Greywander
2019-04-07, 04:57 PM
This is a post I've thought about making for a while. More or less, I thought it would be interesting to go over some of the basic and universal (i.e. setting-independent) damage types, different armor types and how they interact with the different damage types, and the different weapon types and what kind of damage they might deal. As a bonus, I'll also be speculating about the best ways to divvy up weapon skills. The point of all of this is that I feel like this could be useful info for anyone looking to create their own system, as it will help them understand how these concepts might best be incorporated into their game. Also, these can equally be applied to video games as to tabletop games.
In a way, I'm merely writing this for my own reference, to use later when I'm working on a tabletop or video game project. I do hope that someone else is able to glean something useful from this, however, and I'd certainly like to hear any feedback that might help me improve on the ideas presented here.
1. Damage Types
In this discussion on damage types, I will not only divide damage into different types, but also discuss what sorts of injuries each type would be likely to inflict. This can be helpful for those using an injury or wound system instead of a straight health or hit points system, or who want to combine a "debuff" effect with hit point damage.
Physical Damage
Probably the largest and most complex category of damage types, made more difficult by the fact that sometimes there isn't a clear distinction between one damage type and another, and the same weapon or attack might be capable of dealing one type or another or something in between. For example, a warhammer or sling could be treated as either a bludgeoning or piercing weapon, as these weapons share properties of both damage types. While in execution things might be a bit murky, dividing up physical damage into idealized types helps us understand what sorts of injuries we would expect and how to defend against them.
In many RPGs, the standard damage types are blunt/bludgeoning/crushing, piercing, and slashing. The ones I've listed here are similar, but expand on those basic concepts. It is, of course, up to you to decide which ones might be the most important for including in your game.
Force (Bludgeoning)
Not an isolated damage type, but rather an entire family of damage types. In most cases, when dealing with humans or other living creatures, it may suffice to compress this into a single "bludgeoning" damage type, however the differences between the different subtypes can become important especially when dealing with object, such as buildings or constructs. For example, concrete has great compression strength, but poor tensile strength. Force damage typically tends to do very well against all armor types.
Compression is the force of pushing things together. It is probably the most common force type you will encounter, but not all types of compression are the same. We can further subdivide compression into bludgeoning (quick impacts, like falling, or hitting something with a club), crushing (e.g. being slowly crushed in a giant's hand, or by a constrictor snake), and sonic (pressure waves of alternating compression and decompression).
Tension is the force of pulling things apart, so the opposite of compression. If your orc barbarian ever tries to rip off an enemy's limbs, this would be the damage type to use for that. Sonic damage could also be modeled as alternating compression and tension damage.
Shearing is a sort of sliding force. While compression pushes inward, and tension pulls outward, shearing slides sideways. Shearing is perhaps best demonstrated with a somewhat gruesome example: Imagine you are in an elevator moving upward, and you stick your arm out of the open elevator door. Your arm becomes trapped against the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the room below. As the elevator tries to continue moving upward, the elevator floor pushes up on your arm, while the ceiling of the room below is pushing down. Shearing damage is unlikely to be important as a separate damage type, unless dealing with buildings, and could be treated as a type of crushing damage.
Bending is more or less what it sounds like. If you apply one force to an object, it's probably compression damage. Two forces going in opposite directions is probably shearing. But three forces, where the two outside forces are in the same or similar directions and the central force is in the opposite direction, would be bending. Breaking a limb or snapping a neck would likely fall under bending damage. In most cases with living creatures, bending could be treated as some sort of compression damage. For objects, bending damage could case it to deform (bend) or to break, depending on the material.
Torsion is a twisting force. In a way, this is similar to shearing, except instead of pushing in straight lines in opposite directions, your are rotating in opposite directions.
Injuries
Force damage typically doesn't cause external wounds or bleeding, unless a body part is severed. Bludgeoning and sonic damage can penetrate deep into a living creature (as we are mostly made of water, which transmits waves very well) to cause organ disruption that can stun or even kill a target. For all force types, broken bones are also common, as is internal bleeding.
