In the course of designing a pen and paper RPG (ongoing for a few years now), I have sketched out the following damage scale:
1 A blow capable of temporarily incapacitating; a solid punch to the jaw or floating ribs, a gunshot wound (any location), a solid blow to any limb or the body from a melee weapon; first degree burns; tear gas
2 A blow rendering unconsciousness or blood loss causing unconsciousness; either a gunshot wound to the head (nonfatal) or a solid blow to the head from a melee weapon; strangulation (2 minutes); second degree burns; nonfatal exposure to chemical weapons
3 A fatal blow or blood loss resulting in death; or strangulation (10+ minutes); third degree burns; nerve gas
4 A fatal blow which severs the head or cuts the torso in half; fire or acid which chars the flesh of a corpse leaving no skin or hair
5 Repeated blows or explosives which reduces the body to lumps of flesh; this level of damage could be caused by an enraged mob to a helpless individual over the course of 10 or 15 minutes; fire or acid capable of consuming flesh but not destroying the bone
6 Mincer or grinder which reduces the body to a flesh paste; or in the path of detonation of a shaped charge; fire hot enough to reduces the body to ash or acid to dissolve it to soupy remnants
7 Thermonuclear explosion; chemical processing of body using for example concentrated acid; or specialized equipment capable of evaporating flesh
8 Disassembly by nanoscale machinery; exposure to surface of the sun
9 Disassembly to atomic components; exposure to core of a neutron star
10 Exposure to singularity; exotic methods of reducing to component quarks or strings
Care to guess what the game is about?
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Damage scale
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14 comments:
If it helps any, the typical character will resist damage level 5 to 7.
Your attempting to one up Rifts?
Hm, some superhero stuff going on here? Other then that I was tempted to think about the civil war in the Q Continuum...
Exploration of the afterlife, and this is the "birth" menu?
I would guess this game is about dying, given how low on this chart fatal injury is!
"Marvel" style superheroes (i.e. nobody like Stupidman - errrr, Superman - who has a get out of jail free card)
ZOMBIES!!!
transformers!
Points for everyone who guessed afterlife. Specifically something inspired by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno.
I'd like to develop something with my own IP, and this is one possible direction...
Wow. If I lived in your universe, I think I would very much prefer to opt out of the afterlife. (Or would that in itself be damage scale 11?)
Also, what about an ability that simply and quietly imputes categorical non-existence to matter, including down to its quarks? The most powerful attack imaginable would not be accompanied by a blinding light show and a shower of quarky residue -- it would simply entail whatever unfathomable sentience was capable of such power focusing its terrible attention on the inconvenient entity, and at the moment of effect, the latter would simply no longer have a presence in reality.
With the attention in the higher end of the damage scale to what exactly happens to the recipient's body after death, I was going to guess that many characters in this setting have an ability to recover from even the most violent deaths. Perhaps their disembodied essences cling to the faint remnants of their former bodies. The degree to which their bodies are destroyed should determine how quickly they are able to recover.
...Toon, or Paranoia?
That would be the average range of punishment an average tex avery or paranoia clone would suffer in a 3 minute episode (at least with me as the DM).
Dungeon crawl inside the LHC? ;-)
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