Wound penalties against fire etc - anyone house ruled like this?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
41

Lee, page 178 describes combat damage, if you progress through it, there is no soak roll. In combat, there is an attack roll, a defense roll, that is derived to attack advantage, to which weapon damage is added, nothing else is rolled. Wound penalties apply to the defense, clearly, but they don't impact soak, at all, they impact Attack Advantage.

So, you're proposing a system where soak is different for magic than it is for combat, substantially so, or perhaps a system where wound penalties for combat are double counted, once for the defense, and then again at the soak level, to make it consistent with your proposed change to Magic damage.

I'm honestly not sure what it is you propose, but I think it's clear that the rules do not support the view that wound penalties should affect the soak roll.

If anything, what I mentioned as far as a house rule above, about causing a character to go unconscious, is a much cleaner method for handling the issue. An unconscious character is more or less incapacitated, and can be dispatched without the endless toil of trying to apply killing damage with magic. It also resolves long combats, where wounds accumulate, but don't deal killing or incapacitating wounds. It's simple, it's clean.

42

If you're going to be picky about "all," you may want to be picky about "actions," too. Let's say you're paralyzed or unconscious. Can you perform actions? You still make Soak rolls.

Have you ever been fully immersed in ice water for a full minute? I haven't. But I've had my bare legs fully immersed in water about 5°C or 10°F above that for approximately that length of time. It hurt quite a bit, with muscles cramping up. I couldn't walk well; trying to swim would have been brutal. People don't tend to do a polar-bear plunge and tread water for a minute.

Now look at some references. The cold shock response can kill you, and a minute isn't a bad rough estimate. And then there is the incapacitation done by the cold water. Sure, hypothermia will take much longer. Hitting -10 in a minute and having a chance at something worse in the first couple minutes isn't so bad a game simulation for that, is it? Here are just a few quick ones:
https://www.health.com/mind-body/polar-bear-plunge
https://www.soundingsonline.com/voices/hypothermia

And then of course there are the actual rules that say

The damage is inflicted once every six seconds (once per combat round)

I'm pretty sure that means the rules intend us to roll every 6 s.

43

I haven't (and aren't in any particular hurry to try it). I was including "going swimming in cold seas" as a "Polar Bear Plunge", though - are we using different definitions?

I can't read your first link - am getting a server error message. The second link states that "the average adult can survive over an hour in cold water", which doesn't seem consistent with making a stress roll every round - the odds of it not exploding at some point is pretty low. There's also the penalty to swim to consider - the link does suggest that by half an hour (and probably less, but not implied to be by an order of magnitude) you'd be unable to swim, but that's still a lot longer than a minute.

Cold Shock response feels like it's potentially just getting a bad damage roll on the stress die?

I also note the rules for Exposure and Frostbite on pg 105 of Rival Magic. This explicitly states that "Frostbite is an additional danger of low temperatures...[characters affected] take damage from frostbite every time they make a deprivation roll." Deprivation rolls are made at intervals from 3 hours (for minor cold doing -3 Frostbite Damage) to 15 minutes (for Critical cold doing +15 Frostbite Damage). So there's (fairly closely related) precedent for not making the damage roll from environmental conditions every round.

In addition to cold water environmental damage, you also have heat BS&S (pg 66) has direct sunlight in the Great Desert doing +1 non-combat damage. Whilst being out in the desert unprotected is a very bad idea, I'd be similarly inclined to link the damage to the (desert specific) Deprivation roll rather than doing it every round, as otherwise people would fall over far too quickly.

44

Polar-bear plunges are typically done in ice water, at least where I'm from (people cut a hole in the ice on a pond, for example), and I used ice water from the table. If it's notably warmer than ice water, then the damage would be less, making survival more likely.

From the first site:

Being in cold water—between 41 and 59 degrees—for anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes can trigger a type of nerve dysfunction, or paralysis, that limits your ability to swim, says Tipton.

The third site says this about similar temperatures:

If cold shock response doesn't kill you in the first minute, within 10 minutes your limbs start to become incapacitated,

And that's notably above ice water's temperature, by roughly 5°C-15°C or 9°F-28°F, which is a significant margin.

Right, which is what matches up with your comment above about an exploding die. Right? If you don't hit an exploding die, you'll survive a long time. But there is a good chance you'll drown since your muscles will cramp up much faster. If you do hit the exploding die and it's high enough, cold shock response. If neither the cold shock response (commonly results in drowning rather than directly killing) nor drowning kill you, then you're waiting for hypothermia, and that will take a while.

Regardless, my point above was that so many people want to add Wound Penalty to Soak rolls, but doing that makes them highly unrealistic. They're far more realistic without adding Wound Penalty to Soak rolls. You're pointing out that even the Soak rolls without Wound Penalty might be too harsh, so adding Wound Penalty would just compound unrealism.

