03-16-2018, 06:44 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: May 2009
Location: In Rio de Janeiro, where it was cyberpunk before it was cool.
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Re: Increasing lethality
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And in that sense you have answered your own question. There are tons of gritty rules that make dealing with injuries harder, as well as many ways of making combats harder by the use of tactics and etc. Martial arts has rules for partial/cumulative crippling due to damage, such as losing DX in an injured arm. Aside from this, I dont use any of these gritty rules and I never felt the lethality thing was a problem... Given that in my table we have people dealing 16-20 dice of damage per hit a headblow will kill almost anyone anyway. Yet, we had spent the last 3 years without a permanent character death (well, until the last game session at least). And the only reason he died was due to amazing NPC tactics. Ill elaborate. Its DF campaign heading into its 6th year, we are around 1100 points atm. We were travelling very fast through a gigantic plain, maybe too fast, we used create mount spells to create racing horses, then buffed them with haste 4, and then buffed them with quick march (for those who are wondering, yes we have the skill levels/FP to sustain that). From what I remember, we were travelling at a maximum speed of 44 yards per second. Then out of nowhere we entered an artificially created no mana, no sanctity, etc. zone. The damage was quite tremendous, with 9 out of 10 PCs + NPC allies needing to make an HT roll for death, some fell so much that they went past the 'void' zone. Only to look up and see themselves surrounded by 18 warriors and an archmage that is the enemy of one of the PCs. We barely survived, and one of our wizards stuck in the middle of the void zone was cut off from the rest of the group and suffered 15 attacks from 5 dual wielding NPCs. He had a fighter with sacrificial parry and very high skill protecting him, but 6 hits got through and having 13 HP and little armor, that was the end of him. Despite that, we had a modicum of luck, the evil archmage did not get a critical success on his death spells or in his mass daze attempts, so we slowly killed his cronies, buffed up, healed, and ended up winning the fight (this evil wizard was also pathologically arrogant), and even managed to use sovereign ward to prevent him from running away, killed him and looted his stuff. 50% of our combats are like this, we live on a knifes edge, always having to play to the maximum of our hability or we die. But when you successfully achieve this level of difficulty, theres no need to further hinder the PC's chance of survival/sucess imho. The chance of a critical hit killing someone is already too much of a suspense mechanic to need anything else. |
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03-16-2018, 06:56 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Increasing lethality
As an aside to all this. When it comes to comparing effects of GSW in the torso in RL to GURPS. There is I think an issue in trying to get a exact* match.
And that is in GURPS terms the torso is made up of either Abstract 'torso flesh' at HP with standard injury mods and bleeding, or vitals x3 injury mod and extra nasty bleeding rules and treatment rules. I think there's sometimes a bit of a temptation to see wounds in the basic torso that don't hit GURPS vitals as just being 'poking holes in meat' and we start to think hang on why is my PC rolling to die from holes poked in their 'non vital meat'. Ultimately in RL hits to the torso that don't hit heart, lung, liver or kidneys, can actually be more than just poking holes in meat, and I do think that HP loss even on locations without extra rules can represent a lot of things other than just amount of flesh immediately interrupted Of course this is just an RPG system, we're not trying to write a medial text or wound simulator here! And of course some wounds to the torso do amount to just poking holes in meat, which is half my point about grazing rules! *well Ok there's lots of issue, but I think this is a biggish one Last edited by Tomsdad; 03-16-2018 at 07:13 AM. |
03-16-2018, 07:43 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Land of the Beer, Home of the Dirndls
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Re: Increasing lethality
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Require Surgery to stop bleeding for vital hits and/or major wounds (and while you're at it, make vital hits more common, either by a Gygaxian/LT version of 1 in d6, or on a torso hit with a margin >= 3). |
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03-16-2018, 08:10 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Increasing lethality
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But if you want to get more death using just the standard rules, without dipping into more complex bleeding rules and Martial Arts options and all that, I'd suggest two things: 1) Make the HT roll vs death tougher as HP go further negative – a commonly suggested house rule, and a helpful remedy for high-HT types that just won't die. Simplest method: -1 on the HT roll at -HP, -2 on the HT roll at -2xHP, etc. - dead simple to remember. (That's tougher than RAW from the start, as even the first death roll is at a penalty – but I think that's the goal here...) 2) Whether you make "instant death" rolls harder or leave them unchanged, rework things so a mortal wound result becomes far more likely. I think that'd work well: it makes trauma care much more valuable, and makes falling to negative HP far deadlier if that care isn't there. Which means PCs will still tend to survive, but often only through harrowing surgery. Monsters and bad guys, meanwhile, who don't typically adventure with life-saving buddies, will usually just plain die of their mortal wounds. I don't know if those changes would do all you want, but they are nice and simple.
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03-16-2018, 09:13 AM | #15 |
Join Date: Feb 2012
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Re: Increasing lethality
Mortality is totally fine. People don’t die for a 9mm bullet which doesn’t damage vitals or major arteries. If we choose to use only basic rules, then we are playing an arcade game. If we want realism, hit locations and bleeding are there. Of course, we still need a good vitals hit to kill a person with a 9mm. A 300 WM is another thing.
The only real problem is the habit to have HT 12 as a minimum. Its main goal is to actually reduce mortality, so it’s a feature more than a issue. Just limit HT+hard/easy to kill to 10 or 11 and you’ll avoid the problem of PGs that never die until at -5xHP. |
03-16-2018, 09:24 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Increasing lethality
One idea I've been toying with is exploding damage dice (for every 6 you roll, you get an extra die). Exploding on 5 and 6 for Vitals hits might also be fun.
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03-16-2018, 09:33 AM | #17 | |
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
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Re: Increasing lethality
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5-6 is a 1.5x increase 4-6 is just shy of 2x 3-6 is just more than 2.5x 2-6 is a lot of exploding! It's about 3.6x
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03-16-2018, 10:01 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: Increasing lethality
Shots to Torso Vitals default down to Torso shots -ie if you miss a torso vitals shot by 1 (including the -3 strike penalty for a vitals shot), you still hit the torso. Either adjust this value to -2 or -3, and have your NPC's start shooting at vitals (note that this is realistic firearms training - they teach you to shoot the center of mass, with the associated vital organs and major blood vessels) or allow the reverse effect - if you make a generic torso shot by 3 or more, it counts as a vitals hit.
All of a sudden vitals hits become much more common, and the resultant triple damage hits + surgery needed to stop bleeding rules should result in much more lethality... |
03-16-2018, 04:19 PM | #19 | |||||
Banned
Join Date: Mar 2018
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Re: Increasing lethality
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Also I think a graze rule could be useful. A lot of gun damage rating in GURPS is designed around penetrative power and a pronounced bell curve distribution is reasonable as such penetration does tend around a median line. But rating penetrative power against various default homogenous materials is not very much like the incredibly wide range of bullet wounds in a living target. On top of this the way the rating is converted into dice and pluses can significantly effects minimum damage. Quote:
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03-16-2018, 04:32 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Nashville, TN
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Re: Increasing lethality
As an addendum to this, if you're of a mind to tinker with costs of things, the cost of HT is lower than it probably ought to be for the benefits it provides. HT is as cheap as it is because it aids PC survival; if that troubles you, increase its cost.
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