Sheer Mechanical Damage

"Sheer Mechanical Damage" is a phrase I misremembered from the book The Red Hourglass. The phrase used in the book is Sheer Mechanical Injury. While that is correct, its not actually as useful to me as the phrase I remembered.

The book is about predators, and how they work. What strategies do they have for killing things and then eating them. Or occasionally eating them, and then killing them.

I have found it a surprisingly useful book for thinking about games with conflict. For thinking about games with asymmetric conflict, where specialities, tricks and stratagems matter. That is, any modern miniatures, combat oriented RPG or boardgame, computer strategy game, fighting game or action RPG.

In one of the sections of The Red Hourglass, the main predator of discussion is the Tarantula. As far as cunning methods for killing things go, the tarantula is pretty boring. It is also primitive. It hit a point of development where it didn't really evolve any more. The same thing is true of crocodile, and they basically kill things in the same way - sheer mechanical damage.

The only trick to being good at sheer mechanical damage is being big and strong. So evolutionary change is focused on being the biggest and meanest whatever kind of creature you are. And it turns out, once you hit that point you don't need to change any more. You can fill that niche for millions of years relying on just sheer mechanical injury. Anything else that wants a piece of the predator pie, it needs to find other more complex tricks to surviving.

In designing a combat system for a game, the "sheer mechanical damage" strategy is the best place to start. It needs to be right before you can worry about fancier ways to kill things.

Combat based games, in their essence come down to two things: Survivability and lethality. The sheer mechanical damage scenario tests that at its purist. For most RPG systems this is basically hit points versus damage. Bigger is better on both counts. Once that part of the system is right, then it is time to get fancy.