Deep wound mod for SoE

[Aramis]

Hello.

New member to the forums shouting here. Until now I've just been lurking around.
I just recently ran my first session of Shadows of Esteren to four friends of mine and they really liked it, so we decide to start a full campaign that I'll try start writing in following days.

I really like the fighting attitude system and it brings some good tactic layer to the combat, reminded me a bit about The Riddle of Steel and Blade of the Iron Throne but to me it still seemed little bit too shallow.
I thought to myself that I'd really like to see this kind of system a bit more fleshed out and decided to write a little combat mod for hit locations and deep wounds.
This is copied almost in it's entirety from Praedor, a rpg originating from my native Finland, that I have played quite a lot and really like it. I just made little adjustments to adapt it for SoE. (Unfortunately Praedor is only available in Finnish.)



The basic idea of the deep wound system are hit locations and your characters deep wound value.
Deep Wound = Way of Combativeness + 5

If the attack roll is a success and hits we first roll percentiles to see the location it struck, calculate the damage, subtract armour protection value in that specific hit location and calculate inflicted damage.
If the inflicted damage =/> Deep wound value, it's considered as deep wound and we consolidate the chart for effects.

So for example:
Strike hits your characters left arm. Her deep wound value is 7 and the damage inflicted to her after protection provided by her gauntles is 9, it would be a Deep Wound +2.

Below I've provided a link to the Excel chart.

Deep Wound and Hit location chart
This is the first version and needs to be play tested a bit to get the amounts right.
I'll be using this during our campaign to see how it works and make some adjustments too.

In the future, I'll also be making a adjusted list for armours for every bodypart and giving them their sepperate protection values and prices.

I might add the first edition of the list here, but I try to throw a playtest oneshot asap to test how this works in practice. In theory it should work just fine, but ofc getting the different protection values right is important.

I'd appreciate any and all constructive feedback.

EDIT: 18.12.2015
Updated the download link to new version of Deep Wounds Chart
- Fixed few typos and rewrote few parts to be clearer.
- Edited layout of the sheets.
- Added hit location template.

[Songe]

Simple and elegant, your Deep Wound mod seems to work fine.

Although i already consider Esteren's system lethal enough, i was looking at something that could make my players' characters to scream (because of pain) or to feint (same).

I actually want to capture the flavour of the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bones (D. Keyes) fights, duels and battles : into this story, characters are often losing consciousness (which is a good way to end a chapter, or, in RPG, a scene).

But i am usually fond of "simulation" systems. Esteren's got a narrative one.
I really think i could use your idea of deep wound to achieve what i want to in this game.

Thanks !

[Evolena]

I will probably have a look at that, as the question of localized hits and (head) protection has been risen during my first combat.