Called Shots

One of the things I love about many action video games (Monster Hunter being the best example) is that where you aim significantly affects how much damage you deal. I've always wanted to figure out a way to incorporate that into tabletop RPGs that is manageable at the table without giving me the ability to easily decapitate my players' characters, and I think I've finally cracked it.

As a reminder, creatures in Prodigy have both health and a maximum number of injuries. Health is depleted by incoming attacks, and when it reaches 0 the character gains an injury and refills their health to full (damage does roll over). When a character reaches their max injury count, they fall unconscious, and they die upon suffering 1 further injury. While health can be increased through character advancement, a character's body mass determines their max number of injuries (1 or 2).

Creatures with 3 or more injuries are substantially larger than most player characters and thus afford more choices when it comes to attacking them, enabling the following rules.

Arrange the creature's injuries into a pyramid with 1 injury at the top such that each successive row has more injuries than the row above it. This injury tree is public knowledge (although the damage that must be dealt to give the creature the injury is kept secret). When attacking the creature, the player must choose a particular injury in the pyramid. Selecting an injury in the bottom row is a normal attack. Selecting an injury above the bottom row makes the combat test harder for every injury below it. When an injury receives its full damage capacity, remove it from the table and give it to the creature. When the top injury is removed, the creature falls unconscious.

Let me walk through an example. A griffon has 10 health and 4 max injuries, which gives us a pyramid like so:

The parenthetical numbers are the gryphon's health distributed per injury, which would be kept secret from the players. When the characters attack, they may select any of the 4 injuries in the pyramid. Attacking the bottom 3 would be a regular attack against the griffon, a Professional-difficulty test (requiring a 12 or better), but attacking the top injury would be 3 steps harder, a Sage-difficulty test (requiring a 22 or better). To make targeting the top injury a little easier, players could target one of the lower injuries. After dealing 10 or more damage to any one of them, the table looks like this:

Attacking the bottom 2 is still a Professional-difficulty test, but the top injury is now only a Master-difficulty test (requiring a 18 or better).

Depending upon the specifics of the monster, I could rule that certain kinds of combat maneuvers make it easier to attack injuries higher up on the pyramid - climbing on top of a monster or tripping it might provide easier access to their vitals - or rearrange the pyramid slightly (a multiheaded creature might have one injury on the top row per head).