IGDN Blog — Design Insight

In tabletop roleplaying games, there are many different ways to track when a character fails, each giving their own mechanical feelings to our games. Today I want to look at two more combat-focused game design tools: Health and Wounds. Then after reading this article, you can better decide which of these concepts are right for your ttrpg.

Health Definition

For the sake of today’s post, Health is a numerical representation of a character’s wellbeing. Here are our assumptions:

The lower the number, the closer they are to failure in the encounter/game.
The character’s performance is nearly the same at full Health and low Health.
Health is lost or gained in small, medium, and large events (single attacks, sliding on pavement, etc.)

Wound Definition

For this argument, Wounds are a milestone representation of a character’s well-being.

Here are our assumptions:

The more Wounds a character has, the closer they are to failure in the encounter/game.
Wounds are incurred only by significant events (big damage, large stresses).
When a Wound is incurred, a penalty is incurred and the character’s strength decreases.

What Health Feels Like

From a player perspective, Health is a clear indicator of how your character is doing and feeling. When your character has 5/20 Health remaining, you can quickly tell that you are in a dangerous spot. You know to trigger a change in tactics.

How the game approaches healing (the restoration of Health) changes the tactics you might adopt. For example, a game with easy access to healing in an encounter might only encourage you to take a quick break from the action, to increase your health. In a game where healing can only happen rarely outside of an encounter, you will might up more defensive actions for the rest of the encounter.

In either case, the measure of Health acts as a warning to players of the state of their character, assuming that when your Health reaches zero, your character can no longer function, and therefore the player can no longer play. From that perspective, Health is a measure of how far away the player is from not being able to play the game.

What Wounds Feel Like

A Wound is a condition placed on the character that makes playing them more difficult. From a player perspective, they can stand their character taking damage to a certain point, but even a single Wound is something to be avoided. Each instance of a Wound carries a weight; the implication of making your character play worse, and more susceptible to gaining another Wound in the future. When a system has Wounds it leads to more cautious play, especially when getting a Wound makes it easier to get more, creating a “death spiral type effect as each Wound makes getting the next Wound easier. So, if you failed the check without a Wound, you will certainly fail the check with one. Players understand the implications of how a Wound will affect play, and it influences how they approach situations in-game.

On the opposite side, players will take more risks if they don’t think their actions could result in a Wound , creating a more superhero-feeling for the player. Those five bullets did no Wounds to me? “I just got shot five times and not even a scratch on me,” the player might say, and that becomes the narrative. This leads to a heroic, flashy, rule-of-cool style gameplay when you know there is little to no chance to acquire a Wound in an encounter, since the lack of mechanical consequences leads players to believe that there are no consequences at all.

Design Space

Health is easy to quickly look at and understand. Number goes up, good. Number goes down, bad. Wounds have different requirements to determine when they are applied and what the consequence of getting a Wound is.

Player perception of Health changes drastically between 1 Health to 0 Health. This shift is unrealistic, and lends itself more to heroic games or systems about solving the system like a puzzle. Higher damage and lower Health values can shift the style away from a heroic feeling.

Wounds can have the design potential for both heroic and gritty games. The nature of Wounds not always being applied means that players feel heroic fighting peons but can feel more gritty when fighting bosses. So, the number of threatening enemies is how you can control the level of grittiness and heroicness.

Within a design space, Health is generally more granular, meaning designers can give more incremental rewards, relating to reducing Health more or having more Health, without those rewards being as game changing as systems with Wounds. But that does not mean Wounds are devoid of design space, as you can still tweak the threshold at which a Wound is applied and how to choose consequences, or even what those consequences are.

In summary, here are some considerations for when you are deciding between Health and Wounds, and which one (or both) will be right when designing your system.

Health

Simpler and more intuitive
Lends itself to heroic games
Easier to create items and abilities
Can lead to Health sponge situations when Health values get too large

Wounds

Can be more realistic
Can do gritty
More design work needed
More space to explore with consequences of wounds received
Be careful of death spirals

Extensions

I wonder what other design spaces we can explore with the relationship between Health and Wounds. Can we expand Wound systems to break a death spiral, maybe making players not necessarily weaker, just different, with each Wound? Can we make Health feel less of a drastic change between 0 and 1 Health, or would that just be too heavy-handed in forcing players to change their tactics? How much of a grittier feeling would incremental Wounds along a Health track cause? Ultimately, you need to choose what’s right for your game and the kind of play-action you want to encourage in your players.

