"Fixing" Stress and Subdual with Campaign Qualities.

[Agent 333]

After having several bad experiences where the one guy pummeling the big-bad knocked him out before the rest of the team dealing regular damage got through half his Vitality, I've come up with the following (haven't tested either yet):

Draining Subdual: As long as a Special Character has Vitality, Subdual Damage is treated the same as regular damage (ie: it lowers Vitality). Once the target has run out of Vitality, subdual damage is treated normally.

(Note that the above severely depowers subdual damage as an option, this might help alleviate that):

Easy Knockouts: Characters fall unconscious if they have fatigued II and are fatigued again, instead of falling unconscious after fatigued IV.

(This in turn makes abilities to ignore fatigue more powerful, but all campaign qualities introduce some re-balancing issues...)

Breaking Point: If a character suffers from the shaken IV condition and is shaken again, instead of falling unconscious he gains some form of insanity (See any list of types of insanity from any RPG to ever deal with the subject. There's a Spycraft 2.0 supplement that deals with it.). Until his shaken grade decreases, he is immune to further stress damage.

This quality is designed to make Stress damage something other than just another way to knock people out.

Again, I've yet to play test any of these, but tell me what you think!

(By the way, I've also had several bad experiences with Special NPCs dropping so fast to Critical Hits that non-critical damage was essentially meaningless. Still not sure how to deal with that one...)

[Doublebond]

Have you considered merely giving special characters enough ranks in cagey to address the subdual/stress problem? And some ranks in tough to address critical hits?

Tough in particular presents PCs with a difficult choice: do they activate a critical hit, and do no damage but ware away at the enemy's tough grade, or do they to forgo the critical success and deal what damage they can? Or do they make use of critical injuries?

[meadicus]

Interesting. I've often thought of doing something similar with subdual, namely to answer two quibbles of mine

"If my vitality (heroic-ness) protects me from big pointy things, why doesn't it protect me from big blunt things."

And also,

If two characters are attacking the a single special NPC, one with a sword, one with a club, then they're not actually contributing to the same damage pool. So two people attacking, won't (aside from increased chance of crits) bring the NPC down faster.

I'm not sure what you've suggested here is quite right. A hit to wounds from a subdual weapon needs to be as bad as a hit to wounds from a lethal weapon. But I shall definitely watch this thread with interest.

[Doublebond]

It always did strike me as odd that subdual damage is, out of the box, almost entirely better than lethal damage for dealing with special characters than lethal damage. They should be alternative ways to deal with enemies, but nevertheless equal.

Vitality in Special NPCs far, far greater rate than their saving throws, and because of that it very rapidly becomes substantially easier to kill them via subdual damage (followed shortly by a coup de grace) rather than lethal damage. What's more, an opponent becomes progressively weaker as he is defeated by subdual, whereas one is fine with their vitality being hit until they run out of vitality entirely, whereupon they are dealt one single grade of fatigued.

One can try to address this with ranks of cagey, but it can be hard to do so without inadvertently encouraging players to forgo subdual damage entirely.

One of the few, small failings with the system, in my opinion.

[Mister Andersen]

Alternatively, you simply treat specials as having a single pool of damage like standards, but only subdual forces the fort saves/fatigued stacking

[Doublebond]

Alternatively, you simply treat specials as having a single pool of damage like standards, but only subdual forces the fort saves/fatigued stacking

Wouldn't that still result in subdual being just plain better than lethal?

[Mister Andersen]

Consider that normally, every time the save fails, subdual damage resets to 0, where as vitality damage keeps going

[Doublebond]

What about something like the following?

• Subdual no longer causes unconsciousness upon failing a save once while the target has four levels of fatigued.
  
  • Subdual no longer incites saves if the target has four levels of fatigued.
• Having no vitality and four levels of fatigued causes unconsciousness.
• Subdual is freely converted to lethal damage if the target is vulnerable to subdual damage (thus removing potential loopholes concerning npcs normally immune to subdual damage) and has four levels of fatigued.

It seems to me the additional effort involved to finally start whacking away at vitality would be counterbalanced by the fact that the target is going to be distinctly weaker with each level of fatigued and that you still get to bypass wounds entirely.

What's more, it has lethal damage characters and subdual damage characters working towards a common goal—either way, they both still eventually need to get rid of the target's vitality.

[Mister Andersen]

Or, everyone just has Damage Defiance (subdual)

[Doublebond]

Or, everyone just has Damage Defiance (subdual)

That'd nerf damage conversion pretty hard wouldn't it?

[Mister Andersen]

It's the utterly simplest means of making subdual damage less effective than sharp pointy things without having to dick around in the guts of the sub system.

[paddyfool]

Currently, the default balance seems to go as follows:

Lethal damage: Generally easier to go crit-fishing (all the highest crit ranges are on weapons doing lethal damage as default, and crits are more meaningful); works against more targets (e.g. Undead; good luck pummeling a zombie into submission).

Subdual/stress: Brings down special characters faster.  Seemingly because it's more cinematically appropriate to quickly KO an important villain and still be left with the issue of what to do with him later than it is to kill him quickly.  Or for the heroes to be knocked out a la Tintin but go on to make a dashing escape than it is for them just to be killed.  (High vitality = plot armour, in other words).  Also ignores DR.

If you want to shift the balance in favour of lethal damage, iirc there are already campaign properties to do that (hewn limbs being one, I think).  If you want an opponent who cannot be knocked or stressed out easily, Cagey is your friend, as stated.

EDIT: If you want to try a common damage pool for special characters, though (and this would have the added advantage of making them simpler to manage), I'd suggest the following:

Everything takes its toll (permanent)
Special characters (and PCs?) just lose vitality when they take stress or subdual damage.  If they have no vitality remaining, they take a grade of fatigued (as normal) and any further stress or subdual damage forces a save vs unconsciousness.

I'm really not sure how well balanced it would be, given the more limited range of targets for subdual damage; probably depends on your campaign world and what you're fighting.  It also rather nerfs a few features, such as the "No Pain" ability.  EDIT: On the whole, I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're just feeling very experimental.