9. harm and healing

Today we’re talking about “Harm and Healing” (pages 12-13)

When a character gets hurt, the player marks segments in her harm countdown clock. Mark one full segment for each 1-harm, starting with the segment 12:00 to 3:00.

Typically, when a character takes harm, it’s equal to the harm rating of the weapon, attack, or mishap, minus the armor rating of the character’s armor. This number—harm minus armor—is called “harm as established.”

Harm before 6:00 heals automatically with time. Harm after 9:00 gets worse with time, unless stabilized. If the player marks the segment 11:00 to 12:00, the character’s life has become untenable.

When a character’s life becomes untenable, the player has to choose how to continue. Death is one option, but there are others.

Angels are all about healing and stabilizing harm.

The first thing to note is that harm is tracked via the countdown clock. Functionally, the clock is the same as saying that each characters has 6 hit points, but several things are gained by giving the harm track the form of the countdown clock. First, there is the important thematic connection to the fear of nuclear holocaust in the ‘80s, as explained on page 293. Additionally, the clock reappears as a way to track Threats, making the clock a recurring motif. (The clock also appeared as an optional technique in battles in the 1st edition, but neither the clock nor the technique made it into the 2nd edition.) Second, the countdown clock makes the crisis point visible and palpable. It provides drama in its very structure. The first 45 minutes of the clock are these large, leisurely segments, but as soon as you hit 9:00 you can see at a glance that shit is getting real, real fast. If I were to write the numbers 1-6 on a page and say that nothing bad happens with the first three injuries (or events, if we’re dealing with a threat), but everything ramps up for the final three injuries, you might understand that intellectually, but the equal weight given to each number on the page belies my words. The clock is able to make the dramatic rhythm visible.

The second thing to note is how differently AW uses harm than many other games use hit points. In a lot of games, hit points are a character resource that increases with advancement. The function of harm--which of course never increases with improvement--is not as a resource, but as a narrative cue: “Harm before 6:00 heals automatically with time. Harm after 9:00 gets worse with time, unless stabilized.” What is important to the game and its players is how harm affects the narrative, so the important line is that moment when the injuries become critical to the story, i.e. when they start getting worse and demand attention. As with hit points in other games, the damage is mechanically abstract, but unlike those other games, that tipping point in the injury helps the players create the fiction surrounding the harm. At that point, the countdown clock truly earns its name and we are counting down the moments to when the character’s life becomes untenable.

As a sidenote, damn I love the word “untenable” here. The word means not able to be defended and not able to be occupied. You have passed the point of defending this life, and in the case of a player choosing either death or a new playbook, the character will no longer occupy the current playbook.

So both as a visual clock and as a narrative cue, the harm countdown clock is all about facilitating narrative and instilling drama into the matters of life and death in Apocalypse World.