History Main / DamageTyping

* The classic ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' games use several damage types: Normal, Laser, Fire, Plasma, Electrical, Explosive, and EMP. Every armour has separate DamageReduction stats for each type, though Electrical and EMP aren't displayed. ''Fallout 3'' does away with all this and just uses a single "damage" stat.

* Starting in ''MetalGearSolid2'' all the games in the series have separate stamina (or "psyche") and health bars. Either one being emptied will lead to a game over, but you can usually get a bonus of some sort by knocking bosses out rather than killing them ([[TheGuardsMustBeCrazy plus knocked out guards won't lead to an alert being started if their bodies are found]], though they will elevate their alert level).

*** ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' [[ObviousRulePatch fixes this]] by ruling that after a character's non-lethal damage equals their maximum hit points any further damage is automatically lethal damage.

** Technically, there's no upper limit to how much non-lethal damage someone can take, so if you spend all day punching them, they'll die of thirst before waking.

* The ''Smallville RPG'', has five different damage types of equal weight called stress. Since it's based on the TeenDrama ''Series/{{Smallville}}'', most of those damage tracks relate to the kind of petty backbiting that might happen in high school (Angry, Afraid, Insecure), with only two addressing physical damage (Injured, Exhausted).

* Palladium games (such as ''{{Rifts}}'') have Structural Damage Capacity and Mega-Damage Capacity. One hundred points of SDC is one point of Mega-Damage. Getting hit outside of armor by an MD weapon usually invokes the ChunkySalsaRule.
** Similarly, the game Mekton has Hits and Kills - one Kill is 25 Hits (10 hits in the first edition), which has similar effects on unarmored targets, also called the RMIW effect (Red mist in the wind).

* VideoGame example: Starting in ''MetalGearSolid2'' all the games in the series have separate stamina (or "psyche") and health bars. Either one being emptied will lead to a game over, but you can usually get a bonus of some sort by knocking bosses out rather than killing them ([[TheGuardsMustBeCrazy plus knocked out guards won't lead to an alert being started if their bodies are found]], though they will elevate their alert level).
* The ''[[{{Champions}} Hero System]]'' has two separate "hit point" stats, Stun and Body. Body damage will kill you, Stun damage will just knock you out. As the system was first developed for superhero gaming, it shouldn't surprise anyone that it's easier to do huge amounts of Stun than huge amounts of Body.

* ''{{GURPS}}'' takes this every possible way it could be handled. There's burning, corrosion, crushing, cutting, impaling, small piercing, piercing, large piercing, huge piercing and toxic. All damage types will end up reducing the victim's hit points--you don't have to track damage separately for the different types--but some damage types give a multiplier to the amount of damage that gets through the victim's armor. Further, some kinds of armor give varying amounts of protection depending on what sort of damage they are protecting from. On top of that there are also attacks that damage fatigue points, making characters more exhausted rather than damaged. Then after all of that it also handles radiation damage as a sort of hybrid between the other types of damage. In short it has rules for every possible way one could cause damage, and different ways characters are expected to react to them.
** ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' is very similar to this with the damage types: Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative Energy, Toxic, and Psionic. Different powers provide varying amounts of resistance (damage absorption) or defense (dodging and deflection) to these types. Then there is the Hamidon, whose attacks deal ''untyped'' damage which bypasses all of this.
* ''DarkHeresy'' also features an impressive array of damage types - there is Fatigue, enough of which can render a character comatose; there is Energy, Impact, Explosive and Rending damage as the four normal damage types, and if the character is out of Wounds, these also inflict Critical Damage corresponding to their damage type; there is also Tearing, which is basically Rending, but much, much worse; there is poison; and there is insanity, which is damage to the mind, as well as Corruption, which is damage to the soul, not to mention stat damage. And racking up enough Critical Damage, Insanity, Corruption or damage to any one stat, and the character either dies or is rendered unplayable. And this is disregarding the various mental disorders a character can pick up during the course of the campaign.
* ''Spycraft'' uses lethal (normal everyday damage), nonlethal (obvious), and a myriad of others. This includes the ElementalRockPaperScissors, as well as vacuum, laser, explosive, stress (yes, stress; the average person will be stressed if outnumbered 5:1 by people whose weaponry starts in the 'machinegun' category and goes up), and so on.
* ''TableTopGame/TheDresdenFiles'' RPG was intended to feature damage tiers with increasingly bad consequences when filled. Certain weapons and attacks start automatically at a higher tier than others. A gun, for example, might start a tier higher than a knife. This was scrapped after early testing revealed some serious flaws in the proposed system. The final product just gives some weapons the ability to add a number to the roll when calculating damage.

