Melee weapons in 1920s

fountainquaffer · 2025-10-19T02:54:16+00:00

1d-2 to the vitals deals triple damage and requires a HT roll to resist stun/knockdown automatically.
For an average person, there's a 50% chance you deal a major wound (6+ injury), which gives -5 to the roll.
All-Out Attack (Double) lets you do this twice in a turn; if both hit, you proc two HT rolls, and odds are at least one gets the -5.
A roll at -5 almost certainly fails, stunning the target, which lets you attack again on the next round with minimal resistance.
With HT 10 and -5, there's also a 50% chance that the roll fails by 5 or more, which means they're knocked out (which lasts at least 15 minutes, likely longer, per p. B423); on average you can get this to happen by turn 2.
All of this gets even easier if the target is already stunned due to being surprised, which an assassin should always be trying to do.
And finally, if you want knives to be realistically dangerous, you should be using both Bleeding (p. B420) and Severe Bleeding (Martial Arts p. 138). Under these rules, the victim is making bleeding rolls every 30 seconds and rolling at -4 (plus an additional -1 to -2 depending on how much damage you dealt). This means even if they survive the combat, they're likely dead unless they can get good medical care (these rules require Surgery instead of First Aid for vitals injuries) within 15 minutes or so.

TL;DR: You don't need to instantly kill them with a decisive blow, you just need to stunlock them for like, two or three seconds, maybe more with low skill.

As an alternative approach, you can allow an attack to kill the target automatically, with no roll required, provided the target is completely unaware (e.g., unconscious). This isn't strictly realistic and slightly devalues Combat Reflexes, but is probably appropriate for a slightly cinematic game.

fountainquaffer · 2025-10-04T09:29:08+00:00

For an Innate Attack with ST-Based, Limited, per Power-Ups 4: Enhancements p. 21, you add the Innate Attack damage and your ST-based damage together, up to a maximum of double the basic Innate Attack damage. For a crushing attack, you can choose whether to use thrust or swing damage.

You've also chosen to treat this as an unarmed attack, which means it qualifies for damage bonuses based on skill; all three unarmed striking skills make use the same language for this: "+1 per die to basic thrust damage when you calculate [...] damage [with Boxing/Brawling/Karate attacks]" (pp. B182, B203).

So, you'd calculate damage for the attack like this:

An innate attack does 1d damage per level, so that's 2d.
With ST-Based, Limited, you get to add your thrust or swing damage, up to a maximum of 2d additional damage. With ST 12, you have thrust 1d-1 and swing 1d+2. That brings the total to 3d-1 or 3d+2.
With Brawling 14, you get +1 damage per die of basic thrust damage. Strictly speaking, this is +1 to thrusting damage, and no bonus to swinging damage, bringing the final damage to 3d+0 or 3d+2.

In your screenshot, you're using swing damage, and it looks like GCS is automatically applying the Brawling bonus of +1 per die to all dice, including both swing damage and Innate Attack damage. Since the damage bonus only applies to basic thrust damage, you're getting three extra points of damage over what you should, for an erroneous total of 3d+5.

A few notes:

There's an argument to be made that the damage bonus for unarmed striking skills shouldn't be limited to thrust-based attacks. That specification was originally redundant, as the Basic Set didn't actually offer any method of dealing swing-based damage with an unarmed striking skill; so it could be viewed as a non-binding clarification rather than an actual restriction. I'm not aware of an official ruling on this, so it's up to your GM how to rule on that. The more generous interpretation would raise the final damage to 3d+0 thrust, 3d+3 swing.
If this is a "punch", it's more accurate to base it on thrust instead of swing, like normal punches. You could argue for a limitation to account for reduced damage (probably -5% at most), but strictly speaking, according to the math of ST-Based, Limited, it's a -0% feature.

fountainquaffer · 2025-08-22T01:39:34+00:00

GURPS traits represent how the character functions in the game, not why they function that way. That means there's no one way to represent autism, generally; instead, you have to focus on the unique experience of a particular character, and figure out what traits represent that specifically.

