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Old 10-19-2018, 12:29 AM   #11
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
(...) By the RAW, you take 10 damage, but suffer none of the crippling effects. This is a simplification, yes. If you want a more complicated but possibly more realistic option, use random hit locations to see how the damage gets distributed instead, as I suggested.
Really? Only 10 hit points of damage and no crippling at all? That makes the attack much less threatening than I thought...

In your example, how many times do you roll random hit locations for crippling damage? Following your logic it seems you only roll 1 time… Right?

Finally... what about this?

Quote:
Originally Posted by evileeyore View Post
(...)
As per B400, anything exposed. So yes, you can completely cripple, blind, deafen, etc someone if they take a full hit to the front that does enough damage. Large Area Injury is rough. I suggest not being the target of it.
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Old 10-19-2018, 12:44 AM   #12
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

Large area injury does not mean ignoring armor, at all. In Low Tech conditions it usually is resisted by half torso armor, though you can do better than that if you get your unprotected hit locations out of the line of fire.

Large area injury does not have any hit location effects, normally. B400 is quite clear, and evileyore quite wrong. While a slight oversimplification, B398's "Attacks that cover a large area – such as an avalanche or a cone of dragon fire – make hit location irrelevant" is almost always accurate.

B400 goes into what hit locations are exposed to the attack...but it does so in order to determine which locations are eligible for the part of least protected location in determining your effective DR. The only time hit location effects are supposed to kick in is if you've only exposed one location to the attack at all, say sticking a foot in lava or having an arm reaching out of your cover when the dragonfire strikes.
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Old 10-19-2018, 01:32 AM   #13
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

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Originally Posted by Hide View Post
In your example, how many times do you roll random hit locations for crippling damage? Following your logic it seems you only roll 1 time… Right?
No, I was recommending rolling possibly multiple times. You'd roll once, apply the damage up to the crippling threshold for whichever location you rolled, and then roll again if there was damage remaining, repeating until you either ran out of damage, or rolled the torso, which has no crippling threshold.

So, for example, say you took a 20 HP blast full-on to the front, meaning basically all the hit locations applied. Assuming you had the typical 10 HP, if you rolled left arm first, you'd apply 6 HP to that, crippling it. Then, you'd roll again on the table. If you rolled eyes next, that would do 2 HP, crippling them. Then, if you finally rolled torso, the remaining 12 HP of damage would just all go to there.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hide
Finally... what about this?
It's not the rules-as-written. If you want to use it, you can, though I think it does make crippling rather too likely from large-area attacks, personally.
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Old 10-19-2018, 01:51 AM   #14
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
Yes. See "Large-Area Injury", p. B400: "Don’t modify large-area injury for hit location (that is, treat it as a torso hit) unless only one location is exposed."
That's not saying what you think it's saying.

It's saying "don't modify injury for hit location", so no reductions for exceeding a major wound or doing x1.5 damage for hitting the neck. It isn't saying "don't do damage to limbs or eyes or etc".

Especially since it calls out not hitting the face or eyes if they are "turned away", that immersive Large Area Injury only injures the body parts that are immersed, and it explicitly calls out reducing damage in excess of a major wound if only a limb or sub-limb is hit. All that means "deal damage to all affected parts".


You have to take the paragraphs as a whole and not just pay attention to one portion of a single line.




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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Large area injury does not mean ignoring armor, at all. In Low Tech conditions it usually is resisted by half torso armor, though you can do better than that if you get your unprotected hit locations out of the line of fire.
That's not exactly accurate. It's (Torso DR + Lowest DR of Exposed Parts)/2.

And really it should be (Highest DR Exposed + Lowest DR Exposed)/2... but I'm not nitpicking this one.
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Old 10-19-2018, 01:58 AM   #15
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

Okay, I found a Krommquote that completely disagrees with me and the way I've been running Large Area Injury....

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
True large-area injury causes just one wound. It is by definition a wound to a large area – i.e., your whole body, with no hit-location effects. You use [(torso DR) + (lowest DR)]/2 as effective DR against the damage, but this rule does not imply that either your torso or the area with lowest DR is specifically affected. The DR formula is simply a way to approximate the fact that when receiving generalized, whole-body damage, your torso is the biggest area exposed but small holes elsewhere are an issue, too. In short, if you're exposed to an acid bath, explosion, fire, etc., you'll never end up with a crippled limb, just fewer HP all over.

When an attack that's capable of causing large-area injury is concentrated on one body part, it is no longer a true large-area injury attack. What the rules are saying there is that when an attack that would otherwise cause large-area injury is limited to a small area, you don't use the rules for large-area injury any more. You use the rules for injuring the small area.

