Heroes in roleplaying games come up against a number of seemingly insurmountable problems, dragons not the least of them. Central to most play is the idea of the character that doesn’t just fold like a lawn chair when the going gets tough. They don’t talk about their feelings while the universe is at stake (and we have to fill 5 more minutes of screen time) like some of the truly terrible movies and TV shows that hit the airwaves in the last decade or so. Save the galaxy, talk about your hopes and dreams after.

One of my current favorite game systems — Outgunned! and Outgunned Adventure — takes this literally with the use of grit as their damage rating for characters. Mental, physical, emotional — it all comes out of your grit stat. Every character has 12 points. At certain points, in addition to losing grit you also take conditions like “You Look Hurt” or “You Look Embarrassed”, etc. The conditions affect the number of die you roll in a pool (looking for matches, like Yahtzee.) At 12 points of grit, you are taken out, broken — but not necessarily dead.

There are several new systems that use a similar “hit point” plus “condition” sort of damage mechanic to cover not just physical, but emotional, psychic. or other kinds of damage. It makes these systems more flexible, but also tends to dilute the impact of “injury” in old school gamer minds. In Star Trek Adventures, stress is the mechanic — you have a certain amount to avoid being taken out/broken. Even at 0 stress, it doesn’t necessarily mean death; you’re just out of the action. However, injuries can be added as traits, with increase difficulty to actions taken.

In Dune: Adventures in the Imperium(another 2d20 system), the character takes damage equal to their most appropriate skill before they are taken out. For example, a duel is an extended task (basically a series of actions, as in any RPG fight…just badly explained.) The PC has, say, a Battle of 7 (pretty good!), so they will have to take 7 points of “battle” to be taken out. Even then, they can choose to take a complication and spend a momentum or threat point to stay in the fight. But another and they’re done. In social conflict, they might take the hit on their Discipline or Understanding to represent being embarrassed, or fooled by an opponent. 

Alien and Blade Runner split the baby with damage for physical or mental damage, with critical hits that do some form of disadvantage to their die tests. However, the need to model emotional or mental damage shows a more mature approach to the sorts of things that hurt a character — and which require grit.