Combat resources: HP/SP/MP.

[Psychic Robot]

The old Star Wars: Galaxies had a system of health (HP), stamina (SP), and mind (MP). You had various abilities that you could use to attack those "lifebars," but they had the downside of taking away from your own HP/SP/MP bars. If one of your bars hit 0, you were incapacitated until you had someone "heal" your bar.

Could this be a viable system for resource management in combat, or would it be too complicated?

[Username17]

Could this be a viable system for resource management in combat, or would it be too complicated?

Yes.

Frankly, Champions gets by with Endurance, Stun, and Body, and some people think that it is too complicated. So both are true.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

HP/MP duality is classic to most RPGs.
They get by fine without SP... but if you really want it, nothing wrong there.

The reason SP doesn't exist in, say, the myriad Final Fantasy series is because being forced to rest every few minutes of sprinting is obnoxious. I doubt the series would be as popular as it is today with Stamina involved.

Dungeon Crawl, on the other end, has Food as well as Stamina. Starving is a serious issue, possibly even too micromanaged for most tabletop RPG gamers.
It helps balance abilities though since god-tier raging berserkers and almighty glass cannon wizards can easily run theirselves down to nothing (death) within a few turns if their abstracted calorie burn exceeds food supply.

[ckafrica]

stamina is certainly obnoxious in Elder Scrolls games. Before we can say it's usefull what is it supposed to be for and how does it operate.

[Talisman]

I like this, conceptually. I also like the idea that you can deplete your own bars and attack other peoples' bars (warriors can attack a mage's Mana, for example). It could, if done right, allow for an elegant interaction between hackin' people up and searing them with arcane fire.

Having never played Elder Scrolls, I'd see Stamina as fatigue - Stamina damage represents wearing the hell out, and things that attack stamina are basically nonlethal attacks. Some attacks might drain your stamina bar, as you wear yourself out in an effort to nove strike your enemy.

(lurks and watches the thread)

[TavishArtair]

I must dissent. I don't think three "bars" to watch is too much information, certainly I can keep track of that much in the middle of a raging battle, but the problem is how much is the rest of the system, mechanically. So in this regard, I must agree. If you're proposing this in something that is, say, a 3e D&D-alike, or similar in design, I would stare blankly at you, because then it is too much.

It would have to be the centerpoint of a system that is fairly "light" in other regards. And depending on how you structure it, it might be an interesting game but not an interesting roleplaying game.

[Talisman]

it might be an interesting game but not an interesting roleplaying game.

Explain.

[Thymos]

While cool, this sounds more at home in a computer game.

It does sound far too complex for a pen and paper rpg.

You also need to ask yourself what you're gaining by adding the extra bars.

HP is to extend combat and have something to measure when your character can't take hits anymore. This ends up working great; usually.

MP is usually measuring how many spells you can throw before your spent. How well this works is entirely dependent on your system. If some classes (wizards) make use of MP and others (fighters mostly) don't, and you let people blow all their MP on one attack, or within a few rounds, then this doesn't really lead to... anything balanced. If on the other hand you give out a ton of MP and don't let people blow much of it at any one time, you have to ask why your bothering with MP in the first place instead of making those abilities at will (Final Fantasy games are pretty guilty of this). MP is interesting in computer games, but even there it's lately always a refilling bar that doesn't simply go from full to empty. Mostly because if it goes from full to empty without refilling it doesn't seem to work very well or at least isn't very interesting. This unfortunately means a lot of extra work for what doesn't seem to be like much gain.

Stamina, well even in computer games this is usually annoying. The only good use for this I've seen is like an HP bar that is far smaller and regenerates extremely quickly and simply has adverse affects when it's empty. In CoD4 and Diablo 2, when it's empty you can't run. In Oblivion you don't hit as hard. This seems kind of neat, but you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.

This is different if your talking about simply making 3 different HP bars to give characters weaknesses, as originally suggested. I'm simply evaluating the current most common uses of the 3 resources.

What your suggesting originally is just to split up HP. I don't know how well this can work, but it sounds like balancing this can be a headache.

[Maxus]

There was an old game--the Quest For Glory series--which actually the Health, Mana, and Stamina bar.

It was a fun game, although having crap stamina early on was pretty annoying.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The stamina bar in Quest For Glory was to put a limit on how much you could train in a day without resorting to heavy-handed 'you can only pump your strength stat up by 20' per day.

Of course, the game become much easier on the maxxing-out-stats front once you realized that you could funnel your health bar into your stamina bar... and you could bring your health bar up.

Not that it really mattered, since you had an unlimited amount of time to train in Quest for Glory 1 anyway, pills were cheap as free in the second QFG and stats advanced the quickest in that game anyway, you had unlimited time to train again in QFG3 if you weren't at a plot breakpoint, and you had unlimited time yet again to train in QFG4.

