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Old 02-26-2019, 11:04 AM   #1
RyanW
 
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Default Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

I was looking at this and thinking about completely revamping the damage system using it.
  1. You never roll damage. Instead, attacks (and ST) have a Wound Potential. On a successful attack, roll 1d. On a 1-2, subtract 1 from Wound Potential. On a 5-6, add 1 to Wound Potential. (Or use a Fudge/Fate die, if you prefer).
  2. DR is replaced by Protection. This is the (adjusted) Wound Potential that can be completely stopped.
  3. When Wound Potential exceeds Protection by three or less, the Wound Potential is reduced:
    • Exceeded by 1: Reduce by three.
    • Exceeded by 2: Reduce by two.
    • Exceeded by 3: Reduce by one.
    • Exceeded by 4+: Not reduced.
    • Where multiple sources of Protection apply, apply the reduction for each in turn and check the remaining against the next source of Protection (you might find this rule cumbersome in games where layered armor is common).
  4. Apply the rules from Conditional Injury normally starting at Injury and Severity.
If you favor protection over damage, you could reduce Wound Potential by 1 if it exceeds by 3 or 4 instead of just 3. It could round either way.

(Also, did you know the forum allows nested lists? I didn't, but I thought I'd give it a try).
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Old 02-26-2019, 12:00 PM   #2
DouglasCole
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

Play it. Love to see how it works. The reason I didn't do the protection angle is subtracting logs is real division, but your system sidesteps this nicely.
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Old 02-26-2019, 03:58 PM   #3
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

One potential sticking point: Melee weapon damage adds. In the normal human range using modest weapons, it's actually pretty close to just keep it as is. It would make an ogre swinging a halberd utterly terrifying, though I'm temped to call that a feature rather than a bug.
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Old 02-26-2019, 10:54 PM   #4
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

I'd like to see someone run a statistical analysis on how Conditional Injury works as written. For xd6, what Wound Potentials can you get, and what are the probabilities of each? How does this distribution change as you apply DR to reduce the damage roll?

Once I have that information, I'll have a better idea about how to go about replacing regular damage rolls. My suspicion is that the distributions are heavily biased toward the top end, and that they don't carry all that much: maybe two or three points downward, rarely more than that. And because more dice means that the sum tends to cluster more, I don't expect the number of dice to have much of an effect on how concentrated the resulting Wound Potentials are.

If this is the case, I might recommend rolling, say, three dice? (exact number pending on the statistics), reading “6” as zero, and taking the lowest of them, and using the result as a penalty to the attack's rating, which would be set at the upper end of the range of Wound Potentials that the equivalent damage dice pool would generate.

I wouldn't be going for strict duplication of the existing results; just a relatively simple technique that would give a halfway reasonable approximation of them.
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Old 02-26-2019, 11:02 PM   #5
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

Another possibility is to ditch the damage roll entirely, including any sort of “now roll dice to adjust the effective Wound Potential of an attack”, and instead base that adjustment on the margin of success: say, succeed by zero or one, reduce effective Wound Potential by 3; succeed by two, reduce it by 2; succeed by three, reduce it by 1; succeed by four or more, don't reduce it.
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Old 02-27-2019, 01:15 AM   #6
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

Quote:
Originally Posted by dataweaver View Post
Another possibility is to ditch the damage roll entirely, including any sort of “now roll dice to adjust the effective Wound Potential of an attack”, and instead base that adjustment on the margin of success: say, succeed by zero or one, reduce effective Wound Potential by 3; succeed by two, reduce it by 2; succeed by three, reduce it by 1; succeed by four or more, don't reduce it.
I normally use tBone's grazes rule, where an attack made by zero (or a defense failed by one) halves damage. In this system, that would be equivalent to subtracting two from the Wound Potential.

