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I was just realizing that many of you have sighted as a problem the player characters being too hard to hurt. Now, maybe I was doing something totally wrong (the last game I ran was in 2000 and I don't have my books on me), but I found my players to be eminently killable. I've never thought of my self as a killer GM, but I almost killed my most combat effective character with Gremlins.

Were hit locations an optional rule, cause I found that was always what undid them (though I had to mod the hit location chart as leg hits were all too common).

Sorry if this is too rambling or non-sequitor.

-E

Sorry, I thought this was a interesting topic and probably wasn't really suited in the 'DC novels' topic.

Marcus

Well, in my (far too!) long experience of gaming I have come to the conclusion that although being a 'killer GM' isn't my style, characters can and should still be killable. As for the DC system itself, there can be times when they do seem to have too many hit points. I know people who have simply deducted 25 to 50% from the original totals to make for a deadlier game.

I guess everyone has their own ideas though

We have reduced the hitpoints by 50% on agreemnet of both players and GM. The hitpoints of the NPCs and those of the players where in no relation. They still throw handgrenades at each other since they can not kill a PC but kill all human npcs in a 12m radius.

For me, I had a program for my TI-85 that randomly generated stats as needed for NPCs and calculated their hit locations as a PC. The minor cannon fodder I wouldn't bother with as much. They have a fixed total and headshots count double towards it.

I never really had a problem with killing a PC.....savage 311 in close range works wonders .

It did seem that players did have some serious stoutness to them when it came to living through encounters.

I never did like the hit location table that much so I used the armor coverage table from Aftermath. The result was rather fun and made for some interesting game play. For your edification here is the hit location table that I use.

d30 (thats right...30! )

1 Head
2 Face
3 Neck
4 Chest
5 Abdomen
6 R Shoulder
7 L Shoulder
8 R Hip
9 L Hip
10 R Humerus
11 L Humerus
12 Groin
13 R Elbow
14 L Elbow
15 R Forearm
16 L Forearm
17 R Wist
18 L Wrist
19 R Hand
20 L Hand
21 R Thigh
22 L Thigh
23 R Knee
24 L Knee
25 R Shin
26 L Shin
27 R Ankle
28 L Ankle
29 R Foot
30 L Foot

I guess i have been doing this too long (27years) because it just seemed to make a lot of sense to me to be this detailed in where people get hurt.

D30, now thats nerdy
I used the quick kill rules from T2K. They are pretty nasty. That shotgun thing is true but the problem was that in some games to many NPCs had the same weapons. But with halve the damage ponits we got along fine. We also changed the hit locations since almost everyon aims for the center of the body in a fire fight, rather than for the legs.

Zvezda wrote:D30, now thats nerdy
I used the quick kill rules from T2K. They are pretty nasty. That shotgun thing is true but the problem was that in some games to many NPCs had the same weapons. But with halve the damage ponits we got along fine. We also changed the hit locations since almost everyon aims for the center of the body in a fire fight, rather than for the legs.

yep, Im a big nerd

The leg shots was the first thing that we noticed was a bit odd. I felt sorry for the players going around on crutches (4 out of 6) after a particulaly nasty gun battle. One of the players said the way things played out it woulda been like fighting in Stalingrad during WWII. It wouldn't have been so bad but one guy catostrophically failed his thrown check which dropped the frag grenade into the middle of the party.......leg hits for everybody

Ah, Aftermath. What a great game idea, even if the execution was not what it could have been.

Sounds somewhat familiar. In the first 20 or something years of playing DC there where some complains about the amount of leg hits so we had to change the hit locations a bit. But as you have proved, everybody nerdy enough can make hit location tables to fit the need of the party.

Do you guys only apply damage from things like grenades to a single hit location? Maybe that's where the difference comes in (though I can't remember ever letting my guys have more than handguns). I usually applied area efffect weapon damage to any part of the body that I deemed would have been coaught in the explosion. This made fire, crashes and explosions real scary.

-E

Concussion damage as per rules of p. 99 in the DC core book. An equal amount to all body parts....but the fragments of grenades usually tend to hit the legs since they had to be rolled on the standard hit location table.
If they do it right my players usually get all the weapons they want. So the often turn to crime to buy new guns.