Whenever I design a ttrpg I always find myself facing an issue, how to make damage, health and armour make sense.
I have tried ideas from using a simple HP mechanic (16/42) and static damage reduction armour (flat numbers), using armour as a second bar of health, having mutliple types of health, a wound mechanic that only appleis when you take a certain amount of damage. damage being part of the attack, etc.
Nothing feels that satisfying in practice, I really want a damage system that makes the attacks have OOMPH, makes me feel like the character infront of me actually got devastated yet is not slowing down the game.
TL;DR give me your favourite damage mechanics and explain why they are so good.
Only slow players slow down a game.
Yeah but if you require 4 rolls for a single normal attack then it will be slower than 2 rolls.
A person who takes 15 minutes to process the steps of a single roll is slower than a person who takes 1 minute to process the steps of 10 rolls.
You just roll 4 dice and have a rule that to hit, to sound wound, to save, to invuln are done by the order of the dice along an axis. If the attack misses, you ignore the rest of the dice.
Watching play on on YouTube etc is painful when they'll roll single attacks through the motions consecutively, just fricking roll the whole chain and read the dice along a line for progression, or 4 different coloures dice.
Eh, not really true. Sure, slow players slow down a game the most, but you can still have slow mechanics.
Slow players and slow mechanics are not mutually exclusive.
Have you tried increasing the lethality? It doesn't matter how exactly you tweak the mechanics if the players are not actually afraid of their characters dying.
This
Lower health, with more layers of protection is a sweet spot in my experience. Your level 15 superman is a pretty tough guy, but a hobo with a shotgun will probably kill him at point blank.
Armor = dodge is depressing though. Armor as damage division works, but tends towards lower lethality. It can work, though.
Could try something like Warhammer Fantasy style where it's a Strength vs Toughness roll (3 Str vs 3 Tgh has a 50% or 4+ chance to wound on a D6, higher/lower changes roll by + or - 1) and almost everyone has 1HP and even heroic characters only have 3 or, at most, 4 HP.
Characters can also have multiple attacks, often something like 4 Attacks and 3 HP. If you wanted to represent someone getting weaker as they take wounds you could lower their number of attacks for each wound they take. Will mean you won't have to recalculate anything, just attack less. This isn't part of the game proper, however.
It's made for wargames but has been used for skirmish games like Mordheim. Will probably work best if you make it only a few characters and monsters have multiple HP. Even veteran knights in warhammer only had 1 HP, though their squad leaders might have 2 attacks but still 1 HP.
This sounds interesting, i will try tooling around with it to create something. So would weapons change the number of dice you roll or change your modifier?
It'd change the modifier. Dual Wielding gave an extra attack. Though since Warhammer is a D6 system it means that each +1 you add can have a big effect it means the bonuses from weapons are usually quite small. Swords and Spears add no strength, they let you parry when paired with a shield or attack with a second rank. Two handed weapons like Halberds and Greatswords do add strength, though.
The worst thing with a D6 isn't getting too strong, it's getting too tough. A toughness 5 monster can only be wounded on a 6+ by normal Strength 3 opponents so Toughness 5 was extremely rare outside of commanders and their mounts.
But you can fix all that and give yourself some wiggle room to let all your weapons have bonuses by simply using a bigger dice.
I like the Stress and Consequences mechanics they have in Fate. There's some amount of damage you can just walk off after the fight, but after that it starts giving you weaknesses that your GM can exploit, and which take more time to heal.
The bad news is that in order for you to find something that makes sense to you, or is satisfying to you, you either have to come across it through experimentation or from reading every system you can.
The worse news is that you may never find something that makes sense to you or satisfies you.
What I have to offer has so much crunch, you'll question even why I do it, but it is what satisfies me and makes sense for the game.
Just post it man, Even just an idea would be helpful.
>oomph
PCs have 3 HP.
NPCs have 2HP
Armour is 1, 2 or 3 points reduction and always ablative by 1 point per hit.
Knives and similar do 1 damage.
Small arms do 2 damage.
Big weapons do 3 damage.
Death at negative HP.
0 HP requires assistance to not die in a short period of time.
1 HP is life altering jury unless assisted in a short period of time.
Done.
