Realistic Combat that's Simple(ish)

[mmadsen]

I think this elides over "how long" and "with what treatment" than is useful in many cases.

Again, I don’t think anyone is realistically healing gunshot or stab wounds during a mission. If anything, you might roll to aggravate a flesh wound or injury by fighting, climbing, etc., rather than resting, but the game doesn’t need regular healing to top off hit points when they aren’t drained consistently by each encounter.

But people do. It makes an enormous difference where the gunshots land. And what the guns are. I can say this with personal certainty.

When I said. ‘ I don’t think anyone finds it plausible that their unarmored character can just take gunshots with impunity, so I don’t think they should survive because the rules make gunshots non-lethal,” I did not mean that every gunshot should be lethal. In fact, most gunshots aren’t. But every gunshot has a decent chance of hitting something vital.

You can’t, for instance, charge someone with a gun, safe in the knowledge that the first shot or two can’t stop you. (You can charge and yell and hope they panic and miss, of course.)

It wouldn't be weird if it wasn't all that likely, depending on those factors however. A lot more military using modern body armor survive in environments where they can (and sometimes do) get hit by rifle rounds than was true even a decade ago.

Yes, armor works, and people do survive hits to their armor. And they can die from hits just to the side of their hard armor plate.

 

[mmadsen]

it's primary lack of realism in either edition is the steady pace of combat - but that's the default state for most RPGs.

I feel like you have more to say about this.

Champions had an interesting mechanic for this. Each character had a speed stat, which determined how often you got to act. It was a bit clunky to consult the chart and confirm who got to act on each segment, but it meant that you didn’t cycle through everyone quite so predictably.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Again, I don’t think anyone is realistically healing gunshot or stab wounds during a mission. If anything, you might roll to aggravate a flesh wound or injury by fighting, climbing, etc., rather than resting, but the game doesn’t need regular healing to top off hit points when they aren’t drained consistently by each encounter.

Who says I'm only talking about "during a mission"? Not all time critical things are during the course of one mission or even session, so just waving it off until later is not always functional, and that's even if you're only talking Cyberpunk rather than the more general topic of this thread.

When I said. ‘ I don’t think anyone finds it plausible that their unarmored character can just take gunshots with impunity, so I don’t think they should survive because the rules make gunshots non-lethal,” I did not mean that every gunshot should be lethal. In fact, most gunshots aren’t. But every gunshot has a decent chance of hitting something vital.

Okay. I don't have a real disagreement with that.

You can’t, for instance, charge someone with a gun, safe in the knowledge that the first shot or two can’t stop you. (You can charge and yell and hope they panic and miss, of course.)

Probably the more likely result, honestly, but who wants to bet?

Yes, armor works, and people do survive hits to their armor. And they can die from hits just to the side of their hard armor plate.

Just saying its yet another thing that pushes up the surviveability, before you even get into any sort of metacurrency or the like.

 

[Retros_x]

Tank: easy to hit, hard to cause damage Duelist: hard to hit, easy to cause damage

I would say that difference only is worth to do, when there is actually a difference in gameplay effects. If in the end mathematically both end up with a similaramount of damage and everything else stays the same, why even add complexity here if there is no meaningful decision between building a Tank character and building a Duelist character.

If the role of these two is the same: engaging in melee and staying there, than I don't see a reason to not go the DnD way and just use an easy abstraction like AC. The AC can both mean hard to hit and hard to cause damage, because there is no meaningful difference, they both represent the ability of the target to increase survivability of attacks.

In general I don't care about realism too much I just need a combat resolution mechanic and depending on the game vibe the granularity of this resolution might differ and has different design intentions behind it.

 

[Mannahnin]

it's primary lack of realism in either edition is the steady pace of combat - but that's the default state for most RPGs.

I feel like you have more to say about this.

Champions had an interesting mechanic for this. Each character had a speed stat, which determined how often you got to act. It was a bit clunky to consult the chart and confirm who got to act on each segment, but it meant that you didn’t cycle through everyone quite so predictably.

On initial read I thought that with "steady pace of combat" Aramis was referring to its frequency/incidence rate. RPG characters tend to get in a LOT of fights, and this necessitates the odds of dying in one being relatively low if we're going to have ongoing character continuity.