** Early on in the game's history, there were creatures and effects that gave opponents Poison counters. Get ten Poison counters, and you lose. The mechanic was more or less pointless unless you built your entire deck around shooting for this win condition, and such decks tended to be suboptimal compared to [[WhyDontYouJustShootHim doing damage the old-fashioned way]]. Poison counters were quietly dropped in later editions.
* Swedish tabletop [=RPG=] ''TabletopGame/{{Eon}}'' has damage types that include trauma, which is lethal tissue damage that will kill you, and pain which will knock you out eventually and hamper you if you don't pass out.
* The video game ''VideoGame/CallOfCthulhuDarkCornersOfTheEarth''. There are minor wounds, major wounds and breaking your limbs (and poisoning, but that's very rare). All of these require different medication to heal (though major wounds turn into minor ones after a while.) Your health is not a fixed amount, but basically is slowly drained by any wounds you have on yourself, and slowly climbs back to normal when all of them are healed. (Also, breaking your leg will slow you down, and produce a {{Squick}}y sound of rattling bones when walking.)
* This is the heart of the combat system in ''RoleMaster''. Weapons are categorised by what kind of [[CriticalHit criticals]] they cause (which are the real victory factors) and may cause multiple types of criticals depending on the weapon and the opponent's armour. For example, a broadsword causes "slash" damage to lightly armoured opponents and more "krush" damage to heavily armoured ones, while a mace would mostly cause "krush" damage against any armour types. After 2nd edition that changed a bit.
* In ''MutantsandMasterminds'' (1e/2e), a system without HP, where damage is dealt by rolling to have their natural toughness, or armor or forcefeild of some sort save them from damage, there were two different charts for damage Lethal and Nonlethal, giving a penalty to the roll for each failed throw, untill they fail by enough, where more serious penalties are inflicted. Depending on the edition, 1e had entirely different types of damage decided on when the power was taken, and certain damage was forced to be lethal or not. in 2e any power could do any damage (Though a smart DM would question the Player on how they intend to merely incapacitate the foe with a 1000 degree Nova Blast), but either way, Nonlethal damage could only apply penalty to nonlethal damage saving throws, and could, at max, knock out the foe, where Lethal damage would deal a penalty to both nonlethal and lethal saving throws, and could make the foe [[MostlyDead dying]].

** In the first iteration of the series, Special attack power and defensive ability both were determined by ''one'' "Special" stat, so pokemon with a very high number in that area were [[GameBreaker game-breaking powerhouses]] since they could soak up and dish out Spec. damage equally well. This is one of the main reasons why Psychic pokemon (specifically, [[OlympusMons Mewtwo]] and GlassCannon Alakazam) were so ridiculously overpowered in RBY, and the split into two separate stats helped to even the playing field quite a bit.
* ''AgeOfWonders II'' has a set of flags for an attack which could inflict StandardStatusEffects: Fire (Burning), Cold (Frozen), Lightning (Stunned), Magic, Poison (Poisoned), Death (Cursed), Holy (Vertigo), Physical, Wall-crushing (2x for machines and gates, affects walls and other map objects).

