Blunts vs. sharps

Traditionally in Ultima games, blunt weapons and sharp weapons have worked the exact same way, they've just had their specific damage and weight. It would be nice if they had different effects, though.

Here are some suggestions,

SHARP
* Chance to pierce, which causes serious bleeding. While a target is bleeding, they take damage over time. My preference: the rate of bleeding would depend on the damage, and could be pretty small, but would last a long time if it were a big wound, and only stop when the wound was attended to outside of combat.
* A critical strike can kill.

BLUNT
* Chance to knock down a target and cost them a blow to their stamina.
* A critical strike can knock unconscious.

And I just wanted to start a discussion, so I wanted to cover how other games have handled this.

Modern MMMOs like LOTRO and WOW have wound effects, which include different types of bleeding. These are debuffs that pass within a short amount of time, then stop.



My problem with this system is that its pretty short game time. If a 1 hp blow causes you to bleed, the bleeding should end soon. But if a 10 hp blow causes you to bleed, it should bleed for a long time in the game until you attend to the wound.

In Darklands, there were two stats, Endurance and Strength. When your Endurance was depleted, you were knocked unconscious, and when your Strength was depleted you died. Blunts did more damage to Endurance, and sharps did more damage to Strength.



This obviously relies on a different stat. In theory, complete loss of Stamina could cause you to go unconscious, but then you'd go unconscious from running and jumping too much.

Path of Exile has a more complex bleed effect, called puncture. The damage per second is based on a percent of the initial hit, and if the target moves, the effect increases. But this also wears off pretty quickly.



This is again a very shortly timed effect.

In Unreal World, injuries are specific and based on a location on the body and some cause bloodloss, which increases over time if the bleeding doesn't stop, usually requiring you to treat the wound. Heavy blows -- say from bears --can also instantly knock you unconscious and sharp strikes -- from lynxes -- can instantly kill you, if you aren't protected and don't have armor, which absorbs the attacks.



This is closer to what I'd like, but I wouldn't ask for the injury system to be as specific. Just to have a bleeding effect that could be removed. I also wouldn't ask for it to be as unforgiving.

Anyone have any ideas or input?

 

Two more ideas, which may or may not be far out, just throwing these out there:

* Effects like bleeding or even poison could take their toll using the type of 'stat fatigue' system I proposed with hunger, whereby there would be a cap on your max health. That would mean that staunching the bleeding wouldn't automatically raise you to full health, it would just remove the cap on your health. After the bleeding is staunched, then you can work towards regaining your health.

* Blunt damage might cause wounds that would appear as stat caps too, in that they would have to be healed, but wouldn't accrue over time.

* Losing all your stamina could possibly knock you unconscious, but there would be a minimum amount of stamina necessary for the game to allow you to run or jump, so you couldn't lose all your stamina by running and jumping -- only through blows.

 

My problem with the basic concept is realism. If you're going to have different weapon types have different damage effects.. they do it in a way that makes sense. You shouldn't have to stretch the logic or imagination in order to think.. hmm ok that might make sense.

Impact weapons for example or more damaging to armors.. and blunt damage is going to bruise and break bones.. cause internal bleeding etc.. slashing would cause the most bleeding and piercing the most internal damage. Then there's armor types vs damage types. Plate is most effective vs slashing.. pretty effecting vs piercing unless there's enough force and at the right angle.. but it takes the most damage from blunt. Chain is effective vs slashing but has very little effectiveness vs piecing and practically nothing vs blunt. Leathers are best vs piecing and fairly moderate vs others etc..

I don't want to see normal damage types having strange effects on stats. If it's worth doing it's worth making sense.

 

Part of the point of this thread is to open up discussion on this and get input from others here on what they think would make sense. So what type of effects would you suggest? And what did I suggest that make sense and doesn't make sense?

What would you think of the general concept of "wound" or "bleeding" caps on your health, like I suggested in my second reply, that occur from specific injuries. These would have to be specifically treated before your health bar could increase to maximum. The wounds could then heal because of treatment, or during camping, which might substitute for the need for sleep. Camping would then just remove wounds, allowing you to recover to max health.

 

So this would be a possible use of the system I was thinking of for sleep deprivation and hunger,

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I still conceptually like the idea of sleep deprivation, but realize it causes game problems. So sleep could be used for other things like recovering from certain wounds or injuries. Hunger would build pretty slowly, so I don't think it would cause game problems or tedium even with the stick approach.

