New Hit Locations and Injury Tolerance

[Kelly Pedersen]

Martial Arts introduced several new hit locations: Ear, Jaw, Joints, Nose, Spine, and Veins and Arteries. I'm wondering what appropriate prices for Injury Tolerances negating these locations would be. My initial thoughts:

No Ears: 2 points.
This one is comparable to No Eyes, but clearly less valuable. It's slightly easier to target the ears, but lacks the major effects of an eye hit - you don't even suffer hearing loss from losing an ear, apparently!

No Jaw: 1 point
There's no "No Face" injury tolerance, but if there was, I'd be rating it at 5 points (it's easier to hit than the eyes, but the effects are rather less severe). "No Jaw" basically eliminates the enemy's ability to take an extra -1 to hit to give you an extra -1 to knockdown, and it's not worth that much.

No Joints: 3 points
Eliminates an "easy cripple" point on your limbs, but it doesn't make your limbs immune to being crippled at the normal thresholds, so I figured it's probably worth less than No Eyes.

No Nose: 2 points
Losing the nose does apparently remove the sense involved, as opposed to Ears, but the sense of smell is even less important then hearing, generally speaking, so it gets rated the same as No Ears.

No Spine: 3 points
Compare this to No Brain: it's about the same difficulty to hit it, but the spine has more DR, less extreme wounding multipliers, and less severe consequences for damage. So, it's probably worth fewer points to not have one.

No Veins/Arteries: 2 points
This is entirely subsumed by No Blood, so is obviously worth less. Also compare it to No Joints, which it resembles (it's basically an extra hit location within the arms and legs, plus an extra one within the neck), but is less severe than (higher penalties to hit, no crippling potential; the only advantage is somewhat increased damage multipliers).

Thoughts, comments?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

you don't even suffer hearing loss from losing an ear, apparently!

No more than you loose your sense of taste if your lips are cut off. The "ear", being the flappy bit of tissue on the outside of your head, isn't a sense organ. It's helpful in protecting the actual sense organ, and it has a role in guiding sound into the sense organ, but it doesn't do the sensing itself. Human ears don't even twist, to more closely target a sound, or fold over to close off the ear canal. A species with parabolic hearing due to ear mobility might loose a level or more from ear loss, however.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

No Jaw: 1 point
There's no "No Face" injury tolerance, but if there was, I'd be rating it at 5 points (it's easier to hit than the eyes, but the effects are rather less severe). "No Jaw" basically eliminates the enemy's ability to take an extra -1 to hit to give you an extra -1 to knockdown, and it's not worth that much.

This could make an interesting perk for a boxer, actually. I know the term "Glass Jaw" for someone who's vulnerable to jaw hits - is there a term for someone who seem's to be invulnerable to them? Iron Jaw?

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

No Nose: 2 points
Losing the nose does apparently remove the sense involved, as opposed to Ears, but the sense of smell is even less important then hearing, generally speaking, so it gets rated the same as No Ears.

Loosing your sense of smell is a bit questionable. I know when your nose is BROKEN it can occlude your sense of smell, because the broken bones deform the nasal cavity and prevent airflow. Getting your nose cut off shouldn't do it. Just FYI.

And of course, a species with Discriminatory Smell also looses 15 points of advantage if they loose their sense of smell.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

No Spine: 3 points
Compare this to No Brain: it's about the same difficulty to hit it, but the spine has more DR, less extreme wounding multipliers, and less severe consequences for damage. So, it's probably worth fewer points to not have one.

Does this also protect from people unscrewing your head with Neck Snap to cause Quadrapalegic?

[Kromm]

Actually, I didn't just MSU with the new hit locations . . . My reading was that while losing an ear had a relatively minor effect on hearing (mostly, it makes locating the sources of sounds a little harder), losing the nose leads to significant olfactory impairment. I have no idea why, but there it is.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

No Jaw: 1 point
There's no "No Face" injury tolerance, but if there was, I'd be rating it at 5 points (it's easier to hit than the eyes, but the effects are rather less severe). "No Jaw" basically eliminates the enemy's ability to take an extra -1 to hit to give you an extra -1 to knockdown, and it's not worth that much.

No Face is included in No Head [7] which also includes No Brain [5].

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

No Veins/Arteries: 2 points
This is entirely subsumed by No Blood, so is obviously worth less. Also compare it to No Joints, which it resembles (it's basically an extra hit location within the arms and legs, plus an extra one within the neck), but is less severe than (higher penalties to hit, no crippling potential; the only advantage is somewhat increased damage multipliers).

There is crippling, see the Veins and Arteries table MA page 139. That said shell tech has Injury Tolerance (No Blood; Not immune to blood-borne toxins, -50%) [3].

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Actually, I didn't just MSU with the new hit locations . . . My reading was that while losing an ear had a relatively minor effect on hearing (mostly, it makes locating the sources of sounds a little harder), losing the nose leads to significant olfactory impairment. I have no idea why, but there it is.

I wasn't suggesting that you were just MSU - like I said it makes perfect sense for someone who's nose has just been smashed flat, and because I didn't know any better about the smell thing, thought the cutting case might merely have been overlooked.

I'm seriously curious about the sense of smell issue - all I know about the nose anatomy suggests the serious smelling business is right inside the facial bones, not in the surface structure. Now I'm trying to figure the mechanism out.

ETA: Wikipedia suggests that damage to the ethmoid bone can cause anosmia, by damaging or severing the olfactory nerves that pass through it. When martial artists tell stories about a nose strike that drives shards of bone into the brain, this is probably the prime culprit.

"The ethmoid bone is very delicate and is easily injured by a sharp upward blow to the nose, such as a person might suffer by striking an automobile dashboard in a collision... Blows to the head can also shear off the olfactory nerves that pass though the ethmoid bone and cause anosmia."

Learn something new every day.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Bruno

No more than you loose your sense of taste if your lips are cut off. The "ear", being the flappy bit of tissue on the outside of your head, isn't a sense organ. It's helpful in protecting the actual sense organ, and it has a role in guiding sound into the sense organ, but it doesn't do the sensing itself.

Huh. I would have assumed that losing an ear was at least good for Hard of Hearing...

Originally Posted by Bruno

Does this also protect from people unscrewing your head with Neck Snap to cause Quadrapalegic?

It probably should. I still wouldn't price it much higher, mind.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

No Face is included in No Head [7] which also includes No Brain [5].

Hmm. Good point. Given that, No Face should be only 2 points. Well, good thing I still put No Jaw at lower than that, then. :-)

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

There is crippling, see the Veins and Arteries table MA page 139.

That's a bit of a separate optional rule, though. The Veins and Arteries hit location description, on MA p. 137 specifies that you should "ignore crippling effects [...] for limbs."