Just wanted to run this by folks. Maybe get some constructive input.

One of my players and I have been talking about the condition monitor, and we never really liked how an average human who is one box away from incapacitated suffers less of a dice modifier (-2) than a big tough troll who is one box away from incapacitate (-5 dice).

So, that being said, we came up with idea of blacking out the unused boxes on the condition monitor vertically instead of horizontally. Starting the blackout at the bottom right corner and going up until you hit the top, then going up from the centre bottom. However, when you are taking damage, you are still marking horizontally from the top left. (did I make sense?)

Anyway, just looking for input.

Perhaps in more simple terms... -1 for every (Track Length/3, rounded up) boxes?

kinda hard to follow. how would that change things? sounds like you are doing the same thing. how does the troll have 16 hit boxes? is he an adept? I agree with the first part though. something should be done.

I think the system as is makes perfect sense. The troll can push through the injury and keep going, despite being impaired, while the comparatively fragile human passes out.

A troll with max Body can manage 15 boxes which is -5 dice.

Wouldn't it be easier to have the troll metavariant and similarly significantly larger than human types (like sasquatch, centaur, dragons, etc.) base off every 4th box instead of every 3rd on the physical damage track?

Or how about (Max natural Body/6)*3 as the number of damage boxes between penalty increases.

So Trolls would take roughly twice the number of boxes to receive the same penalty as a Human.

If I understand you properly, you're saying that a character takes a -1 dice pool modifier every 3 boxes only up to a certain point, after which it's an additional -1 every two boxes. If that's the case, then yeah, I can see that working okay. It'll mean higher wound penalties over all, but not so much it's unplayable. It's solid.

So, instead of:
Left to Right -->
[x] [x] [x] -1
[x] [ ] [ ] -2
[ ] [ ] [ ] -3
[ ] [ ] [ ] -4
[ ] [ ] [ ] -5
[ ] Dead

You want:
Top Down
l
v

[x] [x] [ ] [ ]
[x] [ ] [ ]
[x] [ ] [ ]
[x] [ ] [ ]
[x] [ ] [ ]
-1 -2 -3

So, it would take 5 boxes of damage to fill the -1 track instead of 3 boxes?

I think it was more:

[x] [x] [x] [x] -1
[x] [x] [ ] -2
[ ] [ ] [ ] -3
[ ] [ ] [ ] -4
[ ] [ ] [ ] Dead

Nope.

Example: body of 6, giving 11 boxes (using a # symbol to fill the unavailable boxes).
[ ] [ ] [#] -1
[ ] [ ] [#] -2
[ ] [ ] [#] -3
[ ] [ ] [#] -4
[ ] [ ] [#] -5
[ ] [#] [#] -6

Same character then takes 5 boxes of damage (symbolized by an x)
[x] [x] [#] -1
[x] [x] [#] -2
[x] [ ] [#] -3
[ ] [ ] [#] -4
[ ] [ ] [#] -5
[ ] [#] [#] -6

Basically it means that EVERYONE will be at a -5/-6 before passing out, regardless of how many actual boxes they can take.
(Exception: the full cyber troll tank, which has 19+ boxes; and I'm OK with this relative to the base idea)

Exactly!

just like all of the older SR versions that had everyone suffering a +3 Target Modifier before passing out.

Which, unfortunately, produces the death spiral effect - which is neither realistic, nor fun for most people. But if it's what works for your group, great!

how is it not realistic? What they do now is not realistic, IMO.

Various studies have been conducted to see if that sort of performance degradation occurs - I can't remember the methodology offhand, but the conclusion in aggregate is that it does not. Adrenaline is one hell of a drug.

Hell, I remember reading about one case where a guy tried to punch someone with the hand that had been severed moments prior.

Wow. That must have sucked for all involved. Depending on how much follow-through he put into it, he might have stabbed the guy with his arm-bone.



Conclusion: Get rid of impairment for damage taken. Let people fight on through the end, and make subdueing someone more about inflicting temporary inability to function despite the adrenaline - such as beating them so badly their muscles won't work, tazing them to prevent them from controlling their body, manually restraining them in a grapple - and then affixing restraints, rather than just about inflicting nebulous "stun" damage.


I might propose making the difference between "dead" and "alive but unconscious" a matter of how hard you got hit when your last health box was filled in, similar to the Star Wars Saga Edition's damage threshold. If you suffer the beat-down of a thousand blows with a billy club, you'll wake up feeling like hell, but you will wake up. If you take a full burst from a machine gun, you probably won't, barring incredible amounts of armor or magic or the Hand of God.

And spells to stun people should still work, of course. They'd simply do the same as a spell to kill, but be unable to kill. The drain code on them should probably be a little higher, though, to discourage stun combat followed by a quick knife between the ribs being the optimal combat strategy.

I want to look up the rules that Albedo: Platinum Catalyst used again, sort of like what you describe, though not quite.

I vaguely recall it being (effectively) a willpower check every time you took damage to stay conscious. There weren't any real penalties from damage,* except that each time you rolled to stay conscious it got harder.

*Tops it was like -1 to a d20 for every wound. Compared to Shadowrun, pretty negligible.

I still like dual "Stun/Wound" damage tracks in gaming. Not like SR does it - Stun as an abstract combo of luck and toughness, and Wounds representing actual 'life'.

Most damage comes off Stun, representing stuff like minor cuts and bruises, near misses, battle fatigue, etc. Things that you can mostly shrug off or has minor impact on your functioning. Wound damage represents significant lethal effects, usually crippling in some way. Most damage affects your Stun track. Run out of stun and you start taking lethal Wound damage. Some effects can inflict Wound damage directly, like critical hits or being struck while incapacitated.


-k

KarmaInferno, we've had that. It was in the Star Wars RPG, the Revised Core Rulebook edition, and it divided your health into "Wounds" and "Fatigue." Fatigue was just what you suggest, and critical hits went straight to Wounds.

The problem with that was that it leads to critical hits being grossly overpowering. This is the origin of one of my first Star Wars stories of awesomeness, but it's much less awesome when it happens the other way 'round and the players are on the receiving end.

Other than the luck side of your description (which is embodied in the Edge attribute), it sounds exactly like SR to me.

Can you please direct me to these studies?

Unfortunately it's been a number of years since I've read the material and I don't have it directly on hand; I did a little bit of searching but I just can't seem to find it in the plethora of results I've been getting and can't find a suitable way to narrow it down.

Though, if I recall correctly, it's not that there's zero performance degradation due to injury, it's just that there's not some massive amount of it as would be represented by the penalties going up as high as you've got them going.

Then why should a high-body troll suffer such a massive penalty then?

Well, by the time that Massive Troll is suffering those [higher] penalties (a 1 or 2 point higher penalty is still not MASSIVE, in my opinion), the human is already bleeding out or dead. *shrug*