Health deterioration, House rule idea Options

[Tanegar]

The moral of this story: do the math on any proposed house rules.

[Draco18s]

The moral of this story: do the math on any proposed house rules.

Correct.

It might work out OK for the average human who's already been healed by a good medic and a good mage (4 dice, 1 TH) but not for the street sam troll who's got stacking wounds and can't be healed further and has low edge (2 dice, 3 TH).

[Yerameyahu]

Ah, thanks. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I was trying to figure out what rules you were talking about.

[Draco18s]

Ah, thanks. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I was trying to figure out what rules you were talking about.

I started by making an offhand comment about the OP; should have quoted it.

[Dreadlord]

In my game, I apply a fair number of the grittier options.

I use ALL the applicable conditions mods. ALL First Aid, Medicine, and Resting Rolls are modified by wound mods, no matter who is making the roll (if you are trying to heal yourself, wound mods apply TWICE). I also use the Severe Wounds optional rules in Augmentation pages 120-121. I have also considered putting those same mods on the mage casting a Heal Spell as well, but haven't pulled the trigger yet on that.

I find these rules alone is enough to scare the players into making a hangnail into an episode of ER, with everyone grabbing medkits "STAT!" and teamworking the injury as much as possible, with the mage finishing it off with a Heal spell. And when they don't have time to do that, you can feel the desperation and teeth-gritting determination as they attempt to finish the run as fast as they can before they start falling like flies, or get so injured they are in a hospital for a month or more, assuming they survive. Injury has also led them to abort a run, which I feel is very realistic!

The healing times using the RAW tend to feel about right, as long as you decrease their dice pool as I noted above for their recovery tests. Glitches also become more common.

[Draco18s]

I use ALL the applicable conditions mods. ALL First Aid, Medicine, and Resting Rolls are modified by wound mods, no matter who is making the roll (if you are trying to heal yourself, wound mods apply TWICE).

I am surprised anyone in your game bothers with first aid at all. Someone with 3 boxes of stun and 6 boxes of physical is getting a -3 to that first aid test.

Oh, and -2 for being in bad conditions (the street)

Oh, and -1 for it being a little dark

Oh, and -2 for the subject being a mage

Oh, and there's a minimum threshold of 2 before any healing even occurs (17 base dice needed at this point to get 1 box of either track healed).

Do you apply these modifiers to natural healing tests too?

(Sorry, your 4 body minus your two wound penalties and you got a glitch? Take 1d6 more boxes of damage)

[Tanegar]

Injury has also led them to abort a run, which I feel is very realistic!

Yes, very realistic. But is it fun?

"We didn't do the job, which means we didn't get paid, which means we can't afford to lay around recuperating. We need a new job!"

"But boss, we're all shot up. We can't pull off a job in this condition."

"Well, then I guess we all roll over and die."

To pull a quote from RPG.net's review of FATAL, "If this were any more realistic, you'd be able to TASTE the penis length!"

[Draco18s]

Yes, very realistic. But is it fun?

Not to mention the automatic +1 notoriety for failing a run.

[Aerospider]

The moral of this story: do the math on any proposed house rules.

All of it, it seems. Weak builds, medium builds, strong builds, optimised builds, builds that use every single bonus that stacks in order to make the average guy in the street look as tough as an asthmatic ant.

I must admit that I don't bear in mind the optimised builds when thinking up house rules and judging them. I never have that kind of player at my table (not that I ban them) and I think it generally makes more sense for the nature of an optimised build to bend to the rules rather than the other way around.

So does it make sense that a tank with enough injury to kill a pleb nearly three times over to be unable to stave off the internal bleeding long enough to complete the mission? Maybe, maybe not.

Should the same apply to a less extreme but still very tough tank? Say 16 boxes total for a threshold of 4 or 5? Perhaps the rule is too harsh for that. But then I'm already thinking Critas was more on the money with his Body+Edge idea and a tank should have a fair chance then. Plus, we're only talking about one box per day and do many runs go on for days and days without any let up? When first contemplating this rule I imagined it would be of dramatic significance quite rarely, but present enough to hurt a little every once in a while. Maybe my games are quite unusual in that more often than not no more than one of the characters come close to filling up a damage track.

[Tanegar]

All of it, it seems. Weak builds, medium builds, strong builds, optimised builds, builds that use every single bonus that stacks in order to make the average guy in the street look as tough as an asthmatic ant.