This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network’s blog series. The content of this article reflects the views of but one member of the IGDN. This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Brandon Gutowski of the C22 System. If you want to get in touch with the contributor he can be reached on Twitter at @c22system, on Facebook @PagodaGamesLLC, or visit their website at www.c22system.com.

In the tabletop roleplaying community, we often get caught up in the role vs roll debate—whether it is more important to embody the character than it is to object the rules of the game, or whether it is more important to work within the game (and “roll” the dice”), even at the expense of a cool idea, because that’s what the game is. Each side tries to explain why one is more important than the other. Sure, we all agree that each game at each table is different and tabletop roleplaying games are mostly about creating the best experience for you, but this answer is a cop out. I want to understand why we disagree so we can play better games for ourselves by finding the perfect balance for our own table.

Why We Enjoy TTRPGs

Sure, joking and telling stories is fun, beating monsters is fun, and new gear is fun. What about other parts of games where your favorite NPC dies, or you are stuck on a derelict freighter surrounded by monsters staring at the Jenga tower you hope you never need to touch?. Those situations aren’t necessarily fun, but they are engaging.

Engaging is what I am going to focus on as the goal of a roleplaying game. I am going to use the definition of the “flow state” as the optimal place to be for a good gaming session. The graph below is my favorite visualization of the flow state. Each game should aim to keep the players in the flow channel.

If the game is too challenging for the players, they get anxious or lose interest, like fighting the final boss at level 1 when it is presented as winnable. If the task is too easy, players get bored, like fighting off minions as a max-level character. The part that makes this task particularly difficult is that in a way the player skill is constantly moving to the right, so the challenge constantly needs to be increased to stay in “flow”. So naturally, the graph says that as you get better, you need more difficult challenges to stay engaged or in “flow”.

Applying this to roleplaying games is rough. What constitutes difficulty in a tabletop rpg is hard to define. We could define system complexity as difficulty, therefore system mastery is skill. Conversely we could define character depth as difficulty, so that roleplaying skill, the player’s ability to use character-interactions to accurately represent a character and effectively charming the people at the table, is our skill axis. Neither of these accurately represent what keeps a player in the flow state. Someone with perfect mastery of a system could be a horrible roleplayer, and showstopping roleplayers can have very little knowledge of the system they’re playing. So let's take a step back to what we do when we as GMs want to challenge our players further.

Our players are getting better at the game, both in using their abilities, their wits, and have gained new, powerful items. Using a combat game as an example, we would naturally throw more complex enemies paired with more environmental hazards at them and that satisfies the increased challenge as the players have more factors to deal with. But that does not always work. If we continue to throw the same type of fight at the players, they are already skilled in this fight, so even with more complex enemies, the encounter is not engaging enough. To combat this, we change the tactics of the fight. Now it's a protection fight, or there is a timer, or now they cannot see. Each of these is a slightly different skill, we are slightly varying the “Skill” axis to keep fight strength similar and keep players engaged. Just using a combat focused game as an example, we know that there are many different skills involved in roleplay games, therefore we can expect there to be multiple flow graphs.

When we break tabletop roleplaying games into two skills like this, we can see where the disagreement occurs: those that require more complex characters and interactions, and those that need more system complexity and playing the game as a game. Both groups look for different things in systems. Every player has a unique combination of system mastery skill for every system and roleplaying skill for every style of game. This is the origin of the disagreement. So now you're thinking we solved it. Those with higher system mastery and lower roleplaying skill like crunchy games or the "Roll" side of the argument. Those with higher roleplaying skill and lower system mastery prefer narrative games or "Role" side of the argument.

No. Bad. We've haven't solved anything yet, sit back down.

