Hey guys, this isn't really a game idea but more of a discussion question.
How do you guys decide how much damage is done in your rtds? You know, stuff like determining when to chop off of a limb, calculating fall damage, and most importantly how to interpret endurance rolls.
As for myself, one of my biggest problems is trying to interpret an endurance roll of 3.
I always err on the side of hurting people! Traumatic amputations for all!
Failing that; just common sense it. It depends a lot on the setting and how much an injury reflects reality. A limb is easy enough to chop off with a good blade and some force, especially if you do it at the joint. Straight through solid bone is harder, especially thick bones like the femur, but doable if you have a good heavy chopping blade, especially if you have the luxury of few good whacks. However, in action movies and kungfu stuff, limbs get severed like crazy. A bullet to the shoulder can be a fatal wound quite easily in real life, while in fiction people often shrug broken rips and bullet wounds off like nothing.
As per interpreting those loathsome middle numbers, I like to think of it like this: On a 5 you're gonna get away with the least injury possible, none if thats even remotely applicable. 4 you get minor injuries. A glancing blow. 3 is partial; you don't take the full thing, but you still take a good hit. 2 is you take the full thing, and 1 is you actually throw yourself into the blow and get hurt even worse.
So for the limb lopping, 5 it just misses you, 4 it gives you a cut, 3 it gives you a deep gash, 2 it hacks straight down into the bone and 1, you try to dodge out of the way and accidentally dodge into the sword strike, increasing the force of the blow and severing the limb entirely.
Yea, I feel the same way about a lot of things. Like, I'm afraid if I try to model guns off of real ones, gun buffs are going to come after me. >.>
@ATHATH also good idea. I might use that as well. Might need to tweak the setting a little to accommodate it, but that's fine.
I've got a book here somewhere...Ah, here it is. The Compendium of contemporary weapons, by palladium, which is designed to be somewhat system agnostic, so if you need info about guns, I've got some specifically setup for this sort of thing. Just change the names.
As per ammo, you could always just do what Atomic Highway does with fuel for cars: Every engagement, roll a dice for each gun user. If they get a 1, then sometime during that engagement, their ammo runs out.
Simple, quick and you get to choose exactly when to fuck em!