Suggestion: Health and stamina renaming

[Ondb]

After seen demo and listening as Josh has to explain again and again what the hell is stamina i would suggest to rename:

 

Current health -> fatigue

stamina -> health

 

I think this would be much less confusing as current state. Fatigue will start at 0 (full bar) and raise to some level 100). 

 

1/ healing spells will restore health (instead of stamina). Which normal naming convention to virtually every RPG.

2/ Resting will now remove the characters fatigue (this actually makes more sense).

3/ As characters gain new levels, their hit points increases. (again standard naming convention to RPGs.) 

 

 

[Fatback]

But when you loose all your health you die and when your super fatigued you fall asleep. This is opposite of what would happen with your naming convention making it more complicated.

[Ark Evensong]

4/ And then, when you get very tired, you die.

 

Really, I think "Health" being connected to the thing that makes you die when you run out is a lot more important than "Health" being connected to the thing that keeps you fighting, standard naming conventions be damned.

 

The way it works now, I believe Full Health and Full Stamina are the same number. In your example, it sounds like everyone would have 100 "True Health", so you'll have to implement some scaling for the damage done to that, which will only obfuscate the way it works under the hood.

 

Lore-wise, it also depends on what healing spells are supposed to do. Do they knit your wounds back together, or are they more of an Adrenaline/Painkiller combo? And if it can actually heal your wounds, what consequences will that have on the world? Will you still need doctors? etc. etc.

 

Regardless, there was already mention in one or two of the videos that Stamina was likely to be renamed to Endurance.

... I'm not really sure whether that will clear up any confusion, but it makes more sense than Tired=DED.

 

Fake EDIT: Ninja'd by Fatback

Edited August 8, 2014 by Ark Evensong

[Ondb]

But when you loose all your health you die and when your super fatigued you fall asleep. This is opposite of what would happen with your naming convention making it more complicated.

True. This would need to change too then. 

1. When you are super fatigued you will get huge penalties to stats and combat.  

2. When you run of health you die or fall asleep.

[Labadal]

Endurance instead of stamina.

 

Endure. In enduring, grow strong.

[Ondb]

4/ And then, when you get very tired, you die.

 

Really, I think "Health" being connected to the thing that makes you die when you run out is a lot more important than "Health" being connected to the thing that keeps you fighting, standard naming conventions be damned.

 

The way it works now, I believe Full Health and Full Stamina are the same number. In your example, it sounds like everyone would have 100 "True Health", so you'll have to implement some scaling for the damage done to that, which will only obfuscate the way it works under the hood.

 

Lore-wise, it also depends on what healing spells are supposed to do. Do they knit your wounds back together, or are they more of an Adrenaline/Painkiller combo? And if it can actually heal your wounds, what consequences will that have on the world? Will you still need doctors? etc. etc.

 

Regardless, there was already mention in one or two of the videos that Stamina was likely to be renamed to Endurance.

... I'm not really sure whether that will clear up any confusion, but it makes more sense than Tired=DED.

 

Fake EDIT: Ninja'd by Fatback

Normal characters would have limit at 100. Barbarian would have 125 (or some different number).

 

Also when you think about fatigue, you can easily implement other mechanics.

1. Slowly increasing over time 

2. Soul-wind can drain fatigue and etc..

[Ark Evensong]

Eh, well, then we're no longer talking about a simple renaming, but an entire overhaul.

 

Anyway, the part about going down and getting up with a penalty is already in. The first time your Health hits 0, you're Maimed, and indeed get huge penalties to offense and defense. The next time you run out of Stamina, you're dead for good. (On the non-Expert modes, anyway. On Expert, it's 0 for the first time, and you're gone.)

 

For most classes, damage to Stamina is converted to Health damage on a 4:1 ratio - Basically, you can go down 4 times from full before you're gone for good. Barbarians convert it on a 8:1 ratio, so they can go down a lot more often.

 

4:1 is fairly clean. It's simple enough to grasp after the initial "Huh, I have two Health bars?" confusion. I'm really not sure how you envision filling up your Fatigue meter. What conversion rate you do use? Percentages? Or will having a large amount of Combat Hit Points make you last less fights? If you are using percentages, you really should just stick to a 100 pool for everyone, no exceptions.

[Osvir]

After seen demo and listening as Josh has to explain again and again what the hell is stamina i would suggest to rename:

 

Current health -> fatigue

stamina -> health

 

I think this would be much less confusing as current state. Fatigue will start at 0 (full bar) and raise to some level 100). 

 

1/ healing spells will restore health (instead of stamina). Which normal naming convention to virtually every RPG.

2/ Resting will now remove the characters fatigue (this actually makes more sense).

3/ As characters gain new levels, their hit points increases. (again standard naming convention to RPGs.) 

I think health/stamina is fine. Stamina is what you use to take action, health is vitality. In a sense, visually presented, Health "kind of" works like -10, -9, -8.. etc. variables that are used when you are dying in D&D similarity.

 

Health = Mortality

Stamina = Stamina/Fatigue

 

Imo. Then I, or other, can do a mod Quest that unlocks imMortality

[Pray]

Sawyer already said stamina being renamed endurance.

[Lephys]

Not that the world would end if its name were changed, but I think "stamina" does the job just fine. It's basically your immediate reserve of energy, with which to move your muscles, etc. Fatigue is just negative stamina, so changing it to fatigue doesn't really accomplish much.

