How to One-shoot Someone?

[Ipergigio]

I have a question about CoD's rules.
Let's say I want to kill my opponent with a sigle attack, maybe stabbing his chest with a blade or shoot at his head with a gun. What the rulebook tell us about it?

Thank you!

[nofather]

If someone is completely immobilized, you can perform a Killing Blow.

But otherwise you would need a lot of successes on a standard attack. There's a variety of ways to maximize the chances of this.

[Heavy Arms]

The game generally assumes a basic attack is trying to do as much damage as possible, and thus as nofather said, you just want to max out your standard attack's effectiveness. Special attacks like a called shot to the head are for when you're either looking for a special effect that doesn't inherently take out an opponent (inflicting stun), or you're taking advantage of a specific supernatural weakness (staking a vampire).

The system also differentiates - at least for humans and similarly squishy things - between a fatal attack (filling a their health track with lethal damage) that will kill a target iff untreated, and instantly fatal damage (filling their health track with aggravated damage).

It's also hard to be too specific because an adult human's Health can range from 5 to 11, which means an attack that can instantly kill one person might not incapacitate another.

[HelmsDerp]

Down and Dirty combat allows you to bypass the normal combat rules and resolve combat in a single roll under some circumstances.

[Draconis]

The others have pretty much covered it, but:

• If you want to take someone out of the fight, you have to do damage equal to their Stamina
• If you want someone to be bleeding out and die within minutes if not treated, you have to do lethal equal to their Stamina + Size, or bashing equal to twice that
• If you want someone to be dead completely, past all hope of saving them, you have to do agg equal to their Stamina + Size, or lethal equal to twice that, or bashing equal to thrice that

The main way to accomplish the last one is to do a Killing Blow, aka a Coup de Grace: if they're completely helpless, you can do damage equal to your attack pool, without a roll.