45

Did you pick up on the point about the Exposure and Frostbite rules from Rival Magic supporting not making the roll every round? (You didn't address it at all, so not sure if you just skimmed over it and didn't have it register.)

Do you think they change what leads to a sensible outcome?

46

I'm aware of those rules, and they're in at least one other book if not two. Those are for much lesser exposure. You can stand naked in 0°C air for a long time without suffering much compared to what you'll suffer if you're in ice water. Clothing will also protect you a lot better from the air than from the water. From personal experience, I would rather be naked -40° air for 10 minutes than immersed in ice water for 1 minute; neither is pleasant, but I'd stand a far, far better chance of survival in the former. On the hot side, how many times have you burned yourself reaching into an oven to put something in or take something out, even if it take a little time? Meanwhile, how much time do you think it would take to get a significant burn if you had touched one of the oven's internal surfaces?

From a life guard:

Water conducts heat 25 times more efficiently than air, so heat-loss will be far faster in water.

From UMN:

Cold water dangerously accelerates the onset and progression of hypothermia since body heat can be lost 25 times faster in cold water than in cold air.

Sure, you could slow it down some. The real issue shows up in how ArM5 handles environmental damage and how math works. Let's say you're exposed to +0 cold over your whole body. That's still +0. But what if we have -N cold? Would exposing your whole body make you less likely to get hurt because -4N is smaller than -N? So how do we fix things when you get to this point? When you're going below +0, you need to institute a change. That's what they did. Ice water isn't below +0, so we shouldn't have to.

Now, looking at the odds, one of those sites said 20% are deaths by cold shock within 2 minutes, and that's with warmer water. If we consider that to be +0 damage water since it's warmer, we're looking a roughly a 1% chance per roll of dying. That gives an 18.2% chance for the average person to die in the first 2 minutes. That actually comes out much better than I was anticipating. Huh. And if we look at messing up your limbs, you'll probably take -1 every two rounds. That's -5 in a minute. Incapacitated is flat -10 when we look at defense, so that's in the ballpark of a 15-point penalty. 3 minutes. That's a little fast for "1 to 15 minutes" or "within 10 minutes," but it's at least in the right ballpark. Considering we want a fairly simple mechanic and we have one that comes out this close to reality, do we really want to mess with it to try to finagle the last little bit of reality out of it?

47

My key point is that something that is ridiculous if damage is assumed to occur every round isn't necessarily ridiculous if you assume that it happens less frequently. Whilst "don't make wound penalties affect soak" is one solution to "rolling every round and letting the wound penalties affect soak results in people dying ridiculously quickly", "don't roll every round" is another, and if the former solution can still result in unrealistic results it may not be better than the latter. It may still be if it produces more sensible results more consistently, but hypothermia feels like something that should build up over time, which is more consistent with wound penalties affecting soak totals than them not doing (although I suppose it could also be modelled with Fatigue loss, given that's a common effect of cold spells in Ars Magica).

Similarly, being boiled (or immersed in sub-boiling, but still too hot) water is something that should become more and more of a problem over time as the heat in your body builds up, rather than you having an equal chance of dying at any given point in time.

I will concede that "heat building up in your body" isn't necessarily the same as "wound penalty", given there's a question of whether you should really be more likely to boil to death if you have several broken fingers at the start of the process (having lost blood / gone into shock meaning you die more quickly is a bit more plausible, though). I'm not sure what a good alternative to allowing wound penalties is that avoids that problem - in theory you could make the damage modifier higher over time, but that's not consistent with the fact that the medium isn't actually getting more intense.

The fact that the Exposure rules say that exposure to freezing temperatures (whilst soaking wet, even, given one of the Condition Modifiers listed for it) aren't every 6s, implies that not every possible source of heat related damage is applied every 6s. The table on pg 181 lists "Ice" as +1 damage (which would increase to +4 if completely immersed in it), so it's reasonable to assume that Ice does apply its damage every round. I can't see anywhere that specifies that very cold water does its damage every round, though. Have I just missed it?

Assuming that it's not specified somewhere, cold water presumably does less damage than ice*. You could represent that by making it do less damage per round, but you could also represent it by having it do damage less often - as you've pointed out, you'd still want it to be doing more damage / damage more frequently than air at the equivalent temperature, but that's fairly easily done.

[*I'm half waiting to be told that there's a reason this isn't true, admittedly.]

48

In actuality, ice water is actually worse than ice (assuming any natural ice temperature on earth), but using "ice" seemed a good estimate. I'm not sure if it's enough worse to set it all the way to +2. Certainly, if ice does it's damage every round, it is quite unreasonable for ice water not to.

