Health

A measure of how much damage or other negative consequences avatars, characters, or units can take before they suffer serious penalties.

When damage in games does not directly lead to death or elimination, this has to still have some effect for the damage to have a gameplay purpose. The most common solution to this is most likely having a Health attribute. While each Damage can have individual effects, reducing Health completely or beyond certain levels can have additional effects.

Examples

Many Category:Roleplaying Games, e.g. Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, the Dragon Age series, the Fallout series make use of hit points to keep track of players' Health. The Legend of Zelda series and Minecraft instead use hearts to indicate how healthy the players' characters are. The Board Games Ghost Stories and Talisman keep track of Health through tokens (although Ghost Stories call them "Qi" tokens).

The Quake series and the Grand Theft Auto series complement Health values with armor values which reduced damage but are themselves reduced when doing so. While these relate to the same type of damage that can happen the games; ones based upon the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, e.g. Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, and the Call of Cthulhu often have both physical and mental Health values.

The number of members in squads in Memoir '44 is a form of Health value since individual losses do not reduce the effectiveness of them - first when all members have been eliminated is there any effect and that is the complete removal of the squad.

Using the pattern

Health is basically an Attribute which sometimes can be used as a Resource, so designing games to make use of Health to a large extent consist of considering the design options of these two other patterns. However, sometimes Health is split into several different Attributes. Quake, for example, has both health and armor Attributes which have very similar properties.

The Damage and Health patterns often influence each other heavily, but Health modifies Damage since the latter one can exist without the former. While Damage causes reductions in Health, there are many ways of modifying this. Armor can reduce the amount of Damage taken and acquiring them, or choosing which one to use, can become gameplay elements. Difficulty Levels and Handicap Systems can be applied before or during game instances to shift gameplay between Casual and Challenging and to try and find Player and Team Balance.

While complete reduction of the Health due to Damage typically leads to Game Element Removal and Player Killing or Elimination, the use of Health can add granularity to this by introducing additional levels where other effects take place. One example of this can be found in GURPS: falling below one third of one's [[Health] halves Movement, losing all requires Die rolls every second to stay conscious, and receiving Damage double to one's Health requires rolls to avoid death. These effects are in addition to specific ones caused by the Damage that reduced the Health.

If Health can be healed or repaired, it becomes a Renewable Resources. Chargers are Environmental Effects that can provide this effect, and together with healing Pick-Ups show how restoring Health can be linked to moving in Game Worlds. Being able to perform healing actions is a way for players to actively affect Health, and can be made possible through Tools or Powers; how well they can do this can be modulated through Skills. Such abilities make candidates for being Privileged Abilities.

Interface Aspects

Given the importance of Health values for overall gameplay development, they are usually displayed as Game State Indicators so they are easily noticable by players. For their own Avatars or Characters this may be through HUD Interfaces since these Focus Loci may not be visible themselves to players. Geospatial Game Widgets - for example hovering health bars - are often used for players' own Units, encountered Enemies, or the Avatars and Characters of Team members.

Consequences

Can Instantiate

Attributes, Renewable Resources, Resources

Can Modulate

Characters, Combat, Damage, Destructible Objects, Lives, Units

Relations

Can Instantiate

Attributes, Renewable Resources, Resources

Can Modulate

Characters, Combat, Damage, Destructible Objects, Lives, Units

Can Be Instantiated By

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Can Be Modulated By

Armor, Chargers, Difficulty Levels, Game State Indicators, Geospatial Game Widgets, Handicap Systems, HUD Interfaces, Pick-Ups, Powers, Privileged Abilities, Skills, Tools, Traps

Possible Closure Effects

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Potentially Conflicting With

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History

New pattern created in this wiki.

References

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Acknowledgements

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