[House Rule] Penalty to Stun/Knockdown check equals "bleeding" modifier -- critique

[apoc527]

Hi everyone,

Really quick potential house rule here. I find it irksome, sometimes, how it's just as easy to resist Stun/Knockdown from a 4 point injury to the torso and a 25 point injury to the torso. There are modifiers on Stun/Knockdown from hit location (-10 for Skull, -5 face and vitals), but that's it.

What about applying the effective Bleeding modifier to the initial Stun/Knockdown check as well? This equates to a -1 per 5 injury on the HT check.

Thoughts? Unnecessary? Too harsh?

For example:

Bad Guy A gets hit with a 9mm pistol in the torso for 4 damage. He rolls normal HT. Bad Guy B gets hit with a sniper rifle for 26 damage. He rolls at HT-5.

This would tend to make unconsciousness come faster as well, which may or may not be a good thing.

[vicky_molokh]

I suspect this has scaling issues, as HT normally ranges between 8-12 even for tough stuff like tanks and RATS (who shouldn't be easily stunned even if they're on the verge of being destroyed but not destroyed yet).

[Kromm]

I hate to sound contrarian, because I'm all for house rules, but I think in this case we're discussing taking away what HT buys. Players buy high HT because they want their characters to tough out serious injuries and keep fighting. It's a common goal for players. And the HT isn't free – it costs points. Frankly, the GM who doesn't like that should simply cap HT in the campaign and/or not give "mook" NPCs high HT.

Also note that the way GURPS handles serious piles of hurt is through progressively more severe consequences, all of them cumulative. For instance, if an ordinary man with 10 HP is struck for 25 points of injury, he's now at -15 HP and thus between -HP and -2×HP. He must make a HT roll to avoid death. If he lives, he must make another HT roll, at -1 for being so badly hurt, to be conscious; this repeats every turn unless he takes Do Nothing. And if he's conscious, he must make a HT roll to avoid being knocked down and stunned, with severe failure (15+) meaning unconsciousness anyway. With HT 10, that's 10 or less, 9 or less, and then 10 or less . . . odds are excellent that he's going down.

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by Kromm

I hate to sound contrarian, because I'm all for house rules, but I think in this case we're discussing taking away what HT buys. Players buy high HT because they want their characters to tough out serious injuries and keep fighting. It's a common goal for players. And the HT isn't free – it costs points. Frankly, the GM who doesn't like that should simply cap HT in the campaign and/or not give "mook" NPCs high HT.

Also note that the way GURPS handles serious piles of hurt is through progressively more severe consequences, all of them cumulative. For instance, if an ordinary man with 10 HP is struck for 25 points of injury, he's now at -15 HP and thus between -HP and -2×HP. He must make a HT roll to avoid death. If he lives, he must make another HT roll, at -1 for being so badly hurt, to be conscious; this repeats every turn unless he takes Do Nothing. And if he's conscious, he must make a HT roll to avoid being knocked down and stunned, with severe failure (15+) meaning unconsciousness anyway. With HT 10, that's 10 or less, 9 or less, and then 10 or less . . . odds are excellent that he's going down.

Ironically, after posting, I had this same series of thoughts. I think the issue is that HT is relatively cheap and boosting HT rolls is almost trivially common amongst "adventuring" types (which is fine). For example, effective HT 12 is 15 points (HT 11 + Fit).

While you are quite correct to point out the effects of large injury (consciousness checks being the most relevant), I was simply feeling that larger initial damage ought to produce a higher chance of initial shock (Stunning). It just seems unintuitive to me that a barely major wound is the same as a really big one.

Oooh, there's an idea. Instead of using the Bleeding rules, why not scale the penalty to multiples of the Major Wound threshold (or just use HP, for ease).

So, a Major Wound is a standard Stun/Knockdown check. There's then a -1 for every multiple of the Major Wound threshold. So, for someone with 12 HP, a major wound is 7 injury. At 14, they'd roll at -1; at 21, they'd roll at -2, etc.

This isn't as large a penalty for most PCs as the -1 per 5 injury threshold and the more damage accrued at once, the worse the overall effects.

But maybe this is just a result of playing too much high point total games. At 150 points, this is rarely a concern. At 250 points, it just seems like Stun/Knockdowns are rare for fighting PCs. YMMV, I guess!

[Kromm]

To be fair, at 250 points, PCs mostly fear death. The knockdown/stun "death spiral" is for plausible humans, who don't show up much past 200 points. For high-end heroes out past 200 points, this is something mooks worry about, and what makes mooks mooks. The rules were written with this pretty much in mind.

[Flyndaran]

Lost of ordinary people have wished they went unconscious from some pretty serious wounds. I think it's safe to say that the worst party of getting shot isn't the possible swooning.
But I'm all for stat/skill caps for genre' sake too.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Lost of ordinary people have wished they went unconscious from some pretty serious wounds. I think it's safe to say that the worst party of getting shot isn't the possible swooning.
But I'm all for stat/skill caps for genre' sake too.

Serious wounds? Heck, I've wished to ride out flus and throat infections in some kind of safe medically induced coma. I've even wished that for non-physical things, like particularly annoying periods of my life.