>I really want a damage system that makes the attacks have OOMPH
Sounds like the issue is a lack of imagination, because even the basic, "big number go down much" can achieve that.
Savage World style damage might be a good inspiration
PCs/Important villains get 4 Wound
Mooks get 1 Wound
Everyone has a "damage threshold" that is determined by their Constitution stat. Armor adds to the "damage threshold".
If the damage dealt to a person is below damage threshold, they ignore the hit. If it is above/equal to damage threshold the person is "stunned" until the start of their turn. If they get "stunned" again, they suffer 1 Wound
If the damage exceeds the threshold by 4+, for every 4 steps above you, in addition to above, deal 1 Wound per every 4 steps you exceed by.
Damage dice explode.
Demolishing both PCs and npcs in one hit is fun and definitely gives this OOMPH feeling, while still making the regular hits feel important - after all, enemies can have like 10 Wounds tops for kaiju-size monsters with all the features for additional health, with 99% of them staying in 1 Wound for mooks, 4 for bosses range
Hard disagree. Savage Worlds combat is usually just "nothing, nothing, nothing, oh, I rolled 33 damage with my thrown lawn chair and sent king kong to the shadow realm."
What I'm saying is, in Savage Worlds neither skills nor equipment really matters much, because everything is subservient to lucky exploding dice which determine the outcome of 90% of battles.
It isn't in my experience, (well, for mooks it is, but for wild cards it definitely wasn't the case), although I can see this scenario happening if you face a highly armored, high vitality enemy with low Strength of your own.
Hard disagree on skills though. Have run the math the other day and success rates are heavily swayed by modifiers. It can feel like dice explosions make modifiers trivial, but if you look at it, to succeed on a -2 check with a d6 in skill, you still need to roll a 6 on your skill or wild die, exploding dice or not. And with a +2, you just have to not roll snake eyes.
What I can agree with is that the combat/skill rolls are pretty swingy and sending king kong to the shadow realm happens more often than "from time to time", but I like that. Definitely a matter of taste though
>Hard disagree on skills though. Have run the math the other day and success rates are heavily swayed by modifiers.
I did say combat specifically - I meant skills as in your trained skills that determine your die sizes. But to address your point, I do think that even against modestly armoured enemies, it takes long enough to whittle them down through repeated stuns (that they often shake off) that exploding dice are the main determinant of success most of the time.
The most OOMPH-ful damage system I've seen was in Adeptus Evangelion 3, which evolved from the Dark Heresy hit effects. However, it is incredibly clunky in practice and difficult to keep track of. I love the idea of it, but playing it sucks hard.
After rolling to hit, determining hit location, and giving the target the ability to use a defensive action, you roll damage. Subtract Armor (dependent on hit location and functions as DR, if the result here is 0, the attack does nothing), and compare the result (Effective Damage) to the Toughness of the target. If the Effective Damage is less than the Toughness, it's a Glancing Blow. Otherwise, it's a Critical Hit.
In either case, add the Effective Damage to the target's Damage Pool, and roll a d6 (glancing) or d10 (critical) on the corresponding hit location's damage type Hit Effects chart, adding 1 to the result for every 15 points in the target's Damage Pool.
Then you do a bunch of modifiers and status conditions, so it gets even more stupid, but in principle you've got a few key factors in play:
- Armor as DR
- Damage doesn't matter except in fixed increments
- Effective Damage vs Toughness decides the possible range of the effectiveness of the attack
- The Hit Effects are what actually cause status conditions like death, with damagePool/15 as modifier
There's also "Soft Damage" which only adds to Damage Pool but doesn't get to roll on Hit Effects, and Minimum Momentum that says your Hit Effect modifier needs to be at least 1 to be subject to Critical Hits (d10).
In the end, it can result in long slug-fests as all actors get more and more disabled and lose limbs, but death only happens sometimes. It can also result in a few unlucky rolls ending the fight quickly.
God, AdEva is such garbage. I wish it wasn't the gold standard for trauma-based super robot games.
It could be worse. I've seen homebrew systems that made AdEva look like a smooth ride down an empty freeway in comparison.
