Hit points are fine so long as you also have some kind of possibility of instant serious or even fatal injury from a strike regardless of HP.

As for psychological factors, didn't Unknown Armies actually handle the whole 'killing people messes you up' thing going on?

Quote from: J Arcane;724462Hit points are fine so long as you also have some kind of possibility of instant serious or even fatal injury from a strike regardless of HP.

As for psychological factors, didn't Unknown Armies actually handle the whole 'killing people messes you up' thing going on?

HP though arent "meat" though. Well least in D&D they arent.

Other games have had rules for broken bones, trauma, etc on top of the rest.

As others in the thread have mentioned. It is a factor of how much bookeeping and combat slowdown you want to deal with. How much realism is too much realism.

Quote from: J ArcaneHit points are fine so long as you also have some kind of possibility of instant serious or even fatal injury from a strike regardless of HP.

Quite doable so long as HP are limited. But then you need some parry/dodge rules. D&D abstracts the parry/dodge into increased hit points, GURPS has the victim roll to parry/dodge. What would you base HP on? Well, 1d6 seems a bit rough, too easy to die. How about CON? Or STR? Okay, average of STR/CON. But what if the person's strong but small, or big but weak? Let's have a new stat, SIZe. And then why have levels, let's just have skills. And how about hit locations? And thus from D&D we get RuneQuest, a fine system with a different feel to D&D.

A few other systems save the victim rolling and have the parry/dodge be the difficulty for the attacker to hit. Some versions of D&D and many other systems have a critical hit rule.

And so on. Lots of ways to do it, just a question of style, really. I mean, hit points are abstract and feel it, but whenever you have lots of people making multiple dice rolls and chart lookups to resolve one sword swing or gunshot, that feels abstract, too.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;724454I liked the combat in Fasa's Behind Enemy Lines WWII game.  Also, while I can't say I liked them that much, the firearms rules in The Morrow Project were kind of impressive.

I have all the old editions of Morrow Project.  3rd revised had Chaosium rules tossed in as an after thought for skill checks.  And now 4th is out in hardcover.  I know it's gonna have great gun stats and bleeding out rules in it and all.  But I'll never play the game because I don't care for linear percentile rolls when skill checking.  Gun fire is already kludged before bullets ever leave the barrel.

As a sourcebook, Morrow Project is cool to have though for play in other systems.

Quote from: Omega;724458Wrong.

Even being shot point blank in the head is not a guarantee of death, or even unconsciousness. Bullets, arrows, slings, bolts, whatever. The Romans had special "tweezers" to remove sling stones from inside people. Think about that one for a moment.

Hit points perfectly abstract the weirdness of combat.

Not sure what surgery has to do with weak weapon damage.  More medics are needed on staff instead of body burners?

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;724515Not sure what surgery has to do with weak weapon damage.  More medics are needed on staff instead of body burners?

It means that slings will hurt you bad enough to need surgery to remove them from your ass. Some people seem to think that a sling shot is the same as getting pelted with a pebble.

Nevertheless, daggers do the same damage as slings in most versions of D&D, and will kill you just as dead when applied to the right place at the right time. Abstract HP and all that.

Yeah HP work perfectly well as long as they aren't married to levels.

Quote from: Pete Nash;724391My players would be having fits if they were missing 2/3 of the time at almost point blank range. Conversely they'd hate the almost insta-kill of a prepared hunter or sniper waiting for them with a rifle - an almost inevitable situation if they throw their weight around and piss off the bad guys (or the law for that matter).

I'd be fine with that sort of 'realism' in a game.
Hopefully it would lead to more interesting play than the endless cycle of 'we kick in the front door, guns blazing' with no chances of failure or consequences later on.
That's a big part of why I disliked Deadlands, at least as our GM ran it. It just ended up feeling like wish-fullfillment... kinda like Westworld.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;724417They'd also be unhappy about the months or years long recovery from gunshot and shrapnel wounds, which recovery is often incomplete leaving function inhibited.

Wouldn't it be similar with any serious wounds from swords, axes or arrows? Again, I'd be fine with that... let me play a backup PC for a while. Have the original PC show up as a grizzled veteran with some nasty scars and a limp.

