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Old 10-16-2019, 09:13 PM   #31
MikMod
 
Join Date: May 2019
Default Re: Trying to make consistent sense of what damage and healing represent

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Originally Posted by Jeff Lord View Post
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.
I admit I've never understood TFT this way. There seem to be too many examples of an attack being effectively a single blow. Not just arrows and thrown weapons, which are clearly one blow, but things like charge attacks, and the fact that armour and shields count just once against the attack. Reading the example battle in ITL it seems clear one attack is one strike.

Of course in melee combat there are many feints and a flurry of moves, but I always considered this to be a prelude to attempting to land one solid and disabling blow on your opponent. When I watch HEMA type fights it seems clear that it's usually that you create an opening for a decent strike, if you can, then pull back ready for the next clash, rather than hacking several times. So in my head the 5 seconds is used to try to manoeuver a good strike.

I'm not sure this is in itself is that important regarding healing though.
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Old 10-16-2019, 10:00 PM   #32
MikMod
 
Join Date: May 2019
Default Re: Trying to make consistent sense of what damage and healing represent

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Originally Posted by Jeff Lord View Post
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.
Thank you for bringing some 'professional' views to the discussion! :)

Okay, so the point about shock implies that many small wounds can be shrugged off but a big wound is much harder? In TFT terms, eight 1 point wounds should be 'less harmful' in some way than one 8 point wound?

And there is the point that a healthy person can take a wound better than someone who is already wounded? In TFT terms, a 2 point wound should be 'more harmful' to someone who is already hurt?

I'm not sure I get the bit about 'cannot be treated individually'. If a patient has two large cuts, then there must be a sense in which each cut can be treated, even if there is (also) some sort of 'overall' damage to the person as a result of the two cuts - trauma, shock, bloodloss etc, stuff which has 'one' effect on the whole body?

Am I understanding correctly?
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Old 10-16-2019, 11:23 PM   #33
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Trying to make consistent sense of what damage and healing represent

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Originally Posted by TippetsTX View Post
So in the context of this discussion, I think it is very quantifiable. I'm fairly confident that those of us who land on the 'per wound' side of this debate would define a wound as a single hit or, more specifically, any successful attack action (or threat event) which results in damage to the target’s ST. To your point, that is still an abstraction, but an acceptable one and for the sake of consistency, we should agree on a common lexicon at least.
Yes, for me too it works fine as an abstraction.


Quote:
Originally Posted by MikMod View Post
I admit I've never understood TFT this way. There seem to be too many examples of an attack being effectively a single blow. Not just arrows and thrown weapons, which are clearly one blow, but things like charge attacks, and the fact that armour and shields count just once against the attack. Reading the example battle in ITL it seems clear one attack is one strike.
Yes, there are several cases where an attack or other cause of damage does seem to be a single event that would almost always cause a single wound:

* missile shots
* thrown weapons
* missile spells
* many traps

Also, returning to considering the way damage from individual wounds are all individually healable even when doing per-fight combat, IF the wounds are taken each in separate fights.

Why would that matter?

Particularly when low-damage foes are encountered (e.g. nuisance creatures), player awareness of a "per fight" healing system will strongly reward the gamey knowledge of the players that that's how healing works, to rotate out anyone who gets even slightly hurt in a fight in favor of putting people who haven't been hurt in that fight yet to risk being in harm's way, with the idea all the damage will vanish if no one takes more than 2 or 3 points, but they'll be lasting injury if someone has 4 or more 1-hit rat bites or something.

And as MikMod wrote, the way armor subtracts from damage of an attack once strongly implies to me that the damage and protection math is about single hits.
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