Realistic Combat

[mmadsen]

Training for the Real Fight or Avoiding Fantasy Gunfight Training also adds some more examples of an enemy not going down fast enough when shot:

Who dictates the speed of the fight? The bad guy and how fast he falls, does. It might be a fast or slow process (the bad guy dying), but one should get in the habit of solving one problem at a time before moving to multiple threats. You can shoot two rounds on paper or ping a piece of steel and move to the next target, but in reality, two rounds or the sound of steel being struck may not solve your problem.

I remember servicing a bad guy one night at about 7 yards with night optics. I was trained to do double-taps throughout my military career. I punched him twice with two 5.56 rounds and stopped for a split second in my mind and on the trigger, looking for a response from the bad guy. The problem was that he was still standing with an AK-47. I hit him with two more rounds before he began to fall the ground. To my amazement, he stood back up before collapsing a second time.

Lessons learned, shoot until they go down. Not one, not two, or three. I now teach a four in the chest, one in the head failure drill with the rifle. Why four? It may take the human body that long to react to the amount of trauma you are inducing (5.56). At the time of this incident, we were using military green tip ammo and the energy transfer was minimal. Realizing we had a stopping power problem, we developed a drill that would work on any determined individual and made it part of our training package.​

 

[Slife]

A bullet efficiency study using information from the last 10 years showed that a a .45 hollow point will drop a target 95% of the time. I'll get the link when I find an internet version.

The other 5%? The target rolled a nat 20.

 

[mmadsen]

Remember, a diminuitive cut on the hand or arm killed you with a 50% chance.

I doubt that. Typo?

 

[mmadsen]

A bullet efficiency study using information from the last 10 years showed that a a .45 hollow point will drop a target 95% of the time. I'll get the link when I find an internet version.

That seems unlikely, given the story above:

This individual was hit five times with 230-grain, .45-caliber hollow-point ammunition and never fell to the ground. The offender later stated, “The wounds felt like bee stings.”​

Was this a one-in-3,200,000 event?

 

[painandgreed]

Excellent point. If you've ever been in a chaotic situation, the fog of war is very real, and you can't really see anyone or anything except whatever you're dealing with right then. It might be reasonable to ask for a spot check simply to attack someone new, especially if they aren't attacking you.

Realisitic modern d20 combat would be lots of hide, move silently, spot, and listen checks. Hiding behind cover. Listen checks to determine the general location of the enemy. Moving silently so the enemy doesn't know you're in a different postion. Making spot checks with bonus for your listen checks to see the enemy (big bonus if they're still shooting). Spoting a guy is contested against his hide roll and may take a few rounds to see where he is well enough to shoot back. Even then, when spotting a person, you'd have to make the roll by five or more than needed to determine if it was friend or foe many times (leaving them with choice to shoot at the unkown figure knowing they might hit a friend or let the bad guy shoot them first).

People also like to take cover and stay there. If shooting is going on, it would probably be something like a DC 10 Will check to look from behind cover and shoot back. DC 15 or 20 if shots are hitting real close.

 

[JRR_Talking]

good discussions

most people die of the wound sometime later from blood loss, or much later from disease. All not really very heroic. I guess D&D doesnt model, you survived five hits from the troll....its just in an hour you'll be down and dead some hours/days later.
went to a survival lecture once. told to stab someone and then run, makes them bleed n fall faster.


we mostly play SPI dragonquest which models 'hits' pretty well, including why a duel with a rapier is less lethal than with a slashing blade.

i own (somewhere) a rpg based on men under fire. most of the objective cards where 'dont fire your weapon' with the occassional player 'winning' if he fired and didnt hit and a few would draw a true fighting type. Mostly folks waited for a flame unit or tank to come along and do the work.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

I do WW2 re-enactment which involves shooting blanks out of real guns at eachother, and the big thing that strikes me as unrealistic in most RPG combat is the speed and lack of hesitation that it happens at. For HtH or close combat gunfights where everybody is shapshooting, it might make a good approximation. For longer ranged gunfights, say in the woods at 50+ yards, things do not happen that quickly, at least for the person being shot at. In d20 terminology, it takes several spot checks just to figure out where the shooter is. Muzzle flash adds a decent modifier but only if they continue to shoot at you. Usually this time is spent diving for cover instead of looking for an attacker while you're being shot at. If being shot at, many people tend to stay behind cover and keep their head down. The only system I've really seen address this is Twilight 2000 in both hesitation and location of targets.

