Damage Brainstorming
So, I'm back to brainstorming about damage systems. On one level, how you keep track of injuries and such is a critical element of the game, because it can change what people do and what the setting is like so much... on the other hand, unless you're really interested in the "game-within-a-game" of fighting out combats in detail, any damage system will work, as long as it fits the setting well.
So, a few random goals:
- Simple: I'm not interested in a really detailed or intricate system. It should work without much effort or memorization on anyone's part.
- Some Element of Chance: I want stuff like "if this hits, the target WILL go down" to be rare. I'm willing to add another roll if necessary to ensure that there's some excitement and unpredictability involved. Sometimes the brick goes down from a lucky hit, sometimes the wimp just won't die.
- Tradeoffs: ideally, it should support some tradeoffs between different weapons and actions, so that you won't always want to do the same thing.
- Fits In: the basic system should be as similar as possible to the normal task resolution system, so that folks don't have to spend a lot of time learning it. It should be an intuitive extension of the regular rules.
- Lightly Gritty: not so lethal that combat is suicidal, not so cinematic that the PCs are never in danger.
- Fast: it can't take a lot of time to resolve. That's always been my personal gripe about Ironclaw's system... it takes too long. We don't want too many steps or compared rolls.
- Not Frustrating: the typical result of a hit should not be "bounce". We couldn't stand the way that very tough critters worked in Savage Worlds, where you had to keep pounding on them harmlessly until you got lucky.
Okay, here are some questions that have to be answered.
- How is the damage from an attack determined? How does your Muscles rating influence it?
- How do we determine how much damage the target can bounce off? Similarly, how does armor work?
- How does cumulative damage affect the target? Do we have cumulative damage at all?
Since I'm just brainstorming, let's assume that the damage roll is your Muscles die combined with whatever Damage Dice your weapon contributes. It's just a standard "roll-and-take-the-highest" check, like everything else. This would normally give a result from 1 to 12, with the possibility of bonuses or penalties to adjust it further.
An easy way to include bonuses is to say that how well you hit adds significant boosts to your damage. Like +2, +4, +8, etc.. An Extraordinary hit should inflict pretty impressive damage even with a dagger.
We could compare that to some sort of Soak roll (making it an Opposed Test) and handle the results accordingly. This would give us the usual set of results: Extra Failure, Crit Failure, Failure, Tie, Success, Crit Success, Extra Success. The high end results should include stuff like outright death.
Let's see... Damage vs Soak (Muscles & Weapon Damage vs Muscles & Guts & Armor).
- Extraordinary Failure: not even a scratch; weapon may break (GM option).
- Critical Failure: not even a scratch
- Failure: target takes no real damage, just scratches.
- Tie: no real damage, but target is -1 (cumulative) to all defense rolls until they spend a turn resting.
- Success: actual damage. Target gets a -1 to all defense rolls that can't be gotten rid of without medical attention.
- Critical Success: as Success, but target is incapacitated and must make a Survival Check next round
- Extraordinary Success: make that Survival Check at -4.
Posted by Kiz at April 29, 2004 02:01 PM