Tellings Revision: Critical Damage/Increased Damage Skill

Here's a game philosophy question: What does an extra damage, critical damage, increased damage skill mean?

More accurately, what are the game mechanics justifications for such skills? One fo the central issues that the Tellings revision faces is to push what seems to be proprietary to Tellings and to soften, retool, or remove mechanics reminiscent of other game systems. The whole mechanic of doing extra damage or critical damage is common to many games, of course. It is a perk, a special effect, a game changer. For example, backstab in most games is about striking an opponent from behind, from surprise, ignoring most defenses, and inflicting double or more damage. This makes sense for games like D&D when a character's wound level is measured (generally) by how many hit points they have. Therefore, an attack that does a lot of HP damage is a "big deal" and can be overlaid with additional rules about incapacitation.

However, for Tellings, this kind of thing is covered by hit location, Trauma Point, and Trauma% rolls. In other words, the measure of whether a strike is a "big deal" or not is different than a big hit to a HP pool. In fact, most Tellings characters never really gain additional BODYpts. Wounds and critical wounds work differently.

Therefore, does it make sense to have skills like Killing Strike, Charge, or Crushing Blow (which can do up to 4 x damage)? Wouldn't buying Weapon Skill Levels: Damage and increasing Attack Score to make called shots more effective fit the game philosophy more? Or is there a place for some critical damage skills modified and tailored for the Tellings system of damage?

Would something like changing Find Weakness to allow the character to change their weapon/attack damage to PEN damage make more sense?

Revision: Chapter Two: Character Creation

Chapter Two: Character Creation

Chapter Two covers how to make a Tellings character from Attribute generation through an Example of Character Creation. For the most part, the chapter can stand except for a revision to the Example of Character Creation and thinking about a few of the Attributes. Here are the chapter headings and the revision possibilities are (*) asterisked:

Generating ATTR Scores
Attribute Descriptions & Information
Agility
Charisma
Constitution
Dexterity
Essence
Knowledge
Perception *
Strength *

Given the fact that I have not played Tellings consistently in a while, now that I am running a table regularly, I am finding combat to be a little slower than I remember it. Actions happen less often than I recall. This might be because a) I am not used to it and b) starting characters are a little on the slow side (without any increased ATTRs or EASE skill levels).

I am considering modifying either the PER INIT bases (probably not) or Weapon Ease scores.

Moreover, starting characters seem to have difficulty with penetrating armor. Again, I doubt this will be solved by changing STR DAMAGE bases, but rather it might mean bumping Weapon Damage up a point.

Experience and ATTR-Gained *

I am going to look at the whole ATTR-gained system. I still like the idea of power levels and caps being based on ATTR-gained, but it needs some smoothing out. This will be handled moreso in Chapter Nine.

Generating Body Points (BODYpts) and Endurance Points (ENDpts)

An Example of Character Creation *

This section is useful but needs an overhaul (especially if rules change). Mainly, the character needs updating, the character sheet scans need cleaning up, and I have to make sure everything adds up correctly.