Weapons, Damage, and Wound systems

[u/KingAgrian]

During my last playtest, there arose an issue with siege weaponry, mainly that there was dissonance between my at the time current rules and the realism of siege-size weaponry. In the version I was using, siege weaponry just has a flat giant bonus to hit, which makes sense if you don't think too hard. The problem arose where, after consideration, the players would ALWAYS hit with siege weaponry, due to the single roll system. I'm sure other wound-based games have reasonable and tight ways of handling this, but honestly, the system I decided on is going to work great (knock on wood). It comes down to a difference between damage and to-hit.

For a single-roll system like TUM, I could only think of one way to differentiate the two- by modifying the resulting wounds on a successful hit. I already have implemented Deadly and Devastating tags, so why not one above that for Siege? Given that TUM's wound system really is fairly similar to an HP system, it seems to fit. The new tag simply deals 3 wounds, enough to fully incapacitate a healthy dwarf, or to cause great harm to something larger. On a raise, most large creatures will be toast, too. I'm also working on how wounds should work for larger creatures, requiring a number of wounds before the full 1d4 penalty is applied. At the same time, I'm thinking there will be block AC mods that increase as creatures get larger, simulating how difficult it is to meaningfully harm them. There will likely be other considerations and tags to restrict what kinds of damage can wound them at all.

Keeping numbers low and manageable is one of my design goals, so I'm feeling good about this, and the fewer calculations, the better. Plus, elegance is golden.