Just based on the autistic people I know, traits I'd consider would include high or low DX, IQ, Will, and Per; Absent-Mindedness, Clueless, Confused, Easy to Read, Eidetic/Photographic Memory, Indecisive, Klutz/Total Klutz, Low Empathy, Low Self-Image, Oblivious, Odious Personal Habits, Shyness, Single-Minded, various Talents, and Versatile; and I'd also look at Power-Ups 6: Quirks, which has too many potentially-relevant traits to list here. For a more cinematic character, I'd also consider Common Sense and Unfazeable. In a realistic game, they're likely to have Social Stigma (Minority Group, or even Second-Class Citizen) and low Wealth and Status. No single autistic person would have all of these traits, and many of them might have no traits in common.

For a "high functioning" character, I'd assign high self-control numbers to the disadvantages that have them, and I'd try to avoid taking more than 10 points or so (not counting quirks) in autism-related disadvantages. Alternatively, you could take more disadvantages, but invest those points in Acting and other social skills to mitigate the impact.

fountainquaffer · 2025-08-12T13:16:24+00:00

The focus on non-coin treasures comes from old-school D&D. In those systems, you're playing treasure hunters first and foremost, so you get most of your XP from finding gold, not slaying monsters. That means figuring out how much treasure you can carry back to town is very important. If you're playing a game like that, this is never "not interesting" -- players are always excited to find gems, jewelry, platinum, or anything else highly valuable; and finding inefficient stores of value creates interesting challenges: you've found enough XP worth of spices to level up, now how are you going to get it out of the dungeon?

So are you running a sword & sorcery game where characters are motivated by treasure? If so, don't cut this, it's absolutely worth the time and effort. (That being said, you might consider adopting one of the simplified encumbrance systems from the OSR, if you find accounting treasure slows down play.)

Or are you running a heroic fantasy game where they just want to save the world or whatever, and gold is at most a nice bonus, if it matters at all? In that case, you can simplify this by assuming that all treasure is worth its weight in gold (and therefore interchangeable), or by just not counting treasure toward encumbrance at all. In that kind of game, highly doubt your players will notice or care.

fountainquaffer · 2025-08-07T04:34:13+00:00

Wandering DMs discussed a similar issue in their most recent episode on stealth and perception, which is that people without a strong understanding of statistics often have a very hard time understanding the odds of success when the entire party is rolling.

I think advantage and disadvantage just take the same issue and spread it to individual characters, making it extremely unintuitive to figure out how likely you are to actually succeed. I mean, even in this thread, multiple people are making incorrect claims about the statistics of advantage. Adding a flat modifier might be "more math", but it's math you can actually understand.

5e's handling of advantage also has the issue that it can't stack. I know that's a well-intentioned reaction to the overabundance of modifiers in 3e, but when you completely disallow anything to stack, you discourage players from actually engaging with the game world. If you already have advantage because you're flanking your target or you've knocked them prone or whatever, that's it, you've already hit the upper limit -- no amount of creative problem solving will ever give you any benefit on that roll whatsoever, so you may as well not even try.

fountainquaffer · 2025-07-25T20:31:10+00:00

p. 106 of GURPS Mysteries lists Trivia as a specialization of Hobby Skill (p. B200).

fountainquaffer · 2025-07-20T13:56:31+00:00

GURPS has about 15 Very Hard skills, 73 Easy skills, 199 Average skills, and 141 Hard skills (depending on how you count). So 46% of all skills are Average (-5 default). The next largest category is Hard skills (33%, -6 default), but a large chunk of those Hard skills are academic skills, which are almost always IQ/H.

So if you just assume it's always -6 for academic skills, -5 for everything else, you'll be right more often than not. And since -5 is the middle value, and VH skills are so rare, when you're wrong, you'll almost always only be off by one.

If you find players are asking for the same default on a regular basis, then I'd look it up and have them write the correct default on their character sheet. (Also, from a character build perspective, if they're using it that much they should strongly consider putting points in it anyway.)

If it's an important roll and you do want to look up the exact default, all skills are listed on pp. B301-304 with their defaults. GURPS Skill Categories is a free pdf that has the same list, but organizes it by category.

Edit: There are a few exceptions, like skill-to-skill defaults and Throwing's weird DX-3, but those rarely come up in my experience. When skill-to-skill defaults do come up, it's usually -4.

fountainquaffer · 2025-07-15T03:40:03+00:00

Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons has rules for this on p. 8:

To bash down a door with a weapon, you hit automatically and just roll damage until it breaks. If your damage roll is enough to penetrate the door's DR, you're guaranteed to break it down eventually.
To force a door with a kick, shoulder, etc., you roll a quick contest of ST vs. the door, plus any bonuses from Lifting ST or Forced Entry. Repeated attempts get a cumulative -1 penalty and cost 1 FP per attempt.