The first two paragraphs seem mostly good to me, but then it gets excessive. Just use wounds/much much lower HP values rather than rolling dice for damage. Why use mult-digit HP pools when you have such an involved to-hit/armor system? Way too many steps.
remove hit points and made damage reduce your stats
The strike hits your face and deals 13 points of charisma damage.... not so pretty now are ye elf?
>Average HP: 10
>Gun: 1d6+4
>Vest: 5 Armour (SOAK)
ppl with no armour can be on shotted. If you have armour best case scenario the attacker does 0 damage to you. Worst case scenario he 2-shots you. Just make the damage spread tight. And maybe even give small mods to the damage dice if the user is competent. For an example a conscript soldier (poor shooter) will just try to hit center mass, while hitman (expert shooter) will try to hit the heart of head.
Damage and health shouldn't be complex. Lingering injuries are usually very disliked
>You got shot, spend next 3 weeks in the Hospital. lame!
I do like decreasing stats a bit more, but depending on the system you should be carful. But since im a BRP enjoyer I worry not.
damage spread is meant to represent how hard or well you hit someone. So a gunshot can range from a shoulder hit (1dmg) to a mortal shot (10dmg). But in most cases I feel this is way too swingy.
kek, this actually does make sense in a way.
>knight armor
>vs 5.45
Anon a 5.45x39mm can pierce that plate at 700 yards and cause a SEVERE wound that will require immediate medical attention in order not to die. And if that soldier is wearing a ceramic or titanium plate that sword will be outright no selled.
>inb4 magic shit
Then why fight with swords?
>inb4 magic shit
>Then why fight with swords?
All swords need to do mechanically is be able to deal enough damage to make up for being melee.
But I can hardly see a reason to ever play a melee character in a high lethality game. Would rather be a heavy crossbowman or something.
Projection much anon? What I said literally has almost nothing to do with what I posted. The image is called AK vs DnD as in how much AK would kick DnD's figurative ass. If anything the Picture is showing a a moment before that smug ass smile gets wiped off the female knight's face. The soldier seems like a somewhat reasonable fella here. The knight clearly does not realize in how much danger she is. He did let her get awful close and apparently mid thrust. His Kevlar armour will probably stop the sword. But no doubt he would suffer blunt trauma end even maybe fall over. If we say this man is 170cm cm, an average high for a Human, that would mean that this woman is around 2m tall. Meaning that she is probably quite strong. Which makes since, she was picked to be a knight after all. As if there is magic involved I have no idea and I don't think so. Anyway here is another image for you to project upon.
Eh, D&D already has rules for automatic rifles. It deals 2D8+Dex per burst. About 12 damage.
A Knight has 52 HP. So she could literally face tank a crit. And she could attack where he's unarmored.
Really the soldier wasn't being sensible at all in letting her get so close. He probably thought he was dealing with a 10HP target like in his own setting/system. Normal guards in D&D also have 10HP, it's just that knights do not.
again anon, its a silly image, no need to go this deep into it. But I enjoy the autism you display. Keep being based
>As if there is magic involved I have no idea and I don't think so
Yeah, I'm thinking he doesn't stand a chance.
Like in PDQ? A knife in the guts can reduce your business contacts. Your character consists only of tags or phrases, each with ranks. You can decide which should lower in ranks on receiving damage. Typically you choose tags which are not relevant in the current conflict, but at some point all remaining tags are conflict relevant and it becomes some sort of death spiral.
Like Traveller? It's a pretty good system, actually.
>really want a damage system that makes the attacks have OOMPH
If every attack is supposed to feel impactful, then none of them will be.
???
Every attack is not supposed to feel impactful, only the ones that strike true. Dodge, dodge, block, FRICK I'm DOWN! Or got a meaningfully crippling wound, or I'm getting one step closer to one of those, which seem imminent. If you can take 1 HP of damage when you have 45 HP, that is pointless and feels like nothing. HP pools should be quite low so that the damage you do get feels impactful.
Like how wfrp handles it
Toughness negates damage, so a tougher character can take hits better than a frail little b***h
Armor also negates damage, though there are ways to negate and avoid it. In particular individual body parts are armored, so unless you buy a whole set(which can be expensive) enemies can take called shot penalties to hit you in unarmored locations.
