Best damage allocation system

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:47 am

So as frank said, if a giant mecha or humanoid suit rpg were to be made it should probably have damage to specific parts.

The problem is how the hell would you allocate that damage? Obviously called shots would have a hit penalty but the attacker could choose where, but what if they simply want to hit the opponent?

What should even count as separate parts? Do you have a left arm and a right arm, left and right leg, just arms, just legs?

The reason is I want to design a game inspired by this game

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/WARFRAME_Wiki

and armored core.

One where your basically a person in an exoskeleton, but you can modify your suit with different weapons and abilities.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 7:46 am

People "just trying to hit" are inherently going to target the center of the target that they can perceive. But as most any video (or post shooting picture) of a police shootout will show, most people can't shoot accurately under pressure, so you get bullets going all over the place.

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Notice the evidence marker 46 under the truck body? Apparently there were about 7 cops who fired over 100 rounds at that truck. The rest went into the cars and houses all along that street. And the two women in the truck were not shooting back.

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 8:15 am

Like kzt I think the standard attack should be directed at the centre of mass. Shots can then have a random chance of hitting the limbs or what not. I don't like a mechanic of aimed shots either hitting the location or missing completely. There are a few ways to handle aimed shots in a mecha game, you can have different charts for aiming at different locations, or you can have some type of confirmation roll then roll on the main table.

It would be interesting if you could have a location resolution mechanic without relying on a table, but I don't think it's possible. Since you will probably end up using a table then you want it to be as small and clear as possible. Also your locations don't have to correspond to physical locations on a mecha, hitting the weapons or hitting the jets are valid choices. Abstraction is going to be good, Battletech is close to the upper limit of complexity that most modern gamers will put up with, but even that is not as popular as it was in the 80s/90s. I'd look into how Warmachine handles their mecha and how Warhammer 40K handles vehicles.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 8:16 am

You only care about tracking damage to locations where it makes a difference. If you care that they have a rocket launcher in their right arm and a laser in their left, you want to track damage to left and right arms separately. If they just have a weapon system in their "arms" slot, you can make it a single hit location.

Tracking individual hit locations is a terribly slow way of doing things though. Might it be better to have a general damage value, and have successfully damaging attacks get a chance of a "vital hit", which rolls on a table customised to the mech? You can put damage to weapons, mobility reduction and pilot hits into that table and get a similar effect without all the location and varying armor charts and rolling 3 times for for every shot. Honestly location based damage is pretty bad at representing modern automatic firing weapons anyway - as that picture shows, real combat involves a lot of bullets, and either you track location for each shot separately (major timesink) or you "bunch" shots, in which case you are losing the realism edge anyway.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 8:48 am

So even for mecha games hit locations should be dropped?

I'm ok with that.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 9:08 am

The CBT HitLocations are pretty useable i think.
Left and Right Arm and Leg.
Center Torso, Left and Right SideTorso.
RearLeftTorso, RearRightTorso, RearCenterTorso for 2 Legged Mechs.
Head.
Quadrupeds work slightly different.
You roll 2D6 to determine where you hit with 12 being the Head.

Artless · Post by **Artless** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 10:48 am

How about staging damage? I haven’t personally run any combats using something like this but I imagine it might model shielding and general fire vs. called shots in an okay fashion. Anyway, what the staged tracks would be are kind of like miniature Stun>Physical overflows for each attack:

Attacks do damage along different, graded tracks ranked something like Light, Moderate and Fatal. Damage in excess of a lower grade moves up to a higher one, and aimed shots might allow you to “place” the shot along a grade for a penalty. So say your guy’s frame is good against general fire with shielding or whatever, but otherwise weak so his tracks look like:

Code: Select all

L&#58;&#91;&#93;&#91;&#93;&#91;&#93;&#91;&#93;&#91;&#93;
M&#58;&#91;&#93;&#91;&#93;
F&#58;&#91;&#93;&#91;&#93;

And you count up the lowest track until you can’t and then move up to the next track for each attack. Each attack would then log a hit against the track it landed on, removing a box for that track and each track lower. You’d be busted when you had no more Moderate boxes to remove, but dead or destroyed when you have no more Fatal boxes. Or, each attack deals an amount of boxes of damage corresponding to the track it landed on, you'd log those on a regular wound track.
Maybe you have to count up through the lower tracks each time you get up to a higher track. So it would actually take at least of 21 damage to log a Fatal hit in one go rather than 8 with that frame.
I dunno. Just an idea. In this, disabling specific stuff like weapons would probably be status effects like it is in other single-track models instead of individual targets to attack, and you might take a damage penalty or hit penalty to remove some specific capability.