Now you're getting it. In order to figure out where the rule breaks, you have to do the math for the most brokenly overpowered builds you can think of. Then come to Dumpshock, get somebody to make a build that's even more overpowered than that, and do the math again. If the rule only breaks for outliers, you might have something. A straight Edge test with a threshold higher than 1 breaks everybody. Body + Edge is better, but still punishing for any character who isn't a tank or Mr. Lucky. A human with average Body and Edge rolls six dice, and cannot reliably meet a threshold higher than 2, and will glitch... fuck, I don't know how to figure that. Intuitively, I'm going to say it's unacceptably high; Draco18s, enlighten me, please.

[Draco18s]

A human with average Body and Edge rolls six dice, and cannot reliably meet a threshold higher than 2, and will glitch... fuck, I don't know how to figure that. Intuitively, I'm going to say it's unacceptably high; Draco18s, enlighten me, please.

Open Excel

Type this:

CODE

=BINOMDIST(3,6,1/6,false)*100

And that will tell you what you need to know.

Parameters are:
1) number of "hits" you're looking for
2) number of dice rolled
3) probability of a "hit" (in this case, 1s, so 1/6)
4) false (you don't want true for SR)

So, 5.35% (of 3 1s). Do the same for 4, 5, and 6 1's and sum (6.22%) and a 64.8% odds of 2 or more successes.

[Yerameyahu]

I prefer this: http://anydice.com/ Gorgeous.

[Draco18s]

I prefer this: http://anydice.com/ Gorgeous.

T-roll is better. Namely because it includes Turing complete probability calculations for ANY dice roll setup you can imagine (check the dropdown for ShadowRun d6s and with Edge).

[Yerameyahu]

Hello? I said this one's prettier. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Aerospider]

Now you're getting it. In order to figure out where the rule breaks, you have to do the math for the most brokenly overpowered builds you can think of. Then come to Dumpshock, get somebody to make a build that's even more overpowered than that, and do the math again. If the rule only breaks for outliers, you might have something. A straight Edge test with a threshold higher than 1 breaks everybody. Body + Edge is better, but still punishing for any character who isn't a tank or Mr. Lucky. A human with average Body and Edge rolls six dice, and cannot reliably meet a threshold higher than 2, and will glitch... fuck, I don't know how to figure that. Intuitively, I'm going to say it's unacceptably high; Draco18s, enlighten me, please.

Except that I don't agree with that methodology. I expect the super-optimised builds to cause rules to break, at least in terms of plausible realism, and think they do so all over the shop already so I choose not to consider them. Again, I may well be in a minority over how much consideration the extreme cases warrant.

The supertank build might treat Edge as a dump stat (for all I know) but with this kind of rule in place he'd have to rethink and to me that's the natural order of things. Think of it like the 20 dice cap optional rule - a 40+ DP in your speciality might normally be considered a great build, but with the cap in place it suddenly becomes very sub-optimal

[Aerospider]

Hmm, maybe that was somewhat dismissive of me and not in-keeping with the debating spirit. Might have to stop posting before getting out of bed.

So how about this angle - how often will a 29-box tank be concerned about an extra box per day of running? Does anyone run the kind of game in which such a character could die from overflow?

Ok, version 2.0.

Only applies to physical damage, roll is Body + Edge (I still like the Edge element) and threshold is reduced by 1 if first aid and/or Heal has been applied since the last injury was suffered (reflecting that the wounds are not only less severe but also more under control).

Better? Too much the other way?

[Draco18s]

Lets see.

Your supertank troll with oodles of edge is going to be pushing around 16 dice to this test (10 body, 6 edge) and the absolute max is around 23 dice (12 body + 4 aug + 7 edge)?
Average expected hits is going to be about 5 (or 7-8 ).

At 13 physical boxes for the unaugmented max body troll, his maximum wound penalty is going to be -4 (and 16 dice to roll).

The cybertroll is rolling around with 16 boxes + 12, looking at a maximum wound penalties of -9 (and 23 dice to roll for that).

Maybe a little too far the other way. Someone who's rocking a nearly full tracks isn't going to be on a run.

Normal runners, at around 6 body (for your high end--orc or troll--as opposed to your body 2 mage) and 3 nominal Edge has 9 dice and a max threshold of -3 (1 box shy of the -4).

The low end (body 2 mage) is looking at a -3 top-out but only has 2 + 4 = 6 dice to roll.

It's a little easy, still, on that mid-to-high range. Full damage tracks shouldn't be the average (e.g. a full track's TH is the averge # of hits on the available dice pool). But that low range is going to kill somebody, and they're the least worrisome. They're not going to be going on the runs where they get shot up a lot, get shot up, and then want to run again.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

What exactly are we trying to prove here Draco18s? I am still a bit unsure.
The numbers above are not speaking to me.

[Draco18s]

What exactly are we trying to prove here Draco18s? I am still a bit unsure.
The numbers above are not speaking to me.

