It was announced at Origins that the Gritty Rules: Massive Damage Rules (Codex of Heroes) are in effect for all Arcanis Campaign games. This means (among other Stun effects) that any damage (after AR) you take that equals or exceeds your Fortitude defense is a wound. PCI has stated that in addition everyone gets 1 extra wound (you get 1+ Passive Vigor in wounds).

As evidenced at the BI, average damage rolls shouldn't be used when massive damage rules are in effect as the chance for auto-wounds is too high.

John

Do we have any solid data about how much faster/slower this makes combat? As the player of a guy who average-damages about 23 with my powerful attacks, I would think it would be faster.

It is my opinion that average dice rolls aren't useful (and aren't really average) and particularly when using massive damage rules are not realistic to use.

why go to the trouble of implementing a such a rule and then go out of your way to use averages to avoid having the rule come into effect?

I have said elsewhere that this rule is not balanced out currently, at most in tier 2 there are very few methods to remove wounds (psionic heroes, ansharans and yarricites).

this game just got more randomly deadly rather than intentionally deadly.

I would still like to see Joe or Tony make that rule public

Josh
I had hoped to see something official as well and I'm perfectly willing to remove this post when it's done. I was told though by Tony that this is in effect for all games. I agree with you that it makes it randomly deadly rather than nail biting, edge of your seat, big battle deadly. The average damage either means you're never at risk of a wound (lower damage averages) or always taking a wound (higher damage averages) so I agree that they aren't compatible with the Massive Damage.

In all honesty, I don't know if it speeded up any of our combats, but I do know that taking 25 average damage that bypassed AR to a 10' radius was not fun for anyone at our table.

John

Our table used average damage (for the bad guys) in the BI and it definitely sped up combat.

When they announced the Massive Damage rule at the BI they did not mention anything about the stun portion (just the wound portion). I think, if anything, it slowed down the combats because more players had more wounds (and thus more penalties).

As to combining the two, we had low enough Fort defenses and enough variability that upper teens was often enough to deal a wound to some (even our highest tier player with 27 avoidance only had low 20s fortitude). The only ones that were auto-wound for everyone were giant king mighty swing (which usually got combined with sweeping strike for 2-3 wounds dealt) and shared suffering spell.

The big thing I see Massive Damage doing is making Fate far more valuable as it will be needed to ignore wound penalties and to reduce stamina (or raise defenses) to avoid taking a wound.

Note on my comment: I used my average damage to be iillustrative of the numbers I hit, and not to support its use in the game. I in no way suggested that it should be used as that would be silly in an exploding attribute game.

Combats are likely to be sped up. At the BI I took out 3 or 4 targets with lucky rolls doing wound damage. I agree that the healing of wounds short of time measured in days isn't available until T3 except in specific cases such as Psionics (self only)

Fate will be used more to boost defenses. Foes at the BI seemed to be higher damage than what I recall seeing at least commonly in mods. Or at least, more of the opponents had that bigger damage threat.

A fate point will allow you to auto-stabilize iirc even when vanquished by wounds. There's also the option in the back of the Codex of Heroes to allow a character to avoid death by taking on an appropriate flaw - missing limb, one eye, lame, phobia, etc.

I think the later should be included if it's not already as going into effect with the massive damage rules.

I know part of the reason for the massive damage rules was an encouragement and rationale for why people would use slower but higher damage weapons.

I'm fine with either approach.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

Fate to stabilize is great, until the monsters continue to attack vanquished goes. That happened quite a bit at the last few rounds of the BI.

John

shield of enduring will became much more useful also

the massive damage rule was partially referenced in the announcement, the full text of it can be found in the Codex of Heroes

also those crossbowmen were probably some of the deadliest mobs out there damage/wound wise

This BI in particular really showed that you need a dedicated healer at the higher tiers. Leadership (even maxed out with Born Leader) isn't enough to keep a group going.

John