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Decapitation and lethality in your game
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7564676" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7564676, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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