 

I was mainly looking at what other games did. Simply getting hit with a mace isn't going to drain your stamina. Losing blood.. that would drain your stamina. You could make an arguement for most cases sure.. but it wouldn't make obvious sense to players if it's too ambigous. And I already suggested a few things.. ie vs armors.. specific would types like broken bones. Most of which is almot certainly beyond the scope of what the SotA combat system will give us as adding this kind of thing starts to get expensive.

But I suppose I can simplify this a bit.. armor vs weapons as it pertains to damage taken by the player can come either as bonuses vs armor type or penalties against damage. Either works.

*I* would consider damage effects on specific locations. Damage to arms reduces effectiveness of weapons.. just about any damage in general to keep it simple. Pain is pain.. broken bones would render an arm useless. Damage to legs would reduce movement speed/mobility.. dex penalty.. broken bone severely so.. bone breaks would be considered criticals.

Bleeding would reduce stamina faster than health. You kinda need the blood to deliever oxygen and such. I do like the concept of larger wounds making bleeding last longer.

Piercing I'm not so sure about. While slashing and blunt may work well everywhere you're really only going to use piercing on the torso. Piercing is good for limited bleeding but otherwise might be limited to extra damage.. possibly having the highest potential for critical hits for straight up extra damage. Assuming it get past the armor.

I would balance all this with armor vs weapons.

It occurs this idea might play into RG's notion of showing damage via animation rather than by UI health bars. The question is how much animation would be required.

 

Yea, you'd still need it to affect your health bar or stamina bar until its treated, though. What do you think about using my stat cap system for specific injuries?

 

If I understand it correctly.. limited recovery until wounds are treated.. it'd be fine by me but might be a little too much micromanaging health for others. Especially those of us of a non-magical persuasion. I'm a little torn between immersion and playability. A group of fighters has a tough fight in a dungeon and can't fully recover because they either don't have the supplies, the skills or the spells. Then again it just might make things interesting. They wouldn't necessarily be able to rest or camp unless an area was secure.. and that's another can of worms to deal with.

 

You'd be able to buy potions though to help.

The way I'd argue potions to work is to have an effect over a period of minutes, rather than immediately, btw.

 

That's fine with me. I never gave it much thought but the instantaneous potion effect is about as realistic as game combat mechanics.

on a side for my rangery part I will be making much use of non-magical healing skills including extensive use of any herbs that might be available. As it has already been confirmed awhile back there will be non-magical healing of some sort.

 

As I am a nurse (surprise!) and spent five years working nightshift in the county ER here in Los Angeles, you can imagine that I've seen just a little bit of what various types of wounds do to a person. I think I can claim just a bit of personal expertise. The preceding sentence is NOT pure sarcasm, I am willing to defer to the expertise of, oh, say, a doctor. Perhaps a coroner? But I also do think that I understand quite a bit about exactly how to make the standard issue human die.

First, just so y'all know it, the primary mechanism of death, in almost all cases of trauma, is shock. Shock occurs when the body is having trouble keeping itself on an even keel, and if pushed far enough over, it just gives up. It's not that you are out of oxygen, or blood, or that your heart is physically incapable of pumping, there is just a certain line for each person past which their body will wave the white flag, throw in the towel, and stop trying.

The easiest way to induce shock is trauma to deep tissue, especially vital organs, in the torso. This is how piercing weapons work, and is why a well placed arrow will drop a target in the first shot. It doesn't HAVE to pierce a vital organ (though that is certainly encouraged)

This being the case, Piercing weapons have an inherently large damage range, going from "Through the eye/heart/brain/etc!" Instant kills, down to, as Bowen pointed out, glancing hits that were slowed by armor or impact with a superficial bone, that barely cause a scratch. Anyone who's ever shot a bear and landed in the fat knows how effective THAT is. So highest max range, lowest minimum range.

Slashing weapons are almost entirely based on blood loss. Blood loss comes from severing blood VESSELS, not just tissue. I had a picture on my cell for a few years that a guy asked me to forward to his buddies. It was of the three inch long one inch deep gash in his forarm (radial, not lengthwise, if you care). There were no major blood vessels caught in it, just muscle, so it barely bled (Though a surprisingly small untreated bleed can become life threatening, it takes a couple of days. Not relevant to a discussion of combat damage.) Many slashing weapons have points and can be used to thrust, allowing for gruesome piercing blows that have extended width due to the cutting edges. They have less capacity for instant kill, but not by much. it just takes more force to push a sword through a chest than it does an arrow. They do, however almost always inflict a worse "minimum" wound than a purely piercing weapon. The scratch from a glancing arrow is barely noticeable, a light cut from a razor blade can leave a six inch bleeding gash. Smaller range, lower max, but much higher min.