I was observing the scenarios available to the possible house rule, seeing how many dice a given character had to roll and figuring out what their maximum threshold is.

As it turns out, the test is largely meaningless for the people Aerospider is trying to "punish" (the street sams with piles of body, I assume). Previously the test was just outright impossible for everyone (even a TH2, which is an average human only 1/3 of the way to being unconscious, is difficult for anyone who didn't soft-max edge).

Anyway. Aerospider.

The way to work through the rule is to figure out what numbers you have to deal with. That being the potential dice pool, the DP penalty from wounds (the potential TH), and which group you want to be most effected. This should be the high-body characters with -1 to -3 in wound penalties (depending on their total number of boxes of health).

I'm not sure what to say in order to get somewhere that's "good."

[Tanegar]

I still think you're trying to fix something that isn't broken. The "Severe Wounds" optional rules in Augmentation are perfectly adequate if you want to make boxes of damage less like hit points (which, IMO, is an excellent goal, and I wholeheartedly support the use of Severe Wounds rules). They strike the right balance between making getting shot something worth worrying about and not beating the PCs down like redheaded stepchildren for sticking a pinky finger out from behind cover (see Dreadlord's house rules).

[CanRay]

"JesusAllahBuddha this burns like a motherslotter! Damn, whose idea was it to use Willie-Peter?" "It's burning your cyberarm, you can turn off the sensation." "Oh, right. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that's better. Oh, look, it fell out onto the ground. Good thing it missed my boot. ... Why do my lungs hurt?"

[Aerospider]

Someone who's rocking a nearly full tracks isn't going to be on a run.

Quite. I was never looking for an ingenious way to tip characters into overflow (though would want that danger included in the rule) and would hope that someone with only a box to spare would give serious thought to taking a break at this point. This is also a part of why I didn't consider catering for the (IMO) ridiculous tank builds.

[Aerospider]

As it turns out, the test is largely meaningless for the people Aerospider is trying to "punish" (the street sams with piles of body, I assume).

Ooh, I'm glad you used the quotation marks there. I never look to punish any character based on build, especially not by house rule. Rules should affect various builds in ways that are fair by realism or gameplay. It was interesting to note that (by the first version at least) those that could suffer the most damage would suffer most, which is not reasonable given that they are suffering for being strong. That said, I am tempted by the notion that the more bullets you're carrying in your organs the more can go wrong and deteriorate.

[Draco18s]

Quite. I was never looking for an ingenious way to tip characters into overflow (though would want that danger included in the rule) and would hope that someone with only a box to spare would give serious thought to taking a break at this point. This is also a part of why I didn't consider catering for the (IMO) ridiculous tank builds.

Extreme tank builds will just have huge tracks (pushing 20+ boxes) which is why a character won't mind having 6 boxes filled. To them they're at "half health" or less, whereas other characters would consider themselves at being "almost dead."

Ooh, I'm glad you used the quotation marks there. I never look to punish any character based on build, especially not by house rule. Rules should affect various builds in ways that are fair by realism or gameplay. It was interesting to note that (by the first version at least) those that could suffer the most damage would suffer most, which is not reasonable given that they are suffering for being strong. That said, I am tempted by the notion that the more bullets you're carrying in your organs the more can go wrong and deteriorate.

Exactly. I was using the term as a negative reinforcement tool (punish versus reward) towards the target audience, rather than something intended to be harsh and unforgiving.

[Aerospider]

I still think you're trying to fix something that isn't broken. The "Severe Wounds" optional rules in Augmentation are perfectly adequate if you want to make boxes of damage less like hit points (which, IMO, is an excellent goal, and I wholeheartedly support the use of Severe Wounds rules). They strike the right balance between making getting shot something worth worrying about and not beating the PCs down like redheaded stepchildren for sticking a pinky finger out from behind cover (see Dreadlord's house rules).

Perhaps I should have illustrated my issue better.

Suppose two weak characters are a little bit shot up, no more than 6 boxes. One gets his head down whilst the other decides to stay active until a better healing opportunity arises. Now the second guy has nothing to worry about if he keeps himself out of trouble - that crossbow bolt in his calf will wait. The first guy, however, is in some danger. He has a low Body rating, no medical equipment or expertise on hand, poor conditions, whatever - he has only 1 die to roll for healing. That's a 1 in 6 chance of gaining 1D3 damage as well as losing an extra day of healing. If he's rolling 2 healing dice that probability goes up to 7 in 36, as we all know. So while his mate is off galavanting about town he's just praying his sick bed doesn't kill him.

Note, I'm quite happy with the glitch rules on healing, but desire an equivalent for those who put off healing for another day.

I'm also a big fan of the severe wounds rules, but they don't cater for this concern.