Damage Feels Unimpactful in Games So I Fixed It In Mine - Sol Devlog

I was playing Dungeons and Dragons the other day and by the other day I mean like a year and a half ago and my players were in combat with a monster this was a pretty standard fight but things ended up getting kind of dicey no pun intended there was kind of intended I I wrote it in the script but I didn't think you know whatever let's let's just get on with the story anyway so one of my players ended up getting knocked unconscious I'm generally pretty nice to my players so this was actually a somewhat rare occurrence which is is maybe not how a dungeon master should operate but I just end up wanting all the characters to be friends and I don't know yeah after the player was knocked out the very next turn they were quickly healed by another player and back on their feet as if nothing happened then they quickly attacked and defeated the monster after the session there was something about this fight that bothered me and I think it was the lack of impact of not only being knocked out but the lack of impact of damage as a whole there were no lasting effects on the character there really felt like there should be some sort of repercussions after being beaten senseless and I'm not even talking about mechanically here I'm talking about from a character standpoint you would expect a character to at least be somewhat traumatized or afraid or something after being knocked out by a terrifying monster so when working on my game I kept all this in mind and I think I found a way to solve this problem by allowing damage to be impactful to the character narratively as well as mechanically hi I'm Nathan and this is my tabletop RPG deck builder called soul today we're going to be talking about my new equipment system items and how that relates to health when I was trying to solve this problem two game systems kept popping to mind one was Mech Warrior slot-based inventory system each weapon or component was equipped onto your Mech onto a slot on their body and when that part was damaged it would no longer function and the other one was the singular time I lared yeah that thing where you run around in the local park and hit hit nerds with foam swords it was high school I don't know what what do you want from me I'm totally kidding I don't have anything against LARPing I mean look at me I'm making a tabletop role playing game by myself for fun anyway but yeah the specific LARP I went to used a limb BAS system for health if you get hit in the arm you can't use it anymore and if you get hit in that limb again you're dead essentially so really the same concept as Mech Warrior just simplified so with that in mind I decide to make a slot-based inventory system with health as well this will help a player sympathize with her character more damage generally is pretty nebulous a player having 25 out of 100 Health doesn't really mean anything to them other than that it's kind of low however a character having two broken legs and a dislocated arm is probably something they can relate to this also forces a player to adapt to their situation both in a mechanical sense and a narrative one now the rest of the details I'm a bit fuzzy on so bear with me a bit I have two separate ideas on how this will lay out one one is a character sheet that will look something like this having a slot for each body part Head Shoulders Knees Toes Etc except not really that at all and more like head body right and left arm right and left hand legs and feet I felt like this was a good idea but after a while I felt like it was sort of limiting how many cool arm items would there be compared to like actual weapons or items you'd hold in your hand or say you have a character who has a shirt that you like but you also want a jacket over it I'm only kind of kidding with that example anyway so instead I just tried a different format going with head body legs right and left hand and three utility slots that could take any sort of item I was hoping this would give a player a little bit more freedom and flexibility with builds without forcing them to only do one type of item per slot so not sure which way to go but I'll figure it out soon there's also a different problem other than me not being able to make up my mind is I've been planning on doing customizable items these would be made up of cards and therefore need multiple slots this is going to be similar to a lot of War games you see these days where you can equip different add-ons to your weapons or your other equipment so either of these systems would look something like this this is cool and all but I fear it's kind of a lot like likely this many cards will interrupt the flow of the game but I still might try it anyway and if it fails maybe I'll scrap the idea or maybe make it simpler by using tokens instead of cards or something either way this is the current prototype so let's talk about how it relates to health which also brings me to another way I'm planning on making damage more impactful having two types of health physical and mental health physical health will be linked directly to each item slot like we've talked about then when a character is attacked and one of these item slots reaches zero Health then they will no longer function just like my Mech Warrior example now I'm not sure how someone will choose to Target these slots one of the ideas is having a d8 and have the damage dealt to whichever slot that the dice rolls then having more specific abilities that allowed you to Target exact slots there could even be a mechanic for expanding more concentration the player's energy source to Target a specific slot as a side note another potential for this slot-based inventory system is to have status effects applied directly over item cards this could allow for cool different effects for instance having different statuses like broken dislocated bleeding Etc now Mental Health on the other hand is a separate Health pool that gets damaged whenever your physical health goes down or when you are psychically damaged in some other way if your mental health reaches zero you go unconscious like I said this is linked to your physical health so let's say your hand takes three damage then your mental health will also take three damage this health pool will be much larger and likely be able to take multiple equipment slots being brought to zero in order for your mental health to be brought to zero as well there's also a potential for hitting already destroyed physical slots dealing additional damage to mental health unsure of that one though still toying around with it I'm also not really sure how I feel about the symbol I chose for mental health currently I'm choosing the psychology logo or symbol that that people use because I already have used the brain for intelligence and concentration so I don't know I just work here anyway as per usual I'd like to address any problems that I think that this system could have I think what's most likely to cause problems is what other games call snowballing unfortunately with players becoming weaker and weaker over a battle they could get worse and worse and then inevitably die in short it's punishing I generally don't find myself drawn to in these sort of games or at least Le when it comes to like video games and stuff however I think the realism could lead to better storytelling which is inevitably the biggest goal for this project although I really want to make sure it's not too punishing because it's not really what I'm going for I'm not looking for something where your characters are dying all the time but we'll see how it goes the only other thing I could see being an issue would be the sheer number of cards that a player has to look at granted this wouldn't be much different than any other game you usually see this in a character sheet so this could be okay but I worry if I do keep the customizable weapons this could end up slowing the game down a lot but yeah I think a character struggling to succeed and seeing them overcome these obstacles despite being broken and bloodied is a lot more interesting than a character who gets knocked down and is perfectly fine moments later at least that's what I think thanks for making it to the end of the video it's been a long time since I posted there's been a lot going on in my life which uh biggest one of which is I just mooved moved to a new house but yeah I'm going to be hopefully trying to work exclusively on content creation and game development over the next year and give it an honest shot but I'm also working a lot of house renovations and that kind of stuff getting everything together so so yeah it might not be as frequent to start but once I do get into the swing of things you're going to be seeing a lot more of me um I've also started streaming uh I'm trying to do Tuesdays Thursdays but yeah like I said currently busy with housework uh so kind of juggling this and and that my uh recording setup right now looks like this uh so definitely pretty temporary and even with this sort of setup it's still pretty echoey so um yeah anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Beets Creations

Views: 65,918

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Id: 1Mz9ZhCg0U0

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024