Pulse

What causes pulse to increase?

What causes it to decrease?

What happens if it gets "too high"?

How high is too high?

Does it affect bleed rate?

Anything else worth noting?

Combat is pretty bare-bones right now, so it's fairly simple. Dramatic things in combat (like getting attacked, or connecting with someone) increase pulse, and being outside of a fight normalizes it. A higher pulse does make for a higher bleed rate, but it also lets you hit slightly harder in a fight. 

In the future, I'd like to do a few things with pulse, including:

• make a low pulse impactful, too, if someone is at rest and their blood volume is low -- there's already the coded possibility for a low pulse, but no real path there
• tie pulse into complications with heart-related effects and afflictions we already have
• cause other dramatic or tricky things to increase pulse, outside of combat
• put in extra effects and afflictions related to extremely high or low pulse
• include a realistic threshold that pulse shouldn't increase past, in-or-out-of a fight, without some kind of extenuating circumstance (magic comes to mind)

The reasoning for including pulse as a combat metric is because we wanted a combat system that would include many strategic paths to victory, and feel immersive and doable for many different types of characters. So, even though it's very bare right now, we built a very broad framework to slowly fill out (hopefully). 

This is neat! Thanks for answering. I always get a little freaked out when my pulse goes up to danger and I don't know how long it can stay there without killing me, and I don't know how to bring it down. This all seems very immersive though. Looking forward to seeing it fleshed out.