Not all injuries are created equal. A bullet hurts you in different ways than banging your shin on a nightstand does, and getting burned is a different type of injury than both. They all heal differently, as well.
In an attempt to work some sort of realism into the bizarre abstract that is Hit Points, many games come up with different categories of damage, which you mark off in different ways as you get hit in various fashions. In general, you have three types:
- Bruises. This tends to be relatively insignificant damage that heals quickly, like getting punched in the arm by someone with human strength. Taking too much, however, will usually slow you down in some way (or even knock you out).
- Vital injury. This is the important damage, the stuff that you have to watch for. Getting cut, shot, or hit by something with Super-Strength tends to deal this sort.
- Supernatural damage. This tends to be even more dangerous than an equivalent or greater amount of vital injury, and can be very hard to heal. The Achilles' Heel of a supernatural race (like sunlight to most vampires) will deal this type.
In general, if there's healing magic or other Healing Factor options, all three types will heal about the same way (though supernatural damage is usually trickier).
Note that this is more involved than merely having different kinds of defenses for different kinds of damage. A lot of games assign damage to one of several elemental types (physical, fire, frost, etc.), and then apply different defenses against each (physical armor, fire resistance, frost resistance, etc.) — but once your defenses are subtracted from the damage, your hit points are reduced in a completely identical manner regardless of "damage type." This trope goes beyond this; to qualify for this trope, the injuries themselves must be qualitatively different.
See also Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors and Non-Health Damage. Not to be confused with anything that impairs your ability to type on a computer.
Examples:
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Tabletop Games
- Champions: The Hero System has two separate "hit point" stats, Stun and Body. Body damage will kill you, Stun damage will just knock you out. As the system was first developed for superhero gaming, it shouldn't surprise anyone that it's easier to do huge amounts of Stun than huge amounts of Body.
- Hero also has separate damage types, as well, in Normal and Killing. Normal damage tends to do plenty of Stun but only average Body, and Killing Damage does lots of Body and either very little or quite a bit of Stun — known to many players as the "Stun Lotto". note Killing damage also bypasses normal defenses, unless those defenses have been made "resistant" to killing damage; this represents the idea that a prizefighter can be tough enough to take many hard punches, but is just as vulnerable as everybody else to a knife or a bullet. However, once the Stun and Body from either of these types of damage are subtracted from the target's Stun pips and Body pips, the resulting injuries are treated identically.
- Dark Heresy also features an impressive array of damage types — there is Fatigue, enough of which can render a character comatose; there is Energy, Impact, Explosive and Rending damage as the four normal damage types, and if the character is out of Wounds, these also inflict Critical Damage corresponding to their damage type; there is also Tearing, which is basically Rending, but much, much worse; there is poison; and there is insanity, which is damage to the mind, as well as Corruption, which is damage to the soul, not to mention stat damage. And racking up enough Critical Damage, Insanity, Corruption or damage to any one stat, and the character either dies or is rendered unplayable. And this is disregarding the various mental disorders a character can pick up during the course of the campaign.
- Dead of Winter has regular Wounds, Frostbite Wounds that cause Damage Over Time, and Despair that advances the character towards death just like physical harm. Most healing and preventative effects only work on specific kinds of damage; in particular, Despair can't be removed by ordinary healing.
- The Dresden Files RPG was intended to feature damage tiers with increasingly bad consequences when filled. Certain weapons and attacks start automatically at a higher tier than others. A gun, for example, might start a tier higher than a knife. This was scrapped after early testing revealed some serious flaws in the proposed system. The final product just gives some weapons the ability to add a number to the roll when calculating damage.
- Dungeons & Dragons: In addition to normal damage, there's "subdual" in AD&D, or "non-lethal" from 3rd Edition onward. Taking nonlethal damage greater than your current Hit Points would knock you unconscious. Taking nonlethal damage EQUAL to your hit points leaves you staggered (read: punch-drunk). In older versions, 1/4 of punching damage is normal; later editions simplified this. Many jokes about how you can punch someone all day without killing them have resulted. You can also choose to deal lethal damage with a punch, but unless you're a monk or mystic, it's at a penalty; the penalty is irrelevant to an incapacitated target.
- Technically, there's no upper limit to how much non-lethal damage someone can take, so if you spend all day punching them, they'll die of thirst before waking.
- Pathfinder fixes this by ruling that after a character's non-lethal damage equals their maximum hit points, any further damage is automatically lethal damage.
