Are there any "one hit kill" systems where combat is fairly quick and deadly

I would only hit that if it would kill it

I've heard that Riddle of Steel is fairly deadly.

Just a warning: One hit kill combat is not a good idea.

Unknown Armies: Modern Setting, rules make it so any gun fight will kill someone, and it's not clear who will neccesarily be that person unless things are set up so only one side has guns to begin with (and then you have magic to make even that calculation impossible).

Thus the chapter on gunfights is titled "how not to start a gunfight"

GURPS.

>oh, you have a base of 10 HP and won't doverge far from that if you're a normal human?
>oh, you got shot by a decent old west rifle? that'll be 4d6 to 7d6 damage depending on the gun, your "armor" probably only gives you 4-5 points worth of resistance

Stormbringer or whatever the game based on Eric and his adventures of called does lethal pretty well.
Take more than 4 points of damage and you're losing a limb

Paranoia.

Except for the "fairly" part. It's extremely unfairly about how quickly you can die.

At that point pretty much no rolls are needed.
Cat wins initiative because superior DEX.
Cat kills commoners in a single pounce.
TPK.

humans without plate armor or something will usually die after two hits in warhammer fantasy roleplay (2e), assuming said human is no pc who can burn one of his fate points to evade a critical hit and you roll for sudden death (like you should for most minor enemies)

my cat would roll to seduce. it would still be TPK, she just takes them out after sufficient belly rubs.

It's still a thousand times better than its opposite. I don't think I've ever had anything ruin RPG combat faster.

My group all agreed we want something more punishing

"More punishing", or "HOMYGODWHATJUSTHAPENED?!!"

If the later, why not I guess.

Hey man, don't underestimate house cats.

youtube.com/watch?v=KhfsAokR-D4

>"one hit kill" systems
>combat is fairly quick and deadly

You'd think these two go together but a lot of systems that have very lethal combat often have very swingy combat as well. Many of these systems also don't have true "kills" in a single hit (players can burn fate points, other resources, or perhaps roll on a table); but I assume you are thinking more about "1 hit = out of action" rather than a literal death. WFRP and Dark Heresy are good examples of this, and to some extent Shadowrun can be.

L5R

If characters are built correctly they can easily kill another player charter in a single attack or injure them so badly they won't hope to survive the next hit let alone be able to defend against it. Sad really.

four hits only for major enemies. Mooks are two hits iirc.

I personally would go for The Riddle of Steel, or any of its successors (Blade of the Iron Throne, Song of Swords, Burning Wheel (I think?), Band of Bastards) for gritty, detailed and (once you've got the hang of it) fast combat.

Savage worlds is good.

Gunslingers and Gamblers is a good western rpg that can be quite deadly

see, this is what gets me though. You have a 1 in 10 chance of surviving being shot in the brain. Seriously- you can be decerebrated and still recover with proper medical care and lots of rehab.

Then there are dudes who roll into the OR who've been shot 8 or 9 times and still are just fine. Ok, again, broken bones, lots of rehab. But not dead.

There's a very narrow band of history in which we have guns but don't have surgery and antibiotics. SO unless you're talking about that timeframe, I think its dubious to say "most" gunfights kill someone. A lot of them sure. But its much easier to survive than you seem to think.

Just do D&D but you don't get more HD as you level.

So casters are even more busted, good to know.

play Hârnmaster. or WFRP 1e/2e.

Magic missiles=Deadly=Threat
Crossbows=actually deadly
wizards+enemy crossbows+Surprise=dead wizard.

>She's gone from being curvy to fat

She was hot 2bh now she's just too big.

James Bond. Tech, gadgets and politics are dated since it came out in the early 80s but system is solid.

Most pistols will only range from Light Wound to Incapacitate on a single shot. Degree of wounding depending on success roll. Heavier pistols, rifles etc can be one shot kills. Even a light wound can prevent actions until a pain resistance roll is made.

Effectively a light wound is like 1 damage, a medium 2, heavy 3, incapacitate 4 and kill 5. Wounds accumulate, Receiving a new light wound is never allowed to take you beyond incapacitate but anything else can add up to a kill. Healing takes a long time so PCs need to save hero points to reduce damage or they're off the mission.

Getting one-shotted isn't punishing, it's boring. Unless you consider losing a pawn in chess "brutal".

WHFRP 2e is a good suggestion for fantasy.

Call of Cthulhu without the monsters and magic could cover a lot of other things.

