Deathwish development has deliberately been on the back burner for a while now, for the simple reason that I’d rather be playing games than designing them right now. I had this damage system sketched out a while ago, though, and I think it’s still pretty cool a few months later. Here we go.
Brief supplemental note: Deathwish uses standard rounding, rather than always rounding down as many games do. This brings averages of two traits up — a Secondary Attribute based on Attributes of 5 and 6 is 6, for example.
Trauma Tolerance: Trauma Tolerance and wound effects will be discussed elsewhere later, but the basic idea is essential to understanding the damage system. A character’s Trauma Tolerance is the average of his Body and Strength and may be modified by traits. So Joe Average with Body 5, Strength 5 has Trauma Tolerance … 5. A boosterganger with Body 3, Strength 9 has Trauma Tolerance 6, and so on. This figure is never directly tested or compared — rather, it sets a character’s wound thresholds.
Wound Thresholds: Every character has four Wound Thresholds: Slight, Moderate, Serious, and Critical. Any injury a character suffers is applied as one of these wounds (and you’ll see how in just a minute) — damage does not accumulate, no “hit points” are lost, and wounds do not “add up” into higher levels.
Slight Wounds are minor injuries, glancing shots, bruises, or flesh wounds that slightly impair a character. These wounds are definitely noticeable and painful, but they’re not a huge deal and will never immediately incapacitate a character.
Moderate Wounds are significant injuries such as deep cuts, gunshot wounds to nonvital areas, and other grisly affairs that will make most characters seriously rethink the life choices that have led them to this point. These wounds impair characters significantly, may immediately incapacitate a character, and can deteriorate over time, but not too quickly. Most characters will call it quits after receiving a mortal wound — this is the kind of thing the military would haul you off the field and give you a hospital bed and a Purple Heart for.
Severe Wounds are serious, life-threatening injuries: bullets that hit major arteries or organs, big explosions, long falls — the kind of high-grade lethality that Deathwish characters inevitably find themselves on both ends of. Serious Wounds usually immediately incapacitate a character, and even characters who remain active are very ineffective. Characters with Serious Wounds will almost certainly die within a few hours if they don’t receive medical treatment.
Critical Wounds are injuries that are not usually survivable: rifle bullets to the brain, huge explosions, high-speed head-on car crashes, and the like. Characters with Critical Wounds are immediately incapacitated and will die in minutes if they are not tended to — and they’ll still probably die later. Particularly extreme Critical Wounds, such as explosive discorporation or decapitation, can result in instant death, but characters (player characters, at least) generally get to chuck a few dice to cheat death.
Wound effects: The incapacitative effects of injury haven’t been worked out yet, but the effect on character actions is quite simple. Each wound level makes all tasks a character attempts one level more difficult than normal — a Moderate Wound gives +2 Difficulty, four Slight Wounds give +4 Difficulty, and so on. Difficulties that reduce target numbers below 1 will be discussed later — but anything that hard is highly unlikely to succeed, to say the least.
Wound Thresholds: Okay, great, but how do you figure out what kind of wound an attack does? It’s a little like the base mechanic.
- The Slight Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance / 4
- The Moderate Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance / 2
- The Serious Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance
- The Critical Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance * 2
So, an average guy with Trauma Tolerance 5 has Slight/Moderate/Serious/Critical 1/3/5/10.
Attacks and injuries do Damage expressed as a number. The Damage Value is compared to the target’s Wound Thresholds, and the highest threshold it exceeds is the level of wound the character takes. So, for our average guy, 1- and 2-point wounds are Slight, 3- and 4-point wounds are Moderate, 5-9-point wounds are Serious, and anything higher is Critical. Note the large gap between Serious and Critical Wounds — it’s hard to kill someone instantly without a big, big weapon (which we’re just about to see, I promise). Note also that Trauma Tolerance of 6-9 gives a Slight Wound Threshold of 2 – which means 1-point wounds don’t do any damage. The Slight Wound Threshold is 3 for Trauma Tolerance 10+ characters, but let’s not worry about that madness right now.
