations. You'll notice I have no art included (which is by far the most expensive) because I do it myself.

400$ on art alone could work for you though. This being said that's not even the biggest problem.

You don't own Ghibli's creation, those are copyrighted. This has been discussed before. You'd be investing 400$ which you couldn't sell. If you wanted to share it for free as a gift to humanity, you could still be shut down because you don't own the rights.

This looks interesting. I think I've only ever commented other games once or twice but this deserves it. I'm not interested in the plot or the anime style so I won't play it but the art is solid. I mean, effort was put into it and I appreciate that. Keep at it!

Ok so how about this:

Every time you attack a die is rolled to determine where you end up hitting 6: head 4-5: body 3: left arm 2: right arm 1: legs. This would be displayed as a special die.

Then you roll a number of dice represented by the combat ability of a character. In other words, a combat 3 means you roll 3 dice, a combat of 2 means you roll 2.
The highest roll is selected. So for example, with a combat 3, you’d roll 3 dice: 2, 4, 5; 5 being is highest roll. If you opponent has a combat of 2: 1,3: 3 would be the highest roll. This is pretty much the same as in the board game Risk for those who are familiar. This means that lower skilled character still stand a chance against tougher fighters.

Then you compare if you succeed or fail in your attack. If we keep the example above:

Player A: 5 vs Player B: 3. This means player A succeeds at +2.

Now let’s take another example:

Player A: 3 vs Player B: 5. The player misses at -2. (the enemy dodges the attack).

+2 or -2 is what I’d call the margin of success. The higher the margin of success, the more potential for injury. On the other hand, a lower margin of success means missing of even worse, a counter attack from your opponent. Not that this takes place in a typical turn-based combat: A takes his turn then B takes his turn etc…

How about this:
Different weapons are affected differently by the margin of success.
Dagger:
+1, +2: Graze
+3, +4: Light injury
+5: Serious injury
VS
2-handed battle axe:
0: Graze
+1, +2: light injury
+3, +4, +5: Serious injury

This would keep different stats for different weapons relevant. Not that weapons would simply cause different damage but that’d be one difference from one weapon to another.

This leaves armor and how it affects gameplay. While I do want armor in the game, I don’t want it to further complicate things. I think the best approach would be to reduce the margin of success.

For example:
Being hit on the head while wearing a helmet thus decrease the +2 MoS (margin of success) to +1 and the type of wound you’re getting. I think that’s simple and straightforward enough.

Now the question is, how can I integrate the heart in all this? In the description I’ve provided so far, I’ve talked about how combat influences the potential for injury but not how health comes into play.

Any ideas?

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Another option is to drop regular die and use special die instead:


Big Crown: Critical Success
Two small crowns: success
two small skulls: minor failure
One big skull: major failure

Maybe I could play around with that concept.

There are differences of course, but I don't know what exactly this system is supposed to accomplish. I don't think it's realistic either.

I think it's realistic that the more wounded you are the less efficient you end up in battle. That's not really what I'm going for however as an end result. I'd agree that just getting weaker the more injured you become is not a thrilling alternative to a basic hit point system.

Anyway, as for the hearts system, it seems to me that it would make more sense if tougher creatures got a lower wound category rather than surviving more wounds of the same category. A punch that causes a serious, but not life threatening wound, to a five years old child would be unlikely to cause a serious wound to an well trained adult, rather, it would cause what you call a light or medium wound. Heck, try the same punch on an elephant and I doubt anyone would say the elephant got wounded.

Oh, I like that. That's a good idea. There's ground to work from this.

As for innovating, it does require more work and trial for sure. I'm hoping it won't be too time consuming as I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel after all.

If you're using dice, I'd say each Graze could be used to inflict a -1 penalty on the next roll. As a rough example, if you're using a D20: 15-20 is a miss. 9-14 is a graze, 3-8 is a light wound, 1-2 is a serious wound. I would avoid instant critical wounds, but of course those can be 1 if you jog the numbers around. That means that if you've been grazed twice, 15-20 is still a miss and 9-14 and 11-14 is a graze, but now 3-10 is a light wound. This means you could get to a point where is it impossible to be further grazed (as now 3-14 is a light wound), but you're still dodging around because you're rolling 16+.

I'm using D6 for the game, do you think it could still be applied then:


This being said, I like the idea that grazes increase the chances of getting a more serious wound further down the road.

How about this:

Instead of representing health reserves, hearts represents your resistance to injuries. Every time you are wounded, your hearts will determine what type of injury you will end up with (from a pool of possible injuries). Some injuries will reduce your heart meter which in turn will make you more prone to more serious injuries further down the line.