Characters are squishy and just durable enough to survive until a fate worse than death comes along.

WFRP is where our party basically got shredded by some cats. And we didn't have beginning characters. I believe it was in Death on the Reik? Don't remember which part of Enemy Within.

>Call of Cthulhu without monsters and magic

So just BRP? Why isn't there more love for BRP?

Song of swords.

Here's the damage table.

Probably because no one recognizes it when you keep referring to it as an acronym, dumbfuck.

>Getting one-shotted isn't punishing, it's boring. Unless you consider losing a pawn in chess "brutal".
No, it's not boring. It just takes players to understand the perils of combat and avoid all combats that aren't cakewalks.The suspense is in the issue of whether one succeeds in creating such conditions.

L5r

That's how it's referred to everywhere. If you don't recognize an acronym on Veeky Forums, then just google "BRP rpg", for example, and your confusion is forever fixed.

Savage Worlds is one of the worst wound systems I've ever GMed or played.

The high resistance thresh-hold in hand with the exploding dice ensures that the only real way for players to take damage is exploding dice, which is neither rewarding from a game standpoint nor a narrative one. If you design an encounter around this high resistance thresh-hold, rather than simply taking damage they'll just die instantly.

This is aggravated by the fact that it spirals like bejeebus. A -1 in Savage world is significant, a -2 is damning. So you can somewhat forget fighting back or worse yet surviving the "Not fucking die" rolls where you'll have at least -4.

There's nothing between -1 and +0 in Savage Worlds, meaning that you either have to heavily hobble your player or provide entirely narrative consequences unless you want to get imaginative and rework the wounds system.

So, it's pretty one hit kill, OP. You may enjoy it. Just keep in mind the one hit kill elements are entirely based on luck swings and not really much else. The luck is a bigger factor on the metaphorical pyramid than I would like. Which may actually be enjoyable to you, I don't know if it's your thing. Give it a go.

Not only is it boring, it's also unrealistic. Humans don't drop dead that easily.

>avoid all combats that aren't cakewalks
so just about every single combat that's even remotely worthwhile
if you're going to go kill boars in the fucking forest to gain exp and shirk out of anything remotely dangerous, it's not even worth playing

>A -1 in Savage world is significant
Yes
>a -2 is damning.
Damning? Maybe if you have a d6 or less in a skill (excluding fighting in my calculations because parry is the TN instead of 4).
d8 still has a 7/12 success rate (fail 5/8 on the d8, but of those only 2/3 will be failing from the wild die). That translates to ~58% success rate. Significant, but it is still in their favor.

Now if they're a bit more experienced they should probably have at least a d10 in their shtick then success goes up to 2/3 or ~67% pass (1/2 fail on d10, 2/3 of those will fail).

So I will completely agree with it being significant, but I disagree about damning. Especially if bruisers take that edge that lets them ignore the first point of wound penalties, and I think there might be another to ignore the second point as well, fits with the bruiser archetype.

Classic Traveller, full stop.

Also Interlock/Friday Night Firefight from Cyberpunk 2020

GURPS can be pretty lethal. Here are a couple of examples:

>Medieval fantasy
A regular spear deals thrust+3 impaling damage, which works out to 1d6+1 with perfectly average strength. With an all-out (strong) attack, a perfectly average person can make that 1d6+3. Half of the time, that is 7 damage or more. An impaling attack to the vitals deals triple damage after armor, so make that 21 damage (assuming no armor). An average human has 10 HP, so that puts him at -11 HP, forcing a roll to not die.

>Modern soldiers
A 7.62mm rifle deals 7d6 piercing damage, an average of 24.5. A single torso hit with an average damage roll would force a typical human to roll to not immediately die.

(I'm working from GURPS Lite for the damage numbers.)

>21 pages of damage tables
It's like someone played a cruel joke on an AD&D2e player.

There are no exclusively one-hit-kill systems.

Ironclaw Omnibus was probably the deadliest I've played, assuming the DM made competent mooks.
1-shot "Overkill" is possible on any character, which actually has it's own morale effect.

Not necessarily one hit kill, but the combat in the Song of Ice and Fire RPG is pretty damn swift.

A char's health is Endurance x 3 (where Endurance starts at 2 and hits limit at 7). There's a number similar to DnD's AC, but also with an armor rating that soaks damage. Damage itself is static but can be multiplied depending on how many numbers you get above the AC.

Heavier armor actually slows you down but trades for more soak. Once you reach an enemy and no longer have to move, you can roll to attack him twice on your turn. You can also split your attack two enemies adjacent to you.

