Sidequest: TWO long; didn’t write
Been a while, huh? Welcome to another Sidequest, the show where we do whatever the hell we want under the guise of research and documentation—essentially, Mythbusters. This is gonna be another ‘things that don’t really deserve their own article’ edition, which is always fun to write since it takes all pretenses of cohesion and thematic consistence and files them under ‘lol, lmao even’.
Anyway:
HP vs VP: A Battle of Semantics
When it comes to point-based race wincons, there are 2 main ways of doing them: VP (victory points AKA ‘normal everyday points’) and HP (AKA life AKA Health AKA ‘when this baby hits 0, you’re gonna see some serious shit’).
Now, on the surface, these two mechanics feel fairly different, especially since the choice of which you use affects your game’s dynamics drastically. However, under the surface, they’re more or less equivalent, albeit mirrors of each other: VP goes up, and reaching the required threshold makes you win, while HP goes down, and reaching 0 makes you lose. Of course, there’s a pretty big difference between winning and losing, especially in multiplayer games, but in 1v1 games they’re effectively the same thing—when you win, your opponent loses implicitly (or explicitly…whatever, there’s more important semantics to argue about).
And therein lies the biggest actual difference between HP and VP: the semantics associated with each, and the mechanical implications that arise from players’ expectations regarding those semantics. The main difference is how (and how easily) the value changes.
The generally-accepted semantics for VP dictate that it usually just goes in one direction: from 0 to whatever. HP, on the other hand, generally goes down, but in the vast majority of cases, where there’s health, there’s healing. Technically, making the opponent lose VP has more-or-less the same effect as healing your HP: both effects move your opponent further from victory, while not getting you closer to winning yourself (I’ve written at some length about the winning-losing semantics here).
With both HP and VP, the only point that really matters (in the game-deciding sense) is the last. It doesn’t matter if you win while at 1 HP vs 150 HP, and vice versa with VP. Generally, games don’t really care about the point gap to allow for catching up to opponents and to prevent win-more scenarios.
Just to finish drawing the parallels between the two, let’s go over the other things you can do with the 2 point systems:
- As we said, healing HP is equivalent to making your opponent lose VP -> it gets your opponent further from victory while not getting you closer to victory
- Losing HP is equivalent to your opponent gaining VP -> it gets your opponent closer to victory while not getting you further from it (the whole last-point-that-matters thing)
- ‘Draining’ HP (you gain as much as the opponent loses) doesn’t feel like it has a neat 1:1 equivalent with VP -> it gets you closer to victory and further from defeat at the same time; draining VP gives you the same, with the added benefit of your opponent being further from victory at the same time…this stuff gets kinda confusing the more I think about it, so let’s just say we’ve covered the important cases for now…
Aside from healing, the next biggest use case for HP that doesn’t really happen with VP is ‘using life as a resource’, i.e. paying HP as a cost for effects. You can definitely do this with VP, but there’s a pretty good reason why you would be better off avoiding that: feeling*. The only health point that matters is the last, so paying life is a means to an end. Giving up VP, on the other hand, means actively throwing away progress. In most cases, the payoff for a cost that large would have to be really big, and effects like that tend to be swingy to the point of being impossible to balance. They’re either too weak, and never a good choice to actually use, or strong to the point of becoming the dominant strategy.
*There’s also the secondary thing of the mirror stuff, i.e. the literal equivalent to paying HP in terms of victory-defeat-closeness is actually to give your opponent VP, since paying life moves the opponent closer to victory without affecting your progress.
In general, players don’t mind effects that are detrimental to them, as long as they don’t help the opponent too much. VP are usually important enough to be considered unfuckwithable, so fuck with them at your own peril. It doesn’t matter if you don’t mind throwing away progress—your players probably mind, prohibitively so.
Oh, just as a final aside: you can more or less reformat and reflavor any VP-using game to use HP instead, given you’re clever enough to make it work, and vice versa. As to why you’d want to do that—you tell me, shoulda coulda woulda, etc. etc. An interesting basis for a blind study (probably single-blind) would be to see if and how players’ behaviour and/or strategies change depending on whether the game uses HP or VP. Both groups of participants would play the same game—completely identical ruleset, aside from the scoring method, without being aware that another version of the game exists.
What I’d like to test with a study like this would be whether players who play the HP version play more aggressively than the ones who play with VP, based purely on the difference in how players percieve the semantics and ‘flavor’ of the two methods. As far as the rest of the experiment, I have absolutely no clue. I’m not really a scientist, and my experiment design skills come to an abrupt stop at this point. Exercise left to the reader and all that jazz…
Schrödinger’s effect
“Draw a card.“
“Put the top card of your deck into your hand.“
What’s the difference between these two? If you said ‘the second is just unnecessarily verbose’, congratulations! You’re in for a typical, unnecessarily verbose Sidequest lesson!
The way most people would parse the two sentences, there really isn’t any functional difference between them. Going with the most common/default assumption, drawing a card usually happens from a deck of cards, the top card of said deck is the one that gets drawn, and the destination is usually your hand. With that common understanding of what ‘draw’ means, the second sentence is mostly redundant.
It turns out, though, as far as a lot of games are concerned, the 2 different wordings lead to completely different results. This is the point of the article where I introduce a new concept: events. As usual, this is nonstandard wording that I’ve been using internally forever, but IMO it’s a pretty good descriptor.
Events, as the word suggests, are basically just things that happen™ inside a game. Events are directly related to triggered and/or replacement abilities, and are essentially the mechanism that makes triggers work under the hood.
Obligatory programming related/inspired digression: I got the name event from the domain of computers, where they represent this exact same thing. Whenever you click a button in the vast majority of user interfaces, that signals that a ‘click’ event happened in some part of the program—in this case our button. What actually happens when that event is registered is our triggered ability—called an event listener or event handler in computer terms.
In games, an event is an action that other effects—usually triggers—care about. How those work under the hood depends on the game, but the framework and concept is universal; I’m just giving it a name. For example, drawing 2 cards can be represented in the game’s rules by 2 distinct ‘draw’ events, or by a single ‘draw’ event, but one that carries extra context with it that the ‘listener’ cares about.
Given this context, we can finally spot the major difference between the 2 effect wordings: the second one goes out of its way to not create a ‘draw’ event, while still giving you the card. It keeps the most important part of the effect—giving the player a card—but it prevents any trigger shenanigans that drawing said card would’ve normally caused.
‘Eventless’ effects are a really handy trick to have in your arsenal. Be wary, however, because it does come with some caveats. For one, triggered abilities are very useful things, and you want to make sure that you have a good reason to do effects that avoid them. While it is a balancing factor, it’s also something can easily go against players’ intuition, leading them to think it’s just funky wording rather than a functionally different effect. This is a valid way to create new design space, but its effectiveness in doing that is dependent on the events in question and how the rest of the game interacts with them.
See, I was gonna write a conclusion here, but due to the nature of this article, I genuinely think it’s punishable by law in at least some countries, so…
This is InvertedVertex, signing off.