How This Came to Be
Sometimes when you're writing a scenario, you want to know exactly how dangerous an attack is to ensure a certain game experience. Maybe you've killed a bunch of Agents before with situations you thought were relatively safe and want to avoid making the same mistake. Maybe the narrative pacing requires an enemy dangerous enough to command attention but not so dangerous that it wipes the party. In either case, you have some math to do so you can make an informed decision on what damage to use.
When an attack hits an Agent, there are three main outcomes that concern the player: Stunned, Incapacitated, and Killed.
Stunned
This occurs when an Agent loses half their current HP in one go. Each turn, they roll CONx5. If they succeed, they can act normally next turn. For the average Agent with 12 CON, this means they spend 1-2 turns out of the fight. Completely stationary targets grant a +20% bonus to ranged and melee attack rolls against them, so you might want to grant anyone attacking a stunned target in melee a +20%. It's the same bonus granted by pinning a target, but even when stunned, it is unlikely anyone would be totally stationary (so no bonus for ranged attacks).
Incapacitated
Incapacitation means the Agent has been reduced to 1 or 2 HP. This triggers automatic unconsciousness and a CONx5 roll to avoid suffering a permanent injury. The Agent is still alive, but they are out of the fight. Even if someone revives them with First Aid, they'll only have about 4-5 HP on average, which means a simple unarmed attack has a 3% chance to stun them, 20% chance to incapacitate them again, and a 10% chance to outright kill them.
Killed
This outcome is self explanatory. Your Agent's HP is zero and they are dead. However, it comes in two flavors: 'Dead'
and 'Very Dead.' Dead is when you're at 0 HP but the Handler says resuscitation
is possible, assuming someone gets to you within CON minutes (eg: you take 12 points of damage from a rifle while only having 10
HP). Very Dead is when the Handler says you can't come back (eg: a
monster tears you in half for 3D6 damage, a successful Lethality roll reduces your HP to zero instead of just knocking it to zero with the sum of the dice on a failed roll, etc.)
Other Outcomes
There's technically two other outcomes: 'hurt but up' and 'unhurt.' These happen when the Agent takes damage but not enough to stun them or all the attack's damage is absorbed by Armor.
I wrote a set of spreadsheets to automate the math, both for myself and those who can't or don't want to do it. The name is a cheeky reference to the scenario, The Star Chamber.
Okay But How Do I Use This Thing?
All the sheets are protected except for two cells, HP and the Resilient boolean. We'll get to the second one later. The protection is just so no one can mess up the spreadsheets for others, whether by accident or because they decided to be a jerk. Using the sheet is pretty simple. Decide what HP value you're interested in and enter it by editing the indicated cell. Then you wait a few seconds for the spreadsheet to update. Be patient, it has a lot of math to do. Then you can cross reference the damage values with the armor values to see the various probabilities that someone with that much HP is stunned, incapacitated, or killed by an attack.
Examples
Example 1: Caught in a spray from an AK-47
You want to know what happens when an average Agent (12 HP) in full combat gear (6 Armor) is caught in spray of automatic fire from a rifle (10% Lethality). First, we look at the 10% Lethality row, as this is the damage value we are interested in. Then we find the net Armor value. The Agent has 6 Armor from their body armor, but the rifle has 3 AP, bringing the net Armor down to 3. So we look in the column marked with a three. This tells us that there is a 30.4% chance of the Agent being stunned, a 12.2% chance of being incapacitated, and a 31.9% chance of being killed outright. Overall, there is a 74.5% chance that this attack will dispatch the Agent, and there is a 44.1% chance that it will knock them out for the rest of the fight (or for good).
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Example 2: Fumbled Demolitions roll
The same Agent is wearing a bomb suit (10 Armor) and defusing an IED (30% Lethality). The IED explodes in their face. At first glance, we would use the Composite sheet, but the probabilities would be wrong. The values in the Composite sheet are a weighted averages of critical hits and normal attacks. It's 0.9 x (chance of stunned/incapacitated/killed with a normal attack) + 0.1 x (chance of stunned/incapacitated/killed with a crit) because 10% of all successful attack rolls are critical hits. A regular explosion can't crit, it just deals straight Lethality damage.
Because the Composite sheet incorporates critical hits into its calculations, we have to look at the individual sheets it draws its values from. First, we go to the 'Stunned' page and look at the row for 30% Lethality. The IED has no Armor Piercing, so we just look at the top result in the column for 10 Armor. This tells us that there is a 10% chance the Agent is merely stunned by the blast. We can repeat this process on the 'Incapacitated' and 'Killed' pages to find there is a 1% chance the Agent is incapacitated, and a 30% chance they are killed.
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Example 3: Ambush with a shotgun
We can use the sheets for critical damage too. Surprise attacks are automatically critical hits, assuming the attack roll succeeds. Critical hits deal double damage, so the chances of different outcomes are different.
Lets say the Agents are searching an abandoned tenement. There's a gangster with a shotgun (2D8 damage) holed up inside who thinks the Agents are cops because of their reinforced Kevlar vests (4 Armor). An Agent rounds his corner and fails their Alertness test, making any successful attack from the gangster a critical hit. What fates await them at the end of the barrel?
We look at the 2D8 rows for 'Stunned/Incapacitated/Killed (crit)', and look across to the eight Armor column (because Armor is doubled against buckshot). We can see the gangster has a 31.3% chance of stunning the Agent with that surprise attack, a 12.5% chance of incapacitating them, and a 43.75% chance of killing them. If we look up three rows, we find ourselves in the 3D8 row. This is in case the gangster had a double-barrelled shotgun and fired both barrels.
Additional Notes
All the rows contain common damage values that the Agents will bring to bear
on their problems. In hindsight, there aren't any weapons that deal 3D6
damage, but it shows up in the crocodile statblock and a few unnatural
monsters. The 2D10 is for calculating Lethality attacks against Agents in
cover, where the Lethality roll automatically fails, but there's still the HP
damage to be reckoned with.
All of the examples I've given are calculating the lethality of NPCs vs Agents, but these can easily be used to see how tough the enemy opposition is. Are you worried the captain of the NRO-Delta squad is going to go down like a chump? Plug in his HP and cross reference for your Agents' weapons and the Armor he'll have.
Some monsters aren't affected by Lethality the same way humans are, taking damage equal to the Lethality rating on a successful Lethality roll instead of just dying. Set the cell next to 'Resilient' equal to 1 (or any number that's not 0) if the monster is Resilient. Statistically, what this does is increase the chance of stuns and incapacitation, as Lethality rolls only deal regular HP damage rather than dropping things down to 0 HP.
I usually don't have monsters affected by the 2 HP unconsciousness threshold, but I do have stuns affect them. If their CON is low, they're human-scale enough for stuns to make sense. If they have a CON score of 20 or more, then I don't feel bad having stuns affect them because A) it takes a lot of damage to stun them, and B) they have a 99% chance of recovering from the stun each turn because of the way inhuman stat tests work.
Anyway, I hope this post has explained how to use this google sheets document
and it helps you as a Handler.
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