Remove featherfall or make it useful

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Andrew:

Losing 50% of your hit points doesn't scale with your hit points. It is always 50% of your hit points regardless of how many hit points you have.

That's the EXACT definition of scaling with hit points. It does 300 when you have 600; 500 when you have 1000; or 5 when you have 10. It doesn't do a set amount; it does an amount that changes based on your hit points.

And I agree that hit points are a bookkeeping abstraction, but that's irrelevant to the issue of scaling damage dealt to max hit points.

Systems that don't use hit points:
--Hero System
--Storyteller
--original Legend of the Five Rings, and others which use the same 'exploding d10' system
--Shadowrun

Most of these also have wound levels, which apply penalties of one sort or another. I played a fair bit of Shadowrun, and GM'd it some as well...and let me tell you, designing a combat in Shadowrun was *hard* because of the way penalties worked. A character with moderate wounds, lost a LOT of effectiveness...or, conversely, if the party got in the first licks, the fight might become very easy, very quickly. A good GM can pull this off, but it's not something to leave to the whims of a random number generator. Building a dungeon crawl based on this would give something *seriously* different.

Actually, if you want games that don't use hit points per se: many first person shooters. These games are all about reflexes, and resource management...you've only got so many healing potions and top-notch ammo.

[Derakon]

Every FPS I can think of has a health gauge and litters healing packs all over the place. Recently they've taken to letting you regenerate if you don't get hit for awhile, but you still have a health gauge that, once depleted, causes you to undergo spontaneous existence failure.

[EpicMan]

I'm pretty sure all FPSs use the hit point system, they just replace the raw numbers with a pretty bar and make their health potions look like first-aid kits or other generic 'medical' stuff.

Sure, some FPSs have minor penalties for low health (Secret Service comes to mind), and some give their players innate regeneration after not taking damage for a while, but it all boils down to 'this much damage will certainly kill you, less than this will never kill you'.

If you want a more realistic model look at Dwarf Fortress (well, more realistic except your dwarves gain power like Angband characters to become virtually unstoppable killing machines). You can take organ damage (damaged eyes = blindness, damage heart/liver/brain = probably instant death), bones can be broken and limbs can be lost. Just don't try it if you get headaches easily - the ASCII graphics in DF are a bear to look at and decipher.

[Hariolor]

*snip to put on new trap thread*

[Storch]

My questions were not connected to traps in any way and I apologize for hijacking the thread :-)

To explain my view more clearly:

• It is OK for high-level chars to have lots of HP and survive things low-level chars couldn't. It is even realistic - boxing champion or american football player survives with no problem during every match such beating that it would very probably kill me or at least required long stay in a hospital.
• I do not need realistic damage simulation of severed limbs and punctured spleens. HP abstraction is good enough.
• It is not OK that it is possible to do everything the same at 0 HP as if nothing happened. I would expect gradual deterioration of strength, carrying capacity, speed etc.
• It is not OK that it is possible to heal from almost dead to full health instantly and repeatedly and that it is integral and necessary part of the gameplay.

[Hajo]

[*]It is not OK that it is possible to do everything the same at 0 HP as if nothing happened. I would expect gradual deterioration of strength, carrying capacity, speed etc.

Loosing carrying capacity at low HP might turn annoying - if you won a battle, but got badly hurt, you must collect your stuff newly from the floor after resting a while.

If you need to flee a battle, but stayed in it long, you might have lost vital equipment ...

[cinereaste]

It is not OK that it is possible to heal from almost dead to full health instantly and repeatedly and that it is integral and necessary part of the gameplay.

This seems to be a pretty fundamental part of game play at the moment. Do you have an alternative?

For me, this sort of healing never bothered me. Yes, IRL people can't drink a potion and suddenly have limbs grow back, etc. But magic doesn't exit IRL either. If people are worried about realism in terms of healing, then shouldn't they also be concerned about realism about magic? It's magic healing. If your system allows magic that breaks laws of physics, why not have healing magic that breaks laws of biology?

[Derakon]

It's not inconceivable that you could rework Angband such that in-dungeon regeneration was limited to use-on-pickup items dropped by killed monsters or found on the floor. Thus the only ways to heal would be to keep killing or to retreat to the town. You'd have to completely rework monster damage to make this work, though; dealing >25% of the player's max HP in a single turn would be completely out of the question.

This would have the happy side-effect of basically eliminating instadeaths. It also wouldn't be Vanilla any more by any stretch of the imagination.

[nullfame]

It is not OK that it is possible to do everything the same at 0 HP as if nothing happened. I would expect gradual deterioration of strength, carrying capacity, speed etc.

Well, there is the stunned side effect. If you have taken a real beating you are likely to be stunned or cut so that satisfies "weakened at low HP" for me.

It is not OK that it is possible to heal from almost dead to full health instantly and repeatedly and that it is integral and necessary part of the gameplay.

The potions that allow you to do this (Life, *Healing*) are currently (3.1.2v2) pretty rare. Taking Morgoth-quality damage would require at least two !healing to recover from.

[Storch]

I do not want to make angband "real". I accept that magic is magic and that magic healing potion is not aspirin.

What I wanted to say is, that I do not like these aspects from gameplay perspective. I usually do not enjoy fighting Morgoth much because it's just a bit silly war of attrition.

Eddie mentioned Runequest which uses different system. I was interested if there are other examples of playable, enjoyable alternative systems.

[Derakon]

I'd interpret a non-war-of-attrition fight with Morgoth as being a fight with Morgoth in which you don't rely on difficult-to-replace consumables. And, well, you can still do that. Replace your healing items with Cure Critical Wounds, available in infinite quantity from the temple. Use Phase Door (available infinitely from the alchemist) to get away before you chug the potions. Use Rods of Teleport Other (you should find plenty in a standard game, and they don't get used up) to deal with summons. The only remaining special item is one use of Destruction to set up the battlefield, but if you can't find a single scroll of Destruction all game then there's no hope for you.

If you want a fight where healing isn't needed at all, then you're going to have to seriously rethink how Angband combat works.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

My first dungeon crawl games go all the way back to the C-64, Apple IIc, and Amiga. Wizardry, the Bard's Tales, the early Might and Magic, the Ultimas, the early SSI D&D games, lots of secondary games I don't even recall now.

GENERALLY speaking, healing in all of these was pretty easy to do, even in combat. Especially as you neared the endgame.

A very unusual characteristic of Moria/Angband is that it's a single adventurer. This changes the dynamic with huge fights. Games do sometimes set up the real, major fights (those that end at least a major section of the game) as the player against 1 really powerful, *solo* monster...but it's still usually 4 or 6 party members against that BBEG.

Such a fight is always, to a degree, a battle of attrition. How can it really be a BBEG if you can drop it quickly? And where's the drama if it can't threaten you? This is where the difference between a solo character and a party kicks in. With a party, you can devote 1 character to healing, maybe 1 to buffing, as seems appropriate to you, while the rest attack...you still move towards the goal. This opens the door to more tactics, but it's still attrition. With a solo character, you can't do that...or to put it differently, there's no capability to both deal damage AND heal effectively at the same time. So, you're trading off dealing damage when you can, and healing when you have to.

Derakon's PD + CCW is still attrition combat; the fact that you have near-infinite supplies doesn't actually change that. Any combat that runs 20+ rounds, and in which you'll be forced to heal or recharge extensively, is an attrition combat. If I need three Meteor Swarms to take something out, taking 200 damage in the process, that's not attrition combat. If I need to cast a dozen mana storms, and heal 1500 points of damage taken during that time, THAT is attrition combat.