Post by telok on Dec 5, 2021 20:37:51 GMT -6
I was wondering how people ran critical damage (character, not vehicular). There isn't a detailed example in the books and my group tried a couple different things. The core issues it caused were the speed of death after hit points ran out and how it related to the promethians (this was given as the reason at least one person decided to not play one).
We identified and tried three ways to read the crit rules. I'll use an example Bob who starts with an impact crit-3 to the arm from being whopped with a baseball bat and then start getting bitten by rats.
First was that crit damage worked like hit points and you counted it up. As it went up your crit effects went up. Since Bob starts with 3 points of critical damage the next rat bite puts him at 4 points, bites do rending damage and the rats noms his leg. Rending crit-4 on the leg lops it off. We tried this one for the first fight, it seemed silly. Felt like combat went from padded boffer larp to one-hit-kill very suddenly, and nobody ever went down from critical effects inflicting fatigue. The up side is that promethians and wraiths are really tough under this model, downside being that everyone else generally went down on a hit or two after their HP ran out and the killing effects were functionally half of the crit tables.
Second method was that you tracked crit damage per limb, but still as above. Now a Bob would take a rending crit-1 to the leg if that's where the rat bit him, but if it bit him on the previously wounded arm then that arm is at crit-4 and tears off. We used this version for most of the game but it pushed a few things. Promethians would have been only slightly more resilient than normal folk with limbs tearing off at crit-5 instead of crit-4 and they wouldn't suffer the blood loss & fatigue of the first crit. Two crit-2 hits on the same location basically put anyone else down, either from limb loss or straight out death. This was how our vampire and werewolf died the first times, gnome vamp to two las pistol shots to the leg (2+3=5) and the wolf to two magic missiles to the body (2+2=4 and Con reduction cut warform duration that cut Con again, poor sucker went from Con6 to Con2). It also led to us having two characters switch to bolt pistols and called shots to the head as soon as a tough enemy ran out of hit points, because nearly anything would fall over dead on the second hit and they didn't care about the actual damage. We saw a few more non-killing crit effects, but it made combat move towards called shots on the damaged body part as soon as someone's hit points ran out.
The third way was to keep track of just the crit effects without increasing the severity for multiple hits. Under this one Bob would end up with the impact crit-3 and a rending crit-1 on the arm. While this one gave us more of the lower crit effects and we started seeing fatigue KOs from crits it also obviously broke the promethian's critical damage model and moved wraiths from "I have 2xCon + 3xWill + Comp hit points" to... more of a side-grade than an upgrade or downgrade.
In the end we were never fully satisfied with any of them. The first way felt very 'tap-tap-tap' on the hit points then suddenly switched to extreme chunky salsa effects. Second way was like the first but with one or two actual critical effects to other body locations before death, at least until we caught on to the bolter pistol called shot strategy (which honestly would probably work even better under the first method). The third felt like we were finally seeing more actual wounds than skipping to the gore explosion death animation, but it didn't jive with promethians at all.
So how does everyone do crits?
We identified and tried three ways to read the crit rules. I'll use an example Bob who starts with an impact crit-3 to the arm from being whopped with a baseball bat and then start getting bitten by rats.
First was that crit damage worked like hit points and you counted it up. As it went up your crit effects went up. Since Bob starts with 3 points of critical damage the next rat bite puts him at 4 points, bites do rending damage and the rats noms his leg. Rending crit-4 on the leg lops it off. We tried this one for the first fight, it seemed silly. Felt like combat went from padded boffer larp to one-hit-kill very suddenly, and nobody ever went down from critical effects inflicting fatigue. The up side is that promethians and wraiths are really tough under this model, downside being that everyone else generally went down on a hit or two after their HP ran out and the killing effects were functionally half of the crit tables.
Second method was that you tracked crit damage per limb, but still as above. Now a Bob would take a rending crit-1 to the leg if that's where the rat bit him, but if it bit him on the previously wounded arm then that arm is at crit-4 and tears off. We used this version for most of the game but it pushed a few things. Promethians would have been only slightly more resilient than normal folk with limbs tearing off at crit-5 instead of crit-4 and they wouldn't suffer the blood loss & fatigue of the first crit. Two crit-2 hits on the same location basically put anyone else down, either from limb loss or straight out death. This was how our vampire and werewolf died the first times, gnome vamp to two las pistol shots to the leg (2+3=5) and the wolf to two magic missiles to the body (2+2=4 and Con reduction cut warform duration that cut Con again, poor sucker went from Con6 to Con2). It also led to us having two characters switch to bolt pistols and called shots to the head as soon as a tough enemy ran out of hit points, because nearly anything would fall over dead on the second hit and they didn't care about the actual damage. We saw a few more non-killing crit effects, but it made combat move towards called shots on the damaged body part as soon as someone's hit points ran out.
The third way was to keep track of just the crit effects without increasing the severity for multiple hits. Under this one Bob would end up with the impact crit-3 and a rending crit-1 on the arm. While this one gave us more of the lower crit effects and we started seeing fatigue KOs from crits it also obviously broke the promethian's critical damage model and moved wraiths from "I have 2xCon + 3xWill + Comp hit points" to... more of a side-grade than an upgrade or downgrade.
In the end we were never fully satisfied with any of them. The first way felt very 'tap-tap-tap' on the hit points then suddenly switched to extreme chunky salsa effects. Second way was like the first but with one or two actual critical effects to other body locations before death, at least until we caught on to the bolter pistol called shot strategy (which honestly would probably work even better under the first method). The third felt like we were finally seeing more actual wounds than skipping to the gore explosion death animation, but it didn't jive with promethians at all.
So how does everyone do crits?
