New Damage Mechanic

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

The Rules are here: let’s change ‘em!

First, off: great work, Mark, in getting ZEFRS off the ground. Ever since Drake’s original Rpg.net thread, I’ve been wanting to take a look at the game. It’s been very nice to see this thing come about.

I’m keen to try and run a game of ZEFRS and I’m thinking about trying to do something set in Atlantis: the Second Age. But my brain is already finding things I’d like to change. And I know others have had some thoughts as well. So, I’d like to get some reaction to my thoughts.

In this thread, I’ll be discussing the Damage mechanic. The Damage Talent isn’t a bad combat mechanic, but I can’t say I really like it. For one thing, it doesn’t really implement the Resolution Chart, since you only roll it when you are at <1. Also, in a combat-heavy genre like S&S, it becomes something of an uber-stat.

Taking only the first right now, what I’d like to do is to have the PC’s actually roll resolution against their Damage in combat. The model might be True 20/M&M’s Damage Save. Perhaps something like this:

• to attack, roll your Weapon/General Fighting minus the opponent’s Movement/General Prowess. Weapon & Strength Bonuses work as Colum Shifts in this scenario.
  
  
• A blow is landed on a roll above White. Tentatively, I’d classify wounds so that
  
  Green=Slight Wound
  Yellow=Moderate Wound
  Orange=Serious Wound
  Red=Specific Wound.
  
  Note: I don’t really know what those mean yet, other than Specific Wound. I was thinking of bringing in some MSH rules, which gave
  Slams and Stuns on certain colour results.
  
  
• When you are hit, you roll your Damage Stat + Armour if applicable (Armour also functions as a Column Shift). You are trying to match the color of the attacker’s result. Doing so, means that you shrug off the wound because you are an S&S badass.
  
  
• Every colour level by which you miss the attacker’s result, gives you damage (so, if the attacker scored an Orange and you scored Green with your Damage, then you failed by two colours (i.e. Moderate Wound). Each colour results in a -1CS to your Damage Talent, with possible additional results.
  
  
• When Damage Talent drops to 0, you are out of the fight. Lethality may depend on game-style.
  
  
• All of this is just for PC’s and Foes. Enemies just roll the Damage check—any failure at all result in a take-down.

Now, philosophically, I much prefer this idea. I like that even a weak attacker could get a Red result and force a badass to make a hard Damage roll, which can’t really happen in the ablative mechanic as it stands. But I can see one big problem with this as well: a PC with a maxed Damage Talent of 5 only has a 65% chance of shrugging off a little Green result. That may be a bit too deadly: it’s more of a 1st level D&D character, than an S&S swordsman. You might take up Mark’s implication in the footnotes and raise the cap for Damage. You might also just give everyone a base Damage of 5 to start with so they don’t have to sink all their points into it. There are probably other issues as well, but I can’t think of them yet.

The above suggestion doesn’t, however, do anything to obviate the uber-stat situation. Here, I was thinking of taking a page from PDQ and suggesting that you eliminate the Damage Talent entirely and let the player choose what Talent he wants to try and save himself with. This would introduce a tactical element:
Kuran Besh is a big, hulking brute with a sword (Sword 15). His opponent gets in a blow and Kuran’s player has to decide what he wants to try and save with. His sword Talent is so high, that he can probably shrug off almost anything with it. But, if he fails, then his Sword Talent drops in damage. OTOH, his Movement is only a 3: he’s less likely to make the save, but he’s less concerned with losing ability in Movement than in Sword.

The obvious problem is that there are lots on totally inappropriate Talents (Arcane Languages, for example). This isn’t an issue for something like Truth & Justice because there are very few Qualities and character’s are living in a soap-opera. But it is a problem to use in ZEFRS. One potential solution is to have the Damage roll made under the PC’s choice of physical Talents, but penalties apply to all physical actions. This would let a PC with great Animal Reflexes resist damage as well as someone with great Stamina or Will. But, I’m not completely comfortable with that.

Thoughts?

[markkrawec]

Plagiarizing the True20 damage save was almost exactly what I had in mind, with even less modification than you suggest. When an attack hits, the target makes a roll against (damage resistance + armor rating for the hit location). If the resister gets a higher or equivalent degree of success, no damage. Total success (orange) on resistance against a heroic hit (red) yields a marginal (green) injury, & so on down to outright failure (white).

I was thinking of assigning different effects to the various degrees of injury, also à la the Toughness save. Say a marginal/green wound is like a hurt, an acceptable/yellow wound is a wounded, total/orange is disabled & heroic/red is dying. Each degree imposes penalties on further actions. Your damage resistance rating never actually changes, just like your other Talent ratings don't decline when you run your boat aground or brew a bad batch of beer.

Just as you say, enemies could go down whenever they fail their damage check. I think that would actually increase the PCs' ability to hack their way through a shipload of pirates, rather than having to cut them down 1 or 2 points at a time.

I have to admit I haven't actually tested how that would play, or given too much thought to what the penalties for wound states ought to be, but it seems more aesthetically satisfying than Damage Resistance being the one talent that doesn't work like any of the others.

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

markkrawec said:

I was thinking of assigning different effects to the various degrees of injury, also à la the Toughness save. Say a marginal/green wound is like a hurt, an acceptable/yellow wound is a wounded, total/orange is disabled & heroic/red is dying.

Right with you in concept. The trick for me right now is really working out the results of the wounds.

Each degree imposes penalties on further actions.

A point of debate for me. Just not sure how much of a Death Spiral is ideal. That's why I'm thinking about having the "damage" apply to only certain Talents.

Your damage resistance rating never actually changes, just like your other Talent ratings don't decline when you run your boat aground or brew a bad batch of beer.

Agreed.

Just as you say, enemies could go down whenever they fail their damage check. I think that would actually increase the PCs' ability to hack their way through a shipload of pirates, rather than having to cut them down 1 or 2 points at a time.

I think so too, although using the official rules I guess you could just give all mooks a Damage Talent of 1.

[markkrawec]

The other thing that gave me pause about adopting this method is that it's essentially what choosing to defend in combat does now. In the rules as written, you can choose not to attack & instead make a check against your weapon rating whose result is subtracted from the amount of damage the opponent does.

I guess if you were using the damage save method instead, you could say defending means you give up your attack that round & your opponent checks against Weapon Rating - (your Movement + Weapon Rating) when attacking you.

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

Food for thought. I've never really liked "Full defense" options myself, except when the charcter is trying to defend someone else. But, still, it bears thinking on.

I was also wondering if a really great Defense roll ought to have some sort of positive benefit. A bit like Spin in SotC. My first thought was something along the lines of:

"If your Defense roll is 3 or more ranks better than the attack roll, then you get a an automatic riposte."

But, conceptually, that problematic, since the Defense roll isn't a parry, but is actual sucking up the attack. Still, maybe that would work if I go back to my idea of dropping Defense Talent entirely.