The Mushroom Press Design Blog

The Development of a Damage System

In a game about kung-fu, you’re sunk without a robust damage system for tracking wounds.

We again inherited the framework of a fantastic wound system from the precursor game. The Ripples system was an abstracted damage system that lumped all varieties of harm (even social and spiritual harm!) into an increasing pool of dice. When a deadly enough attack struck, these dice were rolled and the highest set was matched to make a Chi Condition.

These conditions were both narrative and mechanical in turns. A character was expected to adhere to the narrative applied to them by the wound (which could include anything! Broken arms, suicidal depression, overzealous adherence to duty… Anything!). When their actions or descriptions did not align with this narrative, they instead took a mechanical penalty to compensate.

The foundation of this system was brilliant. It balanced narrative reality with mechanical incentive. The only issue was one of implementation.

One of the issues we recognized added to the bloat of combats was that there was no terminus point to damage. A character could have a billion ripples as long as they weren’t rolled by a sufficiently powerful attack. But this was secondary to the issues that arose with the Chi Conditions.

As it ran at the table, conditions could pile on very quickly, but they only rarely had a tangible game effect. The amount of steps to placing them led to an excessive over-balancing, meaning fights could drag on with very little change for many rounds.

There were no clear guidelines describing what could be a narrative wound, which led to such bizarre scenarios as a foe having “only the palms of his hands” burned so that he could not use his sword without penalty. Let it not be said that my players cannot find a mechanical advantage even in the most narrative of rules.

Most unsatisfying to myself, was the contrast of a particular brilliant idea with its own antithesis. At the end of a combat, all accumulated ripples were rolled to place on lasting consequences from the battle.

I loved this rule. It meant that as wounds piled on, even though they had no immediate effect (avoiding the dreaded “death spiral” of most wound systems) they did increase the risk of lasting consequences.

The let-down came in the recovery rules. First, they had to get through the character’s full defense, being reduced in severity by the result! Second, Characters got to roll their full, unmodified die pool constantly to reduce and recover these conditions, so even in the case where such conditions were even applied they swiftly vanished.

We addressed these issues in turn:

It was first proposed to implement a balance that actually appeared in the Legends rules: a track of ripples that left a character vanquished when it was filled. This created a clean terminal point to conflict, and gave characters a sense of urgency as they took wounds.

We renamed the Chi Conditions “Imbalances”. The old term had too much baggage with the previous game’s “secret arts”.

We did retain the “damage as dice” framework. We added that as a character continued to take damage that the severity of the Imbalances they received would increase appropriately.

Finally, to add between-combat “teeth” to Imbalances, we made the natural healing very slow. We balanced this out with a faster and riskier option of healing others with what amounted to field medicine.

Imbalances have a rules framework that demands a dramatic payoff. It doesn’t really matter what form that payoff takes, but if they go out with a whimper rather than a bang, a player is left wondering why they bothered to record them on their sheet at all.

So my thinking was, whether dealing with the natural character arc that would heal the imbalance or sweating it out on an operating table, there needed to be tension and drama generated by the imbalance. In this way, rather than serving a pure “hamper the players” style utility purpose, imbalances drove gameplay into the desired shape.