Finally, the wounds(HP) attacks actually go against are almost always very few in number. It's very difficult to get even 20 wounds, in a system where someone can end up easily doing 3/4s that in a single attack. WFRP avoids HP bloat hard. Even a dragon may only have 40-60 wounds(though plenty of damage negation).
Finally, what ties a lot of this together is the somewhat restrictive healing, and injuries you can receive. Unless you have a magical healer in the party(and even then they're usually limited by some "per combat" shit) then you have to rely on expensive healing draughts and good old fashioned rest to try and heal off stab wounds. This especially applies to more damaging injuries like severed limbs or broken bones, that will require medical attention even a healing caster can't provide.
All of this comes together to form a system where even a few lost wounds feels like a major fricking detriment, where every attack coming your way is nailbiting because the enemy might randomly crit and suddenly your character's name being "Peg" gets a whole lot more funny.
I'd also recommend looking at Dark heresy, it does something very similar, but actually has cover rules and IIRC fatigue rules for accumulated damage over time.
It's narration that makes combat interesting, not mechanics. You could have the absolute perfect combat mechanics according to your preferences designed by God himself, and it would still suck ass if you didn't use your imagination.
You can also have the most perfect narration possible, and it's still going to suck donkey dicks if the system doesn't suit it.
D&Drone trying to salvage a shit system thinking. Narration is important, but it should be a product of combat itself. Combat is a game of decision-making, planning, and calculating odds. If you want combat to be enjoyable, it should be an enjoyable puzzle to solve.
False.
Your input is worthless
moron
False.
Replace damage with smarties or gummi bears. Edible games is the next big thing i tell you haha
- I prefer a separation between fatigue and wounds, with fatigue being more granular.
- I dislike HP and stamina scaling with levels. Maybe stamina can scale a little.
- Full stamina gets a bonus. Less than full no bonus. Under half gets a malus. 0 is exhausted and immobile.
- armor coverage and type/material are separate axes. Full, 3/4, half, no coverage (3,2,1,0). Heavy, Medium, Light, None (3,2,1,0).
What kind of game are you making OP?
How often are you designing rpgs? Like what have you actually made?
pre-hitpoints(use whatever term you want)
getting hit first influences your preHP
(on paper it reduces the damage to hitpoints but is reduced by 1 each time)
when a target receives damage with less than maximum preHP then they receive each lost preHP as additional damage to HP
the idea is that there's a fatigue or stamina on top of HP that represent how close to death they are
>players use a handfull of cards or dice to take actions
>these are also their HP
Instant oomph.
Been rewriting Nechronica's damage system for combat between regular humans.
>No HP, only hit locations with body parts or equipment
>Weapons and armor are parts you can allow to break instead of suffering damage. You can stop a wound to your guts by letting your shield or sword get damaged instead
>Armor and shields give defensive reactions, so you can soak some damage every round without anything breaking, but you give up action points
>To make it more sensible for humans I've refluffed stuff like a brain getting broken to concussion, but a single good hit to vitals is going to bring a character down and likely to death.
>Having teammates nearby to keep attackers from landing good blows and having skills for damage avoidance or negation is extremely important
>Tanking hits is entirely active and involves managing your action economy against equipment resources and skill pool.
My system (players like a lot so far) you have:
Weapon has a Cut (AP) value which is added to damage
If Armour is equal or less than Cut, it reduces damage 1-1, if armour value is greater then it does this then halfs it and turns it into Impact damage
ofc impact damage weapons skip the halving but have no Cut damage
You have a wound pool and location (limb, torso head) hit points, when wounds go negative you make endurance checks with proportionate malus to stay in the fight and when hit points go negative you roll on crit tables and apply to that location. Works real good for emergent mechanics for undead etc too (no pain so no endurance checks, no blood loss etc... smash head to end fight quickly).
I remember when 'emergent' was the big buzzword on /tg/, but it's been a long time. Either way, I do not think an emergent mechanic is what you think it is, if such a thing exists at all.