Although now I could see an argument for it being about the pace of action in any given fight. In my own LARP and fencing experience, I do remember it being much more a mix of different paces- slower paced tentative feints and feeling each other out and pot-shotting punctuated by furious bursts of action where combatants are striking as fast as possible, trying to finish off an opponent, or overwhelm/push past them as part of a tactical maneuver*. And the latter are quickly tiring which enforces breaks/lulls again. Which is a significant contrast to a standard RPG combat round where each combatant tends to do the same amount of things each time they get to act.

Systems like Champions and Car Wars and Shadowrun having the faster combatants acting on more distributed segments each round is definitely a thing, but that's still a steady pace for them, as long as they maintain speed. As opposed to lulls and bursts for each combatant.

*(I often see this in realistic portrayals of modern combat too, for example WW2 stuff like Band of Brothers or SPR).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would say that difference only is worth to do, when there is actually a difference in gameplay effects. If in the end mathematically both end up with a similaramount of damage and everything else stays the same, why even add complexity here if there is no meaningful decision between building a Tank character and building a Duelist character.

Often its because there's a difference in how they play, even if the results are similar. Tanks tend to work better for people who want minimal engagement (roll dice, do damage) as compared to duelists, who can sometimes win and sometimes lose on the deal depending on how they engage with mechanical options. Those serve different needs even if they both take and do statistically similar damage.

 

[Thomas Shey]

On initial read I thought that with "steady pace of combat" Aramis was referring to its frequency/incidence rate. RPG characters tend to get in a LOT of fights, and this necessitates the odds of dying in one being relatively low if we're going to have ongoing character continuity.

Although now I could see an argument for it being about the pace of action in any given fight. In my own LARP and fencing experience, I do remember it being much more a mix of different paces- slower paced tentative feints and feeling each other out and pot-shotting punctuated by furious bursts of action where combatants are striking as fast as possible, trying to finish off an opponent, or overwhelm/push past them as part of a tactical maneuver*. And the latter are quickly tiring which enforces breaks/lulls again. Which is a significant contrast to a standard RPG combat round where each combatant tends to do the same amount of things each time they get to act.

Usually that's buried in the length of combat rounds. One of the complaints I had about GURPS combat is that its way too fast, because it assumes a consistent focus that just isn't there for any number of reasons in reality.

 

[mmadsen]

I would say that difference only is worth to do, when there is actually a difference in gameplay effects. If in the end mathematically both end up with a similaramount of damage and everything else stays the same, why even add complexity here if there is no meaningful decision between building a Tank character and building a Duelist character.

I think this gets at the crux of what people like the original poster want from “realism” in their game. A heavily armored soldier should be able to stand and take harassing “fire” from slings and arrows, or unseen attacks in the dark, while an unarmored skirmisher needs to give ground and see each attack coming.

If you play the game with new players, they immediately think in these “realistic” terms. If there’s a goblin throwing javelins from the end of the corridor, the guy with a large shield should obviously lead the way.

 

[mmadsen]

On initial read I thought that with "steady pace of combat" Aramis was referring to its frequency/incidence rate. RPG characters tend to get in a LOT of fights, and this necessitates the odds of dying in one being relatively low if we're going to have ongoing character continuity.

If you consider a fair fight to be 50-50, then winning 10 fair fights (and losing none) is virtually impossible, 0.1% chance of success. I don’t think many people have thought that through.

Of course, in real life, one-in-a-thousand people do pull off the near-impossible. We can either play “old school” and wait for it to happen organically, or we can introduce Fate Points to nudge things in the right direction.

 

[Mannahnin]

If you consider a fair fight to be 50-50, then winning 10 fair fights (and losing none) is virtually impossible, 0.1% chance of success. I don’t think many people have thought that through.

Of course, in real life, one-in-a-thousand people do pull off the near-impossible. We can either play “old school” and wait for it to happen organically, or we can introduce Fate Points to nudge things in the right direction.

Right. And in practice, D&D (for the key example) has increased PC durability and sped up healing over time to better emulate action films and other heroic fiction. Other games use different tools, like fame and fortune points, going back to Top Secret.