Piercing
A force focused onto a single point, typically a sharp one. Despite the name, piercing attacks are generally much better at penetrating flesh than they are at penetrating armor. Arrows, and even bullets, have so little mass that even cloth armor (Kevlar is a type of cloth armor) can stop them, or at least reduce them to less than lethal damage. A heavier weapon like a spear or javelin might fair better, but most piercing weapons would rather go around the armor and find a gap.
Injuries
Piercing typically causes small but deep wounds with little bleeding or external damage. It has the potential to damage organs, which can severely impair a target until they can heal, and can even kill depending on the organ that is damaged. If a bone is struck, the bone can also be broken. Otherwise, piercing has little effect on muscle tissue, so it's generally best to target the head or torso where you're more likely to hit a vital organ.
Slashing
Shallow but long cuts across the body. As such, even simple cloth armor can be greatly effective in turning away slashing damage, but against unarmored targets slashing can be highly effective. One feature to note about slashing damage is that the sharpness of the edge tends to contribute more to the damage inflicted than the weight of the weapon or force applied.
Injuries
Typically heavy on bleeding. While usually shallow, with more force these attacks can cut deeper, potentially cutting off limbs, heads, or even bisecting the target. These generally require an extremely sharp edge and a fairly strong wielder, though.
Chopping
This usually gets folded into slashing, but I thought I'd give it separate consideration here. Chopping combines the effects of the previous three physical damage types. Like force (especially bludgeoning) damage, it is greatly influences by the amount of force applies (i.e. the weight of the weapon and strength of the wielder). Like piercing, it pushes into the target and penetrates deeply. Like slashing, it utilizes a sharp edge. The main difference between chopping and slashing are that slashes are drawn across the target, while chops are pushed into the target. As such, chopping weapons tend to be very high damage and are effective against a wide variety of armor types, albeit less so than another weapon designed specifically to counter that type of armor.
Injuries
Chopping weapons share many of the characteristics of weapons that deal each of the above damage types, albeit to a lesser degree. Like bludgeoning weapons, they can disrupt organs, but are usually lighter and therefore have less force. Like piercing weapons, they can penetrate deep to destroy an organ, but have more resistance due to the less concentrated area of impact. Like slashing weapons, they can cause lots of bleeding, but cut deeper rather than longer. The one area where chopping weapons excel over other types would be in dismemberment and decapitation.
Hammer-and-Anvil Effect
One of the peculiarities of physical damage types is that often part of the force of an attack is lost because the attack itself moves the target. When you hit something with a stick, it doesn't just stand rigidly still, it first gets pushed by the stick, then bounces back (or not) to its original position. If a solid object, like a wall, is behind the target of the attack, it has nowhere to go, and so the full force of the blow can be delivered to the target. This acts like a hammer and anvil; the hammer strikes the blow, while the anvil holds the target in place. Common types of "anvils" would be if a target is up against a wall (as previously mentioned), the ground when the target is prone, or if the target is being grappled by an ally.
Different types of physical damage interact with the hammer-and-anvil (H&A) effect in different ways. For example, in a D&D-esque system, we might use the following damage modifiers for attacks made with a hammer-and-anvil bonus:
Bludgeoning - H&A is particularly effective for bludgeoning. Double the weapon's damage dice.
Crushing - Crushing by it's nature requires an H&A effect already in place, and as such is not affected.
Sonic - H&A more easily conducts sound waves into the target, inflicting +1 sonic damage.
Tension/Shearing/Bending/Torsion - H&A helps root the target in place while pulling on it. The attack deals one additional die of damage, but one step lower than normal.
Piercing - Piercing attacks by nature don't lose much force during impact, so H&A is limited in effect. The attack deals +1 damage.
Slashing - Slashing involves cutting laterally to the target rather than pushing into it. H&A has no effect.