Attack Mechanics: Attacks, including weapons, have two stats: Penetration and Lethality.
- Penetration represents the attack’s ability to pass through materials, including cover and characters’ bodies.
- Lethality represents how destructive and injuring the attack is once penetrating.
These values vary all over the place, depending on the type of attack, but higher is better for both.
Doing Damage (The Good Part): Rolling damage works unlike any mechanic I’ve ever seen, in this game or any other. It’s a compound roll built from the core mechanic (as everything in a tightly designed game should).
To roll damage against a character who’s been hit, start with a number of d10s equal to the attack’s Penetration. Lose 1 die for each point of Armor (including Cover) the character has on the struck location. Roll the remaining dice against a target number equal to the attack’s Lethality. Add up the Values of any Successes to get the Damage Value, and figure the wound the character takes from there.
Dice that exceed the Lethality are Failures and so do no damage — it’s entirely possible to hit and do no damage, even with high-powered weapons. Sometimes the bullets just go right through! Note also that armor protection is mostly invariant — it stops cold anything with an equal or lower Penetration, and it reduces dice, not damage.
That mechanic’s probably really vague without some weapon examples to see what this means.
Weapons Table
WEAPON PENETRATION LETHALITY AVERAGE DAMAGE
Unarmed attack 1 (Strength) 1.5 (Str 5)
Pistols and submachine guns
Glock 18 (9mm) 2 4 2
Glock 20 (10mm) 2 6 4.2
M1911 (.45 ACP) 2 5 3
Five-seveN (5.7mm) 4 2 1.2
MP7 (4.6mm) 4 2 1.2
S&W 500 (S&W .500) 2 8 7.2
Rifles and machine guns
M16 (5.56mm) 3 6 6.3
AKM (7.62*39mm) 4 5 6
AK-74 (5.45*39mm) 5 4 5
M468 (6.8mm) 4 6 8.4
FN MAG (7.62*51mm) 4 7 11.2
M2HB (.50 BMG) 7 8 25.2 (!)
As you can see, Lethality counts for a lot in those average damage figures – an unarmored person will take more damage from a punch than a Five-seveN! Penetration is a bigger deal than just looking at the table makes it seem, though, because the damage curves change drastically as dice are lost to Armor and Cover – and smart combatants will use as much of both as they can. (For reference, light ballistic vests are Armor 1, military/SWAT vests are Armor 2, and armor with trauma plates (e.g. Interceptor Body Armor) is Armor 3.) That Five-seveN is a lot better for shooting someone with Armor 2 (at least compared to the other handguns – you still won’t do very much damage.)
The way damage is rolled means that any attack, no matter how powerful, can end up doing no damage and that low-Lethality weapons (most handguns, for example) tend to do only incidental damage. This is very much intentional, and there are a few ways to get around it (more on that later).
I’d like to post some examples of the probabilities of inflicting different wound levels on an average character with different weapons, but I’ll need to go write a computer program first. One interesting metric is the chance that a weapon will do 0 damage – a 5.7mm has a 41% chance, a 9mm has a 36% chance, an M16 has a 6.4% chance, an AKM has a 6.25% chance, and a .50-cal has only a 0.01% chance.
Modifying Penetration and Lethality: I haven’t done any real design work on this, but there are two major ways to change a weapon’s Penetration and Lethality: ammunition and hit location. Ammunition can modify either trait in either direction, e.g. hollow-points reduce Penetration and raise Lethality, while armor-piercing rounds do the opposite, in addition to any other effects it has. Hit location directly modifies Lethality – torso hits are resolved at the weapon’s base Lethality, but limb hits reduce it and head and vitals hits raise it. A +2 Lethality bonus (the figure I’ve been eyeballing – and, so far, my eyeballed numbers have been pretty much right on) makes handgun wounds pretty serious. Lethality can’t be lowered below 2 or raised above 8 for any reason.
