No More Killing Attacks!

[Mr. R]

So after reading M&M products and some from Palladium and even Old School V&V, I noticed that in those games there are NO killing Attacks.  A sword is just a str 2 add to your damage.  A pistol is a dam 5 ranged.  Or what ever mechanic you are using at the time.  Now in a Fantasy Hero games, a KA is part and parcel.  But in a comic, people get hit with swords or shrapnel and come out little the worse for wear.  

 

So has anyone done this?

 

NO KA's.  A 2d6 HKA Sword is now 6D6 HA.

 

If you have not done this, but are thinking about it, what are your thoughts?

 

Finally any long term ramifications?

 

Thank you!

[Pattern Ghost]

2 hours ago, Mr. R said:

So has anyone done this? 

 

NO KA's.  A 2d6 HKA Sword is now 6D6 HA. 

 

This is an idea that's been brought up from time to time, and I think it can work.

[Mr. R]

Would you see any big hurdles, or is it simply a matter of refusing killing attacks and leaving all else priced as is!

[assault]

All the Resistant Defense powers become unnecessary, except Force Field becomes PD/ED, costs endurance.

 

Force Wall/Barrier(?) and Entangle can probably be left as is, although they might become a bit of a better buy.

[ghost-angel]

Those systems aren't built with two types of attacks in mind: one doing more STUN on average and one doing more BODY on average. Hence their lack of presence. Killing Attacks do not, in any way, have to be lethal to Superhero level Characters.

[Pattern Ghost]

Well, Palladium has SDC and HP, but they also have MDC, so they don't get to talk.

[clnicholsusa]

I believe it's more on the lines of those systems don't represent combat effects in the same manner. The M&M I'm familiar with replaced as much math as possible with varying 'stress states' to save against. Palladium had an interesting mechanic with two types of health points, but they were still HEALTH points in that a character wasn't disabled until they were injured. Old School V&V (and the myriad  war game babies attempting to simulate medieval combat) were concerned with nothing but health points. To be honest, having a STUN characteristic is what draws me to Hero. If the only non-lethal options are run away or sneak by, RPG's play too much like CRPG's.

[IndianaJoe3]

The Normal/Killing damage mechanics do complicate the game (I'm leaving KA's out of my in-process Champions Lite rules), but they also provide a mechanical distinction between lethal (guns, knives, etc) and less-lethal (fists, batons, etc) damage. 

[Sveta]

Mechanically speaking? You're looking at not terrible much difference. On average you'd likely be doing less actual BODY on an attack if you converted KA to normal attacks. On the other hand, it would be more consistent Body, so there is that. As mentioned above, with the exclusion of KA, resistant Defenses would require a touch of a rebalance to figure out their actual worth, but that would be pretty easy. Just treat as the new PD, ED mess, test, and call it a day.

 

Metaphor speaking? It misses some umpfh that Killing Attacks had. A bar room brawl is one thing, but when someone pulls a knife, the atmosphere changes. An honorable bout of fisticuffs that the devious mastermind brought a gun to has an entirely different feeling. 

 

Can you and would it work? Almost certainly! Should you? That depends on the feeling you are aiming for.

[Cassandra]

I believe they used this with The A-Team.

[ghost-angel]

The problem with all these threads is people focus on the word "Killing" in KAs, like so many used to focus on the word "Energy" in EB.

 

You have to look at the Mechanical Effect and how it interacts with the system. Will it be more lethal? Absolutely, it does more body on average per DC than Normal Attacks do. But that doesn't mean using it will make the game more lethal For PCs. Which is the key idea.

[zslane]

You might also be able to adjust lethality by using Normal DCs and AP. Instead of resistent defense, just use Hardened on normal defenses. This way, instead of having a binary “killing” or “non-killing” damage model, you can have a sliding scale of effectiveness via AP.

[Cantriped]

The main problem with removing KA is that every single defense power is priced based on existance of both Normal and Killing Damage, and the opportunity cost that comes from having significant amounts of nonresistant defenses.

Oh... it is also Impossible to legally create an attack that causes Penetrating BODY without Killing Attacks... which significantly reduces the value of that modifier because who gives a rats ass about few points of STUN slipping through defenses when some usually gets through anyway by system design.

