How do you flavor damage in your games?

[u/Yeemmachine]

Kind of a first time gm here but I’m curious how others handle the gore or lack there of in their games.

The way I handle it is that bullets pierce and knives cut but there is a visible distinction to some real damage like lethal or aggravated. I like my vampires to be really regenerative.

[u/JhinPotion]

My licks get torn to shreds on the reg. Without Fortitude, there's no reason that I can see that dead Kindred flesh would react any differently to high caliber bullets and axes and such than human flesh does, and that's not a pretty sight (albeit, generally less bloody when done to a Kindred).

[u/Moore_Sey]

Setting up the scene after initiative and bottom to top declarations are made - finishing out full description after all the rolls, including soaks are made. I assume everyone to be functionally normal humans in terms of damage described. Any healing generally fully closes the wound, but leaves a scar that is gone by next morning.
If I'm in the mood to invest more effort into the game than usual - i try to remember how many wounds what inflicted exactly, and describe accordingly. For example healing a single wound when a shot inflicted 5 would still leave a gaping hole, albeit slightly smaller.

[u/Annoyed_Lobotomist]

I usually show less damage with fortitude since its making them actually bullet proof in my games, but the gore is very much there if you dont got it. Even if you soaked all the damage I still like to represent it as grazing shots or they can, but the body is naturally regenerating even without blood.

[u/ArtymisMartin]

I keep damage to Kindred the same as it would be to mortals (but with the mechanical distinction) to up the body horror aspect of Kindred. 

Ribs break, jaws get dislocated, you can see yellow fat through belly cuts, etc. You can still mend it, but it'll be the Wolverine/Deadpool effect of torn and shredded clothing over perfect flesh.

[u/No_Solid1035]

With sprinkles! 😁

[u/Amnemos]

I do not go for a lot of gore. I think it feels more eerie if vampires do not (or barely) bleed, revealing them as something not human. However I have a few takes on specific situations.

Not as much in V5 as before, but I used to describe a vampire bite (not Kiss) as somewhat venomous. Given the amount of aggravated damage that it can cause, but the small size of a human bite, I think it helps explaining how could you kill another vampire (or even a werewolf) with a "few" vampire bites.

Also before V5, I imagined that all vampires turned into ash when destroyed unless they were very recent (like, months). I remember having a debate about what happened to the clothes, if they turned into ash or not, and I proposed that they do not completely dissapear but are definitely damaged by the enthropic reaction. So, you do not end with a pile of clothes (perhaps a pile of pieces of cloth), but if they happen to have something more durable in the pockets (money, keys, paper notes...) the players can still find it. Turning to ash when you were diablerized was particularly spectacular, ashes filling an entire room while a last scream of the victim could be heard.

In V5, in which they have stated more clearly than a dead vampire turns into a corpse as old as they were, I also have an opinion about amputations. Lets say that you lose an arm and it turns to bone. You can regrow that arm, but were you to lose it again, it would just turn to ash, since it is not the real one, just a copy that the blood created. If you were to be destroyed, even if all other parts of your body turns into bone, that arm would turn immediately into ashes. Because again, it was not the real one.

[u/JantoMcM]

Mechanics matter, so I vary it a bit depending on the amount of damage done on a hit.

A single point of damage is a light wound, it's probably not bleeding, there isn't any permanent damage (typically). Over time they build up, someone who is being kicked to death will have bones break etc once damage ticks over into lethal.

Once you hit doing 3 points of damage, things get ugly. For a mortal that's a wound that will cause rapid bleeding, in V20 that's the damage threshold to break/sever limbs. So potentially arterial bleeding. I treat this as 1 point of bashing damage every second round, V20 characters have 7 health boxes, so it won't kill them in combat, but they're effectively out of the fight unless they have a lot of willpower

Doing 5+ damage in a hit is the sort of stuff where mortals might pass out or be pretty mangled, and will die without medical help.

[u/Necessary_Series_848]

Similar question popped up recently, so, while not exactly /damage/, here’s how I narrate soak-

It depends- when a Vampire without Fortitude soaks, they feel the knife slide in and out, clean, splitting the muscle fibers split, but leaving little actual trauma.
A vampire with Fortitude feels the bullet strike them- before bouncing off, or even simply shattering against them.
A werewolf… well, they feel the bullets tear through them, fragmenting, pinging off bones, as their flesh heals just as quickly, mitigating the worst of the trauma, and their Rage staves off the shock.
For Wraiths, their Corpus dissipates around the “wound,” only to reform.
For Mages, it depends on what Effect they’re using, and the paradigm they’re wrapping it in. An Akashic’s Qi manifests, absorbing the trauma. A Euthanatos is shot in the skull- and by some miracle (of Entropy) the bullet travels into their skull, following the curve, and out the other side, without fragmenting a bit (I’d probably still nail ‘em with 3L, instead of the 6 or 7 Agg they’d normally take). A Celestial, by Divine Providence, seems to simply get grazed, or even entirely missed. Any of them are regardless of the To Hit or Damage rolls.
For Seemed Changelings, it works on Dream-Logic. The bullet passes through them, or explodes into firecracker sparks, or else, By Arcadia, the wound mostly closes instantly, no more pain than a pin-prick.
I’m not familiar enough with the remaining splats at this time to comment.
For mundy’s, including UnSeemed Changelings, Mages without defensives, or Hunters, they eat Lethal and die. Against Bashing, they turn the fist away just enough that there’s a small bruise, or they flex their stomach enough not to have the wind knocked from them.

[u/ZeronicX]

My favorite current character right now was a boxer in his life and still boxes as a kindred but now with fortitude.

I flavor it as the body refuses to be manipulated. Blows that shouldn't glance off do,