System for dismemberment

[Space Titanium]

Lately I've been seeing a lot about AD&D's critical system and how it was fairly simple to have a limb dismembered. I know that there are critical hit tables out there and critical hit cards that can do the same thing, but I was wondering if a combat system could be implemented to do the same thing without a critical.

Sunder Limb
As a use of the sunder combat maneuver a character can attempt to remove a creature's limb (such as an arm, leg, or tentacle). A character must rolls applying there CMB against their target's AC - if this succeeds, the character successfully attacks the limb they're aiming for. The character rolls damage as normal, the limb taking full damage and the creature's hit points being reduced by half this amount. A limb has 1/5 of the creature's total hit points.

I honestly have no idea how well this would work, but I thought it would be interesting if a character could reduce a creature's natural attacks as well as their weapon attacks.

[Ross Byers]

You may want to take a look at Ultimate Combat. According to the product description, it includes Called Shot rules.

[That Guy]

main issue is that you are letting people ignore 3/5 of an a targets HP.

bad guy has 100 hp? not a problem, you only need 40 damage and he has no arms. unless he is a monk, his feet are only good for running, and then its only another 40 damage until he is just a torso, and a nothing more then a trophy in our "hero's" lair.

also loosing a limb is fairly fatal to anyone without immediate aid.

for an average human i would have the limb damaged in steps, like broken at 1/4 of hp (-2 to limb action, or 1/2 speed), crippled at 1/2 of hp (limb mostly useless, cant attack, or 1/4 speed), with lost limbs being the final step at 3/4 hp.

i would also give the target a bonus to his ac, at least a +2, as i think a limb is at least two sizes smaller then it's owner.

[Space Titanium]

@Ross - Thanks for the tip. I am now even more enthused for Ultimate Combat, which I didn't think was really possible.

@That Guy - Good points to bring up. As soon as I posted my idea I knew it was a little too much, but I wanted to try and see what people thought. I'll see if my players want to try it out.

[Ice Titan]

Average commoner has 3 hp.

If, say, a cat thought to use the sunder combat manuever on an unsuspecting commoner, he could pull the commoner's arm or leg off if he rolled a 4 on his d4-3. If the commoner got an opportunity attack, he might be able to pull the cat's arm off.

Since I don't think housecats can pull people's arms off, maybe this is better as a feat or with improved or greater sunder as a prereq.

[That Guy]

Bah, commoners are just moving scenery anyway, a stiff breeze should take off an arm easily :)

but you could also take negative hp into account for dismemberment, so that the commoner would be bleeding to death before the frisky feline has ripped the arm free, and to make it a little harder to "Disarm" somebody.

[Karuth]

Attacking body parts can get deadly quickly. A sunder specialist can go beheading people quite easily.

So that it does not go out of hand maybe you should warn your players if they start using it a lot, the enemies will be using it against them a lot as well.

And at the very least I would give the body parts a size bonus to AC as they are smaller than a whole body.

[Umbral Reaver]

Now that a few people have UC, can we get some word on how called shots work in that?