Copper Dreams Funded, Updates #7-10

The team behind the Copper Dreams Kickstarter campaign has plenty of reasons to be excited today, as the campaign has been fully funded with 37 more hours to go, which means they’ve raised almost $10,000 since we last checked. While this news is very important, we’d be remiss not to mention that the team has also published four new campaign updates too in the meantime.

Update 7 deals with the game’s mechanics and specifically the way the game handles health, update 8 and update 9 focus on interviews and Kickstarter rewards, and update 10 celebrates the project’s funding and also informs potential backers that a Paypal payment option is now available.

An excerpt on the game’s health system:

Your character’s ailments are represented by three different bars below their portrait in the main HUD, accruing a full bar of ailments in any of these lead to death. You can see these in more detail on your character sheet, which will also automatically find any medical equipment you may have that could cure them out in the field.

The three categories of ailments that all different kinds of damage fall under are Lesser, Greater, and Mortal.

• Lesser Ailments are light wounds that would hardly faze you like a bullet graze or getting winded. These can often be recovered from automatically after combat, though some will require further healing. Characters have a large capacity of these types of wounds they can endure.
• Greater Ailments are a medium wound that is bearable but can begin deteriorating character stats and combat efficiency. Some of these kinds of wounds can be shrugged off after combat, but will more often need medical supplies from equipment or a clinic to to be healed.
• Mortal Ailments are a critical problem, like a pierced lung or other organ damage. These will always require medical supplies or a clinic to remove, and may make you consider how to change tactics for that character based on how their body is damaged. These are not “just a flesh wound!”

Every PC and NPC has a set number of ailments for each category they can receive before death takes them. There is a player advantage system with this though, in that a PC doesn’t immediately die when a category is filled, but rather drops unconscious during combat. Another hit thereafter will kill them. So for example, a security guard might have a capacity of five Lesser Ailments, three Greater Ailments and one Mortal Ailment, which means if you setup your attack and roll with luck you might kill them with one mortal ailment, or a poorly planned and rolled attack may deal Lesser Ailments, but if you dealt five of those they’ll still be dead, regardless of how many Mortal or Greater Ailments they have.

When you deal damage, you will roll 2d8 plus any pips to get a damage output, which will then correspond with an ailment based on what weapon you’re using and which body part you hit. The ammunition or special abilities of a weapon will also influence the type of damage being dealt, or add an additional damage roll. For instance incendiary rounds for a slugger weapon will roll for both the ballistic damage as well as a separate fire roll.

The wound caps design a big part of the simulated combat, despite being an abstract number — unloading an entire clip into someone will surely always kill them by sheer number of ailments being aggregated. Because when an enemy emptying a clip into one of your characters does the same thing, you’ll want to advise some caution when engaging. There are of course drawbacks to these kinds of tactics that are confronted from enemy AI and sensory mechanics. Flooding the world with bullets can be expensive (and certainly loud) so you’re often better off with item uses like pistols with suppressors or chemical warfare, or using guerrilla tactics to always have the upper hand when you can.