Realistic Damage

Phoenix Command accomplishes this.

Explain

How about a game that isn't a massive clunky clockwork clusterfuck?

Paranoia? Then again that system also gives you a number of clones to make up for all the ones that your teammates kill.

harnmaster is as good as it gets in fantasy.
for more modern, try to get some leading edge variant, aka phoenix command light

harnmaster. it's a precursor to RoS and SoS

it has been developed by Nasa scientists with realism in mind. damage from a bullet ranges between 1 pt to... I think 80,000. leading edge published slightly less complex versions of it... for example with its movie franchise games... terminators, aliens, lawnmower man, dracula

That's not a objective analysis. Riddle may lack elegance in the rules and have a terribly written core rule book. But the game actually works very well when players take interest in learning the rules.

I made a system for this once. What it did was make it so the players never touched combat if they could at all avoid it because combat against a skilled opponent was extreme deadly.

>lack elegance in the rules
>game actually works very well

Pick one, retard.

You have damage tables. You have a couple values you roll after looking up those tables. At the end of combat depending on the total damage you've suffered you end up figuring out your chances of survival given various levels of medical aid.
It goes up to like 200,000, technically up to like 5 million.

The benefit is that it makes the combat actually less lethal. Once you're hit you're at severe disadvantage, making fleeing or surrendering an appealing option. Of course you might be unlucky enough to die from a single good hit, but most of the time combats aren't fought to the death. (It also makes undead scarier since jesus fuck they just don't quit)

You are misunderstanding what "elegant" means in terms of rules writing.
It means the rules are not clearly written, obtuse, opaque, not easily understood, not that the rules are bad.

Traveller had a system where your stats (Str, Dex, Con) were you HP, with you losing them when you got injured. If one was zeroed, you are unconscious, two or more zeroed was serious. Was a bit of a change from games like D&D as instead of standing toe to toe and ablating each other for ages, it was instead all down to forward thinking, planning, ambushes and sucker punches. A single burst of automatic fire was enough to kill someone. This meant that most tried to avoid combat, or do it in such a way that they were not in danger themselves; ie, sniper rifles, artillery, hiring mercs or deploying combat drones. Armour could help a bit, but as weapon development matched the armour, it tended to be pretty brutal against your own or a better technology. Having better gear than the opponent was good though; grav powered power armour and RAM Grenades against leather clad axe wielding barbarians was usually a slaughter.

I don't think that user is looking for a discussion, he just wants to call others retard for little reason.

Any system which has you referencing dozens of maneuvers and roll charts and tables to do a single round of combat isn't a well made system, fucking period.

If you're gonna do that shit then put it on a pc or an app where all the pointless bookkeeping and searching can be done instantly.

Mandatory GURPS.

There's HP, but dipping below 0 just means you make a HT (constitution, fortitude) check every turn you're active in the combat. You fail it, you pass out. A pistol shot to the head will take a human below 0 in one shot easily, two to the torso will probably do the same.

As with actual combat, the wounds very rarely cause you to drop dead on the spot, it's after 30 minutes of bloodloss and passing out that you need to worry.

spoken like someone who's never been shot in the face

Except you don't need to reference those charts at all and "I trust my sword at his chest" or "I swing for the arms" actually is a perfectly reasonable declaration in riddle. Maneuvers are entirely optional. And when you know them by heart, they arent complicated. They are "take 2 less dies here, gain 2 dies there, but must strike zone X" or "Take 2 dies here, but add success to attack die pool if you sucessfully defend."

It's really, really not hard. If the guys had paid a good designer to make their book readable, and they had good art, I'm convinced riddle of steel would've been a well known RPG. It's the amateur look of it all that makes people extra critic of their work. And the lack of design means things that really don't matter all that much (like maneuvers) end up in a central chapter.

A gunshot to the head in GURPS is usually lethal unless you're well-armoured, superhumanly durable or have instant medical treatment to-hand.

A lot of the rules are based on real statistics.

But gurps sucks.

GURPS actually does do this by default. It uses hit locations so yes, getting hit in the right place will kill you are at least knock you out and leave you to bleed to death over time. At the very least you will be stunned when push comes to shove.