I don't know what it means in /tg/ buzzwordism, think I missed that, but in the terms I'm used to an emergent phenomenon is one which has not been deliberately structured (didn't set out explicit undead damage interactions to try and make them less vulnerable to piercing damage etc) but appears as the result of other structures (wound pool takes you out of combat via pain, which was done to properly emulate what happens when someone mag-dumps 9mm into the local Ketamine Ape while he's robbing the liquor store, so they obviously auto-pass that, blood loss likewise...).
Dice attack vs dice defense difference is the damage or nullified attack, increase attack bonus by 1 for every new round but not defense, swingy dice for more oomph or go with small dice pools or whatever, I doubt you care.
sounds vey prolonged and gay.
I like simple opposing roll checks for most attacks. Some attack roll vs some defense roll, the difference tells you the damage. This also means low, if not equal HP for everyone.
Alternatively, I've never been bothered by the storyteller system, attack, defense, and soak works just fine imo.
I've stated in other threads involving weapons but noone complains about my system as it rarely means death. Most often just incurs a penalty or a stun to future saves. You could take normal 5e saves and just apply it to damage and alter it between them.
Say a broadsword requires a strength save at +5 or stunned. But if they roll a natural 1, they make an additional strength save without the +5 and at disadvantage or die.
A rapier ignores armor bonuses. Which armor would state what bonuses it gives like "+2 vs bludgeon, +4 vs piercing/slashing" and so on.
The reason I do this is so that I don't have to scale what monsters I use to the level of the party. Goblins are dangerous at any level. Albeit more of a nuisance than a large threat. A dragon would react to an army of goblins coming at him the same way you would.
you don't paly games
I guess I will post this here instead of the homebrew thread, but I can't decide on whether a diceless system is better than a more normal one or not. basically the idea is that you have 3 kinds of health: hp, armor, and evasion. armor and evasion recover every turn but hp does not. normal damage depletes evasion first, then armor, then hp. an attack can do bonus damage that only affects one type of hp. for example an aimed shot would do some amount of normal damage, but also bonus damage that only affects evasion. the advantage is that it would speed up play by removing dice rolls and make evasion tanking more consistent instead of being invincible until you get a bad roll and then get one shot.
the limitation of this system is that it can create a significant damage threshold that would make characters invincible if their damage output isn't high enough. one way to counteract this would be to have combo attacks where characters could perform followup attacks when certain conditions are met, which would greatly increase damage output.
what do you think? is this an improvement over a normal system or is it making it more complicated for no reason?
>the advantage is that it would speed up play
I really don't think it will
you're replacing something where people mainly decide based on vague heuristics with something where people can easily think a turn ahead, and where thinking a turn ahead is important for survival/killing. Sure, you're not spending time rolling and reading dice, but you're going to be spending a ton of time thinking about your decisions.
Could be a fun system but don't use it if you're going for speed. One thing I'd maybe add is attacks that ignore some type of damage negation, like an armor piercing attack. It doesn't make it easier for followup attacks to go through armor, it just ignores it entirely.
well the idea is that an armor piercing attack would just be an attack that does bonus armor damage.
bonus armor damage would mean that followup non-piercing attacks would be unhindered by the armor since it's already been destroyed, right?
Defense is a trade off between mobility and armor but your system makes it a combo.
Why would anyone aim carefully while shooting at a full plate guy in your system? Plate guy's evasion is going to be dramatic anyway so there's no point doubling damage here.
But in real life you do want to carefully aim for a weak spot like eye/neck/armpit.
On a design philosophy level, in my book anyway, your actual system favors ressource management as opposed to actual roleplaying itself.
That's how you end up saying "okay you did go through his evasion and then armor now let's check for HP" instead of "you hit him right on the coconut, let's check if your pickaxe can dig through his helmet to land in his brain".
If you want to go full autismo you might find it funnier and more rewarding to go for body parts + damage types (crushing/piercing/slashing/etc). Keep evasion as a sum of all (un)armored body parts if you really want to go randomizerless?
Defense is a trade off between mobility and armor but your system makes it a combo.
Why would anyone aim carefully while shooting at a full plate guy in your system? Plate guy's evasion is going to be dramatic anyway so there's no point doubling damage here.
But in real life you do want to carefully aim for a weak spot like eye/neck/armpit.
On a design philosophy level, in my book anyway, your actual system favors ressource management as opposed to actual roleplaying itself.
