Design Principles

Principles of the combat mechanic design are as follows:

• Simple to understand and execute.
• Mechanically advantage melee to avoid prolonged nerf standoffs.
• Enough flexibility to make interesting foes and character builds with unique abilities.
• Prevent ‘insta-kills’, and encourage hero fighting.

Combat in Drift is a combination of LARP-Safe Melee weapons, Nerf-style blasters and Bows / Crossbows.

Damage and Hits

Drift is a global hit system, where characters have a number of hit points, shared across all locations.

Armour and personal shields must be phys-repped by ‘reasonable effort’, and with appropriate lammies. Drift does not have concepts of partial or full coverage; a lammie and physical representation is all that is required.

There are two types of damage; Kinetic and Energy, which have specific interactions with player skills and equipment:

• Melee weapons deal Kinetic Damage
• Bows / Crossbows deal Kinetic Damage
• Nerf weapons deal Energy Damage

Damage is limited to 1 hit per second, per damage source.

Damage can be absorbed by Kinetic Armour and Personal Shields. Basic variants of these are relatively common equipment, but more expensive and capable equipment is obtainable.

Medical Cards

Medical Cards (or Med Cards for short) are an integral part of Drift, and players should expect their characters to routinely acquire these. Medical cards might be given to players when they take injuries or interact with certain in-game mechanics. Medical cards feature several key elements:

• A Medical card type (eg. Physical, Mental or Disease).
• Symptoms or complications caused by the Medical card to be roleplayed.
• Instructions for a suitably skilled Medic to diagnose, and treat the medical card.

Some medical cards may be disposed of immediately upon treatment, whilst some may have longer lasting or even permanent effects, which will be stated on the card.

Critical State

When a character reaches zero remaining global hits, they are placed into a critical state and begin a death count of 90 seconds. 

Whilst in a critical state, unless a call or other game effect prevents them doing so, characters remain conscious and may:

• Call for assistance.
• Crawl a short distance.
• Throw insults at the bad guys.

Whilst in a critical state, a character may not:

• Walk or run.
• Use equipment or skills, unless specifically stated otherwise.
• Use or Reload weapons.
• Throw items or equipment.
• Do anything else that’s not listed above.

Whilst in a critical state, there are several means by which a character may be ‘stabilised’. While stabilised, the character’s death count pauses for the duration of the stabilisation. When no longer being stabilised, the character’s death count continues from where it paused. If hit points are restored to a character in the critical state, they leave the critical state (and their death count resets).

Character Death

When a character is in the critical state, and their death count reaches zero, the character is declared dead. Players should continue to phys-rep their corpse where possible and reasonable to-do-so, to allow for gear retrieval, post-mortem analysis or other role play, after which a player may create a new character.