I had an MGS game. Two operators fucked up and had a shootout with a fairly durable miniboss.

The guy soaked up at least 20 shots over 4 or so seconds before finally succumbing to his wounds.

GURPS is neat.

I wrote up the beginnings of a system once where damage was done to your ability scores, but I couldn't balance it with the rest of the things I was trying to do. In principle, though, it's the best option I can think of - critical qualities for a modified damage system are that it can't be so complicated it slows gameplay, shouldn't involve lookup tables, and should be thoroughly integrated with rule structures you already have.

Also worthy of note - it's important to reverse your causality. Where you hit shouldn't tell you what kind of damage you deal. The kind of damage you deal should tell you where you hit - that makes it much easier to write the rules in an intuitive way and link them to flavor.

Rolemastar was pretty good for this sort of thing IIRC.
Looks a lot more complicated than it actually is, too. Sure, there's a million tables, for each kind of sword and whatnot, but a given character's only going to use about three.

Nah then that removes a ton of combat flexibility. The main way in which PnP combat trumps similar video game combat is that it's more open with more options, being able to choose where to hit is a big part of that.

As a game design exercise, I like to attempt making one now and then. The more I try to make it realistic, the less fun and player-friendly it becomes.

Band of Bastards?

I like the way shadowrun does it. Getting shot without appropriate armor (read: the heaviest you can get your hands on) is pretty likely to kill a normal person or put them out, doing a "vitals" shot (aiming for heart, brain, other vital areas) is tricky but makes it much more likely to kill the person you're shooting. A 'high level' character doesn't get much better in that regard unless they try to turn themselves into robots or put on the most hardcore endgame armor. Also the injury modifiers are pretty fragging solid.

Yeah, you don't have people bleeding out three days later because their spleen was ruptured, but the game seems to assume a very high level of medical advancement that solves that kind of injury pretty easily.

If I wanted a 'muh realism' damage system, I'd probably take the shadowrun one, consolidate the stun and physical condition monitors into one thing, add a roll for lasting injury/dismemberment when someone hits physical overflow in an appropriate way, and put in a reasonable medical skill test to fix those. So someone could get his hand fucked up, but then a doctor NPC would put it back together.

Tying lasting injuries to being KO'd in combat means the players won't be screwed just for participating (i.e. the katana cuts off your hand while you're at almost full health ayy lmao), but instead they have a clear line they have to cross before that kind of shit starts happening.

That's not necessarily true. You write your attacks and abilities with options in mind - an attack that deals Con damage is going to be described differently than one that deals Dex damage. If a hit to two or more different body regions deals the same kind of damage, then there's no mechanical difference between them and you shouldn't bother writing separate rules for them because there's no actual options being offered; if they deal different kinds of damage, then this approach still keeps them separate. Therefore, the number of mechanical options is the same either way, but you get more flexibility in fluff by reversing the causality - now your attacks work against anything with the appropriate ability score, regardless of its physical configuration (which varies from monster to monster).

Oh I see what you're going for.

Seems a little abstract though, what does taking dexterity damage represent? If it's something like getting a limb lopped off, that's going to leave a permanent result.

There's one version of maiming injuries I've found that you may be interested in, from Ars Magica. Basically, when you would take a wound, you can reduce its severity by gaining a disadvantage. As an example, if you would take a fatal wound, you could make it only a moderate wound by having your character get blinded, or crippled, or [...]. Gives more player control, and ways for people to retire characters into NPCs when they would have died (or, with glorious modern medical technology, give them a reason to need money: surgery isn't cheap).

Fate does it simply. Your "health" is your ability to barely avoid damage. Perhaps you sprint away from a grenade or catch a sword that is about to slice you. The better your physical stat, the more chances you get. Eventually, your luck will run out & to avoid surrender, you actually have to get injured. Depending on the severity, they could take a long time to heal. Injuries can be abused by the enemy to one-up you. For instance, "I attack from the side where his eye is blinded! He won't see me coming!" And then the attacker gets a + to hit you. Taking damage instead of surrendering can actually cause you a lot of trouble down the line.

