Shoulds we bring back Hit Locations?

A bit of context before getting into the meat of it: as I mentioned in other posts, I'm in the middle of running an online campaign of Dragon of Icespire Peak (D&D 5e's Essential Kit campaign) for a few friends, and eventually they'll end up fighting the titular dragon, and I want to make it a more interesting encounter than how it is presented, because as it is in the book it is...underwhelming.

So I started planning what to add: legendary resistances and actions, lair actions, some minions, making it fly and change the environment (it's a white dragon, so ice patches for players to slip on or to use as cover), but what else could I add?

That's when I went to my library for ideas and, while flipping my copy of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns by Marcia B., a faithful rewrite of the 1974 Dungeons & Dragons rules which includes a few snippets from the supplements in its appendices, I stumbled upon Hit Locations, originally published in Supplement II: Blackmoor. I started reading them and I immediately understood why they weren't successful: they'd make every combat too long and slow down the game to a crawl. Adding them to the already way too bloated 5e combat would be a bad idea...
...if it was every combat.

What about adding them to a specific fight to make it feel more epic, though? Would that emphasize the threat of the big monster and help the atmosphere? I hope so, because I plan on trying it out!

I took the tables I found in FMC and tried to slightly adapt the mechanics: the dragon has 133 HP, but each body part also has its own HP pool, which depletes when it gets it:
- Head: 33 HP
- Chest: 106 HP
- Abdomen: 80 HP
- Legs: 40 HP
- Tail: 40 HP
- Wings: 26 HP

(You'll immediately notice that the total is much higher than the dragon's HP, but if the dragon will lose 133 HP across all of its body parts it will die anyway)

The next step is the Location Chart, which tells us the likelihood of a specific body part being hit based on the position of the attacker (a simpler version could forego the position part and have only one d20 division):

PART                    FRONT     SIDE     REAR 
Head                    16-20        17-20         /
Chest                    7-15         11-16         /
Abdomen                /              8-10      15-20
Legs                      1-6            5-7        11-14
Tail                          /              3-4         5-10
Wings                      /              1-2         1-4

Players will have two choices whenever they make an attack:
1. roll a d20 on this chart to see which part they hit based on their position;
2. declare before they attack that they're aiming at a specific part they can target from where they are. In this case they'll make the attack at a higher difficulty (e.g. +3 to the dragon's AC), therefore having a lower chance of hitting in exchange for targeting a specific part.

Each of the body parts, when brought to 0 HP, will have a different effect, impacting the rest of the fight:
- Head and Chest will lead to the dragon's early death;
- Abdomen will prevent it from using its breath weapon;
- Legs will bring its move speed to 0;
- Tail will give him disadvantage on DEX saves;
- Wings will stop it from flying.

I don't know when I'll be able to implement this ideas in my game (as we all know, scheduling is the real BBEG of any campaign), but once I manage I'll report here how it went.

What do you think? Have you tried something like this at your table? Or would you like to? Or maybe you think it's a bad idea and I should forget about it? In any case, let me know!

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!

May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fellow Manifesto

Image
A while ago I was watching  this video  about Sword World, the TTRPG that was created in Japan when TSR refused to let them publish Replays (basically their version of Session Reports) with their official names - specifically for the campaign that then became known as Record of Lodoss War, a fascinating story - but one thing that stood out to me of the system was the concept of Fellows, which is what this post is about. But what are Fellows? To learn more about them I found the unofficial English translation of the game (easily found on Reddit,  here ). I'll use that as a reference, but I'll modify it a bit to make it work with OSR games. In short, to quote the Rulebook: Fellows are characters who assist the PCs in their adventures. Fellows are available on social media and in fan magazines. Players select those they wish to take with them on their adventures and have them travel along. So they are basically NPC versions of PCs that people make available online, so t...
Read more

Let's create a monster in Cairn 2e!

Image
This week I'll go back to Cairn 2e after creating a PC for it a few weeks ago . This time I'll follow the procedure presented in Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide  to create a monster in just a few simple steps, strating by (you guessed it) rolling on some random tables, in the best OSR tradition.   Let's start with the Monster Appearance  table, which asks us to roll a d20 twice, once for  Physique  and once for  Feature : Physique : 5, Eyeless ; Feature : 20,  Wings. So it's some form of bat.   Next, we have the  Monster Traits  table, for  Quirk  and  Weakness : Quirk : 6, Draws symbols ;  Weakness : 12,  Music . Ok, I'm getting ideas. Maybe it's some kind of familiar, drawing symbols on preys for its master, but music distracts it, preventing it from following orders? Not sure yet. The third table we roll on is  Monster Attacks , for  Type  and  Critical Damage . Type : 8, Shoots ; Critical Damage...
Read more

My first solo session - Basic Fantasy RPG

Image
    Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In today's blog post I will tell you about my first approach both at solo TTRPGing and to playing an OSR game, and what I learned from the experience.   I decided to do this to learn more about OSR games before trying to be the referee for someone else, because I know the transition from 5e to old school games can be difficult and take a bit to adapt to, so I'd be able to help my future players in doing the same. Kevin Crawford's Black Streams: Solo Heroes allows me to play as just one beefed up character, and I chose Chris Gonnerman's Basic Fantasy RPG as my system of choice because, while I've not made a choice yet on which one to use for a future campaign, it seems like a good introduction; also because the dungeon I decided to run was from Chris Gonnerman's The Role-playing Game Primer and Old School Playbook and used Basic Fantasy stats natively: it would've been easy to convert it to anoth...
Read more