11-12-2019, 04:47 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
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Toning down the grue
One element about DFRPG that occasionally irks me is the gruesomeness of the combat system. I spend a lot of time introducing the game to kids, and the hit location system is quite graphic. It feels harsh to ask my seven-year-old if she is shooting the orc in the eye or the neck. Or for my ten-year-old to consider whether he'd like to cripple the ogre's legs and then back across the room peppering the crawling creature with arrows until it bleeds out. The tactical combat system, of course, encourages that sort of thinking: what's the most efficient method of butchering your opponent?
With my own kids and their friends, I've just dealt with it, either playing down the violence or de-emphasizing the importance of optimal tactics. The benefits of the character generation system still make it worth it, in my eyes, over D&D. Now that I'm hoping to offer a summer camp next year for middle-school students, I'd like to think it through more carefully. I don't love the idea of kids going home to tell their parents that they spent their day decapitating, crippling, and blinding every foe they met. One option is to simply ignore the hit location system and have all shots be to the torso. That's how my groups mostly played GURPS 3e back in the '90s and nobody clamored for more realism. This simplifies armor, too. This is basically the way my students play in our school club because they don't have enough time to really learn the rules. With the summer camp, I'm hoping to actually fully teach them the game. The downside of removing hit locations entirely is that some foes are designed for hit locations (I'm thinking of you, Peshkali). This might also nerf some professions like the scout. Another option I've been rolling around in my head is to somehow retool the hit location system to be less explicit. I can't decide what that would look like yet. It seems fun to be able to take penalties to hit for potentially greater damage or other effects. Maybe it's just about describing things differently. A crippling shot to a limb might just be a Charley horse or a stomp on their foot. Not sure how to manage eyes and neck though. Maybe taking the -9 for the eyeshot is doing something so crazy that you stun/distract/enrage your foe into having -1 to attack rolls (i.e., the effect of one eye). Not sure how doing that a second time though would lead to them flailing around blindly. Have any of you ever taken a stab (ahem) at something like this? |
11-12-2019, 06:18 PM | #2 |
Aluminated
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: East of the moon, west of the stars, close to buses and shopping
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Re: Toning down the grue
I'd do away with hit locations and just treat everything as torso shots.
That said, perhaps I've always run with a different kind of kids, but every early gamer I've ever met, on being introduced into a combat situation, goes for the kill. They often want to go straight for the head and do maximum damage. They may not be bloodthirsty as a matter of course, but when they do get into combat, they don't take half measures. So don't introduce hit locations, but be prepared to trot them out when you're asked for them, because you will.
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11-12-2019, 06:35 PM | #3 |
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
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Re: Toning down the grue
Can always do something like:
-4 to skill: any injury past armor is tripled -8 to skill: any injury past armor is quadrupled OR armor is halved tripling and quadrupling replace any damage type modifiers. that first one is basically "vitals" the second one is "pick brain or chinks" But without the specificity.
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11-12-2019, 06:54 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Toning down the grue
Interesting post. I imagine that the game's audience doesn't skew so young, and expects the full monty where slashing and bashing are concerned, so I can't fault the design for being what it is.
For the young'uns, though . . . I don't know, I think there's a bit of a mismatch between "let's play a game of hacking at enemies with swords" and "let's not have too much gore". Still, to tone things down a bit, ideas that come to mind are:
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11-12-2019, 07:14 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
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Re: Toning down the grue
Great ideas. I appreciate the thoughts thus far.
I want to clarify that I'm definitely not faulting the design. One of the things I like about DFRPG is that it is clearly written for adults. I've just seen a few scenes in recent games that felt a bit off with my own youngest players and am considering the optics for an official (parents-pay-for-it) school camp. |
11-12-2019, 08:51 PM | #6 | |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: Toning down the grue
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11-13-2019, 01:00 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Central Texas, north of Austin
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Re: Toning down the grue
Yes, this is a good discussion with several helpful replies.
I think T-Bone had lots of good guidance on steering fights towards resolutions with less fatalities. I want to call this the A-Team approach. That's the action packed show from the '80s with Mr. T. They reveled in fighting with lots of intimidating military hardware, but no one got killed, just knocked out. But I also have a related solution. If you can successfully hit a more difficult location on a foe, he must make a fright check to avoid running or surrendering. The rationale is that the foe is witnessing your threatening expertise and realizes how close he is to losing his eyes, brains, or guts. The fright check can be penalized in proportion to the degree of harm that would occur if you actually applied the wounding modifiers. This could lead to another concept that starts to require a lot of changes to the game: some kind of morale tracking. Maybe characters have a morale supply that can track damage (b-dog likes damage tracks). Attacks could wear down morale instead of gory HP. This creates a dual damage track. Douglas Cole has a damage supply called Vitality (if I remeber correctly) used in conjunction with physical HP in his Dragon Heresy RPG. So a precedent has already been set for a variety of damage types and tracks. |
11-13-2019, 09:57 AM | #8 | |||||||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Toning down the grue
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Whether that's a good idea is off-topic for this forum and perhaps on-topic for a forum about child psychology. It suffices to say that there are those who feel that hiding the consequences of violent actions by, for example, taking the blood and gore away tends to desensitize kids. Quote:
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For that matter, it doesn't take much tweaking to use Animal, Faerie, Hybrid, and Mundane monsters that ought to bleed and squeal. Making heavy use of "And Stay Down!" should do it. Using that rule for these monsters but not for the supernatural ones above ought to keep high skill and special abilities useful. And if you want, you can always have the seeming ogres, orcs, tigers, etc. be magical creations summoned by a wizard, and simply go "poof!" and turn into treasure if defeated. Kids used to video games won't even find that odd.
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11-13-2019, 03:22 PM | #9 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
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Re: Toning down the grue
If you're going to be running a game for kids the level of violence is something you'll be accountable for. But when I was in middle school there weren't a lot of movies I watched that didn't feature heads exploding or body parts being lopped off, usually with geysers of gore and chunks of person. I started gaming when I was 10, and while the games weren't detailed in that violence my GM's didn't hesitate to describe the gruesome critical hits. I'd talk to your kid players and find out if they're uncomfortable with the violence before you start dumbing down what they may find the most enjoyable part of the game.
If you want to make that cut just cut out hit locations entirely. It's the cleanest and simplest way to not have to detail limbs being crippled or eyes being stabbed. I wouldn't try to simulate generic critical injuries. That's just being vague about the gruesome parts and kids have enough imagination that that just makes things worse. But keep the difficulty for targeting a weak spot in the armor or unarmored location. |
11-16-2019, 04:37 AM | #10 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Toning down the grue
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Tags |
gore, hit locations, kid friendly |
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