Sometimes on the Internet and you get lucky and this happened with my post about using the old Fantasy Standard of “He has the Strength of 10 men” in a LARP Rule.

Jeremy Springfield on Google+ put in a comment to me that explained the Siege Damage Rule used in a system he plays and it made a lot of sense to me. He has a post regarding this on his blog “A Gamers Life” which talks about this is in 4x LARP.  It’s a good idea to take a look at this post: http://www.jeremyteague.com/2015/01/siege-damage-in-4x-larp.html

In the game that Jeremy plays in characters have  1 point of damage on all body areas and all normal weapons do 1 point of damage.  This sounds like a system with the kind of combat you want to avoid – i.e. it is easy to get your character injured or killed. It also sounds like my kind of system – I like combat to be a scary and intense option,( I guess that’s my horror LARP background coming through).

However some characters do “Siege” damage. Siege damage is reserved for characters stronger than the average human and is reserved for large weapons. In this case any character hit with such a weapon takes 1 point of damage to all locations. Effectively incapacitating the character.

There is also an option for a sufficiently strong character to catch and throw back such weapons where appropriate – there is a great example of Trolls throwing boulders at characters.  Which also includes the options for other similarly strong characters to catch and throw back the boulders.

This means you can simplify my original concept to.

All characters get 1 point in all locations – unless they have the strength of several men when it comes to handling damage

Exceptionally strong attacks can be reduced to a single call “Siege!” or something similar.

I think this could lend itself to

• Games that are very realistic or
• Heroic games where characters are exceptional when compared to the average NPC.

In modern terms perhaps a gun does 1 point of damage but an RPG does Siege damage.

What do you think?