alternative wounding rules

From: kaledan2001 <kaledan2001_at_...>
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 15:34:05 -0000

I've never really been happy with the rules for taking and giving wounds in the middle of extended contests (i.e. trade 7AP for a -1). They seem arbitrary, fiddly, don't scale well with pc power, don't seem to correspond to any kind of narrative description of being wounded, and don't seem to match the rest of the system. If you want a character with a magic sword, you write 'magic sword 17' on the char sheet, an immortal character, you write 'immortal 17', one with a fatal disease, you write 'terminal disease 17', why should wounds be treated any differently?

So I've been toying with the idea of using the following rules variant:

If you want to explicitly injure an opponent (instead of the default playing to win and not caring too much either way about whether the opponent gets hurt in the process), you describe action and stake APs as normal. As always, the AP bid must be appropriate to the action, and so could be as low as 1AP for firing an arrow up to 40AP to leap onto the head of a dinosaur and plunge your sword into its eye.

If you lose, you take the normal result from the extended contest table. If you win, opponent gains a new ability, at value X/2, X, 2X or 3X, depending on level of victory.

The name of the ability (it would be a flaw if HQ still had flaws) is usually 'Wounded', but could
be 'stunned', 'poisoned', 'crippled', 'shamed', 'ensnared', 'demoralis ed', 'terrified', 'mindblasted', etc.

The value of X is taken from some ability other than the one used in the contest, typically 'strong', 'magic sword', 'terrible claws', 'venomed stinger', the rating of an affinity containing a feat, etc.

This new ability then works exactly like any other. Typically, it will be a negative augment (giving a -1 or -2 to any action it is applicable to, similarly to the normal wounding rules).

However, it can also be the opposing factor to an action. If you are 'mindblasted 10W' and tried to cast a simple spell, then you would be opposed by the 10W instead of the usual 14. If you are 'befuddled 17', you may need to oppose that with some 'hate' or 'loyalty' ability to recognise friend from foe before you can get back to using your sword combat. If you are badly wounded, simply walking could be a major struggle.

Stacking wounds use the augment rules, smaller wound augments the larger, so wounded 17 on top of wounded 1W is wounded 3w.

The healing rules effectively disappear, replaced by the normal simple contest rules, taking into account whther the healing and/or the wound is magical.

To me, this seems to match the way wounds (and some spells) work in stories much better than the default rules. Wounds are either an irrelavance to be shrugged off or a major narrative issue, rather than a uniformly increasing penalty. A hero trapped by ensnaring roots summoned by an evil sorceror must find some way of dealing with the roots instead of simply marking off some AP and carrying on hitting bad guy with their big sword.

But what does everyone else think? Overpowered? Has RQ cooties? Suffers from arrogant imperialist cultural assumptions?

soru