The Dresden Files > DFRPG
The First Law of Magic In-Play: Semi-Official Advice
Tedronai:
A character gets hit by an attack from a 'Mac truck', causing him to get Taken Out. A Mac truck is about weapon 5, significantly above a hand grenade in the non-linear scale of weapon ratings in DFRPG.
Does this mean that he was actually hi by the Mac truck? Run over? Turned into 'street pizza'?
Not necessarily.
The result could, for instance, be narrated as forcing the character to dive wildly and desperately out of the path of the truck, down the steep, but not quite sheer, cliff at the side of the mountain road, inflicting dozens of abrasions, contusions, and other individually minor injuries, along with perhaps a few bruised and broken ribs, and a fractured leg.
The character will quite reasonably survive, assuming that he is delivered to a medical facility in reasonable order, after suffering a Taken Out result from a weapon:5 attack. He'll need that medical attention, and quite possibly could end up in a hospital bed for the next few weeks, but he survived.
And there's no reason why similar lines of story logic could not be used to explain the results of a weapon:20 evocation attack from Blasty McBlastypants, the Blasty-Happy Sorceror of Legend.
KOFFEYKID:
All Im saying is that in some situations it makes more sense for there to be a death than to give some wildly implausible reason for survival.
Say there is a group of 4 thugs in a parking lot which is 9 zones big (a square split into 9 pieces). They are all in the center zone, the area is completely empty and consists entirely of flat pavement. A weapon 10 effect hits every zone, tell me how they survive?
I know its a situation pretty much setup to make the only plausible outcome death, but thats sort of the point.
Tedronai:
Tell me what that 'weapon:10' effect is.
Is that a weapon:10 spell designed specifically to put people into a deep and dreamless sleep?
They're asleep. And will be for quite a some time. Maybe it'd be better described as a shallow coma. They might need some medical attention in the form of long-term minor life support (fluid and nutrient intake is going to be an issue for someone who's asleep for weeks or months). But, barring that, they'll live.
LCDarkwood:
--- Quote from: KOFFEYKID on March 16, 2011, 12:37:42 AM ---I'm talking literally about hitting somebody with the equivalent of 2 and a half grenades in the face. :)
--- End quote ---
(Contextual note: I agree with you that sometimes, the nature of the attack leads to only one logical, lethal conclusion for Taken Out. I'm giving myself permission to float onto another topic because I find it fascinating. So, uh, don't assume that anything I say below is anything but what it is.)
Actually, after the defense roll is accounted for (presuming you hit, of course), you're not really talking literally about anything of the sort. A shift is a shift is a shift.
So if you have a Weapon:10 bazooka, and you roll a Great, and the defense is Fair, you inflict a 12-stress hit.
If you have Weapon:0 fists, roll a Legendary, invoke three aspects, and the defense is Fair, you inflict a 12-stress hit.
In game terms, those two results have equivalent meaning. But like I said, no one would suggest in the fiction that a 12-shift Fists punch is the force-equivalent of a 12-shift hit where you got most of your shifts from a bazooka's Weapon rating.
For a normal guy, you're still looking at taking a Moderate and Severe consequence if you want to stay in the fight. The bazooka gets no inherent privilege of effect in this case - the fact that it's a bazooka just means that your consequences are going to be "Burned to Hell" and "My Gut Has Shrapnel In It" vs. "Major Head Injury" and "Bruised Ribs".
Fate has a kind of schizophrenia about it at times, because it can often "feel" more simulative than it really is - the only thing it's trying to simulate is narrative logic. The mechanics only really represent things that are highly abstract, but those abstractions are bound in by the concerns of the fiction we're creating at the table.
So we have things like Weapon ratings, which gets bigger, ostensibly, as the weapon gets "nastier". We have them because the fiction suggests that we should pay attention to that.
But high Weapon ratings don't necessarily mean a weapon is more lethal - in game terms, all it means is that you're more likely to get a bigger result without having to invoke aspects. It doesn't magically make it more likely that a certain weapon will kill over another, because as I said in the OP, no dice result equals a killing strike automatically.
And that's intentional, because it keeps fictional interpretation where I think it should be, in the hands of the individual group. I'm okay with a game where we decide that a 12-shift knife stab kills you, but a 12-shift bazooka hit explodes nearby and tosses you about so hard that you end up shattered in the hospital, but survive. And I'm okay if we decide later in that same game to make a bazooka hit kill someone and a knife stab put them in the hospital.
For some folks, the fact that you can only situationally associate one set of constraints with the other is a bug. For some, and for me, it's a feature. So it goes.
KOFFEYKID:
Well my point in using weapon rating over accuracy is more that, you can pull a punch, its hard to argue that you "pulled" the explosives in the warhead making them less lethal.
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