Making combat less lethal.

[pzmcgwire]

What if knockdown (8+damage) and the DX -2 penalty (5+ damage) applied even if stopped by armor?

A corollary to this could be that half the damage or all of the damage stopped by armor become fatigue hits?

Maybe this should apply just to NPCs to increase the survivability of PCs?

[hcobb]

Between healing potions and Physickering, getting knocked down to adjST in the negative single digits is just a time out.

This then becomes an interesting technical challenge to the players to win with one down.

[Shostak]

Is less-lethal combat desirable? From my perspective, TFT’s lethality is a feature, not a bug.

A RAW approach to increasing combat survivability is to have losing-but-surviving be a more viable possible outcome. Characters who are badly wounded but still able to fight might want to throw down their weapons if they want to survive.

But, if you really want to reduce lethality with house rules, I’d look at a wider buffer zone of unconsciousness—say from 0ST to -5ST.

[pzmcgwire]

This makes it easier for PCs to go through a large number of opponents in a cinematic manner and not necessarily having to kill everyone in the process.

[hcobb]

Just use my mook rules as needed:

https://www.hcobb.com/tft/new_spells.html#Mooks

[Steve Plambeck]

I find many reasons to prefer a wide buffer zone between death and unconsciousness, primarily to broaden the chances for role-playing. (It can be a more intersting story to be taken prisoner rather than simply killed.) While the lethality of TFT is critical to its character, making it easier to incapacitate both NPCs and PCs doesn't really have to compromise that. For example, a prisoner can always be killed later. You can usually finish off an unconscious adversary, and if you can't then there's usually an interesting reason for that.

While I've worked out how to do that for another system, it easily translates into what could be house rules for TFT.

(1) There are two kinds of hits, labeled Lethal and Non-lethal, and they need to be tallied separately. Sharp and pointy weapon damage obviously counts as Lethal hits. Fatigue, blunt damage, and bare-handed damage count as Non-lethal hits. They'd each still recover naturally at the rates for regular injury and fatigue set in TFT: Lethal hits 1 per 2 days and Non-lethal hits 1 per 15 minutes.

(2) Death only occurs when Lethal hits equals or exceeds ST -- Non-lethal hits never count towards death.

(3) But Unconsciousness occurs whenever the total of Lethal and Non-lethal hits equals or exceeds ST.

Under these rules, death can never occur due to Non-lethal hits alone. A ST 10 figure with 12 Non-lethal hits and 9 Lethal hits is still alive, but unconscious. If left alone, they'll regain consciousness in 3 hours when the Non-lethal hits wear off but they'll still have the 9 Lethal hits and be close to death until healing occurs by any of the usual means -- they could wake up on a now quiet battlefield wondering which side won. If the same figure had the same 12 Non-lethal hits but zero Lethal hits, they'd regain consciousness in only 45 minutes because their total net ST at that point would then be back to 9.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by pzmcgwire

This makes it easier for PCs to go through a large number of opponents in a cinematic manner and not necessarily having to kill everyone in the process.

It means parties will tend to take a lot of prisoners. They'll then have to decide what to do with those prisoners. Depending on what sort of game it is the PCs may end up more or less forced to slaughter helpless prisoners. It's not always going to be a problem, but it is sometimes.

[Drakenbow]

Originally Posted by pzmcgwire

What if knockdown (8+damage) and the DX -2 penalty (5+ damage) applied even if stopped by armor?

A corollary to this could be that half the damage or all of the damage stopped by armor become fatigue hits?

Maybe this should apply just to NPCs to increase the survivability of PCs?

I'm a little late on this discussion, but this is an interesting idea. Perhaps a hit of 8+ points of damage induces a save like the Trip spell.

As someone else suggested in this thread, make some damage non-lethal. I've used this idea in some groups (I moved around a lot). My thought was however for not all blunt damage, but for sapping, bare handed, kicks, magical punches (magic fist and hammer touch), or like. The damage was halved with a portion being lethal and the other portion non-lethal. The character would be knocked unconscious when the Lethal + Non-Lethal was more than the character's ST. Death only with Lethal being more than ST (or whatever House Rule which allows for going negative). As someone said, it is possible to kill by punching.

It allows for story content of someone who is left for dead on a battlefield. It also allows for the enemy to take prisoners of the characters only to have the characters negotiate with their captors or make a daring escape.

[David Bofinger]

I think if you want some characters (e.g. PCs) to more often survive being made unconscious then give those characters a talent which lets them do that. e.g. by allowing them to add 1d6 ST some time after being injured up to a maximum of ST 1.

Most of the time, in most campaigns, most GMs will be happy enough for average grunt enemies to die when made unconscious, unless specifically attacked with the intent of a less than lethal result. If so, don't give the talent to everyone.

You could even say to players that they can have the talent but it counts as, say, one attribute point. So they can choose between carrying the insurance the GM sells or trusting to their own skills and fortune.

Another class of character you might give the talent to is campaign-level influential NPCs who the GM would prefer did not die, because replacing them in his plots would mean a lot of work and perhaps stories would suffer. The king who rules the city the party lives in might be such a character. Giving them the talent is a compromise between letting them die and railroading their survival.

Whether a talent like this should exist depends heavily on the kind of campaign and the GM's style. In the style of play imagined by RAW it probably doesn't make sense.

[pzmcgwire]

Good discussion here. I think increasing the range for unconsciousness is good. The original Melee rules of unconsciousness occurring only at ST1 was much too narrow, though surprisingly in practice how often it happens.

My original proposal of knockdown and DX penalties for hits even if stopped by armor was to make things more cinematic.

The examples that prompted this for me are big hurly burly brawls such as in the recent D&D movie where the barbarian plows through a platoon of armored guards, not killing many that I surmise, but definitely reducing most of them hors de combat.

After winning a battle, combatants are often rushed and don't have time or inclination to finish off unconscious foes. You loot the bodies then move on. If you're in a dungeon, you're moving toward the objective since likely the noise of battle probably is alerting the denizens much more quickly than unconscious foes waking up to sound the alarm.

The issue with TFT is the need to rest for spellcasters to recover strength which then makes it more likely for a PC party to hang around and investigate fallen foes further.

Just like with the ambient powerstone recharging rules, perhaps there should be an ambient fatigue recovery rule that fatigue recovers at 1 ST per 30 minutes of light exertion, such as walking, riding, hiding. As long as no combat is occurring, fatique just recovers.