Health/Wound Systems

>>50018562
I would say The Riddle of Steel's combat / wound system is perfect for a low fantasy game. It meets your requirements perfectly, while still being a real fun, interactive way of fighting.

>>50018662

I don't think I have really looked into riddle of steel, will have to check it out.

>>50018662

Whats the gist of it?

>>50018689
Essentially it works as such, with dice pools:
>Attacker swings with 7 dice, gets 5 successes
>Defender attempts to block with 4 dice, gets 2 successes
>5-2=3 successes, which translates to a level 3 wound wherever they hit (wound levels go from 0-5)
>level 3 wound might be a broken bone, steady bleeding, disfigurement or so on.

Once your factor in strength to the damage vs their armor and toughness, you have a pretty fun system where combat is incredibly dangerous, but very engaging.

>>50018830
Huh that sounds fine, how does armor work? and how do weapons factor into things.

>>50018689
>>50018822

I really trimmed it down in >>50018830, but that's about the gist of it.

Different areas have different effects (getting stabbed in the thigh vs getting stabbed in the neck for instance), but the 2 big things that make combat short is Shock and Pain, both of which occur when you get injured.

Shock reduces your dice pool immediately, but wears off. Pain is usually smaller, but reduces your combat pool effectively permanently for the rest of the combat. You might have a dice pool of 12 dice to sling around and chop off heads with, but get stabbed in the lung and your dice pool might drop down to 6 or 4 or worse (since stabbed lungs really takes the fight out of you).

>>50018562
Gurps has a pretty deadly combat with systems for crippling limbs and dismemberment as well as stuff like being blinded by wounds to the eye.

>>50018890
What about when fighting non-human things? like bears and shit.

>>50018862
Armor is protection that soak up successes - if your armor is AV 4 (i.e. good mail, light plate, shit like that), then that means it takes 4 levels off the wound. Which is really good - so you can take a hit there for sure. However, armor only covers what it covers. - if you have a sweet helmet, and someone hits you in the neck (which is grouped as the head for rolling for hit location) and you don't have a gorget or something covering your neck, then your fancy plate helm doesn't do shit.

Weapons are pretty diverse, and act as so: they have a target number you need to roll to hit with them (say, on a d10 you need to roll a 7). So you roll 5 dice, get 2 dice with 7 or higher on them - that's 2 successes.

The weapon (say its a battleaxe) has a damage score of ST+3. That means it takes your Strength (default for stats are 4), adds 3, then adds your successes. So that's 9 damage.

The defender is gonna get hit for 9 damage (a level fuck you wound). They get to subtract toughness (say 5, but they can only take away from the strength bonus cause an axe still hurts, so it will count for 4.) and armor (the 4 from up above) and any defense they rolled (lets say none).

So it works out as 9-8= 1, a level 1 wound. A flesh wound or scratch at best. But say the axe got 4 or 5 successes, then thats a much worse wound, and way bigger repercussions.

>>50018910
Lets take a bear for example - I was testing it against one of my players recently. Bears can basically run around, but they are just gonna hit, and hit hard. The big difference is how wounds affect them. Like I said in >>50019014
you can only use your toughness stat (say 4) to counter their strength part of the damage.You can be real tough, but a sword in the gut is a sword in the gut. It also stops you from having a naked guy wit 9 toughness laugh as swords break against them.

Bears however do just that - their toughness can count overall, so that wounds either don't pierce as much as they would, or the bear just isn't affected until something really serious hits it.

Plus, when a bear hits you for 12 dice to your head, you either dodge or lose your head. It ended up like a horror movie.

>>50018562
>>50019059
Hope that helps OP

Why not The Runed Age's wound system? Hit locations for each limb, and severity of wounds give you penalties to moving that limb. Makes combat gritty and lethal.

>>50019205
Will definetely be looking into it

>>50019205
Not OP but I found it very interesting. Always meant to look into Riddle of Steel.

If I may ask, how does healing work in this system?

>>50019287
By all means, I encourage it. The combat system is really robust. I've merged it into the system I'm using currently for my setting. The only thing is that its an older game so the once plentiful forum of knowledge is now gone, and beyond a slow fan site you kind of have to come here or puzzle shit out yourself.

I know that they made another game very similar, and also Song of Swords featured heavily here is very similar to TRoS (at the expense of still being in development).

>>50019389
Very slowly. Essentially anything beyond a level 2 wound requires medical care. At the end of each week, you roll a health test against the pain score for each wound, with each success lowering the pain respectively. Proper environment and care takers allow for extra dice to rolled, and so on. Surgery may be required for bigger wounds, and strenuous activity can cause them to open up all over again.

For the sake of speed of game, they offer the alternative of rolling it every day instead of every week, and a roll as soon as combat ends to see if the wound "just looked worse in the heat of combat" (doesn't really work if your arm got chopped off though).