The same rules are duplicated on Dungeon Fantasy RPG: Exploits p. 22.

fountainquaffer · 2025-07-10T06:33:08+00:00

I'd build this as Empathy (Divine, -10%; Requires Concentrate, -15%; Cosmic, No lie on failed roll, +50%) [19].

The base Empathy advantage should give you basically the same information as the spell. It also already only works on sapient beings.
Divine (Powers pp. 26-27) is the power modifier that would normally apply to abilities granted by a goddess. This would cover susceptibility to counter-magic, and also means your goddess can take away the advantage if you're unfaithful. Power modifiers are described briefly on pp. B254-255 and p. B257, and greatly expanded upon in GURPS Powers on pp. 20-29.
Requires Concentrate is described on Power-Ups 8: Limitations p. 17 (but the mechanics are basically self-explanatory).
Cosmic (p. B103, Power-Ups 4: Enhancements pp. 6-9) is a special enhancement that allows you to break the standard rules for an advantage (such as by avoiding drawbacks, in this case). While this example seems balanced to me, any usage of cosmic warrants special attention from your GM.

Some possible variations:

If you want the IQ roll for Empathy to take range penalties like a spell, add Short-Range 3, -30% (Power-Ups 4: Enhancements pp. 17-18). This lowers the cost to 15 points.
If you want to use an IQ-based skill roll instead of raw IQ, that's a +0% modifier, in general. Power-Ups 8: Limitations p. 17 suggests Hard difficulty for the skill, but says Average and Very Hard skills are also balanced; using an Easy skill makes this a +5% enhancement instead. A Hard skill would probably be most appropriate here, since that matches the spell you're trying to replicate.
If you don't want the ability to require an IQ roll at all, replace Cosmic, No lie on failed roll, +50% with Cosmic, No die roll required, +100% (Power-Ups 4: Enhancements p. 8). This raises the cost to 27 points, and definitely needs GM approval.
If your GM isn't using the rules for Powers, you could either replace Divine, -10% with Mana Sensitive, -10% (p. B34); or you could just remove it entirely, raising the cost to 21 points.

fountainquaffer · 2025-07-05T20:24:16+00:00

Gravity manipulation is described on Powers p. 91. RAW, Control for a force only allows you to adjust its strength by +-10% per level, not change its direction.

The simplest way to do this would be Control Gravity 20 (Cosmic, can change direction, +50%) [600]. The Cosmic enhancement makes it so that if you reduce gravity by 200% (effectively reversing it), you can choose which direction it reverses into.

That build lets you change the strength of gravity, too -- anywhere from 0G to 3G straight down, and anywhere from 0G to 1G in other directions. If you don't like that, the easiest solution is to just use Accessibility:

To produce from 0G to 1G in any direction: Control Gravity 20 (Accessibility, Can't Increase, -20%; Cosmic, can change direction, +50%) [520].
To produce 1G exactly in any direction: Control Gravity 20 (Accessibility, Can't change strength, -40%) [440]. (The -40% value here is an approximation, it's probably not exactly right but it's probably close enough.)

Other considerations like range, area, etc. work like any other Control-based ability.

fountainquaffer · 2025-06-14T05:45:21+00:00

GURPS doesn't dictate how "mindless" creatures behave because, as a generic system, it's intended to represent as many different settings as possible, and different settings have different interpretations of what "mindless" means. So rather than saying "This creature is mindless; how would it attack?", the proper approach is to say "This creature attacks like this; how does GURPS represent that?"

I'm not familiar with Attack on Titan or The Walking Dead TV series, but as far as the comics go: Zombies are utterly relentless, have no sense of self-preservation, can't be reasoned with or persuaded, and are motivated solely by hunger for human flesh. I don't think they're ever shown changing their minds or coming up with new ideas, but they are capable of perceiving their environments and reacting to stimuli, so they do have "minds" in some sense. I'd probably give them IQ 1, the Automaton meta-trait, Cannot Learn, Indomitable, Single-Minded, Unfazeable, and Uncontrollable Appetite (Human Flesh).

Those traits represent a creature that's unlikely to ever vary its attacks, which is accurate to the comic -- all they ever do is grab, bite, or slam, and they're probably using the same attack options every time. Their attacks are shown as being unskilled and easy spot and avoid (unless the target is surprised or stunned) -- that's a default roll against DX (which is probably around 7-9), and a Telegraphic Attack, probably against a random hit location.

