House Rules for Hit Location

[Old Man]

Likewise' date=' for location 13, a hit to the buttocks is not going to be as damaging as a hit to the crotch:[/quote']

 

Location 13 isn't really the crotch. Location 13 is Vitals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Have you seen a hit location chart for a palindromedary?

 

 

 

The actual meaning of 'vitals' clearly varies depending on which Hero book and section you're looking it. It's been explicitly defined as vital organs, i.e. the heart, but the sectional armor charts have pretty much always treated 13 as the groinal region. Hence the uselessness of vests for defending vitals. It doesn't help that location 13 on the chart is right between abdomen and thighs, making that interpretation all but foregone with players.

 

This discrepancy is actually kind of annoying in the sense that a groin wound, while surely causing plenty of stun and bleeding, just would not be an x2 body hit.

[Greywind]

Likewise' date=' for location 13, a hit to the buttocks is not going to be as damaging as a hit to the crotch:[/quote']

 

Location 13 isn't really the crotch. Location 13 is Vitals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Have you seen a hit location chart for a palindromedary?

 

 

 

Or it's a shot, that for one reason or another, manages to bypass armor, which has been known to happen in reality.

[IndianaJoe3]

Likewise' date=' for location 13, a hit to the buttocks is not going to be as damaging as a hit to the crotch:[/quote']

 

Location 13 isn't really the crotch. Location 13 is Vitals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Have you seen a hit location chart for a palindromedary?

 

 

 

I think that the x2 BODY multiplier is because the femoral arteries are right there.

[Old Man]

Likewise' date=' for location 13, a hit to the buttocks is not going to be as damaging as a hit to the crotch:[/quote']

 

Location 13 isn't really the crotch. Location 13 is Vitals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Have you seen a hit location chart for a palindromedary?

 

 

 

@Greywind: I could see that, but mechanically it seems like some kind of activation roll would make more sense than throwing in an arbitrary line in the hit location table. I could see bypassing a breastplate, for example, but a chain hauberk not so much. Weapon type matters too, of course; I've often been jealous of Gurps' differentiation between cutting, piercing, and impact damage. HERO tries to handle that in the weapon tables but I've hated every table since FH1.

 

@Indy3: Likewise, you'd think that would be better handled under the bleeding rules. Of course, location 4 doesn't come with additional bleeding, and location 3 doesn't come with a flash attack. Suddenly it seems as though we'd be better off with a hit location table that had columns for location, stunx, bodyx, bleeding dice, and tertiary effects...

[mhd]

Likewise' date=' for location 13, a hit to the buttocks is not going to be as damaging as a hit to the crotch:[/quote']

 

Location 13 isn't really the crotch. Location 13 is Vitals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Have you seen a hit location chart for a palindromedary?

 

 

 

If I remember correctly, GURPS Vitals isn't available via random roll. You could easily do the same for HERO. With this alternative system, you might even introduce it twice, representing Heart & Kidneys, and thus get different deviating locations on a near-miss.

[etherio]

Hey...if you gotta necropost, I think this one is worth it ;^)

[mhd]

I'm this close to adopting the table, the only thing stopping me currently is the Vitals hit location. As the basic table is all about positional deviation, this pretty much equates Vitals with Groin. And I would say that we do have "vital" organs outside of that region, unless we're playing an adolescent Toon variant.

 

I've never been quite happy with them even in the default version, so that was on my todo-list anyway, now I just need a good way to integrate that with this table.

 

My current favorite solution would be simply removing the Vitals location, replacing it with "Groin". BODYx 1, nSTUN 1.5/1 (m/f). A vital shot could be aimed at several locations, mostly Breast, Ribs, Stomach. It doesn't ever come up randomly, but is either just a narrative result of a very high damage roll or simply the character dying from the attack, or is simulated by an maneuver with an intrinsically high damage (+4DC, usually). Of course this is more likely to apply to a +4DC fencing thrust than a +4DC jump kick. To make this viable for people without martial arts or high CSLs, the "Offensive Haymaker" rule can be used. Note that the usual application of that (haymaker to the chest) has the same penalty as a shot to the vitals would have (-3 location, -5 OCV).

 

I would have liked some increased chance of hitting the base location with a missed shot -- so a normal chest hit instead of a +4DC vital hit -- but that would just make the offensive haymaker better than the normal one.

 

Doing it the haymaker/maneuver way would also serve as a good incentive to use the +/- DC method of modifying damage instead of multipliers, as suggested in this thread.