I created such a system once. It did everything I wanted: it was easy and quick to map conceptual damage scenarios to system mechanics and vice versa, all damage scenarios were caught by the system and nothing fell through the cracks, its relation to real world logic aka "realism" was surprisingly robust, and the system was quick to present and didn't require a lot of prior knowledge. It played equally well with eighth-graders and industry professionals (physics, medical, etc).

The problem was, the problem which was solved by this system was extremely niche, which meant the value of the solution was marginal. The draw to players who are aching for this sort of thing isn't worth enough to overcome the barriers to embracing the new; add to this the fact that you can't copyright game mechanics and there's really no reason to bring it to market unless you invent/discover it, which I was not positioned to do. In the end I filed it away as an interesting experiment and continued work on my various game projects on more efficient tangents.

(continued in another post because of length)

Continued from .

Re-reading your post, I realize I may have jumped the spirit of your question a bit. There is more than 1 way to craft a playable game with "realistic" lethality, since that is what you seem to mean when you say realism.

You can make the moment-to-moment "grind" of combat act on something other than "health" as the measure of ground lost or gained; this lets actual damage be as lethal as you want without messing with people's idea of how combat should play out (which is what usually leads to the perception that it sucks), though some people find this defers the basic problem of wanting an abrupt, deadly feel to play instead of solving it.

You can also simply enact the realistic mechanisms you want, and design your game to to thematically and mechanically cue the player to expect and appreciate this, changing how they fundamentally play and value game states. This will never capture the segment of your potential audience that are set on rejecting games with that level of lethality and simulationist complexity.

There is an entire spectrum that combines these two approaches to different degrees, and both take dedicated work and a carefully refined vision. Hope that answers your question.

>unless you invent/discover it
should be
>unless you invent/discover additional synergies and therefore reasons to do so

Sorry for being unclear.

It's a pity the dev/design team had no interest in doing that, or at least finding someone to pay to do it for them. In my experience the only way to get on such a team in that capacity is for that team to be working on a AAA project and you to have one of the other "actually" necessary skills, or to make friends with them and win them over to the idea that their system will be better if the usability of its presentation isn't garbage.

Injuries that result in poor muscle control - electric shock, cut tendons or nerves, that sort of thing. Generally in extremities; Strength would probably be similar injuries in more core areas, like shoulders and torso, while Constitution would probably be organ damage. Those are the broad strokes, anyway.

It also opens the door to mental combat - attack the Wizard's Charisma for massive damage.

So what was the system?

It's in a box in storage someplace. On my old hdd too, but I'm not at home and I didn't make that hdd discoverable outside of the local network.

If I remember when I get home and the thread is still up, I'll post it. Any specific questions I can answer? It would be easier than trying to remember and express the entirety of a system that I made years ago.

Don't be a tease

I'm not, I'm a submissive. Ask me a direct question and I'll answer it.

Realistic combat is not fun to play as a game. It tends to be brutal, short, and tainted with a high degree of random chance.

RuneQuest is the obvious answer.

7 hit locations, each are around 5-7HP, and you have a small allowance of rerolls to work with each session.

I stab bandit in the abdomen with a short knife. How does your system covers it?

Song of Swords

This
Riddle probably molested him as a child and he's mad about it

are u a qt?

>Then along came a spider.

youtube.com/watch?v=9sGdpCt168M

Have HP refer to ones balance and stamina. once it gets to zero attacks start hacking limbs and perferating lungs.

Higher damaging weapons are normally bigger (or move faster in the case of range) so you spend more effort getting out of the way.

Armour and shields let you be more lax in dodging and letting your equipment deflect blows.

I assume you mean
>I SUCCESSFULLY stab bandit in the abdomen with a short knife.
since the thread is about damage and lethality not hit resolution or defensive equipment.

Off the top of my head, assuming the regular human bandit just stands there and take it and don't have specific reactions or attributes that trigger from the scenario, they're incapacitated (can't remember the actual status name I used, but it's a condition that restricts actions and can be mitigated or bypassed depending on the level of incapacitation and how the character is built) with a chance to pass out immediately and a progressive bleed effect that itself leads to unconsciousness and death.

Does that answer your question?

