princelian
SOC-12
I've been following the "How Deadly Is T20?" thread and the various combat house rules threads, and it got me to thinking - which is, in and of itself, sometimes a dangerous thing.
I like the game mechanic of die reduction followed by damage reduction for armor. It means that someone in modern armor being shot with modern weapons has a fair-to-good chance of not dying on a single shot; this mirrors real life, and everything's okay.
Until you get a critical hit, that is. For many weapons, even on single fire, a critical means "generate a new character." Autofire (for increased damage) will nearly guarantee a visit to the Prior History section of the rulebook. And while the Prior History system is another favorite part of T20 for me, I don't want to spend all my time there.
My proposal is that critical hits should be something exceptional (especially when accomplished by the PCs) and still something to dread (when accomplished by the NPCs) but shouldn't be QUITE so awful as they are in the rules as written (RaW).
How to do this? Critical hits do their normal multiple for Stamina damage. That doesn't change, and represents the high degree of shock one might feel upon being lasered in the head. This could kill you outright anyhow (6d20 x 2 is going to be a lot of Stamina even for a mid-to-high-level Barbarian), but is more likely to knock you out.
For Lifeblood, however, a critical hit leaves one more die per multiplier during armor reduction. What's that mean, exactly? Here's three examples:
Weapon A is a 20/x2 critical weapon, meaning it threatens on a natural 20 and does double damage. It does 2d8 damage. On a normal hit against AR 4 armor, it will reduce the dice to 1d8 (the highest) and the remaining AR will reduce the damage by 3. On a critical hit, however, the die reduction is reduced by 1 (because the extra damage is 1x) and it will do 2d8 and reduce the damage by 4.
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Some weapons, under this system, remain pretty horrific, such as an FGMP-14, for example. You don't want to be hit by one of those, but you certainly don't want to be critically hit by one of those - 2d20 is a bad number to be facing....
I like the game mechanic of die reduction followed by damage reduction for armor. It means that someone in modern armor being shot with modern weapons has a fair-to-good chance of not dying on a single shot; this mirrors real life, and everything's okay.
Until you get a critical hit, that is. For many weapons, even on single fire, a critical means "generate a new character." Autofire (for increased damage) will nearly guarantee a visit to the Prior History section of the rulebook. And while the Prior History system is another favorite part of T20 for me, I don't want to spend all my time there.
My proposal is that critical hits should be something exceptional (especially when accomplished by the PCs) and still something to dread (when accomplished by the NPCs) but shouldn't be QUITE so awful as they are in the rules as written (RaW).
How to do this? Critical hits do their normal multiple for Stamina damage. That doesn't change, and represents the high degree of shock one might feel upon being lasered in the head. This could kill you outright anyhow (6d20 x 2 is going to be a lot of Stamina even for a mid-to-high-level Barbarian), but is more likely to knock you out.
For Lifeblood, however, a critical hit leaves one more die per multiplier during armor reduction. What's that mean, exactly? Here's three examples:
Weapon A is a 20/x2 critical weapon, meaning it threatens on a natural 20 and does double damage. It does 2d8 damage. On a normal hit against AR 4 armor, it will reduce the dice to 1d8 (the highest) and the remaining AR will reduce the damage by 3. On a critical hit, however, the die reduction is reduced by 1 (because the extra damage is 1x) and it will do 2d8 and reduce the damage by 4.
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- Under the normal system, Weapon A does 4d8 on a critical hit ignoring armor, which is pretty much dead (mean 18 Lifeblood).</font>
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- Under the normal system, Weapon B would do 6d10 with no armor, mean 33 points of Lifeblood.</font>
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- Under the normal system, this hit is 9d12 no armor, and vaporizes even those big rhino things (mean 58.5 Lifeblood).</font>
Some weapons, under this system, remain pretty horrific, such as an FGMP-14, for example. You don't want to be hit by one of those, but you certainly don't want to be critically hit by one of those - 2d20 is a bad number to be facing....