- In Basic D&D, subdual damage was only allowed to be used on dragons at first. The dragon thus defeated became indebted to the PC, which might result in getting a handy new pet/mount/NPC.
- Some books in 3.X also made reference to 'Vile' damage, which was explicitly damaging their very soul, and could only be healed in a place under the effect of a hallow spell.
- Similarly, Frostburn presented 'frostburn' damage, a type of cold damage which can only be healed in areas above freezing temperatures.
- This is in addition to damage properties that only matter at the moment the damage is dealt, such as whether the damage is physical or energy (and for energy, its element, like fire or acid), magical or nonmagical, the shape (bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing) and material (cold iron, silver, adamantine, or pretty much anything else) for physical damage.
- d20 Modern modifies the rules for nonlethal damage; essentially, unarmed combatants can duke it out all day without inflicting a single point of damage. It's not until someone brings in a weapon of some sort that damage is actually recorded. The rules justify it as characters that are involved in fighting can continue fighting on heroic willpower and adrenaline as long as you're only talking about fists and feet. It's not until a weapon is used that the intent to seriously injure or kill becomes available. Basically, you have to up the ante from a fistfight to end it.
- You can be knocked out if you get punched for enough damage, but it's rare to get hit that hard, short of a Knockout Punch (an actual feat chain), and even then the saving throw is easy.
- Martial artists can dish out lethal damage with unarmed attacks, though it's less damage than regular brawling attacks.
- 5th Edition D&D gives you the choice of whether to make the final attack which knocks a monster down lethal or nonlethal, resulting in the target either dying or just being knocked out. It only works for melee attacks, however. A ranged or spell attack that knocks a target down to 0 hit points is always lethal.
- Also in 5th Edition, rather than having Contractual Boss Immunity, boss-appropriate monsters often have Legendary Resistance: A certain number of times per day (typically three but it can vary), if the monster fails a saving throw it can choose to automatically succeed. Once it's out of Legendary Resistance uses, however, all failed saves take full effect and this is usually debilitating enough to remind you why Contractual Boss Immunity exists. So, effectively, all bosses have some extra Hit Points that can only be removed by one status each.
- Technically, there's no upper limit to how much non-lethal damage someone can take, so if you spend all day punching them, they'll die of thirst before waking.
- Eclipse Phase has physical health and mental health. The former is only depleted by actually taking damage from some source (e.g. being punched), whilst the latter can be depleted simply by seeing things that would upset the mind (and/or stomach) of regular people. Wander into a crime scene where the victim was carved into chunks and their blood was used to repaint the room? You might be today's Vomiting Cop. Take too much physical or mental damage at once (exceeding a Wound/Trauma Threshold) and you can even develop temporary or permanent Wounds and Traumas; that regular punch might give you a black eye, but if you get really badly wounded by a berzerk robot with a chainsaw you could lose An Arm and a Leg. Worse yet these threshold-breaking incidents can also knock you unconscious outright or put you into a catatonic state, leaving you incredibly vulnerable or otherwise removing you from the active scene for some time. Characters that suffer too much physical damage will outright die (though generally Death Is a Slap on the Wrist in-setting, unless you're too poor to afford a new body), whilst those that experience too much mental damage will need to be sent away for expensive and time-consuming therapy.
- Eon has damage types that include trauma, which is lethal tissue damage that will kill you, and pain which will knock you out eventually and hamper you if you don't pass out.
- GURPS takes this every possible way it could be handled. There's burning, corrosion, crushing, cutting, impaling, small piercing, piercing, large piercing, huge piercing and toxic. All damage types will end up reducing the victim's hit points — you don't have to track damage separately for the different types—but some damage types give a multiplier to the amount of damage that gets through the victim's armor. Further, some kinds of armor give varying amounts of protection depending on what sort of damage they are protecting from. On top of that there are also attacks that damage fatigue points, making characters more exhausted rather than damaged. Then after all of that it also handles radiation damage as a sort of hybrid between the other types of damage. In short it has rules for every possible way one could cause damage, and different ways characters are expected to react to them.
- Lancer uses five major types - Explosive, Energy, Kinetic, Burn and Heat. Explosive, Energy and Kinetic work as normal, whilst Burn inflicts Damage Over Time until cleared and Heat pushes characters closer to overheatingnote .
