Severed arm hit points

[Alexandre]

Hi all,

are the HPs of a missing location reduced? For example, if you lose an arm do the HPs of that location drop to 0 (or another number but less than the previous maximum) on the account of the arm not being there anymore? And you only have to heal the location back to 0 HPs (or whatever the reduced number is) to "fully" heal the wound (i.e., just closing it, of course, not reattaching the arm or anything like that). 

I seem to recall that if you roll to hit a missing location then you actually miss, so the above would make sense. (One of my players came up with this idea during last session and it does make a certain amount of sense, to be honest, even though I never thought about it this way).

Cheers,
Alex

PS: I am not talking about the e.g. RQ3 rule that a reattached limb lose 1 HP permanently. In this case the limb, or part of it, is really amputated. 

Edited November 15, 2023 by Alexandre

[SDLeary]

One "tradition" (house rule) is that you ignore hits to that location, and they hit the next location (arm -> chest, leg -> other leg or abdomen).

Another is that you roll % to determine how much of the arm is either severed or remaining, and then the GM makes a decision based on that. For example, if only the "hand" is severed, you might not lose any HP in the location, but of course you may lose skill and obviously use of that part of the body. On the other hand, if you lose enough of the arm, say above the elbow, then the entire location might then be ignored.

No official rules that I am aware of, primarily because Hit Locations are no longer the default, and thought as to integrating Locations heavily back into the core has not occurred at Chaosium.

SDLeary

[Atgxtg]

4 hours ago, SDLeary said:

One "tradition" (house rule) is that you ignore hits to that location, and they hit the next location (arm -> chest, leg -> other leg or abdomen).

Another is that you roll % to determine how much of the arm is either severed or remaining, and then the GM makes a decision based on that. For example, if only the "hand" is severed, you might not lose any HP in the location, but of course you may lose skill and obviously use of that part of the body. On the other hand, if you lose enough of the arm, say above the elbow, then the entire location might then be ignored.

No official rules that I am aware of, primarily because Hit Locations are no longer the default, and thought as to integrating Locations heavily back into the core has not occurred at Chaosium.

SDLeary

There was an official rule for RQ3, and it was similar to option 2, and was part of the Regrow Limb spell. The reason why I remember it was that we had a PC lose a limb and then roll 01 to see how much was severed, so I rules that he only lost a finger, and I took 1% off of his Manipulation category modifier.

 

It's not the current BRP, but I can get the old spell description if desired.

 

 

Oh, and the old rules used to make a distinction between severed (taken off in one hit) and maimed (disabled through multiple hits). The difference being that maimed limbs were still attached but non-functional. This meant that maimed and partial severed limbs skill had hit points and such. This would be unchanged from before as it should not be any easier to chop off whatever was remaining in future fights. If you get your hand chopped off your shouldler doesn't become and narrower. 

When a limb was compositely gone, sometimes hits to it might simply become misses with weapons passing through the space where the limb shoyuld have been (again the % roll could be used here), but that was never formalized into a rule.

[Alexandre]

No that's OK, my question was more specifically about the HPs remaining. This can be important for healing (since it's on a wound basis). Suppose your 4 HPs arm is severed after a 8 points hit. You also lose 8 general HPs. Would you rule you can heal up to the original 8 HPs or you can only heal less? I appreciate there is no rule in fact I am wondering about a (plausible) interpretation. 

Thanks,

Alex

[g33k]

5 hours ago, Alexandre said:

No that's OK, my question was more specifically about the HPs remaining. This can be important for healing (since it's on a wound basis). Suppose your 4 HPs arm is severed after a 8 points hit. You also lose 8 general HPs. Would you rule you can heal up to the original 8 HPs or you can only heal less? I appreciate there is no rule in fact I am wondering about a (plausible) interpretation. 

Thanks,

Alex

I would not refigure "general" HP's.

Consider the case of your amputee veteran -- no arm, but otherwise fully healed.  They are back in combat!

Now... if someone lands a solid hit to the torso:  does it hit a weaker, flimsier torso, with fewer HP's (because the character now has fewer total HP's)?
Does each leg have fewer HP's because of a missing arm?

Clearly not.

Keep the general/total HP's as originally rolled.

[Atgxtg]

9 hours ago, Alexandre said:

No that's OK, my question was more specifically about the HPs remaining. This can be important for healing (since it's on a wound basis). Suppose your 4 HPs arm is severed after a 8 points hit. You also lose 8 general HPs. Would you rule you can heal up to the original 8 HPs or you can only heal less? I appreciate there is no rule in fact I am wondering about a (plausible) interpretation. 

Thanks,

Alex

g33k has it right.

