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A question of injury levels, both RAW and house ruled

Started by mcjomar, February 19, 2016, 03:04:56 PM

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mcjomar

As per the topic title, this is about the injury level rules in the rulebook or the LRB.

Specifically I remember from a couple years back someone bringing up the ability for characters to die/go "out of action" from 6 hits to a single location, even if they do as little as 1 point of damage?

Please could someone explain this to me (in addition to any house/conclave rules to get around it), as my recent brush up on the rules isn't making it into my head.
Cheers  :)
"Heretics are like cockroaches - annoying to find, and even more annoying to kill." - unattrib.

MarcoSkoll

Quote from: mcjomar on February 19, 2016, 03:04:56 PMSpecifically I remember from a couple years back someone bringing up the ability for characters to die/go "out of action" from 6 hits to a single location, even if they do as little as 1 point of damage?
If any given hit inflicts damage up to the character's Base Injury Value (or BIV), then it does one level of injury. If it does more than their BIV up to two times their BIV, then it does two injury levels, and so on and so forth.

Effectively, any damaging hit (after armour/forcefields/cover) does one level of injury, and for each time the BIV is exceeded, an extra level is done. So, in theory, four 1 damage hits to a character's head would kill them.

However, we normally don't bother ruling on this one for most characters. I've been playing since the game came out, and I don't think I've ever actually really seen it happen. The odds of only one location being hit multiple times for tiny damage are really small, and the GM can always exercise his omnipotence and fudge the result if he thinks it's needed. (I've certainly at times waved my hand and said "All the remaining shots miss" if continuing would unheroically put a player and his characters completely out of the game). The mechanic also means even the toughest characters can sometimes be worn down by a lucky weakling, which is good for helping balance out the game.

It's only really very tough characters that need any tweaks - the system stops working so well past about T80 or so, so for superhumanly tough characters, we tend to exceed this level of resilience by using special rules.

For examples, Dark Magenta's replacement Astartes rules put them at ~T75-80, but allow them to downgrade a lot of injury results - the end result actually plays more like you would expect of a Space Marine. Their Ogryn rules also go for a comparatively low sounding ~T85, but give them two extra light injury levels on every location (and a few other boosts) - this balances their resilience to low damage hits (which they can now weather a lot of) and high damage hits (which they're still better at taking than characters without extra injury levels, but aren't immune to).

I hope that sort of explains it.
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Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
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mcjomar

That covers it pretty handily, cheers.
Obviously the odds are quite wild for that to happen, so hopefully I'll never see it in a game.
"Heretics are like cockroaches - annoying to find, and even more annoying to kill." - unattrib.