Yes, this does mean that total immersion in acid or fire can't cripple a body part while immersion of just one part cripple it, which some people find illogical. If you dislike that outcome, you'll need to invent house rules. My suggestion is that you divide the injury into chunks capable of causing a major torso wound (6 HP for a man with 10-11 HP, 7 HP for a man with 12-13 HP, and so on), and roll a hit location for each chunk. That's a lot of work, which is why the rules don't specify that you should do this.
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Old 10-19-2018, 02:29 AM   #16
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

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Originally Posted by evileeyore View Post
That's not exactly accurate. It's (Torso DR + Lowest DR of Exposed Parts)/2.
If it was exactly accurate, I wouldn't have said "usually".
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Old 10-19-2018, 06:45 AM   #17
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

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I have 10 hit points (and no armor), and then a dragon deals 30 points of damage to me with its breath of fire (cone)... Let's suppose I survive, what happens next?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
By the RAW, you take 10 damage, but suffer none of the crippling effects. This is a simplification, yes. If you want a more complicated but possibly more realistic option, use random hit locations to see how the damage gets distributed instead, as I suggested.
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Originally Posted by Hide View Post
Really? Only 10 hit points of damage and no crippling at all? That makes the attack much less threatening than I thought...
I don’t think "take 10 damage" is correct Kelly Pedersen; I think you take the whole 30. (Forum, please correct me if I'm wrong.) By RAW, I believe the following would happen:
  1. Change your current HP from 10 --> -20. You took 30 points of injury (because you have no armor DR to subtract from the basic damage (B378) and there are no wounding modifiers (B379)).
  2. Make two HT rolls to avoid death (B419). You're rolling one for -1xHP and another for -2xHP. If you survive and are not Mortally Wounded (B423), continue to #3.
  3. Make a HT roll to avoid knockdown and stunning (B420).
  4. At the beginning of your next turn, roll against HT-2 to remain conscious (assuming you choose anything but the Do Nothing maneuver and don't make any active defenses). Since you're at -2xHP, your HT rolls to stay conscious have a -2 penalty. If you remain conscious, continue to #5.
  5. Choose your maneuver, but be aware of the following:
    • Depending on the results of your knockdown and stunning roll, you may be stunned (B420) or unconscious (423).
    • You have a -4 shock penalty to your DX- and IQ-based skills (defenses are not penalized) for this turn only. (B419)
    • Your Basic Speed and Move is halved (round up), because you're below ⅓ HP. (B380, B419)
    • You Dodge is halved (round up), because you're below ⅓ HP. (B380, B419)

Last edited by Captain Joy; 10-19-2018 at 06:51 AM. Reason: Added Hide's 2nd quote to the chain.
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Old 10-19-2018, 07:28 AM   #18
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

With the DR-averaging, if every part of you is covered in 100 DR except 1 hand, you would have an effective DR of 50, and take 50 damage if hit with a 100 damage attack... even though normally the amount of injury you could suffer due to a hand wound would be capped at the amount needed to cripple it?

Instead of rolling for chunks, maybe we could just directly apply a % of damage (rounded down) to all hit locations based on the % odds of rolling them on the random hit location table?

Allowing a successful unarmed parry to represent "I'm putting my hand overtop a small bodypart" (eye, nose, mouse, ear) so it takes damage intended for that location doesn't seem unreasonable. At -1 if you've lost a hand and can only use your arm as cover, and another -1 if you're trying to cover 2 small parts. Most weapons are thinner than arms/hands and wouldn't be very good cover, and if you tried this without dropping them there should be risk of stabbing yourself in the head.

I think you're allowed to do a facing change as part of a retreat, so if you do a retreating defense against a Cone (this can sometimes reduce damage if it's limited to do less depending on distance from attacker, so it's a good idea even if you can't get entirely out of range) you could say you're turning away from the attacker, preventing the mouth/nose/eyes from facing them. I think the ears would still get hit though since they're on the side of the head, and someone with 360 degree vision could also get blinded since they might have eyes on the sides/back of head. Whether or not you turn in time should depend on the roll though. You don't get that step at all if you don't actually make your roll against a grapple, for example, it keeps you in the original hex.
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Old 10-19-2018, 07:50 AM   #19
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

If you want detailed large-area damage, you could distribute the total damage among all affected locations (either equally, which is simple, or in proportion to their hit modifiers, if you like using your calculator at the table). That still does the same amount of HP, but means the damage to any one hit location will be low enough that you're unlikely to cripple that location. So, it's mostly compatible with the RAW method of just not worrying about crippling. Only truly large amounts of damage will manage to cripple exposed hit locations -- and that at the point where the target is likely not to survive anyway.
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Old 10-19-2018, 08:32 AM   #20
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Default Re: Dodging the dragon's breath

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I don’t think "take 10 damage" is correct Kelly Pedersen; I think you take the whole 30.
Yeah, you're right - I misread the question originally.
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