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. Most player characters have a base of three ‘body hits’.

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, and should be retained by players.

For more information, see Medical System

Healing and Repairing Hits

Hits to Personal Fields recharge in accordance with the description on the Item card, unless the item is Damaged (eg. by being RENDED).

Hits to Kinetic Armour, automatically repair after 60 minutes of not taking further damage, unless the item is Damaged (eg. by being RENDED)- although we encourage players to do some roleplay to support this. Alternatively, characters with at least one rank in Engineer, can repair this with 3 minutes of suitable roleplay outside of a combat environment.

Hits to Health, automatically regenerate after 60 minutes of not taking further damage. Alternatively, characters with at least one rank in the Medical career, can heal others with 3 minutes of suitable roleplay outside of a combat environment.

Note that for all three types of hits, many in-game equipments, consumables and other Items can provide additional sources of repair and healing.

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 at GOD.

Grappling, Dragging and Disarming

Characters may roleplay* grappling and dragging other characters in order to restrain or reposition them.

Attendees must not physically grapple or drag other attendees, without explicit consent provided immediately prior. Doing so will be consider against our Player and Crew Charters.

Un-resisting (eg. allied, or incapacitated) characters may be dragged by ‘two hands’. This can be two hands from a single character (full attention) or one hand from two different characters (freeing the other hand to perform other actions, eg. returning fire!).

Resisting (eg. hostile) characters may be restrained and/or dragged by four hands, from two characters (full attention).

Whilst restrained or dragged, a hostile character may not perform any hostile actions (eg. striking with a melee weapon, throwing a grenade, or reloading a weapon).

Characters being restrained may be forcibly disarmed by another pair of hands. In these circumstances, when disarmed, the character should drop any items or weapons they are holding.

Resisting characters may RESIST being restrained, grappled or disarmed, preventing them being affected by these effects for 5 seconds.