How to Apply Damage and Healing to Actors
There are several ways to apply damage/healing to an actor that is either a Traveller, Animal or Robot. Ships and vehicle damage require manual adjustment of the actor sheet due to the diversity of damage mechanisms in the rules sets. Note that the damage characteristics vary by rules set, as well. To simplify for this page, we will focus on the three physical characteristics (STR, DEX, END) in the examples. For rules where there are other damage stats (e.g. Cepheus Deluxe with Stamina and Lifeblood), the same principles apply.
Editing the damage fields on actor sheet is the most direct way to apply damage / healing. All characteristics have at least two values, a base value (the value when the actor is 100% healthy) and a damage value (shown in a red font, is the amount of damage that characteristic has sustained). The image below shows the standard stats block. STR (strength) has a base value of 6 with 1 point of damage - so the current strength is 5. The resulting modifier is -1 for that characteristic value of 5. Similarly, DEX has a base value of 7 with 2 points of damage (the resulting modifier is also -1 for a current value of 5).
To add an additional 2 points of damage to the STR characteristic, change the red number from 1 to 3.
When a successful roll results from a weapons skill check (when the automatic roll damage setting is set to true) or damage is rolled manually from a the weapons listing on the player sheet (by clicking on the damage field in the listing), a damage card appears in chat. An example is,
This card holds all the data necessary to apply damage to an actor. Simply drag and drop the red box onto an open actor sheet and a dialog should appear with information on how to apply the damage. If you don't want to see the dialog but just have the damage automatically applied, hold the shift key while dragging and dropping.
You can also drag and drop damage onto a actor token when this experimental setting is enabled.
If you right-click a token, an interface menu appears as shown below.
The box below the token image is the "hits" field, which is the sum of all the damage characteristics minus the current damage. It is the number of additional hits the actor can sustain without dying. In the image above, the token has 27 hit points left. To add damage to the actor, click in the hits box and type in a negative number, e.g. -5. This will subtract this many hit points from the various damage characteristics. Note that this is done automatically so no damage dialog will appear. To heal the actor, enter a number preceded by a plus sign, e.g. +6. A value of +6 will heal the actor by six points - again applied automatically.
Damage can also be applied automatically when making a successful weapon skill check by targeting another token(s) prior to rolling. Multiple tokens may be targeted; however, the weapon action must have multiple attacks. Tokens are selected in the order that they were targeted. As with other damage application methods, automatically rolling damage setting must be enabled. If a successful weapons skills check is made, the damage popup dialog will appear to apply damage to the target token, by default. There is a setting to prevent the pop up and automatically apply damage ("Auto Damage Targets"). Please note that if using the "Auto Damage Targets" setting, only damage rolled by the GM will be applied. Players do not have permission to change actors they don't own.
Another way to apply damage or healing from any roll is to select any tokens to apply the damage or healing (this is not the same as targeting). Next, right-click the roll chat card with the damage/healing value. The roll does not need to be a damage roll, it can be any roll with a result that is greater than zero. After right-clicking, a context menu appears:
There are four options to apply damage/healing:
- Apply damage applies the damage value to the actor and open the damage dialog (for all selected tokens)
- Apply destructive damage is similar to above but multiplies the damage by 10.
- Apply scale reduced damage divides the damage value by 10
- Apply healing applies the value as healing (even if from a damage card). No dialog appears as the amount is added automatically.
The value used for the above actions depends on the type of chat card selected. For a damage card, the damage/healing value used is the damage value for the card (and any chosen multiplier). For a skill roll, the value is the effect value. For a manual roll, the roll total is used.
The actor method 'applyDamage' is open to macros where you have an actor reference, e.g. _token.actor.damageActor({damageValue: 1, armorPiercingValue: 9999, damageType: "NONE", damageLabel: "NONE", canBeParried: false}, false) applies one point of damage to the selected token from the console. The fields are damage payload object and whether to show the damage dialog (boolean). The damage payload object has the format:
{
damageValue: integer, (the value of damage apply, negative is healing)
armorPiercingValue: integer, (the amount of armor to bypass)
damageType: string, (type of damage, system dependent and affects secondary armor)
damageLabel: string, (freeform label describing damage)
canBeParried: boolean, (whether attack can be parried)
}