Do you think you could elaborate on your complaints with the whole idea of hit points a bit more? You say it has problems, is basic and that it's overused, but that's not much to go on (someone could say that about any commonly used aspect of video games - graphics, sounds, etc.). It seems like you're unhappy with the way most games have the player being able to perform the same stuff whether they're perfectly healthy or almost dead, but is that it?

Sure, fair point. Some of my issues with hit points is the zero penalty until dead. That tends to annoy me most with RPGs. For example a game with casters that have to be protected, it's a fairly standard tactic to just run past the frontline units and just whack the back ones. They'll have enough HP that they can easily take an attack from another warrior class in exchange for killing the casters. Granted this can also be construed as a failure in the RPG to have a steep enough penalty for not facing an opponent / moving past an opponent. But instead, most games have aggro systems and aggro abilities like Taunt as a way to try to protect the caster characters, instead of allowing positioning to actually work. (JRPGs tend to just cheat and let the back row not get hit)

It's also used as artificial gating too often. Just up the hit points on the bad guys, now it's more difficult. (or reduce the damage done by the player) Nothing breaks realism for me like playing a WWII game, and having to put round after round into a bad guy's skull. And Destiny with it's bosses that are basically giant slow moving sponges for damage are really lazy design.

I also hate the clutter of displaying a health bar and/or hit points on every character, and the change in focus that games with hit points and health bars have. You end up playing the watch the health bar game and the try to make the damage numbers get bigger game. Borderlands for example, I'm not really convinced it needs to have the RPG trappings that it does. It could have procedurally generated guns with different characteristics, and scrap the levels and hitpoint scaling, and it would be just as much fun, perhaps more so, as you'd never out level content accidentally or encounter something over your level, or get stuck not being able to play with a friend because the level spread is too great between the two of you.

There are definitely places where degradation of character traits is detrimental to gameplay. Mario is a good example, in that you certainly couldn't reduce the jump amount. However, they do shrink you and take away your fireball throwing ability if you get hit, which is certainly more interesting than if they just gave a HP bar over mario or gave him little heart icons in the upper left.

RE: Sir Weeble: Plenty of fast games don't have hit points. Sonic, Mario both don't have traditional hit point systems.

And I agree everything is a hit point system. Even mario's system is hit points, but it doesn't mean we all have to use the same exact implementation of hit points that we see from RPGs. I want to see more creativity, and more reflection on why someone chooses to use the standard hit point system, and see if maybe they can use something else, or put a different spin on it. I agree we have to be careful not to make a system that is too complicated to grok easily, but I'm kind of tired of seeing large numbers fly out of everything I shoot in action games.

You already kinda named it.

C) Independent limbs having health (Vagrant Story / Deus Ex)

But I love the way Dwarf Fortress is doing it. Limbs do not have health but there is a chance armor get pierced and a limb gets damaged in a certain way (bruced, muscle torn, bone broke, severed, etc). It all depends on the type of impact (slashing, piercing, bashing) and the quality of the material.

Some of my issues with hit points is the zero penalty until dead.

If I recall correctly Jagged Alliance games had such penalties. Your soldiers moved slower and shot worse the more damage they took. However I can see a reason why most of games don't implement such mechanic.

To keep a game challenging you have to tune it for certain player skill. Now if you cripple in-game character on damage taken you have second variable to factor. Now if you tune for full health character, any penalty will rump up difficulty so taking even light wound could mean failed level or battle. On the other side if you tune for example to 75% heath, then full health character will roll through the level.

This is in my opinion anti-pattern because it make a game easier for better players and harder for worse players while it should be the other way around.

That said I prefer games that instead of exact HP meters (be it numeric, percentage or bar) rather hint on player's status. For example screen blurs slightly and covers with red stains so you know you have to back off and heal or you die soon.

You could have a separate category for a bleeding wound, ie a type of Moderate Wound that would become serious after X turns, it's also easy to have a system where sleeping/resting someplace not clean/safe could aggravate a wound and promote it from Moderate to Serious, and Serious to Dead/KO. For Light Wounds, I think of them as cuts that will close on their own, bruises, etc, and while I'm sure someone could bleed out from a thousand cuts, for gameplay purposes, simplifying that case away isn't that big of a loss in my mind.

The abstraction of the life point has great value: it allows the players to quickly understand how it works. If wounds are a set of exceptions and complex situations, this draws a lot of attention to itself, and requires more "design space" (that won't be available to other features).

If you have a combat system that is very simple and can generate non-random injury outcomes, it could work, but under most circumstances I believe the complexity of such a system would make a game hard to get into.

Old turn-based tactics games used a similar system (I believe Wages of War did this) where a bullet would be fired by an enemy and hit a specific part of the body, determining the effect.

