Recently, I have been doing some work on my house-rules, and I have come to some odd issues when trying to make Conditional Injury (herein CI) and The Last Gasp (herein TLG) work together. Obviously, the articles weren't meant to be used together, and were not designed for it. So, after some work-shopping with Douglas of Gaming Ballistic over on the GURPS Discord server, this is what I came up with.
I want to preface that nothing in this article is meant to disparage anybody. Both CI and TLG are phenomenal articles and good game design that will hold up against the test of rigorous play across many years is much harder than you think. Huge props to Douglas to the articles and feeding the brain with thoughts that challenge the over-simplification we see in TTRPGs today.
First, let's take a look at why it is an issue in the first place. In TLG, Pain and Damage gives AP loss. In CI, wounds of any Severity past -7 gives Pain, and with CI, "damage" is no longer a flat score. This is a bit of an issue. Continuing on this, TLG's system of AP loss for damage tends to be odd at high HP and average HT; why do two men with different HP take the same AP damage for different total HP damages? Obviously this is a way of simplification and ease of use, but within CI, we can take a different approach.
So, how did I fix this? To begin, I asked Douglas over at GB, who wrote both articles. This is what he had to say.
"Either take a one-time AP hit, or each pain category might reduce AP maximum by 10-20% depending on how cruel you're feeling, but 'take a loss each turn' is - realism aside - far too much bookkeeping for a conditional system."
This is, in fact, what I did, and here is why. After I remapped the CI scale from -6 to +6 to 1 to 13, I had more options and creative freedom to make rules that don't require odd math to account for the -6 to +6 scale. Why that matters, is because now, we can make AP damage based off of your wound Severity times two, which bypasses odd math and needing to make a table for AP damage per Severity. That means, using this alternate system for AP loss, a hit of Severity 2 (or -5 prior) would be 4 AP damage. This makes someone who is HP 20 take less AP damage than someone at HP 10, for the same amount of damage before converting it to a severity level.
For the second part, being Pain in CI, I had to take some liberties. Doug suggested, as above, "each pain category might reduce AP maximum by 10-20%", which is what I did, to a degree. Each level of pain uses the SSRT-scale to apply a maximum AP level to your character. See the table at the end of the post to see how this pans out. If you have AP left after taking a high wound, which is rather unlikely, reduce your current AP to your maximum level. What this does do? Well, it makes it so a Severity 2 wound will not drain 2 AP/sec forever for the average person, which is somewhat unrealistic in my opinion. Avegerius Jospeh, who took a Severity 2 arm scratch, wouldn't immediately have to stop his sprint due to the AP drain from that scratch. Instead, he would lose a bit, and end his run sooner, but not be unable to do anything other than lurch around until he takes some painkillers.
Finally, adding together all those rules, we get the following tables.
Do note that this can give way to some odd math. However, so far, this hasn't been an issue. With all the other tables on my sheets, you'd think that this system would greatly slow combat. However, it really doesn't. You fill out each table (Long-Term Fatigue chart, HP-Damage Matrix, and Pain-max AP table) and glance at it when needed. Below is an example of an AP 10 and AP 12 Pain-max AP table, including the HPT and LPT rules. You can also replace each pain level with a Severity instead, if you do not have each Severity's pain rank memorized.
If you have your own ideas, or would like to ask about my design choices, let me know. I am using these rules in a weekly game, and if something comes up that would make me want to change these rules, I will post an update article. I would like to again thank Douglas from Gaming Ballistic as well as all of my players that have helped me now and in the past with developing my rules.
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