Chopping - H&A greatly affects chopping, but less than it does blunt attacks. The attack deals one additional die of damage, but one step lower than normal.
Chemical Damage
Not much here for now. Feel free to suggest ways this could be expanded upon.
Burning
A broad category of chemical damage that includes fire and heat, acid and corrosion, ice and frostbite, as well as electrical burns. Burning damage can also include things like vampires touching a cross or running water, or a werewolf touching silver, or a fae touching cold iron. Burning could also include something like a disintegration ray or radiation, if you didn't want to make those separate effects.
Injuries
Burning typically causes shallow but extremely painful injuries. As such, actual damage values might be low, but the burned creature might have difficulty acting due to the intense pain. Deeper burns will actually damage the pain receptors, and as such not be painful, but indicate more permanent damage that, even when healed, will have lasting effects such as scarring and limited sensation at the burned area. Enough burning damage will eventually deconstruct the target, destroying them.
Entropy
A bit of an odd one, but the damage that results of aging. This can happen naturally over time, or artificially whether through magic or technology. Not sure this belongs under "chemical damage", but here it is.
Injuries
Things tend to break down as they age. Metal rusts, wood rots, and living things wither. This damage is probably permanent unless magic or advanced technology allows you to reverse the effect.
Biological Damage
As living creatures, there are a number of ways to interfere with our life functions, which can result in impairment or even death.
Toxic
Venoms and poisons differ only in the method in which they are administered (many venoms are only dangerous if injected, and would be reasonably safe if eaten). In a way, toxic damage is a type of chemical damage that applies specifically to living creatures, as toxins are chemicals that act like a spanner in the works of the biological machines that keep us alive. Toxic damage is a bit different in that different creatures would be generally be resistant or susceptible to specific toxins rather than toxic damage as a whole. Obviously, non-biological entities like robots will tend to resist toxins entirely, and the same may be true of supernatural entities like undead.
Injuries
The effect of a toxin is going to depend on the specific toxin used. In many cases, a toxin will be a debilitating effect rather than straight damage. Some toxins can be purged from the body, leaving no lasting effects, while others might cause permanent harm.
Disease
Similar to toxic damage, but instead of being chemical in nature, disease damage is the result of an invasion of another organism into your body. As such, it is truly "biological", both in the sense of the source of damage and the target of the damage. As with toxins, different creatures may be resistant or susceptible to specific diseases, rather than disease as a whole. It may be possible for a creature to develop a resistance to a specific disease after being exposed to it, but many diseases mutate quickly, rendering such a defense ineffective.
Injuries
Again, similar to toxins, the effects will depend on the specific disease.
Toxic vs. Disease
One might wonder what the purpose of dividing up these two damage types is, and indeed, many systems use a unified "poison" type to indicate any form of biological damage. I'm no biologist, but I thought it might be important to distinguish between the two. For example, a creature that is able graft limbs from other creatures onto their body might have a weaker immune system, otherwise their immune system would attack their new limbs. This could then manifest as a vulnerability to disease, but with no effect on toxic damage.
Electric
While a lightning strike can cause burns (and a number of other horrific effects), on living creatures (or robots) it also interferes with our nervous system. Creatures without a nervous system (or, at least, one based on electrical impulses) will generally not be affected by electrical damage (though they may take burning damage from the same attack).
Injuries
The effect can depend on how intense the current is, and, to a degree, luck. There might be no effect, or it may stun the target, cause spasms or seizures, knock the target unconscious, cause permanent brain or nervous system damage, or kill the target.
Survival
I wasn't sure what to call this one exactly, but I thought it important to mention things like suffocation, dehydration, starvation, and extreme temperatures (not extreme enough to cause burns, but enough to change your body temperature).
Injuries
Not quite "injuries", per se, but survival damage is more akin to resource deprivation. Usually, one can go for quite some time without food, or even drink, and a minute or two without air won't have any noticeable effect (beyond the panic it might induce), but enough deprivation will gradually lead to a general weakness until the target becomes incapacitated, and eventually dies.