If you wanted to rename the tracks to whatever, that's fine. Shields, Suit, Squishy; Armor, Vitals, Core. The point was to abstract the placement of shots so general shots that hit well can pile up and let you take stuff down eventually while "placed" shots are for when you cut the fat and try to shoot a dude in the head. Or engine. Or modified supercore.

I don't know if it's any good or close to what you might be looking for, but there it is anyway.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 11:28 am

Thymos wrote:So even for mecha games hit locations should be dropped?

I'm ok with that.

The way I see it, a human knight has weaker points in his armor, a vulnerable head, a sword in one hand and a shield in the other, and yet we don't clamour for hit locations in D&D. The extra complication involved in hit locations can be worth it, but I wouldn't automatically assume you want it just because it's a mech game. Decide what feel you want for the game first. Fast play or methodical? Tactical or knockabout fun? Then you can decide what is important enough to model and what can be abstracted.

silva · Post by **silva** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 11:59 am

Red_Rob wrote:The extra complication involved in hit locations can be worth it, but I wouldn't automatically assume you want it just because it's a mech game. Decide what feel you want for the game first. Fast play or methodical? Tactical or knockabout fun? Then you can decide what is important enough to model and what can be abstracted.

Yeah, this.

Last time I tried playing Battletech (for nostalgia reasons) I ended up playing the PC game.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 12:28 pm

If you deal with Hit Locations in a Mecha Game, then each Location should get it's own Health-Track.
Track full? Location destroyed. Has certain effects on the rest of the Mecha.
Leg gone? Slowed to a crawl. Literally. Both Legs gone? Stationary Target.
Arm gone? Wepaons/Gear/Ammo there lost.
Side-Torso gone? Weapons/Gear/Ammo there lost.
Center Torso gone? Engine destroyed, Mech Dead.
Head gone? Pilot Dead.

Battletech, at it's core, is a beer and Pretzels game.
It can get fucking over complicated, i'll be the first to admit that and complain about it . . but if you don't care about the advanced stuff, it's a quick and dirty system that uses only 2D6, a sheet and a Pen to mark Damage on and a Mini for the map.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 2:12 pm

The only times I've felt hit locations were really appropriate is when the PCs are fighting a really ginormous enemy. Then it gives it some cool videogame "boss battle" flavour to whittle the bad guy down piece by piece.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 3:58 pm

hogarth wrote:The only times I've felt hit locations were really appropriate is when the PCs are fighting a really ginormous enemy. Then it gives it some cool videogame "boss battle" flavour to whittle the bad guy down piece by piece.

More generally, any time you have the potential of attackers that are very much smaller than the target, having holistic damage is really unsatisfying. The moment that a panzerfaust causes critical existence failure to Godzilla is generally more insulting than anything else. Big targets want hit locations, whether they are giant robots or giant lizards.

If you're talking arena combat between robots of the same size, it's not important. But if you're going to include stuff that is considerably smaller, those hit locations are essential to make the size difference be felt.

It's actually a classic example of mechanics driving the feel of the game. D&D's lack of hit locations makes battles against very large enemies clumsy and stupid. If something has fingers the size of you, the fact that you're striking its hand should actually matter. If you're fighting a kraken, you should be fighting individual tentacles. And the game system should organically support that without some stupid kludge "kraken tentacle rule".

-Username17

zugschef · Post by **zugschef** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:06 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:If you're fighting a kraken, you should be fighting individual tentacles. And the game system should organically support that without some stupid kludge "kraken tentacle rule".

how would that system look like, roughly?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:59 pm

Each Tentacle has X HP and attributes and the Kraken itself has Y times Number of Tentacles + Body HP and Attributes maybe?

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 5:07 pm

Stahlseele wrote:Each Tentacle has X HP and attributes and the Kraken itself has Y times Number of Tentacles + Body HP and Attributes maybe?

So, the hydra?

wotmaniac · Post by **wotmaniac** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 5:25 pm

virgil wrote:
Stahlseele wrote:Each Tentacle has X HP and attributes and the Kraken itself has Y times Number of Tentacles + Body HP and Attributes maybe?
So, the hydra?

