Enemy bodyparts and damage thereof

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Okay, I know combat is pretty simplistic at the moment, and we have a lot of these features I’m about to suggest already in, albeit in abstract terms. Would it be terribly hard and/or game breaking to implement a similar damage system that the player has to what enemies have?

For example, players have two arms. If one of them loses all its HP it’s broken. It’s a random chance to see if you’ll land a headshot on a given attack (I think headshots are ranged only). What if zombies had two arms, and if you hit one enough times it’d be broken, keeping them from doing their lunging bite attack that causes infections? What if a headshot wasn’t a percentage chance, and occurred if you just happened to hit (or god forbid) aim for the head?

Currently, creatures die if they walk into bear traps or over spiked boards (As well as losing some movement points/becoming downed but that’s fine) but they’re much less dangerous for you as a player since they’ll just hurt your legs. I think we’ve all seen squirrels and rabbits die on broken windows and rubble. This is a pretty flat and dull way to replicate damage in my opinion, when the framework seems to be in place for a much deeper system.

Imagine, Krav Maga could be based around breaking and dislocating zombie limbs, your hatchet could send arms and legs flying off their owners, a screwdriver aimed at the eyes could blind zombies giving you a better shot at escaping, and a bullet to the mouth could keep them from biting anyone ever again.

2

Somehow I dont feel bodyparts specific model is neccesary. I do enjoy crippling limbs on visual side as far as 1st person stuff goes, but since the results are after all merely some minus% to enemys capability to take actions or them being prone I feel location spesific damage is irrelevant, and it easily slips to micro-managing where you want to hit enemies (I dont want to end up in situation where I forgot to configure my attacks to go for head, so I keep pounding pulped legs because I told character to do so).

This can be avoided by making specific attacks. Crippling attack to make enemies move slower, targeted attacks for additional damage at cost of accuracy - or intention to disable offensive capability (broken arms etc) and balance-affecting attacks to move or make enemies stagger or go prone, result of these attack is exactly the same status effect that would be result of limb-specific attacks - this is just more robust and easier to implement.

To have krav maga you’d simply have bonus to certain of these special attacks, maybe with additional effects. Untrained persons would be quite inefficient when making these special attacks, so they’d be mostly just bashing heads until they gain their brawling skills up.

3

A ““simple”” Dwarf fortress-like targeting mode should do the trick. I enjoy chopping my enemies’ heads, arms and legs.
Its not so hard, but having a simple calculating system calculating more than it can calculate may destroy cataclysm

4

I agree with DeepEnd that if they improve the combat system with more option I’d rather they just keep it simple with attack types instead of aimed attacks.

Lets say:

Off balance - 1/2 damage and chance to knock them down or stun
Disarm - 3/4 damage and chance to reduce targets damage (or actually disarm npcs when they work)
Standard - Normal attack we currently use
Aggressive - 1-1/2 damage but decreases accuracy more then off balance or disarm. Use it after a stun.

Some weapons/styles might remove/reduce the penalty taken for using different attacks.

5

I think a full limb-damage tracking system would be excessive, seeing as, for the most part, you’ll be slaughtering hordes and hordes of enemies, and that level of individual detail would be a needless resource drain. However, something like this could be accomplished with conditions, such as the existing kind we have with knockdown, where the critter gets a blue background, moves randomly, and much more slowly.

I imagine this would work as simple modifiers to an existing hostile. A broken arm will reduce chance to hit and/or damage, possibly removing the ability to bite, while a broken leg would reduce movespeed and possibly have a percentile chance of adding the knockdown condition with every move. These are just a couple ideas off the top of my head, so there’s no reason to not expand further.

Just as importantly, we’d need to define what would cause these conditions. It could be fairly simple, such as item flags (Like weak_block and rapid_attack), giving the weapon an X chance to inflict a certain kind of wound.

What I’d like to see, though, is zombies that start with these woundtypes randomly when they spawn. I’m not sure exactly how it would work, particularly with static spawning, but it could give individual zombies a bit more character, and mix up the individual threat level of any particular zombie type a bit more.

6

And there is no limit of adding a narrative to this game and damage. Instead of “You do 45 critical damage and kill zombie” could be narrated “You chop the zombies head off!”. There are no specific bodyparts, but the narrative tells the tale and the gore we so much desire. Yes, it is faking it - but it is often more than enough to do the job.

