Miss Points VI - Effects

One of the first things I noticed was that Crit Table M included a class of things not in the Death, Dismemberment, and Injury (DDI) table – Effects. This does not mean there are no consequences or impacts listed in the DDI; there most certainly are. This refers to various non-injury types of effects Such as being knocked prone or being disarmed. Although it somewhat went against the title of the DDI table, I wanted to use these effects for two main reasons. First, I liked them – they added more interesting things and decisions in the course of combat. But second, and more importantly, it provided what to me was the best approach in aligning these two tables – that is, instead of removing effects from the existing DCC crit table, it made more sense to me to add the effects to the DDI in order to align the two.

Once the decision was made to add these effects, the primary question was…which effects? In order to be as complete as possible, I decided to go to the rule set that is a strong source for DCC in general – the d20 rules. I grabbed the list of Conditions from the SRD site, and started messing around with it. It was clear there were things that made no sense to me as effects while others were things I found interesting, but not necessarily for the first pass at this effort. So to organize my thoughts, as I often need to do, I categorized the Conditions into things I would Keep, Ignore, or Investigate (later). This became the Conditions table. This is a sample:

(If you want to see the entire things, you can go here - where you can see pretty much all the spreadsheets in progress, as well as the alternative percentage calculations for things like 2d5 or the Odd Mix: 1d3+1d5+1d7...)

I then distilled this down by using only those categorized as “Keep”. In that process, I noticed there were a few that were in Table M, but not in this pared-down list, so I added them. This resulted in the following list of Effects:

Even that is not quite done; for as I typed this I realized that some of the Effects were more like actual damage – duh...Ability Damage has it right in its name. Others I could see being either – Blindness, for example, could be temporary (as an effect) or permanent (damage). I also needed a kind of "severity" rating to determine where these effects would fit in the overall scheme. So with a bit more work, I ended up with this table - Effects ranked by severity.

So that’s the set of effects from which I will draw when building the new DDI table – for all of those places where it currently reads “EFFECT TBD”, the severity of the effect dictating where in the table it will be used.

Next up...how to structure the table...