LucanDesmond said:
Ok, I've never played those games. Whats it like not having HP or something like it? How do you know how hurt you are?
Well, in Deadlands when you hit someone you roll a d20 for "hit location" (head, left arm, right arm, chest, guts left leg, right leg IIRC) and you divide the damage done by 5 to determine how many "wounds" you take to that area. Each wound gives you a -1 penalty to all actions, up to a max of -5 in which case that part of your body is destroyed. If you have worse than a -2 wound anywhere, you are bleeding to death and start taking wind damage (which is kind of like a measure of how tired you are). Once you're out of wind, if you're still bleeding, you start taking wounds to the guts. 5 wounds to the head or the guts kills you outright, whereas wounds to the arms and legs won't kill you unless you bleed out. I know that sounds kind of complicated, but it goes a lot faster in combat and, yes, you can kill people with one hit. PC's get special bennies (poker chips, actually) that allow them to do things like re-roll dice or negate wounds. It works well, you just have to note how many wounds you have to various areas.
In Mutants and Masterminds, on the other hand, hit points are replaced by a fourth saving throw: Damage. When you get hit in combat you roll your damage save vs. the damage rating of the attack. If you make a DC of 15+the damage, you're fine, you shrugged it off. Then, there's a sliding scale for various degrees of failure, from being stunned for one round to actually being knocked unconscious. Also, every time you get hit and fail the save, you get a -1 penalty to all subsequent damage saves until you have a chance to rest and recuperate. Like Deadlands, you get bennies (hero points, in this case) which you can burn to do things like re-roll dice. In the base rules, there's actually no way to kill someone via damage, because M&M is supposed to be a four-color style superhero RPG, although you can adopt the "grim and gritty" rules for more Frank-Miller style play, in which case you can theoretically kill people in one hit.
I don't think either of these systems would be particularly well-suited to computer games either, though. What I'd really like to see is an entirely new approach that takes advantage of the things computers do better than human GMs, like track lots of data simultaneously. But then I'd also like to see CRPG's where each battle is a unique situation rather than just a lot of "Mobs X, Y, and Z charge you, take them down" over and over and over and over and where managing your character is more than just keeping your finger on the potion hotkey.
