Chopping off Body Parts

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And how many crippled characters were there with low level and mid level characters running around with swords of sharpness before they had access to regeneration?

I honestly don't remember regeneration being available outside of rings early on. There were quite a few NPCs who were maimed in some way. I remember a beautifully illustrated one in a Dragon adventure early on; the guy was missing a hand and possibly an eye.

In the games I played in -- the only ones I'm qualified to speak about -- most characters got retired if they lost a limb.

 

[Scarbonac]

Ah, the sword of sharpness! What a wonderful device; in 1e/2e I cooked up a sharpness matrix that allowed for everything from decapitation to severed limbs to the loss of a finger or two.

Plus a critical hit chart covering extra damage multiples, broken bones, incidental severing, pierced lungs, severed arteries...


Good times, good times...

 

[Li Shenron]

From SWSE

Maiming Foes (Official Optional Rule)

A character may attempt to cripple an opponent instead of killing him. To do so, the character must declare his intent ahead of time and make an attack at a –5 penalty and deals half damage on a successful attack. Should the resulting attack take his foe to 0 hit points while still overcoming his threshold (effectively killing him) the target is instead maimed in some manner, but otherwise alive (see the Severing Strike talent

Doesn't sound too bad, except that I would not detract this "damage" from hit points otherwise he's both maimed and unconscious (or is "unconciousness" removed in SW?).

I think such optional rules are not so fun anyway. First battle of two the players have "fun" chopping monsters parts off, then it may become boring. Also, as soon as the DM starts using it against the PC, you have to make a rule about how to regain lost body parts in a way that is not too easy, otherwise the game (which already is at risk of becoming a "die-respawn feast") will become also a "chop-regrow feast". But if it's not so easy, at the second time it happens to a PC, the players are already whining about "bad DMing".

 

[Kaodi]

Well, in the current edition, you could do it as an optional " double critical " . A critical threat on a critical confirmation allows for a second critical threat that has the chance of maiming the target. If you kill the target with the same blow, it can be a decapitation if you so choose.

 

[Dice4Hire]

There are hundreds of ways to do it with house rules, no matter the edition.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Torn Asunder: Critical Hits does this very well indeed, with a bit of tweaking. For 3e, anyway.

And the Advanced Player's Guide has some interesting rules, too.

OTOH, I imagine it will be the kind of option that is only available to those characters possessing with the right manoeuvres, or suchlike, in 4e.

If at all.

But who knows which third party publisher might be crazy enough this time, should they be permitted, or whatever. . .

 

[Gez]

I figured, from that video with the trolls, that they removed grapple but in exchange gave vorpal swords to everybody. 3e is depicted as a guy hugging a troll*, but 4e is depicted as an adventuring party beheading four trolls in just as many seconds.



(* Seriously, has anyone ever tried to initiate a grapple with a troll? Unless you're polymorphed into something bigger and stronger, that's like attacking a gelatinous cube barehanded or stripping naked before going to hunt that white dragon.)

 

[Aloïsius]

My DM thinks that vorpal swords mechanic is boring and unrealistic. Thus, they are in fact sharpness : everytime they got a crit, he rolls a d6 or something. This is why the barbarian and the ranger have lost their legs during the last combat.

 

[mmadsen]

Maiming Foes (Official Optional Rule)

A character may attempt to cripple an opponent instead of killing him. To do so, the character must declare his intent ahead of time and make an attack at a –5 penalty and deals half damage on a successful attack. Should the resulting attack take his foe to 0 hit points while still overcoming his threshold (effectively killing him) the target is instead maimed in some manner, but otherwise alive (see the Severing Strike talent)

That's a pretty silly rule that assumes the only reason someone might lose a limb is because the other guy was "pulling his punches" and didn't want to kill him. Sure, that might explain Vader taking Luke's hand, but that rule's not a good general-case solution.

The issue, as has already been pointed out, is that D&D uses abstract, ablative hit points, and anything that bypasses those abstract, ablative hit points is likely to break the game. Warhammer worked this out fairly well, by have "critical hits" be what happens when someone drops below zero hit points, not something that randomly happens at any point in the fight.

At any rate, people really, really like the idea of landing specific blows, not abstract ones, which makes for trouble in a game based on abstract damage and abstract healing.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I don't think there need to be rules for it, really. Any rules are going to get ... overloaded.

Because if it is in the RAW it is going to happen relatively often. If the players have the option to maimify somebody instead of killing them, they're going to do it, probably pretty often. You'll see a whole bunch of fights with 14 dead goblins and 1 maimed goblin (for questioning).

If you put into the RAW that you can avoid a death by taking some maiming or another, characters are going to be limping around with missing limbs very often. And if I remember my medical science, all those war-time injuries where people have missing limbs are seldom "I got my arm cut off by a saber." but "I got cut on the arm by a saber and then the wound became infected and they had to take the arm." Or "My arm was so mangled that it would have never healed correctly and would have become infected, so they had to take the arm."

Maybe a side-bar call-out somewhere that a GM might want to think about, in special dramatic cases, letting a character survive by taking a maiming effect ... but I would be seriously hesitant of rules to that effect.

--fje