Game Mechanic: Negative Damage is Healing

I just had an interesting discussion with a bunch of 3rd party D&D writers. One wanted "heal" to be a keyword, and honestly, that's sensible. But I wanted to take a whack approach to this demand. This should work for any game that revolves around damage types, such as D&D, though it could also work with other systems that deal with numeric amounts of damage. To keep things simple, though, I'll use D&D 5e as an example system where this would apply.

Negative Damage

Damage can be reduced below 0, unless it is because of a negative ability score modifier added to the attack. When you take negative amount of damage, you regain that amount of hit points. Other modifications to the damage apply.

What does this achieve? You can flavor your healing spells in various ways, giving the imagery of how the healing works.

• The fire that cauterizes the wounds.
• Piercing damage applied straight to an acupuncture pressure point or something.
• The divine radiance that just heals because it's divine or something.

Not only that, but it suddenly matters also how you want to heal others. What if your group's warlock is resistant to fire damage? A spell that would deal -11 fire damage suddenly deals them only -6 damage (remember, it's rounded down, not just to zero!). Frankly, though, I assume healing spells would just let you choose what damage type the healing goes with.

Damage reduction would also be a lot better. A goblin hits you for a measly single point of bludgeoning damage, and your Heavy Armor Master feat reduces it to -2. Thus, you suddenly heal 2 hit points.

Of course, some adjustments would be necessary here, like solidifying the idea in players' minds that the hit points are not always just wounds. They can stand for stamina, luck, or some other things that PHB mentions.

Finally, absorption could become a proper game keyword. Immunity reduces damage to 0, vulnerability doubles it, resistance halves it, and absorption... negates it. Simple as that, AND it's already a thing in the game (see flesh golem).

Negative psychic damage is placebo, change my mind.
Xetorath Healer, by TSRodriguez (at least according to Pinterest, the original DeviantArt page for it seems to be down)

Anyway, time for me to get ready for my session, just wanted to write this up real quick before I forget the idea. Have a great day, everyone!

Double the Zombies

Lately I've been pondering spicing up the core of most TTRPGs: the conflict resolution. Most of the time, it's a simple success or failure. Sometimes, a partial success and/or partial failure is added inbetween. Could there be anything more though? Well, through my weeks of passively mulling this over, I came up with one idea: every dice roll could influence something that's not related directly to your success or failure, instead perhaps influencing the situation you're in. It will be difficult to come up with something that could work this way for any setting generally, so I started by writing up another 200 word RPG as an example. It's supposed to be setting agnostic, despite relying on a term like "ammo".

Double the Zombies

Your characters are zombie outbreak survivors. Everyone describes their character and gives them 4 mundane items (10 of ammo counts as 1 item). You can only carry 4 items. Distribute 10 points across the stats: forcefully, subtly, quickly, carefully, boldly, cleverly. No stat can have 4 or more in it.

Roll 2d6 when trying to do something significant. Reroll one die and choose either result if a piece of equipment can help you. You succeed if the sum of your relevant stat and the rolled numbers is greater than the difficulty, or if you sacrifice an item in a relevant way, destroying it permanently.

Difficulties: 5 (easy), 7 (moderate), 9 (difficult).

If both numbers on the rolled dice are identical or players stall too long:

• A single zombie appears if there were none previously and it can reach the current location.
• The zombies overcome an obstacle that prevented them from threatening you.
• The number of zombies doubles if they were a threat already.

Roll 1d6 if zombies are too close to someone. On a roll less or equal to their amount, you get hurt that many times. You die if you get hurt 3 times.

 

What's worse than being surrounded by zombies? These zombies attracting more with their attention aimed at you.
Z, by iayetta83.

Is it a good game? Probably not, it's very minimal. in the scope of its rules and a ton of stuff is left out, like turn order or recovery from wounds. But my goal wasn't to write an exceptional game, it was to test my idea for a conflict resolution beyond success or failure with a written example. Honestly, if anything, the format of 200 word RPG is awesome at that: it allows the game designer to see if their idea could work in practice, assuming they're willing to cut some corners when making the idea into a Minimum Viable Product. Writing short games isn't easy to most, which is why I'd recommend giving this a try to anyone interested in game design. Whether it's a 200 word RPG, or a TTRPG that will take up exactly 1 page (and maybe 1 extra with optional+GM rules), it's worth a try. Or at least it works for me.

Either way, I look forward to seeking more unique conflict resolution mechanics. Until then...

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!