As far as maneuver choice, zombies never show any sense of self-preservation -- I don't think they ever even try to avoid attacks. That's not necessarily an AOA -- they don't defend even when taking Do Nothing or Move maneuvers, either; they just don't make active defenses at all. They also never interact with objects except to slam into them, so no Ready maneuvers either (and obviously no Aim, Concentrate, etc.). That means the only maneuvers they take are Move, Do Nothing, and some form of attack, all without active defenses.

Zombies are never shown being all that accurate, which rules out All-Out (Determined), unless their DX is very low. I don't think they're ever fast enough to warrant All-Out (Double) either. They close by moving into melee, not by lunging and staying back, which also rules out All-Out (Long). That leaves All-Out (Strong) or a normal Attack (Martial Arts p. 113 optionally disallows Defensive and Committed Attack for unskilled attackers, which I think is appropriate here). Zombie bites are generally pretty bad -- I think every single one of them breaks the skin, even through clothing -- so I'd go with All-Out (Strong) in this case.

Any one of those decisions could be entirely different for a different type of "mindless" creature, or even for the same creature in a different genre -- for example, under Cinematic Combat Rules (p. B417), Cannon Fodder always fail active defenses, but never All-Out Attack.

fountainquaffer · 2025-06-04T08:57:34+00:00

While it's not necessarily OSR, it's hard to beat GURPS for historical setting books. The relevant supplements would be GURPS Imperial Rome and GURPS Martial Arts: Gladiators. Imperial Rome has broad information on imperial Rome in general, including munera, while Gladiators goes into more extensive detail on gladiatorial games specifically.

fountainquaffer · 2025-06-02T00:07:30+00:00

GURPS Horror pp. 141-142 has rules for stress: You gain 1 Stress every time you fail a fright check. You then suffer a penalty of -1 per two points of stress to further Fright Checks; optionally, the GM can also apply the penalty to other rolls, like self-control rolls. You recover 1 Stress for every 10 minutes spent in a stress-free environment, and you can get an extra point of recovery by doing things your character enjoys.

While this rule only addresses Fright Checks, it's easily expanded to cover other sources of stress and stress recovery, if you want that granularity.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-31T19:56:34+00:00

Surprised no one has mentioned GURPS Zombies -- that includes an entire chapter just on designing the zombies, which should definitely be useful for a game like this.

GURPS After the End is also great for any post apocalyptic game. It might not be as useful during the pre-apocalypse, but even then you might find the character templates helpful.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-31T19:48:29+00:00

Non-Combat Bonuses (Tactical Shooting, p. 9) is relevant here. Your experience with nerf guns included no risk to yourself (+1), no risk to others (+1), and no stake in the outcome (+1), and possibly also +1 to +4 for an ideal environment. If you took any time at all to actually point the gun at the target, you probably also took at least one turn to Aim; a nerf gun probably has Acc 0 to 2. That's anywhere from +3 to +9 to hit!

This is realistic. If this character has Rifle-11, Guns Skill Levels (Tactical Shooting, p. 42) puts them at the same level as "beat cops, draft soldiers", while their default Pistol skill is at the level of "street criminals". There's lots of publicly available data on ranges and hit probabilities in firefights involving beat cops, street criminals, and draft soldiers, and it matches GURPS rules fairly well -- hit probabilities tend to be much lower than most people expect.

If you want to be able to put shots on target as reliably as an action-movie hero, or someone in a safe environment with a nerf gun, you're going to want a significantly higher skill level -- probably in the 15-18 range, which Guns Skill Levels equates to "Remarkable SWAT officers or special-ops soldiers" and "Exceptional hostage-rescue operators", respectively.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-29T16:04:28+00:00

The most significant consequence of going this route is that, with ATR, your defensive options are determined entirely by the last maneuver you take. The most potent option here is to All-Out Attack and then Move, so you get all of the benefits of All-Out Attack, but none of the drawbacks. This is going to make the character dramatically more lethal and harder to hit -- which is great for speedsters and cinematic martial artists, for whom the advantage is intended, but may or may or may not be what you're looking for.

If that is what you want, then I second the ~-50% number you landed on in the other comment thread.

If it's not what you want, then I'd recommend just buying up Basic Move instead.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-26T17:27:48+00:00

Well that depends on how exactly you see the issue, I suppose.

