Combat realism as applicable to stats

Click here and disable ads!

It doesn't work like this. Generally, melee weapons are much less deadly than firearms. For example knives can not only pierce organs, but also push them away. Meanwhile bullets will usually have enough energy to pierce them.
The difference between wielders may be a difference between no important organ getting damage and being gutted.

If you want realism, you also have to accept a relatively high degree of chance.
While on average being shot will probably incapacitate (note: not outright kill) someone, it's not totally unlikely that you get shot (or stabbed/sliced) multiple times without much immediate(!) effect. Just the same you might be dead at once. It depends a lot on whether vital organs or blood vessels have been hit (and how much adrenaline you might have flowing through your system).

So let's say you set out to make a system as realistic as possible. You would likely need a lot of different hitzones all over the character models. Depending on which zone the bullet/knife/sword hits, you can then calculate what and how much damage is done and what will be the likely results (ranging from some bleeding to insta-death).

The problem I see is the relatively high probability of one-hit, game-over events. Some people sure love unforgiving gameplay, but most players will only be frustrated, I guess.

Even if you are stabbed "non-lethally", pain, shock and blood loss will be more than enough to render you helpless, and unless you receive immediate medical attention, you're probably going to die (slowly) anyway. Plus, infection of the wound(s) could cause some serious problems as well, especially considering that societies relying on melee weapons probably wouldn't have effective medicine to counteract that sort of thing. In otherwords, melee weapons will fuck you up even if technically speaking they're "less deadly" when it comes to immediate effects.

In most of games societies relying on melee weapons have magical means of healing, so the immediate effects are most important.

Don't be fooled by Hollywood presentation of gun fights, especially when it comes to hand guns:
http://www.thegunzone.com/11april86.html

Note how many times the various participants were injured and still managed to remain conscious and keep shooting:

Among those wounds, McNeill hit Matix with that head shot plus a neck/chest shot early on in the fight; Dove delivered that difficult hit as Platt was wriggling from the passenger window of the Monte Carlo, as well as two others; Risner (from 30 yards!) also made a lethal chest wound on Platt in mid-fight; and Mireles, after his shotgun blast had delayed Platt with four 00 foot wounds, had one-handedly put three rounds into Matix's head and two into Platt (one central nervous system, one scalp) all while himself gravely wounded.

Yeah, this too.

Realistic combat system must somehow deal with pain after getting hit and/or having a wound. Pain affects stats and other things, even the ability to do anything.
Thing can be handled like a separate aspect (pain & pain resistance of character), or by cumulating penalties to stats.
Twitcher1 included such thing, but didn;t pay attention how it was done, except being drunk provided some reduction or immunity.

Some firearms training classes I was in had us study that firefight for days, then do a walkthrough reenactment on set based on the actual area. They're lucky because one agent actually made a fairly lucky shot on Platt which caused him to bleed out, otherwise he would've easily finished them all off.

LEO combat training is pretty shit but the divide has grown since then.

Speaking of hollywood gun fights.

Have you guys watched Way of the Gun?

How much you're affected by the pain really depends a lot on the individual. Whether you're used to enduring pain (especially similar pain in similar situation), whether it came as a surprise, whether you're scared or pumped up, how fit you are, so on and so forth.
Think of tattooing for example. It hurts considerably but it's quite possible to just pull through without even flinching, and when it's over they can function without issue. Now compare someone used the machine on your hand when you were just obliviously walking down the street, it's quite certain you'd react much stronger and it'd incapacitate you for a moment before you collect yourself.

Then there's meds that can help you retain your ability better still.

Also most animals don't tend to be overwhelmed by pain like humans are, they'll fight to death if cornered.


That fight cited is a rarity in any case, most people will likely go all mental even if you just throw a jar of baby food at them.

Yeah, I've seen Way of the Gun. Pretty good film, Awor.

Johannes, that's not really something you can count on. The "stopping power" of firearms is to this day a fuzzy topic. Handguns, especially, are not guaranteed to drop someone immediately. Even with rifle rounds, it can take several rounds to fully incapacitate a person - or enough minutes for blood loss to cause the same. While the Miami shootout was special in the sense that both perpertrators were highly trained soldiers, other somewhat similar events have taken place:
http://www.northhollywoodshootout.com

Notice how all of the officers and civilians lived, even though they were injured not only by glass fragments and metal shards but also 7.62 bullets:

He reached the tree that was to be his only cover for the next 20 minutes, and believing he had tripped over exposed tree roots or uneven paving he looked down, to see a massive wound through his thigh.

