Making combat less lethal.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

It seems to me that widening the gap between unconsciousness and death has some dramatic effects on the game. Whether these are good changes or bad changes might depend on the campaign.

1. The chance of an individual PC being killed goes down, for a given strength of opponent. If strength of opponent is increased to keep PCs in danger then we're likely to see fewer individual PC deaths and more TPKs.
2. The risk of killing someone you shouldn't goes down. PCs can afford to shoot first and ask questions later more, because they know if the victim turns out to be someone they didn't want to kill then they can be dragged back from the edge of death a lot easier.
3. Taking a prisoner is much easier. No need for, "Pull your punches, we need one alive!" Instead just stab them into unconsciousness and save as many as required.
4. After a party victory there will be lots of bad guys lying around who can be saved if the party wants to save them. The party will have to choose between keeping them prisoner (which in many campaigns will be impractical), releasing them (which may lead to catastrophe when they tell the army of darkness where you are) and killing them (which may be distasteful to players and/or incompatible with player codes of honour).
5. Assassination becomes a more difficult and specialised mission.

There are probably other effects. But it seems to me the posts in this thread have mostly focused on the first point, and not thought much about the others. And those others matter.

David, at least as far as my own comments on this are concerned (particularly in Post 6, http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...26&postcount=6) something got lost in translation.

My suggestions have all been about making the causes of unconscious easier to come by without reducing the chance of death. I've stuck to death starts at ST 0 for all normal wounds. What I am in favor of is a few softer forms of damage (hit with a light club, smacked with a broken chair, a punch in the nose, a knee to the groin) counting more like "fatigue", and only the hits tallied for "fatigue" being excluded from counting directly towards death.

Indirectly of course these "fatigue" or "non-lethal" hits still count. An unconscious figure is the easiest figure to kill in TFT. As the rules stand, it's almost impossible to knock out an opponent without killing them even when you might not want to. My advocacy if only for more choice in the matter. If you do still want them dead, finishing them off while unconscious is technically easy. Knocked out is a lot like being knocked down -- mortality goes way up in this game, not down, when figures are off their feet.

If an assassin's blow reduces a target's ST from 10 to 0, the target is dead, period, and that doesn't change. My idea is that if the target had 6 hits of fatigue first, if should still take 10 hits to kill then, not 4. The target will still be down and helpless after only 4 hits, and then it's up to the assassin to do something about that.