Alternate Wound Penalties Chart

This comes up occasionally on various socials, and I've been wanting to make a handy blog post to point to, for my own personal houserules about the matter.

Wound Penalties and how I handle them.

So, we all know the original chart for numerical penalties to actions performed by PCs on the basis of physical injuries they previously sustained, from page 124 of the K:DL Corebook.

I use those pretty much rules-as-written, but modified the numbers a little bit. This caused me to make an alternative version of the chart itself, in order to easily present the slight increase in granularity... and vehemence.

You can see it here:

So your first Serious Wound gives you a -1 modifier to any rolls, ongoing until the wound has been stabilized or healed.

The second Serious Wound you suffer will increase this penalty to -2, with the same conditions as above.

(Wounds that have been stabilized - even if not healed - do not count for this consideration of "Is it two or more Wounds?", only non-stabilized ones do. Naturally though, stabilized Wounds can always reopen, especially when engaging in hurried and/or rowdy physical action, and, say, rolling a (-9) for something wild or risky... And when the stitches tear and your bandages start soaking red, or when that improvised splint breaks and your bone starts cracking again... Well then the Wound very much counts once more!)

The same would happen if you got a Critical Wound right away: -2 to any actions for which it makes sense that the injury could hinder you in your performance. And since this category of Wounds has such lovely examples given for it in the corebook such as: punctured lung, severed aorta, ruptured eyeball, or spinal cord damage, amongst others - well, let's just say it may be most rolls that could reasonably be affected...

Here I am already being a little more harsh than the corebook is with its -1 for a Critical.

The final step, then, aggravates it to -3, when you have both Serious and Critical Wounds. I feel this reasonable for such a messed up state of physical health. Also, perhaps I just like my players to suffer and despair. But what can I say? The game - and especially all sorts of combat and violence in it - is supposed to be harsh and brutal, after all.

 

A note on crunch - If you're wondering about the level of severity this adds, and whether you'd want it in your game, here's some maths if it helps:

So, I wanted to know what a +1 modifier would do in K:DL's 2d10 system, in percentages, so I crunched the numbers (which is rather easy, since for a roll of 2d10 there's exactly 100 possible outcomes. So that maps to percentages very nicely. And it turns out that a +1 bonus (or penalty) will affect the rolled result in exactly 15% of all possible rolls. 

By "affect the result" I mean that this single modifier makes the difference between either a full success and a partial, or a partial and a miss. In other words, the question was "How often does a +1 penalty end up turning my 9 into a 10, or my 14 into a 15?"

And the answer is, 15% of the time. 

(This remains true also when you factor in Attribute bonuses, it only becomes slightly less at extreme values, such as at a +4 Attribute, another +1 bonus will increase your result only around 13% of the time. Attributes of -3 or lower are likewise affected. But for our purposes here, that is largely negligible. Let's just operate on the assumption of "+/-15% for every +/-1 bonus/penalty".)

So a -3 penalty adds up to 45%. That's how often your combined Serious and Critical Wounds will reduce your 10 to a 7, your 11 to an 8, your 12 to a 9, your 15 to a 12, your 16 to a 13, or your 17 to a 14.

So the question one can ask themselves when pondering whether to use the original chart or the above depicted one, is basically this: Do I feel that "Oh man, 15% are plenty and 30% is properly hurtful?" 

Or can I get on board with "Yes, a really badly mangled person should when acting under duress be performing less well than normally around half the time they try to do something ambitious, complicated, or dangerous?

My game, my table? Solidly in the latter camp. Your table? Your call!

She says she wants to playtest her new homebrew damage rules.
What do you do?

 

A bit later, after a couple games with the above table, I had another idea, and wanted to see if it could be incorporated into it.

I made a second version of my chart from above, which features a little extra twist I came up with:

 

Numerically, this is the exact same as the one shown above - except for the addition of the new modifier to See Through The Illusion. 

I found this enjoyable for two reasons: 

- it fits that Basic Move's trigger, when you suffer shock, injury, or distort your perception through drugs or rituals..., and thus is just too sweet of an opportunity to pass up for making move snowballs and mechanically funnel the fiction into driving towards my GMing Agenda: Tear back the Illusion to reveal the True Reality behind it.

- it mirrors the thing that happens from Stability at its lowest levels, so I feel that neatly ties together the Madness and Death aspects of these two mechanical subsystems. 

I've been using this one in my games ever since, but am sad to have to report that it hasn't yet triggered in an actual game. Hmmm, could it be because I'm still being too nice to my players... Perhaps I should punish them even harder... Yes, that must be it!

Excuse me while I go cook up some new depravities and mutilations for them to suffer through.

Be back to you soon with the next update!