- Damage in Magic: The Gathering can, at it's most basic level, be split into "combat damage" (dealt by attacking creatures) and "noncombat damage" (any damage not dealt by attacking creatures). This damage is permanent when it hits players, planeswalkers, and battles, but disappears from creatures at the end of the turn (as long as it's not lethal). But there are plenty of exceptions and twists to this across the game.
- When players take damage, they lose life. Damage to players can be prevented or redirected just like damage to creatures. On the other hand, some effects cause players to lose life directly, bypassing the damage mechanic entirely; these effects aren't subject to damage prevention or redirection. Furthermore, life loss effects can only effect players, as no other damageable permanents have life that they can lose.
- Depending on the cards in play, each of the five colors, colorless sources, or the type of the source dealing the damage can be considered its own type. Some cards can prevent damage only from red and black creatures
, artifacts, attacking creatures, or noncombat damage. Just as many can increase it based on the same attributes.
- Several keywords change how damage works as well. A creature dealt damage by a source with "deathtouch" will be destroyed immediately, no matter how much damage is dealt. Sources with "wither" deal damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters, which permanently reduce that creature's toughness and it's power until it leaves the battlefield.
- Some spells and abilities can give players poison counters. Unlike loss of life, which can be reversed with cards that gain the player life again, a player with ten poison counters loses automatically. It was later expanded with the "infect" keyword. Like wither, creatures with infect deal damage to other creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters, but they also deal damage to players in the form of poison counters (which still counts as dealing damage, but doesn't cause loss of life). This isn't to be confused with the earlier keyword "poisonous" or the later keyword "toxic", which deal combat damage to everything normally, but give a damaged player a set number of poison counters in addition to (but not scaling with) the combat damage.
- The Commander format has "commander damage", which is combat damage dealt by a player's commander creature and functions identically to any other combat damage unless it is being dealt to an opponent. If a player is dealt 21 or more commander damage from one commander over the course of the game, they lose. While it causes loss of life like any other damage, regaining life doesn't reverse it. The 21 damage also has to come from the same commander, so a player with two commanders couldn't knock out their opponent by dealing 11 damage with one and 10 with the other. Funnily enough, the rules only specify damage from a commander an opponent controls, not one that they own themselves, so it's possible for a player to be dealt lethal commander damage by their own commander if an opponent gains control of it.
- Mekton has Hits and Kills — one Kill is 25 Hits (10 hits in the first edition), which has similar effects on unarmored targets, also called the RMIW effect (Red mist in the wind).
- Mice and Mystics: Most damage is dealt in wounds, but a few enemies inflict poison wounds that can only be removed by effects that specifically target poison.
- Mutants & Masterminds, has incorporated differences in types in several ways. Generally, the system does not have HP, you roll your Toughness against damage and failing the roll accumulates penalties to further rolls.
- In first two editions, there were two different charts for Lethal and Nonlethal. 1e had entirely different types of damage decided on when the power was taken, and certain damage was forced to be lethal or not, while in 2e any power could do any damage. But either way, Nonlethal damage could only apply penalty to nonlethal damage saving throws, and could, at worst, knock out the foe, where Lethal damage would deal a penalty to both nonlethal and lethal saving throws, and could put the foe into dying state.
- 3e dropped the difference, with anybody able to deal lethal or nonlethal at will, with no separation of penalties. Default setting tone presumes that all damage is nonlethal.
- New Horizon has two wound level charts: Stun and Injury. It's pretty self-explanatory.
- Palladium Books: The games using the Megaversal system (including Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, After the Bomb, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and others) have separate scores for H.P. (Hit Points) and S.D.C., Structural Damage Capacity. Loss of S.D.C. represents superficial injuries, such as bruising, muscle strain, and being bashed around, while loss of H.P. is seriously life-threatening. Some games also include Mega-Damage Capacity, each point of which is equal to a hundred points of S.D.C.; this accurately represents the effects weapons intended to take down mechs would have on human-sized targets.
- In Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution damage is divided into melee, ranged, heat, lethal, and nonlethal subtypes.
- Red Markets splits damage into two types — Stun damage represents superficial injuries ("bruising, numbness, blunt trauma, muscle fatigue, and other non-bleeding damage" as per the rulebook), whilst Kill damage represents serious, if not life-threatening injury.
