Thread: Damage Revisited

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

In BRP as in RQ before it, the biggest factor for damage is the weapon being used, rather than the skill in placing the attack. In BRP, a guy with a 50% skill using a rifle that does 3D6 is a greater threat than a guy with 100% skill using a weapon that does 1D6 damage. Skill does not translate well into damage in BRP. Yes there are specials and crticals, but they do not come close to weapon damage rolls.

One way to handle this is to double the chance of incurring a Special Success with a weapon. It would only be simple during a session if you amend your own success table accordingly, as not to slow down actual gameplay with mathematics. It may not be the most accurate way to handle things, but I think it could be a reasonably simple fix and doesn't break the system, I'ld advise against actually changing the damage values too much to save on grief down the track.

Originally Posted by deleriad

Although it seems oddly pedantic, it is hard to know what represents a "graze" in BRP. Is a graze a 'near miss' that does effectively no damage but maybe leaves a cut or a bit of a burn? In that case it is a failed attack. On the other hand, if a graze is defined as 1 HP of damage then the majority or weapons and anyone with a damage bonus, can't actually cause a graze. Personally, I tend to think of grazes as 'near misses' i.e. inconsequential damage. I think of any HP damage as significant.

1 point of damage is very significant. On average it represents about 1/11 of the ability of the character to take damage. That means that 11 single point hits will kill most characters! In the real world, a single point hit would probably hurt like hell, enough to temporarily distract a person from what they were doing if they were not used to dealing with notable pain. Even if you are using the heroic hit point option, it is still a significant amount of damage.

Like you, I've always considered a graze as an attack that just barely missed. Thus, if the dude with the .50 cal misses by 2 percentiles, then the target felt the round pass, if the miss it by 1 percentile, then it probably penetrated their clothes and perhaps left a scratch or burn as it passed if they were wearing no ballistic armor.

I would consider a graze by a dagger or other weapon to be the same. A miss by the attacker, but just barely. I would consider grazes and whatnot to also be inflicted when the attacker is pulling their blow to perhaps annoy or subdue.

Personally I'm all for losing +/-'s from damage rolls. I'm old enough that when faced with a weapon doing 2D6+2, a 1D4 damage bonus and +2 damage from a spell that I start to lose the will to live when asked to roll damage.

It would work, but then we would have to find another way to differentiate between weapons, some very powerful compared to the baseline, with a finite number of die types. I'm not really one that likes rolling tons of dice.

And, honestly, while skill should help determine how well an attack is placed, even a master can be thrown off by angle, etc, in dealing a definitive blow. Perhaps certain weapons should have more impact in Special and Critical situations, masters being able to hit these thresholds more often.

SDLeary

Originally Posted by d_ns

So, every game I run into anymore, I find myself asking this question when it comes to weapon damage (or other damage rolls, honestly) - why are there ever situations where it is impossible to only do a single point of damage?

Well, someone who is weak and small could have a negative damage bonus, so that could reduce damage to 1 point.

Also, weapons in BRP and RQ in general are assumed to be sharpened metal. Wooden equivalents would not get the +1 damage. A fire-hardened spear, for example, does 1D6 damage.

Originally Posted by d_ns

This sort of thing makes players happy - I have a higher guaranteed damage factor - but it makes me a little twitchy as a "realistic" gamer who wonders "what ever happened to grazes, or flesh wounds?" - I don't care how strong you are with that spear, if you only manage to score me along my fleshy belly with the point of that spear, I shouldn't take as much damage as an average hit from a sword cane or worse, a .22 pistol!

If it makes you that unhappy, just change the damage dice. So, 1D4+2 becomes 1D6, 2D6 becomes 1D12 and so on. Drop all +1s and use 1D12, 1D18, 1D24 and so on for large damage bonuses. It still doesn't help with the giant with a Naginata doing more than 1 point of damage, but this way he would do 1D14 + 1D12, so would do 2 damage as a minimum rather than 6.

