Damage Types

Baseline: No Damage Types

Many games have a single damage pool: a weapon deals X hit points, subtracted from the target's HP bar. Even without typed damage, armor can modify incoming damage in two ways:

• Damage Resistance (DR): A percentage reduction. 10% DR on 10 damage means you take 9.
• Damage Threshold (DT): Comes in two flavors:
  • DT-Min: You must exceed the threshold for any damage to get through, but if you do, all of it does. (DT 5, hit for 10 → take 10; hit for 2 → take 0.)
  • DT-Reductive: The threshold is subtracted from incoming damage. (DT 5, hit for 10 → take 5; hit for 2 → take 0.)

These systems alone create meaningful armor differentiation without introducing typed damage at all.

Physical Damage Subtypes

Even within purely physical (also called kinetic or ballistic) damage, games can subdivide. GURPS, for example, uses cut, crush, and impale:

• A sword cuts, a club crushes, an arrow impales.
• Armor can resist these differently: chainmail is excellent against cutting and decent against impaling, but nearly useless against crushing (too flexible). Plate resists all three well.
• This gives players an intuitive, numerical way to compare armor types and understand why plate is heavier or limits dexterity — it's the tradeoff for broad physical protection.

Elemental Damage

The classic elemental system maps to the four elements but usually gets reinterpreted:

This gives you three additional damage types (fire, cold, electrical) on top of physical, which is a manageable expansion that players intuitively understand.

Specialized Damage Types

Beyond elemental, Tim identifies several specialized categories:

• Attribute damage: Directly reducing stats (strength, dexterity, intelligence). Particularly dangerous in magic systems where intelligence governs spell access or mana pools. Can tie into localized damage — leg hits reducing speed, head hits reducing intelligence.
• Poison: Very commonly kept separate. Often implemented as a DOT (damage over time). May use its own health pool, resistances, and thresholds.
• Radiation: Similar to poison mechanically but setting-dependent. Essential in post-apocalyptic games, irrelevant in fantasy. May coexist with poison as a separate system.
• Corrosion / Acid: Great for creature attacks, environmental hazards, and traps. Has its own DR/DT considerations.
• Negative / Void energy: Common in fantasy settings. Life-force draining. Typically hard to find armor protection against, requiring magical defenses.
• Plasma / Laser: Further subdivisions of energy damage. Justified when armor interactions differ meaningfully — reflective plate armor might deflect lasers but do nothing against fire, and vice versa.

Pros of Many Damage Types

1. Specificity and flavor: A fire elemental dealing fire damage just makes more sense than generic HP loss.
2. Variety across systems: More weapon types, more armor differentiation, more creature diversity, more interesting traps.
3. Visual richness: Each damage type gets its own special effects — acid, plasma, fire, electrical — making combat more visually engaging.
4. Balancing leverage: More knobs to turn means no single "best" armor or weapon. Min-maxers may dislike this, but it creates genuine equipment tradeoffs.

Cons of Many Damage Types

1. Rules complexity: Every new damage type multiplies the interactions across weapons, armor, creatures, and traps.
2. Status effects as an alternative: Many damage types can be replaced by status effects. A strength-draining weapon can simply apply a "weakened" status effect. Poison can be physical damage + a DOT status effect called "Poisoned." This achieves the same player experience with less systemic complexity.
3. Player comprehension: Players need to understand why one character took heavy damage and another didn't. With many overlapping DR/DT values across multiple damage types, this becomes opaque.
4. UI burden: Conveying all damage types, resistances, and thresholds on a character sheet is genuinely hard. Damage numbers need differentiation beyond just color (accessibility for colorblind players). Tooltips become essential.
5. Balancing cost: More levers means more to balance. The risk of accidentally making something worthless — or best-in-slot — increases with every added type.

Tim's Summary

Lots of damage types give you lots of variety, which can be fun, but complexity escalates fast and ripples into UI, balancing, and player understanding. If you can make it fun and easy to understand, great. If you can't, question why you're adding them in the first place. Always measure against your game's design goals.