An 8 gram 7.62x39mm steel cored projectile had smashed through his upper thigh at 2400 feet per second, shattering between four and six inches of his femur, a horrific and immediately debilitating wound.

Martin Whitfield, the six year veteran of the Van Nuys station, liked by many of his colleagues, always on hand with a joke, father of three, slid down the tree, trying to position the trunk between himself and the gunmen as he collapsed.

He survived. The perps died of multiple wounds as well:

Phillips, carrying several wounds at this point, including shoulder, wrist, hand, buttock, scrotum and leg wounds, was done wrestling with his rifle. He would abandon it by the curb whilst still under the trailer and eventually climb out to face his fate armed with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

For the most part the .223 calibre bullets we striking him directly, although several appear to have been ricochets. The left side of his body was being torn up with multiple impacts noted on his hip, leg and arm. One shot sliced through his left foot near the base of his big toe exiting on the opposite site of the foot, another broke his shin bone just under his knee, yet another left thigh bone close to the hip, the barrage was relentless and was tearing chunks, literally, out of him.
Second by second passed and Matasareanu's will to fight was gradually being eroded with every fresh wound he received.

The large amounts of HP (up to a point) are unintuitively Truth in TV (or rather Truth in Gaming). Rising amounts of HP too.

The movemoving scene was pure poetry .

Skill dependent damage is generally retarded - generally, because it can conceivably be valid in some select circumstances like spells, martial arts, or your weapon being made of Karach, while remaining nonsense in all the other cases.

First of all - how is that supposed to work in universe? You pop someone squarely in the head with a fucking AMR and he doesn't even flinch because you're shitty shot with rifles? Note that being shitty shot didn't affect you hitting the guy, but somehow turned the bullet into, I don't know, a whiff of fucking helium perhaps, because even a wad of plasticine would have a good chance of killing dude at this velocity. What fucking logic is that?

Second, even disregarding realism, it's still just as shit. If your game is any more advanced graphically than, say, Ultima 4, then the discrepancy between powerful looking/sounding weapon and disappointing hit effects will be grating and detrimental to enjoyment. Similarly, in a fantasy setting your legendary sword of power, allegedly capable of cleaving mountains, will be utter disappointment if can barely scratch an unarmoured human.

Third, it's shit mechanically - it's basically to damage what HP inflation is to health. It pretty much implies HP inflation if you want this damage scale to actually mean anything, it has good chance of breaking all kinds of interesting mechanics, like DR/DT and so on, potentially making air-rifle an anti tank rated weapon when wielded by a sufficiently good marksman. Not to mention that scaling damage instead of stuff like hit probability leads to more deterministic mechanics, AKA "hit x times to win".

Fourth, it's shit philosophically, because it muddles *character's* skill with *weapon's* damage. It's slightly less bad (I'd abhor to use the word "better" in this context) with melee weapons and primitive ranged weapons (thrown, atlatl, sling, bow), because they are powered by the user, but still even a complete loser can run someone through and kill them - it can happen even by accident.

Much better way is to let character skill affect other parameters of weapon use - accuracy, rate of attacks (in case of non-automatic weapons), penalties for fast repeated attacks, latency, stamina consumption, defensive penalties when attacking and critical failures. Possibly, if your system is sufficiently refined, adding special techniques or special qualities to your attacks. If your system is abstract enough that hittable areas are still large enough to not fully determine damage (and it generally *will* be abstract enough), while the damage is numerically represented (as in quantitative) it might be good idea to keep weapon's damage range fixed (or modified by strength/speed in case of character powered weapons), but change distribution of the results, with upper end of the range dominating at higher skill levels.
Failing that (for example because fluidly modifying distribution of your RNG is teh hard) you can make skill affect lower bound of damage range in addition to aforementioned parameters to reflect higher chance of hitting given area (may be whole character if there is no location specific damage) where it counts, rather than delivering inconsequential glancing blow/grazing shot. A further refinement is adding bonus to this lower bound, but not based on skill, but on actual difficulty of an attack - sort of a to-hit within to-hit, at differing abstraction level.

