INJURY SYSTEM (TEMPORARY/PERMANENT)
Wounds as persistent states beyond a health bar — broken limbs that heal over weeks, scars that never do, lost eyes and traumatized minds — carried by characters between missions.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN COLONY-SIM · TACTICS · ROGUELIKE · RPG
Darkest Dungeon's diseases and quirks accumulate into biographies, RimWorld tracks injuries per body part with prosthetic replacement as a whole tech tree, XCOM's wounded soldiers sit out missions (forcing roster depth), and Battle Brothers' permanent injuries turn veterans into scarred assets with histories. Designers use injury systems to make combat's cost linger: when damage ends at the health bar, every fight is consequence-free by the next one, but a sniper who lost an eye is a decision that keeps mattering — retire, replace, or field diminished. Injuries also generate characters for free; the mercenary with the maimed hand and the fear of dogs is a story nobody wrote. Key decisions: the temporary/permanent split (temporary injuries create rotation pressure; permanent ones create attachment and grief), whether treatment is a resource sink (medics, prosthetics, therapy), and how visibly injuries are surfaced in unit rosters. Pitfall: injury as pure downgrade tax — if a wounded veteran is strictly worse than a fresh recruit, the system incentivizes discarding characters exactly when they become interesting; compensating scars (experience, quirk upsides, prosthetic superiority) keep damaged veterans worth keeping.