Supernatural Damage
Highly subjective and dependent on the specific setting being used. Still, there's a few useful generalizations we can make here.
Psychic
Damage directly to the mind. This one could actually see use in a "mundane" setting with no supernatural entities or effects, as it is certainly possible to cause psychological damage to people even in real life. The assumption, of course, is that this damage is resulting from supernatural effects like psychic powers or magic, but this need not be the case.
Injuries
Hard to quantify, but psychic damage could result in a change in personality, the development of mental illness, or even insanity. These effects might be temporary or permanent, depending on the source and intensity.
Magic
A nice catch-all for supernatural effects, it's difficult to go into further detail without knowing the specifics of the setting in which it is employed. Spells might do generic magic damage, or they might do some other type of damage (a fireball might do simple burning damage, the same as a mundane fire). It's not really possible to speculate on what sort of injuries these might incur on a target. Depending on the setting, magic might be further divided into several subtypes, possibly dependent on the source of the magic.
Holy
Similar to above, but with a more divine rather than arcane focus. Some settings might treat holy and magic damage as the same, while others will give them specifically separate treatment. As above, it's not possible to speculate on possible injuries. Holy damage might have an "evil" version, such as separate "light" and "dark" damage types. Holy damage could also be divided up so that there's one type for each deity or pantheon within the setting.
Spiritual
Similar to psychic damage, except targeting the soul or spirit of the target, rather than the mind. As with all supernatural damage types, it is impossible to say what the effects of such damage might be.
Untyped Damage
It is certainly possible for an attack to simply do straight damage, with no damage type attached. This typically means that such damage can't be resisted, but it also can't exploit a weakness. One could also deal damage that falls under a category, but none of the specific subtypes. For example, you could have untyped physical damage, or untyped compression damage. Survival damage could be expressed simply as untyped biological damage.
I'm not saying anyone needs to use the damage types I've listed here, just that it's worth considering if it's worth distinguishing between the ones presented here or not. In most cases, it won't be worth distinguishing between different types of force damage, for example, unless your system specifically deals with a lot of constructs (perhaps a Humongous Mecha game).
In a way, I'm merely writing this for my own reference, to use later when I'm working on a tabletop or video game project. I do hope that someone else is able to glean something useful from this, however, and I'd certainly like to hear any feedback that might help me improve on the ideas presented here.
1. Damage Types
In this discussion on damage types, I will not only divide damage into different types, but also discuss what sorts of injuries each type would be likely to inflict. This can be helpful for those using an injury or wound system instead of a straight health or hit points system, or who want to combine a "debuff" effect with hit point damage.
Physical Damage
Probably the largest and most complex category of damage types, made more difficult by the fact that sometimes there isn't a clear distinction between one damage type and another, and the same weapon or attack might be capable of dealing one type or another or something in between. For example, a warhammer or sling could be treated as either a bludgeoning or piercing weapon, as these weapons share properties of both damage types. While in execution things might be a bit murky, dividing up physical damage into idealized types helps us understand what sorts of injuries we would expect and how to defend against them.
In many RPGs, the standard damage types are blunt/bludgeoning/crushing, piercing, and slashing. The ones I've listed here are similar, but expand on those basic concepts. It is, of course, up to you to decide which ones might be the most important for including in your game.
Force (Bludgeoning)
Not an isolated damage type, but rather an entire family of damage types. In most cases, when dealing with humans or other living creatures, it may suffice to compress this into a single "bludgeoning" damage type, however the differences between the different subtypes can become important especially when dealing with object, such as buildings or constructs. For example, concrete has great compression strength, but poor tensile strength. Force damage typically tends to do very well against all armor types.