There is more to it than these two graphs, as they imply that those that are good roleplayers cannot play simple characters because then they would be bored. On the other side, those that are good at mastering systems need complex systems as they would find narrative games too boring. This isn't true. We know that players with both high roleplaying skill and system mastery enjoy playing games of all types and those two skills don't limit the players enjoyment of less difficult challenges. The why is what I want to discuss more here, but first we need to take a quick detour to the pinnacle of roleplaying.

The Pinnacle of Roleplaying

What many posts about this topic decide to mention as the pinnacle of the “Role” side of this argument is when the rules get out of the way of the narrative, the narrative should triumph out of the two. This is actually a great goal to reach for roleplaying games, because it means the rules have become second nature. Using basketball as an example, when you first start learning to play, you spend a lot of your time just thinking about dribbling the ball to allow you to walk across the court. It is not until you have built dribbling and walking into your muscle memory that you can focus on the broader aspects of the game. Then your thoughts during the game change. It is not until you can dribble without thinking that you can start thinking of the game in a different way, it's wider context; how do I get the ball past this defender to score, who else is open for a pass, etc. As you practice, the rules and basics become routine, and your thinking moves to the actual game.

So, as we achieve system mastery, we can handle more complex mechanical situations. As we get better at roleplaying, we can handle more complex roleplay situations. In either case, as we become more advanced in using these skills, our brain is freed up to handle more aspects of the game. This can lead to more opportunity to roleplay, or accept more complex systems. In roleplaying, you’ll see this manifest in character voices, deeper character emotional expression, or more interaction with other player characters. In system mastery, we see these manifest in more abilities being used effectively, complex items, unique monsters, and situational rules. In both cases, our skill in each allows us to open our focus to more of the plethora of things that happen in a tabletop roleplaying game, deepening our level of engagement.

For these same reasons, if a game does not meet your requirements we fall to the other sides of the flow state, frustration or boredom. Frustration comes when there are too many things to track, too much going on that you do not feel like you are performing the way you should be. This is seen in thoughts like “My character has too many abilities”, or “I think my character would lash out in anger over this but I can’t because that would cause a rift in the party, what do they do?” or “There are different rules for climbing ladders and climbing cliffs?!” or “My character does not care about this so they won’t go”. These are all signs of frustration either caused by the mechanics or the roleplay that can indicate a system is not a good fit. The boredom side comes when there are not enough things going on that are new and you’ve had a similar experience at least one too many times. This is seen in thoughts like “Yes of course the intimidated guard loses their backbone and gives into our every demand, they always do” or “Why do I need the rules for this game, I can just do this the same without them?” or ”Oh yes, the GM has stolen my character’s prosthetic arm again so we must go get it back, third time's the charm” or “Clearly the enemy in the air is further than the one on the ground so it should be harder to hit him even if the game does not say so” . These are all very specific signs of boredom, that indicate a system is not a good fit for you. Note: your own boredom will look different (unless you play characters with prosthetic arms a lot).

So there are a lot of factors here. Your system mastery skill needs to align with the game’s system mastery in that small band that is not too boring or frustrating. On top of that, your roleplaying skill needs to align with the game and group’s role playing skill in that same small band that is not too boring or frustrating. Then there is the group and the schedule, it is a miracle that anyone can ever play tabletop roleplaying games at all. But when all these do align, you found the right game for you and that game will be different than the right game for someone else.

That wraps everything up for us now doesn’t it? The best system is the one that provides enough crunch to allow you to roleplay in the way you feel most comfortable.

I’m not satisfied with this answer and neither should you. It only gives us insight into why “every player is different”.

We have a few issues with this flow model when applied to tabletop roleplaying games. The other aspect of this graph indicates that if our skill mastery and/or roleplaying skill is too high, there are games we cannot enjoy due to being too easy. We have seen plenty of examples of players with high skill enjoying less difficult games. This can most easily be seen with the system mastery skill. So that begs the question, why can someone with eight years of DnD 5e experience still enjoy a game of DnD with a group of beginners?

The answer lies in two things: Creativity and the Game Master. Which I will discuss in detail in the next post.

Mechanics have feelings too: Health vs Wounds

Role vs Roll and Why we Disagree: Pt 1