Health and Damage mod -concept-

[feral]

I've been hashing out a health and damage mod in my head for a while now and I believe I have evolved the concept to be more presentable and doable with assistance from a script writer.

 

Mod Scope:

 

The intention of the mod is to refocus the health system to reflect blood loss with stats and items altered to adjust for a more life-like approach to this damage model.

 

Damage modeling:

 

The idea is to introduce HP loss over time rather than an instant HP loss when the player or NPC is struck with different types of weapons, at it's very base it's pretty simple to implement without scripting, however to account for armor, different types of ammo and various feature ideas will require scripting.

 

This mod will not completely eliminate instant damage, but will significantly reduce instant damage taken by weapons in favor of bleeding damage. So for example when a player is shot or hit with a melee weapon it will still do a slight amount of instant damage, a fraction of what the weapon would normally do; and the rest of the damage is taken over time. The amount of insta-damage and bleeding damage is determined by what kind of hit is taken.

 

*Basic hit - A non critical shot or hit from a weapon, does small amount of instant damage and introduces bleeding damage for a period of time balanced on the type of weapon used.

 

*Critical hit - A critical shot or hit from a weapon would do an increased amount of instant damage and introduce profuse bleeding that requires medical attention to stop.

 

Multiple critical hits would stack, the more critical hits you give or take, the more blood loss you will accrue.

 

*Crippled limbs - Crippled limbs would also introduce bleeding damage, but at a smaller pace than critical damage and the amount of health lost over time would depend on what limb and how many are crippled. For example an arm or a leg crippled will not bleed out as fast as a crippled torso, and a crippled torso will not bleed out as fast as a crippled head.

 

Weapon balancing:

 

Firearms would probably have a balanced instant damage and blood loss effect, something around 50/50 for basic damage.

 

Bladed melee would probably do more bleeding damage than instant damage.

 

Blunt melee would probably do more instant damage than bleeding, but all blunt weapons would do fatigue damage too.

 

Energy weapons, not sure how I'd see them handled; since I personally see them doing damage through burning. Initial thought would be to do the least amount of instant damage, and a smaller amount of damage lost over time; but quicker. Say for example 20 points of bleeding damage caused by a firearm would bleed off slower than 20 points from an energy weapon. Also no visual bleeding effects, and possibly their own special status effects.

 

Armor resistance:

 

Without scripting I think it would be impossible to make armor useful against bleeding damage, otherwise the instant damage modeling should still work just fine when re-balanced. I think getting this to work with bleeding damage in the simplest manner possible would require the use of form lists for both weapons and armors.

 

Armors would be rated on a scale from 0 to 4, and this scale would represent the types of armor (could do more for indepth individual armor resistance, but 0-4 for concept)

 

0 nude, 1 clothing, 2 light armor, 3 heavy armor, 4 power armor

 

Weapons would also be put into a form list like this, what this would allow is for weapon and armor classification that can determine how much resistance a piece of armor would be against various weapons. With this I think weapons would do damage to the player and the armor in ratio depending on the ratings of both.

 

Weapons rated below an armor's rating will do no damage to the player until the armor breaks, the further a weapon a rated below a piece of armor the less damage it does to the armor. Weapons rated equally with a piece of armor will do it's full damage to the armor and a fraction of it's damage to the player until the armor breaks. Weapons rated above a piece of armor will still do it's full damage to the armor and damage increasing in steps depending how many points above the armor the weapon is rated.

 

For example: A class 2 weapon would do damage as follows

     Armor / player

0: FULL DAMAGE

1: 100% / 75%

2: 100% / 25%

3: 75% / 0%

4: 50% / 0%

 

etc...

 

It might not seem balanced, but this is just something I'm pulling off the top of my head and can be adjusted for balance.

 

One thing I haven't accounted for would be ammo types, so this armor modeling may need some tweaking to account for that; if anyone has any ideas. Or for simplicity each armor could have it's own specific resistance to damage and bleeding damage, reducing the amount of damage taken from weapons in a similar formula as the game already uses.

 

Aid items and health restoration:

 

This mod would completely re-purpose all items relating to health to fill different needs.

 

*Stimpacks - These will now temporarily restore lost health, stimpacks and superstimpacks will restore health instantly even on hardcore mode but will fade away over time. I personally would imagine stimpacks being reserved for getting yourself out of a loosing battle.

 

*Doctor bags - These will work as they do in game and will also stop all bleeding. Ultimately to balance this item out, they should be modified so that they have to be dropped on the ground to be used.

 

*First Aid Kit (new item to game) - These would be used to stop all current non-critical, non-limb bleeding damage, would temporarily stop or reduce bleeding damage from criticals and crippled limbs.

 

--For critical damage it could temporarily replace the critical bleeding stat with an entirely new stat with a time limit, it should be scripted to detect the amount of critical damage being taken so when the timer runs out it can re-apply an appropriate amount of critical bleeding damage. This would prevent it from being used like a form of armor against further damage taken by criticals--

 

*Blood bags - These will be the only item that will restore health permanently, and will restore health gradually.

 

Food would no longer restore any lost health.

 

Health Regeneration

 

I think for this mod there should be a slight health regeneration, and it would be based off of how well you keep your character fed, hydrated and free of radiation. The healthier you are, the more health you will regenerate over time. This would be a slow, slow process, even at the highest state of regeneration. It could take in game days to completely restore your health from near death.

 

Beds will no longer heal, but time spent in an owned bed to gain the "well rested" perk will give a slight boost to max health restoration, as well as restoring points that would have been regained during the time spent sleeping.

 

Health stats and effects

 

Some of this I probably had gone over previously, but here are a few status effects I have in mind.

 

*Bleeding - Standard bleeding caused by weapons, these are temporary.

 

*Critical bleeding - Profuse bleeding, permanent until removed with specific items.

 

*Irradiated - Increases the length of bleeding time caused by weapons, incremental. The more irradiated you are the longer you'll bleed from normal damage.

 

*Blood loss - Effects from blood loss would include debuff to strength, perception, charisma, intelligence, weapon spread; etc.. Incremental. The player would even have a chance to "black out" when health is dangerously low.

 

*Critical shot - NPC effect, when you score a critical hit to an NPC there is a chance you may render them unconscious to bleed out.