RE: (TFT) Weapons and damage

["George Dew" <gdew@ResponseNetworking.com>]

OK,

I hope I'm understanding this correctly...

I VERY MUCH agree that damage is to an enormous extent, "hit placement."

If most soldiers are taught to shoot "center mass," then there is a market
advantage to combatents who are instead taught to make "head shots." Center
mass may or may not put the target down, but a "head shot" certainly will.

Perhaps another way to handle this would be the "Option Critical Hit."

That is, for each additional die that you put into your "to hit" roll, you
do an additional die of damate?














 

-----Original Message-----
From: tft-admin@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-admin@brainiac.com] On Behalf Of
Jay Carlisle
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 16:42
To: tft@brainiac.com
Subject: (TFT) Weapons and damage

> Now here's a question that I've been wanting to throw out there for a 
> while, but just haven't gotten to.
>
> Technically, it can be argued that a firearm (say shotgun for example) 
> would do a lot more damage than a battleaxe (3D6). I've know people 
> who've gotten shot and unlike the movies, firearm injuries are a LOT 
> worse than they seem, and almost always life-long injuries, if the 
> victim survives.
>
> So do you approach it from the point of view that say, "a shotgun does 
> more damage than a battleaxe and hence does 4D6," or rather, "either 
> weapon will basically wipe out a normal person" so they both do 3D6?
>
> I guess what I'm asking is: Do you go the technical route, or the "net 
> effect" route?
>
>
>

Okay, I really went off the deep end here.
Come on in... the waters FINE!

A battle axe is a tool that modifies the force a Figure uses to weild it.
The energy that causes damage comes from the Figure that swings the tool.

The shotgun is diffrent.
The energy comes from the chemical reaction in the powder.
The energy supplied by the Figure is that required to pull a trigger.

This 'steady-state' situation provides a very important advantage in combat
that TFT misses.

Joe Elf @ ST 11 (Long Bow), DX 12 (adj 15), IQ 9 (Missle Weapons) Joe Dwarf
@ ST 15 (Heavy Crossbow), DX 9, IQ 8 Who gets the first shot?
IMO I can point and pull a trigger significantly faster than I could point
and draw a longbow.
If Joe Dwarf hits, the 10.5 points of average damage says Joe Elf is one and
done.
I feel that this is a case of DX 9 goes before DX 15

Of course, there's that 10.5 points of damage thing.

What does 3d6 damage actually represent from a "shared imagination" 
viewpoint?

I "visualise" it as a kind of 'hit locations' thing where 3 pts dam is a
clip of the wing while 18 pts dam is a "shot through the heart, and your too
late..." kinda deal.

It obviously can't be that sometimes the x-bow throws bolts 3 pts of dam
hard and other times it throws them 18 pts hard.

So I started thinking, (smell the smoke?) what matters about "damage" is
where you hit and how hard.
It's kind of interesting to me that Mr. T recently brought up head shots.
Quite awhile back, when I was first playing around with writting all
equipment on index cards and useing a kind of solitare type system for
manipulating all items, I got intrested in the problems of relative sizes
and how that all applied to equipment.
In looking at ways to represent these diffrences in an intresting and
playable fassion I dreged up some minuita from "my dad got his degrees in
fine art" past and recalled how renaissance artists handled proportion.
They used the human head as a refrence for the human Figure for example.
The "clasical" human Figures height is 8 times the height of it's head.
Like so.
The soles of your feet to the middle of your shins is a head.
The middle of your shins to your knees is a head.
Your knees to the middle of your thighs is a head.
The middle of your thighs to your crotch (another important target) is a
head.
Your crotch to your navel is a head.
Your navel to your nipples is a head. It's also the same height as the
distance across a 1.3m hex.
Your nipples to your chin is a head.
And, of course, your chin to the top of your head is, in fact, about 1 head.
Yes, 8 heads DO fit in a duffelbag.

Now it turns out that your head is about 3 of your palms high.

I use a Scale hex to do things like focus exactally where in a hex something
is, and to describe items and features of creatures or places that are
really odd shaped or otherwise would assist the shared visual with a model
or sketch.
The Scale hex is 4" from side to side n/s by 5" from vertice to vertice e/w
on 1/4" graph but still represents a 1.3m hex sts.
Each 1/4" square at this scale is about 3.25" in length across which is
pretty close to the width across your palm.

I note here that one of the first things a person does with an injury is to
cover it with a hand.

So I can box out your Figure with heads or palms.

Then I have a copy of Gray.

Okay... how much info is out there about the force it takes to hurt someone.
WOW! We ain't in the 70's no more when it comes to info access huh?
Not only can I box your figure out in body-relative units, I can also give a
pretty good idea of what's contained in the unit as far as organs and such.
The formula that a hangman uses to determine the length of a rope needed to
break a neck says that 1260 pounds of force does the trick.
I can break the strongest bone in the body (Tibia, not femur) with that
force as well.
Balistics gel has provided some intresting info on flesh, and I can even put
blood on the floor if you want as the heart rate needed to pump blood
through the body is DIRECTLY related to fatigue, which is what ST is really
for.
Tired leads to injury.

Another neat aspect is that enginering stuff uses force to describe building
standards, so I know how many pounds of force it takes to stress or break
wood or structual steal, etc.

So let's step this up a notch.

Force 10 From Navarone is on AMC as I type this and the Panzers have just
opened up.
Your on the other side of the bridge and here comes a shell straight on your
location.
10d6 damage takes Joe Elf outta the fight w/o a chance.
Fair enough I guess, but this kindda thing suggests to me that "saveing
throws" may not be such a bad idea after all...

First Aid stops the bleeding and treats the shock.
If that blade got into your liver then it's gonna take surgery to treat ya. 
The First Aid might lengthen the time to put you under the knife, but that's
all.

Of course, who want's to have their Figure triaged?
Get TOO real with it and it's no fun, but I like that my Physickers are
picking up First Aid principals.
If I can teach 'em how to kill, I can teach 'em how to heal too huh?

"choke me in the shallow water, before I get too deep..."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I try to use technical data to
produce a net effect.

As a Game Master I cheat like hell.
I am always trying to give my players "movie moments".
I do NOT force these moments by scripting them, rather I let the players
Actions determine the situations that generate these moments.
I strive to make the gameworld plyant to the players Actions.

When a player realises that they can actually build a sha-ken factory in
Hobbit Town provided they have access to iron ah-la Civilization style city
squares (1 1/4" square on graph paper = 1 square mile, but I don't force the
21 square fat-cross of Civ but rather use worker travel times to figure the
areas that a city can develop.) then the movie moments seem to kick in more
frequently via the players own Actions. I already stated what I'd do if the
Hobbits tried to get sha-ken and I'm the GM responsable for many of the
power structures threatend by such a move.
On the Civ scale that's a threatend city, although, rather than raze the
whole of Hobbit Town I might decide to use a more surgical strike all War
Craft/ TA style and just send a force to take out the factory... ergo
removing the item sha-ken from most sources likely to supply a Hobbit i.e. 
no sha-ken on the weapons list in Hobbit Town.


Give a player a kingdom and you've got an assistant GM.

Your gameworld and my gameworld are two diffrent points in the number of the
beast.

GREAT story about the boomerang tree by the by! 

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