Damage
One-pager. A hit is resolved by the One Rule like anything else; the hit's Quality Rating, the weapon's Damage Class, and the target's armor decide how badly it hurts. Injury is tracked as wound levels, 0 (healthy) to 6 (dead) — each level is a −(level) penalty to everything you do.
Damage Class
Every attack has a Damage Class (DC) — how hard it hits before quality, armor, or luck. The scale is numerical and calibrated, not flavour:
| DC | Roughly |
|---|---|
| 4 | a very strong person's bare hands — or a nasty targeted punch |
| 8 | a 9mm pistol (the commonest pistol on Earth) |
| 11 | a 7.62mm rifle (the commonest rifle class on Earth) |
How much damage a hit does
Damage (in wound levels) = Yield × DC × ½, rounded down. And any hit whose raw damage is ≥ ¼ forces a stun check (below), even when it rounds to no wound.
Read the hit's Yield off its QR (QR1 100%, QR2 80%, QR3 50%, QR4 25% — see The One Rule), multiply by half the DC, and round down for the wound levels dealt. The quarter-level stun floor is why even a graze rattles you: real weapons are dangerous and ForeSight doesn't pretend otherwise.
*A 9mm (DC 8): a solid QR3 hit does 0.5 × 8 × ½ = 2 (medium); a brilliant QR1 does 4 (incapacitated); a scraping QR4 does 0.25 × 8 × ½ = 1.0 → 1 (light) plus a stun check. A 7.62 rifle (DC 11) center-mass at QR1 does 5.5 → 5 (dying). A bare fist (DC 4) at QR4 does 0.5 raw → no wound, but a stun check.*
Wounds — the 0–6 track
Injury is a single number, and it is −(level) to everything you do — pain and blood loss don't care what you're attempting:
| Lvl | State | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Healthy | — |
| 1 | Light | −1 to all activity |
| 2 | Medium | −2 |
| 3 | Heavy | −3 |
| 4 | Incapacitated | −4; you can barely act — roll WP each turn to do anything at all |
| 5 | Dying | down and bleeding out; without intervention you deteriorate toward 6 |
| 6 | Dead | — |
New damage adds to your current level (a medium 2 plus a heavy 3 is a dying 5). Toughness rolls throughout are made on Endurance or Willpower, player's choice — some people are physically hard to put down, some just refuse to quit. Pain resistance is not a skill; you roll the raw attribute.
Stun & Shaken
Damage doesn't only wound — it rattles. Any hit that clears the ¼-level stun floor (or any stun-class "S" weapon, which skips straight to it) forces a pain-resistance roll — WP:
| The roll | Effect |
|---|---|
| Shrug it off (good) | carry on |
| Shaken (ordinary) | −2 to everything and one action only; roll WP at end of turn to clear it |
| Stunned (poor, or any S-weapon) | no action but to recover (a WP roll each turn); a QR1 clears it at once, a QR10 drops you unconscious |
Shaken is off-balance and hurting; Stunned is out of the fight until you pull yourself together. Both are temporary and leave no lasting level.
Hit location
By default roll D10 for where a hit lands:
| D10 | Location | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Left leg | fail the Pain Resistance roll and you go prone |
| 2 | Right leg | fail the Pain Resistance roll and you go prone |
| 3–4 | Abdomen | 1-in-10 chance of an extra point; −1 EF on Pain Resistance while you're carrying an abdomen wound (flat, not per wound) |
| 5–7 | Chest | 1-in-10 chance of an extra point |
| 8 | Left arm | fail the Pain Resistance roll and you drop whatever that hand held |
| 9 | Right arm | fail the Pain Resistance roll and you drop whatever that hand held |
| 10 | Head | 1 natural armor (the skull), but piercing damage is +1 |
The distribution is the body as a target: the chest is the biggest thing pointing at you, the head the smallest and the worst place to be hit. Or call your shot — the head, a weapon hand, the sliver of someone showing past cover — for an up-front EF penalty for the smaller target. The same penalty covers shooting through cover: you pay in ease factor for precision, and a success is the called hit (don't charge it twice).
Damage type & armor
What the damage is decides how armor and bodies answer it:
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| M — Melee | slow, low-energy, high-momentum (blades, clubs, fists) |
| I — Impact | fast, high-energy, low-momentum (bullets, shrapnel) |
| B — Beam | energy, no momentum (lasers) — respectable, but never a pulp death-ray (we were physics majors) |
Armor carries a Protection rating (a DC of defence) against the types it's built for; subtract it from the incoming DC before the damage formula. A DC reduced below zero is harmless. Two annotations settle the arms race at the margin:
| Mark | Effect |
|---|---|
| P — Piercing (weapon) | ignores that many points of the target's Protection |
| A — Absorbing (armor) | stops one point of damage that still gets through |
Designer's Note: in a straight fight, armor has the edge. ForeSight carries a small, deliberate bias against killing player characters too easily — enough that armor is plainly worth wearing and one unlucky roll rarely ends a character outright, without making anyone bulletproof.
Scale
A very large or tough target — a vehicle, a dragon, a stone wall — has a Damage Scale; divide the damage done by the scale before applying it. A person is Scale 1. That is the whole of how one DC is "lethal" to a man and "a scratch" to a tank, with no separate rules. (Vehicle damage in Pursuit routes here.)
Recovery — and relapse
Healing is slow. At the interval for your level, make a convalescence roll (WP):
| Lvl | Roll every | On the roll |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Light | day | success drops a level; QR10 raises one (relapse) |
| 2 Medium | 5 days | " |
| 3 Heavy | 20 days | " |
| 4 Incapacitated | day | " |
| 5 Dying | minutes | deterioration — a poor roll drops you toward death, not away |
Convalescence carries a penalty equal to the worst level you've sunk to since you were last healthy — a relapse leaves you fragile — until you fully recover or get medical care. Care (closing wounds, transfusion, surgery) lowers that worst-level penalty or buys levels back directly; it is what hauls a dying character off the 5→6 slide before the dice do.
Poison, disease, and the environment
The same machine handles the slow killers — resolve each as a task and read its Yield/QR for how much it does, or roll a random QR (D10: 1→QR1, 2→QR2, 3–5→QR3, 6–10→QR4) when nothing is opposed:
- Poison & venom carry a DC and a type; the victim resists with a ST roll, and what gets through applies as wounds (or, for sedatives and toxins that sap rather than injure, as exhaustion) on the poison's own clock — seconds for a nerve agent, hours for a septic wound.
- Disease & infection are the tax on untreated wounds and foul conditions: at intervals the GM sets, a ST roll either fights it off or lets it add a level / stall convalescence. Antibiotics and clean care are a fat positive modifier; a battlefield wound left dirty is a negative one.
- Environmental damage — falls, fire, cold, blast, drowning — is just a DC and a QR like any hit (a two-storey fall, a burning room), while slow exposure (heat, cold, thin air, thirst) meters as exhaustion rather than wounds until it turns lethal.