You sort have to free your mind of hits and misses. Tabletop combat is expressed as advances and missteps.

A hit is merely an advance in combat. When you score a hit, you have successfully applied pressure to your opponent and are wearing away at their position and endurance. If you miss, you have done nothing to change the balance of the combat.

Attaching called shots allows your character to make riskier advances in exchange for a better position. Attacks to the head, though easier to spot for the opponent, can cause disorientation and instill fear. Attacks to the arms or legs can cause the opponent to wear that limb, or to expend extra energy in avoidance. As for uncalled shots? Anything goes. It's a free for all.

The only hit that matters is the last hit, because that is the only hit that connects. Called shots here can be used to describe the gore, but it can also help to describe how it was that you broke through the opponent's guard.

Naturally, this perspective needs to scale to the actors and events in play. Large beasts can reasonably take wounds before succumbing to a final strike. Critical hits can slice and gash, fists and feet can strike, strong blows can knock the receiver off their feet.

As well, scale the gore to the importance and longevity of the actor. A nameless bugbear can lose an arm to a solid blow. A player character, barring essential narrative, should probably stay whole until the very end.

Eye of the beholder; my wife thinks I am. I was just joking about being a sub, and I'm a guy.

>implying that's a problem

If it isn't, power to you.

First for Battletech: A Time of War.
Granted, it's set so far in the future that nanotech magic spray bandages are common, cybertech is ubiquitous and affordable, and if you're rich, you can get clone limbs and organs made in between sessions to get healed up in a matter of days from wounds that would be totally crippling today.

That said, even in that, if even a scout tank gives you even momentary attention with even the most basic machine gun, your armor is fucked and gone and your character is 90% certain to be dead.

Dark Heresy
/Thread

>either
or?

Damage in most RPGs is an abstraction you fucking autist

Losing half your hitpoints doesn't mean you got stabbed in the gut six times and shot in the face. It means you avoided or mitigated all of those attacks, but if you lose the other half, you're gonna take a bad hit.

It can't be done and it wouldn't be fun anyway.

>you stab the orc in the gut but he still continues charging and clubs you to death. He stumbles away and bleeds out some ten minutes later.

I was wondering when the resident sperg was going to show up? So pally, how long did you get for this time?

Probably more like
>and that's the last goblin
>you made it by the skin of your teeth, but somehow you got through the ambush
>cool, time to look for somewhere to rest. gonna need a few medicine checks for this
>wait but what about the infection roll
>[rolls]
>fuck, looks like that was the straw that broke your back, so to speak
>well more like your lung
>you collapse and soffocate about 3 and a half hours after the fight
>guess it's time to roll up that wizard, huh

Personally I think the problem with introducing more realistic damage is that you also rope in realistic recovery times and medical fees. It's not super fun when your PC gets shot in the leg and is going to need weeks to be back up and running, and most campaigns don't tend to include large chunks of downtime because events typically happen at a fairly fast pace.

This is probably the best way to model damage.

You get hit, your attributes are damaged and you are no longer as good at doing things. Get hit badly enough, you will be unconscious.

One shot from a revolver will knock someone unconscious or kill them, so realistic western duels are do-able.

If you're in armor, like most PCs, or even thick clothing, you most likely will not die from medieval-ish combat considering the scale it occurs on in most RPGs (1 on 1 or small group vs small group.)
Also, arrows aren't all that deadly, and you're deluding yourself you filthy Anglo.

I've actually been playing around with a similar idea.

As far as damage/injury/armor/death systems go, GURPS really is top-notch.
>Damage types matter
>Hit locations are built in from the start and do relevant things
>Shock penalties do good job representing pain making it more difficult to do most things
>Enough damage to specific body parts can cripple (or even amputate them, if it is cutting damage)
HP aren't just a buffer, and you don't just go from fully functional to unconscious/dead. Being stabbed/bludgeoned/shot generally reduces your effectiveness.

At all technological levels, combat is dangerous. A shot from a high-powered rifle to the head will ruin anyone's day. But so too will being run through with a spear (watch out for that impaling/vitals wounding multiplier). At low technological levels, it makes defending and waiting for an opening when you can kill/cripple your opponent so important. You never want to just stand and trade blows with a comparably equipped enemy (as was true in real life). And at high technological levels, it makes the element of surprise vital.