Compression is the force of pushing things together. It is probably the most common force type you will encounter, but not all types of compression are the same. We can further subdivide compression into bludgeoning (quick impacts, like falling, or hitting something with a club), crushing (e.g. being slowly crushed in a giant's hand, or by a constrictor snake), and sonic (pressure waves of alternating compression and decompression).
Tension is the force of pulling things apart, so the opposite of compression. If your orc barbarian ever tries to rip off an enemy's limbs, this would be the damage type to use for that. Sonic damage could also be modeled as alternating compression and tension damage.
Shearing is a sort of sliding force. While compression pushes inward, and tension pulls outward, shearing slides sideways. Shearing is perhaps best demonstrated with a somewhat gruesome example: Imagine you are in an elevator moving upward, and you stick your arm out of the open elevator door. Your arm becomes trapped against the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the room below. As the elevator tries to continue moving upward, the elevator floor pushes up on your arm, while the ceiling of the room below is pushing down. Shearing damage is unlikely to be important as a separate damage type, unless dealing with buildings, and could be treated as a type of crushing damage.
Bending is more or less what it sounds like. If you apply one force to an object, it's probably compression damage. Two forces going in opposite directions is probably shearing. But three forces, where the two outside forces are in the same or similar directions and the central force is in the opposite direction, would be bending. Breaking a limb or snapping a neck would likely fall under bending damage. In most cases with living creatures, bending could be treated as some sort of compression damage. For objects, bending damage could case it to deform (bend) or to break, depending on the material.
Torsion is a twisting force. In a way, this is similar to shearing, except instead of pushing in straight lines in opposite directions, your are rotating in opposite directions.
Injuries
Force damage typically doesn't cause external wounds or bleeding, unless a body part is severed. Bludgeoning and sonic damage can penetrate deep into a living creature (as we are mostly made of water, which transmits waves very well) to cause organ disruption that can stun or even kill a target. For all force types, broken bones are also common, as is internal bleeding.
Piercing
A force focused onto a single point, typically a sharp one. Despite the name, piercing attacks are generally much better at penetrating flesh than they are at penetrating armor. Arrows, and even bullets, have so little mass that even cloth armor (Kevlar is a type of cloth armor) can stop them, or at least reduce them to less than lethal damage. A heavier weapon like a spear or javelin might fair better, but most piercing weapons would rather go around the armor and find a gap.
Injuries
Piercing typically causes small but deep wounds with little bleeding or external damage. It has the potential to damage organs, which can severely impair a target until they can heal, and can even kill depending on the organ that is damaged. If a bone is struck, the bone can also be broken. Otherwise, piercing has little effect on muscle tissue, so it's generally best to target the head or torso where you're more likely to hit a vital organ.
Slashing
Shallow but long cuts across the body. As such, even simple cloth armor can be greatly effective in turning away slashing damage, but against unarmored targets slashing can be highly effective. One feature to note about slashing damage is that the sharpness of the edge tends to contribute more to the damage inflicted than the weight of the weapon or force applied.
Injuries
Typically heavy on bleeding. While usually shallow, with more force these attacks can cut deeper, potentially cutting off limbs, heads, or even bisecting the target. These generally require an extremely sharp edge and a fairly strong wielder, though.
Chopping
This usually gets folded into slashing, but I thought I'd give it separate consideration here. Chopping combines the effects of the previous three physical damage types. Like force (especially bludgeoning) damage, it is greatly influences by the amount of force applies (i.e. the weight of the weapon and strength of the wielder). Like piercing, it pushes into the target and penetrates deeply. Like slashing, it utilizes a sharp edge. The main difference between chopping and slashing are that slashes are drawn across the target, while chops are pushed into the target. As such, chopping weapons tend to be very high damage and are effective against a wide variety of armor types, albeit less so than another weapon designed specifically to counter that type of armor.
