One Shot
For me it can be traced back to when I was playing in college and started playing Vampire: The Masquerade, and its accompanying Story Teller system as well as Shadowrun. Both of these games had the "death spiral" which encouraged me to alter the way I viewed damage.
Damage went from hit points to actual terms, albeit artificially segregated into gradations (from bruised to mauled), but it also gave us a fuller appreciation for the injury. If my character was hit with a baseball bat, and I was crippled, it would be described as "Your leg is broken" whereas before it would be limited to "You’re down 30 hit points and your move is reduced to half". A big difference.
The biggest change in this outlook happened when I started a completely fresh group a few years ago. We were all older, had suffered injury in one manner or another as people tend to over the course of thirty years of life. Most importantly, none of the players were gamers before. They were guys who didn’t play before and so were uninitiated in the entire wargame roots of the hobby.
Combat injuries were described differently by me with this new group. Most injuries fell into three categories, either a minor but painful injury (a knick with a sword point that got through a parry), a real but not immediately life threatening injury (a serious cut, puncture or bruise) to a incapacitating injury ( a crossbow bolt to the stomach). All of these injuries were treated with respect by the players. If I said "His spear point grazes off your shield and punctures your shoulder" the player would say "Ouch! Damn!". As an afterthought I would say, "You take 4 points of damage". But the hit points had become ancillary to the actual fact of the character’s injury. The player and I would not think of their character as having lost 4 hit points, but as having been stabbed in the shoulder. This would greatly affect how that character was played. Having that kind of injury is painful and distracting and tends to affect our actions in a way that simply isn’t covered by an artificial rule set, even one as grainy and gritty as GURPS. There is a psychological issue that goes along with being hurt that affects your actions. It gives you added role-playing opportunity if you’re character must really shrug off that injury and complete the job. How many, even adventurous, folks would keep walking through a dangerous situation if they were hurt beyond a few scratches early on?
I no longer keep track of an injury if it is only a couple of points, except in terms of actual words, because these things can add up over time, but take a long time to do so. Simply keeping track of the fact that a character is scratched up, with a few bruises and singed eyebrows is far more interesting that tallying up six one-point injuries.
How you react to injury is far more complicated than what most games cover. It is possible for two people to take the same amount of physical damage but be affected by it in very different ways. Using GURPS as an example, you have diametrically opposite traits such as High Pain Threshold, and Low Pain Threshold. But these cover extremes of the human ability to withstand pain and injury, not the more subtle real ways that people react to being hurt.
Someone who is big, strong and muscular, but who has never been hurt, has far less psychological endurance for pain than someone who may be much smaller, and physically weaker yet has had a tough life. This is one of the major points of military training, and martial arts practice, to ignore discomfort and continue with the objective you have to do. Many farmers, and other laborers acquire this very same attitude just as a necessity of their occupation.
But this psychological affect doesn’t really get covered by having something as extreme as a high tolerance for pain. You still feel the pain, and it still affects you, slowing you down, but you keep going, where others might not.
To translate this to a character, people will use injury to affect their plans. One person, if they had their wisdom teeth pulled, might take a few days off because they are hurting. Someone else might go to work the very same day even though they are miserable. The person who went into work is just as crippled physically by the pain, but they are still trying to do their job, though they may not be very productive.
Going back to the group of players I mentioned, when I described an injury, they actually pictured it as an injury and not as abstract points. One character’s arm was chewed up by a large dog, and this was a big deal for him. Ten years ago, my past players would be annoyed at the point loss, and think little of it beyond the penalty on their next attack.
Your body has methods of dealing with injury; endorphins will flood your system to alleviate the immediate impact of damage and let you continue to act long enough to theoretically remove yourself from harms way. Soon after that, your wounds will catch up to you, and that’s when heroes are separated from the rest of us.
There is also the psychological affect of injury. The panic that sets in when you realize you have not only been hurt, but seriously damaged. Part of the horror of being hurt is confronting you with immediate mortality. Another part is realizing your body has been changed, for the worse, maybe permanently. This is one of the motivating intents of the more extreme methods of torture.
Dramatic Use of Injury
Using descriptive injury in a game can make the experience more interesting. It makes the characters more real and makes what they go through more dramatic. What is so dramatic about a warrior, if when he finished his next to last battle of the story, he just keeps walking, hardly feeling the injuries he has sustained. It is much more heroic if he got hurt and feels it, but still must go on. It also brings in another level for non-combat characters who may not be cowards at all, but because they lack experience with being hurt, treat their injuries as much greater obstacles than they have to be. Can the wizard really not climb that ladder with the sprained ankle? The warrior did it with an arrow wound in his thigh! But the wizard will think he can’t do it and so will try to find another way, unless he is being chased by a pack of wolves, in which case he will quickly realize how well he can scurry up that ladder.
Using Injury in Different Game Systems
It can be harder to simulate the effects of injury in some systems. Some systems emulate genres that deliberately try to not simulate the lasting effects of injury in a realistic way. They are made to emulate certain genre’s. Martial arts movie genre’s are a prime example. Opponents suffer multiple attacks that would realistically break a leg, or at least dislocate a joint, yet they rarely have more than a bad limp afterwards, and even that disappears in time for the next fight. People get shot in the movies and simply have to walk around with their hand on their side, rather than worry about dying from massive internal bleeding. This adds to the cinematic flavor of the settings and is very important to the flavor of the games that emulate them. Most games fall somewhere in the middle of the extremes of grittiness and cinematic. One example is a game like D&D which uses Hit Points not just as a measure of how much physical punishment a hero can take, but also factors in the hero’s luck and skills at not being hit in the first place.
In a system like D&D, everyone still has the same inherent level of injury. It just takes a lot more to hurt a 10th level warrior than a 1st level wizard. But the relative percentage of that injury can still be the same. A bad flesh wound or bruise might be 10% of the character’s HP, while a crippling injury would be more like 70%. This is just a scale to use when describing injuries. If you know the Zrun the Barbarian took 13 points of damage from that axe, but he has 100 HP, as the GM you can translate to, "Zrun, the axe smashed into your side, but didn’t cut you due to your chainmail, but you have some seriously bruised ribs from that one". Now Zrun’s player can write down "Bruised ribs on left side" in addition to -13 hit points.
As an aside, a running joke between a guy I gamed with years ago was a D&D wizard who, when rolled up, had one hit point. The joke was that he would probably die from slipping on a patch of ice and landing on his head, splitting it open. The character never saw the light of day for obvious reasons! The not so funny parallel to this is that many people die every year from similarly non heroic accidents that wouldn’t have hurt a physically tougher person.
Obviously the dramatic use of injury requires cooperation on the part of the players to work. The GM can’t easily keep track of every injury, but the players can, and use that to honestly asses their condition.
Do this enough and eventually the metegame stats can begin to fade, and combat seems more real and more risky than losing a game of Squad Leader. If Zrun survives the battles, his player can look back and remember how that Gnoll nearly broke Zruns ribs, which is a much more interesting memory than, "Wow that Gnoll did 13 points of damage to me". It also increase Zrun’s bad-ass reputation because that same Gnoll could have easily killed most other people but ONLY managed to bruise Zrun’s ribs.
In the end, it's how hard you try to make the rules of the game simulate reality, and not let the rules be the reality. It’s a little more work at first, but pays in the end.
