A Whole lot of Silence and Trousers: Hit Points in the Wild (Part 1).

DRAGON AGE ORIGINS (DAO) MEACHNICS -  KORCARI WILDS

Content Labels – Game mechanics


This one’s going to be a little light on story, since the sequence in the Korcari Wilds is a sort of second breakfast of tutorial with a little elvenses of story. 

In order to do the ritual that makes Sooney a real Grey Warden, Duncan needs some darkspawn blood.  So he sends her, Shady Pick-Up Artist recruit (hereafter referred to as Biggs) and kind of pathetic, jaundiced recruit (hereafter referred to as Wedge) and the Littlest Warden (that’s Alistair) round the corner to pick some up.  And while you’re out, would you swing by a ruined tower the Wardens used to own and pick up the magically preserved treaties we never bothered to collect before?

The other recruits names are actually Daveth (who is kind of alright, excepting his pick-up lines – and those he wisely declines to use on Sooney)  and Jory (whose jaundiced pallor, I am hoping, is just coincidence and not telegraphing that he’s going to chicken out at a critical moment), but who cares.

Biggs and Wedge are a tradition of sorts for video games.  They’re names came in, as far as I know, with the localization that turned Final Fantasy 6 into Final Fantasy 3 derived from the names of Luke Skywalker’s wingmen in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1978), and yeah, the function follows the label.  These are the protagonists wingmen.  There’s always two, they never matter, and they either get killed by a bad guy or by you, after a sudden yet inevitable betrayal.  One’s a two-dagger rogue, the other is a two-handed warrior.  Biggs is a little shady but determined, and Wedge is a BIG CHICKEN.

Then there is Alistair, and someday soon, we’ll talk about Alistair, but for now, let’s stick with the basics.  He was trained to be a Templar – the knights who say no (to mages), he’s a Very Nice Boy, and his first act as the senior Warden of Ferelden is to tell Sooney that she’s giving the orders from now on.

The Korcari wilds is the Southern New England of Ferelden; kind of a big swamp before things get really cold.  It’s one of, if not the biggest environments in DAO in which you get to wander, which makes it kind of a shame that it’s so damned boring.  There’s some water, some trees, and a big dome from a sunken building and you do not get to go inside*.  Here is where you meet darkspawn for the first time.  Also wolves, but the wolves don’t require much explanation.  They’re very big wolves, weirdly willing to attack superior numbers of armed humans.

Darkspawn require a little more explanation.  They’re big, they’re nasty, they’re kind of sub-verbal, yet mysteriously able to manufacture weapons and armor fit for an army, they’re ALWAYS CHAOTIC EVIL, and they’re all humanity’s fault. Their blood is poisonous, and they usually spend their time underground, digging to find the Old Gods.  When they find one, it sends them to the surface to crap in all the cereal bowls in Thedas.  That’s a Blight.  Blights are bad.  Bad enough that the Grey Wardens exist to fight it.

The opportunity to fight (and fight you do) brings up some interesting thoughts about how you fight in a game, and what mechanics lead to what kind of fights.

So this is where story gives way to mechanics, but I swear to Andraste this is going to be worth reading.  Even if it’s about Hit Points.  And, well, it is.  If you’re just here for story, I suppose you don’t have to keep going, but I hope you’ll indulge me a little.  On my third outing in the series.  Yeah.  I ask a lot.

Ok, so in a game where you’re going to be fighting and it’s not a one touch and you die sort of system, you’ve got Hit Points.  When a jerk hits you, you lose some of yours.  When you hit said jerk, they lose some of theirs, and the whole object of the fight is to make that jerk run out of Hit Points first.  It’s pretty simple.

But, no, it’s not that simple, and it leads to some weirdness, not just in DAO, but there’s some here, and it’s one of the more common and also weirder forms of weirdness, and it leads to another super power that Sooney Cousland possesses.  She loses about 3 quarts of blood every fight with no lingering effect. 

Hit Points, as uncle Gary and uncle Dave designed them**, were supposed to be an abstraction, and that abstraction didn’t have much to do with how well your body took a sword going through it.  When you got “hit” in a fight, and “took damage,” it was more that you got a little more tired, used up a little more of your luck, and maybe, just maybe, got a bruise or got a little winded.

Put another way, a dude with one Hit Point was tired, out of breath, scuffed up, and maybe, just maybe, took a hit in the action hero.  A dude with 1 Hit Point from 8 to start, and a dude with 1 hit point from 80 to start were in the exact same shape, but dude B down at 40 from 80 would probably be in the same shape as dude A at 4 from 8.

Under this sort of reckoning, you’re only going to get one actual injury, and that injury will always be a fatal one.  A cat scratch and a fall off a bridge to jagged rock junction 250 feet below are essentially equal, but for what shape you have to be in before you get scared of either.  But that’s not the main problem with the system.

