Serious wounds from environmental damage

[simonh]

For Serious Wounds on page 95 it states that "A character suffering a serious wound... must immediately make an opposed test of his resilience against the successful attack roll of his enemy. Failure results in ..." and various consequences are applied on failure.

Suppose the serious wound results from falling, fire, drowning, etc. What should the opposed test be against?

Suggestion: damage always seems to be a number of dice, so take the maximum possible value on those dice, multiply it by 5, and that's the "successful skill roll" that the player has to beat (by getting a crit, or rolling a higher success). For drowning, fire, etc. use all the consecutive dice of damage.

For example, if you fall 2-5m (1d6) and that takes you to zero or below, roll resilience and either crit, or succeed with a roll of over 30. If you take four rounds of asphyxiation damage and go to zero or below in the chest, roll resilience and either crit, or succeed with a roll over 60.

Simon & Philip Hibbs

 

[dbhoward]

Beautiful house rule. Thanks!

 

[PhilHibbs]

The reservation that I have is that it's not very random, and once you go over 3d6 it becomes "you need to crit". Maybe that's ok, you probably do need something special to take a 10m-drop anvil to the head and shrug it off. I don't know what Harrek's Resilience is, but I'm guessing that many of his rolls are going to be critical successes. I think the basic idea is sound, but whether you go for max damage x5 or actual damage x10 is a matter of taste.

Phil Hibbs.

 

[Deleriad]

This did come up a while ago. It's generally not a good idea to make the opposing roll based on actual damage done because it means that large critters with high HPs can almost never resist a serious wound while small things nearly always can.

What I do for damage caused by events without an attack roll is to use an unopposed Resilience roll. I usually then add a modifier depending on the severity of a wound. E.g. Serious wound to a leg would be a plain resilience roll but major wound to head would be Resilience at -60%.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Hm, good point, Resilience doesn't scale up at the same rate as Hit Points. Something that is proportional to the location hit points would be "better" but is a big step up in complexity.

 

[Deleriad]

Hm, good point, Resilience doesn't scale up at the same rate as Hit Points. Something that is proportional to the location hit points would be "better" but is a big step up in complexity.

One possibility if you were using BRP would be the resistance table using HPs vs damage taken but even that wouldn't work brilliantly. For example, imagine two characters taking 1 HP less than a major wound in a location. Someone with 4 HPs in the leg taking 7 HPs damage would be be 4 vs 7 = 35%. While someone with 14 HPs taking 27 damage would have a 05% chance of resisting. This leads to the counter-intuitive situation where the more HPs you have, the harder it becomes to resist damage. Short of getting a spreadsheet and working on ratios, any system that assigns modifiers to Resilience roll based on damage taken penalises characters with high HPs.

That said, it hasn't come up much in play for me. The PCs did once crash land an airship, badly, so I just asked for Resilience rolls. If I had to deal with fire or cold that has an intensity number, I would just give them a minus 10% penalty per point of intensity.

 

[dbhoward]

Personally I wouldn't make this over-complex, as it really isn't crucial to get it "right." Basing it on the maximum damage x 5 I think is a nice touch; but Deleriad's suggestion of a modifier depending on severity of the wound would work too. The important thing is that it not be a straight unopposed roll.

 

[PhilHibbs]

The important thing is that it not be a straight unopposed roll.

Why not, though? Because high-level characters will automatically beat it

How about just rolling against a notional successful roll of 50, or the GM rolling against the universe's 100% chance to hit (without fumbles or auto-fails) and using that as the opposition?

 

[Vatras]

Is there even a need to roll anything? I come from RQ 3, where there is no check at all...when you lose a given number of hp in a location, you suffer the consequences.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Is there even a need to roll anything? I come from RQ 3, where there is no check at all...when you lose a given number of hp in a location, you suffer the consequences.

Well, no, you can house-rule that rule if you like. I like the roll, though. It gives the players another way to be that little bit more heroic.