* ''NewHorizon'' has two wound level charts: Stun and Injury. It's pretty self explanatory.
* ''SeventhSea'' is a partial subversion in that ''all'' damage initially starts as inconsequential Flesh Wounds which do not hamper a character directly and heal automatically at the end of the scene. However, whenever Flesh Wounds are gained, the character has to roll Brawn against the total number of Flesh Wounds he has. Success means he simply keeps the Flesh Wounds he has, but failure causes him to lose all Flesh Wounds and gain a number of Dramatic Wounds. This usually works 1 Dramatic at a time, but failing by a certain amount causes additional Dramatics, and ''that's'' when the damage type is relevant (though only the most recent source of wounds). For example, a character gains an extra Dramatic Wound for every 20 he came up short from being punched or stabbed, but will gain 1 extra Dramatic for every 10 he was short for being shot, and for every 5 from being caught in an explosion.
* The ''{{Smallville RPG}}'', has five different damage types of equal weight called stress. Since it's based on the TeenDrama ''{{Smallville}}'', most of those damage tracks relate to the kind of petty backbiting that might happen in high school (Angry, Afraid, Insecure), with only two addressing physical damage (Injured, Exhausted).

* ''{{Space Empires}}'' ''IV'' and ''V'' have a wide variety of damage types; in ''V'' you can even create your own in a [[GameMod mod]]! Some of the more unusual ones include Only Weapons (damages only the target's weapons, not the engines or life support or whatever), Random Target Movement (teleports the target to a random position), Crew Conversion (makes the target fight for your side temporarily), and Shield Implosion (saps all shields belonging to the target, and applies a fraction of the shield strength as damage to the target's armor/hull).

* Played with in ''[[{{TabletopGame/Toon}} Toon: The Cartoon Role-Playing Game]]''. While all damage is the same (and results in a [[NonLethalKO non-lethal "Falling Down"]]), Gamemasters are encouraged to call out attacks with highly specific names, such as "slapped silly by an improbable martial arts weapon on live television damage" or "kicked in the rear by an enraged buffalo while falling down a flight of stairs holding a Ming Vase damage".

<<|TabletopGames|>>

** ''CityOfHeroes'' is very similar to this with the damage types: Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative Energy, Toxic, and Psionic. Different powers provide varying amounts of resistance (damage absorption) or defense (dodging and deflection) to these types. Then there is the Hamidon, whose attacks deal ''untyped'' damage which bypasses all of this.

* ''DarkSouls'' has Physical (which is divided into slashing, striking and such), Magic for spells and enchanted swords, Fire and Lightning. Also, there's Holy and Dark weapon effects, that (probably) function as a special type of magic damage, poison/toxic to deal damage over time, and Blood Loss, which directly removes 30 or 50% of your health after a certain number of successful hits.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'': In addition to normal damage there's "subdual" in [=AD&D=], or "non-lethal" from 3rd Edition. Taking nonlethal damage equal to your current HitPoints would knock you unconscious. In older version 1/4 of punching damage is normal, later one simplified this. Many jokes about how you can punch someone all day without killing them have resulted. (You can also choose to deal lethal damage with a punch, but unless you're a monk or mystic, it's at a penalty; said penalty is irrelevant to an incapacitated target.)

* In addition to its more infamous ElementalRockPaperScissors, ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' also has two different classes of damage-dealing attacks, Physical and Special. Physical attacks use the regular Atk. and Def. stats to calculate damage, whereas special attacks use Spec. Atk and Spec. Def. This mechanic has undergone quite a few changes between the various generations in order to balance out the gameplay:

* ''{{DwarfFortress}}'' has a distinction between blunt damage and edged damage, each having different effects on a target. Edged attacks are further divided by how deeply they can pierce versus how large an area that attack is focused on, giving a particular weapon a tendency towards either piercing injuries or slashing ones.

* [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoChinatownWars]] and [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIV]] feature two health bars, one for health and one for armor. Bullets damage both health and armor, but melee weapons bypass armor.

** In the first three generations, this was intrinsically tied to the ElementalRockPaperScissors system, where the elemental type of move determined whether it dealt physical or special damage. [[hottip:*:For example, Water-typed attacks were ''always'' Special, Fighting-typed attacks were ''always'' physical, etc.]] In the fourth gen games, this was split on an individual case-by-case basis so now a move can be either physical or special regardless of typing.