- Rolemaster: This is the heart of the combat system. Weapons are categorised by what kind of criticals they cause (which are the real victory factors) and may cause multiple types of criticals depending on the weapon and the opponent's armour. For example, a broadsword causes "slash" damage to lightly armoured opponents and more "krush" damage to heavily armoured ones, while a mace would mostly cause "krush" damage against any armour types. After 2nd edition that changed a bit.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse applies damage types to all damage dealt, whether as mundane as projectile and melee damage or as exotic as radiant and infernal. In approximately 75% of cases, the outcome of combat is the same regardless of damage type, but some cards can increase, decrease, or completely prevent certain types of damage. For instance, Legacy can use the power printed on Next Evolution to briefly become immune to one damage type of the player's choice, while The Wraith's Targeting Computer increases the Projectile damage she deals, but not her melee damage.
- The Serenity roleplaying game has Stun points and Wound points. Wound points are the dangerous ones.
- 7th Sea: All damage initially starts as inconsequential Flesh Wounds which do not hamper a character directly and heal automatically at the end of the scene. However, whenever Flesh Wounds are gained, the character has to roll Brawn against the total number of Flesh Wounds he has. Success means he simply keeps the Flesh Wounds he has, but failure causes him to lose all Flesh Wounds and gain a number of Dramatic Wounds. This usually works 1 Dramatic at a time, but failing by a certain amount causes additional Dramatics, and that's when the damage type is relevant (though only the most recent source of wounds). For example, a character gains an extra Dramatic Wound for every 20 he came up short from being punched or stabbed, but will gain 1 extra Dramatic for every 10 he was short for being shot, and for every 5 from being caught in an explosion.
- The Smallville RPG has five different damage types of equal weight called stress. Since it's based on the Teen Drama Smallville, most of those damage tracks relate to the kind of petty backbiting that might happen in high school (Angry, Afraid, Insecure), with only two addressing physical damage (Injured, Exhausted).
- Spycraft uses lethal (normal everyday damage), nonlethal (obvious), and a myriad of others. This includes the Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors, as well as vacuum, laser, explosive, stress (yes, stress; the average person will be stressed if outnumbered 5:1 by people whose weaponry starts in the 'machinegun' category and goes up), and so on.
- Played with in Toon: The Cartoon Role-Playing Game. While all damage is the same (and results in a non-lethal "Falling Down"), Gamemasters are encouraged to call out attacks with highly specific names, such as "slapped silly by an improbable martial arts weapon on live television damage" or "kicked in the rear by an enraged buffalo while falling down a flight of stairs holding a Ming Vase damage".
- White Wolf games (such as World of Darkness and Scion) have three separate damage types: bashing ("Ow, that bruises!"), lethal ("OK, that's a bit more than a flesh wound"), and aggravated ("MY VERY BEING IS RENDED!"). Bashing heals in fifteen minutes a level, lethal in two days, and aggravated damage heals in terms of weeks. If the damage goes off your chart, it goes up a level — your fists deal bashing damage, but if you keep hitting them, you will beat them to death — and once you run out of bashing levels, it takes a lot of effort not to pass out.
- The Witcher: Game of Imagination: Played With. Damage itself is just damage, regardless of what caused it. But during hit rolls, there are two main groups of defences with three subgroups in each: physical (hand-to-hand, weapons and projectiles) and magical (witchers' signs, magic, and prayers). Also, healing from Wounded (less than half of total Vitality) takes a few days under medical care. Healing from Dying (less than a quarter) requires quick help and then a few weeks under care to reach Wounded first.
Video Games
- Age of Wonders II has a set of flags for an attack which could inflict Status Effects: Fire (Burning), Cold (Frozen), Lightning (Stunned), Magic, Poison (Poisoned), Death (Cursed), Holy (Vertigo), Physical, Wall-crushing (2x for machines and gates, affects walls and other map objects).
- Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction has Raw, Fire, Acid, and Dark Plasma damage. Raw damage is basic damage from claws, bullets, plasma globules, and stinger tails. Fire causes Damage Over Time and has a habit of ruining the special abilities of most Aliens if they die while burning (and results in an Accidentally Beneficial Attack when used on Runners and Glaive Masters; as runners explode when burnt and Glaive Masters absorb the energy through their phoenix-hide armor). Acid is dealt through exposure to a xenomorph's corrosive bodily fluids (weather their blood or saliva depends on the breed), and directly reduces Armor protection. Dark Plasma initiates a "controlled energy reaction with the target's mass, allowing it to kill in a limited number of shots;" effectively a percent damage attack (10% for Hunter plasma guns and 25% for the Glaive Master's, er, glaive.)
