Toughness question

[ULO]

What if instead of toughness acting like armor it reduced the shock and pain of a wound but left the bleeding and damaging effects?

Sorry if its already been talked about, I was just wondering.

[Ashren Va'Hale]

thats outright genius.... since most players play not to get hit whatever their toughness this would be great, and I have no problem having it work in conjunction with the wp attribute for pain when I think about it.

you still have the hero getting cut up but still fighting hard and the realism of having to do something about that nasty shoulder wound before too much blood is lost.  

A good solution to the naked dwarf problem.

[MonkeyWrench]

Not to rain on anyones parade but what about toughness reducing bloodloss much in the same way that willpower reduces pain.

[Brian Leybourne]

Hmm... I'm not sure I grasp your meaning.

Lets say I am hit for a level 5 wound (before toughness is factored). I have a toughness of 4, so normally that means I receive a level 1 wound instead.

Your proposition is that I get the shock and pain from the level 1 wound but the blood loss and "description" effect of the level 5 wound? Is that correct?

If so, there's an inherent problem in that the damage scale is only 1-5 but many people have a toughness of 5 or more, meaning that you would miss the scale entirely, but I may be misunderstanding you.

Regards,
Brian.

[MonkeyWrench]

I've thought about the toughness/naked dwarf syndrome problem before and pretty much came to the conclusion that the system is meant to be played as is. Every time I tried to monkey with it to produce some other effect it just didn't work or feel right. I think toughness is fine as it is. If some one wants to spend the priorities/sa points to boost toughness to 10 and wear full plate then thats fine, there are more things to do than fight.

  On the other hand it is interesting to see how other people are doing things. I still say that maybe toughness should reduce bloodloss but then it makes it doubly effective in combat.

[Pvt Kastro]

This whole Toughness issue doesn´t seem very realistic in TROS the way it is intended to be. When two people take similar cutting wounds from a sword, for instance, to the exactly same location, they generally suffer similar wounds. One thing that might factor into this, is the general bulk and size of the person being hit. Especially with puncturing weapons, the more muscle and fat and the stronger and thicker the bones the person has, the more force is required behind the strike for it to hit vital organs and such. In this sense, I can see Toughness simply as measuring how fat or big sized a character is. If one wanted to use it like that, you could always make it raise the character´s weight an thus affect his movement and such. This might balance it a little bit. This is not, however, how I think it would be best used for roleplaying purposes.

Still, there is a problem, realism-wise, because Toughness can have such a huge impact on the wounding effects of a hit. For example, a character with Toughness 4 might get a Level 4 Wound whereas a character with Toughness 7 would get only a Level 1 Wound from a similar blow. For realism purposes - and notice that I am merely concerned with realism, as opposed to the TROS philosophy in general - I´d say that most creatures of roughly similar size should have similar Toughness when dealing with wounds. Again, I do not own The Riddle of Steel rulebook, so I do not know what other things Toughness might affect than combat, but I´d do it so that the Toughness affecting the Wound Levels is equal to the real Toughness attribute if its value is 4 or less. If it is more than 4, make the Toughness against wounds be 4 plus one half of the points over 4. So, a character with Toughness 6 would get an armor against wounds of 4 + 2 / 1 = 5. If there are some other functions that Toughness affects, some common sense can be used to concider how it works for them.

This essentially makes Toughness more expensive an attribute to buy since the advantage from it is lowered. I´m not fully familiar with the problem with Toughness in general, so these ideas are only for eliminating the "high Toughness is too good" problem. Otherwise you might simply divide the characters´ Toughness by, say, two.

Pvt Kastro

[Brian Leybourne]

I reccommend that folk read Ron's comments in this thread. It might give you a new slant on the whole toughness "problem".

Brian.

[Durgil]

Another much older thread that helped me understand Toughness a lot better is this ONE.  For opponents whose Strength and Toughness scores are roughly in the same range, the system works.  Problems start cropping up when opponents get really big or really small.  I have tinkered with the Toughness mechanic a bit; anyone who has been here on this forum for a while can testify to that, but what I have found is that when you make changes to this, you're also locked into making changes else where in the system such as with Strength.  I have come up what I think is a relatively easy solution, but a lot of people don't like it much because it involves more dice rolls.  This all has to do with THIS thread.

