Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Session Nine (probably)

Despite the OSR-styled name, I guess this is more of a Delta Green blog, though I do have some D&D-adjacent things planned. This post is an account of the most recent session of the DG campaign I've been running. The players are two of my friends from High School and one of their brothers, who I guess is my friend too, now. I'm writing this mostly to keep track of what happens but also in case anyone is interested.

 The group consists of three Agents, all FBI employees.

• Sadie, a federal agent who specialized in crime scene analysis. (blue98)
  
• Ren, part of the FBI's counterintelligence division, an intelligence case officer with a psych degree. (Winkdeath)
  
• Hopps, former Intel & Ops Support Section, now graduated to fieldwork, also the group's senior Agent and designated "wizard character." (Matiopia)

Analyzing Delta Green's Monsters via Average Damage Output (and other things)

This post will be a little outside my usual repertoire. For those of you who don’t know, my other RPG of choice besides a mishmash of OSR titles (and whatever home-brew I happen to be toting around at the time) is Delta Green. The Handler’s Guide has a monster manual of sorts and in the interest of laying bare the mechanical underpinnings of games, I now tackle the average damage outputs.

But before I get to the actual “math,” I need to decide how I’m going to deal with the Lethality mechanic. It’s a common feature among unnatural beasties but the trick is that it doesn’t deal HP damage like everything else. It just reduces your HP to zero, ignoring armor, basically killing you. Even the one spell in the game that might complicate this with magical armor doesn’t. If you have a single point of Armor from Exaltation of the Flesh, you’re immune to successful Lethality rolls, taking normal HP damage. However, there is a handy part of the rule: successful Lethality rolls ignore Armor. So rather than treating it as infinite damage, I can instead treat it as 18 damage, enough to kill even the toughest Agent from full health. A quick glance at the back of the Handler’s Guide also shows that this still roughly works for all mundane creatures that still interact with this part of the Lethality mechanic. The others that have significantly more than 18 HP take flat damage to the Lethality rating, thus sidestepping the problem. 

The fact that successful Lethality rolls ignore body armor can be represented by thinking that these average damage values have a Lethality% chance to ignore body armor. Or on the scale of averages, only (100-Lethality)% of your body armor actually applies.

However, Lethality doesn’t always ignore Armor. If you have Cover, which also gives you Armor, the Lethality roll automatically fails and deals normal HP damage. So wherever it’s appropriate, I’ll be splitting the average damage of Lethality attacks into “against Cover” and “not against Cover.” Other relevant considerations like Armor Piercing and whether or not the attack should be able to used to Fight Back will also be notated. I’ll also be including Lethality ratings to put perspective on things.

Agents read no further I guess?