RPG Design Patterns

Provide a gauge for harmful effects on characters that hinders the use of related attributes and abilities.

Health Level, Weariness

Endgame, Hit Points, Wound Trait

Many role-playing games deal with exhaustion and mental or bodily injury. Games that want to incorporate the incremental effects of various forms of injury, whether physical or emotional, need some means to adequately simulate these effects without bogging down the game mechanics with too much minutiae. Any role-playing game that assigns a gauge to a character that somehow measures the character’s current state of health (whether physical, spiritual, mental, or otherwise) and uses that gauge to lower the effectiveness of related actions follows the Trauma Gauge pattern.

In its simplest form a Trauma Gauge has a value indicating the current degree of wounding that a character has suffered. This gauge hinders the effectiveness of all related abilities the character attempts. Often, a Trauma Gauge’s value is directly subtracted from a character’s effectiveness although this is not a requirement of the pattern. If a gauge measures the level of wounding a character has sustained and it has some increasingly detrimental effect on a character’s actions as its value increases, it follows the Trauma Gauge pattern. So, the greater the gauge value, the more the character suffers from his injuries. Note that the pattern does not require that there be any pre-defined level of injury at which the character “dies.” Depending on the game requirements, a character could continue suffering greater and greater quantities of trauma forever. In this way, the Trauma Gauge pattern greatly differs from the Hit Points pattern. Of course, there is nothing preventing a game designer from “mixing in” the Hit Points pattern by setting a limit to the amount of injury a character can suffer before expiring.

Note that any gauge that measures a character’s state of “Health” is, for all practical purposes, equivalent to any attribute measuring a character’s state of “Ill Health.” We have chosen to call this pattern the Trauma Gauge pattern rather than the Health Gauge pattern to highlight its differences from the Hit Points pattern. If you use an attribute gauging the level of “Health” rather than “Injury,” you could easily state that a character dies if his Health drops to zero. To have a Health attribute modify character actions, then, you would first have to determine the level of damage sustained before applying any adjustments (assuming a fully healthy individual applies a zero adjustment to his abilities).

The Trauma Gauge pattern is appropriate in games where you

1. Need to incorporate rules dealing with injury and possibly death.
2. Want to simulate the incremental effects of injuries on character actions.
3. Are willing to accept the added calculation demanded by the pattern.

If you find the arithmetical overhead too high a price to pay, you might want to consider the Hit Points pattern instead. On the other hand, if you are willing to live with even more bookkeeping to provide finer control over wounding effects, you should consider using the Wound Trait pattern. Finally, if you want to guarantee the survival of characters until their roles are fully played out in a storyline, you should consider the Endgame pattern.

Please note that the Trauma Gauge, Wound Trait, and Endgame patterns are not mutually exclusive. So, you might want to contemplate using some combination of these patterns in your game rather than rely on any one pattern in isolation.

The Trauma Gauge pattern provides a gauge of a character’s current level of damage and modifies the success of related actions based on this state of health. While this sounds like an unquestionably Good Thing at first, the pattern does suffer from a potential problem known as a “Death Spiral.” If a character is wounded in a game incorporating the Trauma Gauge pattern, his abilities are henceforth reduced in potency. This makes it easier for the character to sustain further injury, since any abilities he might use to avoid future wounds are hampered. Sustaining more damage means the character is even more susceptible to damage, etc. Unchecked, the pattern nudges a character further and further along a spiral toward his death (or similarly catastrophic result).

Generally, Hit Points are only modified and considered when a character sustains some kind of damage. A Trauma Gauge, on the other hand, must be considered on every character action to

1. See if it applies to the action, and,
2. Determine how much it affects the action.

Assuming characters perform actions more often than they sustain damage, the Trauma Gauge pattern requires more overhead. Obviously, systems can be devised that reverse this tendency. But, in most cases, Trauma Gauges require more overhead than Hit Points.

If you use the Trauma Gauge pattern, you will want to make sure that the gauge is applied uniformly across all related abilities so that it does not unfairly favor or hinder any particular character actions. One way to do this is to ensure that all character attributes lie on the same “scale” and all abilities use the same mechanics to resolve conflicts. In other words, don’t make your character’s Strength attribute range from 1 to 4 while his Agility attribute has a range of 1 to 100. Similarly, don’t use a d12 for Stealth checks and percentile dice for combat attacks.

To reduce the “Death Spiral” effect, some games apply an adjustment based on the Trauma Gauge to character actions rather than use the gauge value directly. The adjustments give a nod toward the debilitating effects of wounds without allowing them to overpower a character too quickly. So, a Trauma Gauge value of 10 might translate to a penalty of -2 and a value of 20 might translate to an actual penalty of -4.

Another option you might want to consider is to allow a player to “spend” his injuries by accepting temporary (or permanent) flaws in exchange for a reduction in his current Trauma Gauge value.

Consider an “Office Cubicle” game that has an “Emotional Stress” attribute specifying the current level of emotional injury that a character suffers. Conflict resolution is performed using 1d10, adding pertinent abilities, subtracting “Emotional Stress” and comparing the result to a threshold. The lists of traits and attributes include subjects such as “Office Gossip,” “Backstabbing,” and “Political Correctness.” The more meaningless paperwork piled on a character and the tighter his deadlines, the more emotional damage he sustains. “Say, Wilson, do you have those TPS reports done, yet?” Take 1 Stress. The character’s work ethic and productivity dwindle as greater quantities of stress are piled on. Fortunately, at any time, a character can decide to “spend” his stress points by indulging in some stress relieving activity:

In My Life with Master, minions have a “Weariness” attribute that increases as they suffer injury. Weariness is directly subtracted from all actions except when approaching “Connections.” Connections are NPC’s that enable minions to gain “Love” which is an attribute that allows a minion to resist his Master’s commands.

The Riddle of Steel has a Pain attribute that is subtracted from a character’s dice pools on every combat round. Pain accumulates as wounds are inflicted. The more Pain that a character suffers, the less effective he is in combat and magic.

Sorcerer has a Damage attribute (although it does not appear on the character sheet). This attribute accumulates all damage inflicted upon a character and is directly subtracted from all actions attempted by the character. Players have the option of having their characters make “Will rolls” without penalty to temporarily forego some or all of the effects of Damage. (This nicely sidesteps the death spiral effect.) The game specifies the physical effects of different levels of Damage in comparison to a character’s “Stamina,” such as “bruises,” “need stitches,” and “guts hanging out.” But, interestingly enough, it doesn’t explicitly specify that a character can die from damage alone. Death can arise when a character’s “Humanity” attribute drops to 0, but alternatives to death exist as well depending on what Humanity actually means to a given character.

The World of Darkness (Werewolf: The Apocalypse) gives each character a “Health Level” attribute. After a successful attack is made, a separate damage roll determines the amount of damage delivered. The game uses a dice pool for conflict resolution, so each success on the damage roll indicates a point of damage. The Health Level attribute has 7 possible values (8 if you count “Uninjured”). These are: Bruised (-0), Hurt (-1), Injured (-1), Wounded (-2), Mauled (-2), Crippled (-5), and Incapacitated. Werewolves regenerate damage at the rapid rate of one point per combat round, except for wounds delivered by silver, fire, or other supernatural creatures.