Wounds and more.

From: Nick Hollingsworth <nick.hollingsworth_at_...>
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 18:25:37 +0100


Jeff:
> You are wounded. I just consider it that way...
> If a player insisted, I'd simply put a pair of little boxes on
> the character sheet. One will record the number of wounds
> the hero has taken and the other will record whether or not
> they were critially injured....

This makes it sound as if all wounds are the same. I assumed that a wound from a social skill would cause social problems, a wound from a physical skill physical problems and so on. Further I expected that I would assign a different effect to many wounds, depending on how many are going to get inflicted during the game, just because they are an excuse for a bit of amusement at the players expense.

Frex the effect of the social wound I applied to the humakti was completely made up and was twice as bad when the bloodline that cowed him were around because he was so upset by being humiliated in front of them. This could have prompted attempts by the players to get that bloodline excluded from the court case that followed in order to free up the humakti to help them. The more you use bare numbers in a game the more it becomes a bare numbers game for the players.
There is a balance to be had between simplicity for speed and variation to seed interesting reaction. The old fumble tables for example were such variation, and they added a lot of flavour. In retrospect their flaw was that they were specific to combat. Once I have ingested HW as she is wrote I want to consider generic criticals, fumbles and wounds since they seem three good places to insert some variation in effect.
Secondly I want to consider generic rules for countering enemy edges, like the shield break being discussed on the list. But in a way that does not describe the context of the conflict.
Any GM who does not tinker un-necessarily and prematurely with a game lacks spirit.

Cheers
Nick Hollingsworth
Birmingham - the land of the free and the home of the brave

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