QuoteAnd stuff inflicted on you by the situation or your superiors, for example during a firefight in a village you accidentally kill an unarmed civilian, then afterwards have to take some money to the person's family as a "condolence payment." You look around the room and into the eyes of the father and sister of a young man you killed. Let's roleplay that.

Wouldn't this be oodles of fun?

Depends on a person's idea of 'fun'. I've got that situation going on in our Earthdawn game, a number of innocents that I've caused the death of and recompense that needs to be made... most likely it will be the demise of my PC when I go tell the troll woman why her husband died in a fire.
I was really upset when that stuff happened, no rules were necessary. I like that the game can affect me that way. Not all the time, but once in a while.

Quote from: Simlasa;724556I'd be fine with that sort of 'realism' in a game.
Hopefully it would lead to more interesting play than the endless cycle of 'we kick in the front door, guns blazing' with no chances of failure or consequences later on.
That's a big part of why I disliked Deadlands, at least as our GM ran it. It just ended up feeling like wish-fullfillment... kinda like Westworld.

Yeah. trav you would be dead pretty much, real life room clearing, such as with grenades, work best.

Though with many games, there are annoying damage stats, such as why does a dagger, pike and pistol do different amounts of damage? They are all basically doing the same thing damage wise.

Quote from: dragoner;724559Though with many games, there are annoying damage stats, such as why does a dagger, pike and pistol do different amounts of damage? They are all basically doing the same thing damage wise.

I'll agree that all three poke roughly similar holes in people (assuming a stilletto-ish dagger and an awl pike).  The big difference in those three is more how they will deal with different kinds of armor than how much "body" they hurt.

That said, throw an axe, a mace, and a rifle into the mix, and things can quickly become quite different, though armor again matters at least as much, if not more.

Quote from: dragoner;724559Though with many games, there are annoying damage stats, such as why does a dagger, pike and pistol do different amounts of damage? They are all basically doing the same thing damage wise.

Surely they all deliver very different amounts of energy in different ways? I mean you can get stabbed with a knife dozens of times and survive, a pistol I'm not sure but I wouldn't make any bets past being shot a half dozen times, and I've no idea how many belts from a pike at the end of a 4 meter pole a person can take in one sitting, but I'd wager not many.

Not many at all.

Quote from: The Traveller;724576Surely they all deliver very different amounts of energy in different ways? I mean you can get stabbed with a knife dozens of times and survive, a pistol I'm not sure but I wouldn't make any bets past being shot a half dozen times, and I've no idea how many belts from a pike at the end of a 4 meter pole a person can take in one sitting, but I'd wager not many.

Not many at all.

I think that's part of the issue, but also at issue is the real world variance in effects. People have been shot dozens of times and gone on to kill their attackers. Others have died from a single strike from a pen-knife. Realism is just not all that fun -- too random.

Quote from: Brad J. Murray;724578I think that's part of the issue, but also at issue is the real world variance in effects. People have been shot dozens of times and gone on to kill their attackers. Others have died from a single strike from a pen-knife. Realism is just not all that fun -- too random.

If you take all incidents as being equal, sure. But someone who is highly trained with the knife, pike or gun has a much better chance of doing serious injury than someone flailing around, so it's not very realistic if you don't take all of the major factors into account.

I can definetely see a difference in base damage between a pen knife and a bowie knife, a derringer and a desert eagle, and an iron spike versus a halberd. I modify that base damage by the relative skill of the combatants however; where there is a higher skill disparity the chances of doing more damage are higher. Range and the type of bullet used are also factors for pistols.

It's nicely balanced and quite a lot of fun.

I highly recommend this (badly formatted) discussion of skill in combat: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/knifelies.html

Quote from: Brad J. Murray;724578Realism is just not all that fun -- too random.

Which again has me questioning why we choose to make combat into such focus of 'fun', when IRL it isn't any more fun than cancer or car accidents. Something to be avoided. A last resort.
I guess it's back to that wargames ancestry... where again, men die like flies... and not fun for the individual soldier.