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[d20 Modern] A Better Injury System?
Mojo_Jojo
We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered User regular
We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered User regular
In my eyes D&D has a few major problems and has kept most of them through the years up into the latest generation. Luckily, a fair amount of these problems were dropped when the designers took D&D 3.5 and made d20 modern out of it. Sadly, the same abstract injury system remained.
For a project, I'm looking for something which will mesh with d20 Modern (and to a lesser extent the few bits and pieces presented in d20 past) to create a rather more realistic injury system.
Guns kill people, wounds take a long time to heal and people aren't just a homogenous mass but have distinct body parts. I really don't like the idea of men being able to soak up bullets with no negative effects until they die.
Also, this is for a PBP so extra book keeping doesn't matter (as it doesn't slow the game down at all).
Idea 1: Better Criticals
The obvious method is to keep things pretty much as they are but change criticals from simply a method of dealing extra damage to a method of dealing an injury with some kind of ingame effect. Torn Asunder is, I gather, a sourcebook aimed at D&D which does just this.
It's not perfect by any means, but it might be a good compromise between over realistic constant player deaths and the standard abstracted method.
It would, however, involve me picking up another sourcebook or attemtping to match it with my own ingenuity (a project I may not actually have time for).
Idea 2: Locational HP and Progressive injuries
The idea which I favour, perhaps foolishly, is to divide the hp of a character between the various body parts and track them independently (so a human would have say head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg) each with their own HP.
Damage strikes a randomly determined location (based on size) or would be targeted at a single location (with a penalty based on the size of the location).
We have five levels of health for each body part:
Green
Amber
Red
Useless
Destroyed
Green being from full to 3/4 HP (a few scrapes)
Amber from 3/4 to 1/4 (significant damage)
Red 0 to 1/4 (heavy damage)
Useless being 0 to -10
Destroyed being anything below -10
Green would have no penalty, amber a slightly penalty (say a -4 to all checks involving that part of the body), red a heavy penalty (-8 to all checks), useless makes that body part unusable and destroyed would signal the body part has been destroyed (which would mean death in the case of head or torso and make the part unusable in the case of the rest).
Anything except green would also gradually get worse if not treated. So that a bullet lodged in an arm could result in the loss of the arm unless it was treated in a reasonable timeframe). Treatment would also restore HP but I'd like some kind of lasting effects too so that you need to let the body heal to move between damage categories (treatment may stop a wound bleeding and get it stitched up but it'll be a day or two before the leg can be used easily).
This "bleed" damage would also carry over if it reduced a bodypart to destroyed. So that a serious arm wound could eventually cost somebody their life (through first reducing the arm to below -10 and then sapping torso hp).
As for criticals I'm thinking that they'd have a chance for a location-based effect (unconsciousness for the head, dropping whatever is carried for an arm, maybe knockdown for the torso or legs). A fortitude roll seems the best bet to resist this with the DC being some combination of the damage and crit multiplier (extra critical damage likely having been done away with).
The key problem being that as PCs level they just still gain more hp to the point where they can take a shotgun blast in the face with no harmful effects. This poses a rather large problem and it is one I can't see a solution for.
***
So, the point of this ramble. Has anybody had any experience with improving the injury system of the d20 system with particular regard to firearms? Or if not, any thoughts on either of my two ideas to improve it?
For a project, I'm looking for something which will mesh with d20 Modern (and to a lesser extent the few bits and pieces presented in d20 past) to create a rather more realistic injury system.
Guns kill people, wounds take a long time to heal and people aren't just a homogenous mass but have distinct body parts. I really don't like the idea of men being able to soak up bullets with no negative effects until they die.
Also, this is for a PBP so extra book keeping doesn't matter (as it doesn't slow the game down at all).
Idea 1: Better Criticals
The obvious method is to keep things pretty much as they are but change criticals from simply a method of dealing extra damage to a method of dealing an injury with some kind of ingame effect. Torn Asunder is, I gather, a sourcebook aimed at D&D which does just this.
It's not perfect by any means, but it might be a good compromise between over realistic constant player deaths and the standard abstracted method.
It would, however, involve me picking up another sourcebook or attemtping to match it with my own ingenuity (a project I may not actually have time for).
Idea 2: Locational HP and Progressive injuries
The idea which I favour, perhaps foolishly, is to divide the hp of a character between the various body parts and track them independently (so a human would have say head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg) each with their own HP.
Damage strikes a randomly determined location (based on size) or would be targeted at a single location (with a penalty based on the size of the location).
