... Make Them Suffer!
Alright, so... combat, right? It's when you and your opponent give each other injuries, and then one or both of you could die and all that... right?
Yes.
But that's actually the more boring part of it. Let's look at it in a bit more detail:
K:DL is a system written to support horror gameplay - and true to that calling, it provides you with all the tools to make combat every bit as terrifying and ruinous as any of the other horrors - mental, emotional, supernatural... - that you might spring on your players.
Trading wounds is part of that, but by no means all there is to it. However, it's often the first thing that comes to a GM's mind when first trying to grasp the ruleset - so let's start with that aspect.
"How durable are PCs in this game? How many hits can they take before they die?"
As might perhaps be expected for a game like Kult, there's several layers of Truth to be uncovered in the attempt to answer that fully. Let's explore them one by one.
Because ultimately, the answer is:
"One, or several, or a nearly infinite amount. It simply depends..."
So first let's look at how Harm works in the game. Being a modifier to your Endure Injury rolls, the amount of Harm an enemy's attack inflicts dictates not so much how garish and painful the wounds it causes will be, but rather influences your likelihood of sustaining the various levels of wounds at all.
In other words, higher Harm values on certain weapons do NOT indicate that, say, a 12-gauge pumpgun will kill you in two shots, whereas a 9mm pistol will take four hits to do it.
INSTEAD, the more brutal assault just has a lower chance to leave you completely unharmed after any given hit taken, and a higher chance of receiving either Serious or Critical debilitations.
"So PCs can roll [14 or less] a maximum of 6 times, before their Serious Wounds will kill them, and an attack's Harm value modifies how fast they accrue that number of these results?"
Yes, but also no.
Yes because that is in fact how it can work. The player would have to roll (10-14) every time - because on a (-9), things accelerate and your cruel demise approaches much more fiercely - and the GM would have to decide to give you a Serious Wound as a result on each of those rolls.
If it goes that way, the first four times this happens you mark a Serious Wound on your sheet. The fifth time it happens, you cannot get another SW, so it turns into a Critical Wound instead. You're now running out of life, fast. Assume you keep fighting (either by choice, or because you don't have any), the sixth time this happens, your SW would turn into a CW again, but you can't have two of those - so you die.
No because this is, in my experience and from all accounts I've heard and read about, an exceedingly rare progression of events.
For one thing, players are more than likely to roll a (-9) at some point during the above described process. Since your chance to hit (15+) on an unmodified roll - say, if your attacker's Harm and your own Fortitude+Armor balance each other out exactly - is barely over 20%, this means that after like four rolls or so, you'll strongly tend to have that dreaded (-9) show up. And then you're up shit creek, and have to decide which flavor of its streams you're gonna be paddling down.
For another thing, this assumption rests on the idea that the GM always only chooses a Serious Wound when entitled to select from the (10-14) options of the Endure Injury move. Which frankly, no GM worth their salt should be doing.
To reiterate the central point of this whole article:
Don't just make them bleed... make them suffer!
On a (10-14), you get two other options to choose from, besides the good old Serious Wound.
Lose something, and get thrown off balance.
Admittedly, the inherent complexity and richness of this whole move is easily overlooked, since it is written so streamlined and concise - but let's dive into what these really entail:
First off, each of those options is really several options. either of them can be scaled and graded, for greater or lower viciousness and impact. And they can stack.
A lot of this is about fictional positioning, i.e. things that happen in the communally created narrative, but there is nothing that keeps you from lending it mechanical weight as well.
When you lose something, here's a few examples of what you it could be:
- the initiative ( = your chance to act before your oponent's next move)
- sight of your friends
- track of where the bad guy(s) just went
- your sense of where [up / down / out of here / the hostage / the gun / ...] is
- your momentum (e.g. when running or parcouring across the battle site)
- some of your armor (reducing or nullifying its protective value)
- your breath
- a lot of blood
- some teeth
- control of your bowels
- the respect of your peers watching the fight
- use of your right arm
- your sight (such as, from blood trickling in your eyes)
- all hope to defeat this opponent (at least in the way you have tried so far)
- ...
...and yes, obviously you can lose items, such as your gun or other weapon, your backpack, laptop, left shoe, flashlight, phone, car keys, USB stick, map, wallet, you name it...
But these are very basic, and probably the first thing that came too any GM's mind upon reading the Endure Injury move anyways, so I didn't find them worthy of inclusion in the above list.
Note that there are also a few things the GM is very specifically NOT allowed to take away from you:
Your consciousness, your life, and your chance to survive through the next couple hours or so without swift and intensive medical assistance.
All these can explicitly only be taken away on a (-9) result, and only the player may choose which one happens, when it comes to that.