I've now got a ST table I intend to use with this, but it also borrows heavily from my version of the Know Your Own Strength rule, so it shares almost nothing with the vanilla table. The game I intend to test this under is a western, so unless they run afoul of a bear or something, damage should be either read from a firearm stat-line or from "normal human" levels of ST.
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Old 02-27-2019, 05:51 AM   #7
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

Replacing the damage roll with a simple 1d roll (abstractly representing how well the attack hit) is something I’ve considered, although my system treated lower rolls as better (to keep with the general “roll low” mentality of GURPS). I’ll be away from home for a while, but when I get back I’ll check my notes and see how it would play with this. It was a part of my planned Armor Overhaul, which basically got abandoned (well, frozen, which is part of why my blog hasn’t had updates in such a long time) when I couldn’t figure out how to model real world armor penetration properly (and yet in a gameable fashion, ready for appropriate cinematic modifications).
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Old 02-27-2019, 02:57 PM   #8
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanW View Post
I normally use tBone's grazes rule, where an attack made by zero (or a defense failed by one) halves damage. In this system, that would be equivalent to subtracting two from the Wound Potential.
For simplicity, I'd only go with an additional -1: the idea is that a graze does less damage than normal, with “half damage” being a fairly simple calculation to do. And in this case, an additional -1 at zero is easier to remember and preserves the pattern already established. Which, by the way, was intended to be a repurposing of your DR replacement rule: one point above the cutoff reduces the Would Penalty by 3, and drop that reduction by one for every point beyond that. I'm just applying it to the “you missed!” cutoff (i.e., the margin of success) instead of “your armor stopped it!” cutoff. I like that more than having the amount of damage you inflict being entirely unrelated to how well you did on your roll: it makes more sense to me that the better you rolled on your attack, the more damage you do; and it cuts down on the number of rolls that need to be made: attack and defense instead of attack, defense, and damage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanW View Post
I've now got a ST table I intend to use with this, but it also borrows heavily from my version of the Know Your Own Strength rule, so it shares almost nothing with the vanilla table. The game I intend to test this under is a western, so unless they run afoul of a bear or something, damage should be either read from a firearm stat-line or from "normal human" levels of ST.
Sounds reasonable. I, too, like to pair Know Your Own Strength and Conditional Damage. That said: with my MoS-based Wound Potential system, I intend to read damage from the top down: whatever the damage dice are, multiply by 6 and look that up as Penetrating Damage to find the equivalent Wound Potential — or, if you want to put it another way, the Attack Strength. So 1d6 has an Attack Strength of 2, 2d6 has an Attack Strength of 4, 3d6 has an Attack Strength of 5, 4d6 has an Attack Strength of 6, 5d6 and 6d6 have an Attack Strength of 7, 7d6–10d6 have an Attack Strength of 8, 11d6–14d6 have an Attack Strength of 9, 15d6–20d6 have an Attack Strength of 10, and so on, with a doubling of dice roughly equivalent to +2 Attack Strength and a tenfold increase in dice being +6 Attack Strength. Multipliers (usually ×10 or ×100) also become additions (+6 and +12, respectively).

And I'm using the term “Attack Strength” deliberately: it's very much the same thing as Striking Strength, but for attacks that aren't muscle-powered.
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Old 03-24-2019, 01:15 PM   #9
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Default Re: Conditional Injury (Pyramid #120) thoughts

So I've been putting a lot of thought into this (game has not started up yet, so no actual in-play testing). Caution: Big changes to GURPS ahead.

ST only directly affects ST rolls and Basic Lift - using a variant on the KYOS system. Instead of directly setting damage and HP, it instead provides a range which WP and RT would normally fall within (which must be purchased separately). Since ST 9, 10, and 11 would all give the same base WP and RT, a linear cost seemed unfair, and I wanted to avoid a lumpy cost progression.

Converting weapon tables has proven a bit of work. I'm approximating by saying swing is a flat +1. Additions (or subtractions) to damage (e.g. the +3 part of Sw+3) are halved and rounded away from zero. This can create extremes very different from what would happen if you just applied Conditional Injury to standard GURPS damage as originally written. I'm thinking of giving weapons a max damage stat, to cover the "effective ST for damage purposes cannot exceed triple the weapon’s minimum ST" rule, but it shouldn't really come into effect in my game.
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