Small combat tweak - "Maxhealth"

[Cogliostro]

Everyone, today we're not alone like usual. Meet my friend, Max. Max is a professional boxer. Not groceries. He goes out in the ring and gets hit in the head A LOT, and hits other people in the head A LOT. Since the head is such an important part in his chosen vocation, we've asked Max to tell us what OTHER uses he has found for his well-trained head in life. With his typical candour, he replied:

"UHHH, I UHHHH.... EAT INTO IT." Thanks, Max. That helps a lot.

No disrespect to professional boxers meant, they are great and very dedicated sportsmen who we could all learn a lot from. But it's an unavoidable fact, it's just how we're built by mother nature. Getting hit, especially in the head (but this is actually true for the body on the whole too), doesn't just leave bruises or scars. It causes permanent, irreparable damage.

This means that after each powerful hydrostatic blow to the abdomen, or each sneaky knock-out, you might recover fine; but, alas, you will never again be the man or woman you were before the trauma. No recovery from trauma in the real world is ever an 100% recovery.

The suggestion: add a hidden variable, like those we have for the skills, called MaxHealth, in tribute to my friend Max. MaxHealth works like this:

- initialized to 100 at spawntime for everyone
- every hit you suffer has a fixed random chance of reducing MaxHealth by around 1/10th of the damage dealt to you.
- each reduction if it happens is designed to be small, almost negligible, but just like in real life, they add up inexorably.

MaxHealth controls, that's right, your max health. Your full health now becomes 98, 94, 80%... Keep fighting and you have a good chance to reduce it to match your high school Literature grades. MaxHealth cannot be recovered, fixed with heal-food, or somehow reset back. Once you're a cripple due to fighting, you are a cripple for the rest of your life. Which, of course, everyone will be able to see on you, and maybe they'll be compassionate with you. Maybe.

Going forward, when we figure out how to implement proper medicine, perhaps we might introduce a complicated longterm rehab procedure that could slightly improve someone's MaxHealth if they're way beaten up. But for all intents and purposes, it is supposed to be permanent!

[Rebma]

So, this would be a new "bar-type" stat on our charri-profile? Or would it be a behind-the-scenes effect for our "damage" bar?

I just want clarification because the way I see it, a new bar is where it's not actually putting you at risk, or doing anything other than saying "hey player, you have 18% damage, try limping a little in your RP" Which I'm totally cool with. And with the new bar everyone else could see.(edit:And distinguish healable wounds from permanent)

The second way, it would add permanent damage to your damage bar, which I'm not sure how it would be coded. Would the server recognize your max health was 82% an just tell you what you needed to heal with up to that point? (Like, You need 182 grams more of dried mushrooms to heal 82% message after eating some?) And it would just stay on your damage bar so people were always going "OMG HERE EAT HEALING FOOD!" And it would never help?

Related to that last paragraph, if you were to have 82% MH, would it affect the damage % it would take to kill you? I guess that depends on whether it affects the damage bar or creates it's own.

PLEASE clarify. I like it either way, I just wanna get psyched for the right idea.

[Cogliostro]

I think the second way is the right one: an invisible variable behind the scenes (no new bars) that just controls how far your current bar can stretch. You would immediately see it, and so would everyone else: oh dear, my health bar has shrunk.

At the moment they're all equally stretched out to 100%, with the change, the healthbar could be shorter than all the rest (even when it's full-red).

The coding for the feature would, I imagine, involve a single new variable per character - think any of the skill variables, and then the most complex part would be to correctly write the little bit of PHP code that will handle the random chance of MaxHealth being decreased by a combat hit. Plus replace all hardcoded occurence of "100%" with the variable MaxHealth.

Reduced health due to this feature would of course mean reduced damage output, just as it works now when you are hurt. You can also think of it as now being at 86% health (or whatever), but permanently. You would be easier to kill, yes!

[Caesar]

So.. Your bar would fill from the left with heal-able damage..? And from the right with damage that is unhealable...?

[Elros]

So.. Your bar would fill from the left with heal-able damage..? And from the right with damage that is unhealable...?

I think he means that instead of having a bar like this:

0% **************************************************** 100%

It would be like this:

0% ******************************************** 100%

In other words, you bar would be like 85% the length of your original bar, so you would die by recieving only 85% of the damage that you would have when you first spawned.

Sort of like Karma, the more you fight, the easier you die later in life.

[Cogliostro]

Hmm, I get the feeling the reason for your questions is that we don't see the same bars when we play the game, seeing as how I'm one of the 2 people in the game who turned off the new fancy ones and use the oldschool type.

In the end, it doesn't matter how it appears visually on the screen. Personally I'd like if the size of the actual health bar would shrink down, and it could never go above my well-earned 82% now. It would show me: 82%, but there would be no "black space" to use heal food and fill up. That space is gone forever. Now my max is 82%...

[Cogliostro]

Elros made a great illustration, only thing I'd change is I'd have the smaller bar actually say 82% on it. I think players deserve to know what's up, what their full maxhealth now is exactly.

[Caesar]

I'd prefer the bar like this;



100%

15% damage DDD***************************PPPP (82% max/18% permanent damage)

Elros made a great illustration, only thing I'd change is I'd have the smaller bar actually say 82% on it. I think players deserve to know what's up, what their full maxhealth now is exactly.

[mad]And what good did they do to deserve that?![/mad]

[Cogliostro]

Too complex/gamey, in my opinion. Requires explaining to people what "permanent damage" is etc.

In the other approach your health just shrunk due to suffering too many blows. Everyone intuitively understands it.

[Caesar]

I still think I prefer making it unnecessarily complicated.

[*Wiro]

I don't like it.

[Caesar]

I don't like it.

Which is why...

I still think I prefer making it unnecessarily complicated.

[Dudel]

If a character constantly gets into fights/frays/etc then this makes sense however there are those that get struck for no reason within Cantr, and RL as well, but to force a limitation on them would be a tad irritating.

I'd think if you take damage a few times rather then just a BIG CHUNK once in your entire character life... sure.. but not for every hit, as what is implied now.

My brain says, "For every 80% damage that is taken and healed your 'MH' would drop by 5 to 10%". (That 80% is totaled over the coarse of the character's life.)

My brain also says, "Damn it Dudel why are you agreeing to make it easier to kill characters?"

My response to this was, "Cause this one makes sense and isn't shmity."

[Rebma]

No dudel, it's not a lot going through. Every hit there's a chance of getting up to 10%(1/10th) of the damage done to you going through, but when you think about that, If you get hit 35% what are you getting?

Maybe to add to this, a variable in the system that decides whether or not you lose Max health, or something that say, every ten hits will take the 10% on the tenth hit?

That would satisfy the people who think it's too much damage.

[SekoETC]

It makes sense, I'm just wondering how difficult it would be to code. Also I don't think small wounds should leave permanent damage.