No Recoveries For Dying Characters

[Tech]

6 hours ago, rravenwood said:

 

Just for the purpose of setting the historical record straight - absolutely no disrespect intended! - the negative BODY rule has been around since 1st edition (p.34, "Effects of Damage"): "A character whose Body Pip total has been reduced to 0 or below will die. Death is not immediate, and the character may survive if he can get medical aid. Every turn at the post segment 12 Recovery, all characters with 0 or negative BODY totals lose and additional BODY. If a character has ever lost twice his total BODY then he is considered dead."  The paragraph that follows gives an example explaining that a 10 BODY character will be dead upon reaching -10 BODY.

 

Was "dead at 0 BODY" a house rule, maybe?

I knew it was around way back when, but now I don't have to look it up. Well done, rravenwood!

Usagi said, " I feel like Dying is not significant in HERO" etc.  Fortunately, the games were mentioned: Star Hero and Fantasy Hero. 

 

Question: How often are heroes going to be dying?

 

Having a character bleed to death is almost never heroic. Also, consideration has be taken regarding how long it takes a player to create heroes. Unless you're taking a DnD route and 'too bad you're dead', If a character is going to die, make it heroic! It will be more significant and remembered for a long time than "my arm got cut off by an Orc/blaster and I bled to death." A heroic death in a story is immeasurably more significant than a character croaking off from damage. Granted, the type of game you play can be as varied as the sand but I've done a 'heroic death' story before - over 10 years ago and everyone still remembers it. If a character is going to die because he's outnumbered, ala Boromir, that's understood, but it was still a heroic feat.

If you feel like dying in these games isn't significant, talk to your players about it. They may come up with something everyone agrees on.
 

[Hugh Neilson]

23 hours ago, Usagi said:

That just...I dunno.  It bugs me.  Guppy will bleed out and die in 1.4 minutes, during which time that mortal wound will have no more significant effect. He can completely shake off the effects in about 12 seconds.  He can basically just ignore it.  I don't think the situation becomes any more lethal necessarily, because once shot he'd die in 1.6 minutes regardless of whether he's conscious or not.  If he has no means of healing himself, then he's unlikely to reach medical aid in that 1.6 minutes and he's dead, conscious or not, and if a healer can get to him in that 1.6 minutes, he'll live, conscious or not.  It's just a bit nuts that he can get up and keep fighting for that 1.6 minutes with no real penalties.

 

One common House Rule I've seen is reducing max STUN by BOD damage.  That means Guppy's STUN caps at 8 instead of 20.  I don't find it any more realistic that 1 BOD of 10 is hale and hearty, but 0 means no recoveries, or some other massive binary (either the whole penalty applies or none does) is imposed.

 

18 hours ago, Usagi said:

I'm also seriously considering only allowing KO'd characters to recover on Post-Segment 12.  I find that the combats that tend to drag the most are the ones where everyone keeps just barely getting KO'd and recovering over and over, and it gets to be a real drag.  You have to pummel people to -30 STUN just to keep them KO'd long enough to get them in a paddy wagon, and it leads to these very genre-inappropriate scenes where one of the heroes has to squat over their unconscious foe, periodically punching him in the face to keep him out.

 

Remember that the first "level" of negative STUN is "heavily Stunned" - he's not unconscious and may  not even fall over - he's reeling much like a character Stunned but not KOd would.  If it's not unheroic to slug a Stunned opponent, we're OK here as well - and the target is half DCV and takes double STUN.

[Lucius]

As far as "realism" goes, people with more experience of violence than I have, have praised Hero mechanics for simulating the way a mortally wounded person can keep on acting and moving, right up to point they fall over dead.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says in other words, it's not just "cinematic" reality...

 

 

[bluesguy]

And now for something completely different 😁 since we are talking about when a character is dead

 

[Surrealone]

  

On 11/16/2019 at 1:44 AM, Lucius said:

As far as "realism" goes, people with more experience of violence than I have, have praised Hero mechanics for simulating the way a mortally wounded person can keep on acting and moving, right up to point they fall over dead.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says in other words, it's not just "cinematic" reality...

 

Spot-on - as there's a huge delta between what one sees in the movies ... and reality.  In the movies we see people go flying backward after a single shot from a bullet -- and, often, they don't get up.  In reality, as long as blood is pumping to the brain that gives orders to the rest of a body hit with 2-3 bullets … and the body isn't too impaired to carry out those orders … a mortally wounded person remains up, mobile, and an active threat thanks to a flood of adrenaline and cortisol delivered as part of the fight/flight response.

Bleed-out (which deprives the brain of oxygen … and, thus, its ability to do its job) can take 30-90 seconds, depending on the tool used to deliver the wound(s), type of wound(s) (bullet? puncture? laceration? blunt-force trauma? etc.), number of wounds, location of wound(s) , and damage to internals incurred based on the previous criteria.

[Christopher R Taylor]

There are many stories of people shot multiple times in key areas yet still fighting despite clearly dying on their feet. And one of the aspects of Hero that endeared it to me most was the fact that you can die fully conscious or be knocked out without dying.

[Gauntlet]

I have always done it this way:

 

If a character is 0 or less BODY, but still have STUN, they are still conscious but no longer get recoveries, for either STUN or END (not for post 12 or when taking a recovery). This means that while a severely wounded character can still act when at negative BODY, they can't act long.

[Guest Usagi]

1 hour ago, Gauntlet said:

I have always done it this way:

 

If a character is 0 or less BODY, but still have STUN, they are still conscious but no longer get recoveries, for either STUN or END (not for post 12 or when taking a recovery). This means that while a severely wounded character can still act when at negative BODY, they can't act long.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

[Gauntlet]

One other thing though, if the character is both stunned and knocked out, their next phase has to be getting unstunned, they do not gain back any STUN or END during that phase. They do not get regular recoveries until the phase after that.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

One other thing though, if the character is both stunned and knocked out, their next phase has to be getting unstunned

 

Depends on the edition, in 6th you don't have to.  I personally like the idea (that hit was so hard it takes you just a bit longer to get up) but players hated it, so I dropped it.

[Surrealone]

10 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

Depends on the edition, in 6th you don't have to.  I personally like the idea (that hit was so hard it takes you just a bit longer to get up) but players hated it, so I dropped it.

Getting up with very little END and very little STUN tends to be harsh enough, nevermind the fact that the stunning effect represents shaking off that whopper of a hit because it knocked the daylights out of you (without knocking you out).  If you actually get knocked out, well, you likely already have to take a little longer to get up just because your REC doesn't leave you with enough END to do much of anything; if your REC is low enough, you may actually risk burning STUN due to lack of END … and knocking yourself out, again).

Do/did you really need players to burn more time to recover from an effect (stunning) that they probably shouldn't feel, anyway, if they actually got KO'd?