Song of Swords and WFRP 2e are also good

Video games (which have all the math and stats automated) don't even do this.
It just can't be done (yet).

...

But getting hit in the torso is safer than getting hit in the arm. There's lots of soft tissue in the torso that is non-vital and you can survive getting shot or cut there. But a sword cut or bullet will likely deal so much damage to your forearm it will sever the artery.

Traveller and GURPS do it.

Just means fights are a lot more deadly and you have to be damn careful or wearing some kind of armored suit to survive. That or hire other people to take the damage while you sulk away in the background.

In Traveller you have to take good use of cover, use tactics and leadership to get the first shot, ideally outnumber your opponents, never fight an even fight. Just means fights are more high stakes if you dont prepare well.

A face shot in GURPS requires a pretty serious roll to avoid being stunned. A shot to the brain can cause instant death.

Even so, GURPS is a HP based system and is generally more forgiving than reality when it comes to being injured. If your friends win the fight and you have a reasonably skilled medic on your team, you are probably going to survive anything less than a hit in the brain or vitals or being shredded by an assault rifle.

One way to have a game be both realistic in it's deadliness and not feature random PC death is to pick a setting where people can realistically survive a lot of punishment. If your combat system is designed for medieval knights, it's perfectly reasonable for them to shrug off most hits and need to be worn down through repeated blunt trauma and slowly being wrestled to the ground.

>most campaigns don't tend to include large chunks of downtime because events typically happen at a fairly fast pace.

I would hope that if you're playing a game where that's the case, you'd make allowances for that.

...

Why would someone do this.

This, however I would hack Fate to make it as gritty as possible. Remove the stress track and play with consequences only. That way, any wound will have narrative significance.

Deus Ex made progress in this direction, and then correctly abandoned it in future installments when they realized it doesn't actually make the game more fun.

Tabletop is a better fit because of the level of abstraction - the player doesn't have to experience crawling along at a snail's pace if their character's legs get broken, which means that the movement penalty doesn't make the game less fun. Moreover, you can skip to the end of situations where it's not relevant; selective implementation means that the penalty is only something a player needs to put up with when it adds tension, and you can speed things up otherwise. A video game is often going to have to make you take that agonizing 5 minute crawl to the level exit or whatever even after all the enemies are dead, limiting the number of genres where you can do that.

Arma?

L5R manages really well at low levels. One powerful blow from... anything, really, can kill you, and surviving three or more hits is unlikely, and it's got pretty crippling wound penalties.

With melee combat, there are a lot of factors to take into account- where you are hit, how you are hit (stabbing, slashing, blunt?), how hard you are hit, armor, etc. Unless you get a good hit, your opponent might keep fighting, and then you have to take into account blood loss. Most hits will probably wound rather than killing instantly.

With guns, it depends on where you are hit, armor, and the size/power/type of the round. More powerful rounds and shots to the body/head can disable/kill instantly, especially if they hit vital areas. Less powerful rounds/hits to the legs or arms are less likely to kill instantly, especially if they don't hit vital areas.

I'm surprised there was no follow up to this.

Fuck off backwards gamer. GURPS masterrace forever.

Gurps doesn't suck. It just has the wrong tone.

Gurps has always been described as simulationist. What that means is that mechanics generally feel solid, logical, and standard. Which means that the game reinforces a specific tone, or mouthfeel when you're playing the game. The mechanics feel sterile to be honest.

This is probably why the system is popular among /k/, and is commonly used to play Hard Sci-Fi games. It's good at projecting a certain level of realism.

Whereas when Veeky Forums asks for "System that could run a setting like X," we usually want something more along the lines of "Systems that could run a setting like X, reinforces the various themes and events of X, and elicits the same emotions and reactions that I had while experiencing X."

Given the OP was asking for "realistic damage" I'd say the simulationist tone GURPS has is indeed correct.

RQ's combat is very good and very playable, but not all that realistic.

yes even in that aspect GURPS gets overshadowed by specialist system like harnmaster or phoenix command

This stood out to me as insightful.