GUMSHOE and the meaning of Health
In GUMSHOE and a number of other games, characters have a Health pool. In GUMSHOE, if someone shoots at you, and they spend enough points, they will successfully "hit" the first time and every time until they run out of points. But, you are not actually significantly hurt by any kind of weapon until your Health goes below 0. Now if somebody is shooting at you and actually hitting you, this doesn't seem right. And that is because Health down to 0, at least has an abstract function, just like other pools.
The best handle I can give on this is that pools police narrative plausibility. In narratives and in rpgs if a character is in gunfight after gunfight and is never hit, it becomes less and less satisfying. Fine tuning the maximum Health for example can be used to make the difference between a Purist and Pulp game in the case of Cthulhu; in a Pulp game, your hero avoids injury when bullets fly, in a Purist game not so much.
For NPCs, the Health rating can be a measure of their combat ability, an extraordinary constitution, or their narrative importance. An unimportant NPC who happens to be a combat monkey can still start out with a Health of 0, and be killed by the first bullet which files in their direction. This method can be used for mooks, or in a horror game to kill the reassuring authority figure unexpectedly and horribly.
One final example. A weedy PC is sitting in a bar. A sniper fires at the PC. It's not going through their head in any RPG, is it? A combat veteran NPC in the same bar? Straight through the head - brains on the table.
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simonjrogers) wrote,