I had thought about that.
But there, you're actually chopping off heads. It feels like there should be some distinction between that and simply lobbing of arms.
(remember, we're not talking about simple human-like physiology, where lobbing off a leg can kill a guy in a matter of seconds)

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 5:28 pm

zugschef wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:If you're fighting a kraken, you should be fighting individual tentacles. And the game system should organically support that without some stupid kludge "kraken tentacle rule".
how would that system look like, roughly?

In one of the modules in the 3.5E War of the Burning Sky adventure path (spoiler alert), the climax involves fighting an animated statue that's something like 200 feet high. It has 2000 hit points and hardness 40, so you can nibble away at it with damage anywhere on its body or you can deal 200 damage to its head and then hits to its heart cause it to save or die. The head and heart have convenient glowing weak spots for the full videogame experience. The other hit locations are:
[*]Leg: 40 points of damage make it stumble and it needs a move action to stand back up
[*]Arm: 40 points of damage make it drop what it's holding in that arm
[*]Magic Weapon: 100 points of damage will make the weapon malfunction and 200 points of damage will break it permanently

They also have rules for climbing the statue and it has various standard/move/swift action attacks.

zugschef · Post by **zugschef** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:04 pm

hogarth wrote:
zugschef wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:If you're fighting a kraken, you should be fighting individual tentacles. And the game system should organically support that without some stupid kludge "kraken tentacle rule".
how would that system look like, roughly?
In one of the modules in the 3.5E War of the Burning Sky adventure path (spoiler alert), the climax involves fighting an animated statue that's something like 200 feet high. It has 2000 hit points and hardness 40, so you can nibble away at it with damage anywhere on its body or you can deal 200 damage to its head and then hits to its heart cause it to save or die. The head and heart have convenient glowing weak spots for the full videogame experience. The other hit locations are:
[*]Leg: 40 points of damage make it stumble and it needs a move action to stand back up
[*]Arm: 40 points of damage make it drop what it's holding in that arm
[*]Magic Weapon: 100 points of damage will make the weapon malfunction and 200 points of damage will break it permanently

They also have rules for climbing the statue and it has various standard/move/swift action attacks.

that's the "stupid kludge rule", but how would you design your game if you wanted to inherently include this?

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:11 pm

zugschef wrote: that's the "stupid kludge rule", but how would you design your game if you wanted to inherently include this?

I don't think I would want a one-size-fits-all rule. Every giant monster will have different weak parts, after all.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:31 pm

that's the "stupid kludge rule", but how would you design your game if you wanted to inherently include this?

The most consistent way is to be a game that does hit locations from the beginning. Then you have a rule that attacks which can only reach specific locations can only hit those locations.

If you wanted it to be emergent from a system that doesn't have hit locations as a normal thing to worry about, you'd want to either have it be a general ability you have for being much bigger than your opponents (weapon attacks don't deplete your hit points, they build up to give you location based injuries), or a general ability of dishing out a lot of damage (you cause rider effects based on hit locations).

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sat Apr 27, 2013 11:29 pm

Warframe has hit points and shields. No hit locations. I think there are headshots. That's it.

I hate called shots though. They're not particularly realistic, and they usually end up getting abused to fuck and back.

In Dark Heresy they had location-based armor and pool based HPs, so that you could have someone without a helmet in combat. But as soon as they introduced the talents that ignored called shot location penalties (level 3 or so) everyone went in full armor because to not do so was fucking insane.

Hit location for that was a percentile die- specifically, the reverse of your to-hit roll. Sounds nifty, but in reality everyone always forgot about it and it didn't provide much to the game.

If you're going to be playing a system that has more than just simple wound modifiers, where you can actually damage and lose sub-systems, then locational damage becomes interesting. Time-consuming, but interesting.

I still think Star Wars miniatures from FFG has a good idea. You have damage and crits. Once you burn through shields, crits knock out sub-systems as well as counting towards your ship going boom.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sun Apr 28, 2013 3:49 pm

Hit Locations are universally a trainwreck of terribadness in every team-on-team tabletop RPG that has ever been published.

