Unknown Armies:Exotic Damage
You can die in all kinds of terrible ways. Here are a few examples.
Pointblanking
Pointblanking is trying to kill an immobile, helpless target in close proximity. This doesn’t mean an ambush. This means cutting the throat of a guy tightly bound to a chair, or shooting a sleeping person in the face.
So your target is helpless. It’s up to you to decide if he or she lives or dies.
This is a dramatic moment, so don’t try to gloss it over. The consequences of your decision are likely to be severe, no matter how you decide. The decision to snuff out a human life in a cold and calculated fashion—not in combat, not by “accident,” not in a rage of anger or fear—is one of the most important ones you may face. Choose carefully.
If you decide to murder someone, then, here’s how you do it. Roll the appropriate skill. If it’s martial arts and you fail, you do the damage you rolled, firearms-style. If it’s firearms and you fail, your weapon does the maximum damage for its caliber.
If you succeed with either roll, the defenseless victim is dead. Lights out.
That’s not it for you, though. Deliberately trying to kill a helpless target is a rank-7 Violence check. Your GM may assign other checks as well; after all, if you generally think of yourself as a friendly, forgiving guy, or a law-abiding straight arrow, such a deed may well merit a Self check. On the other hand, if you fail to kill your target then you may have to face a Helplessness or Unnatural check (the latter if some sort of magick saved the target).
Drowning
In a crisis, you can hold your breath for a number of seconds equal to your Body score. After that, you have to breathe or pass out. If you breathe in (or pass out) underwater, you’re out of the fight and drown unless someone drags you out and performs CPR. (GMs may make characters who’ve been saved roll their Body or under to have the CPR work.) An average Body 50 victim can stay alive for fifty seconds, so it takes about sixteen rounds to drown. Not drowning means doing your best to stay above water, either with the Swim skill or (if you don’t know how to swim) a General Athletics check. Each success gets you a breath of air, and the breath-holding clock is restarted.
Strangling
There are two ways to choke someone: cut off air to the windpipe (the standard, untrained strangle) or cut off blood to the brain. For the windpipe choke, just use the drowning rules. This goes for untrained neck grabbing, smothering with pillows, plastic bags over the head, and other forms of smothering. An average Body 50 victim can stay alive for fifty seconds, so it takes about sixteen rounds to strangle him to death. For the blood choke, make a successful attack with a minimum roll of 20. Maintain this for three more rounds and the target passes out. Two more rounds and the target dies. This qualifies as pointblanking for Madness purposes. A blood choke requires you to put a rope or scarf or other long, thin object around someone’s throat, twist it once in the back, and pull real tight. It works very fast.
To break a choke that’s on you, you can make one Dodge or Struggle attempt each round, your choice. If you succeed, you break free. Whether you succeed or fail, however, that attempt is the only action you can take this round.
Car Wrecks
The GM rolls one die for each 10mph the car was going, and arbitrarily assembles a number out of any two of the dice rolled based on factors such as seatbelts, air bags, the type of car, and so on. If a car hits something at 50mph, the GM rolls five dice and picks any two to build a two-digit number from. Different occupants in the car can receive different combinations of damage numbers if the GM feels it is appropriate.
Keep in mind that if two cars hit head-on, you combine their speeds. Two cars going at 40 that do a head-on yield eight dice of damage to the occupants.
Is your character wearing her seatbelt? Unless you stated so earlier, you need to make a Mind check: if you succeed, you have your seatbelt on.
Falling
The GM rolls one die per ten feet fallen, adding the dice together. If it’s a controlled, deliberate fall, drop the highest die. (So if you carefully jump down 10 feet, you take no damage. If you’re shoved out of a first-story window, you take full damage because you aren’t in control of the fall.)