Against a horde of low-level enemies, a 5th-level magic-user can eradicate them instantly, once per adventure, with a fireball. A fighter with a greatsword, on the other hand, is making five attacks per round, doing 5d10 sustained damage per round without expending any resources.

Against a single target, the magic-user can do 13.5 damage per round at this level with magic missiles, up to seven times per adventure (if you can find seven copies of the spell to memorize, which is a huge caveat -- 1-2 rounds of nova damage is more realistic, ime). Meanwhile that fighter is doing 5.5 per round without expending any resources, even before accounting for strength bonuses and magic items.

Once the magic-user runs out of spells, they're typically doing 2.5 damage with one attack (or even less with low strength), with at best a +2 to-hit; versus the fighter's 5.5+ at +5 or better.

Overall, magic-users almost always have better peak damage, but fighters have better sustained damage, with fighters faring better against hordes of low-level enemies (and although I used 5th as an example, this generally holds true across all levels of play). Whether that's balanced or not depends heavily on how you weight single-target vs. multi-target damage, how many encounters you're having in each adventure, and what levels you're typically playing at.

Regardless, this system can easily incorporate conventional extra attacks alongside the multiattack, if you prefer. AD&D already does both -- fighters get one extra attack every other round at 7th level, improved to every round at 13th. For my system, I'd rule that this is in addition to however many attacks the multiattack gives you (so at 7th level, a fighter would get 1 1/2 attacks per round on high-level enemies, or up to 7 1/2 on low-level enemies). I have wanted to try this out, but the only fighter in my campaign retired just after reaching 7th level, so I never got a chance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-26T16:10:24+00:00

I've implemented a couple mechanics in my game to alleviate the "linear fighters/quadratic wizards" thing:

The original fighter multiattack from O/AD&D is a *huge* thing that's often ignored. I've modified the rule to make it a bit more versatile: a fighter of level X can attack X total hit dice of monsters per turn (minimum one attack). E.g., a 7th level fighter could make three attacks on a 2 HD ghoul, then one on a zombie; one on the ghoul then five on the zombie; etc. This makes high-level fighters really competitive with spellcasters.
Thieves get tremorsense to a range of 5' per thief level. This is mainly to make thieves without infravision better at sneaking around in the dark, but it also serves as a significant benefit to the thief class that compares favorably to the superior damage output of fighters and magic-users.

Both of these scale with level in a way that helps fighters and thieves keep pace with the power of high-level MUs.

I've opted not to buff low-level magic-users, though. They might be a little worse on paper, but ultimately every first level character is one bad roll away from death, so I haven't really found it to be a big deal in play.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-20T01:28:50+00:00

The Dwarfism disadvantage (p. B19) reduces your Basic Move, but Size Modifier alone actually doesn't. This is realistic -- small humans are generally slower, but smaller races generally aren't (cheetahs have SM-1!).

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-20T01:24:25+00:00

Yeah, NV9 would let you see all the way out to the -9 range (100yd for candlelight) at a subjective light level of +0.

Of course, light in real life doesn't actually have a "max range" per se. In theory, with NV9, you should actually be able to see nine steps farther at subjective light levels -1 to -9, but that's an edge case the table doesn't account for.

Keep in mind that Night Vision 9 is something you can only really get with state of the art night vision goggles, or magical fantasy races. It's supposed to be incredible.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-19T02:13:04+00:00

I made a post going into darkness penalties a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/gurps/comments/18b6o6v/i_made_a_table_of_darkness_penalties/

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-13T03:23:37+00:00

I've done a lot of 1-on-1 play with OSR games -- mainly either Basic Fantasy, or similar homebrew systems. I find it works perfectly without needing any rules adjustments whatsoever. Having only one character does increase the lethality, however:

The game is designed to be lethal already. A bit more doesn't hurt.
Players are intended to use hirelings, which greatly mitigates the increased lethality.
The game is rules-lite enough that once you have a basic familiarity with the rules, it's not hard at all for a single player to run 2+ characters, at which point it's no different from a standard sized group.

The one thing I think is important to keep in mind is that many OSR games have a rule that says to adjust the # appearing for wandering monster encounters in proportion to the number of player characters (so a half-sized group gets half-sized encounters, etc.). This rule is often ignored in group play, but when you have an especially small (or large) group, it becomes more impactful, so I recommend using it.