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. There are minor wounds, major wounds and breaking your limbs (and poisoning, but that's very rare). All of these require different medication to heal (though major wounds turn into minor ones after a while.) Your health is not a fixed amount, but basically is slowly drained by any wounds you have on yourself, and slowly climbs back to normal when all of them are healed. (Also, breaking your leg will slow you down, and produce a Squicky sound of rattling bones when walking.)
- City of Heroes is very similar to GURPS with the damage types: Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative Energy, Toxic, and Psionic. Different powers provide varying amounts of resistance (damage absorption) or defense (dodging and deflection) to these types. Then there is the Hamidon, whose attacks deal untyped damage which bypasses all of this.
- Dark Souls has Physical (which is divided into slashing, striking and such), Magic for spells and enchanted swords, Fire and Lightning. Also, there's Holy and Dark weapon effects, that (probably) function as a special type of magic damage, poison/toxic to deal damage over time, and Blood Loss, which directly removes 30 or 50% of your health after a certain number of successful hits.
- Dominions for physical damage has Blunt (Deals additional damage if an attack hits with the head) Piercing (Ignores some of the enemy's protection) and Slashing ( Deals additional damage, can sever limbs or heads. Elemental damage has Fire (Ignores half of the enemy's armor, can set them on fire and exhaust them with the heat) Cold (Can freeze enemies and tire them out with the cold) Shock (Can stun enemies) and Poison (Deals damage over time) All of these can be resisted individually through the use of innate abilities or spells. Dominions 6 adds in False Damage caused by the Glamour school of magic (Always ignores all armor, can kill an enemy should they take too much damage and assume they should be dead, but it never causes any wounds and it will dissipate should there be no Glamour mages to keep the illusion up)
- Dwarf Fortress has a distinction between blunt damage and edged damage, each having different effects on a target. Edged attacks are further divided by how deeply they can pierce versus how large an area that attack is focused on, giving a particular weapon a tendency towards either piercing injuries or slashing ones.
- Fallout: The classic games use several damage types: Normal, Laser, Fire, Plasma, Electrical, Explosive, and EMP. Every armour has separate Damage Reduction stats for each type, though Electrical and EMP aren't displayed. Fallout 3 does away with all this and just uses a single "damage" stat. In Fallout 4, damage is once again separated, into Physical, Energy, Poison and Radiation, with separate Damage Reduction stats, but Radiation damage works differently from the other three — it causes Maximum HP Reduction.
- Front Mission: From Front Mission 3 onwards, most if not all weapons are given one of three damage types, which are countered by the according armor/defense types: Piercing type is associated with armor penetration, Impact type is associated with blunt-force impacts, and Fire type is associated with incendiary weapons and explosions. Machine guns, rifles and pilebunkers/spikes are typically assigned the Piercing type; shotguns, fists/knuckles and batons are assigned the Impact type; flamethrowers, missiles, grenades and rockets are assigned the Fire type; and starting from the fourth game, bazookas are uniquely the only dual-type weapon, being assigned both Impact and Fire types. There is also a fourth, special damage type: Neutral, which ignores all defense types to deal full damage, and is exclusive to rare particle-beam/energy weapons.
- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and GTA IV feature two health bars, one for health and one for armor. Compared to earlier games in the series which used Body Armor as Hit Points, bullets damage both health and armor, but melee weapons bypass armor.
- Guild of Dungeoneering has physical, magical, self-inflicted, and untyped damage. "Frail" enemies take extra physical injury, and "Mundane"enemies take extra magic damage. Untyped damage is very rare, and nothing is vulnerable to it, but it always hits. Self-Inflicted is likewise without vulnerable enemies and always hits; it is the Necessary Drawback for the powerful physical attacks of the "Irritable" family.
- InfernoMOO: All damage is typed into several different damage types, and you can suffer broken limbs as a result. Explosive damage is its own subset.
- Look Outside: Aside from elemental attack types, there are also damage types depending on the type of weapon used; Piercing (most stabbing weapons), Crushing (most blunt weapons), Slashing (most bladed weapons), and Bullets (most ranged weapons). Different enemies have resistances and weaknesses to specific weapons, usually due to it being a Logical Weakness (for instance, an eyeball monster is especially vulnerable to piercing attacks and bullets).
