Should you be able to cut a beholder's eyestalks off?

[Lord_Blacksteel]

"Should you"? Isn't the question "How do you" or "where do you sell them after you"? - oh, you mean while it's still alive ...

Point 1: 4th edition D&D, while not everyone's favorite, has exactly this kind of thing built in to its various powers. Slows, Stuns, Prones, Forced Movement, Ongoing damage - all of those conditions that the powers inflict cover this kind of special move, usually while also doing traditional hit point damage. So you might take a look there for some ideas.

Point 2: If you do add some kind of called shot mechanic to other flavors of D&D you need to think about how it's going to affect your players when they are on the receiving end, and what the long-term impact of that will be. I made up several versions of "Ye Olde Critical Fumble Chart" and after using it in play for years I came to the same conclusion many others do: it hurts the player characters far more than the monsters. I suspect a system like this added on to D&D would do the same. If you can target the beholder's eyestalks, there's no reason he can't target the mage's hand with a disintegrate ray or a bite - CHOMP! HIT ME WITH THAT WAND AGAIN SPELLGUY! Now you've lost a limb AND a magic item ...

If you ratchet it down a notch and allow say a "stunning" of certain abilities, maybe on a critical hit instead of extra damage, it might work. In fact, there's my experimental contribution: On a critical hit the attacker does max normal damage and can choose to "turn off" one ability of the opponent - an attack, a defense, or reduce them to half movement speed, for one round. It might make sense to create a short list of "critical conditions" that the players (and monsters!) could drop on someone. At the very least it doesn't require a ton of new mechanics or special modifiers. It's also a lot easier on the party.

Point 3: Besides the attacks you have to consider how to heal this stuff. The beholder may be out of luck if he loses the fight, but the temple of evil clerics should have some options to heal up those blinded and maimed Evil High Priests after round 1 of the player character invasion. Does a CLW grow back an eyestalk or a hand?

Old, er, Experienced Gamer Comment: We've been killing them for decades without this. Try harder!

 

[keterys]

I'm talking about real life. When an actual piece of shrapnel flies at your arm faster than you can perceive it, do you get to choose whether to lose your arm or not? Of course not, and that illustrates why letting the player make that decision in-game is ridiculous.

Your ability to make decisions about damage in real life have very little bearing on a player's ability to make decisions about how their character takes damage.

I've seen RPGs where a character might choose to lose a limb as a concession to avoid the potential for a more harmful loss. You might make such a choice to help prevent death (or because the game avoids death but not repercussions), or to keep the character in a fight rather than going down, or to ensure the success of an action at a price.

As a game, not real life, such choices can be quite interesting. Certainly more interesting than only ever tracking the ebb and fall of hit point numbers.

 

[LostSoul]

In general, called shots work at cross purposes to the abstract HP system. If you want hit locations and specific wounds as a regular feature of combat there are systems designed to handle it.

I agree with this. You might have specific write-ups for specific monsters that work differently: "On a critical hit, the beholder loses a random eye stalk." That's probably the best you can get with an abstract combat system. If you move away from abstract combat the whole combat system needs to be overhauled.