Larp 101: The Game » Taking Damage
This is the probably the most difficult part of Larp 101 and, frankly, it's the most optional. You can play for weeks or months and never have to worry about damage, so feel free to consider this page optional and move onto Larp Etiquette if you want to.
Since we can't actually have players duking it out when their characters are in combat, we have to represent that damage taken by a character during a confrontation in some other way. This is handled using the so-called Damage Track which can be seen below.
Bear with us as we continue; this is the longest and probably the most complex of these sections. Don't worry if you don't get it right away; after you do it in-game a few times, it becomes second nature.
Wound Levels
This is the basic damage track for a character. When a character takes damage, it's represented by placing a specific mark in a box on the track. As a character is hurt, they find them selves in one of six wound levels, five of which have penalties which affect subsequent challenges:
| Level | Penalty | |
|---|---|---|
| H | Healthy | None |
| B | Bruised | -1 Trait when you tie on symbols |
| W | Wounded | You must bid an additional trait and you lose ties on symbols |
| I | Incapacitated | Your character cannot move for 10 minutes |
| U | Unconscious | Your character is unconscious for 1 hour |
| T | Torpor | Your character suffers from Torpor of varying length |
In addition to the above wound levels, there is one more state: Final Death (FD). When this happens, your character is lost and you will have to make a new one to continue playing. But, as long as you haven't reached Final Death, your character may heal and return to play.
It's important to note that the time spans in the table above is in-character time. It's likely that far less than that amount of time might take place out-of-character. No one wants to actually sit alone in a room for an hour when their character has become unconscious, for example.
Types of Damage
There are three types of damage:
- Bashing Damage. Bashing damage happens when someone is hit with a blunt object like a club or a fist. Also, vampires who are shot suffer Bashing damage.
- Lethal Damage. This occurs when someone is injured with a bladed or cutting tool like a sword or a chainsaw. Non-vampires (aka Mortals) struck by a bullet suffer Lethal damage.
- Aggravated. Damage. This is the rarest, and most problematic, of damage types. Vampires struck with fire or who remain in sunlight suffer this. Normal mortals never suffer Aggravated damage.
As the damage gets more severe, it takes more effort and costs more traits to heal.
Taking Damage
A character (usually) starts a game session with a clean damage track. As they suffer damage, a mark is placed in a box on the damage track start from the top and working down. Each type of damage has a specific mark. Bashing damage is represented as a slash (/), Lethal damage as an "X", and Aggravated damage as an asterisk(*). In other words, Bashing is a single line, Lethal is two, and Aggravated is three lines in the same box. When a character suffers different types of damage over the course of an evening, the more problematic the damage, the higher on the damage track it's recorded. This last bit is probably the hardest thing to understand so we'll provide an example:
Bob takes three bashing.
Bob takes two lethal.
Bob takes one aggravated.
Alice and Bob are engaged in combat. Both start with empty damage tracks; it's the beginning of the night and neither of them have been injured yet. Alice is a much better fighter, and throughout the combat (and this example) she takes no damage at all! Bob, on the other hand isn't so lucky. Early in the fight, Alice is unarmed and after punching Bob a few times, he is suffering from three Bashing. This means he's now Bruised (since the first box labeled "B" is filled in) and he suffers a -1 penalty if both he and Alice throw the same symbol on subsequent challenges.
But, at this point, Alice draws a dagger and continues to attack Bob, inflicting two boxes of Lethal damage. Notice, that in the second damage track pictured to the right, we've added the Lethal boxes to the top. We do this simply by adding a backslash in the top two boxes marking them as Lethal and then making sure that the damage track continues to include the three Bashing taken earlier by adding them to the bottom. This is what we meant when we said that more problematic damage sits higher on the damage track.
Now, to make matters even worse, Alice has the Discipline of Thaumaturgy which can let you conjure fire. She uses a basic power of that Discipline to ignite her hand and grip Bob. This causes him an Aggravated damage. We add this to the top of Bob's damage track (see the third one pictured on the right) and, just like before, make sure that we still have two Lethal and three Bashing damage under the new Aggravated one.
Unconsciousness, Torpor, or Final Death?
The process described above continues until the row with three boxes is filled in. Exactly how it is filled in is determined by the type of damage taken or "pushed" into that row when more egregious damage is added to the top of the track. If a box of Bashing damage is the first to be placed in that row, then the character becomes Unconscious. Lethal damage will skip Unconsciousness and move directly to Torpor and, as you may suspect, Aggravated damage will skip both Unconsciousness and Torpor and lead directly to Final Death.
Once a person is Unconscious, doing further bashing to them will—after some time—put them into Torpor. This is handled by adding a backslash to represent new Lethal damage to every box of Bashing damage on the track until we reach the bottom and Torpor. However, no amount of Bashing damage will cause someone to reach Final Death in combat. Similarly, once a character is put into Torpor, further Lethal damage will cause Aggravated wounds until a person is finally killed.
Still with us? If not, don't worry. Like we said above, this is something that is best learned by doing, not by reading about it. Once you do it a few times, it becomes pretty easy to understand. In addition to our in-person Larp 101 session at the start of each school year (sometimes one for each semester), we schedule a combat and rules workshop before the first session. During that workshop, we'll help you understand everything you need to know about getting hurt in Carpé Noctem.