Red Results & Dumping Hit Location

[etsmith]

I do believe that I'll be getting a chance to finally run ZeFRS in about a week, so I've been rereading the Conan book and the ZeFRS pages in detail to reacquaint myself with the rules.

Now, I've said repeatedly that I'm going to run the system 'straight' so I can see how well it works as written before inflicting house rules on it. But I'm afraid there's one aspect I just can't bring myself to use: hit locations. As written, characters have to specify with each attack what body part their aiming at and if they get a Red result, that location suffers a specific critical wound. Which seems simultaneously awkward and uninteresting to me.

So instead, I think I'm just going to tell the players that on a Red Result, they can choose to inflict damage (4 + Weapon + Str Bonus) OR specify a critical hit effect. Completely freeform, knock weapons out of hands, send enemies barrelling back into comrades, chop off their head, whatever. The only limit is that Foes cannot be insta-killed.

Since armor is dependent on the hit location system, that has to be changed to. Simply, I'm only going to use four classes of armor:
None
Light (1 pt of Protection, -1 initiative)
Moderate (2 pt of Protection, -3 initiative)
Heavy (3 pt of Protection, -5 initiative).
Specific type of armor (bronze cuirass, iron scale, etc.) is just descriptive color.

Does this horriblely mangle the flow of the game?

[markkrawec]

Sounds like it would speed things up a bit not having to check to see how much armor is on what aiming point. Otherwise it doesn't sound like much of a change at all.

[etsmith]

It also works around the egregious lack of acknowledgment of non-humanoid targets. The current hit location system doesn't even address giant snakes. How can you run a sword & sorcery game without giant snakes!?

[markkrawec]

Well, in all seriousness, I had just assumed that you would attack whatever targets an opponent had (e.g. head, chest & gut for a snake, maybe legs if you want to distinguish attacking its tail) & if when firing missiles you rolled a body part it didn't possess that meant your shot missed.

Against opponents with a boatload of limbs (a sorceror's giant squid-frogs for instance) you might get a bonus instead of a penalty for attacking extremities, if you were to adopt Grey Elf's aiming point modifier scheme.

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

etsmith said:

Completely freeform, knock weapons out of hands, send enemies barrelling back into comrades, chop off their head, whatever. The only limit is that Foes cannot be insta-killed.

You can chop off their heads without insta-killing them?

Since armor is dependent on the hit location system, that has to be changed to. Simply, I'm only going to use four classes of armor:
None
Light (1 pt of Protection, -1 initiative)
Moderate (2 pt of Protection, -3 initiative)
Heavy (3 pt of Protection, -5 initiative).
Specific type of armor (bronze cuirass, iron scale, etc.) is just descriptive color.

Definitely.

[etsmith]

drsamsara said:

You can chop off their heads without insta-killing them?

If you're gentle about it.

Stated more clearly, Enemies can be insta-killed by whatever means the player chooses, Foes cannot, but they are still subject to a non-deadly special effect of the player's choosing.