Looting

You just blew away a Deadboy with a Glitterboy’s Boom Gun – can you really expect to find a pristine suit of armor after the battle? This rule attempts to take some of the burden of these decisions off of the GM and in to the hands of chance.

Core Rule

At the core this rule uses the Technical Difficulties rules in the TLPG. It’s really simple – draw a card per item and see how beat up it is. Players may spend Bennies to improve the level by one per Benny spent. The exception is the Black Joker – fate just hates you, and the item is unrecoverable.

Suite	Effect
Red Joker	No effect. Equipment is pristine. No modifier to re-sell value.
Spade	No effect. Equipment is pristine. No modifier to re-sell value.
Heart	Minor glitch. Resell for 75% of base value.
Diamond	Serious Problem. Resell for 50% of base value.
Club	Severe Failure. Resell for 25% of base value.
Black Joker	Destroyed. Resell for 5% of base value as scrap.

Overkill (Optional)

This optional add-on to the Core Rule adds some overhead, but allows the group to take into account the level of damage done to an enemy. In example of the opening paragraph, you’d generally expect most of the CS Deadboy to be vaporized by the infamous Boom Gun. In the Core Rule, there’s only about a 2% chance of an item being destroyed (from a fresh deck).

For this optional add-on, you calculate the Overkill value. Every two wounds over incapacitation is a point of Overkill. For our Deadboy above, he only has one wound. If he takes two wounds, there is no Overkill. At three wounds, he takes a point of Overkill. The next point of Overkill is at five wounds.

Overkill points modify the table like negative bennies – they drop the result by a level. There are a couple of limitations to this: A Spade can never be adjusted below Severe Failure. The Jokers cannot be modified, up or down. Once something hits Destroyed it cannot be moved further down – even if there are 25 points of Overkill, it will only take one Benny to bring it back to Severe Failure.

The Example

Noble the Glitterboy Pilot blasts a CS Grunt with his Boom-gun. The grunt gets no armor due to the AP 25 of the massive cannon. Assuming average damage, the grunt takes 32 points of damage. With only 7 Toughness (see AP) to work with, this leaves a net of 25 points of damage to manage, which equates to just over 6 wounds.

The first wound incapacitates the Grunt, leaving five wounds to account for. Every two is a point of Overkill, so the Grunt suffers two points of Overkill (5/2, truncate).

The Grunt was wearing CA-4 armor, a laser rifle, and a laser pistol. Noble draws a 10D, 6S, 10C. Without using Overkill; the armor has Serious Problem, the rifle is fine, and the pistol has a Severe Failure. Done.

If using Overkill, this changes a bit. The armor drops two steps (2 points of Overkill), from Serious Problem to Severe Failure to Destroyed. The rifle, similarly, drops two levels – No Effect to Glitch to Serious Problem. Finally, the pistol would be destroyed as well (Severe Failure to Destroyed).

Now, Noble really wanted to recover the armor – those tend to fetch a high price, despite the CS branding. He spends a Benny and brings the armor back to Severe Failure. It’s still badly broken and only worth 25% of what it might have fetched, but it’s much better than the 5% scrap value.