The second option, get thrown off balance can actually be read as a specific sub-case of losing something - namely, your equilibrium and grace. This may sound like a rather narrow choice, but I venture that if you interpret it a little more loosely, there is a lot of potential for using it to make the characters' lives difficult and interesting in awesome ways!
See, what is losing your balance about, essentially? Its central idea is that you are getting pushed into a disadvantageous position in some way. You might also get pulled into such, of course, or thrown... and it doesn't have to be a position, it can also be that you are otherwise put into an unfortunate state or condition.
If you read it like that, whole new vistas of applicability open up to the combat-loving GM: It doesn't always have to be a real hard knock to the chest that puts you off balance - it can be that you are...
- driven into a corner
- maneuvered onto a dangerous ledge
- pulled onto slippery ground
- forced out of cover
- kicked or tripped to the ground
- poisoned to become dizzy and slow
- confused or shaken, forced to reorient
- distracted or surprised by a new enemy / unforeseen turn of events
- entangled or hooked or grabbed, impended in your movement
- ...
...you know - basically just anything that fucks up your flow in combat. Anything that throws you off your A-game and prevents you from acting like the perfectly calm and deadly ninja that you'd usually be in a situation like this.
(Yeah, as if... for most characters, anyways.)
With such a wealth of possible interpretations of these two humble-looking options, I started to get into a little habit of twisting the knife (heh^^) for my players when that result comes up on this move. I offer them a choice between two of them that seem fitting to me in that moment.
Because what's better than making your players suffer? To make them become the co-architects of their own suffering!
So, like maybe
"Things are confusing and you're moving very fast right now. Reeling from the hit, you are forced to choose: Either lose your momentum, or sight of your friends."
or perhaps
"They are too many, and if you're trying to avoid getting hopelessly surrounded by them you'll have to either let them push you back against those rocks (cornered), or evade onto that frozen lake (slippery ground)."
That's always great fun - you should try it some time!
Oh, and remember earlier, when I mentioned how they're all gradable and stackable?
They are. The gradable thing is about when you as the GM decide to pull your punches... or not. Examples include such things as the difference between making them lose their entire backpack (with all the stuff in it), or just make it get a hole and have their map fall out of it. Between losing one of your last three spare clips of ammo, or loosing the gun. Between getting entangled by animated corpse-vines that twist around your ankles, or tripped prone on the ground by said vines.
If I've written them right, you can see some of the gradability right there in the examples. Losing your breath is intuitively much less bad than losing a lot of blood. Getting surprised or distracted can be a weaker form of getting confused or dizzy.
Should you choose to attach any mechanical repercussions to these conditions, you can likewise scale and grade them. From simply a momentary -1 to your next roll, or calling a roll where ordinary there wouldn't have been one (Act under Pressure not to slip and fall when fighting on the icy lake; Observe the Situation to regain your focus and composure when surprised or distracted), to more lasting consequences such as -2 ongoing until the poison wears off, or even making them automatically fail at certain actions.
In this way you can tailor the amount of torment and horror you want to inflict on your players, moment by moment, during your fight scenes. (Or occasionally other scenes that involve an Endure Injury move.)
Stacking, then, is when the same result is chosen repeatedly (either by you or, as per the above twist, by the player themselves), and the consequences get gradually worse.
Perhaps this is just what a given opponent does:
Using that strange martial arts style of hers, she is trying to knock you off balance. The first time she pushes you, you are merely destabilized and must take -2 on certain moves until rebalanced.
The second time, she knocks you face down on the floor. You must now Act under Pressure to get back up, and yes - unless you catch a moment to breathe and consolidate your shit, that -2 is still in effect.
The third time you choose that same result, your inner ear senses are totally messed up from kicks to the head and such... no more standing up straight, no more coordinated motor skills...
It might be a consequence of the PCs' own neglect to address earlier issues:
You never really patched up that hole in your backpack, did you? Well I guess something else might fall out now.
Lemme see your sheet real quick, what might you have in there that I might be interested in...?.
Or it may be the result of a steadily worsening situation just piling on the complications:
After you got entangled and slowed by the corpse-vines, the feral cannibals were able to catch up and are now grasping at you.
Now they grabbed you and are holding you immobile, as they stab you with their short, crooked knives.
Unable to wriggle free, you begin to understand what that weird smelly sludge dripping from their blades must be, as the paralyzing poison starts to take hold on your metabolism...
So, in conclusion, there are many ways you can turn a combat situation from bad to worse to utterly horrific for your players.
At the outset of this article, we asked: How many hits can a character take in this game?
The answer is:
As many as your GM has dots in [creativity + sadism]. Or should that be [creativity x sadism]?
Not entirely sure, tbh - but it's a lot. That much is for sure.
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