** Hero also has separate damage types, as well, in Normal and Killing. Normal damage tends to do plenty of Stun but only average Body, and Killing Damage does lots of Body and either very little or quite a bit of Stun. Killing damage also bypasses normal defenses, unless those defenses have been made "resistant" to killing damage; this represents the idea that a prizefighter can be tough enough to take many hard punches, but is just as vulnerable as everybody else to a knife or a bullet.

* The video game ''Call of Cthulhu: DarkCornersOfTheEarth''. There are minor wounds, major wounds and breaking your limbs (and poisoning, but that's very rare). All of these require different medication to heal (though major wounds turn into minor ones after a while.) Your health is not a fixed amount, but basically is slowly drained by any wounds you have on yourself, and slowly climbs back to normal when all of them are healed. (Also, breaking your leg will slow you down, and produce a {{Squick}}y sound of rattling bones when walking.)

** In Basic D&D, subdual damage was only allowed to be used on dragons at first. The dragon thus defeated became indebted to the PC, which might result in getting a handy new pet/mount/NPC.

*** TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} [[ObviousRulePatch fixes this]] by ruling that after a character's non-lethal damage equals their maximum hit points any further damage is automatically lethal damage.

* The [[{{Champions}} Hero System]] has two separate "hit point" stats, Stun and Body. Body damage will kill you, Stun damage will just knock you out. As the system was first developed for superhero gaming, it shouldn't surprise anyone that it's easier to do huge amounts of Stun than huge amounts of Body.

* {{GURPS}} takes this every possible way it could be handled. There's burning, corrosion, crushing, cutting, impaling, small piercing, piercing, large piercing, huge piercing and toxic. All damage types will end up reducing the victim's hit points--you don't have to track damage separately for the different types--but some damage types give a multiplier to the amount of damage that gets through the victim's armor. Further, some kinds of armor give varying amounts of protection depending on what sort of damage they are protecting from. On top of that there are also attacks that damage fatigue points, making characters more exhausted rather than damaged. Then after all of that it also handles radiation damage as a sort of hybrid between the other types of damage. In short it has rules for every possible way one could cause damage, and different ways characters are expected to react to them.

* Spycraft currently uses lethal (normal everyday damage), nonlethal (obvious), and a myriad of others. This includes the ElementalRockPaperScissors, as well as vacuum, laser, explosive, stress (yes, stress; the average person will be stressed if outnumbered 5:1 by people whose weaponry starts in the 'machinegun' category and goes up), and so on.
* Apparently the upcoming TableTopGame/TheDresdenFiles RPG will feature damage tiers that will have increasingly bad consequences when filled. Certain weapons and attacks start automatically at a higher tier than others. A gun, for example, might start a tier higher than a knife.
** This was scrapped after early testing revealed some serious flaws in the proposed system. The final product just gives some weapons the ability to add a number to the roll when calculating damage.
* In TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering, normal damage dealt to creatures disappears at the end of the turn (as long as it's not lethal), wither damage permanently weakens the creature, and deathtouch damage destroys it immediately, no matter how much damage is dealt.

* In the Swedish tabletop [=RPG=] TabletopGame/{{Eon}}, damage types include trauma, which is lethal tissue damage that will kill you, and pain which will knock you out eventually and hamper you if you don't pass out.

* This is the heart of the combat system in RoleMaster. Weapons are categorised by what kind of [[CriticalHit criticals]] they cause (which are the real victory factors) and may cause multiple types of criticals depending on the weapon and the opponent's armour. For example, a broadsword causes "slash" damage to lightly armoured opponents and more "krush" damage to heavily armoured ones, while a mace would mostly cause "krush" damage against any armour types. After 2nd edition that changed a bit.
* In MutantsandMasterminds (1e/2e), a system without HP, where damage is dealt by rolling to have their natural toughness, or armor or forcefeild of some sort save them from damage, there were two different charts for damage Lethal and Nonlethal, giving a penalty to the roll for each failed throw, untill they fail by enough, where more serious penalties are inflicted. Depending on the edition, 1e had entirely different types of damage decided on when the power was taken, and certain damage was forced to be lethal or not. in 2e any power could do any damage (Though a smart DM would question the Player on how they intend to merely incapacitate the foe with a 1000 degree Nova Blast), but either way, Nonlethal damage could only apply penalty to nonlethal damage saving throws, and could, at max, knock out the foe, where Lethal damage would deal a penalty to both nonlethal and lethal saving throws, and could make the foe [[MostlyDead dying]].

