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Old 03-16-2018, 05:28 PM   #21
lordabdul
 
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Default Re: Increasing lethality

Thanks for all the information, comments, and ideas everyone! I'll look into how to hit vitals more often, along with a few other suggestions I've seen here.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
If a wound is not to some vital area or artery, why would bandaging be dramatically difficult for an expert (skill 14+) field medic? I'd expect that it's mostly less trained civilians, who may have had a first aid course or two (skill 8-10), who find any injury at all stressful and challenging to treat. Once you get the injured character under the care of an expert professional, his chances of survival ought to improve significantly.
The problem wasn't really that it was too hard or easy per se, but that the difficulty is constant regardless of the injury. There are no penalties or bonuses between doing First Aid on somebody who cut their finger, and somebody who's been cut to pieces by a werewolf. Sure, maybe the field medic shouldn't have any problem patching the werewolf victim, but that just means the penalties shouldn't get too high -- not that the penalties shouldn't exist. Virtually all skill rolls have some form of difficulty scale (attacking, influencing, picking locks, etc.), but First Aid doesn't have any, and I'm wondering why, and how that's actually realistic?

Quote:
Originally Posted by mhd View Post
Don't let common CoC characters have HT 12 in the first place is a good start.
In my CoC campaigns, characters are usually 100pts and stats are capped at 12. I think that's quite fair.


Quote:
Originally Posted by tbone View Post
1) Make the HT roll vs death tougher as HP go further negative – a commonly suggested house rule, and a helpful remedy for high-HT types that just won't die. Simplest method: -1 on the HT roll at -HP, -2 on the HT roll at -2xHP, etc. - dead simple to remember. (That's tougher than RAW from the start, as even the first death roll is at a penalty – but I think that's the goal here...)
I've actually considered doing that too... is that a common house rule? Does it work well in practice?


One thing I realize is that although GURPS is possibly realistic here, as pointed by many people, the problem is not so much realism as it is gameplay-related. If you play Call of Cthulhu using the original rules, or the Delta Green rules, or whatever, you'll notice that guns are a lot more deadly. Whether it's less realistic or not (even after taking into account the lower crunchiness of those systems compared to GURPS) is not the question -- that's just how the systems compare. What it does imply however is that the gameplay will potentially be different.

Even assuming that gunfights are equally scary in both systems, and that the players will avoid them in equal measure (which is my personal experience), the aftermaths of gunfights generally play different (again, in my experience GMing CoC with GURPS). In another system, a character will die in combat and the other characters will flee, and we can give the player a new character fairly quickly and move on. In GURPS, however, there will be a lot more action around pulling the wounded character out (making the overall combat scene longer), rolling through medical procedures, finding a hospital, and finally giving the player a new character much later, once we figure out if the wounded character will convalesce for too long. We also end up having to deal with what the wounded character does during that down time... do the cultists go after him at the hospital and the player learns that his character was killed in his bed? Do we play that as a standalone scene? There's a lot of stuff there you have to deal with, that you don't have to deal with if using the BRP rules. It's as much an opportunity for cool scenes and roleplay as it is a downside of GURPS' arguably "more realistic system".. but it's different. I guess I'm trying to wrap my head around the general fact of life that different systems actually do bring out different gameplay, and that as a GM I need to know about it and adjust accordingly... where is Gollum when you need him?! :)

Last edited by lordabdul; 03-16-2018 at 05:33 PM.
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