Unless we have need for separate bodyparts as items (interesting ideas arise…) they really dont need to be treated like ones. Tho… Iter Vehemens ad Necem leans on this and concept works there.

7

I’m in favor of a more complex melee system. So long as it doesn’t get ridiculously over-complex like Dwarf Fortress’s wrestling etc. Stick to the six bodyparts and it won’t get too bogged down in minutia.

There should always be a basic, ordinary attack which randomly selects a body part to attack and does ordinary damage.

Further attack options should only open up as the character’s skill in that weapon/firearm progresses.

Shift+F (which I don’t think does anything currently) could be used to bring up a special attack menu which lists all possible attacks that the character has learned based on their skill level.

Here’s an example of what a bashing special attack menu might look like:

Target Head(Bashing Level 2): Decreased likelihood to hit, but on hit does increased damage to the head, and has a chance to inflict temporary blindness, hearing damage, improved critical hit chance, temporarily decrease bite damage/hit chance, or cause knockdown.

Target Torso(same): Decreased likelihood to hit, but on hit does increased damage to the torso, and has a chance to knock the enemy back, knock the enemy down, temporarily stagger (decrease movement), or inflict bleeding which does damage over a few turns.

Target Right Arm: Decreased likelihood to hit, but on hit does increased damage to the right arm, and has a chance to disarm the enemy (if wielding a weapon), temporarily reduce arm-based attack damage, temporarily reduce arm-based attack accuracy, temporarily decrease defense against grapple attacks.

Target Left Arm: (same as above)

Target Right Leg: Decreased likelihood to hit, but on hit does increased damage to the right leg, and has a chance to knock the enemy down, temporarily decrease movement speed, temporarily decrease leg-based attack damage/accuracy, or temporarily prevent movement altogether.

Target Left Leg: (same as above)

Leg Sweep(Bashing level 3): Normal chance to hit, but does decreased amount of damage to legs + one other random body part (the combined damage will be substantially less than a normal attack’s damage). However, has a high chance to cause knockdown + temporary slow movement. (This is like a leg attack with higher chance to inflict secondary effects but with a tradeoff of doing much less damage)

Throw Sand(4): Must be standing on dirt terrain or similar. This attack requires a relatively small number of action points. It causes no damage, but has a moderate chance of temporarily blinding the target.

Armor Break(6): This attack does slightly less than normal damage, with a slightly lower chance to hit, but does extra damage to worn armor and clothing, reducing their effectiveness. (Obviously this will only be a useful ability if/when zombies and NPCs come with armor)

Etc Etc.

Just some examples. Notably the ‘chance to cause secondary effect’ portion happens with every blow and is relatively low. However if a body part is reduced to zero health then some semi-permanent version of the secondary effects could take effect.

8

Changes firing mode with guns, so it would have to be something else if you wanted them to be available as melee weapons.

9

Ahh, of course. Well you could always stick the change fire-mode inside the same special attack menu. Or just find a different button for one or the other (I think Shift+F would be better for special attacks since it’s already associated with attacking, and fire modes aren’t changed terribly frequently). But either way.

10

This thread has been ambling back and forth between the end zones for awhile now, but I don’t think everyone’s quite understanding what I was suggesting.

The player has one set of rules, and enemies have another, as it stands. The player has the whole list of Diseases, bleeding, infections, cold body parts, pain, as well as seperate HP and protection on each body part (with some overlap, as head, eyes, and mouth all make up the Head HP).

Enemies are a flat HP value and protection value, without any locational damage, and the only sort of effects that can be inflicted on them are knocking them prone with martial arts (And, I think possibly with melee attacks). Therefore, the same Bear Trap that does 30 damage to your leg will outright kill a zombie. You’re naturally more robust, because most attacks unless you have a Block, will go to your torso and head - mostly torso. This same thing is what makes martial arts like Karate so powerful, put on a pair of hard arm guards and that’ll spread out a lot of the damage away from your torso, allowing you to live longer. Ranged attack headshots are a percentage roll out of every shot, and you cannot get them if an enemy has a NO_HEAD tag. They work under the same system as critical and grazing hits which just do more, or less damage.

What i’m suggesting is that something be implemented so that zombies have the same rules that you abide by, which could theoretically allow you to disable an opponent, or add functionality for a deeper combat system where you could aim for specific body parts, poison an enemy, or the like.

11

Understood it fine; I was merely extrapolating upon the idea, myself.

