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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 4758141" data-attributes="member: 1879">Knowledge of real world martial arts and weapons can inform a game, within limits. But frankly there are pretty sharp limits to how useful it is.Take guns for example. You can take any weapon in the world and break it down piece by piece to come up with maintence and reliability rules with differing factors for which oil you used in what enviroment. And your players will never use it. You can come up with a table listing every possible weapons malfunction, but really there are only two types that matter. Something you can clear in combat like a hangfire or a stovepipe jam, and something you cannot like a broken sear spring or squib load. Whatever the details it still boils down to "Spend your next action to clear the problem" vs "Get another weapon."Likewise you can (easily) figure out for any given weapon the bullet weight, muzzle velocity and windage allowing you to compute exactly how much kinetic energy the bullet has when it hits it's target. All of which is shockingly useless when it come to knowing how the target will respond to being shot. I've heard of police officers taking minor flesh wounds to the arm from a .22 and dropping dead from shock, while Rodger Young took multiple heavy machine gun hits to the chest and still survived and was functional long enough to crawl the the bunker and blow it up. All of which tell me that no system however 'exact and realistic' it's designer thinks it is, is ever going to portray all the complexities of life.I used to play in a D&D group that was also SCA fencers. One day we were discussing called shot rules and decided to suit up and try fighting some bouts while going for specific targets. To our shock we discovered that we really didn't hit any less often, but our defenses went to hell. Since there wasn't really any way to translate that into D&D's entirely equipment based AC system (this was before 3e) we gave up trying to make D&D more realistic and got back to rolling dice.Is D&D realistic? Nope. Is gaining HP as you level up realistic? I dunno. A marine friend of mine has been shot several times. He told me once "The first time I was shot I knew I was going to die. The seventh time it just made me mad." OTOH I don't think he could survive falling off a cliff any better than I could.Food for thought. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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