Hi folks.
I’m trying to find the rules for “unarmed melee,” but doing a search of the PDF I can only find the word “unarmed” once in the whole book, on p 103 under the “Stinging Whistle” bonecharm. I realise the actual rules for hitting someone unarmed won’t change, but what is the damage for it? I’m assuming 1 (the same as baseline unarmed damage from STA, with which I’m more familiar).
This leads to my next question: are there rules for choking out an opponent that has a stress track? Again, searching the PDF, I can’t find anything about it.
In combat rules, under “Inflicting damage” it’s stated that “Your bare hands have a damage value of 1”.
I have house-ruled, based on other 2d20 games, that you can increase the damage of your weapons spending extra successes of that roll, at the cost of 1-to-1. This is, if you punch your opponent and get 3 successes on your attack, usually you’d get 1 damage and 2 momentum, but you could use those extra successes to increase your damage instead of adding them to the momentum pool, hurting him up to 3 damage on this single punch.
But when you’re grappling and trying to choke him to death it makes more sense to just use those 2 extra successes into stablishing a truth for the npc: “Choked”, “Grappled”, “Inmobilized” or whatever you just feel like. If in combat, “attack” every turn to see how much damage he gets (a failure attacking means he can shout to alert his friends or simply get free, depending on the context).
The GM can try to spend Chaos or use extra successes on her rolls in order to cancel your truth and free the npc before getting unconscious. Whatever you feel fits better the narrative.
The system is very narrative, so get used to ruling plenty of actions using Truths.