Do you guys have any good alternative damage system/chart that is semi realistic other than HP?

Do you guys have any good alternative damage system/chart that is semi realistic other than HP?

This is a quick one i made to test out for our Call of Cthulhu game, but i think i still need to work more on it.

bump

if it's Cthulhu, could blows to the head affect sanity checks temporarily?

check out song of swords

am i missing something? it looks like somebody swings a weapon at a PC and there is literally a 50% chance that they instantly die.

i mean, you want combat to feel rough, but that seems excessive. i'm pretty sure in real life your odds aren't quite that bad.

i guess there's a roll before this that dictates whether you actually got any damage or not?

is there some kind of defensive action (e.g. protecting yourself with your arms) that would decrease the chance of getting hit in the head / torso and increase the chance of getting hit in the arms?

Well then what would happen if you get an axe or a buckshot to the abdomen ? Or if you get a baseball bat to the head at full swing ?

Yeah dodge and parry is still a skill / ability in CoC

I don't know, but it should daze or stun you in some way like you zone out.

That's pretty good. However.

Your legs might be 30% of your body mass, but they are not 30% of probable hit locations during combat. Autopsies in real life show that most hit locations in a fight are to the arms and upper body/chest. Attacking the legs is very rare unless it's some kind of fight between exotic martial artists. In combat situations people go out of their way to protect their head, meaning unless you ambush someone from behind the chances of hitting the head are much less than 10%.

The percentages for broken bone/severe bleeding are pretty high. It takes a great mismatch in opponent size/strength/training for them to break bones and rip organs that easily. CoC is about average Joe Schmoes, not superhero commandos or somesuch.

Are you still using damage dice? If so, these results should be tied to the damage range somehow, otherwise it will be ridiculous to have someone roll a 1 on damage and luckily do a head shot/broken bone that instagibs their opponent. The instant death results should be tied to maximum dice damage.

But I understand this is an abstraction.

No we dont use damage and we dont use Hit points because we want a "realistic" damage system that dosent break the immersion too much.

The reason the procentile for broken bone and severe bleeding is because the investigators dosent always fight humans, they only fight humans 30-40% of the time.

>No we dont use damage

So a knife and club deal the same damage? Or a knief and a gun? I mean I can understand that if true but I would like to see, for example, a different in being shot by a .22 or being shot by a .308 rifle.

>they only fight humans 30-40% of the time.

Then you really have to modify it by size or something. A shoggoth can tear a human limb from limb in 1 second, while that would be impossible for a human opponent. You must have some way to differentiate this.

I have had that in mind making relly large monsters only be able to score 51-100% while really small score 0-50%. Grapple and Devour are different things but if a shoggoth slaps a investigator with a tentacle he will cause broken bones with every successful hit, atleast to my opinion.

It isnt flawless, and i have only used it for one session where i worked perfectly fine, they where facing a large alien beast that where guarding an artifact. Of the 3 investigators only one got a mild bleeding and i didnt even roll to hit i only rolled for where the monster hit and the injury. Those lucky faggots when into melee with a 3,5m high alien best and one got a mild bleeding with 100% hit chance, tho they scared it away with a high powered spotlight/flashlight. It was really light sensitive and was supposed to be driven away with light and not fought.

Does the system allow for different weapons to have different damage ratings, or is the damage type the only thing that matters now? Is a knife like a sword like a pistol like a tommygun?

ACKs uses hit points, but when you hit 0hp and survive, you roll on a lingering injury table, with modifiers like the quality and timeliness of medical care, and whether or not nonlethal damage was involved. Really good care or lucky PCs can potentially get out with just a scar, or they can get awful results like lamed legs if they're not lucky. In addition, injured PCs usually can't take actions other than talking and movement at half speed until they've had a lot of bed rest, usually weeks.


I like that approach because while it punishes bad outcomes in a fight, the trigger for it (hitting 0 hp) means that good decisions can help a PC avoid permanent injury, in contrast to many games where player choices cannot mitigate that chance.