You don't re-figure hit points for several very good reasons:

• First off general hit points are hit points per location are not the same. Character will have over twice as many location hit points than general hit points. So if you reduced general hit points permanently you'd inflict a disproportionate loss to general hit points and possible even a forced permanent unconsciousness or death. In fact,due to the rate at which hit points progress and the effects of rounding, if you permanently reducing hit points with limb loss would exacerbate a known bug of the game system by penalize characters with a higher CON, becuse the higher your CON the harder is is to survive the loss of two limbs. 
  • For example: let's say you have an unfortunate PC with 10 General Hit Points who looses a leg to a shark. Now the leg had 4 hit points so  the severed leg resulted in 8 points of damage. If the PC lost those points permanently he'd permanently be below the unconsciousness threshold. 
  • BTW, if you add up the hit points per location then 10 General Hit Points would mean 3 HP  in each arm, and 4 in the head, chest, abdomen and each leg, for a total of 26 hit points. 
• Secondly, the body does heal, so the PC must be getting back hit points, and the body must be adapting to function without those parts. 
  • For example: THe shark victim above lost a lot of blood along with the leg, some of which his body won't replace, but it will be blood that he no longer needs due to having one less leg to circulate blood through. 
• Thirdly, as g33K has pointed out, just because one part of the body has been damage, the other parts aren't necessarily any weaker. In fact the opposite tends to happen. If someone loses the use of their primary arm, their secondary arm tends to become more muscular, and so forth. 
•  

 

 

[Alexandre]

Don't worry I am not thinking of refiguring the total HPs! 🙂 Sorry if I can't explain myself well. Let me try and rephrase. Keeping with my example: I have a 4 pts arm which is cut off by an 8 pts blow, reducing the location to -4 HPs. I also lose 8 HPs from my total. Now I get some healing. Since it's an 8 pts wound any healing will restore me up to 8 pts to the location and to the general HPs (*). What this player suggests is that since the arm is gone and the location has now effectively 0 HPs the healing cannot restore more than 4 HPs (and thus the remaining general 4 HPs will have to be healed naturally or through healing that restores general HPs).

Anyway it's probably something not very important... 

(*) I am realizing that not all spells and versions of the BRPS enforce this rule that healing can only restore up to the wound magnitude. I am currently playing a RQ3/BRPS/Classic Fantasy heuristic hybrid where there is this limit (probably from RQ3). But in any case you cannot heal more HPs in a location than its maximum, and since the maximum is now 0... 

 

Edited November 17, 2023 by Alexandre

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, Alexandre said:

 What this player suggests is that since the arm is gone and the location has now effectively 0 HPs the healing cannot restore more than 4 HPs

Why could it restore the first 4 and not the second? I mean he didn't have the arm for them either.

Also, if the PC took 8 points od damage, then 

2 hours ago, Alexandre said:

(and thus the remaining general 4 HPs will have to be healed naturally or through healing that restores general HPs).

But it's not general damage, is an obious injury to a specic location. There is a bloody bit of shoulder or pelvis right there to target with a healing spell. Imagine if a PC had his and chopped off. By the rules that would be the same situation as you are describing.  The character would be perfectly alright right down to the spot where thier arm ends. The bloody stump of their forearm could certainly be cauterized, bandaged and such, so why couldn't it be targeted with a heal spell.

Plus remember a location at 0 HP isn't destroyed, just disabled. 

About the only way your player's argument makes sense to me if if he is talking about bloodloss. 

 

BTW,  I don't think there is any healing that restores general hit point specially, because that is not how RQ/BRP has ever treated injury, or healing spells.

2 hours ago, Alexandre said:

Anyway it's probably something not very important... 

I think it is something very important, and something that will need to sort out for you game before you end up in some oddball situation where one or morea PCs die because the other PCs were not allowed to heal them due to this rule.

2 hours ago, Alexandre said:

(*) I am realizing that not all spells and versions of the BRPS enforce this rule that healing can only restore up to the wound magnitude. I am currently playing a RQ3/BRPS/Classic Fantasy heuristic hybrid where there is this limit (probably from RQ3).

Yeah ruleset here is critical. While the various battle/sprirt magic spells between BRP games are similar there are some differences between them that chance how this works out and what spells are required. 

2 hours ago, Alexandre said:

 

But in any case you cannot heal more HPs in a location than its maximum, and since the maximum is now 0... 

No necessarily. If there is healing magic that can reattach the limb (Healing 6 in RQ2, and possibly and Healing spell in RQ3 depending on what page you are looking at) then the maximum would still be the same. 

 

And even if the limb can't be reattached then you have to ask where are the other 4 point of damage located that need to be healed. It's definitely not general body damage, but a bloody stump at the shoulder or pelvis, and I can't see why such an oviparous injury couldn't be targeted with a spell.