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[Teknonick]

Pilot

(Was going to put 'entry' but...)
Alright... so everyone knows what a hit point (Or health point) is. It's your character's life force, which, once it hits 0, makes you die (Or above 0, alive). When you fall in a game (From a high height), or get punched by a grandma, or trip on a bug, you take damage which decreases your hit points. We all know this. Most games call this "Health" or "HP" or even "LP" (Life Points). Of course some games have "Mana" and "Stamina", but that's beside what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is a new system, where we define hit points and health points. What's the difference? Why should there be a difference? Could this even start to belong in Mythruna? I say yes to all of that (... aside from that fact they aren't yes/no questions)! I don't want to throw all of those answers into one short paragraph... and simply want to waste everyone who is reading this's time (As least enough so I can get my point across), so bear with me here. (Rawr!)

Hit Points

Hit points. I don't need to say anything here, this is the very same thing we all know and love. You get cut, you take damage. You lose a limb, you take damage. You get beat by an old grandma bug, you take damage. Yep, there is nothing new here! Except for this little difference.... When your Health Points decrease, your maximum Hit Points decrease a little bit, depending on severity of the lowness of the Health-i-ness. Again... what is Health Points?

Health Points

Health Points is NOTHING like HP or LP or anything like that. Think... real life. "I'm sorry to say... but your health doesn't look so good. I really suggest you see the local cleric." Do you get it? No? FINE. Health is your health. There's no other way to put it. If you get sick (YES! SOOO AWESOME!) your Health Points would go down. If you get irritated by thousands of little bugs biting you, your health should go down (Because you're SOO irritated, and they are probably sick or ill). So, say you take a cut by some sword from an enemy, your Hit Points will instantly go down due to the way Hit Points work. But, if you manage to survive the assault, and you don't dress you wound, your Health Points will slowly go down over time. If you manage to heal up your Hit Points, but fail to dress your wound, your Health Pints will still be low. Your maximum Hit Points will also be lower than normal, and you might move slower than normal, and you might attack slower than normal, and... oh, you get the picture now, do you?

Outro

So, I hope I got my point across. Hit Points is for combat, and Health Points is for everything else (And sometimes simply the aftermath of combat). "What's the difference?" I just said that. "Why should there be a difference?" IDK, it would be cool? I would love to WORRY about fighting. Simply getting into a fight should be more than you win or lose. If you manage to take a cut from a poisoned dagger you didn't notice, you should have to deal with that. "Could this even start to belong to Mythruna?" YES! Haven't you seen how AWESOME this game is going to be anyway? Physics! Combat! AI! Monsters! Water! This is just a LITTLE extra thing to make it that much cooler.

Now I hope you like my idea, and don't have to comment other than saying "... get out of my house. How many things have you looked through? I don't even remember writing that idea down on paper!" or... err... I meant "I'm doing it." hehee... yeah.... But I hope you understand, and this would simply be REALLLYYY cool if you could add it! I might even have a little credit thing somewhere in the game saying "Teknonick" and then no one will see it, but I'll know it's there. I'll be proud because I helped improve the game. I gave out one of my idea's I've been cooping in my head since forever. I'll, BE AWESOME!

[pspeed]

Thanks for the lengthy and thought-provoking post.

Your motivations for what you describe are not too far off of my own motivations for the system as designed so far.  I have to factor in a few more things so my approach so far has been different.  Which isn't to say "better" but it's the plan I'm working from so far.  It's always morphing a little.

It goes something like this...

Your "life force" (whatever it ends up getting called though that's a pretty good bet) is sort of like your "health points".  It is some kind of direct function of your constitution, size, strength, endurance, whatever.  If whatever those things end up being change then your life force changes.  So if you take a hit to constitution (say you caught a disease) then your life force is lowered until you fix the unbuff.

Your body parts will have hit points in the classic sense.  Of course, so will armor, swords, chairs, doors, stone blocks, everything basically.  Your body hit points will be based on size, strength, and probably (initially) the same function as constitution.  Assuming that your body size or strength doesn't change then your body hitpoints won't change.

However, each disabled limb (or torso, head, etc.) has a con penalty associated with it.  Your head and torso will be really large percentages of your con (with a head being 100%).  If you get your head chopped off then your life force essentially ends up at zero because your max life force went to zero (or nearly so, buffs aside for a second).  If your torso is disabled, ie: 0 hitpoints remaining then you aren't dead yet necessarily but your head will die very soon.  The lack of a torso tends to cause damage to the head, after all.

Disease, poison, etc. are con penalties, basically.  Actually, it's just the generic idea that there _can_ be attribute unbuffs that is key here.  A poison _could_ affect both con and endurance for example... or a disease may affect just endurance (think of an illness that just makes you tired all the time).

Life force already had to be separate from your body's hit points because life force is how you cast magic.  There is no "mana" or "magic points" here.  Your life force is your magic points.  You could literally cast yourself to death.

The "magic power" attribute that I've discussed before (if it ends up existing) controls how much of your life force you must expend relative to the output.  (It's always a net loss but someone with high magic power is casting more efficiently than someone with low power.)  So, player A with a maxed out magic power may be able to use his "Wand of Super Death" a little longer than someone with low magic power.  What I mean by "net loss" is that if you have a "wand of healing" that channels your life force directly into someone else (without adding additional energy) then there will always be a loss in the transfer.  Always better to store additional energy into some kind of battery crystal to aid in the casting... though note that some of your own life force is always required to start maintain the reaction.  It just might be a trickle.

This operates similarly to how fatigue will work relative to endurance.  As you exert yourself, your fatigue will change based on your endurance.  High endurance, you can do more longer before suffering fatigue.  Hunger and thirst affects endurance and eventually con... so ultimately you get tired as you get hungry and if you get really hungry then your max life force goes down.  This is different than simply losing the points because they cannot be healed back up.  Furthermore, if you finally eat then you still have the lifepoint loss until you heal that up (though you regain life force automatically over time).

I like these systems because they sound complicated but most of it is a matter of applying unbuffs to one attribute based on some other attribute.  Since buffs and unbuffs will already be a core part of the engine (what good are attributes if they can't be buffed?) then it's easy to implement these rules.

And the life = magic points is cornerstone for me.  So everything will stem from that.  I played a game a long time ago where your magic points stacked onto your life points and you could cast yourself to death eventually.  Sometimes that was the make or break of a battle and those decisions are fun.  I just took it one step further and it fits Mythruna's mythology better.  No magic is done without player life force... so it should be expended in the process.  It is the most powerful and versatile form of magic in the whole Mythruna mythos... but it is forever in limited supply.

Protect your mages.  Every cut will reduce their effectiveness.  Sort of a nice side-effect of the system and completely intuitive to me.