There have been tons of threads created about perceived Toughness problems; I suggest doing a search and looking at what others have come up with first before you try to recreate the wheel here. ;-)

[ULO]

I was thinking that it would reduce the shock and pain by the toughness score not the wound levels, it would be the same wound level but the shock and pain would be less because of your toughness, letting you to continue to fight on (less CP loss)where others would have succumb to the shock and pain from such a grievous wound. After all isnt toughness the ability to carry on despite the pain not the ability to have it bounce of you. Didnt most bersrkers die from their wounds at the end of battle, but were famous for continuing to fight on despite their wounds.

Just an alternate idea for toughness.

[Durgil]

Maybe WP dives a character onward instead of succumbing to Shock and TO would be a character's ability to withstand pain. I can see Arnold Swartzenager (sp?), in one of his tough guy movies referring to an open wound on his huge shoulder as "it's just a scratch."

This one I pulled from that first topic that I included a link to in my previous post.  I'd continue to read the fallowing posts from Jake and I think Ron and or Brian, it convinced me that I was a little off base.

Little did I know he would someday run for the Governor of California.

[Jaeger]

I have come to prefer the solution that Toughness subtracts from an opponents Str only when determining damage. I forgot who came up with this simple solution but it works great.

 It has a few points in its favor:

1: No naked dwarf syndrome - anyone can kill anyone. No more laughing at a mob of angry peasants because given the averages you know a direct hit from anyone of them really won't hurt.

2: No more sliding scale of stronger and deadlier baddies to come up with for high TO PC's. Because weapon bonuses and successes still count.

3: No need to alter any other attribute such as Str. Because TO still sutracts from Str, keeping it from becoming an uber attribute. But uber strong PC's can still get an advantage over weak opponents as do Uber Tough ones, and well they should.

4: Armor is KING - just as it was in real life. You want to avoid damage from a direct hit? Wear Armor.

5: Some might say that it makes combat more deadly - I feel it just evens things out. It makes mastery of ones weapon more important than the thickness of your skin.

 - Just how it shold be IMHO.

[Rico]

I still don't get toughness very much (if someone could explain please). Let's take our groups most powerful character for instance, He has 10 toughness and is working on bringing it up to 11. How can a person have 10 toughness when metal plate only has 6? I can understand bone blocking a bone, (but I can also see the sword swiping right through the bone) but what about the skin?
Now I know Jake said we don't need caps but he has never met our group and I think we need some caps on toughness (or at least change what toughness means)

[Durgil]

The first chapter of the rule book is very specific about attribute scores being between 1 and 10 and the normal human range is between 2 and 7 with 4 being average.  A 10 and definantly an 11 is just pure munchkinism, IMHO!

[Jaeger]

Rico,

  That type of PC is what my post was all about - eliminating toughness as a munchkin attribute. Let him have his 10 TO, but let him know that now it only counteracts his opponents Strength only, not his weapon bonuses or successes.

  So if he gets hit with 4 successes with by a NPC with a ST of 5, and a arming sword with +1 that comes out to a DL of 10. Normally he would just shrug it off with his munchkin TO of 10. But, now that TO only subtracts from Str, well that means that his toughness accounts for his foes ST - so we subtract 5, but! his remaining 5 points of toughness do nothing against his successes or the weapon bonus, so he still gets hit for 5 successes... he better have armor!

   With a simple rule "re-interpretation/adjustment" munchkinism is cast back into the fiery pits of D&D hell where it belongs.

[Spartan]

In Salamander's campaign, we use the the TO only negates ST rule, and it works well.  It doesn't undermine the basic mechanics at all, and is pretty transparent.  In the TROS-Hârn campaign I run, I merely cap TO at 6 or 7 for humans.  Works great: no muss, no fuss.

-Mark