Decapitation and lethality in your game

How important is it for you to have the possibility of decapitation for any character unlucky enough to receive damage? What should the chance of a character being maimed be? Does this add to the lethality of a game or is it a step too far? How severe should the effects be? Does it depend on the system or setting?

It's not really that important to me. I can't say that there would often be a situation where it was important to a story what traumatic injuries lead to character death, and in my experience permanent maiming tends to be an even more unsatisfactory end to a character than death.

Any system that get fascinated with such things is unlikely to be one where you can have a lot of character continuity, and typically you're going to end up with a lot of random meaningless deaths. I suppose this can be justified by a setting where the meaninglessness of violence is precisely the topic you are exploring, but it would be a bit different than a typical RPG or the typical source material that RPGs draw from.

That said, I do provide for a slight chance of decapitation even in my D&D house rules... it's just never happened. Indeed, the only decapitation I've heard of in game was as a very young player, and older player speaking to me of their game related a story with a sword of sharpness and oil of slipperiness that ended in decapitation of the unlucky PC.

In my house rules, certain events can lead to traumatic damage saves - critical hits that reduce you to 0 hp or less, falling damage that reduces you to 0 hp or less, any single blow that does 50 or more damage, etc. If this save is failed, one of the possible but unlikely results is that you are decapitated and instantly killed, but you could also lose limbs or just suffer such severe internal injuries that death is basically inevitable. This however rarely comes up for a variety of reasons. You could argue that the main reason that such rules exist in my game is that it makes it at least conceptually possible for maiming to happen without admitting to a violation of the rules. But I could certainly live without that.

Pretty unimportant. In most games if a PC does a lot of damage and kills an enemy I might describe gruesome endings such as decapitation, limb removal, guts spilling onto the ground, etc., etc. but it's not at all important that this is represented in the mechanics of the game. So far as being maimed goes, it's been my experience that most players would rather you kill their character then giving them a significant handicap or taking away their gear.

Well, the only way you're getting decapitated or otherwise similarly maimed (losing arms etc) in games I run is:
1) Specific magic weapons - Swords of Sharpness, Vorpral Blades, etc
2) A monster/trap/effect has a specific rule for that happening.
3) Such maiming is, or is pretty much, the only logical outcome of some action a player has their character take.
4) You get killed by massive damage.
5) You get killed by a crit.

In #s 4 & 5 the decapitation/maiming is the description of your death, not what caused it rules-wise. Though yes, story-wise, death occurred because of the decapitation.
And it might be important later on that you were decapitated etc....

You'd think that #2 would be the most common method. But no. In all my years playing these games I've seen ALOT more instances of #3 (mostly maimings).

#1 is the least likely way for these things to occur in my games - because of how few Vorpral/Sharpness blades I've ever included.

What I do NOT use in my games are random crit charts.

I used to have some house rules when I played 5e, where every time you went to 0 Hitpounts you crippled a random part of your body, that way you couldn't go down and up and down and up and down with only healing a little bit at a time. If you crippled the same part twice, it would be destroyed/cut off.

Maiming a player should generally serve some purpose, and the Lay-On-Hands dance needed correcting. That being said, I use a difference system now that doesn't have those same problems, so getting parts cut off is rare.

ccs said:

Well, the only way you're getting decapitated or otherwise similarly maimed (losing arms etc) is:
1) Specific magic weapons - Swords of Sharpness, Vorpral Blades, etc
2) A monster/trap/effect has a specific rule for that happening.
3) Such maiming is, or is pretty much, the only logical outcome of some action a player has their character take.
4) You get killed by massive damage.
5) You get killed by a crit.

In #s 4 & 5 the decapitation/maiming is the description of your death, not what caused it rules-wise. Though yes, story-wise, death occurred because of the decapitation.
And it might be important later on that you were decapitated etc....

You'd think that #2 would be the most common method. But no. In all my years playing these games I've seen ALOT more instances of #3 (mostly maimings).

#1 is the least likely way for these things to occur in my games.

What I do NOT use in my games are random crit charts

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This is how I run it, yup. If a PC is insta-killed by a critical hit I might describe it as a decapitation. I probably would not describe insta-death to a non-crit as decapitation though it's possible.

For me it depends on system. Running Rolemaster, for instance, this sort of stuff comes up quite a bit. Likewise in Burning Wheel.

In systems which have only abstract "hit point"-type damage - D&D being one, and Traveller another - it doesn't come up all that often. Although in our Traveller game, when the PC with a cutlass succeeded in hitting an enemy she was attacking through the slit of the latter's gun emplacement, we decided that the blow resulted in a faceplate shatter as that was all that made sense, and that had implications given the toxic nature of the world's atmosphere.

ccs said:

Well, the only way you're getting decapitated or otherwise similarly maimed (losing arms etc) is:
1) Specific magic weapons - Swords of Sharpness, Vorpral Blades, etc
2) A monster/trap/effect has a specific rule for that happening.
3) Such maiming is, or is pretty much, the only logical outcome of some action a player has their character take.
4) You get killed by massive damage.
5) You get killed by a crit.

In #s 4 & 5 the decapitation/maiming is the description of your death, not what caused it rules-wise. Though yes, story-wise, death occurred because of the decapitation.
And it might be important later on that you were decapitated etc....

You'd think that #2 would be the most common method. But no. In all my years playing these games I've seen ALOT more instances of #3 (mostly maimings).

#1 is the least likely way for these things to occur in my games.

Click to expand...

I've had several characters lose parts to #1-type effects over the years, once or twice even by friendly fire (hint: waving a vorpal weapon around when you and your allies have just been plunged into magical darkness is not a good idea!).

But otherwise, this is about spot-on.

What I do NOT use in my games are random crit charts

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For effects, no. We have a scaling crit system but it's all just numeric damage.

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PrometheanVigil said:

How important is it for you to have the possibility of decapitation for any character unlucky enough to receive damage?

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Not really important at all. In real life combat, it basically doesn't happen. In movies and books and comics, it happens, but it is really a narrative device to say, "this person is well and truly dead." So, in a game, if you reduce the opponent to whatever it is the game says kills them, if you want to add decapitation as a descriptor, that's fine. But there's no need to add a chance of it beyond that.

What should the chance of a character being maimed be?

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I answer a question with a question: What genre are you playing? If I am playing Scooby Doo Adventures, maiming just won't happen. If I am playing The Walking Dead, that's a different story.

I only rarely add such things if the game rules don't already have them baked in, because I don't usually bend a ruleset outside it's intended genre. It it was important to the game's genre, it'll already have these things worked in.