- Metal Gear: Starting in Snake Eater, all the games in the series have separate stamina (or "psyche") and health bars. Stamina can be emptied without killing you, but you will immediately fall unconscious if it happens. Bosses also have a stamina gauge as of Sons of Liberty, and you usually get a bonus of some sort for knocking them out rather than killing them. Knocked-out guards also don't lead to an alert if their bodies are found, though they will be more cautious upon waking up if you punched their lights out rather than shooting them with a tranquilizer gun.
- Namco × Capcom: Each attack has a damage type (a few have multiple damage types), and characters may be weak or resistant to certain types, resulting in increased or decreased damage. There are seven types: physical, fire, ice, electric, spirit, magic, and energy.
- The Outer Worlds has Physical, Plasma (extra damage to all biological enemies except Mantisaurs), Shock (extra damage to all robotic enemies), Corrosive (Damage Over Time to all enemies), and N-ray (armor-ignoring Damage-over-Time to biologicals in a certain radius; usually about half of what you'd do if you were using a Physical weapon of the same type and quality).
- Pokémon:
- From Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire onwards, in addition to the Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors, attacks also have a property called "contact". Attacks that make contact entail a Pokémon making direct physical contact with their opponent, while attacks that do not make contact entail a Pokémon attacking from range without physically touching them. As a rule of thumb, physical moves usually make contact, while special ones rarely do. Some moves and abilities are dependent on a Pokémon making contact: Spiky Shield inflicts damage on an opposing Pokémon if their attack makes contact, for instance, while Poison Touch has a chance of inflicting poison if the Pokémon with this ability lands an attack that makes contact. Conversely, there are Physical moves that do not have contact such as Water Shuriken (being a projectile), and abilities that nullify the contact trait to avoid evoking contact-based effects such as Long Reach.
- Moves can also have a property based on their method of use: biting moves, punching moves, sound-based moves, explosion moves, and so on. Moves with these properties are also affected by certain items and abilities: for example, Damp prevents the use of explosion moves, while the Punching Glove item boosts the power of the holder's punching moves.
- Space Empires IV and V have a wide variety of damage types; in V you can even create your own in a mod! Some of the more unusual ones include Only Weapons (damages only the target's weapons, not the engines or life support or whatever), Random Target Movement (teleports the target to a random position), Crew Conversion (makes the target fight for your side temporarily), and Shield Implosion (saps all shields belonging to the target, and applies a fraction of the shield strength as damage to the target's armor/hull).
- Space Station 13: There is "brute" (think blades, bullets, claws, and so on wounds), "burn" (think fire, plasma and the like), "toxic" (think poison and the like), and "brain damage" (kinda self-explaining, on some servers can be an effect of cloning). Each has their own ways of being healed, such as burn ointment for burn damage, activated charcoal for toxic damage and a Chemist-made med for brain damage.
- Star Craft has damage types linked to unit size. Normal damage is only reduced by armor values. Explosive deals full damage to Large units and half to small, and Concussive deals full damage to Small units and half to large. Medium units take 75% from both types. The sequel has a Keyword system that causes Light, Armored, Biological, Mechanical, Psionic, or Massive units to take more damage from certain attacks/abilities (or to No-Sell certain Status Effects, in the case of Massive).
- Star Trek Online uses this. Energy weapons can deal six different types of damage: Phasers, Disruptors, Plasma, Tetryon, Polaron, Anti-Proton, or Proton. Certain enemies use certain types (Federation uses Phasers, Klingons use Disruptors, etc.) but players can use any of these. Certain types of shields or modules for your ship can increase resistance (or effectiveness) to a specific type of damage, which can be very helpful in the face of an enemy with that preference. There's also Cold damage (frequently used by the Breen), Fire damage (environmental), Toxic damage (Gorn's poison bite), Electrical, Kinetic damage (Torpedoes and Grenades), Psionic (Reman Psychic attacks) and Physical damage (Punches, melee weapons.) These latter ones, with the exception of Kinetic, are only possible in ground combat.
- Warframe has three physical types (Impact, Puncture and Slash) with four elemental types (Heat, Toxin, Cold and Electric). By combining two element types, you can create secondary elements (Gas, Blast, Radiation, Viral, Corrosion, and Magnetic). At the same time, each enemy faction has varying resistances and weaknesses to these damage types, and thus modifying your loadout accordingly to face each faction will go a long way.
- Each type of damage has a unique associated Status Effect, with each instance of damage having a chance based on the weapon's base status and installed mods, and choosing between statuses by weighing the ratio of each type.
