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Old 11-12-2019, 04:47 PM   #1
Dalin
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Default 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?
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gore, hit locations, kid friendly

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