Tuesday, March 23, 2010

More on Massive Damage in Modern D20 Games

A brief note after a long hiatus to say that I've been running Conan with the Massive Damage rules switched on and the world hasn't come to an end yet.

No game of D&D that I've played in has been run with the Massive Damage rules in effect, and when I've asked why I've been given a variety of reasons which boil down to "the game will be far too deadly with Massive Damage". I should mention that the D&D Massive Damage Threshold is 50 points (if I'm not mistaken).

The Massive Damage threshold for Conan is 20 points, so one would have thought that if a D20 game could be made ultra player-unfriendly by Massive Damage, Conan would be the one to show that, but you know what? The monsters are the ones having the hard time of it. So much so I'm having to gently tweak them to make them a challenge. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

I'm now contemplating going "off the reservation" and running a Delta Green game under the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules (as opposed to the more usual and generally more well-thought-of in the Call of Cthulhu community Basic Role Playing rules aka BRP). One of the first things I checked up on was the Massive Damage Threshold for the game.

Call of Cthulhu uses a variant of the D20 rules that differs in detail in many places from D&D, even more so than Conan does, and one of those changes is that there's a different Massive Damage Threshold for the human players than for the non-player Mythos Monstrosities.

A player has to Fort save vs 15 after 10(!) points of damage are dealt in a single attack. A monster does so after an attack deals 50 points(!!).

It would seem, on the face of it, to be a recipe for player death on a grand scale, but then again, that's pretty much in the Call of Cthulhu mold, so I'm leaving it in as written for the time being.

This should sort out the men from the shoggoths.

2 comments:

Dunx said...

Apologies for the slow response here.

I wanted to draw comparison with another heroic game system: the Savage Worlds Cthulhu Mythos conversion, Realms of Cthulhu. Basically, they don't touch the core damage behaviour.

However, they do give options to remove a lot of the player-favouring mechanics: bennies, incapacitation rolls, wound recovery, and so on. They suggest a continuum of harm ranging from pulpy to gritty with different player-favouring mechanics being removed in order to make the situation more challenging.

The sanity mechanics follow the same structure as for physical harm and so the same continuum is applicable independently. RoC talks suggests four basic classes of game type based on the pulpy/gritty state of physical and mental harm mechanics.

It's pretty cool.

Steve said...

I am completely unfamiliar with the Savage Worlds game system. Other people have recommended that I look at it, and you are obviously having a lot of fun with the system. Maybe I should get involved in a game and check it out. Unfortunately, I have so little actual gaming time these days I doubt it would be very soon.