Quote from: J Arcane;304453Personally, I'd love to see more games do away with abstract numbers in general and just go straight for specific injury.  You get hit, you get really hurt, not just lose some imaginary numbers, but rather, take a slug in the arm or get it hacked off.

Agreed. Abstraction in damage creates more problems than it solves.

Arg, after 20 years of playing, the old "combat isn't realistic!" rears it's dumb head.

In a real fight there are so many different variables to track that to try to make them game-able is an excersize in futility. Abstraction is a good thing, too many system-specifics and you become shoehorned when inevitable unbelievable results come up.

That being said, I like the system for knives in Unknown Armies. Even if the knife-wielder misses, they do 1 damage. I like the little kid with a sharpie example they give for it too.

The conversation about super powers made me think of this. I think damage should be related to the skill of the person being hit and the person doing the hitting. For example, superman and doomsday can fight with any equal number for stats, they can autocrush anything around them. Mike Tyson and Buster Dugles are like that. They fight one another as if they don't have any bonuses, but they easily crush other men. They can fight for 10 rounds or fall from a single hit, but average men can't even hurt them.

Quote from: Cranewings;304564Mike Tyson and Buster Dugles [...] average men can't even hurt them.

They don't seem to think so. They have bodyguards. What's that for, in case they run into other boxers outside the ring?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;304568They don't seem to think so. They have bodyguards. What's that for, in case they run into other boxers outside the ring?

Guns and knives are different. And there are knife and gun experts on the level of Mike Tyson with boxing, and no ordinary man would be able to outdraw or stab them.

That's funny, because in April 2002 Mike Tyson was at a press conference with Lennox Lewis, everyone got angry and Tyson came out injured... after not having been struck by Lewis, and with no firearms, blades, or even heavy objects used.

Maybe it was a self-inflicted wound, since only Tyson could hurt Tyson.

Just like Chuck Norris.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;304570That's funny, because in April 2002 Mike Tyson was at a press conference with Lennox Lewis, everyone got angry and Tyson came out injured... after not having been struck by Lewis, and with no firearms, blades, or even heavy objects used.

Maybe it was a self-inflicted wound, since only Tyson could hurt Tyson.

Just like Chuck Norris.

I could also kill any musashi with a sword if he is blinded by the sun, crowded, talking to someone else, drunk, or uninterested in fighting and unaware of me. I could probably knock out tyson if I got one good heel kick across his chin, mid sentance, while he is talking to someone else, but if Tyson is actually fighting me, in an rpg - rolling initiative and everything, I wouldn't stand a puncher's chance.

Then the rpg is stupid.

Any decent rpg at the very least lets you say, "I'll roll, maybe I'll get a critical success." Even better, it encourages tactics and use of terrain, so that not every fight is simply two duellists meeting ten paces apart in an open featureless plain under the bright noonday sun.

There's nothing wrong with the OP's idea of 'hitting' doing a fair amount of damage and 'missing' dealing out a much smaller amount.  It can work just fine depending on what the rest of the rules are like.

  For those who feel it's very possible to come out of a fight unscathed, damage done from a 'miss' could just have a negative modifer to the damage rolled. E.g. 1d10 damage on a hit, 1d10-6 ( minumum 0 ) on a miss.  Problem solved.

There might be merit is some form of exhaustion but the idea that you can get into a melee and you have to get hurt is simply not true.

I used to fence and our instructor could beat me into the ground with a flick of the wrist even measuring the effort he expended would be nigh on impossible. Similarly doing martial arts I have met planty of folks that could whip me blindfolded. Could I take them out in the correct conditions, yes of course, standing behind them with a fire axe etc ...

Also with this system you have the problem with fantasy stuff like touch effects, poison, etc etc.

Better system is to have 2 pools. The first is your 'hit points' this is the abstract pool of stuff in increases as you get better, it includes exhaustion etc etc. The second is your wounds. This is when you get really hurt. Wounds do not recover after a 5 minute breather and have penalties (you could even add specifc effects, sprained ankle, broken wrist etc) and you have a set number that you can not increase.
In combat you can take most stuff off your hit points (work out some formula for this) the rest affects your wounds.

I was playing with an idea on this the other day. A little cage fighting game that was really trying to take the idea of special combat moves and use a fatigue system to limit their use. So you have a fatigue point total and you 'spend' fatigue points to make specal attacks as well as using them to absorb/dodge your opponent's attacks.
Not perfected because in the end if you use the same pool then all you are really doing is comparing resources (I 'spend' 3 do do an extra 5 'damage' to you, in effect means I am on +2) and it needs some more subtlety. If I do it I will stick it up here some place its only a combat system so it won;t be more than 2000 words (ish)

Quote from: jibbajibba;304595I used to fence and our instructor could beat me into the ground with a flick of the wrist even measuring the effort he expended would be nigh on impossible. Similarly doing martial arts I have met planty of folks that could whip me blindfolded. Could I take them out in the correct conditions, yes of course, standing behind them with a fire axe etc ...

I don't think it's possible to generalise.  In a one-on-one duel, as in fencing, a superior fighter can come out unscathed, but in RPGs a warrior PC will often face multiple opponents, in which case a bit of bruising is unavoidable.

If firearms are used, it's a different case again.  Depending on the protection available, it's an all-or-nothing proposition, because any hurt is big hurt.

All of this assumes an attempt at combat realism.  If a game system favours high heroics in the PCs, fighting off an army of minions, untouched, is quite possible.

Quote from: Hairfoot;304600In a one-on-one duel, as in fencing, a superior fighter can come out unscathed, but in RPGs a warrior PC will often face multiple opponents, in which case a bit of bruising is unavoidable.

Yes, but it doesn't mean you require a system in which even "missed" attacks inflict damage. And even so, if the warrior PC is much better at fighting than his opponents, that is, his opponents are incompetent, he might emerge unscathed from the combat.

Quote from: Claudius;304609Yes, but it doesn't mean you require a system in which even "missed" attacks inflict damage. And even so, if the warrior PC is much better at fighting than his opponents, that is, his opponents are incompetent, he might emerge unscathed from the combat.

Indeed.  But to declare that a PC emerges unscathed from a multiple-opponent combat requires an assumed superhuman level of PC skill, and that's why I prefer abstracted D&D combat over the micromanaged choreography of Palladium or the precise-but-tiresome Rolemaster.

Quote from: One Horse Town;304440I wonder what sort of genre it is best suited to? Gangland or medieval war springs to mind.

Fight & you get hurt.

Well I did something like this for my OtE game. It was a political thriller. The problem is gun calibre, tactics etc is what makes role playing a character fun in so many genres. It sometimes lessens the impact of verisimitude, if that's what you're aiming for. Chris Kubasik in his Interactive Toolkit articles  talked about this very thing. I would link to them but I'm afraid it would cause a bloodbath -  "story entertainments", "GM and players on equal footing"....oh my.

Regards,
David R

So what happens to all that training time your character spent learning to dodge attacks?  If I'm a small agile guy attacking with two light blades, and I'm fighting a big, slow hulking guy with an unwieldy two-handed sword, I may indeed emerge unscathed.  I may also get splattered against a wall.  It all depends on how well I and my opponent execute our respective attacks.  

I've tried to years to get a really good, working system that would allow opposed attack and parry rolls.  Something along those lines would suit much better than having missed attacks cause damage.