Wounds

What is your favorite wound system? How do you like your wounds? How severe should they be?

Do you prefer wounds that can be shrugged off after some time? Or ones that slowly stack up and debilitate characters?

Legends of the Wulin has a good system, conditions which characters gain in combat provide fictional triggers for bonuses/penalties to actions. It works well in that system as a way of keeping the combat interesting, they tend to go away out of combat fairly easily though.

Dogs in the Vineyard has something similar. A conflict can change your character's stats, traits or relationships. On a nonviolent conflict this will be very short term, but from a fight, this could be a long term change or possibly permanent.

GURPS does it well

Basic man has 10 hp.
Any hit that slaps you for 1/2 hp or more risks a major wound
You roll against your HT to resist
GM's discretion, but likely candidates are broken bones, extreme recurring pain, and the need for surgeries to remove the maladies.
Very self sufficient/internally consistent application of a rule. It applies to shooting people or blowing up buildings or starship collisions.

I've never seen a system that works well for wounds. IMO it's far better to leave it as a matter of narrative agency, inflicting wounds with blows that require a little extra gravitas, instead of codifying it in a rule system that your players will inevitably attempt to exploit.

Too complicated. if you have to roll more than once to see the extent of your injury its too much.

This is why only you like GURPS, GURPS-fag

did you just watch webdm

The answer is always Nechronica. In Nechronica, your HP is the same as your actions. You have Parts, which are spread between four hit locations, the Head, the Arms, the Torso, and the Legs. When an attack deals damage to you, you have to break that many parts in the affected hit location. So, taking two damage means breaking two parts. The vast majority of things you can do involve these parts, so as the fight goes on, you and enemies are losing your options. If you're out of Leg parts, you're probably slowed to a crawl, literally, with the inefficient Shoulder movement part, if you didn't break that to save far more important Arm parts. When your Arms are gone, often that means your attack options are going to be limited, though not every single weapon will always be on the arms.The Head is generally where you find your AP parts, and if it's getting wrecked, then when the round rolls over, you're going to find that a lot of people are acting and reacting much quicker than you are. The Torso probably has the least well defined role, though there are a fair number of defensive parts that go there, so that may be closest to its niche, meaning you'll be much more vulnerable to further damage when it's gone.

The end result is a very visceral system that emulates taking legitimate, heavy damage to your body, having large chunks of yourself pasted and carved off, and doing the same to enemies. It's perfect for the undead abominations the game is about.

Honestly user, that sounds dumb as hell.

Why does it? I'm curious, because this is legitimately the first time I've ever heard anyone say this. Generally, if anything catches flak regarding Nechronica, it's the whole zombie little girl thing, wishing that some actually cool mechanics weren't tied to it.

It just seems like a recipe for combat to be boring and prescriptive. You have your intrinsic priority list for the actions associated with each body part and sacrifice in exactly that order. It's a great set-up for combat to just turn into creatures running at one another and hacking away at priority body parts until one drops which somehow seems even more boring than 3.5's "set up shop and full attack until dead" combat system. Then again, maybe I'm way off base and I'm just not seeing it because I haven't looked at the system in depth.

You are, in a way, not wrong. You definitely prioritize certain parts and hit locations over others. That's where the rest of the system comes into play. One of the big parts of it is Supports and Hinders. They're, well, either supports or hindrances to a roll. So, let's take a roll of 1d10+1 for example. You get an 8 on the natural roll, for a total of 9. You would hit the Arms on this roll, removing the enemy's valuable attack part by dealing 4 damage. They respond with their Foot, a Hinder 1 making the total an 8 - now you hit their Torso, where they have a lot less valuable stuff; however, this would also completely destroy that hit location. Now, you have a choice - is the Arm hit worth spending another AP on to use the part Arm in response, a Support 1 getting it back up to a 9? Maybe if you do that, they'll also use Scales to defend the hit, costing them an additional AP to keep working. Alternately, you can just let them soak the Torso blow - then they have no torso, and any further rolls of 8 to hit will become attacker's choice of hit location. It's a very reactive system, which is what makes the fact that certain parts weigh heavier more interesting. "Can I afford to let this hit slide? Is something worse waiting in the wings? If I declare X, do I expect this enemy to have an easy response in Y?" Things of that nature.

I'm really really fond of 40krpgs critical wounds system, it turns your fresh acolyte/ guardsmen/ space marine into a scarred veteran really fast, the cost of this however is hyper lethal gameplay where if you do end up in combat you want to run and hit the plave from orbit a lot more than just trading suppressive fire with the enemy, because ammo is also am issue

>now you hit their Torso, where they have a lot less valuable stuff
i know it's a common trope in RPGs, so i don't want to single the game out, but it's kinda just terrible

Well, normally a torso has a lot of very important and vital organs, yes. When you're undead and some kind of foul magic or technology or whatever is keeping your body going even when your head explodes, those organs are suddenly much less vital.

Wounds just provide a single step penalty. You can have a number of wounds equal to (relevant stat modifier -- i.e. Con).

Everything else is just dumb.

I love the wound system in Harn. Different wounds have different infection chances and can affect you differently. It's an early 90's game with charts on charts, but I like that kind of stuff.

I use lingering injuries in D&D, Traveller also has some overly complicated but good ones.

I prefer wound to be majorly debilitating and difficult to get rid of.
If death is cheap then life is worthless.

i too like systems that you get to explore while playing. rpgs arent just story and exploring worlds, it's also exploring mechanics.

You roll more than once to see If a critical is successful, does that make crits too complicated?

I've been playing a 5e campaign with a houserule that gives a chance on a critical hit to add an extra effect to the victim. A small chance of a permanent wound can result, ranging from a limp to decapitation. Not very realistic or anything, but 11 levels in and the wear on the party is noticeable. One wizard has a limp, the paladin has a prosteic hand, a false eye, and a wicked scar across her neck etc. Funny enough the fighter has managed to avoid any lasting injuries so far.

Yes. That's why I avoid it. You can easily stream line the process by using thresholds (if you cause x number of wounds compared to stat x, then apply a critical effect) as in ORE, or use the systems existing exceptional success mechanics like CofD. Both are infinitely better than the GURPS systems way of doing it and the d20 way, but we already established that it sucks using the conditions I set out earlier.