* NewHorizon has two wound level charts: Stun and Injury. It's pretty self explanatory.
* SeventhSea is a partial subversion in that ''all'' damage initially starts as inconsequential Flesh Wounds which do not hamper a character directly and heal automatically at the end of the scene. However, whenever Flesh Wounds are gained, the character has to roll Brawn against the total number of Flesh Wounds he has. Success means he simply keeps the Flesh Wounds he has, but failure causes him to lose all Flesh Wounds and gain a number of Dramatic Wounds. This usually works 1 Dramatic at a time, but failing by a certain amount causes additional Dramatics, and ''that's'' when the damage type is relevant (though only the most recent source of wounds). For example, a character gains an extra Dramatic Wound for every 20 he came up short from being punched or stabbed, but will gain 1 extra Dramatic for every 10 he was short for being shot, and for every 5 from being caught in an explosion.
* The {{Smallville RPG}}, has five different damage types of equal weight called stress. Since it's based on the TeenDrama {{Smallville}}, most of those damage tracks relate to the kind of petty backbiting that might happen in high school (Angry, Afraid, Insecure), with only two addressing physical damage (Injured, Exhausted).

* {{Space Empires}} IV and V have a wide variety of damage types; in V you can even create your own in a mod! Some of the more unusual ones include Only Weapons (damages only the target's weapons, not the engines or life support or whatever), Random Target Movement (teleports the target to a random position), Crew Conversion (makes the target fight for your side temporarily), and Shield Implosion (saps all shields belonging to the target, and applies a fraction of the shield strength as damage to the target's armor/hull).

* ''StarTrekOnline''uses this. There are 6 different types of damage that can be dealt by Energy weapons: Phasers, Disruptors, Plasma, Tetryon, Polaron, Anti-Proton, or Proton. Certain enemies use certain types (Federation uses Phasers, Klingons use Disruptors, etc.) but players can use any of these. Certain types of shields or modules for your ship can increase resistance (or effectiveness) to a specific type of damage, which can be very helpful in the face of an enemy with that preference. There's also Cold damage (frequently used by the Breen), Fire damage (environmental), Toxic damage (Gorn's poison bite), Electrical, Kinetic damage (Torpedoes and Grenades), Psionic (Reman Psychic attacks) and Physical damage (Punches, melee weapons.) These latter ones, with the exception of Kinetic, are only possible in ground combat.

** Hero also has separate damage types, as well, in Normal and Killing. Normal damage tends to do plenty of Stun but only average Body, and Killing Damage does lots of Body and either very little or quite a bit of Stun. Killing damage also bypasses normal defenses, unless those defenses have been made "resistant" to killing damage; this represents the face that a prizefighter might be tough enough to take many hard punches, but is just as vulnerable as everybody else to a knife or a bullet.

** Hero also has separate damage types, as well, in Normal and Killing. Normal damage tends to do plenty of Stun but only average Body, and Killing Damage does lots of Body and either very little or quite a bit of Stun.

* In addition to its more infamous ElementalRockPaperScissors, ''{{Pokemon}}'' also has two different classes of damage-dealing attacks, Physical and Special. Physical attacks use the regular Atk. and Def. stats to calculate damage, whereas special attacks use Spec. Atk and Spec. Def. This mechanic has undergone quite a few changes between the various generations in order to balance out the gameplay:

<<|TabletopGames|>>

* Apparently the upcoming Literature/TheDresdenFiles RPG will feature damage tiers that will have increasingly bad consequences when filled. Certain weapons and attacks start automatically at a higher tier than others. A gun, for example, might start a tier higher than a knife.

*** TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} [[ObviousRulesPatch fixes this]] by ruling that after a character's non-lethal damage equals their maximum hit points any further damage is automatically lethal damage.