Optional Rules

[Guest voodoo54]

Another question for anyone out there. I want to make my fantasy campaign lethal but not extremely lethal. So I was wondering what optional Combat rules and Damage rules do you use in your campaigns if any. Whats the best optional rules to use to make getting in a fight dangerous for the PCs but not too dangerous. I know this is a very open ended question but I'm speaking in general terms.

[azato]

Re: Optional Rules

 

Limit the armor.

 

 

Another question for anyone out there. I want to make my fantasy campaign lethal but not extremely lethal. So I was wondering what optional Combat rules and Damage rules do you use in your campaigns if any. Whats the best optional rules to use to make getting in a fight dangerous for the PCs but not too dangerous. I know this is a very open ended question but I'm speaking in general terms.

[CTaylor]

Re: Optional Rules

 

OK for a more gritty, dangerous world, use all the damage optional rules: use bleeding, impairing and disabling, and hit locations. This will usually make the game pretty dangerous as is. If you let people have more than 10 PD armor, you're going to have a hard time doing much damage to them, so make sure that kind of thing is temporary, heavily limited, or gets destroyed/taken away/etc on a regular basis.

[Markdoc]

Re: Optional Rules

 

My suggestion - use hit locations, but NOT impairment, disabling or bleeding. Then limit access to, or use of, heavy armour and heavy weapons in a "realistic" fashion by enforcing Long Term End loss and social aspects, so that players don't go shopping in plate armour with a two handed axe draped casually over their shoulder.

 

That means that fights can be lethal and people will often be injured quite severely, but that one-shot kills of healthy characters will be rare.

 

cheers, Mark

[CTaylor]

Re: Optional Rules

 

Yeah, use encumbrance and LTE rules, making people suffer for their bonus armor and heavy gear. I would agree with Mark's concept of not one-shotting PCs, but keep impairing and disabling wounds. Just ignore the "if you take this kind of wound you're dead" comments for the PCs, as they are heroes, and use it on NPCs. You disable the bad guy's head, he dies. You disable the PC's head, he's blind a while and suffers from headaches so bad his CV and perception rolls suffer. Unless cured.

 

Disabling and Impairing lets you impose believable and long-term penalties on PCs even if they've been healed with magic. If someone takes a bad enough hit to a location, you can heal the Body, but there are long-term effects (crippled, damaged nerves, bone bruise, or even a missing limb). That will take more potent magic or just time to heal up.

[Chris Goodwin]

Re: Optional Rules

 

If you want to make the game more lethal, make sure to give all of your NPCs and villains, even the mooks, all of their Recoveries when they're supposed to have them, including when they're unconscious. That will cause your players to kill opponents rather than leave them unconscious, because if they're dead they can't get up in three Phases plus a post-12 and beat on you some more.

[Markdoc]

Re: Optional Rules

 

isabling and Impairing lets you impose believable and long-term penalties on PCs even if they've been healed with magic. If someone takes a bad enough hit to a location' date=' you can heal the Body, but there are long-term effects (crippled, damaged nerves, bone bruise, or even a missing limb). That will take more potent magic or just time to heal up.[/quote']

 

The problem with that - we've tried it - is that while it sounds fine in theory, in practice, having PCs out of action for prolonged periods can actually be a pain to GM around (at least, it was for us). We actually ended up (in one game) having two+ PCs each, so that we could play one while the other recovered from a crippling wound. that was only feasible because the game was based in one city, so that PCs could be swapped on a regular basis.

 

I don't mind (in fact, I prefer) fights to have some long term effects. But now I do this simply by restricting access to healing - so it's merely loss of BOD not loss of function. I do this with a house rule.

 

House rule: a healer can only magically heal you up to their Max dice score - once that is reached, you can only receive extra healing, once you have naturally healed back the magical part. That means a healer with 3d6 healing can cure up to 18 points (9 BOD). But he can't heal you again until you naturally heal at least 1 BOD. At that point he can give you one more, topping you back up to his Max of 9. Essentially that means that magical healers can give you one big whack of healing and then they can double your healing rate (Heal one, get one free!) That lets them prevent someone dying of massive injuries the first time it happens, and nurse them back to health faster, but they can't power the party through a series of violent encounters by healing everyone up afterwards. If the character stops to rest up and the healer is on hand, then you can combine the resting, healing and magic bonuses, so it's not as punitive as it sounds - people can recover from near fatal injuries very rapidly, but it's still never a casual thing.

 

Like all my house rules, it's relatively simple to use: as GM, I simply need to keep track of two scores - current BOD and "magical healing". It's far simpler than the "per wound" suggestion and far less powerful.

 

cheers, Mark

[CTaylor]

Re: Optional Rules

 

I've never had much problem with PCs being out of action a long time because we primarily use those rules in military or fantasy campaigns (which either presume you'll be in the hospital a long time if you got mangled, or have lots of ways to heal). However, your campaign will dicate how you want to handle this.

[JohnTaber]

Re: Optional Rules

 

I used a trick in a sci-fi campaign based on Alien Legion that worked great. Raise the damage of weapons but give them all -1 to the Stun Multiple. The effect is more Body damage with less Stun. It works great. Deadly but not overly so.