Whether damage in your game is deducted from stats or a pool of HP, the question is always "how much does it hurt?". Herein, some ideas.
Damage from hits
1d3: Fists, etc.
1d4: Improvised
weapons, blades that are smaller than a forearm, small
missiles.
1d6: Medium weapons (hand axes, maces,
machetes), arrows.
1d8: Larger weapons (spears, swords).
1d10 or more: Large heavy objects.
Damage from creatures depends on their mass.
Damage from creatures depends on their mass.
Damage from falling
1d6-3: From standing.
1d6: From a 5' height.
2d6: From a 10' height.
+1d6 For every additional 10' or fraction thereof.
Mental Damage
Stress, sanity loss etc can be reflected as damage to the mental stats (Intelligence, Wisdom, Willpower, Charisma etcetera) if your game does not have a specific sanity subsystem.
Magical Damage
Spells that deal straight hitpoint damage are mechanically powerful, but boring. Magic feels much more like Magic when it's unexpected. You can tweak your game to reflect this by making damage spells drain stats instead on statted characters, or drain mental, physical or mystical abilities on characters or non-statted creatures.
Making Damage specific
We abstract damage because it speeds things up, but it doesn't do much to encourage roleplaying the pain. A good table will work around this, but providing some hooks to get this rolling can't hurt (see what I did there?). Whenever a high number is rolled on damage from anything; or a character suffers a fumble or critical hit, lingering consequences will make these things actually matter. In other words, serious damage should make characters more flawed (= interesting) over time.
Battle wounds (1d6)
1 Limb disabled (1d4)
2 Damaged teeth or tongue impede speech
3 Horrible scars make the character less charming, but fearsome in turn
4 Dazed: dizziness, poor judgement, memory lapses, prone to reveal secrets
5 Serious bleeding: extra damage over time, enough to kill character if wound is not tended
6 Paranoia: the fight may be over, but not in the character's mind. Fear, mistrust, flashbacks and other erratic behavior.
One could get more specific: a limp, missing fingers, losing hearing or an eye, becoming irrationally hateful, hot-headed or melancholy... the list could go on. Make your own longer list: the party may hate you for this, but the players might not.
Ouch, 1d4 fall damage from "standing to uneven surface" sounds a bit harsh (I'd go with 1d6-3 regardless of surface?)... But otherwise, good benchmarks!
ReplyDeleteI had originally gone with 1d3 for that case. Hmmm... maybe I should just go with your suggestion for the sake of simplicity.
Delete1d4 damage for daggers has always seemed underpowered to me. I always buff it to 1d6. The idea that getting stabbed in the guts, the liver or lungs with even a 4" bit of steel merits just 1d4 damage seems to me to be letting everyone off too easily (players as well as opponents).
ReplyDeleteYour idea certainly has merit. Myfarog (where I took ideas from for the falling damage progression), in the vein of its overall over-the-top granularity, has 1 for unarmed, 1d3 for a hunting knife or club, 1d4 for a staff, 1d5 for a dagger, 1d6 for a small slashing sword, and so on all the way to 1d12 for a woodsman's axe or dane axe, ~1d8 being the median. I contemplated making small blades 1d5 but erred on the side of tradition. I think it still generally works for OSR when you consider how low median hitpoints can get, and the fact that even though a single small stab wound can kill you quick if left untended, disabling somebody high on adrenaline can very well take several stabs. Either way I prefer to err on the side of abstraction when playing DnD-likes (though not so much that _everything_ deals 1d6)
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