On Damaging

Recently in this week's Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee talks about the importance of having a proper effect in videogames to signify you're doing damage. Proper gunfire sounds, enemies reeling and spilling blood, numbers floating over their head, etc. Recently a game designer was asked why they had clumsy numbers floating up over creatures' heads when they took damage, and he said it was to assure the player that they're doing damage.

The point of this matter is how it applies to RPGs. In Fantasy Craft, the game I'm running, we have that floating number. More rarely, either due to a special effect of an attack or a critical hit, an enemy is weakened in a way that gives it actual penalties. This is the closest you're going to get to a sprite reeling or flying away. But most of the time you just get those numbers, which I don't think is very satisfying.

In a game like White Wolf's Storyteller system or Legend of the Five Rings, you have wound "levels" that penalize a character, and this may be more satisfying. It's less satisfying (at least in a wish-fulfillment sense) for the player, though, as they get to feel all the reeling and stumbling around wound too.

One thought or a system would be to give a player a choice when doing damage - bring an enemy closer to death, or cripple them (and make them easier to fight, or humiliate them). Another would to make critical hits more often, but give much milder effects, perhaps along with normal critical effects. Maybe some type of hero point system gives players an ability to blow off those injuries.

The Maelstrom system I was working on had a damage system where you could choose what sort of damage you took - but if you chose not to take an injury, you would come closer to actually getting killed outright. Similar systems could be used on the NPC end, where a player gets to buy effect rather than do straight damage, and build up points between turn. Maybe they degrade if you hang on, though, to encourage immediate use.

I try hard to describe purely numerical damage in my game, but it's tough. Maybe with more mechanical punch, damage can feel dangerous again.