 

It is really, really hard to significantly damage anybody if they are receiving up to half-again as many points worth of defenses for the same price. Also... you can't really use any prepublished material as a change of that magnitude requires extensive conversion to prevent imbalances: Such as characters who had 30 PD but little to no rPD suddenly becoming totally indestructable, and vehicles who no longer have enough total defense to compete with the higher DCs and levels of armor piercing required to simulate lethal attacks.

 

If you are going to remove the KA... remove non-resistant defenses as well, and make everyone pay the resistant price for their defenses. That is fairer to all of the other game elements that have Resistant defenses by default (pretty much everything except characters).

[Cantriped]

PS:  I worked on a primer for a campaign imposing such a rule (no KAs)... I gave it up as too much work for too little reward. It added so much extra prep work (to the exhaustive amount of prep-work HERO already expects of its GMs) that it never even made it to the table.

[Ragitsu]

6D6 HA swords? Are these Saturday morning cartoon blades?

 

[Badger]

How much damage does that mullet do?

[Badger]

Just now, Badger said:

How much damage does that mullet do?

 

Oh and does wanting to claw out my eyes looking at it count as a Darkness attack or a Mind Control attack?

[Cantriped]

4 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

6D6 HA swords? Are these Saturday morning cartoon blades?

 

and after STR Min you're lucky to be getting +4d6 ND...

[steriaca]

Going without Killing Attack is doable. But think...going without Killing Attack makes both Resistance advantage and Resistance Defenses useless.

 

"Lethal" as a +1/4 advantages might save Resistant/Resistant Defenses. It makes Body only defending against Resistant Defenses (Stun is defended against normally). Also applied to NND/AVLD attacks, it allowed thoes attacks to kill, but much like choak holds do (when Stun is gone).

[clnicholsusa]

I'm wondering which part of the KA mechanic we're attempting to eliminate. A long time ago, one of my players wanted to avoid doing multiplication, and suggested rolling the stun of killing attacks with standard dice and assuming the body to be the number of dice rolled (that didn't work, too much STUN). These days, that player would have bought their Killing Attacks as AVAD (+1/2) and been happly as a machine-gun wielding clam (I did mention this was a long time ago).

[Cantriped]

I use hit locations in part because I dislike the Stun Lotto mechanic of KAs.

[zslane]

 

On 5/31/2018 at 3:30 PM, Mr. R said:

But in a comic, people get hit with swords or shrapnel and come out little the worse for wear. 

 

Based on the above statement, I assume the OP wants to mitigate lethality.

 

Frankly, the only thing that makes KAs lethal is their ability to bypass non-resistant defenses. The potential to do a lot of STUN may be annoying, but it won't kill a character, and as such, I don't consider the STUN lotto to be what makes an attack a "killing" attack. So if I were to remove KAs in order to reduce lethality in a campaign, the STUN mechanics wouldn't be a major consideration. Instead, I would just remove KAs and Resistant defense powers. Armor would just be built as normal PD/ED through a Focus. Force Fields would be Hardened by default instead of being Resistant. Likewise, physical objects would have Hardened instead of Resistant DEF. Why? Because if I wanted to add back in some of the "defeats defenses" component of KAs, I'd turn to Armor Piercing for that.

[incrdbil]

depends on the genre. In a grittier campaign, more bronze or Iron game, people without resistant defenses come out very much the worse for wear when a lethal attack hits them rather than a punch.
 

You'd have to tweak some things whose defenses/characteristics were inherently resistant to be fair. by the time you tweak automatons, barriers, vehicles, bases, and other tlittle things I've forgotten about..just seems easier to keep killing attacks.

[Badger]

16 hours ago, steriaca said:

Going without Killing Attack is doable. But think...going without Killing Attack makes both Resistance advantage and Resistance Defenses useless.

 

"Lethal" as a +1/4 advantages might save Resistant/Resistant Defenses. It makes Body only defending against Resistant Defenses (Stun is defended against normally). Also applied to NND/AVLD attacks, it allowed thoes attacks to kill, but much like choak holds do (when Stun is gone).

 

Yeah, that is a lot of why I wouldn't do it  (plus it doesn't really feel "natural" to me)

[Greywind]

On 6/2/2018 at 1:27 PM, Cassandra said:

I believe they used this with The A-Team.

 

No one ever got hit by a bullet in that show unless it was a plot point.