 

That would be like renaming "Health" to "Death," and having it start at 0, and build up until it hits 100, at which point you're dead. Doesn't really make the functional representation any clearer.

[matimini]

Hi everybody,

 

First of all, I have to say that I like the idea of the long-term and short-term health mechanic, not having to rest after every battle and having to manage your long-term health sounds good to me.

 

That being said, I have to agree with Ondb on this point.

I like the idea of healing spells / potions / medicines being able to actually heal characters wounds, and not just give them some kind of energy or stamina boost.

It also seems weird having to rest to restore health. It gives me a "oh, my character is badly wounded, but no need to look for a priest nor a doctor, just have a good 8h night sleep by the campfire and you'll be good to go" feeling.

 

Moreover, I liked the idea of resurrection magic in BG1, where you could resurrect your characters, but it was through rare, expensive or high level spells only.

Being able to reach those spells with a priest was useful and satisfying =)

And I also liked the idea of permanent death, but not really the randomness of it (based on constitution if I recall correctly). 

 

For those reasons, I'd rather have those kind of definition / mechanic :

 

Short-term health: classical, standard, health. Healable through magic and medicine. If a character's health drops to 0, he becomes dead, but can still be revived by a priest, or brought back to the town's church to be revived. (or only knocked out in normal difficulty)

 

Long-term health: fatigue or endurance-like quantity. Recoverable through resting. If a character's endurance drops to 0, he becomes exhausted and weak in combat, and If killed while exhausted (0 short-term health), becomes dead permanently. No magic can bring him back from the dead at this point. (For normal difficulty, the first time a character fall to both 0 short and long-term health, he becomes maimed, with even greater debuffs, but next time will cause permanent death).

 

 

Once again, the main mechanic remains the same, it's more a question of definitions and of what healing spells will actually do.

I personally like better the idea of health being related to wounds and healing spells, and fatigue to resting.

[Lephys]

Well... think of it this way. When you get shot in the chest, you don't instantly die. However, you might be in shock, or otherwise incapacitated, so that you're "downed." Then, if you don't get help soon, you'd slowly bleed out, etc., until you died. All your "Health" would fade.

 

This is kind of the principle behind PoE's system. So, it's not that you couldn't reverse it (long-term resource being fatigue, short-term being actual health), but... that's just why they did it the way they did, and they can't really change it this late in the game.

 

Also, as far as healing spells go, their function has a huge effect on the lore. If everyone can jog about with potions and spells and just reknit organs back together and save people from the brink of death, then there's an awful lot of danger removed from the world. "Help! I've been cut into 5 pieces! QUICKLY, HEAL SPELLS! Oh, phew... I'm fine again, ^_^" etc. I think they purposely want a world in which, even magical folks aren't nigh invulnerable due to magical healing. Stuff of that nature.

[virgi26]

i think it would be more clear for new people if Obs just called health is health and stamina is stamina (not short-term health). That way when you are hit - you loose health and you loose stamina. That's the real world works anyway - you loose stamina much faster then health; when you lost all the stamina you have - you are fatigued, perhaps lay down and can't do anything.

And the way the PoE world works (as mentioned above) you can't heal easyly (only when resting, perhaps time-consuming spells and making bandages), but you can restore stamina pretty quickly in common sense and with some spells.

 

That seems pretty clear to me and actually makes a lot of sense.

 

PS i think, one of misleadings comes from portraing stamina as increasing red space on a portrait, so people think they are loosing health. Maybe they should change this technic. The thing is you can have 1 hp and full stamina, and you look at your portrait, seeing no red space, you think you are perfectly healthy, but you will die from first hit you get.

Edited August 18, 2014 by virgi26

[salo]

I suppose we will see in a few hours if this a huge problem or not.

[Lephys]

PS i think, one of misleadings comes from portraing stamina as increasing red space on a portrait, so people think they are loosing health. Maybe they should change this technic. The thing is you can have 1 hp and full stamina, and you look at your portrait, seeing no red space, you think you are perfectly healthy, but you will die from first hit you get.

I get that, but, at the same time, you have to look at what it's going back to: The IE games. In those, you only had 1 not-being-dead resource to worry about. The red fill represented how close to being out of HP you were. And when you ran out of HP, you died (fell down and stopped fighting). So, in PoE, they wanted it to work functionally the same way. Sure, if you're out of Stamina in PoE, you're not dead, but you're out of the fight. So, it's a lot more useful for something like a very eye-catching red portrait fill to represent how close you are to having a given character fall out of the fight, than to simply represent Health. They could drop out from hitting 0 Stamina, and still have 3/4ths of their Health left. So, the red fill would be very low. People relying on that in any capacity would be running around with all their character dropping like flies, left and right, waiting for the red fill on the portraits to get into dangerous territory.

[nilssab]

I really don't get the problem with calling them Health/Stamina. And I really hope it's not renamed into endurance. Because endurance sounds much more like a trait, as opposed to a reserve. I mean, if you take a lot of hits in battle, you *have* endured them, and it's not like they have decreased your endurance.

 

Semantics aside, If people are confused, my guess is because the system is not that common, and that people do not understand it intuitively. Maybe the green bar is kind of small, and doesn't seem important, maybe the "problem" would be fixed by making it more obvious that there are two meters that govern health.

 

What I really hope is that the system is not changed, and I'm quite sure they won't, so there is little reason in discussing how the mechanics could change if the names are changed etc. Unless it's discussing minor changes that would work within the system as it is now (while ignoring semantics).