Half Move and Dodge at 1/3 HP: Realism of sudden drop?

[JCurwen3]

You normally suffer half Move and Dodge at 1/3 HP.

At just 1 HP above that, you're at full Move and Dodge. Is that realistic?

I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm wondering if there really is some realistic basis to the sudden drop once one reaches a certain "critical threshold" of injury. There might be.

On the other hand, I strongly suspect that not having the loss of Move and Dodge be gradual and just suddenly reach half at 1/3 HP is a game playability thing. If one was working with a spreadsheet or computer-assisted injury tracker, would it represent injury more realistically if there was a gradual loss (which could be computed via linear interpolation between full HP = full Move / Dodge and 1/3 HP = half Move / Dodge)?

[Tyneras]

It's a game play thing. Injury is massively complicated, even a tiny amount of detail can cause bookkeeping to explode. It's kind of like how ranged weapons do full damage to X, and half damage to Y, and no damage after that. You could make a computer program to calculate it exactly, but most people play RPGs with just their brain, dice and paper. The half dodge and move penalty is a big improvement over other systems where you are perfectly fine until you suddenly drop dead.

[vierasmarius]

You may be interested in the Partial Injuries rules in Martial Arts (pg 136). In short, each hit location gets three or four "thresholds" of injury, instead of the binary cutoffs presented in Basic (ie Crippled for limbs, Below 1/3 HP for general injury).

[Gef]

I'm with Tyneras. I never supposed it to be realistic, just a simplification for playability, although I have heard that the way the body copes with stress is somehat cliff-like: There's a point up to which it can cope, and a point beyond which it cannot, with a fairly narrow range in between.

GEF

[Bruno]

There's also the problem that more detail is not more realistic - some things are complex enough that a drastic simplification is just as inaccurate as having a ten or a hundred levels of penalty.

When you're discussing generic hitpoint loss which isn't assigned to any specific location, getting tooooo detailed about the consequences of loosing those generic hitpoints starts stumbling into "but I lost all those HPs from attacks to my fingers[1] - why am I limping again?"

[1] Bad choice of traps to stick your hands into? Attack of an angry woodpecker doing 8 attacks of 1 HP each? Who knows... but mysteriously your fingers aren't crippled because it was 1 Hp at a time.

[Tyneras]

Next game my group has (3 of my players wont be back till February) I was going to try an experiment in HP tracking. Torso, Head, Vitals, Brain and Blood (bleeding) all use the normal HP rules, but limbs keep and track their own HP, so losing 20 HP from your hands just means you lose you hand and start bleeding. Theoretically it should work out, but I'll have to see it in play. Maybe we should run that new adventure that came out, Mirror of the Fire Demon, for the test.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

You normally suffer half Move and Dodge at 1/3 HP.

At just 1 HP above that, you're at full Move and Dodge. Is that realistic?

I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm wondering if there really is some realistic basis to the sudden drop once one reaches a certain "critical threshold" of injury. There might be.

On the other hand, I strongly suspect that not having the loss of Move and Dodge be gradual and just suddenly reach half at 1/3 HP is a game playability thing. If one was working with a spreadsheet or computer-assisted injury tracker, would it represent injury more realistically if there was a gradual loss (which could be computed via linear interpolation between full HP = full Move / Dodge and 1/3 HP = half Move / Dodge)?

Some simplification is required, but if you think it's too simple, you can add an intermediate range so that from 2/5 to 1/4 HP you're at 2/3 Move and Dodge, and below that you're at 1/2 Move and Dodge.

Same with 1/2 Damage Range. Change that to a Range interval where you're at 2/3 Damage, and beyond that you're at 1/3 Damage.

But yes, gradual changes cannot reasonably be done, at least not for HP damage affecting mobility. Range affecting damage can, after a fashion, if you derive damage from hit quality, as happens in some other RPG systems.