Bashing weapons are death by bruising. This may sound silly, but stop and think about what would happen to you if I bruised your LUNG. Or liver. Or brain. This is frequently what kills victims of motor vehicle accidents. Technically, this is also what is happening to broken bones, they're brittle, so when smushed, they break. It takes considerable force (buick?) to inflict an instantly fatal bashing wound, but they don't really care so much about what kind of tissue they hit, bone, fat, muscle, it all bruises the same, and massive tissue bruising can lead to shock. Not to mention all the crushed bits of you that don't work so good anymore. Thus, Lower max (cause it has to be a hit to a vital spot, eg a crit, in order to do that much) BUT, there isn't really so much with hits from a bashing weapon that don't hurt.

Pound for pound, bashing weapons easily cause the least damage. I can kill you with a 3 ounce knife. I *can* kill you with one even smaller. It's just a matter of aim. A 3 ounce club is laughable.

Thus, in addition to Bowen's very true points about armor, I suggest that the different weapons support styles of play. Arrows, spears, and poinyards are for ambushers and crit hunters. One or two good hard hits can drop a foe. Clubs are meat and potatoes, constant, reliable, not really exemplary. Swords are in the middle, slightly more chance dependant, but you don't get "inflicts 1 damage!"

 

I also include just for nitpickers that I didn't talk about infection. Infection is one of the leading causes of death in MODERN hospitals, especially to trauma victims, because our methods of healing physical damage are getting so good. If the body is still functional, sometimes even when it isn't we can put it back together. But an infection in the wrong place, if not noticed, can kill (again via shock, caused by toxins) in as little as a few hours. Drug resistant strains of bacteria just made that process harder to interrupt. The reason I didn't talk about it is that in active battlefield conditions it's not the bacteria that kill you.

 

I'm in agreement with you, but just an FYI that's how Ultima Online did it. This is not a new concept for Ultima. In UO there was Swordsmanship, Fencing, Mace Fighting, and Wrestling. The blunt weapons were under the Mace skill set.

Unlike the other weapon types Mace weapons (blunt) drained the stamina of the people that were hit by those weapons. Also blunt weapons did more direct damage to the opponent's armor in PvP.

So if you were a mace fighter in UO the creatures and people you fought ended up moving slower the longer you fought them because of the stamina loss, and warriors in PvP would actually lose their shields and chest plates very quickly when fighting a macer. It was a completely different tactic. My main character was a mace fighter and if the fight was one on one I usually came out the victor. If it was a long fight you could be assured the opponent lost his shield or some piece(s) of armor. I didn't play for speed like the fencers, it was a long process requiring lots of stick and move tactics. If a shield blew up I would take out my war hammer and finish the guy off.

Fencers usually used a Kryss sword with poison. Or they would use the spear (two handed weapon). Those were some of the toughest. Swordsman usually used a Katana some times with poison, and on rare occasions there where the GM lumberjacks that did like 35% more damage with an axe or something like that. Those guys packed quite a blow.

So I'm expecting this will be in SotA since UO was the first to really do this, not those other games.

 

A small additional note. Penetrating weapons -- most specifically, ranged ones like slingstones, arrows, darts, and bullets -- create two distinct classes of injury, which reflect the difference between the temporary and permanent cavity the penetrating unit causes. There is a 'zone' extending radially outward from the line of passage where the tissues are shocked as the penetration occurs (and again affected as the tissues rebound/collapse). All of Kinetic Energy, 'yaw', deformation, and fragmentation, affect the total volume impacted (as does the path, i.e. deflection counts).

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_trauma; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetrating_trauma.

I was looking for my reference book on Emergency Trauma Surgery, issued from the Dept. of the Army, but it's AWOL.

Another concern is the effect on the nerves. It's easy to see how a slashing blow which severs a nerve can affect a more distal aspect of the body. What is not as well known is that a blunt impact can have a temporary similar effect; particularly if the nerve is 'pinched' between the striking object and a hard surface such as an interior bone. But these details probably fall into either the old 'critical hit' aspect, or are subsumed in the higher-end of the damage range.

 

Also to be considered are blows to specific nerve paths, the idea of bonus effects due to attacking from behind could be expanded to include blows to the head, neck, and spine. Additionally, swelling can create nerve and blood vessel blockages that can disable and imperil limbs. Thus all weapon types have a decent chance of interfering with limb function on a temporary and permanent basis, one question we should ask ourselves is, how much do we as a player base WANT them to?

Who would really want to find themselves unable to walk, unable to hold their weapon, after a good hit, and how much work would you want to be involved in regaining said function?

 

Remember the kidneys when speaking about backstabbing. Stab them there they will be dead fast.