Aggravated damage in White Wolf
In RPGs, there are lots of ways to deal and/or take damage. And not just lots of ways to do it, but lots of kinds of damage. Bashing damage, lethal damage, aggravated damage, stun damage, subdual damage, and even, on rare occasions, normal damage.
Recently, we house-ruled our White Wolf games because I realized that for players, taking damage and dealing damage are two very different things. Damage isn’t just damage. For the player character, taking normal damage means they need healing, but most characters in a White Wolf game — whether you’re playing Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, or Mage: The Ascension or whatever — have ways of healing it.
But White Wolf games also have something they call aggravated (agg) damage, though. Damage dealt by something magical (werewolf claws), something particularly nasty (napalm), or both (werewolf claws covered in napalm) takes longer and more effort to heal. That’s agg damage.
Players naturally want to avoid taking aggravated damage. They know that if they do, it’s going to be hell to heal. It’s a great way to amp up the tension of a combat, or make an enemy extra dangerous. Aggravated damage leaves the PCs wounded and vulnerable for longer. Plus, they usually have to take special steps to heal the damage.
But PCs can deal aggravated damage, too! They get werewolf claws and magical knives, just like their opponents. Which is great! Sure, the magical knife cost more background points than a normal damage one, but it’s aggravated damage, baby!
…Except that aggravated doesn’t mean as much in the hands of player characters. There are some things in the World of Darkness that can’t soak aggravated damage (the White Wolf mechanism by which a character negates damage), and that works well enough. But most of the magical creatures in the setting — like banes, fomori, and so on — can soak agg damage just fine.
Well, the villains have the same healing rules as the player characters. It’ll take them just as long to return to full fighting strength after combat. But how much does that really matter? Most fights in a role-playing game are to the death. The PCs survive, but with the exception of a few repeat antagonists, their enemies don’t.
So what does recovery time mean for a bunch of dead monsters? Not much. There’s certainly a use-case where an elder vampire takes some damage and runs away — then there’s a great ticking clock countdown to find the ancient blood-sucker and finish the job before they can heal up.
I’m sure that I could come up with other scenarios, but they’re all going to be edge cases. Most of the time, I expect my player characters to kill their opponents. And those bad guys are just as dead whether the PCs are dealing normal or aggravated damage.
In order to make that special, magical aggravated damage more tangibly special and magical, I needed a new house rule.
When you roll dice for normal damage, the difficulty is 6. The more dice that come up 6 or higher, the more damage you deal. Aggravated damage is supposed to be worse, more painful, and harder to heal. So for aggravated damage, I’ve lowered the roll difficulty to 5. Now my PCs are more likely to deal damage, and more likely to deal more damage.
It’s not quite the same as the rules out of the White Wolf books, but the extra points that my player sank into getting the aggravated damage weapon are of use in more situations than just the rare vampire-running-away edge case. Now there’s a little more point to using a magical aggravated damage knife versus a huge, normal-damage broadsword. The big weapon may have more dice of damage, but the knife has a lower damage difficulty. And if someone wants to pay the points for an agg-damage broadsword, it’s going to be expensive — and very effective.
