Hit Location equals K or N

[RDU Neil]

Ok... so this is just another brain spew based on a couple of threads I've been reading.

 

Where I'm coming from...

 

1) The concepts of Normal vs. Killing damage are a brilliant conceit, but don't really reflect anything "rea" very well. They support a supers convention quite well, and I love the concepts in general, but maybe there is a better way to apply them.

 

2) Hit locations currently simply do multiples of damage which is effective in a limited way... perhaps there is another way to look at how Hit Locations could be applied.

 

3) There are lots of issues with exactly how armor, defenses and attacks interact... especially as you scale down to heroic levels and more "realistic" (please note the quotes) levels.

 

4) This is purely an optional, Game Rule level way of utilizing Hit Location and/or armor for an appropriate game.

 

So... my premise is, what if Hit Locations determined the kind of damage dealt, rather than the attack being a static form.

 

So... an attack would be bought as a default Killing or Normal... but then you have Hit Locations that can change this as well as armor changing this.

 

Example: Baseball bat across the chest, back, thigh... Normal damage. Baseball bat upside the skull, in the throat, on the knee... Killing Damage. Just take the base Damage Classes of the attack, and translate them into the appropriate damage once Hit Location is determined. 6d6 Normal becomes 2d6 Killing, etc.

 

Example 2: Bullet vs. Head, shoulders, torso, etc., K damage as normal... but perhaps (and maybe not) arm, forearm, hand, foot damage considered normal damage. Remember, we are talking Heroic level, and the possiblity of a Body or so still be done is there. This would smooth the curve of damage, and allow characters to apply their normal defenses, and better reflect that it is hard to do really lethal damage by hitting such body parts unless the attack is big enough to do major chunks of tissue/bone damage.

 

(I do see flaws in this... I'm not saying it is perfect... just throwing out the idea to be bandied about.)

 

Example 3: Really, when it comes to translating K damage to Normal... that is where Armor comes in. Soft armor would do this, without adding a ton of extra defenses, simply turn K damage to Normal which then has some defense against it. (I've always felt that most light body armor is more of turning a characters normal PD in resistant PD, rather than stacking armor on top of it.) Hardened armor would do the same, but actually add more defense on top. Large enough DC in an attack could blow through the armor, returning it to Killing Damage.

 

Armor on certain Hit Locations will react differently. Soft armor on the skull doesn't work so well, etc.

 

I dunno... not a fully formed idea... but if there was a desire to better simulate weapon damage vs. human being, you tend to have to look at more than the force/mass/velocity/power of the attack. Usually it is more important to look at what is HIT first, then look at the nature of the attack to determine what it does. A bullet through a fleshy part might be bloody, but likely also more of a normal attack in terms of combat damage effect. A punch to a throat or temple could be considered a Killing Attack without the person having to buy the martial maneuver or power.

 

Again.. this is using Hero as a toolkit to build a different model of a game, but with familiar, understandable Hero concepts being used... just used differently.

[Chris Goodwin]

Re: Hit Location equals K or N

 

I dunno... not a fully formed idea... but if there was a desire to better simulate weapon damage vs. human being, you tend to have to look at more than the force/mass/velocity/power of the attack. Usually it is more important to look at what is HIT first, then look at the nature of the attack to determine what it does. A bullet through a fleshy part might be bloody, but likely also more of a normal attack in terms of combat damage effect. A punch to a throat or temple could be considered a Killing Attack without the person having to buy the martial maneuver or power.

 

I guess my question is this: what do the current rules not do that these rules do that would make the game more fun?

 

I mean, how much better do you want the rules to reflect "reality"? In the real world, there are so many random factors that go into bullets or fists hitting people that the real world generates results that we'd throw out in a game or in fiction as being "too unrealistic".

 

It seems to me that you're getting marginal improvements at best for the effort of learning almost a whole new system, to figure out which damage to apply when.

[boomer]

Re: Hit Location equals K or N

 

Actually the hit location tables cover this.....a bullet which does killing damage does less (I believe it's halved in the hand) than in the chest or vitals.....this already represents "winging" someone. A bat to the head is still going to do (I believe) 5X damage......and will most likely do enough body to actuall kill someone......also you would apply the disable/impairment rules to that hit for sure......good idea, but I think the rules have already taken this into account.......of course there's nothing to say you can't create your own House Rule for what you want to do.....God I love Hero System for that very reason....

[MitchellS]

Re: Hit Location equals K or N

 

I prefer the K/N rules in M&M myself. You can just choose to do lethal damage if you declare it. To me that better fits the idea of someone like Captain America really being able to kill someone if he chooses to cut-loose. If I were to play Hero again I think I'd allow that as a house rule in my game.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Hit Location equals K or N

 

I prefer the K/N rules in M&M myself. You can just choose to do lethal damage if you declare it. To me that better fits the idea of someone like Captain America really being able to kill someone if he chooses to cut-loose. If I were to play Hero again I think I'd allow that as a house rule in my game.

 

We have 'club weapon', so you can make a killing attack normal: clearly the designers never saw a reason to do the opposite, but it is a pretty easy concept.

 

Personally I have long ruled that, for a penalty, you can make killing attacks normal or normal attacks killing, but there IS a penalty - striking with the flat of the sword is simply harder than with the edge, as designed, etc. The penalty we apply is -2 to -4, depending on genre and weapon.

 

I think there is much to recommend the idea that strikes to particular body parts should be reflected as normal or killing independent of origin. Mind you that can get a bit complicated, and doesn't always follow: I personally think that there is not really enough in the way the killing attack mechanics work to differentiate them from normal attacks, or rather in the surrounding mechanics: a cut will almost always take longer to heal than a bruise, for instance. A broken bone will almost always take about 6 weeks to heal whether it is a single tibia or every bone in your arms and legs (assuming similar sorts of fractures). Some attacks which could and, perhaps, should be quickly fatal have very little lasting effect, others can take forever to heal (for example you cut off the blood supply tot he brain and someone will rapidly die, but if they get the blood going again quickly, recovery is nigh instant. - were they taking BODY? If not what was killing them?)

[zornwil]

Re: Hit Location equals K or N

 

This is a really interesting idea. I like the idea of converting, for example, a neck hit from Normal to Killing. And it's neat to think of some hard-armored spot converting a Killing to Normal.

 

This definitely would encourage higher CV levels for certain concepts...but not all.

 

Would it be too easy to overly safeguard oneself? Or conversely would it be harder to protect yourself all the way around, in a non-superheroic game? Maybe it depends on assuring the armor opportunities are "realistically" controlled - so you'd need consequences to hard-armoring the neck ("can't move head well").

 

But somehow I wonder if this could work as well in some superheroic games...ones with more gritty and tactical feels, so that the fact that a hero's more loosely armored to be nimble will matter a bit more. Though that's all more likely really Dark Champions stuff at that point.

 

Would it be reasonable to have some sort of "does not convert to Normal/Killing damage" sort of Advantage, I wonder? Or is that even an Advantage? I suppose it would be. But probably better modelled with AP or such in terms of what it means.