Multiplayer Interactive-Fiction Game-Design Blog
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03 Damage modelGoes over what kinds of damage (wounds, etc.) characters can take. Most role-playing games use the concept of "hit points" to indicate how much damage a character can take, either in combat or from other mishaps (such as falling). Circumreality does NOT use hit points, but instead uses a more realistic damage model with bleeding, flesh wounds, and broken bones. As a result, combat is more dangerous, and not something a player will enter into lightly. There are two basic types of damage: Damage which is systemic, like fatigue or bleeding, and damage which is localized to a body part (such as a flesh wound or broken bone). I'll being by discussing systemic damage since localized damage can cause systemic damage. A character's body can take several different forms of systemic damage:
Characters have blood, and if they lose it through damage they will fall unconscious or die. The amount of blood that a character has lost is stored in It ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. At 0.0 the character has all his/her blood, at 0.5 the character falls unconscious, and at 1.0 the character dies.
Furthermore, the character's fatigue and mana can not be recovered to less than twice the bloodloss. Therefore, if the character has lost 0.25 of their blood (25%) then their fatigue can never get better than 0.5 (50%).
To cause bloodloss in a character (and potentially unconsciousness or death), call Blows to the head or chest, or perhaps even magic, can cause the character to become dazed. A dazed character is unable to act for a few seconds. To daze a character, call Characters can be killed outright by calling result from some other sort of damage, such as bloodloss. A dead character falls to the ground and their body can be looted. After a few minutes, set by a global that you can modified, they're resurrected and moved to the last safe room they visited. If the character is a NPC the NPC and all contents it still holds are deleted. If you wish more severe penalties for death, such as permadeath or skill loss, you can modify the code for DamageDeath().
Diseases are more complex than the other systemic damages I've described so far. A Circumreality disease acts much more like a real diseases than other RPGs (which usually decrease the diseased character's strength for a few minutes and then the disease vanishes).
A character catches a disease when called. If the character already has the disease then nothing happens. (I haven't implimented disease immunity though, so diseases can be caught more than once.)
The disease begins with 0 "disease units", an intentionally vague value. Every second, the number of disease units is increased by an amount specified by the disease, multiplied by the virulence of the strain. Furthermore, if the character does any activity (that causes fatigue) then the disease will spread more rapidly.
After a time (specified by the disease), the character's body will identify the diseas and then decrease the number of active disease units. When the number of disease units is knocked down to 0, the disease is eradicated.
To create your own disease, you need to:
Calling to drop any held items in the given body part. This can be called as part of the damage. It is automatically called if the character receives significant damage to an arm, or is stunned in the arm. Character's get tired, stored in a property called 1.0. 0.0 means the character is fully rested, while 1.0 is dead tired.
You can cause fatigue damage by calling attacks will cause fatigue. (Some diseases might.) Furthermore, if too much blood is lost, fatigue will also be redurced.
A small amount of fatigue is lost whenever the character performs an action. Fatigue is quickly regained, so the loss is seldom notieced However, if a character tries to perform too many high-fatigue actions in too short of a time, the character's fatigue will drop, performance will degrade, and eventually the character will be too tired to even move. (This frequently happens in combat.) To fatigue a character through an action, call To knock a character to its feet, call Some attacks (such as shoves) will cause one character to fall down. If the character sustains enough damage to a leg it may also be knocked down.
Magic effect "damage" acts a lot like diseases. A magic effect is an object derived from cMagicEffect, although the exact mechanics of disease are not duplicated. To cause a magic effect, call To create your own magic effect, you need to:
Mana works a lot like fatigue, except instead of it being physical damage, it's mental/magical. To decrease a character's mana, call To knock a character out, call Characters will automatically be knocked out if they lose too much blood or receive a severe blow to the head or chest.
Venoms (and poisons), like disease, are more complex in Circumreality than other RPGs. In Circumreality, a venom is somehow injected into the body (or in the case of alchohol, imbibed). A quantity of the venom sits in a "reserve" and slowly seeps into the character's bloodstream or lymph nodes. Doing physical activity increases the amount seeping in. At the same time, the character's live removes a fixed amount of venom from the bloodstream every second.
To "inject" a venom into a character, call To create your own venom (or poison), you need to:
In addition to systemic damage, each body part (based on oBodyPartXXX) can receive damage. The types of damage are:
To cause a wound that results in bloodloss, call Keep the bloodloss amount small; a number like 0.01 is a fairly large wound since it means that the character loses 1% of his blood every second, resulting in unconsiousness in 50 seconds, and death in 100 seoconds.
There are two types of bloodloss, external and internal. Both result in calls to seconds. However, external bloodloss can be seen and can be bandaged. Internal bloodloss is invisible and cannot be healed by normal means; a character won't know he has internal bleeding until he falls unconscious.
NOTE: The BodyPartXXX() functions for bloodloss, etc. are not usually called directly. They're most often a result of weapon damage, which is covered in the next tutorial. Calling bone in the body part, rendering it useless.
Bones will not heal until they're set by someone skilled in setting bones. Then, they'll heal very slowly.
Calling the body part. There are three types of paralysis: quick-recovery, medium-recovery, and slow-recovery. An electrical shock would cause quick-recovery paralysis, which disappears within a few seconds. A sting from a jellyfish might cause slow-recovery paralysis, taking a few minutes to completely recover.
If a character's head or chest is paralyzed, the character may fall unconscious or even die.
Calling Slashing weapons can cause a limb to be severed. If the head or torso of a character is severed, the character dies. The muscles to be damaged. (Or in the case of the head, the character's brain.) Enough damage and the body part will be useless until it heals. Significant tissue damage to the character's head or chest will knock it unconscious or kill it. The cBodyPart class includes some extra properties and methods to handle body part damage. These are:
Each body part object also suppots the how damage from different types of weapons (such as slashing or impaling) affect the body part. The default code should work well enough for most creatures, but you may wish to rewrite this for particularly unusual creatures.
As a general rule, you won't call BodyPartDamage() directly either. It is called, however, by existing methods when a character receives a hit from a weapon. This will be described in the next tutorial.
The cCharacter class includes many properties and methods to handle the damage model. Many of them have already been described above. There are a few others of note:
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