General Hit Location by amount of Damage?

[Spinward Scout]

Has anyone every tried figuring out Hit Locations by the amount of Damage received in an Attack?

I think that could make Combat more descriptive.

But I'm just not sure where to start.

 

[kilemall]

Has anyone every tried figuring out Hit Locations by the amount of Damage received in an Attack?

I think that could make Combat more descriptive.

But I'm just not sure where to start.

Interesting approach.

I worked out a system with CT Striker where you get 1-3 dice based on where you hit, then a range of -3/+3 based on pen value vs armor and random roll. That allowed me to say where a hit occurred, apply different armor based on coverage, and weapons typically performed within their classic die damage but could be stopped by armor or deliver a critical hit to the head.

Then when you get to applying to stats, correlating what systems strength or dexterity means on what body location gives me Very specific and clear wounds to describe to player and medic.

I suppose you could say a 1-2 point hit is a knick or bruise anywhere, 3-7 is a hit on an extremity either arm/leg, 8-15 is thoracic cavity, and 16+ is head with risk to INT/EDU.

Bit uncomfortable with that, both from elimination of randomness and differing people’s stats making x damage more or less serious.

Another way to simplify is assign STR to arms/legs, DEX to head and END to thoracic hits. That would involve applying all of the hit to one area/stat in case of single shots, which makes for more first blood zeroed out stats.

 

[mike wightman]

You would need a different hit location chart for every damage value 2D, 3D, 4D etc or you could convert the damage to a percentage and use the probability tables to work out the damage location.
Something like this

location	1D	2D	3D	4D
arm	1	2-3	3-5	4-7
leg	2	4-6	6-9	8-12
torso	3	7->	10->	13->
torso	4	-->	--->	--->
torso	5	->10	->15	->20
head	6	11-12	16-18	21-24

 

[Timerover51]

Here is an analysis of wound location put out by the US Army Medical Corps.

 

[BackworldTraveller]

Depending upon the wounded to dead ratio the above figures suggest that: -
25% of injury causing shots/shrapnel hit the head; 15% the chest; 7.5% the abdomen; 23% the arms and the rest the legs
It also suggests that head and chest shots are 32% fatal; abdomen 36% fatal and legs about 2% fatal. Arm shots are much less than 1% fatal.

Head and Body armour is a really useful concept!

Taking the dice damage roll for defining location is all well and good but will not correlate directly to the level of injury sustained.

Consider that the level of repair needed is determined AFTER the first aid roll is applied. You don't need surgery for broken bones if first aid is good enough as, if it is good, the bones aren't broken. i.e. You don't know how badly injured you are until the after action assessment.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Wow!

This is all great information!

Thank you Everyone!

 

[kilemall]

Here is an analysis of wound location put out by the US Army Medical Corps.

View attachment 3684

Hmm I didn’t do too badly with my chart then. I have extremities of left/right arms/legs/hands for 6 of the 11 1d6 potential hit locations.

 

[mike wightman]

The OP isn't after a hit location table, rather a "damage done means this location"

 

[kilemall]

The OP isn't after a hit location table, rather a "damage done means this location"

The two are inextricably linked, if you are doing location then how much damage you need to determine which location got hit.

You can do reverse as I suggested, x damage means y location was hit, with the caveats I and BT mentioned.

I’ll let the OP take what he wants from the discussion.

 

[mike wightman]

Roll to hit
Roll damage - amount of damage describes the location

Roll to hit
Roll hit location
Roll damage

Roll to hit
Roll damage
Roll hit location

Notice anything?

 

[Spinward Scout]

Timerover51's chart lets me turn those numbers into percentages. If I know how much damage the character can take, then I can figure out where it could have hit by what what percent the damage is compared to the total Points the character has.

Seems like that would only work for the first hit, tho.

 

[rwd1812]

Here is an analysis of wound location put out by the US Army Medical Corps.

View attachment 3684

I found the document that includes the table above. You can find here:

Wound ballistics report: Bougainville campaign, 1944 - Digital Collections - National Library of Medicine

collections.nlm.nih.gov

The document includes the actual number of wounds incurred, as you can see below:

Bougainville Campaign
Anatomic Location	Living Wounded	Dead	Wounded & Dead	Lethality (% Dead)
Head, Face, Neck	240	144	384	37.5%
Chest	144	87	231	37.7%
Abdomen	66	48	114	42.1%
Upper Extremities	319	1	320	0.3%
Lower Extremities	393	14	407	3.4%
Total Number	1162	294	1456	20.2%
Total %	80%	20%	100%

Note: These figures do not include wounds to multiple locations (332 total, 101 dead), and they do not include minor wounds treated at aid station and immediately returned to duty (total 547).

