Traps and crippling

Dalin · 05-20-2018, 10:25 AM

Scenario: A character with 16 basic HP sets off a trap that has four blades striking his hand for 1d cutting damage each. He wears DR 1 gloves.

Following the crippling rules on Exploits, p. 61, the minimum injury to cripple his hand from a single wound is 6 (16/3, rounding down). Taking into account his DR 1 and the 1.5 wounding modifier for cutting, he'll receive a crippling injury on a roll of 5 or 6 for any one of the four blades (5-1 = 4x1.5 = 6). Indeed, since that is the maximum damage that he could take from an attack, a roll of six wouldn't be any worse than a roll of 5.

As it turned out, I rolled 4, 4, 4, and 3, doing a total of 15 points of injury after adjusting for DR and cutting. His hand was not crippled, but because he was already reeling from prior injuries, this put him near collapse (at -11 HP). No single blade did more than HP/2, so none of these counted as a major wound.

Is this correct by RAW? This is how we ran it, and it went fine, but it did feel a bit strange that he could lose so many HP from his hand.

If the first injury had crippled the hand, would the following blades have continued to cause additional injury? I assume yes. (The injury cutoff is just for single attacks that exceed the minimum crippling threshold.)

Would it be reasonable to consider all four blades as a single attack? If I were to run the scenario again, I might do this but count the DR for each, making it 4d-4. This would increase the odds of crippling (≈90% chance of rolling 10 or more basic damage), and give an appreciable chance for dismemberment (≈34% chance of rolling 16 or more basic damage). On the flip side, the trap would do no more than 6 injury total.

05-20-2018, 10:25 AM	#1
Dalin Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Saint Paul, MN	Traps and crippling Scenario: A character with 16 basic HP sets off a trap that has four blades striking his hand for 1d cutting damage each. He wears DR 1 gloves. Following the crippling rules on *Exploits*, p. 61, the minimum injury to cripple his hand from a single wound is 6 (16/3, rounding down). Taking into account his DR 1 and the 1.5 wounding modifier for cutting, he'll receive a crippling injury on a roll of 5 or 6 for any one of the four blades (5-1 = 4x1.5 = 6). Indeed, since that is the maximum damage that he could take from an attack, a roll of six wouldn't be any worse than a roll of 5. As it turned out, I rolled 4, 4, 4, and 3, doing a total of 15 points of injury after adjusting for DR and cutting. His hand was not crippled, but because he was already reeling from prior injuries, this put him near collapse (at -11 HP). No single blade did more than HP/2, so none of these counted as a major wound. Is this correct by RAW? This is how we ran it, and it went fine, but it did feel a bit strange that he could lose so many HP from his hand. If the first injury had crippled the hand, would the following blades have continued to cause additional injury? I assume yes. (The injury cutoff is just for single attacks that exceed the minimum crippling threshold.) Would it be reasonable to consider all four blades as a single attack? If I were to run the scenario again, I might do this but count the DR for each, making it 4d-4. This would increase the odds of crippling (≈90% chance of rolling 10 or more basic damage), and give an appreciable chance for dismemberment (≈34% chance of rolling 16 or more basic damage). On the flip side, the trap would do no more than 6 injury total.