Oops, looks like I wandered off course on my travel rules series. In part, because I was… traveling. I suffered one point of damage and two points of stress as a result, but am recovering nicely.
I will get back to that series soon with some further thoughts (and observations based on experimenting in my ongoing game), but for the moment let’s discuss something completely different that has come up on the forums, Reddit, etc: the behavior of NPCs in combat, and some tools for quickly/sensibly adjudicating that.
The basic rules divide what I will simply call “harm” into two basic, but fundamentally different categories: damage, and critical injury. “Damage” here is not exactly HP, but rather a general pool of pain resistance, stamina, etc. Most characters have 4 or 5 damage points . Losing all your damage points is never lethal on its own, although it does usually knock you out of a fight (potentially the same thing, in some circumstances!). With a typical rifle round doing 2 or 3 damage points on a hit, there can be an element of whittling away at the enemy that feels… undramatic.
But! On the other hand, there are critical injuries. Crits are serious, long-term harm inflicted whenever an attack is particularly successful (for some extra-deadly weapons, this is essentially any time they hit — beware sniper rifles and machineguns!!). These range from broken bones to internal bleeding to leaving your brains scattered across the fields of Poland. In general, they are grisly and the kind of thing that might make a reasonable person look at themselves and think “Fuck this shit, I’m out.” And they can happen pretty much at any moment, which goes a long way to restoring the spooky, lethal nature of the system.
The rules put it more succinctly:
Normal damage points represent fatigue, bruises, and flesh wounds — painful, to be sure, but not fatal. Critical injuries represent a much more dangerous form of injury — these can maim or kill you.
Dealing with a mob of NPCs quickly makes it clear that tracking damage points for all of them is both fiddly and tiresome. The game is aware of this, and has a number of optional rules for speeding up play for NPCs in combat. On this topic:
To speed the game up and minimize bookkeeping, the Referee doesn’t need to track damage points on minor NPCs at all. Instead, all hits on such NPCs trigger automatic suppression of the target and all similar NPCs in the same hex (page 67), and all critical hits are instantly incapacitating. There is no need to roll for hit location on minor NPCs unless they are wearing body armor or are behind cover.
That’s good streamlining, with one big issue: it doesn’t account for non-critical hits on NPCs at all! If you don’t track damage for NPCs, all non-critical damage would simply seem to disappear into a void. One commenter even suggested this could make NPCs effectively immortal, which is a silly take (and pretty unlikely to occur in most actual cases, crits are not exactly uncommon in this game) — but if you play strictly RAW using this optional rule, it’s definitely one interpretation.
Here’s another: people generally want to live. Your players will usually (ok, sometimes) take care of this for their PCs. As a GM, it’s your job to take care of this for your NPCs. After all, your whole role is trying to make the world feel believable and alive. Almost no one fights to the last man — especially not among those who have already survived years of nightmarish war. Giving NPCs (even faceless mooks) believable behavior once the bullets start flying is as good a place as any to enforce that. So here’s a couple ways I’ve done it.
Goals and Fighting Spirit
For any group of NPCs, I think both in terms of what their goal is, and how dedicated they are to that goal. From there, it’s easy to determine a break point. If they end up in a shooting fight, it all comes back to the goal.
- A gang of bandits that was just hoping to rob the PCs and be on their way probably doesn’t actually want to be shot today, and might take the first opportunity to flee once it becomes clear they’ve picked on the wrong porcupine.
- A lone scrounger who was trying to pluck the carburetor out of an abandoned tractor probably wants no piece of any fight and will run/hide/give up at the first sign of trouble.
In both of those cases, a shootout is incidental to the goals of the group, and their tolerance for casualties is probably very low. Any individual who is hit might very well call it a day, no matter how minor the wound was (there’s no such thing as a “minor” wound if you lack antiseptics and antibiotics!). The group as a whole is probably not that interested in sticking around if they take a casualty or two.
- On the other hand, two starving brothers using their last energy to steal a pig, so their family can survive just one more week, might have nothing to lose.
- A squad of Soviet soldiers on a mission specifically to hunt the PCs would find a battle against them completely aligned with their goal. Their loss tolerance is going to be higher, maybe as high as 50%. If they take a hit, they have reasonable confidence that one of their comrades is going to patch them up or at least get them out of the shit.
Easy Wound Table
For quickly adjudicating wounds for any NPC, I made the following table, which gives you actionable results with a single roll (ok, ok, it’s a couple of rolls if you need to roll for hit locations or armor, but still):
It’s pretty self-explanatory, I think. I do not use this as a player-facing tool, BTW… I tell the characters only what they could reasonably observe. If you drop a guy in the wheat fields 200m away, who knows. He might be dead. He might be unconscious. He might be crawling away, or simply laying in wait. Go find out, if it’s important to you…
In my limited testing, this table tends to give fairly believable results, I think. You’ll get the odd super-soldier who takes several bullets and keeps on coming. You’ll get just as many scared, self-interested marauders who decide discretion is the better part of valor after losing a chunk of arm to a stray round. And just as vitally to many campaigns, after the battle is over, you’ll get a mix of NPCs who are outright dead along with those who will bleed out within minutes, those who need medical attention but within a few hours, and so on. This presents ethical dilemmas as well as practical ones to your characters who may want to question these NPCs. Who knows? The way they treat the fallen may become known in this area…
If you need to know specifically what happened to the NPC later on, just go ahead and roll on the normal hit location or crit tables then. The point of this tool is to speed up combat in the moment, and part of that is offloading time-consuming rolls and recordkeeping to later on.
One suggestion was to combine the Coolness Under Fire roll into this table or some of its results. I personally haven’t felt the need to do so, but it could be easily done. The most obvious thing is that any crit at all should probably automatically be treated as a failed CUF check.
If you want tougher NPCs, you could do something as simple as subtracting 1 from every roll on these tables. Note that the table is used with damage after armor is taken into account, however, so simply giving your NPCs body armor does still matter.