I propose that it should be possible to sever a body part from people who are grappled, even if they are awake. Maybe the act of severing makes them pass out for some time though.
If all it requires is a grapple, severing will be insanely commonplace and utilized by gangers and various parties constantly. This, however, might not be a negative. Is this what we want?
Grapple is a lot easier than that though...
Severing removes a limb or @naked location requiring a cybernetic replacement which notable consumes processor bandwidth and has other very real downstream effects. It provides meaningful RP with an aggressor/victim and medical RP, ideally.
On a sidenote, gangrenous/infected wounds that required actual medical amputation might be a good bridge to get more of that knowledge organically learned by medical professional vs aspiring psychopaths.
We have a lot of underused medical tech in-game, and making it irrelevant with @trust is a bad scene.
Torture chairs exist in various forms, and are quite accessible. :-)
And nuggeting would basically be like, a soft-lock from the game, since you straight up wouldn't be able to do anything. Not a fun experience for those on the receiving end.
Aesthetic chrome is cool but there's a lot of risks which not everyone, ICly or OOCly wants to deal with.
This is themely though as it is better to burn bright then fade away.
"Better drink these first baka, you gonna need it..."
Back to the topic of severing, I feel like making it exceptionally hard to sever a limb (requiring specific locations and tools for instance) just leads to more unnecessary vatting, when it could have been the case that a character could have learned a lesson while being left alive.
Sever mainly came in as an antagonistic tool, rather than a general purpose mechanic to enable various forms of limb loss. It could probably be adapted to be 'multi-scenario' the way that grapple is now, though as Reefer mentions there is some medico remit to think of. At one point you could @service-request a limb off, for those niches meanwhile.
I.E. I'm going to finish severing your xyz, and it'll be a catastrophic and traumatizing event IC, but lets skip over the RP which you really do not enjoy... OR I perform terribly in the sack, and you ridicule me during pillow talk, etc. The goal is for this to be a friendly discussion always.
A bit of catch-22.
[OOC Johnny says: hey can we FTB on this?]
[OOC Joe says: np!]
Johnny does bad stuff to Joe for a while, his face visibly bruised and injured afterwards.
Johnny [to Joe]: Ready to talk now?
As soon as a scenario becomes contentious between the players themselves who are in disagreement about the process and outcome of a scene, it is much safer to just fall back on impartial code rather than everyone coming away with bad feelings from it.
Severing while grappled... I have mixed feelings about that. I recall when sever was first brought back into the game and all the severing that happened up until they rebalanced it. It was, in my opinion, ridiculous. I don't want to go back to that.
Sadly, I think that too many players/characters escalate to most extreme things the game code will let them do. It sucks for the players/characters who want to use things like this in a themely and reasonable manner, but the dials have to be set at a level that prevents abuse.
I agree completely with Reefer on this one. I think the most important question is, "Do we want what the outcome would be?" Do we want the return of constant and regular severing of limbs?
Personally, I don't think I do. I think that if severing became as easy as this change would make it, it would also lose it's impact and wow factor. I agree that it's maybe less realistic but I'm often willing to sacrifice realism for theme and balance.
I also get the argument of severing being seen by some as a punishment less than death that one could employ in hopes of teaching them a lesson. And I think that this could be true sometimes. But I don't think it would be true as often as one might expect.
The whole topic of punishments, winning/losing, selling/noselling and all that is a very interesting one in my opinion but probably not for this thread. For now I'll simply say that I feel it's an art/skill that I'm still learning and developing and that I don't think easier severing of limbs is going to work on PCs that have not responded to you character's other, similar efforts.
But with the game code the way it is? This is pretty unlikely because even knocking someone unconscious is not enough. And I'm not really buying the idea that it would be used excessively.
Why not give the victim the option to die from the wounds when this is done outside a medical setting? That way, they can basically opt out if they do not want to deal with the IC consequences of losing one or more limbs.
It makes a fair amount of sense to me for the latter to work, if the victim is still making (and failing) resist rolls, maybe with the addition that they end up making as many skill checks as if they were choked out so the two outcomes are at par to resist.
That does mean that Attacker 1 Grapple -> Attacker 2 Sever is about 30 seconds faster than Attacker 1 Choke-Out -> Attacker 1 Sever, but that seems reasonable to me with involving a second person in things.
Probably helps if severs are tracked like kills in OOC terms for the sake of monitoring.
(Edited by Slither at 8:51 pm on 10/16/2023)
