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Found an intriguing little concept on the forums by Levi_Kornelsen. A way to ‘sacrifice’ equipment to ‘soak’ up some damage for a hit.

Say the fighter gets hit with enough damage that would put him down for the count, the cleric’s running for his life and the warlord’s fallen down a well and no Lassie for a hundred miles. So the fighter intentionally catches the incoming blow on his shield or weapon or whatever, knowing it’s going to destroy it but also knowing it’s going to soften that blow once it hits him. And what the heck he’s still got his dagger to fight with right?

Just tossing this around in my kanoodle I could see using this as a House Rule. I’d make it Defender only I believe and make it only usable with a weapon or a shield. But anyway thought it was interesting enough to record here for my future musings and ponderings.

WHAT IS “THE SACRIFICE”?
You’ve just taken a hit that will put you down and out of the fight. Considering your options, you offer the GM a “sacrifice” – you shield shatters under the blow, soaking up some of the damage. The GM takes a quick look at their notes, and names a ‘soak number’; the amount he’ll give you off the damage to blow off the shield. You take the deal, the shield shatters, and you fight on.

WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THIS?
Item breakage rules are, for the most part, tacked-on extensions of the idea of a game as a physics engine, a simulation of another world. Sometimes, that’s not nearly as interesting and useful to a play group as treating such things as ‘last ditch’ saving graces would be.

WHAT CAN BE SACRIFICED?
Here are some guidelines on what can and can’t be sacrificed – note that these are not based on the idea of the physics of the matter, but the value-of-the-moment.

• The loss can be described by the player in a way that “fits”.

• The item is applicable to the situation; it’s something that is useful in the context of the fight or the situation immediately around it – in a dungeon, having the lantern blown out of your hand and shattered across the floor might or might not be very applicable to the situation, even if it’s not going to seriously alter to the fight itself.

• The character doesn’t have access to a duplicate of the item (or, if they do, they’re willing to have the loss treated as entirely trivial). Just ‘how close’ a stand-in can be is up to GM determination; if the magician has half a dozen ways to make light, that might count as ‘access to a duplicate’ for the lantern.

ONE SACRIFICE PER SESSION?
It may be desirable to set a limit on sacrifices, so that players aren’t constantly needing to replace battered and broken gear. Or, potentially, it might be desirable to have a mixed limit, say: One sacrifice per session, except shields (break as many as you want!). This is something you’ll need to consider based not only on player action, but the tone and details of the setting; the “break as many shields as you want” came out of a Viking Raider campaign, and fit well since the Norse considered shields to be disposable, and built them accordingly – a “three shield” fight in the campaign was an exercise in player lip-biting.

STEP ONE: DETERMINE A “BASIC SOAK”
A ‘basic soak’ is the minimum amount of damage that will be taken off the top when a player makes a sacrifice and has it accepted. This might be a flat number such as ‘one health box’, or a flexible guideline, like ‘3 + (Level / 3)’. This basic number should be a relatively small amount; with a big enough sacrifice, a character will be able to soak up to nine or ten times this amount.

STEP TWO: BUILD A “VALUE BLOCK”
When a player offers up a sacrifice, the GM will figure it’s value by how critical the item is to the character’s ‘stuff they do’, and by how long it will stay disabled. An example value block is shown below. Note that the ‘physics’ of item toughness and durability aren’t figured into the example at all, and neither is ‘how easy is it to hit’ – if a character relies on a special holy icon to use mystical powers, having it stop a bullet and break is just as valid to this kind of setup as having a shield fracture.

STEP THREE: WHAT ABOUT REPAIRS?
Many sets of game rules have “item repair” abilities that may get called upon if rules for sacrifice are put into use. If you anticipate this being likely, you may wish to set up your value block to take this into account, putting in repair times and difficulties, spell effectiveness, and the like. If player characters have these abilities, it’s more fun to take the extra time to give them another cool use for those abilities than it is to try and freeze such abilities out.

GOING FURTHER: SACRIFICE AND HIT LOCATION
The extreme application of sacrifice is using these same guidelines in place of hit location rules, allowing a player to lose a hand instead of their life. This, though, is a considerably more specific proposal to the game system in question, and will take a lot more tinkering. Applying such rules to both items and hit locations, and then reducing overall health (or increasing overall damage) can create some pretty grim and brutal fighting rules, as players get ugly decision set out for them in combat.

Or you can read it as a PDF by clicking here.

Thoughts?