The current health system seems really complicated, on par with much crunchier games. Are there any plans for alternative health mechanics in the final release?
To get at what I mean, here’s a breakdown of the current damage process:
1. You mess up a roll that has Harm as a consequence and the GM declares that as the outcome.
2. You take harm at a rating of 1-3 when you mess up a roll, the GM decides how much
3. You may decide to mark armor to ignore this harm
4. You can take the damage and put it in the relevant box (3 damage, by the way, puts you in a BAD spot). If you cant mark the box, it goes to the next size up (as expected).
5. If you’d like to mitigate some of that damage, you can make a Resistance roll. You roll Xd, the relevant dice pool, and take 6 – [max single die] stress. This stress is dealt regardless of how well you roll.
6. If you took stress, the GM can reduce the damage of the harm. From the book: “Usually, a resistance roll will reduce the severity of a consequence. If you’re going to suffer fatal harm, for example, a resistance roll would reduce the harm to severe, instead.”
7. If your stress track is full after this, you take Trauma. Once again, the book: “When you take trauma, circle one of your trauma conditions… When you suffer trauma, you’re taken out of action. You’re ‘left for dead’ or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict.”
There will be no alternative health mechanics in the final release (I like the current ones, of course. 🙂
Feel free to hack some up and post them here for discussion.
Cami S, I’d like to point out that those steps you list (except for step 4) are exactly the same for all sorts of consequences, not just harm.
Consequences are a fairly critical component to the system, and so there’s some depth in how consequences play out. As Will pointed out, much of the structure of assigning consequences is the same regardless of the form those consequences take, so we’re not looking at a particularly complex system, just one that layers an additional record-keeping component onto the already existing system.
And if you think about health status being akin to a modified clock (and it does behave like one in some ways) then we’re not even far away from core game concepts in the places where physical harm differs from other kinds of consequences.
Doesn’t strike me as more complex than many other systems, especially when broken down like that. It’ll likely take some getting use to for new groups, but I expect it’ll flow smoothly once the core concepts are grokked, as it were.
Funny you should mention that. I share some of your sentiments.
I am hacking it myself for a game of mine. Since: I like how stress and injuries are separate, but not as much how they play together. I have been experimenting with added mechanics: two shorter stress tracks (Focus and Stamina). Threats deal stress equal to their rating. And when you cant take stress because you haven’t enough, you take the overflow as harm at a rate of 2:1 (min, level 1)
I am sure I will post a more detailed write up soon in fact…been on my desktop all week
Mark Cleveland Massengale so stress act like hp and harm are “criticals” (a la Warhammer)? In this case, what’s the pourpose of resisting?
sort of, not really MisterTia86. This isn’t really a simple houserule. More of a new set of mechanics that fundamentally alter what is happening under the hood. I won’t claim it’s particularly innovative, but it’s what I am experimenting with at the moment.
Threats can force you to take stress (or back out of/rethink actions). And harm is what happens when your stress track is full but you’ve taken stress. Resist to avoid taking stress.
That’s similar to the original damage system for Blades (taking harm when stress overflowed). I ran into issues with it that didn’t suit the core game, but it’s not a bad mechanic.
Some hacks of Blades will need a very different harm system, depending on their genre and style.
Treating damage as a clock is not a bad idea. This could simplify things a bit at the cost of narrative abstraction. E.g., harm=ticks; at 4 ticks, you suffer -1d to everything; at 8 ticks, you die. (7 ticks is equivalent to taking 1-harm twice, 2-harm twice, and 3-harm once, thus filling up your harm boxes.) The long-term project for healing simply removes ticks from the harm clock instead of being its own clock. This sounds more appropriate for a “cinematic” play style where PCs take a pounding and just keep on truckin’.
Yep. The deconstructed harm clock is exactly where the current system came from. (Hacked from Apocalypse World’s harm clock.)