I had some pretty min-maxed characters, but even without the combat focused PCs, combat was really fast. Going above four rounds of combat was either due to bad rolls on both sides of the screen or a boss fight.

I'll put in a post for Blades in the Dark. Basically not!Dishonored the RPG, where you play mostly thugs and street urchins and combat can get real brutal really quickly, making it something you'd really rather not resort to if you can.

>Weird leather surcoat
>Shield not faced with leather or other material
>Axe is way too thick and oversized. Shaped more like a wood axe than a battle-axe

2/10

That's super narrative and it takes a lot to die, but everyone gets fucked up badly with major consequences all the time. As a bonus your character can just wander away like a Darkedt Dungeon character and you have to play a new one.

Also, it's perfect for Darkest Dungeon campaigns.

gurps with harsh realism rules, turn per turn on a 1v1 will be really, really quick, one, maybe two rolls a turn, first significant hit will likely decide the fight

4d6 to 7d6 X2 or x1.5 because pi+/pi++

I run Ice and Fire a lot, and I can second this. The biggest problem is people are too used to D&D; you just trade blows until someone dies. Can't do that with this system. You have to use advanced maneuvers, creative skill uses, outnumber opponents, set up ambushes, etc. Also, the game is meant more for a top-down kind of gameplay, so characters are a bit more expendable in the grand scheme of things.

A Song of Ice and Fire. It's like Total War with roleplay.

RuneQuest 6
Warhammer Fantasy Role Play
Legend of the 5 Rings
OSR Games, i.e. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Labyrinth Lord, etc
Cyberpunk 2020
GURPS with the realism switch flipped
Call of Cthulhu
Dark Heresy

That's what I can remember off the top of my head.

Silhouette.
While rifles (for example) can kill you pretty easily the system is actually not very swingy. It only uses d6, so modifiers have a huge impact.

Nice since if you kill an opponent or get killed yourself it's often because of things you or your enemy did. Like flanking or coordinated fire etc.

Bad luck can of course come up, but even then if you stacked some good mods you probably won't die because of it.

Depends on what is doing the hitting.

Most editions of Traveller, to be honest. TNE and Trave hero stand out as the big exceptions, but most of the rest support one lucky shot with small arms. Mostly you'll regret having been hit even once, but not be dead, which is actually more realistic than one shot kills.
Og course, if the weapon is a plasma gun...

3.PF at any level that isn't 2-6.

I would say Shadowrun? It's very much up the the gm, but the system can heavily incentivise using tactics, planning, and legwork, otherwise you could end up on the wrong end of high-threat-response team loaded in mil-spec gear, powerful mages, and guns fire radioactive bullets that give you cancer because why the fuck not.

It's not really one hit kill, but with the right gm the game can have real threats the players need to play around

Degenesis is quite deadly

RECON

Classic Traveller? Gurps? Riddle of Steel? Song of Swords?

Tavern Tales can be as gritty and brutal as you want.

Hey, that's a Boffer Sport, not a LARP.

These anons have it right, try a game from the Riddle of Steel family.

Only if you play REAL L5R, which is using Wick's original rules. If you're successfully hit by a katana, you die, regardless of the presence of armor.

Again, savage worlds can easily modified to fit your needs. Lower wounds by one and up the damage of all weapons by two dice, avoila

Knowing John Wick, this sounds absurd enough to be true.

and once they start bringing out the heavy stuff. An AT rifle is 6d6x2(2). Yeah. Run.

Dread, the Jenga rpg.

In blood and honour, one of his post L5R games set in actual sengoku Japan, there's a rule where you can instantly kill a certain number of non-samurai, based on one of your attributes.
Also, while katana shots are pretty lethal in that game, hitting hit by a rifle is a straight up instakill.

GODLIKE One Roll Engine is pretty deadly

just post more of this chick.

>too big

literally no such thing

Bestiality is not allowed on Veeky Forums

Literally all the proof you need that Song of Swords is a mistake.

Savage Worlds is a terrible system in general. It's also one of the your only options for a good generic system besides FATE and GURPS.

BRP is good.

Why? Because it has easy to use, close to realistic damage?

Rolemaster isn't quick, but can be one-hit-kill a LOT of the time if the dice go the wrong way due to the vicious crit system.

More often, though, it's a "stunned and bleeding out" game.

Anyone made a Nidhogg or Divekick P&P system yet?