Beastly Burdens and Deathly Strikes

As a stop-gap to my next series of posts, I thought to tighten a few rivets on my encumbrance and dismemberment modules.

Beastly Burdens

I continue my drive to make Encumbrance relevant by way of unforgivingness.

Without abdicating from abstraction, let us say that I don’t quite like the way encumbrance currently affects physical actions outside of combat.

In combat, sure, adrenaline kicks in and being burdened for the whole of two minutes is not such a drastic thing as it might seem and appears well covered by the existing rules, no, I’m looking at the more sustained kind of efforts, feats like swimming, climbing, hiking and sneaking by.

I _dearly_ wanted One Blanket Rule to bind them all and in the darkness spank them instead of a case-by-case finangling but I just don’t think that does the different situations justice. After all, encumbrance adversely affects both swimming and sneaking in harsh yet completely different ways, one being about reducing water resistance and weight, the other being about silhouette reduction and minimization of noise.

Thus my aim’s to make the following changes, in ascending order of severity:

Hiking/Marching: If a character’s encumbrance total exceeds the difficulty rating of sustaining a forced march, it is used instead.

Climbing: Every encumbrance point past Unencumbered (1/4 the character’s strength total) increases the climbing difficulty class by one.

Swimming: Any encumbrance point increases the swimming difficulty class by one.

Sneaking: Every encumbrance point past Unencumbered and every occupied slot past fast-access increases the fumble margin by one.

Deathly Strikes

Deathly Strikes are those attacks or hazards whose rolled damage exceeds the character’s maximum hit-point total. Things such as falling a great distance or getting squarely (critically) clubbed on the head, the kind of events where getting away with *just* a broken limb is considered fortunate.

These kinds of injuries, since their damage exceeds and defies absorption by the ablative hp total, are rolled on the Death and Dismemberment table with a single d6, excluding the whole upper, more forgiving, side of the table.