We have five levels of health for each body part:
Green
Amber
Red
Useless
Destroyed
Green being from full to 3/4 HP (a few scrapes)
Amber from 3/4 to 1/4 (significant damage)
Red 0 to 1/4 (heavy damage)
Useless being 0 to -10
Destroyed being anything below -10
Green would have no penalty, amber a slightly penalty (say a -4 to all checks involving that part of the body), red a heavy penalty (-8 to all checks), useless makes that body part unusable and destroyed would signal the body part has been destroyed (which would mean death in the case of head or torso and make the part unusable in the case of the rest).
Anything except green would also gradually get worse if not treated. So that a bullet lodged in an arm could result in the loss of the arm unless it was treated in a reasonable timeframe). Treatment would also restore HP but I'd like some kind of lasting effects too so that you need to let the body heal to move between damage categories (treatment may stop a wound bleeding and get it stitched up but it'll be a day or two before the leg can be used easily).
This "bleed" damage would also carry over if it reduced a bodypart to destroyed. So that a serious arm wound could eventually cost somebody their life (through first reducing the arm to below -10 and then sapping torso hp).
As for criticals I'm thinking that they'd have a chance for a location-based effect (unconsciousness for the head, dropping whatever is carried for an arm, maybe knockdown for the torso or legs). A fortitude roll seems the best bet to resist this with the DC being some combination of the damage and crit multiplier (extra critical damage likely having been done away with).
The key problem being that as PCs level they just still gain more hp to the point where they can take a shotgun blast in the face with no harmful effects. This poses a rather large problem and it is one I can't see a solution for.
***
So, the point of this ramble. Has anybody had any experience with improving the injury system of the d20 system with particular regard to firearms? Or if not, any thoughts on either of my two ideas to improve it?
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Mojo_Jojo on
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I personally think much the same about DnD's homogeneous clay lump-people HP distribution, but locational damage introduces a whole extra bunch of questions most players don't want to answer, not just the ones about arms becoming useless in the middle of a fight.
If you want to integrate this better into DnD, you probably want to go with the "advanced critical" route, which I'm pretty sure someone somewhere is likely to have tried before.
The full locational damage system sounds more like an entirely new d20 based game then an add-on for DnD, sorry.
Other than that, I like it a lot, but convincing people to use it in Dnd may be more trouble than it's worth. In fact, psychologically it would be easier to introduce as a new game...
I think, though, that one of the biggest problems you are going to have with any of these is converting the current weapons to use the new system and more importantly, doing it consistently so that new weapons created for standard DnD can be converted over quickly and easily, so that players don't decide to switch back so they can use their new gnome sized Dire Urgrosh that they found in a source-book, but which isn't covered by your system...
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But d20 really isn't it. Everything is abstracted, so once you start de-abstracting one portion, you kind of have to start to reworking everything else from the ground up, too.
And I mean, if you want shotgun blasts to 1-shot your PCs, just use an entirely different system, something like the Storyteller system.
Picture this: Level 1 strong hero with 12 HP. Not too insane right? Well, you split those hitpoints up, and pretty much several spots are going to have 1 or 2 hp. Any wound to a first level character is going to uselessify a limb. A goblin's stab is probably going to gimp someone so they can't keep going.
Not only that, but like you said: At high levels, the HP will be enough that it wouldn't have made anything more realistic, except if I KEEP shooting the head, I'll eventually mess it up.
As for balancing those DCs, I suppose it's possible, but it's quite likely you'll end up with points where the DC is monsterous, or way too easy. If you look at the Star Wars d20 critical effect system, they're all like DC 14, so they're not impossible to resist at say...level 3. But when you hit level 15, they're nigh impossible to fail (which, as for losing limbs, might be a good thing. A crit and a nat one needed to get your arm chopped off? Sounds good, shouldn't be too common less it be played out).
Still, I think there could be ways to revamp everything better.
EDIT: The least of which isn't Vitality/Wounds. It's a quick and easy fix, even if it's still not perfect.
No, no, it's Star Wars so it should be way more common. The films would lead me to believe that getting an arm chopped off and/or falling to your death are among the most commonly-occurring phenomena in the Star Wars universe.
That only happens like three times. We played it out with first levels and the party had to call it quits after losing a net total of three limbs in the first hour :P It was insane.
Luke lost a hand, Tyrannus lost two, Darth Vader lost like 3 altogether plus his legs. It'd be pretty common when the weapon of choice is a sword designed for slicing, and at least it's in a setting where limb replacement is easy.
That, and the fact that many of the gun damage scores can easily go into the double-digits.
I suppose. But it really puts an end to that adventure, you know?