Damage
One-pager. A hit is resolved by the One Rule like anything else; the Quality Rating of the hit, the weapon's Damage Class, and the target's armor decide how much damage is done. Damage feeds Wounds & Recovery.
Damage Class (DC)
Every attack has a Damage Class — how hard it hits before quality, armor, or luck. The scale is numerical and calibrated, not flavor:
| DC | Roughly |
|---|---|
| 4 | An inhumanly strong person's bare hands |
| 8 | A 9mm parabellum pistol (the most common pistol on Earth) |
| 11 | A 7.62mm rifle (the most common rifle class on Earth) |
Note: earlier editions gave firearms a separate +1 at close range; that's now baked into the base DC, so the anchors above already assume typical use. (They still need a calibration pass against the full weapon list.)
How much damage a hit does
Damage = QR-yield of (DC ÷ 2). QR1 is deliberately bumped so even a marginal hit hurts.
Read the hit's Quality Rating, take the DC, halve it, and apply the QR yield (see QR Yield Factors). The yield curve is front-loaded on purpose: a barely-successful shot (QR1) is already dangerous, because real weapons are lethal and ForeSight doesn't pretend otherwise. Higher QRs climb from there.
Hit location
By default, roll D10 for where a hit lands. Or call your shot: aim for the head, a hand, or whatever's exposed, and take an up-front EF penalty for the smaller target. The same penalty mechanism covers shooting a target behind cover, or aiming for the one body part sticking out — you pay in ease factor for precision.
Damage type
What the damage is determines how armor and bodies respond:
- M — Melee: slow-moving, low energy, high momentum (blades, clubs, fists).
- I — Impact: fast-moving, high energy, low momentum (bullets, shrapnel).
- B — Beam: energy, no momentum (lasers and the like). Respectable, never a joke — but deliberately not the room-clearing death-rays of pulp SF. We were physics majors.
Armor, penetration, and absorption
Armor adds Protection (a DC of defense) against the types it's rated for. Two annotations decide the arms race at the margins:
- P — Piercing (on a weapon): ignores that many DC of the target's armor Protection.
- A — Absorbing (on armor): ignores one point of damage that gets through.
Designer's Note: in a straight fight, armor has the edge. ForeSight carries a small but deliberate bias toward not killing player characters too easily — enough that wearing armor is clearly worth it and a single unlucky roll rarely ends a character outright, without making anyone bulletproof.
Scale
Very large or tough targets (a vehicle, a dragon, a stone wall) have a Damage Scale — divide damage done by the scale before applying it. A normal person is Scale 1. This is how the same DC means "lethal" to a man and "scratch" to a tank, with no separate rules. (See Equipment and NPCs; vehicle damage in Pursuit routes here.)