That's how you end up saying "okay you did go through his evasion and then armor now let's check for HP" instead of "you hit him right on the coconut, let's check if your pickaxe can dig through his helmet to land in his brain".
If you want to go full autismo you might find it funnier and more rewarding to go for body parts + damage types (crushing/piercing/slashing/etc).
>Why would anyone aim carefully while shooting at a full plate guy in your system?
well the point is that you would try to use anti-armor attacks against enemies with high armor and anti-evasion attacks against enemies with high evasion. there could be skills that let you convert one type of damage to another, like maybe a sniper skill that lets you convert excess aim attack into regular attack.
> your actual system favors ressource management
that's what I was going for
Ars Magica has a decent combat system for a game very removed from fighting, with two different damage resolution mechanics. The first is first mundane physical fighting, be it man vs animal, a fist fight, shooting someone with a Crossbow, ect. Attacker rolls Dex+Skill to hit, Defender rolls Quickness+Skill to defend. If the attacker beats the defender, a quick bit of math is done by adding damage to the advantage and subtracting Armor+Stamina, giving a damage total. Depending on the character's size (literally how big physically they are) that will give them a light, medium, heavy, or incapacitating wound, or outright kill them. Wounds have a persistent penalty, leading to a death spiral.
The other system is when the character is acted upon, mundane world or supernatural force. Say falling off a building, being set ablaze, or having a magically guided dart made of crystal plunged through them. In such cases, it is just a roll of damage against the character's soak (applicable armor+stamina) total and the wound is decided from there as normal. Depending on the circumstances, the defender may be able to add a skull and/or second characteristics, such as avoiding a dragon's fire.
Either way, wounds take a long time to heal and have a chance of getting worse. Get wounded enough, and all you can do is convalese, which is punishing in a game where a character advances in experience not by adventuring, but by studying/practicing.
Finally Art&Academe (source book) has a nice example list of wounds based upon their source and severity. Very Warhammer Fantasy Crit table feel to it.
Attacker successes minus defender successes = damage. Defender gets more successes, no damage. EZ.
I like that.
What systems use that mechanic.
The Riddle Of Steel
Big on wounds. No HP. Even a light hit can cause you to lose because you lose the Initiative and suffer penalties for the rest of the fight. It's a death spiral.
>give me your favourite damage mechanics and explain why they are so good.
For me, it's Cyberpunk 2020.
Armour is damage reduction.
Your Body stat also reduces damage.
You get separate HP for each body part AND a distinct "overall wound level".
Every time you take damage, they are substracted to the HP of the individual body part (run out of HP and the part is gone) and added to the total of overall wounds.
Take enough damage and you can collapse from the shock.
Reach a high enough wound level and you start rolling to stay conscious.
Beyond a certain threshold, you roll to stay alive.
The more wounds you accumulate after that, the harder it will be to stop you from dying, even if you are straight picked up by the Trauma Team.
It leads to interesting situations, where you can have a wimpy character take a punch in the guts and straight pass out, and be fine the next day, while another can have his left arm clean cut by a high calibre weapon and still fight for a bit, before dying of his wounds.
And even the smallest handgun can one-shot an unarmoured character.
AND, while it can seem pretty random on paper, in practice it never feels unfair. You'll get PCs dying left and right (having one PC die every scenario isn't that uncommon) but when it happens you usually see it coming and be the result of a frickup or being too wienery.
It doesn't even take that much more rolls than other games.
You roll to hit, then roll for damage and if the damage gets beyond a threshold, you roll to stay conscious or to stay alive. That's it.
You know, for as busted as CP2020 is mechanically, I agree it has a pretty well designed HP system.
One time I thought about making a system wherein the damage you take was compared to your 'willpower' stat. Less about tracking your biology and more about fighting through pain and degraded ability to do what you want to do.
Second favourite damage system is, interestingly, a wargame:
En Garde! by Osprey.
The damage depends on the success margin of the attack.
You don't have HP, you receive wounds, of two or three different levels.
Take a minor wound and you get serious penalties for the rest of the fight.
Take a mortal wound and you are out of the fight.
Take a second minor wound after receiving a first one and it turns into a mortal wound.
