This post is a response to Tubatic’s excellent “Nothing Is Sacred” blog entry, which I enjoyed reading but disagreed with completely. (After it got promoted, I couldn’t keep commenting directly, so I had to write this.) It’s not nearly as good, but it invites discussion. Thanks anyway for making me think.

The use of HP is a mechanic that appears in every genre of game, from RPG to RTS, so it’s not surprising people are getting tired of it. Alternate methods I’ve heard of mostly try to imitate real-life physiology by tracking damage to specific parts of the body or by recording loss of vital fluids. The advantage to this appears to be that the game no longer appears to be an artificial construct and instead a living, breathing, and, most critically, bleeding experience. (Not trying to offend any British readers.)

I’m challenging this on two points. First, regardless of appearances, numbers still rule the game. You just can’t see them. Has anyone here played a paper-and-pencil RPG before? If so, you’ll know just what can happen when every possible damage mechanic is tracked: the sheer number of mechanics and, yes, numbers balloons. Dungeons and Dragons version 3 was infamous for this, with nonlethal damage, separate ability damage for all six abilities, more or less “permanent” damage that could only be healed under specific situations, damage resistance, damage reduction (which is completely different), and more damage types than the average console RPG has font colors. Damage to specific body parts was also in there, but it got stuffed into a sidebar in the second rulebook. That’s how complex it can get. Obviously, realism isn’t simple.

My second point, which I first stated in Tubatic’s blog before it made the front page, was that the Health Bar was the ultimate abstraction, reducing all life functions to a ratio between current state and peak ability. I can see why this tires people, since it leads to the insane possibility of being one hit away from death and still capable of striking as hard. But it also has the advantage of eliminating much of the distraction that comes from monitoring multiple indicators of well-being. I’ve noticed that once you have more than three constantly changing values in a game, it bogs down. This number can be increased in turn-based games, but it still divides the player’s attention.

Hiding all these numbers doesn’t make sense because that makes maintaining a character’s health that much harder, unless you’re good at memorizing everything. I didn’t have a problem keeping track of all the different healing spells and items in Neverwinter Nights (which is incidentally based on D&D v3 mechanics), but my sister couldn’t master it, and she completed the game faster than I did. And that’s with numbers visible. Once they’re gone, it’s not always clear what part of you is hurt. A lost arm is easy to spot, but an injury to the hamstrings isn’t. You’d be left guessing in many cases. Keeping some variant of the Health Bar, even if tucked in a dialogue box somewhere, will make playing the game more streamlined.

This does not mean, however, that the Health Bar concept can’t be played around with or improved. Most RTS games include some damage types that deal differing levels of damage, so a player can severely damage, say, a siege tank, with anti-armor weaponry. Some conditions, such as poisoned, might alter how you take damage or cause damage at a specific rate. Conditions, in fact, are probably underused. My point is that the idea is next to impossible to eradicate completely, so we might as well make use of its potential.

The best spin I’ve seen on the Health Bar idea would probably go to Okami. The game had both an exceptionally abstract health system as well as three design improvements. First, health worked differently for Amaterasu and her enemies, with the wolf getting the more simplistic system and the monsters slowing down when severely damaged. Second, the player received an auditory cue when badly wounded, making constant glances at the indicator unnecessary. Third, numbers never showed up on the screen: health was purely visual. I thought that the visual system needed work (no more fractions of Solar Energy), but the effects speeded up the game. I never felt that it was a purely mathematical experience, since I never really had to worry about it that much in the first place.

The fact is we’re always going to need some abstraction. And maybe a bigger screen.