Tinkering with: Conditional Injury, part I

I’m a big fan behind the spirit of Pyramid #3-120 “Conditional Injury” article by Douglas H. Cole. By taking HP as the starting point for a new entity called Robustness Threshold, he introduced a “Wound” system for GURPS that dispenses with tracking HP, make less likely that a character would die from a “1 HP injury” and it seems, to me at least, more realistic.

For it all to work, he also modified wounding modifiers (like the x1.5 damage that cutting attacks have) and hit location modifiers (like the x4 damage the skull). This is a part I don’t like very much, if only because I’ve grown too accustomed to standard GURPS values for these things and can’t wrap my head around the changes. There’s also one additional table look-up in his system to figure out how much injury is dealt, and modifications for several advantages.

I’m pretty sure he did all of that with the power of math behind him. Well, that I do not have, but nonetheless here I present an adaptation on his system that aims to keep things a bit more familiar to the usual GURPS bits and bolts.

Quick Recap

If you’re new to GURPS, remember that the basic workflow for how much damage a character takes from an attack is this: 

• after a successful attack, the attacker rolls his dice of damage to figure out Basic Damage, which is reduced by Damage Resistance; 
• whichever is left after that is called Penetrating Damage and is then modified by Wounding Modifiers, the final result of that being called Injury, which is what you actually reduce from your HP score.

The Wounds Table

What if instead of figuring out Robustness Threshold and then recording that, we build a “Wounds” table based on typical GURPS “thresholds” for injury effects? Say, >1/10 HP (cripples an eye), >1/2 HP (a major wound) and so on.  So, for a 10 HP character, we could do it like this:

For comparison sake, there’s two additional tables at the end of the article with higher HPs.    

Don’t fret at the math! You can download this Excel spreadsheet and plug your HP value and it will populate the thresholds for you, easy peasy.

To determine the actual “Wound Level” a character currently suffers, compare the Injury he just suffered to the table, reading it top to bottom:

• What was the amount of injury?
• What is the wound level?
• Can it cripple something?
• Can this wound worsen the current Wound Level?
• What’s the pain or shock level associated?
• Does it affect Move & Dodge?
• Does the character need to check for Knockdown, Unconsciousness and/or Death?

And that’s it. On your character sheet you would reproduce only the Injury and Wound lines of the table (better yet to add the Accumulation line) maybe like this:

Once you’re on a Wound Level, your stay on it, until you’re healed or “move up” to a more threatening one. There’s no need to track each individual wound. To see how Pain and Accumulation work, check the Pyramid article.

When you suffer a Grievous Wound or worse, check for unconsciousness every turn (B419); a Deadly Wound requires you to roll HT to stay alive, refer to B423 (I know, Deadly Wounds, Mortal Wounds…)

Using this approach bypass converting Injury into another value and keeps Wounding Modifiers the same they always were. I also removed Agony as a condition, on the grounds that per RAW you have two possibilities of being disabled during combat due to injury: unconsciousness and death. Agony adds a third way for that to happen which I’m not sure about.

Admittedly I eye-balled most values, but they seem ok to me!

The main takeaway though, is that using this table bypass converting Injury into another value and keeps Wounding Modifiers the same they ever were – which I believe makes it easier to implement. It also gives more a bit more granularity to characters, compared to calculating Robustness Threshold, which condenses most common human range HP scores into three or so values.

Injury Tolerance

Unliving and Homogenous need no chance. Diffuse, however, does: use the approach from Conditional Injury – it will be easy to match with my table.

Healing

Of course, there's healing to be considered! For the quickest method, use Douglas's Time-Based Recovery. I'm still musing about a different take on this, but two methods I got in my head would require you to either track total amount of injury suffered (which is kind of a downside) and or track individual wounds, should you decide to. I'll post these when they are done.

There's also the matter of adjusting some advantages as Conditional Injury does, but I think most will work as they are (and if so that’s a bonus!) - at least if you elect to track total amount of injury.

Cooling the Dice

So, this is it for a first passage. I suppose I don’t have enough mastery of the system to envision the fringe case scenarios of where this might break, but this seems quite usable as it is.

I would like to hear any opinions on this, but for an easy start, here's one point to consider:

For Grievous wounds or worse, should the Unconsciousness check be rolled each turn (as in RAW, B420) or only when a character suffers such a wound? I’m leaning towards the former.

And finally, for two more table examples.

Here for 25 HP:

And here for 90 HP:

Cheers!