Variant: Reducing Impact Damage

[Shane Ivey]

Wild Talents scales back the deadliness of falling and other impacts significantly from the Godlike rules. If you want a little more grittiness in your long-distance falls, here are a couple of suggestions.

First, and easiest to implement, as GM you could simply disallow the defensive roll to reduce impact damage in extreme cases. Falling from the roof of a warehouse? Go ahead and roll to take the damage to your legs instead of your head. Falling from the roof of the Chrysler Building? Forget it. No amount of wriggling is going to keep your skull intact.

For more detail, you could use the following modified rule. This is a suggested modification, not an official revision. If you use it, replace the text under this subheading as follows.

Reducing Impact Damage (page 40)
Some skills and miracles help reduce impact damage. If you see it coming you get a single dice-pool roll with a relevant stat+skill or superpower (at the GMís discretion) as a defense against the damage. This is a reflexive roll that can be made even if it wasn't declared as an action.

If the impact is a surpriseóyou donít see it until the round when itís going to hitóyou must have Coordination dice equal to or greater than the damage to see it coming. See the impact chart for dice equivalents.

A successful roll has two benefits.

First, you can transfer the defense rollís width in damage from hit location 10 to one other hit location. This is useful because you can choose to suffer some of the damage on your strongest or most armored hit location.

Second, if youíre falling and you land on your feet (or equivalent limbs), subtract your jumping distance (as determined by your Body stat) from your yards-per-round speed to determine how much damage you take. If your jumping distance is greater than your speed, you suffer no damage at allónot even the 2 Shock per location.

Example: Mafia goons throw Leatherneck out of a helicopter high over the city. Ordinarily he would take 2 Shock to each hit location and 7 Killing to the head in falling damage at terminal velocity. But with a Coordination+Parachuting roll at width 5 he transfers 5 of the Killing damage to his torso. He takes 2 Shock and 1 Killing to the head, 2 Shock and 5 Killing to the torso, and 2 Shock to every other hit location. After Leatherneck hits pavement he has a body full of broken bones but, incredibly, can get up and stagger away.

[Hobbes]

I like these options. I'm all about the grit. I'll sample both and see which is most condusive to both suspension of disbelief and player fun. Thanks for posting these!

[Mike Lucas]

If the impact is a surpriseóyou donít see it until the round when itís going to hitóyou must have Coordination dice equal to or greater than the damage to see it coming. See the impact chart for dice equivalents.

The impact defense roll has to be declared in a combat roundóyou canít just freely scrap something else youíre rolling to reduce impact damage. Some relevant stats and skills include Body+Endurance, Body+Jumping and Coordination+Acrobatics.

I like that high coordination gives you a chance for a defense roll even if you don't see it coming (can't remember if that was in the original rules, don't have my book with me right now). Cool!

But those two paragraphs seem to contradict each other, in the case where you don't see it coming but have high enough Coord. In such a case, how can you have declared Coordination + Acrobatics or similar action, since you didn't see the impact coming? Is it a matter of being able to use extra matching sets that you happened to roll? Or of always declaring a Coordination + Acrobatics multiple action "just in case"?

I'd be tempted to rule that in this case, you can scrap something else you're rolling, as long as you haven't already resolved the action for it.

- Mike

[Shane Ivey]

Good point. I'll edit.

[Mike Lucas]

Awesome!