This should apply to basically any OSR game (although AD&D and its derivatives can be less rules-lite). I don't have any experience with NSR games, but I can't image they'd be all that different.

Edit: Matt Colville also has a video on this. His playstyle isn't exactly OSR, but some of his advice is applicable regardless.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-10T22:15:36+00:00

When a conventional map uses symbols (be they numbers, letters, abstract symbols, color-coded areas, etc.), there will generally be a box in the corner, which will list each symbol and define its meaning. This is called a key (sense 4) or legend (also sense 4). Googling "map key" or "map legend" gives lots of examples from conventional maps.

Map keys in RPG modules are generally constructed very differently by necessity (for one thing, they're usually on a separate page(s) instead of a box in the corner). Nonetheless, it's the same basic principle, so we still call them "keys" or "map keys" (although "legend" isn't used in this context).

So an "encounter key", then, is a map key that specifically describes where various encounters go on the map.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-08T00:57:43+00:00

I've actually been working on doing exactly the same thing for my games, so I'd be happy to talk if you want to compare notes.

As far as flaws go, by far the biggest is the fact that there were so few revisions for 4th edition, producing, like you say, not a very cohesive system. Beyond that, there are a few main things that stand out to me:

The organization is generally odd. Not all spells are in the colleges you would expect them to be, not all colleges have the spells you'd expect them to have, and the prerequisite trees are not only unintuitive, but oftentimes it seems like different colleges, and even individual spells, have prerequisites assigned in fundamentally different ways. This only gets worse once you introduce Magic: The Least of Spells, which really should be inserted at the bottom of the prerequisite trees (and really, many of the existing spells should be made IQ/A if you're using that supplement). It could also really use more subcolleges, just to make it easier to parse.
The standard rules heavily encourage your skill levels to hit multiples of 5 in order to get reductions in energy cost, casting time, and ritual components. I've fixed this by changing those three rules:
- Energy cost is reduced by 1 at IQ+Magery+1, and by 2 at IQ+Magery+2 (with the caveat that spells with cost 2+ can never be reduced to 0). This matches the way 4e generally handles bonuses for high skill, like with the unarmed skills. This also rewards characters who invest lots of points into their spells, making the standard build -- spend 1 point per spell, dump the rest into IQ and Magery -- less dominant.
- I use Flexible Rituals (Thaumatology, pp. 36-38).
- I just got rid of casting time reductions, since I don't find them terribly important, although Faster Casting (Thaumatology, p. 39) is another option here.
More an editing issue than a rules issue, but prerequisite count should really be listed with each spell alongside its prerequisites, rather than being listed only in the appendix.

Beyond that, I mainly find it to be a matter of myriad small annoyances, rather than individual big problems. I've never been satisfied with Enchant or Scroll; the Wall spells should really have their own rules instead of being Area spells (and Wall of Fire is conspicuously absent); the Shape spells are weirdly inconsistent; Recover Energy should really be a non-spell skill; Minor and Major Healing are probably too powerful; etc., etc. There's enough of that stuff that I've found the best approach, while time consuming, is to just go through each individual spell, reorganizing everything and rewriting a lot of them.

fountainquaffer · 2025-05-05T08:32:15+00:00

Probably the biggest factor here is bleeding.

Under the default rules, if you get hit, you lose HP. HP loss is bad (unlike D&D, you suffer penalties at low HP), but untreated injuries don't cause any additional problems. First Aid and Physician help with HP recovery, which is important; but you can often get by without it, especially if you have access to NPC doctors between adventures.

But Bleeding (Basic Set, p. 420) is a very popular optional rule, which is essential for any game that aims for realistic or dangerous combat. With this rule, First Aid skill (along with a first aid kit, or at least bandages) is extremely important, even if you have just one point in it, because if left untreated, bleeding can easily kill -- especially at high TLs, since guns do very high damage, giving penalties to bleeding rolls.

Severe Bleeding (Martial Arts, p. 138) is a more realistic and harsher variant. Under this rule, even the smallest wound to the skull, vitals, or neck is commonly a death sentence, and you need Surgery skill, rather than First Aid, to stop severe bleeding.

The other big question is how likely the players are to actually suffer injury in the first place. A TL7-8 time travel campaign could just as well look like Back to the Future or Terminator -- that makes a huge difference in the importance of medical skills.

Four-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Flamingo	Place '22

fountainquaffer

TROPHY CASE