Injuries
Chopping weapons share many of the characteristics of weapons that deal each of the above damage types, albeit to a lesser degree. Like bludgeoning weapons, they can disrupt organs, but are usually lighter and therefore have less force. Like piercing weapons, they can penetrate deep to destroy an organ, but have more resistance due to the less concentrated area of impact. Like slashing weapons, they can cause lots of bleeding, but cut deeper rather than longer. The one area where chopping weapons excel over other types would be in dismemberment and decapitation.
Hammer-and-Anvil Effect
One of the peculiarities of physical damage types is that often part of the force of an attack is lost because the attack itself moves the target. When you hit something with a stick, it doesn't just stand rigidly still, it first gets pushed by the stick, then bounces back (or not) to its original position. If a solid object, like a wall, is behind the target of the attack, it has nowhere to go, and so the full force of the blow can be delivered to the target. This acts like a hammer and anvil; the hammer strikes the blow, while the anvil holds the target in place. Common types of "anvils" would be if a target is up against a wall (as previously mentioned), the ground when the target is prone, or if the target is being grappled by an ally.
Different types of physical damage interact with the hammer-and-anvil (H&A) effect in different ways. For example, in a D&D-esque system, we might use the following damage modifiers for attacks made with a hammer-and-anvil bonus:
Bludgeoning - H&A is particularly effective for bludgeoning. Double the weapon's damage dice.
Crushing - Crushing by it's nature requires an H&A effect already in place, and as such is not affected.
Sonic - H&A more easily conducts sound waves into the target, inflicting +1 sonic damage.
Tension/Shearing/Bending/Torsion - H&A helps root the target in place while pulling on it. The attack deals one additional die of damage, but one step lower than normal.
Piercing - Piercing attacks by nature don't lose much force during impact, so H&A is limited in effect. The attack deals +1 damage.
Slashing - Slashing involves cutting laterally to the target rather than pushing into it. H&A has no effect.
Chopping - H&A greatly affects chopping, but less than it does blunt attacks. The attack deals one additional die of damage, but one step lower than normal.
Chemical Damage
Not much here for now. Feel free to suggest ways this could be expanded upon.
Burning
A broad category of chemical damage that includes fire and heat, acid and corrosion, ice and frostbite, as well as electrical burns. Burning damage can also include things like vampires touching a cross or running water, or a werewolf touching silver, or a fae touching cold iron. Burning could also include something like a disintegration ray or radiation, if you didn't want to make those separate effects.
Injuries
Burning typically causes shallow but extremely painful injuries. As such, actual damage values might be low, but the burned creature might have difficulty acting due to the intense pain. Deeper burns will actually damage the pain receptors, and as such not be painful, but indicate more permanent damage that, even when healed, will have lasting effects such as scarring and limited sensation at the burned area. Enough burning damage will eventually deconstruct the target, destroying them.
Entropy
A bit of an odd one, but the damage that results of aging. This can happen naturally over time, or artificially whether through magic or technology. Not sure this belongs under "chemical damage", but here it is.
Injuries
Things tend to break down as they age. Metal rusts, wood rots, and living things wither. This damage is probably permanent unless magic or advanced technology allows you to reverse the effect.
Biological Damage
As living creatures, there are a number of ways to interfere with our life functions, which can result in impairment or even death.
Toxic
Venoms and poisons differ only in the method in which they are administered (many venoms are only dangerous if injected, and would be reasonably safe if eaten). In a way, toxic damage is a type of chemical damage that applies specifically to living creatures, as toxins are chemicals that act like a spanner in the works of the biological machines that keep us alive. Toxic damage is a bit different in that different creatures would be generally be resistant or susceptible to specific toxins rather than toxic damage as a whole. Obviously, non-biological entities like robots will tend to resist toxins entirely, and the same may be true of supernatural entities like undead.
Injuries
The effect of a toxin is going to depend on the specific toxin used. In many cases, a toxin will be a debilitating effect rather than straight damage. Some toxins can be purged from the body, leaving no lasting effects, while others might cause permanent harm.