As can be seen, the dead make up about 20% of total casualties, and as BackworldTraveller noted, lethality for head, chest, and abdomen is very high, around 40%. Extremity wounds rarely lead to death.

Looking at percentage breakdowns, as a simple approximation, head wounds make up about 25% of total, torso about 25%, arms and legs each about 25% (perhaps useful for a simple allocation of hit location? (e.g. serious damage 50% to head, 50% to torso, minor damage 50% to arms, 50% to legs)

Anatomic Location	Living Wounded	Dead	Wounded & Dead	Simple Approx.
Head, Face, Neck	20.7%	49.0%	26.4%	25.0%
Chest	12.4%	29.6%	15.9%	25.0%
Abdomen	5.7%	16.3%	7.8%	Included with Chest
Upper Extremities	27.5%	0.3%	22.0%	25.0%
Lower Extremities	33.8%	4.8%	28.0%	25.0%
Total %	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%

 

[whartung]

The detail is that perhaps a reason heads are over represented compared to the actual area of the body they represent is because they're poking these heads around obstacles or over trenches.

More sophisticated hit location systems take into account potential cover.

"Ok, you hit. Now roll for location. I see it's a 6, which is the abdomen. That's all well and good, but it's behind a concrete wall, so the shot did not penetrate."

As a random "shooting at people in a bull ring" type of hit location, the head is probably a 10% amount of full standing body area.

 

[rwd1812]

Yes, agreed. 26.4% (~25%) must be based upon a soldier needing to stick his head out somewhat to engage the enemy, etc. otherwise, it would be closer to ~10%. I was actually surprised how high the value was.

 

[kilemall]

The other issue with that real world stat example is near as I can tell it’s not necessarily a per wound breakdown, just hit location of the most serious wound. I would expect several multi hit wounds in the chest and abdomen areas, being center mass, and a higher proportion of single hits to the head with more lethal per hit results.

 

[infojunky]

Looking at the numbers, it doesn't really indicate if lethality from the wounds is outright or from induced sepsis, though a brief guess is that the numbers reflect that. Abdominal wounds generally have sepsis as the chief comorbidity leading to death...

 

[Drew]

I would like to know what the injuries were from what weapon system. I would suspect that a sizeable portion of the upper abdomen was from artillery and or mortars. The lower extremities were probably from grazing height machine gun fire and mines. Head/neck injuries could have been attributed to either to a grenade, artillery, or since it was in the jungle from shell bursts in the trees.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Also, battlefield medicine has advanced a bit since then (and we're assuming that fictionally-advanced technology also helps). The WWII numbers might be a fair model for lower TL situations, but we're saving a lot of troops who'd otherwise have succumbed to their injuries.

 

[kilemall]

Also, battlefield medicine has advanced a bit since then (and we're assuming that fictionally-advanced technology also helps). The WWII numbers might be a fair model for lower TL situations, but we're saving a lot of troops who'd otherwise have succumbed to their injuries.

Here’s a quick and dirty tech roll, based on my previous system but a few new quirks.

Baseline medic roll difficulty is predicated on 68A and the state of the patient. One stat zeroed out is 6, two stats is 8 and all stats is A.

DMs are skill, TL of equipment/drugs and facility state. TL is calculated as TL-7, facility is -2 field, -1 medical vehicle/bay, +1 hospital.

Stabilize rolls once per minute with additional -1 DM per roll, surgery required with surgeon performing at 2 zeroed stats or more.

Eventually even near death is highly recoverable at higher tech levels.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Eventually even near death is highly recoverable at higher tech levels.

Remember Robocop (1987), where Murphy gets shot multiple times (hand obliterated, bullet to the skull) execution style by the Bad Guys™ ... and the medical teams STILL manage to save his life (after which he gets cyborged into becoming Robocop)?

If you ever listen to the director's commentary track for that movie, during those scenes the commentary is talking about how the movie makers were asking EMTs and emergency room personnel if what they were wanting to do on screen was even plausible/possible. The medical people were telling the filmmakers, "yeah, we see that kind of trauma A LOT, and it's survivable with medical attention."

Even in the mid-1980s, the filmmakers worried that what they wanted to show happening to Murphy was comical to the point of being implausible. But when they talked to actual medical trauma professionals, they got told that what they were wanting to film happening to Murphy wasn't even the most extreme stuff that the emergency room people had been able to save people from.

Granted, the survivors were "never the same again, afterwards" ... but they LIVED.

And that was with the medical technology and techniques available ~40 years ago.
Medical technology and techniques have only gotten BETTER since then.