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Post by etsmith on Oct 2, 2007 12:24:12 GMT -5
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?
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Post by markkrawec on Oct 2, 2007 13:09:55 GMT -5
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.
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Post by etsmith on Oct 2, 2007 21:16:15 GMT -5
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!?
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Post by markkrawec on Oct 3, 2007 13:30:09 GMT -5
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.
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Post by The Fiendish Dr. Samsara on Oct 4, 2007 20:24:08 GMT -5
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? Definitely.
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Post by etsmith on Oct 4, 2007 23:03:04 GMT -5
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.
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