Disease
Similar to toxic damage, but instead of being chemical in nature, disease damage is the result of an invasion of another organism into your body. As such, it is truly "biological", both in the sense of the source of damage and the target of the damage. As with toxins, different creatures may be resistant or susceptible to specific diseases, rather than disease as a whole. It may be possible for a creature to develop a resistance to a specific disease after being exposed to it, but many diseases mutate quickly, rendering such a defense ineffective.
Injuries
Again, similar to toxins, the effects will depend on the specific disease.
Toxic vs. Disease
One might wonder what the purpose of dividing up these two damage types is, and indeed, many systems use a unified "poison" type to indicate any form of biological damage. I'm no biologist, but I thought it might be important to distinguish between the two. For example, a creature that is able graft limbs from other creatures onto their body might have a weaker immune system, otherwise their immune system would attack their new limbs. This could then manifest as a vulnerability to disease, but with no effect on toxic damage.
Electric
While a lightning strike can cause burns (and a number of other horrific effects), on living creatures (or robots) it also interferes with our nervous system. Creatures without a nervous system (or, at least, one based on electrical impulses) will generally not be affected by electrical damage (though they may take burning damage from the same attack).
Injuries
The effect can depend on how intense the current is, and, to a degree, luck. There might be no effect, or it may stun the target, cause spasms or seizures, knock the target unconscious, cause permanent brain or nervous system damage, or kill the target.
Survival
I wasn't sure what to call this one exactly, but I thought it important to mention things like suffocation, dehydration, starvation, and extreme temperatures (not extreme enough to cause burns, but enough to change your body temperature).
Injuries
Not quite "injuries", per se, but survival damage is more akin to resource deprivation. Usually, one can go for quite some time without food, or even drink, and a minute or two without air won't have any noticeable effect (beyond the panic it might induce), but enough deprivation will gradually lead to a general weakness until the target becomes incapacitated, and eventually dies.
Supernatural Damage
Highly subjective and dependent on the specific setting being used. Still, there's a few useful generalizations we can make here.
Psychic
Damage directly to the mind. This one could actually see use in a "mundane" setting with no supernatural entities or effects, as it is certainly possible to cause psychological damage to people even in real life. The assumption, of course, is that this damage is resulting from supernatural effects like psychic powers or magic, but this need not be the case.
Injuries
Hard to quantify, but psychic damage could result in a change in personality, the development of mental illness, or even insanity. These effects might be temporary or permanent, depending on the source and intensity.
Magic
A nice catch-all for supernatural effects, it's difficult to go into further detail without knowing the specifics of the setting in which it is employed. Spells might do generic magic damage, or they might do some other type of damage (a fireball might do simple burning damage, the same as a mundane fire). It's not really possible to speculate on what sort of injuries these might incur on a target. Depending on the setting, magic might be further divided into several subtypes, possibly dependent on the source of the magic.
Holy
Similar to above, but with a more divine rather than arcane focus. Some settings might treat holy and magic damage as the same, while others will give them specifically separate treatment. As above, it's not possible to speculate on possible injuries. Holy damage might have an "evil" version, such as separate "light" and "dark" damage types. Holy damage could also be divided up so that there's one type for each deity or pantheon within the setting.
Spiritual
Similar to psychic damage, except targeting the soul or spirit of the target, rather than the mind. As with all supernatural damage types, it is impossible to say what the effects of such damage might be.
Untyped Damage
It is certainly possible for an attack to simply do straight damage, with no damage type attached. This typically means that such damage can't be resisted, but it also can't exploit a weakness. One could also deal damage that falls under a category, but none of the specific subtypes. For example, you could have untyped physical damage, or untyped compression damage. Survival damage could be expressed simply as untyped biological damage.
I'm not saying anyone needs to use the damage types I've listed here, just that it's worth considering if it's worth distinguishing between the ones presented here or not. In most cases, it won't be worth distinguishing between different types of force damage, for example, unless your system specifically deals with a lot of constructs (perhaps a Humongous Mecha game).