Healing would involve picking which injury you want to heal (and removing the associated debuff).

What do you think?

Alright so I want to do away with "hit points". It's a fossil in the rpg genre (my opinion) and too seldom questioned or pioneered upon. The reason is likely because they’re easy to handle in the rpg genre in general. More powerful monsters have higher hit points to compensate for stronger players.

I frankly don’t like it (which is problematic since it’s pretty much the only alternative out there). There’s a good reason for that; they’re difficult to replace. It’s easy to say you don’t like something, anyone can do that, the hard part is finding an alternative.

Now I’m using lower numbers in my game, probably going as high as 10 as a number but hopefully no higher. This includes health of course. If 10 is the highest, the most legendary of scores, weaker characters would need to be able to survive in-game without risking of dying in a single hit. That’s essentially the challenge of the whole thing.

I find a certain charm in lower numbers, it’s simpler and more accessible than having 9999 dropping all over the place. Darkest Dungeon is a good example of lower numbers being attractive. Paper Mario did that as well if I remember correctly.

The challenge is keeping battle realistic without being too lethal. It doesn’t make sense to me how someone could survive more than a couple of sword strikes for one thing.

One option is making it more difficult to hit in the first place and making the consequences of being hit more important. The problem with that missing too often means combat really isn’t progressing and that can drag on and become boring.

Having lower numbers also has the challenge of having a diverse set of weapons with their own pros/cons. You can’t just rely on damage to differentiate a dagger from a sword for one thing. Besides, damage output to differentiate weapons is also sort of a let-down, it’s creatively lazy I think.

Darkest Dungeon death’s door is what inspired me to do away with hit points entirely, that and the injury system of Shadowrun pen and paper. They both have game mechanics which are clever, especially Shadowrun. Shadowrun keeps track of your injuries. It becomes harder to fight the more injured you are. I think that’s not only smart but also realistic and consequentially something I wanted to have in my own game.

So I’m thinking of using injuries as opposed to abstract “points”. I liked the idea of having random injuries selected every time a character is hurt. I couldn’t just have all the various injuries as one big pool, I needed various “levels” of injuries; from light ones to potentially fatal ones. I also needed to tie this in with the health characteristic of player characters and implement a way for opponents where it wouldn’t end up being too complex.
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So, basically, that’s where I’m at now and what I’d like to discuss. My objective in creating this thread is to read suggestions from other people and also to point out where the HP alternative I’m putting forward comes short so that I can fix it before it’s hard coded in.

Everything written in this original post is brainstorming, nothing set I stone. I’m trying to organize and tidy up my set of ideas to make them practicable,
unique and fun.

For example:

Suppose a wizard has a health of 2. He therefore needs to be fragile without being a glass canon.

My starting point would be too each unit of health represent being able to sustain a certain amount of injuries. A first reaction might be to say: “Well, what’s the difference with hit points then?”. For one thing, every type on injury would have different impact.

Suppose a health unit means you can sustain a certain amount of injuries before being in a critical state (think Darkest Dungeon Death’s Door here) where every single hit might mean your death, regardless of the gravity of the wound sustained.

So basically, how about something like this:

Graze: has no immediate effect on a character but they’re being kept track of. Once you reach a certain amount of grazes, character are inflicted a single light wound. Grazes are dismissed post-combat. They’re too light to really amount to anything outside of combat that is. It’s sort of a safe “injury”. Three grazes could lead to a single light wound.

Light wound: light wounds have consequences. It can be something like an injured arm which lowers combat effectiveness for example. Light injuries carry over after battles so they’re to be taken more seriously so to speak. You can’t die from light injuries however. Since they do stack, getting healed before the next encounter becomes important (whereas grazes do not carry over). As you stack more light wounds, the next injury leads to a serious wound. I’m thinking of 3 light wounds to keep with the grazes vs light wound concept.

Serious wound: Serious wounds are well… serious. They have much more serious consequences than light wounds. Serious wounds can lead to critical wound which in turn can lead to death. Serious wounds are also harder to heal. Stacking up 3 serious wounds leads to critical wounds.

Critical Wounds: These do not have consequences per se but each critical wound increases the likeliness of dying for each consequences wound.
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This doesn’t mean that the only way to die is to gradually stack wounds from level to level. All sorts of injuries can be sustained in battle.
So that’s about it right now and this message is long enough on its own. Let me know what you think!