The issue is that the desired gains in verisimilitude and increased tactical options are pretty much never ever worth the amount of game-slowing that the added complexity causes. Unless someone here has a genius flash of insight which allows for three rolls to resolve as fast as two rolls and/or multiple pools of hit points to be tracked as fast as a single pool of hit points then there are only four possible options for hit locations:

Expect players to wait for really lengthy periods in between each of their turns. This is the approach all current mecha RPGs take, and it's really problematic for any gaming group not composed entirely of ruthlessly focused OCD types.
Ditch the RPG aspect. You have a wargame, where the entire game is fiddly resource management. This is the approach BattleTech takes, and while it's doable, still tends to have issues with resolution time. You'll spend all of an afternoon session doing a 4-on-4 mech combat, and you probably won't even finish before Brian has to get home to the kids.
Ditch the Tabletop aspect. You resolve everything via computer / smartphone / tablet. This sounds great and should be easy in the current day and age - but it requires a large amount of preparation up front (coding damage location and health trackers for each mech's subsytem's between each system) and some pretty large areas of standardization within the system, which limiting the amount of customization players can perform on their mechs.
Ditch the Team-on-Team assumption. Here you have a game world more like Voltron than like Macross. Each player only tracks a single character / vehicle HP pool and the players fight a singular enemy giant monster of the week (with a singular HP pool). Possibly the player mechs can merge their Zords to form Devastator and work as a robot with location rolls where each player controls one location, possibly not.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Apr 28, 2013 4:39 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:Unless someone here has a genius flash of insight which allows for three rolls to resolve as fast as two rolls and/or multiple pools of hit points to be tracked as fast as a single pool of hit points then there are only four possible options for hit locations

... well in my infamous home brew system I ditch the extra rolls, ditch separate hit points and still do hit locations of a sort. More like a called shot mechanic I suppose.

Every character has hit points, attacks can damage those. Every character has limbs, attacks can, separately, damage those but the limbs don't have individual HP pools, they are basically binary single hit point targets. An attack with Sever can knock out a limb. It is not even a random limb. It is selected at the attacker's option. An attack with Decapitate can knock out a head or similarly fatal/KO extremity. If all of a targets non-fatal limbs are knocked out a Sever can knock out a Decapitate location instead.

This in turn requires relatively soft consequences for that damage in the long term (you may lose your limb use for a combat, but you usually expect to heal it for the long term), a lot of healing and effects that block, mitigate or control damage. But some of those effects to block damage, and various other things also permit the expenditure of limbs as a resource by the defender. Which is another way of simulating non-random disabling of limbs with minimal rolling and at the table complexity.

Players want to sit down and say "I chopped his arm off!" or "I took that hit in my arm and fight on without it's use!". You can do the first one as special damage/called shot and the second can be generated by the first or as a way of a defender opting to redirect damage or pay resource costs for other things.

I think it would work well for a mecha game. The Mecha Axe Attack gets a sever injury thrown in on basically all hits, that's it's thing. Desperate Robot Block lets you block critical existence failure with a disabled limb of your choice. The Mega Kamikaze Punch smashes up your mecha arm for extra damage on hit with it. Etc...

If you really wanted to you could roll the same mechanic in with actual separate hit point pools for limbs/hit locations whatever... but that is significantly more complex for tracking/accounting than just having a list of limbs with lines struck through the ones currently knocked out.

Still even that would help if you can just get over the thing where most such systems insist on randomizing the hit location. I mean sure that might be nice, but it's way too costly especially on standard/all attacks.

Basically, being able to hit anything other than "main pool of abstract hit points" doesn't need to be a randomly targeted thing with extra rolls. It can just be a selectable special attack effect.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sun Apr 28, 2013 6:20 pm

Do you really need to have the pool of hit points too?

Slade · Post by **Slade** » Sun Apr 28, 2013 8:40 pm

Thymos wrote:So as frank said, if a giant mecha or humanoid suit rpg were to be made it should probably have damage to specific parts.

The problem is how the hell would you allocate that damage? Obviously called shots would have a hit penalty but the attacker could choose where, but what if they simply want to hit the opponent?

Dragon Mech:
They have critical thresholds, doing a critical has chance to additional bad effects based on health.

They do have called shots vs mechs: Requires a spot check DC 15, full rd actions, -4 hit penalty, but the effects are magic tea party (though it gives suggestions like damaging weapon damages weapon, [isn't that just a sunder?], damaging arm causes one of the arm critical effects, etc)

But best idea is called shot to damage crew inside the mech; weapon needs to be piercing unless DM is nice, Crew must make a save DC = Mech reflex save rolled to negate; Split up mech's damage to mech (1/2 to crew equally taken in area, 1/2 to mech).

So if my huge mech used a 3d12 Sword with 28 str (assuming no power attack as that requires a lv 7 mech jockey) then average dealt 33 damage. So each crew that fails reflex takes 15 damage, mech takes 16 - hardness (usually 8 or something).
With Power Attack the damage will be better.

Since most crew are low levels (in general) that has a decent chance to kill the crew.

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