- Headshot = lethal

- Arm = decreases aiming capabilities

- Legs = Move slower (or can't move, or need to crouch to move, etc.)

etc.

You could also patch wounds...

The pro of this system is that the rest of the combat was relatively simple and allowed for such focus on survivability.

The con is that these outcomes were fairly random (you could not focus a shot on a leg for example, for a better chance to hit than say going for the headshot) which made this a lot less interesting than it could've been.

Is this all theoretical talk or do you have an applied project in mind?

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To keep a game challenging you have to tune it for certain player skill. Now if you cripple in-game character on damage taken you have second variable to factor. Now if you tune for full health character, any penalty will rump up difficulty so taking even light wound could mean failed level or battle. On the other side if you tune for example to 75% heath, then full health character will roll through the level.

This is in my opinion anti-pattern because it make a game easier for better players and harder for worse players while it should be the other way around.

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This is a very important point. From a realism and variety standpoint degraded performance is attractive, but I think the most important consideration has to be what's fun. Accrued advantage is the common criticism of Monopoly and Risk: you play for a small edge in the beginning of the game and then slowly grind out the inevitable win for hours. In general, once victory is more or less assured, you want the game to end as quickly as possible. Injuries can work, but they're difficult to get right.

I think Bushido Blade handled injuries well, as Alpha_ProgDes brought up. You could be injured and disadvantaged, but a single hit could kill so you were never out of it. On the other hand, if you have injuries and a slow hp style grinding to death, the player with a lead is going to be very hard to upset.

Theoretical talk since it came up in another thread about health bars and I didn't want to derail that conversation too much.

That said, my latest project is a turn based tank game, with no hitpoints. I look at where shots land, check the armor thickness at that spot, adjusted by the angle, compare that to the penetration, then if there is additional penetration leftover, I turn that into a distance. I then let the shot continue penetrating and see what it hits inside the tank, as the basic internals are modeled and given collision. If a crew member is hit, they can be wounded or KOd, if it's the engine is hit, it can be knocked out, a fire can start, the treads can be hit, rendering the tank immobile, etc. It's still early in development, in the end all those components may end up with some hitpoints, but I see no reason to display those numbers to the user, and I could keep it as just percentage chance each time a shell hits a location.

That said, I understand I can get away without hitpoints more in my game, than say, World of Tanks. In World of Tanks, you have but one tank, and many times you will get shot by someone you don't see, and it might not be that fun to get one-shotted and the game ends. War Thunder Ground Forces is very similar to WoT, but doesn't have hitpoints, but lets you respawn. In my game, since multiple vehicles are being controlled by one player, a single total loss or mobility loss isn't going to be nearly as catastrophic. (And I also recognize that games that feature people, component damage can get weird and detailed in confusing ways. Though hitpoints have their own weirdness, they at least are fairly simple)

And I had another project where a took the hit points out of a Tower Defense game, the creep path was raised up, and the player had to knock the creeps off the path to kill them -- this goes towards the sumo style positioning. It had some interesting gameplay elements, as ice could be used to make things slippery for example, instead of the traditional slowing of enemies that TD games tend to use as an ice effect. You're right in that it took up a lot of design space, pretty much the whole game was recentered around the change away from hitpoints.

Some of my issues with hit points is the zero penalty until dead.

Fair enough objection, but you can have different penalties depending on your damage level and still have hit points.

I considered doing something like you're talking about on a game I'm working on, but in the end opted to use the standard "perfectly fine until you're dead" method. My main reasons for keeping the standard method:

#1 - wounded animations would have required doubling my animation assets (2d game so 2x sprite count)

#2 - it's already standard so none would blink an eye at the lack of the feature

#3 - moving slower or jumping less when wounded would change how you traverse the world too much

#4 - being wounded means you're not playing very well already, so reducing your speed/accuracy/etc would just add insult to injury.

In the end 2-4 were just rationalizations to support #1. I'm hoping to have 4 character classes and various armors for them all, so in the end the choice was to knock out the classes, armors, or wounded animations/effects. Just a pragmatic solution overall. Classes and armor would add more fun to the game than wounded animations and a penalty system.

From a design standpoint, a wound system is a fine thing - if you've got the time/budget to generate the assets, or the style of game that doesn't require much in the way of assets. There's a lot of features that could be in games, but end up being cut due to number of assets required to implement it.

Yeah, the Resident Evils could get away with no health bar and just a set of wounded animations, and I think maybe only the last 'almost dead' one was actually penalizing movement. Obviously modelling 4+ sets of walking animations is not feasible if you have a limited art budget, though I think attempting to do a blend on the character with a red or black color can get rid of looking at a separate lifebar and remove the need to have numbers fly out of the air.