Get the fuck out of here.

The proper response to such *cynical* system is either trying to get enough advantage to win with high probability or avoid fighting altogether rather than engaging in stupid *heroics*.

Well, magical means of healing may actually make managing non-immediate effects much more interesting than "you die to infection within days" or "you die to skull cave-in immediately".

I would love to have a system in which you'd use willpower to determine pain resistance, and endurance to determine resistance to actual physiological disruption.

Nah. HPs are shit. You can still get one-shotted no matter how badass you are and HPs still fail to reflect that, it's just that most hits aren't immediately lethal or disabling. Unless something splatters your brain stem or pulverises a really large part of the rest of your brain (directly or not), chances are you will still be alive and possible even in action for at least a while.

Which is actually a good thing for making enjoyable and fairly realistic games, especially when they also feature advanced enough technology and magic to change "die later" or "become permanently crippled" results to something more forgiving.

Of course, good curative magic or tech shouldn't be usable in combat - this role should be limited to supportive ones, keeping characters alive and possibly active for the duration of the combat rather than actually restoring them to their former shape.

Actual curative means should require time, resources and peace and be necessary to actually let character you kept alive through the encounter stay this way.

"The orc nicks your leg with a dagger. It hurts a bit but doesn't matter much, you can still fight just fine."
"I attack the orc."
"You cut his brain in half."
"I go back to town to have my minor wound treated for 2 weeks to prevent infection so I don't die."

Sounds fun.

Weapon damage scaling with skills makes sense as an abstraction precisely because the damage a weapon does can vary from trimming your fingernails to piercing your brainstem. If you're using a vaguely appropriate weapon for the encounter (obviously a dagger vs a dragon or a missile launcher vs an unarmed civilian make skill pretty irrelevant) the wound will depend on how the attack landed, which in turn will depend on the relative skill of the combatants.

The only problem with this is that damage doesn't scale directly with difficulty- it's pretty fucking hard to sever someone's pinky toe but it won't do nearly as much good as a sword pretty much anywhere in the gut. But one can assume people defending themselves in combat with armor and such WILL make the most vital spots the most difficult to hit.

HP vs locational damage is obviously a tradeoff, and I doubt it would be worthwhile in most games. Given the option of having HP and a kick ass fleshed out system for spellcasting, or locational damage and a rudimentary shitty spellcasting system, (since both take time to implement and effort to interact with properly) I'd opt for the former. Ditto goes for almost any other system- equipment, character skills, stealth, dialogue options, extra areas to explore; any of these things are far more appealing to me than locational damage, and I doubt I've seen any game that has done more than 2 of them to my satisfaction.

Fixed.

Time doesn't have to mean weeks.

It works just fine in a highly abstracted system, where you only see the results of your action - e.g. TB, top-down strategy games, tactical games, etc...

If you hit a sensitive area and you are using a firearm, the damage should be determined solely by weapon-type, true (but I'd say melee is somewhat different). Of course, the right result for low-skill would be not hitting at all. The problem is 3rd person real-time being a system inherently problematic for cRPGs, due to the mismatch between player and character skill becoming easily apparent.

Also it would likely be better if combat wasn't as prominent, or rather less frequent, in a game such as this.


Ultimately though, I think gameplay is more important than realism.
If a system works, and you can muster enough suspension of disbelieve to stand its less-realistic parts, I would prefer it every day over a realistic but non-fun system.

Except getting nicked in the leg is something you can easily cure while travelling with bare minimum of medical skill and some basic supplies or herbs. Basic restorative magic if you want to avoid scars as well. It's inconsequential in most circumstances.

Now change "getting nicked in the leg" to "getting stabbed through large intestine" - what's better, having to actually use some advanced healing magic or technology in order to survive and to take time to recover or just popping a healing pot or cure moderate wounds to immediately return to "good as new" state?

Except being clueless doesn't prevent you from landing the attack in the right place and right way. It merely renders it less likely.

Max damage the weapon can inflict remains the same, it's those other parameters I mentioned in my previous post that are affected.

In other words not RPGs where instead of vast armies you command a group of up to 8 adventurers out for fun and profit.