Tweaking Segira's Combat

I'm not going to duplicate the whole page here, because Segira's combat is just what's in the current Hammercalled Rules Reference with some streamlining and changes.

One of the things I wanted to do in Segira is to make combat very expensive, very quickly. The high-lethality nature of Hammercalled generally pushes players in this direction, but there are a few differences that are worth noting.

Suffering Damage

A character who takes damage can suffer status effects as well.

When a character suffers damage equal to the tens-place of their Toughness (after armor mitigation), they must roll Presence.

If they fail, they gain the Stunned quality.

If they suffer damage equal to their total maximum Wounds in a single hit, they roll against their Presence again, but gain the Knocked Out quality if they fail and the Stunned quality if they succeed.

When a character runs out of Stamina and Wounds, they gain the Dying status effect, regardless of whether or not they have suffered enough damage to cause other status effects.

The first of these is that the Stunned and Knocked Out status effects aren't tied to specific weapons now. The only effect tied to weapons is On Fire. I cut a lot of things out of the list, but since Segira's set in an alternate historical setting and some of the other ones just don't really work in realistic ones, that's probably okay.

One of my concerns going into Segira is that there was a relatively low consequence for taking small amounts of damage, and this will provide players with an incentive to avoid combat as much as possible and make it very weighty.

I think. We'll see with playtesting how that goes.

The other thing is that I've made some other improvements to wording. I work a lot when really tired, and while that's the case here (I haven't been procrastinating by watching The Man in the High Castle or anything), I did notice that I've been catching a lot of really awkward wordings on the combat rules in particular.

Looking at our list from yesterday:

Do the final touches on character creation, which I realize I never actually put in the book coughoopscough.
Do a character creation example.
Do the sample characters.
Finish the adventure
Maps?

That's not ideal, but we have some improvement.

Now our final stretch looks like this:

• Do a character creation example
• Do sample characters
• Finish the adventure
• Maps?
• New front fiction?
• Proofread

Yes, that's more bullet points, but one of them was implicit in the previous one, and now there's a little less left to do.