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Old 10-14-2019, 06:17 PM   #24
Jeff Lord
 
Join Date: Jul 2018
Default Re: Trying to make consistent sense of what damage and healing represent

Hi MikMod. I'd be happy to try.

First off, I've repeatedly stated that I don't believe that "per wound" is actually a quantifiable thing. What is a "wound," exactly? We have a 5 second combat round (as opposed to 1 second in GURPS); a lot can happen. When a sword (any) hits you for maximum damage, that might be one good shot - or it might be two or three, or more. The same goes for a dagger in HTH. You take "hits" from a successful attack; that doesn't necessarily translate to a single "wound." Admittedly, arrow damage is harder to justify this way but that's a whole other story.

One of the reasons that I prefer TFT to GURPS is that these particular abstractions work for me and my players. YMMV, obviously.

Apologies in advance for trying to sum up (and/or condense) a number of Skype conversations. The gist of what the folks I spoke with said was as follows - "wounds" are not simply the sum of their respective parts. Hence they are not able to be treated as individual, discrete, units. If the human body takes (for example) four points of hits, that's not good. If it takes four points of hits and then another four points of hits, this is actually much worse than four points of hits X2. The accretion of damage will drastically impact the body's ability to "shrug it off." Trauma based shock is not fun.

This is, of course, only important if you want your abstraction to "lean" more towards realism than other abstractions. In the end, they are all abstractions. The argument for wanting to extend play by having the players able to deal with more damage is a powerful and compelling one if such is your desire.

In addition to healing considerations, this has led me to toy with the idea (house-ruled, of course) that players with less than half their ST (or whatever home-brew stat is in use) suffer a -1 DX penalty, just as players with 3 ST or less suffer a -3 DX penalty.

I think Skarg had the right of it when he said:

"But when we play and GM immersive RPGs a certain way for years, our perspectives get pretty developed and it can be challenging to step into another player's different perspective."

And I agreed with him again when he said:

"In my case, when the topic is something I'm convinced of a strong opinion about, I tend to keep trying to explain that perspective until it sounds like people get what I'm saying, especially if they seem to be responding to my posts by asserting things in ways that seem to not get what I've been trying to explain."

Last edited by Jeff Lord; 10-14-2019 at 06:25 PM.
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