No it dosent, you can slice the abdomen open with a knife, sword or an axe. It might be slightly harder with a smaller weapon but if you have a well sharpend knife you can cause revere damage to a persons body.

We want to avoid the "He only got a knife, he can only do 1d6+db, i do 1d4+db with my fists". We want "Oh boy he took out a knife in a fist-fight, well fuck...".

You will get increased possibility when you parry with a greater weapon vs a smaller.

A well placed .22 / 5,5mm round can easily fuck you up. If you burst with a tommy you get -10% to hit as normaly but you roll location for where the bullets hit and then what kind of damage all the 3 bullet does, if you get 3 sever bleeding you will only have 1/3 of the time to live/stop it. I havent really figured out how to do with small vs large caliber rounds yet.

That's an incredibly stupid design decision. No offense. I'd get it if you were going for some kind of wishy washy narrativist crap, but if you're gonna have pretensions of realism, especially extreme realism like that, treating all weapons as the same is beyond retarded. Saying that "you can die from a knife as well as from a sword" makes about as much sense as "no reason to differentiate a fighter jet from a bicycle, both take you places".

Then how would you do it ?

I don't personally believe in reaching for such levels of simulationism in the first place, because it's kind of a losing battle no matter how you look at it (the more accurate you get, the more glaring the inevitable inaccuracies do, so until you can simulate the universe to the atomic level past some point you're just making fun of yourself), but if it had to be this way I'd probably make it so that different weapons had a different percentage chance of causing each type of injury. Either use damage codes (but make sure that the table is long enough to accommodate more than just the "heaviest weapon in the rulebook", so you don't get stuck when you suddenly need to pull off something scarier for a Mythos creature), or change the damage roll mechanic to allow for modifiers. You're rolling a D100 anyway, might as well add a certain number for the damage rating.

As I said, you will not achieve realism, but if you want to approach it, this certainly beats ignoring the problem.

Didn't Rollmaster have hundreds of exquisite tables for each weapon type, where it would hit, what kind of damage and maiming it would do, etc.?

Ops and Tactics also has "realistic" firearms rules.

That's what you want. Other people have done it already.

I havent ignored it, i just havent figuerd it out yet. Thank you for your input.

Today's surprising fact:
Out of all of Chaosium's BRP-games, Call of Cthulhu produces the most sturdy characters.

OP, if you're already rolling d100 and want more detailed combat, go get a copy of Mythras or RuneQuest6.

Don't listen to this asshat his knowledge of combat comes from movies and vidya games. You are on the right track! It is correct to believe that a man with a knife is just as deadly as one with a sword, damage-wise. *(Sure, you could use mods to differentiate between the reach of a sword and a knife for to-hit purposes; but if yer looking for good nasty combat, your ideas have merit.)

oh ffs, I meant THIS asshat

>don't listen to the meanies! In REAL LIFE, all weapons have the impact of "Kill"!
For all the good that'll do, even a moron like you could probably survive being shot at by a 4 mm pistol bullet. You WILL die if you are shot with an antitank round. There's more to the difference between the two than their fucking range.

Hell, even that asshat John Wick eventually related with the narrativist clusterfuck he's turned 7th Sea 2nd Edition to. Firearms cause a different type of damage from "everything else". And that's a game that doesn't have the first shade of a pretension of simulationism. Claiming to have a realistic damage system than ignoring something like this is ludicrous.

You take a sword; I'll take a razor blade. Let's fight and see who wins.
By the time you've hefted that fucker, I've jumped in and gutted you and jumped back out.
tl;dr - it ain't the weapon, sunshine, it's the man wielding it that does the damage

You sound tough for someone who considers 15 pounds heavy.

Didn't imply 'heavy' - the implication was unwieldy in the hands of a non-expert. Oh, and not all swords are katana replicas, edgelord.
Git good.

True, the only sword that matters is even lighter.

Glad you've switched to my side! EVERY blade is a deadly blade in the right hands, and smaller blades are deadlier in less expert hands than bigger unwieldy ones.
I'm glad we're friends again.