Weapons with a higher level of damage (basically: just gunpowder weapons. It's a swashbuckler game) have a damage bonus added to the success margin, which means they can miss as easily as any weapons, but if it hits, it always inflicts at least (X) level of wound.
It's brutal, but it makes sense given that it's a wargame rather than a ttrpg, so individual units are less important.
But it would be trivial to add more wound levels, to make combats a bit more survivable.
I've thought about something like this a lot, I really like the idea of it.
"Wound thresholds" in general seem like a good way of changing damage numbers into something more reasonable than just hacking away at HP
What kind of penalties are we talking about?
>What kind of penalties are we talking about?
As I recall... oh wait I have the book right there.
See pic related
Wait, so a model with 1 Stunned suffers -1 Init, -1 Shoot; a model with 2 Stunned suffers -1 Init, -1 Shoot and -1 Fight; then a model receiving a third Stunned switch all of them for 1 Light Wound and then suffers -1 Init, -1 Shoot and -1 Fight?
No, the difference between two Stunned and one Light Wound is that you can remove the stun counters, while the wound stays until the end of the game.
Sorta what I'm trying to do for my system, but its split between vigour and vitality. Vit is basically as you described, Vig is more like stamina and recovers quickly. Attacks that get over a certain threshold do Vit damage, with long term penalties, close calls lower Vig, which you can restore by catching a breath. Melee is also a contested roll with the victor scoring the "hit", also forcing the opponent to move and having some control over the direction at times, since h2h combat isn't actually so stationary irl.
You should only be willing to accept two outcomes for any damage roll, the first is that the damage is negated or prevented somehow, the second is that the damage occurs and the damaged character suffers a mechanically-significant injury. People will tell you that injury systems are time-consuming but they're wrong, it's the opposite, injury is what players and DMs actually want and this is why HP systems are so unsatisfying. HP systems are just busywork.
Yep
I'll provide the "damage" mechanic in my game. It's a WIP, so if any anons can catch any caveats with it, I would appreciate it.
The Effect Roll in my game is rolled with a varying die depending on if it's a Light (d6), Standard (d8), or Great (d10) Effect. The d4 and d12 are used in case the Effect Die gets a step-up or two due to Perks or Drawbacks, but I digress.
After rolling the Effect Die, one adds the relevant modifiers to the result of the Effect Die. After getting that total, one subtracts the largest relevant penalty from it (one's Armor Score for physical attacks or Resistance for non-physical attacks are common). The result is however many Effect Points you impose on the target.
You can then spend those Effect Points (EPs) to do things like:
>Mark (Costs 1 EP per): Mark 1 against a relevant Threshold on the target per EP spent on this. If the number of Marks meets or exceeds the Threshold the first time, the target takes a severe but non-fatal effect of the nature of the action that caused the Threshold to be exceeded. The second time this happens, and it could very well be fatal. [If when in doubt, apply all EPs into Mark]
>Weaken (Costs 2 or 5 EP): Target takes a -2 (or -5 with 5 EP spent) Effect Penalty to a designated range of actions that the outcome can feasibly hinder. A minor action on the part of the target removes this condition. If 5 EP were spent, you can choose to still penalize it at -2, but it would take a major action on the park of the target to remove this condition.
>Afflict (Costs 2 or 5 EP): If the target doesn't take a minor action to undo this condition before their Turn comes up, the target adds 2 (or 5) Marks against their Threshold(s) that the Afflict effect directly impacts. This effect persists until the target takes a minor action to remove it. If 5 EP were spent, you can choose to still have it add 2 Marks against their Threshold(s) on their Turn, but it would take a Major Action to remove it.
>Char limit
Jesus what a dire system
>Whenever I design a ttrpg I always find myself facing an issue, how to make damage, health and armour make sense.
Just play D&D, homosexual.
Ill be honest: I like low hits (8 at most) and armor class.
Despite their problems, these simple old mechanics are still the most Agile way to bookkeep combat, and make plenty of abstract sense.
bad
I really like exalted combat (2e in particular with some fixes). If you get hit you die (or turn into a frog) so its all about interactive defenses and resource management.
The closest it has to relevant health in high-level combat is a defensive approach using soak and damage reduction.