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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9730220" data-attributes="member: 18">That could theoretically happen, but do you have any actual examples?I think the issue is too the closest things I can think of to being examples are like reverse-examples, where either an older game did something clunky, but worked really well for vibes, or an older game did something clunky, which technically made a lot of sense for describing a situation and had good fictional outcomes from how it worked, but like, took literally dozens of times more to resolve than it should.So in one case it worked out okay, and in the latter, it was a disaster even though it "accomplished"* something that a modern game probably wouldn't.I'll give you the actual examples, because I've asked for such:The first is Friday Night Firefight for Cyberpunk 2020. It's a slightly clunky and slow system, but for all that, it does feel like you're actually having a gunfight between futuristic people wearing various kinds of body armour and with very varied kinds of cyberware, and not so so slow and clunky as to completely take the wind out of things (unlike 2020's netrunning system, which is godawful for everyone involved including the netrunner and GM!). The results I would say are better than 2022's Cyberpunk RED somewhat bland combat, but Cyberpunk RED doesn't actually attempt to apply modern design principles and approaches sadly, it's basically just FUZION 2.0, stuck 20 years ago, just not stuck 30+ years.The second is Millennium's End, a 1991 RPG which took a magnificently insane, self-indulgent and iconoclastic approach to gun combat by having you:A) Look at number of drawings of people, with numbered regions, and picking which one best represented the target from the angle they were being shot at (this lead to... disputes...)B) Get a transparent plastic overlay, and putting it over the drawing (I forget if different guns or fire modes had different overlays, but they might have).C) Roll the dice to see where you hit, then getting into an argument about whether it was really a miss or because the hit area was blank but very near the body or because the hit area was actually a line between two body parts or the like.D) Check if you penetrated any armour/cover (there may also have been a chance for the bullet to deflect at this point, I forget).E) Try to work out exactly what kind of injury you did.Was it doing something modern design wouldn't? Yeah absolutely. Was it worth doing? Absolutely not. Was the combat better than contemporary games like Cyberpunk 2020 even Twilight 2000? Not even slightly, it was if anything significantly worse and more painful.But I await your examples.I think this is true but I think it's impossible to suggest that isn't very common in 1970s and 1980s RPGs, which were often designed with truly insane and historically completely wrong takes on how melee or bow combat worked, and often designed thoughtlessly, in ways that failed to allow for events that were downright common in the fiction or setting they were supposedly emulating (a good example being that few 1980s and even 1990s fantasy RPGs allowed you to sneak up on someone and stealthily take them out, even though it was relatively common as a trope in fantasy of that era and before - one of the fascinating modernizations of Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number is that it creates a sort of "OSR compatible" way to do this). One of the changes of starting point with more modern RPGs tends to be "What are the thing that happen in this genre/setting/era?" and "How do we make sure our game makes it possible for them to happen in the right way for that genre/setting/era?", where a lot of 1980s and again even some 1990s and 2000s RPGs are just "Here's a system we like, let's try and jam some stuff we think of from this genre into it, and just kind of forget about the other stuff!".* Accomplished in this sense like you might "accomplish" going to the supermarket by phoning four friends, getting them to build a palanquin from you out of wood scraps and loose nails, and then carry you around Tesco.</blockquote>

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