Here's a quick & dirty Improvised Weapon system for Scion. It quickly generates reasonable stats for any item you want to swing at somebody. The system is designed to be fast and rough, and it intentionally keeps most improvised weapons as less powerful than intentionally manufactured weaponry.
Basically, the system is just a series of tags that can be applied to an item you want to use as a weapon. A given improvised weapon may have any number of tags, even zero. (In fact, most objects a mortal could use as a club would have zero tags)
The tags are: Long, Huge, Sharp, Pointy, Massive, and the negative tags of Fragile, Awkward, and Soft.
Tags do NOT replace stunt dice. Creativity should be rewarded, so most improvised weapons will generate 2 stunt dice when first picked up and used. Clever description of the things you do with a weapon (improvised or not) will of course continue to wrack up stunt dice. But even without stunt dice, a rock or pointy stick may prove more useful than your bare fists. Assume all improvised weapons have the following baseline stats, except when modified by tags:
Acc:+0 Damage:+1(bashing) Defense:+0 Speed:5
The applicable Tags work as follows:
Long: The item is at least 5 feet long, making it possible to keep a foe well beyond arm's length. It adds +2 to Defense for calculating your Parry DV.
Wide: The item sweeps a very broad area when swung, such that a person can't just duck to get out of the way. Typically, this means something at least as wide as a compact car. If an item is wide, it gains Accuracy +2 (on top of any stunt dice being awarded).
Sharp: The item has a sharp edge, so it slices rather than bludgeons. It does +2L damage.
Pointy: It has one or more very sharp points, and is used to pierce the foe. This does +2L and has the effect of the Piercing Tag on the weapon chart (meaning armor is halved). The effects of Sharp and Pointy are not cumulative - Pointy overrides Sharp.
Massive: Mass increases inertia which can result in greater damage. Massive is a little different from the other Tags in that it includes a numeric code. For objects that way 5001bs to 1700lbs, add +1 die of damage due to the mass. This could be recorded as Massive1d. For even more massive objects, assume that the minimum Epic Strength required to lift the item becomes the number of bonus levels of damage that item does when swung as a weapon. The shorthand for this tag is MassiveX where X is the Epic Strength required to lift the item.
If you're unsure the mass of an item, a good list can be found here. That list includes as it's first column the Minimum Epic Strength requirement.
And yes, this is intentionally a very small bonus. Most of the damage in swinging a vehicle at someone is done by your Epic Strength. Deliberately pinning someone under a huge item will use a slightly different system, detailed in another post.
And now for the three penalizing/negative tags: Fragile, Awkward, and Soft
Fragile: Items made of glass, paper, unreinforced dry wood, etc, will tend to break when swung with Epic Strength. Any item labeled as Fragile by the GM will break the first time it deals damage. When that happens it loses the Long or Wide tag (if it has both, the player may choose which one it loses on the first hit), and if it has the Massive tag the bonus damage dice it adds are permanently reduced by half. If it already had none of those tags, the item breaks apart into bits.
Awkward: If an item weighs more than 1/2 of the maximum weight your character can lift as a Feat of Strength (see the chart on page 181 of Scion: Hero) then it is considered Awkward for him or her to use. Alternately, an item that is extremely poorly balanced or annoying flexible and spineless may be ruled Awkward by the GM. If that is the case, the item is used as a Speed: 6 attack, and has Defense -2 penalizing your parry DV.
Soft: An improvised weapon that is soft and yielding, such as a pillow, does lesser damage. In such an instance, you roll five fewer dice. Only threshold successes and superhuman strength (whether mundane at 6+ or actual Epic Strength) will cause damage in these situations.
Implementing the system is pretty easy: the GM can just keep a list on their screen (not using a screen, I'll keep them on a note card) as simple as
"Long:+2Defense,If a character relies on the same item again and again, you can record the relevant data on their character sheet.
Wide:+2Accuracy,
Sharp:+2Lethal,
Pointy:+2L+Piercing,
Massive:+Levels=EpicStrRequired,
Fragile:BreaksWhenHit,
Awkward:Speed6DV-2,
Soft:-5damage.
Don't forget the stunt dice!"
1 comment:
In yesterday's changes, I added a new negative trait "Soft" for situations where someone is attacking with a bag of leaves or a wet blanket.
I boosted damage by a die across the board, so using a rock or a lead pipe would be more affective then using your fists. I also cleared up the wording to make it obvious exactly what the stats are for an item with no tags.
The reason the baseline stats are so weak is because of the "lowest common denominator" of the official weapon charts. Improvised weapons need to be weaker than intentionally-crafted weapons of the same mass. The Hadseax entry tells us that 6-inches of sharpened steel is only +2L. The Bo entry tells us that no mundane weapon gets more than +2 to accuracy or defense.
Lastly, I altered references to stunting to more properly reflect my current views on how the game's stunt system should work. In the original draft, the main power of an improvised weapon was in guaranteed stunt dice. Since then, I've come to realize that's a bad idea. Your first use of a given improv weapon is almost always a 2-die stunt, but subsequent stunt dice are far from guaranteed.
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