(Rewriting as I didn't do well the first time...)
Reasons: Ice relies on conductivity, while ice water uses convection, the latter being more efficient (which is part of the basis behind wetsuits). Water also has about double the specific heat capacity of ice, so it can suck up heat just as readily, though ice water, is right at the point of melting and thus has it's huge latent heat. Of course, the ice could be right at the point of melting, too, which would leave only the convection issue. Ice can be colder than ice water, but only a small bit relatively speaking, so not nearly enough to make up for these factors.

49

Fair enough.

It did also occur to me whilst I was away that the alternative mechanism to make you more likely to die over time that isn't affected by broken fingers that I was looking for may be the Deprivation mechanic itself - whilst the corebook only applies it to food, water and air, Rival Magic extends it to exposure to extreme cold, and it wouldn't be ridiculous to entend it to exposure to significant heat (although I'm not aware of direct Rules support for this - BS&S just decreases the time interval for a water deprivation check).

Does +1 damage per round, not stacking with wound penalties, plus a deprivation check every X minutes work to simulate cold water immersion? My initial feel is 5 minutes for X, but not sure on that - you'll die on your tenth failed check, and you've probably got 1 - 3 successful checks before you start consistently failing them.

50

Exactly. If there was a soak roll in combat, the wound penalty would apply twice. That's why there isn't one.

51

That just means you've capped the wound penalties. It doesn't change the approach.

52

You're making an explicit call that PoF is not a combat source of damage. I reject that interpretation. The rules you cite do not state that magical damage is not combat damage. In my interpretation, PoF is active and circumvents armor and interacts with the target's state, as opposed to passive sources such as a bonfire (the example on page 181).

53

The rules make the explicit call on page 181 third paragraph under the heading of Injuries.

54

You have two very questionable ways of arriving at this. First, if it applies, it doesn't matter if there is a roll or not:

rolls and totals

Since the lack of a roll does not stop the penalty from applying to a total, we can look here:

SOAK TOTAL: Stamina + Armor Soak Bonus

So this is explicitly a total. If you say it should apply to Soak, then it applies to this whether you have a roll or not. You could come at it from a different angle: it's already applying since it factored into Defense Total, so it shouldn't apply again. Of course, that's pretty sketchy logically because neither Defense Total nor Attack Advantage (which includes Defense Total) factor into Soak Total. Technically, if it applies to Soak, then in regular combat you're supposed to apply it to Defense Total and then again to Soak Total since they're two independent totals.

The second questionable part is how you argued for "all," while "all" is an adjective there, not a noun. What does "all" modify? "Actions." You roll Soak even when you're Incapacitated; there is no exception to Soak rolls for things like that in the rules. Incapacitated says

Obviously, Incapacitated characters can do nothing

Are you saying the Incapacitated character can perform an action? If I look up "action," I get things like

the fact or process of doing something, typically to achieve an aim.

a thing done; an act.

something done or performed; act; deed.

an act that one consciously wills and that may be characterized by physical or mental activity

the process of doing something, especially when dealing with a problem or difficulty

Are you really saying an Incapacitated character can perform an action when they explicitly "can do nothing"?

I'm not saying you cannot choose to apply it to Soak rolls. Your game, feel free. What I am saying is that any statement that the rules imply you should is extremely questionable due to these two issues.

I'm pretty sure there is no cap to Wound Penalties. What do you think that cap is?

There is no maximum limit to a character’s Wound Penalty, and characters cannot die immediately from non-fatal wounds, no matter how many there are.

Because the book says so:

Non-combat sources of injury have a damage bonus, which is added to a stress die to determine the amount of damage done...
These rules are also used for calculating damage inflicted by spells.

Not only that, this statement has been ruled to apply to spell damage that comes from Finesse-based attacks against a Defense, rather than using Attack Advantage, as well.

55

Because the book says so:

Non-combat sources of injury have a damage bonus, which is added to a stress die to determine the amount of damage done...
These rules are also used for calculating damage inflicted by spells.

It doesn't. You've chosen to interpret it that way.
The first sentence says something about non-combat sources to which I do not count PoF.
I read the second sentence as an inclusive statement emphasizing that magical non-combat sources use the same rules, i.e., these rules supersede rules for non-combat magic even if the description in the magic section suggests otherwise.

The English language provides a lot of latitude in its interpretation. This entire discussion is largely about different interpretation biases.

56

I think we have a good reason to interpret it that way: David Chart has said that's even how combat damage with Finesse-based Attack Total v. Defense Defense Total works. Is choosing an interpretation because the line editor says it's the right one so bad a choice?

57

Is choosing an interpretation because the line editor says it's the right one so bad a choice?

Nope, perfectly valid.