No, seriously, you did. Even once you advance to a certain point in the game where you would figure you had a hard time limit you really don't, as the plot device doesn't fully kill you.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Damn, I loved Quest for Glory 1-4. There are only two games I have played from start to finish as much as those games, and that's Grandia 2 and Kingdom Hearts II.


But anyway, I digress.

Why do you need three bars anyway? Why can't the magic bar come from the stamina bar? A lot of tabletop games and RPGs (including Final Fantasy) do that anyway.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Damn, I loved Quest for Glory 1-4.

Not 5?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I haven't played 5 yet. Mostly because I heard that they toned down the adventure and beefed up the action--but the combat system was never the selling point of these games anyway. The ridiculous puzzles and multiple ways to both kill yourself and complete the game were.

[TavishArtair]

it might be an interesting game but not an interesting roleplaying game.

Explain.

Pretty much what was just covered. Basically, covering multiple "bars" for each individual piece on the field is quickly a trying experience for a referee or anyone who has to manage more than one sheet, such that the mechanic works out well in a game where everyone controls ultimately just one piece, or well for a game that is completely computer masterminded.

[Manxome]

And a game where everyone controls just one piece is definitionally not a roleplaying game, according to you?


Various posters here seem to be making very narrow assumptions about how these bars would be used that seem to contradict what was said in the original post. Maybe everyone else here played SWG and I'm just confused because I didn't, but what I heard was "you have three bars that all function as both health and ammo," not "you will be forced to rest every few minutes of sprinting."

In a basic set-up with three dual-purpose health/ammo bars that are separately targetable, the basic strategy would be to use your highest bar to fuel your attacks and target your opponent's lowest bar (thereby dropping your enemy faster while staying up longer). Linking health and ammo also tends to mean that anyone who acts like a glass cannon becomes one and someone who's been fighting for a long time will be easy to kill even if his opposition was far below his level, which may or may not be desirable properties depending on how you want your game to look.

That's somewhat more complicated than the traditional set-up of "one health bar, one ammo bar," but doesn't seem so much more complicated as to be unworkable. Whether it's a good idea or not will depend on how good a job you do setting up powers that interact with that basic mechanic in interesting ways--you probably want each of the bars to be tactically and thematically distinct and for them to indirectly influence each other in some way that promotes tactical depth. I'm not sure exactly how that would look.

[Thymos]

Star Ocean: till the end of time actually had 2 health bars (HP and MP) and some attacks did use HP or MP to fire off.

The problem this game faced, that would be multiplied by having more players, was that it was more efficient to focus all the characters on damaging one bar in almost every situation except when faced with an extremely lopsided enemy. And I do mean extremely lopsided.

Basically whenever anyone hits a bar on an opponent other than they one that will ko the opponent, they aren't doing damage. So either all the players need to target different opponents, which can work and make for interesting tactics but leads them to be screwed if the opponents aren't all varied (if you face many opponents with one weakness, then only one attack type will shine leading the other two attack types to feel... ineffective for a bit).

The other tactic is to have everyone in the party focus on attacks that damage a specific bar and ignore the other two bars, which works in all but the most lopsided situations and leads to what we have with one HP anyways.

This also puts extra pressure on players to be well rounded defensively because they will eventually encounter an enemy that will target their weakness if they have one.

So under this system you can't have a weakness or you'll be a liability, so you better minimize whatever weakness you do have, and it makes more sense for everyone to have the exact same strength.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In Shadowrun, people have two bars. A stun damage tract (stamina) and a health bar. If you take too much damage to your stun bar you fall unconscious. If you lose your health bar you die. If you take stun damage after your stun tract is depleted you lose health.

Oftentimes an attack aimed at your health meter got converted to stun damage. This meant that against credible opposition attacking the health bar was an inefficient way of damaging someone. The easiest way to drop someone is to layer on the stun damage. And what do you know, they make an ammunition that adds +2 to damage (damage in Shadowrun is small, so this is a very big deal) with the 'disadvantage' of it always doing stun damage.

Now in Shadowrun this actually works out for the better, since it generally avoids the crazy-lethal combat you see in D&D. But the fact of the matter is that enemies only targetted one bar. Even if the health and stun tracts were equal in depletion and non-transferrable, people would've settled for targetting one or the other.

[JonSetanta]

Various posters here seem to be making very narrow assumptions about how these bars would be used that seem to contradict what was said in the original post. Maybe everyone else here played SWG and I'm just confused because I didn't, but what I heard was "you have three bars that all function as both health and ammo," not "you will be forced to rest every few minutes of sprinting."

Hmmm... Good points. Some of us are reciting what these bar-tropes are used for rather than for what they could be used, though.

Indeed, Stamina need not mean "Gets tired quicker, can't run, gets winded lifting a spoon to their mouth too many times". It could just mean "There is a limitation to using abilities that drain Stamina."

In the MMO Flyff there are 3 bars of HP, MP, and FP, the last being pretty much an MP bar for warriors.
There is a key difference though: MP skills never miss, while FP recovers faster by multiple magnitudes.