Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon
None of those are equal in immediate effect on the target.
The torso is the least immediately dangerous. That's not to say it's not dangerous, of course, but it is less so than the others. A cutting attack does good damage, and an impaling attack has a chance to hit something vital, turning a dangerous hit into a very dangerous hit.
Face is the next most immediately dangerous. Any hit has a chance of striking something vital and doing massive damage. If it does not, however, there is not anything vitally important that is damaged, so it is no more likely to be life-threatening than a torso wound that misses anything vital. It is, however, painful, and more likely to immediately impair or incapacitate the target due to pain. A hit to the torso that might do almost nothing could stagger or drop someone when delt to the face. This is also ignoring special sub-locations of the face, such as nose or jaw, which while they deal no more damage, have increased additional chance to immediately impair or incapacitate the target.
Neck is possibly the most immediately dangerous, barring face hits that cut into the brain (Though it's so close to the face in immediate danger that I could easily see it argued that I've got them ranked backwards). Cutting attacks deal more damage to the neck, and any blow has a chance to hit something vital that makes things even worse. Major wounds from crushing attacks are particularly nasty; one to the spine will immediately incapacitate the target (See Martial Arts), while one that hits elsewhere will cause choking instead (See BioTech). It also shares the pain effect of the face. All of these make it more likely to immediately impair and incapacitate a target. It also has much more severe bleeding (For which First-Aid is useless) and possible long-term impairments, which make neck wounds less survivable.
.
|
None of that seems to go against what I'm suggesting though. I'm not arguing that hits to these areas are instant death sentences, I'm arguing that they are intermediate in terms of immediate effect on a scale between torso and brain.
I take you point about hits to the face either being superficial or really bad, however short of putting in some kind of unique threshold dependent rule I would argue that is modelled by low damage rolls compared to high damage rolls. Which makes sense because high damaging rolls tend to indicate blows that have connected more and thus more likely to have gone through the 'crumple zone' and hit the good bits behind.
Also to be fair you could make similar arguments about almost all parts of the body, the vitals in the torso that count as 'vital' are also covered by less important tissues.
Basically it comes down to this I think wounding multipliers on location should reflect a meat: immediately crippling good stuff, ratio. All the locations seem to follow this except the lower head and neck. Once you past the surface there really isn't very many areas in these locations were you can stick something without hitting something pretty damn important to continuing to live in the short term.
If nothing else why can I severe the leg of a St10man with a 8 point blow from a sword, but the same blow to his neck has him fighting to stay concious while I wait for him to bleed out? And if he makes his HT roll he can still act more freely than if he's lost his leg!
Now don't get me wrong dead is dead and that chap's not going to last long, but for a system that's very good at giving us several different ways of getting there and isn't shy to have legs and arms flying off and the immediate mechanical effect of that happening, why does the neck get left out. Short of the assumption that a mortal wound to the neck from cutting is decapitation, headless chickens obviously having very high HT scores!