At 150+ feet, D&D can do a fair job of this if you have the enemy move and hide after attacking. Of course, 150+ foot fights don't often occur in dungeons.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

In situations where large numbers of people are killed, say the holocost or other government sponsored genocides, first the people to be killed have to be dehumanized in the killers mind before they can do the deed. Again the holocost is probably the most documented account of this happening, though one of the smaller genocides in the 20th century. 6 million compared to the 180 million world wide during the 20th century. But in all the situations the murdered people are first dehumanized buy the killers long before the killing starts. In D&D terms it is going to be ALOT easier to kill and owlbear, goblins, orcs or Dragons than killing members of your own race, or members of another race you see as people (easier mentaly )

Exactly: The point is never to think of them as people. If you think of them at all it's bad, but the only way to really handle it is if they never become people to you. You need to condition yourself to think of them as simply very good targets, don't try to learn their language either. Leave that to a translator. If you can't understand them it's just noise so it's easier to avoid thinking of them as people, once you learn their language it becomes harder.

 

[Celebrim]

As long as we are dealing with Hollywood myths of the effectiveness of bullets, or really injuries in general, I'm surprised no one has brought this this up. (Or if they have, I haven't noticed it.)

Briefly, between the two of them, the bad guys took 18 different bullets before dying, and several FBI agents died even though the bad guy had already took six bullets including .45's and 9mm's, and the killing shot came from an agent who himself had already taken hits.

Keep this in mind whenever some hot shot martial artist street fighter wannabe talks about how easy it is to break an opponent's bones with his bare hands or otherwise traumatize a atheletic human hyped up on endorphins.

 

[Griffith Dragonlake]

I agree that trained fighters are used to more punishment than novice fighters, and they have the determination to fight on, but the kind of injuries you're looking at are from fists and rattan weapons (versus armor), not live blades and iron maces. A trained fighter ignores bruises because he can -- bruises don't physically impair him much -- but "heart" doesn't help you fight through a decapitation.

Going back to your original post, the two fencers in question are able to fight on despite being impared.

Very true. Most wounds don't immediately incapacitate a determined foe. Some wounds incapacitate anyone though -- and scoring a shot to the brain or spine is not an ablative process of wearing someone down.

And this is where critical hits with multipliers come in.

There the hit points only work because the fighters are wearing full suits of heavy armor and not using armor-piercing weapons. In that case, they really are fighting to exhaustion, and all the little bumps and bruises add to their fatigue.

Well, we can certainly discuss armour as DR (which I use IMC).

Hit points would do a terrible job of modeling a fight from, say, The Three Musketeers, which is equally heroic, because there combatants rarely take more than a scratch before getting run through. Similarly, hit points wouldn't work well for a western or a samurai movie, where one shot or one slash is supposed to kill even a competent foe.

Sorry but I cannot agree with this. Just because a character is getting hit and losing hit points in d20 combat does not necessarily mean that they are bleeding. As has been stated many, many times over the last 30+ years, hit points represent much more than just the ability of the body to take damaage.

If you really want to get particular, you could use a system that involves active defense (parry, shield block, dodge), passive defense (armor), armor as damage reduction, and includes the fatigue cost of all of the above. The combat would basically run as miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, dead. James Wyatt once pointed out on his web site that such a system while more realistic is also more boring. Maybe calling hit points as hero points is better…!