How combat resources should work in PE?

[Elerond]

Combat resources

Information tidbits what we have got from Obsidian, we know that they plan use at least two combat resources Health and Stamina. Where health represent characters overall condition, like how many wounds, broken bones, bruises characters has and these can be healed only by rest and time. And stamina represent characters how badly characters are shaken by hits which they have suffered, like hit to stomach causes character to be winded up, blow to head causes blurry vision for the character, so such damage which character will recover quickly if character can take short break from the battle.

But started to think if there should be more combat resources than this two for example fatigue. My idea about fatigue is that character's actions like hitting, using soul powers, running, etc. will consume fatigue points and when fatigue point go zero character's actions would be slower or otherwise hindered or maybe they start eating stamina, as character tries to operate in state of exhaustion. So fatigue would represent character's exhaustion level. Adding fatigue as combat resource could also work as one way to explain why some characters wear light armor instead of heavy armor. As fatigue gives option to give armors an exhausting factor, for example full plate will stop nearly all damage from hits, but it will also double/triple amount of fatigue what character's actions fatigue cost.

 

How combat resources should be determined?

Usually in computer role-playing games characters get more health as their level rises which causes them to be some what utopistic god-like creatures that don't die from anything less than apocalyptic feat. In my opinion this is not the best approach to this question. So with more than one combat resource in use I would like to see that character's health would be quite constant through the game. I think that amount of the character's health points could be determined for example by character's constitution (or similar) attribute, using it with factor of one or two. So if character has constitution of 15 character could have 15-30 health points and only way to get more health points is by rising character's constitution or possibly by feats. In max level character should be able to have max double of health points compared to level 1. This way normal weapons from the start of the game will not become useless against character and this will lower need for utopistic high level magic items and they can be as rare as they should be. This system also makes armors to be more important as your character can die fairly quickly without one.

Stamina point development in my opinion could follow health point development from other games and so in end game to knock out a character you probably need sleep or other spells, abilities or weapons that do great amount of stamina damage and otherwise character will fight to bitter end. Why stamina should increase if health don't increase, I come with this idea by watching boxers, as newbie boxers are usually pretty easy to knock out where professional boxers can much more hits in their head before they are knocked out, so my opinion is that one can get better tolerance against knock out via training and regular beat downs, but gut wound will be serious even for most trained and experienced characters. And if fatigue is added as resource it should have similar development with stamina, and you only need to look professional long-runners to see why.

 

Armors

Often in role-playing games armors are represented so that better armor will make hitting harder, which is not bad way to do it, but in my opinion it is somewhat over simplified way to do it. And I would like see rather system where armors absorb damage from the hits. For example plate mail could absorb 5 point of health damage and 10 points of stamina damage and regular broad sword could do d6 points of health damage and three times of that stamina damage, so only most deadliest hits from sword can penetrate through armor but half of the hits will cause stamina damage. And against critical hits armor don't give any protection as critical hit means that character was hit in such place where armor don't give protection.

Addition to armor characters should have dodge ability which gives them change to avoid blows or make it harder to hit them. Dodging should cause loss of fatigue for character and so character can't anymore dodge blows when s/he is too exhausted to move. I am not sure if armors should cause additional hindering for dodging than added fatigue cost, because that is already very punishing for low level characters, but for high level character it may not be such punishment but I am not sure that it should be.

 

That is quite enough for this time

 

That was my vision which direction combat resource usage and presentation in PE should go, with some opinions about armors and dodging, but I am also interested about your opinions and visions about subject and combat as whole in PE, so be good and share them with rest of us.

Edited October 29, 2012 by Elerond

[rjshae]

Damage absorption by armor is being discussed here.