Originally Posted by soltakss

If it makes you that unhappy, just change the damage dice. So, 1D4+2 becomes 1D6, 2D6 becomes 1D12 and so on. Drop all +1s and use 1D12, 1D18, 1D24 and so on for large damage bonuses. It still doesn't help with the giant with a Naginata doing more than 1 point of damage, but this way he would do 1D14 + 1D12, so would do 2 damage as a minimum rather than 6.

If I'm going that route, I'm going balls out, and that giant is going to do a d26 damage. Or maybe I'd start looking at it differently and deal with multiple dice with minuses, to keep the 1 minimum value, but also keep the curve.

So while a 1d4+2 can become 1d6 easily enough, 2d6+2 (3-14) becomes 2d6+1d4-2 (1-14) maybe.

Originally Posted by Link6746

What I plan on doing is making the skill roll's success level affect the amount of damage done. So basically higher and lower success levels than "normal" would give +/- to damage equal to success levels above or below the norm.

That's already factored in there. The special and critical success rules up the damage for such hits. For instance a implae does dobule damage, and a crtical can ingore armor or do max (depending on which set of rules you are using).

The thing is, since crits and specials don't occu that often (less than 20% of the time, for success chances below 100%) they don't mean as much as the weapon damage die.

One way to do it would be a "6 step system"
You have 6 damage dice: 1d2, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12
If damage exceeds 1d12 you simply add the next dice step so it becomes 1d12+1d2, 1d12+1d4 and so on.

1D6+1 would be 1D8 in this system. Damage bonuses/penalties would step the damage dice up or down as appropriate. Atg's armour system presumably works similarly, stepping damage up or down rather than subtracting from damage done.

If you want to you can say that any result that rolls all 1's only counts as 1 point of damage.

That would probably work best with locational hit points as that tends to be the most lethal flavour of BRP.

It is roughly the system I use in my very lite CoC variant I use for running coC with non-rpgers.

In the shower, where I do all my best thinking, I realized why I have issues with the armor reducing damage classes idea - it means that light armor can't ever protect you from taking damage from a heavier weapon. 2 point leather would make a d10 weapon into a d6 weapon, say, meaning that you're taking damage, where if you had 2 point leather on versus a d10 roll, you'd have a 20% chance of avoiding damage altogether.

Not sure which is closer to realistic, but it feels wrong to say that your leather can't ever protect you from damage from a larger weapon, even close blows.

Originally Posted by d_ns

In the shower, where I do all my best thinking, I realized why I have issues with the armor reducing damage classes idea - it means that light armor can't ever protect you from taking damage from a heavier weapon. 2 point leather would make a d10 weapon into a d6 weapon, say, meaning that you're taking damage, where if you had 2 point leather on versus a d10 roll, you'd have a 20% chance of avoiding damage altogether.

Not sure which is closer to realistic, but it feels wrong to say that your leather can't ever protect you from damage from a larger weapon, even close blows.

d10-2: 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8 - average 3.6 median 3.5
d6: 1 2 3 4 5 6 - average 3.5, median 3.5
The difference is fewer extreme results so your leather armour prevents you from ever taking 7 or 8 points of damage. Say you have a 5 HP head then would you rather have a 40% chance of being knocked out by a single blow or a 33% chance?

I'm not sure there is a 'realism' element here. Reducing damage steps means that armour tends to "muffle" the impact but rarely fully negates it.

Originally Posted by deleriad

Reducing damage steps means that armour tends to "muffle" the impact but rarely fully negates it.

But you can have each step be dX-1: d2-1, d3-1, d4-1 etc.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

That's already factored in there. The special and critical success rules up the damage for such hits. For instance a implae does dobule damage, and a crtical can ingore armor or do max (depending on which set of rules you are using).

The thing is, since crits and specials don't occu that often (less than 20% of the time, for success chances below 100%) they don't mean as much as the weapon damage die.

Sorry, was in a fog when I wrote that and was thinking about someone's optional rule that adds more success levels than just 2 types of success and failure.