gestalt11
Arbiter
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2015
- Messages
- 629
Sounds like it's abstracting more than it should
Well in general what you get a is a sort of collage of abstraction. By this I mean that HP completely abstracts away things like pressure point and nerves and getting stabbed in the kidneys. So a designer adds in "critical hits" to put such things back in.
All in all it makes things into a kind of hodge podge that is usually fairly inconsistent but is often good enough to do what you want and fast enough to not bog down the players.
However I think developers are missing that somethings needed to be fast because D&D was PnP. Having something like a multiple limb system is really not too burdensome for players if you give a decent interface and a decent system. I think they are just stuck. Most of the work is handled by the computer. I would never want to saddle a DM with a multi-limb system but I know that players can deal with it fine and I know that it can even be done in real time. I have known of over a thousand people who did it just fine in Lostsouls and there are some other muds that did some similar thing as well. So its a pretty big sample size.
In Lostsouls a "critical hit" was hitting the head or to a lesser extent the chest (you could choose to aim at specific location but incurred a large accuracy penalty). They really needed no additional abstraction. And when you look at the critical hit mechanics in many RPGs they are complex enough that in reality nothing has actually been simplified but have two more "simple" abstractions. You usually have things like crit % crit multipliers often have extra defenses against crit added in, various stats and itemization doing various things to crit. All of that extra complexity is completely unnecssary with the multi limb system and you wind up with roughly a similar amount of complexity. If you want to attempt to have the equivalent of high crit percent you simply get a lot of accuracy and aim for the head. In the end the complexity is the same but the multi-limb system is actually more elegant and consistent.
So the argument that devs do it for a simpler and more managable abstraction is, IMO, pretty shaky. I think they do it because they are just stuck in the past.