I am very much in favor of giving enemies a similar health system to the player. I simply find the potential combat options that would entail, to be the most compelling feature of your suggestion. Player choice is a big thing in roguelikes, and apart from having plenty of weapons to choose from, the game has relatively little player choice where it comes to combat. Giving enemies the same health system as the player would open up a lot of options to diversify combat and make combat play very differently depending on your choice of weapon and skill level - something which is harder to pull off with a flat HP system.

In any case, at least for my part you don’t need to repeat yourself. =)

12

I’ve been a bit worried about both this & the expanded-injury thread chiefly because they seem to be adding lots of complexity & possibly requiring additional gear as well.

Complexity can be fun for advanced players–granted–but requiring everyone to work out how best they’ll make this attack on that zed could pose a barrier for new folks, as well as for those of us who don’t want to micromanage every swing. I’m pretty content with my combat-monster having defensive-Unarmed (taekwondo) and offensive-Unarmed (centipede style), switching between the two as needed.

(Yeah, I managed to find a MA NPC. He was buggy, but useful.)

13

It wouldn’t require more gear, or at least all that much new gear. I’ve specifically been trying to suggest stuff that doesn’t require a lot of extra work to implement, because that’s what tends to get added. Also, it’s only called ‘complexity’ when it doesn’t add anything, and ‘depth’ when it does.

I don’t see why you couldn’t just have the default go to and hit random parts of the body, and implement an option to target specific ones later. Sort of like the old Fallout games. If you didn’t aim for anything you could hit anywhere, but you’d tend to hit the torso. If you did aim for something (Go for the groin!) it’d take 1 extra AP and have a reduced chance to hit.

I personally wouldn’t think about how i’d best defeat every zed, i’d probably either do the unaimed attack, or go for the head if I was confident in my ability to land head strikes, maybe targeting the legs of everything if I was trying to escape a mob or wolf pack. Now, for a ‘boss’ type enemy like a hulk? You’d better believe I’m going to think harder about what i’m doing, which is something that exists already. It might mitigate the need to have a high damage weapon on hand like a shotgun that you swap to when you see something very tough barelling down on you. I suppose that’s not really a ‘need’ as it is, but i’d sure like to have my carefully aimed silenced .45 shot do good enough damage to be worth it.

14

NPCs already have this. [quote=“sodapop, post:1, topic:781”]Okay, I know combat is pretty simplistic at the moment, and we have a lot of these features I’m about to suggest already in, albeit in abstract terms. Would it be terribly hard and/or game breaking to implement a similar damage system that the player has to what enemies have?[/quote]

It’s already in the game for NPCs; you can hit their various bodyparts. Although I don’t know if they suffer penalties or effects, like pain or speed loss.

15

[quote=“sodapop, post:13, topic:781”]It wouldn’t require more gear, or at least all that much new gear. I’ve specifically been trying to suggest stuff that doesn’t require a lot of extra work to implement, because that’s what tends to get added. Also, it’s only called ‘complexity’ when it doesn’t add anything, and ‘depth’ when it does.

I don’t see why you couldn’t just have the default go to and hit random parts of the body, and implement an option to target specific ones later. Sort of like the old Fallout games. If you didn’t aim for anything you could hit anywhere, but you’d tend to hit the torso. If you did aim for something (Go for the groin!) it’d take 1 extra AP and have a reduced chance to hit.

I personally wouldn’t think about how i’d best defeat every zed, i’d probably either do the unaimed attack, or go for the head if I was confident in my ability to land head strikes, maybe targeting the legs of everything if I was trying to escape a mob or wolf pack. Now, for a ‘boss’ type enemy like a hulk? You’d better believe I’m going to think harder about what i’m doing, which is something that exists already. It might mitigate the need to have a high damage weapon on hand like a shotgun that you swap to when you see something very tough barelling down on you. I suppose that’s not really a ‘need’ as it is, but i’d sure like to have my carefully aimed silenced .45 shot do good enough damage to be worth it.[/quote]
FO/FO2 veteran here. IIRC you always hit the torso unless calling for another part of the body. Putting in something like that system (basically, called shots took a penalty to hit but generally gave better damage/critical-hit tables) would be OK.

(It’s the first-aid thread that adds more gear.)

My concern was that the system seemed like it might de facto penalize players who aren’t micromanaging every attack. Glad to hear that’s not the intent.