The main problem is that the language undermines the intent.  A car that gets hit and takes damage is going to show it, and it’s going to be expensive.  When a person gets hit and takes damage, you’re expecting broken bones and severed arteries, and that’s how it always got described to me by my Dungeon Masters***, and that’s how it looks in DAO, too. 

There’s an option in the Dragon Age games that is on by default called “Persistent Gore,” which means for about 5 minutes after any fight, however brief, you are covered in blood spatter.  This gets distracting and unintentionally hilarious in cut scenes.

Out in the Wilds, Sooney plants a knife that Crocodile Dundee would find a little excessive between the shoulder blades of a hurlock.****  Blood fountains.  The hurlock turns around and smacks her back with a 30 pound maul.  Blood fountains.  She kicks him in the darkspawns.  Blood fountains (the gentlemen in the audience wince). 

DAO has a Hit Point system.  How I know is that they reset at the end of every fight*****.  It takes a couple of minutes to get back up to full, but not many.  Sooney gets savaged by a wolf and fresh as a daisy for when the darkspawn drop by. 

Back in the 80s, once the technically mistaken notion of what Hit Points were was so ingrained in the culture that it became indistinguishable from a correct notion, folks started reacting to it and designing games to address the problem that comes up when you think of Hit Points in terms of how tough your character’s actual flesh was.  And there is something ridiculous about the notion that you could successfully hit a hobbit in the face with a sword and have to do it more times than you would have to with a grizzly bear to kill the little guy.  Folks in the 80s seemed to be about the realism, a notion I find kind of laughable, but, I will grant that they were looking at the things in previous games they thought were particular howlers.

You get things like Hit Locations, which make RoleMaster so very… distinctive****** an experience.  They show up kind of rarely in video games, though video games can take the system – tracking where the jerk hit you and what it means to the bit of you the jerk hit – and really do it justice.  Mostly, I can think of the Fallout games, DayZ and Bushido Blade.*******

You get health levels, like in the World of Darkness and Apocalypse World tabletop games (and from the looks, a variation in most modern shooters, with the addition of regeneration) where you have a pretty small number of Hit Points, and each one you lose means something to your overall effectiveness********. 

You get games like Earthdawn that try to justify Hit Points by making the only option for getting more an advantage that is described as gaining greater and greater superhuman levels of resistance to injury.

In DAO, if you run out of hit points, you fall down, a skull appears in place of your portrait and you have to try and duke it out using the other members of your party.  Since Sooney’s allies kept stopping in their tracks the moment enemies appeared if she was stealthy, this happened a lot.  Sooney would pop up behind the alpha or the emissary*********, stab it, get mobbed, promptly die and I’d be left fighting out the remainder as Alistair.

This sort of thing also happened a lot just due to the target acquisition system.  Point Sooney at a jerk, press the X button and watch her weave between the jerk and three of his jerk friends to find a position as far from the targeted jerk, usually between an ally and the jerk he was fighting, as she could get and then maybe, just maybe attack.  Most of the time she’d just stand there, stupified for a moment and then I’d be back to playing as Alistair.

Once the fight is over, Sooney would be back up, but with a little red icon over her options representing an injury.  The injuries do different things in theory, but in practice, they just mean you have to use a second kind of health potion to make it go away.

Truth is, I kind of like the thought behind the system.  Your red bar is just everything that keeps you from actually getting hurt, and once you do get actually hurt, you are down and out of the fight.  Once everything is over, you can pick yourself up, regain your energy, but you’ve still got the lingering injury and that needs treatment.

But then there’s the blood spatter, the skull over your portrait when you fall, implying that Sooney is hanging out with the other Couslands and the Maker while Alistair mops up.

This could explain why she’s not all that broken up by their loss. She gets to visit at least once a fight.

* if this were Dark Souls, we'd have died 16 times in there by now...
**I feel like I don’t need to explain that most of the things we take for granted as features in role playing video games came from tabletop RPGs, especially the one made by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (the aforementioned uncles).  I probably don’t need to, but I should.  Hit Points, levels, warriors, rogues and mages – that’s where it came from.
***You get really good at describing awful, yet non-disfiguring, -disabling or –fatal injuries.
****Hurlocks are the bigger darkspawn, genlocks are the smaller ones. A.k.a. orcs and goblins.
*****This is more a modern take on Hit Points.  Back in the old days, you had to go whine at the cleric to get them back.
******Let me tell you about the time in the RoleMaster-powered Middle Earth game where my fool of a Took bombed a stealth roll and somehow managed to get turned into marinara by some tavern steps in Bree.  Good times.  Good times.
*******A fighting game with 1-hit kills.  The graphics are 1st gent PS1, but the gameplay and the philosophy behind it are super intriguing.  It’s the only game I know of where the only way to actually win it is to run away from everyone who is not a boss encounter.
********OK, the only thing that ApocWo does in this vein is that after you reach 9 o’clock, you start losing health levels without treatment.  But it counts.
*********Alphas are the tough darkspawn warriors, emissaries are their mages.  ALWAYS KILL THE CASTER FIRST.