Minimal Damage by Weapons or Spells

[Bill_in_IN]

Believe me. I get it. Sometimes, the house rules accummulate. Having played Classic TFT into the late-90s when the game had been out of print for ~15 years kind of pushed many of us into the situation of having lots of house rules. However, back then, I had to pause and ask myself, "Are we still playing TFT?"

Even with volumes of additional house rules that change what is written in ITL, sometimes drastically, it is still up to the GM and their players to judge if they are still playing TFT or a game strongly based upon it. My personal litmus test is the compatibility of PCs between games ran by GMs. Can you take characters at various levels of development from one game and place them into another AS IS without modification or exceptions? The closer a GM sticks with ITL RAW and the more PC affecting house rules that another GM employs, the less compatible the PCs from each game become.

This topic may be worthy of its own House Rules thread.

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

I think it might also be interesting if there was more to a 'hit' than just ST damage.

For example...

• Sha-ken hits that serve as a distraction (apply a temporary DX penalty)
• Club strike that leaves you dazed (temporary IQ penalty or loss of action)
• Something else that causes the target to stumble (temporary MA penalty)

Well, one way you can do this without affecting RAW is to list out what additional "more" you would like and then have the character ROLEPLAY it.

Joe gets hit with Sha-Ken. Roll damage. Next turn Joe's player says "huh, i guess Joe was distracted by those Sha-Ken. I don't need to, but I'm going to give Joe a -1DX penalty for it."

Sam gets hit by a club. Roll damage. Next turn Sam's player says "huh, even though its a generic damage, I'm going to say Joe got hit on the head and additionally is temporarily -1IQ and won't be able to use his Reverse Missile spell for a couple of turns.

Bill gets hit by a chair. Roll damage, which turns out to be Zero. Next turn Bill's player says "huh, even though there was no damage, I'm going to say that Bill wasn't ready for it and his move is 1 MA this turn as he stumbles forward, doing nothing else."

Even if you can't impose rules on others, you can impose them on yourself. I've done that sometimes to the detriment of my character because it felt appropriate and added to the story.

[Nils_Lindeberg]

I have a rule for fatigue damage from weapons (and unarmed).

When ever you hit and you do less than 1 damage after armor, you do 1 fatigue damage instead.

When you use Physicker you also heal an equal amount of fatigue (this also helps wizards.)

In combat you can take a rest action. You can only do this when you could actually do something to contribute, but choose not to. This is a limitation to stop milking fatigue from a fight you can't really do anything about or a fight that is already more or less won.

When you are out of fatigue, you go unconscious, and any extra fatigue damage you take will turn into real damage instead.

This way you can pummel a heavy-armored opponent to submission, and a knight might want to take a break from the battle now and then and rest or even have a physicker look him over and then back into the fray in the battlement or the defense line.

I also run with stun and knock-down damage being calculated before armor, since it is quite possible to knock a person off their feet before they get seriously injured. This also encourages the use of heavier weapons, instead of the standard DX race, and then expertise on top of that together with smaller weapons benefitting more from fine quality rules.