Explosives, Area of Effect, and Wounds

Explosives are dangerous business (just ask your local demolitions pony). They can be confusing to many players, largely because they deal damage in a radius instead of to a specific target.

When dealing damage from explosives, area of effect (AoE) spells, or other AoE attacks, all those wounded take damage as if it were dealt to every part of their body exposed to the blast. Damage dealt is dependent on both the skill of the explosives user and the distance of the target from the epicenter of the AoE attack. Distance from the epicenter subtracts dice of damage.

As an optional rule, explosives users may simply roll damage once for the epicenter and remove dice of their choosing for subsequent radii of damage reduction, removing dice two at a time, pairing the highest and lowest. This is slightly faster than rerolling damage for every distance increment.

Unconsciousness (Sweet, Blissful, or Otherwise)

There are two ways to be rendered unconscious: when someone is trying to knock you out, but not kill you, and when someone is trying to kill you, and doesn’t quite finish the job. Let’s be honest here – most ponies don’t care much if you’re alive, and of those who might (usually slavers) it’s more likely that they’d just shoot those who don’t surrender. Killing ponies is much easier than keeping them alive.

If you’re trying to knock someone out without killing them, there are a number of ways to go about it. Many melee weapons can be wielded or used in such a way as to deal non-lethal damage to opponents, crippling them and otherwise dealing wounds as normal but knocking them out instead of killing them when the final blow is struck. Nonlethal ammunition for small guns, big guns and energy weapons exists similarly, and stun grenades are the explosive equivalent, while any number of spells could be used for non-lethal suppression depending on the situation. When dealing or receiving nonlethal damage, the target is unconscious if the wounds dealt by the non-lethal weapon or spell would otherwise kill them. When knocked unconscious in this fashion, characters remain unconscious until medically treated, or until 4 hours later when they begin to recover. Otherwise, they just receive the wounds as normal.

Wounds dealt by a non-lethal weapon can still be deadly if the same character is later hit with a normal weapon. For example, say P-21 hits some unwitting foe with a stun grenade which deals 4 wounds to the torso. For the sake of example, this doesn’t knock him out, because he has an endurance score of 6. Now let’s have Rampage come along and buck the same foe in the side, dealing another 3 wounds to the torso. That poor bastard now has a total of 7 wounds to the torso, which is more than his endurance score; he’s dead. Had Rampage dealt her 3 wounds first, and then had P-21 stun him with the grenade, he would merely be unconscious. Characters knocked out in this way are unconscious for 2d4 hours, plus an additional 1d4 hours per wound over their endurance score that they’ve received.

The other way to be knocked unconscious is when you’re in combat and other characters don’t quite finish you off, and is essentially only for player characters and important NPCs. When a player character receives a total number of wounds, spread across all locations, equal to four times their endurance score, they begin to lose consciousness from pain. For every action they perform in this state, they must make a hard (MFD ¾) endurance roll. If they fail, then they pass out from their wounds until they are either treated or they heal naturally (assuming they don’t die by other means first).

Characters that become unconscious while bleeding out (or under some sort of other recurring damage effect) will die within thirty minutes unless they receive medical attention to remove the affliction and stabilize them.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1026