Help a noobie understand critical hits

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

But frankly. All that you described can just be done by assigning different roll values to the weapon as appropriate and then add a dr modifier. You don't need to have a table for your players to look up. They look at their character sheet and it tells them exactly how much damage their weapon does! That's good gameplay right there.

If your game focuses mostly on guns, and you're not letting players do fancy stuff like shoot enemies in the head or cut off arms and legs, you CAN just treat basic damage (what you roll after you hit) and injury (how many HP are lost) as the same thing, after subtracting DR.

If you do start getting into that fancy stuff, or run a game that's more medieval instead of gun-based, then those wounding multipliers start getting interesting. E.g. if you shoot a zombie in the torso and roll 5 damage, it's piercing damage, so because it's a zombie (Injury Tolerance: Unliving) it takes only 1/5 of that as injury. It loses 1 HP where a human would lose 5 HP. But if you shoot it in the head, which is harder, it has an extra +2 DR so there's only 3 points of penetrating damage after DR. But there's a x4 wounding modifier instead of x1/5 so it takes 12 points of injury instead of only 1!

The upshot is that those various wounding modifiers exist to reward players for roleplaying intelligently against various kinds of foes. If you always did the same injury with a weapon no matter who you hit and where, there wouldn't be a reason to headshot zombies or to cut the arms off a living statue instead of stabbing it in the "heart".

They exist to give players more interesting choices during combat.

P.S. There are also some advanced rules like knockback which are based on basic damage (before DR) and not on final injury, but I'm assuming that you're not using those or you wouldn't be asking.

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

No, it cannot.

2D+1 Pi- penetrates as much armor as 2D+1 Pi+, but after penetrating in causes lesser wounds.

Unless it's a headshot! Then they both use x4. Or vitals shot, like aiming for the heart, where they both use x3.

I know you know this but saying so for OP's sake.