Knights of the Old Repubilc
magnulus
most other games I have on my PC don't crash. It's getting to the point
where it is seriously affecting my enjoyment of the game- it is annoying.
It happens during loads.
Also, the D20 system sucks. It just doesn't make any sense (strength
affects to-hit probabilities? armor affects a person's ability to not be
hit?). Nothing has changed from D&D's second edition rules, aside from how
the math is done.
Stephen Mackey
>Also, the D20 system sucks.
Compared to?
>It just doesn't make any sense (strength
>affects to-hit probabilities?
Strength = ability to make your blows pierce armor. If you prefer a character
with a "finesse" archetype, then there's a feat for that.
>armor affects a person's ability to not be
>hit?).
Uh, yes, armor can deflect blows. What's so nonsensical about that?
>Nothing has changed from D&D's second edition rules, aside from how
>the math is done.
It sounds like you're not really giving the system a fair chance, or attempting
to understand the level of abstraction involved.
--
Stephen Mackey
"Scientists tend to do philosophy about as well as you'd expect philosophers to
do science, the difference being that at least the philosophers usually *know*
when they're out of their depth."
-Jeff Heikkinen
Mean_Chlorine
> Anybody else get alot of crashes with this game?
Nope. Kotor was quite stable for me. A very few CTD's, but, nowadays,
what game doesn't?
> It is wierd because
> most other games I have on my PC don't crash. It's getting to the point
> where it is seriously affecting my enjoyment of the game- it is annoying.
> It happens during loads.
Could you have a corrupt save somewhere earlier in the game? If the
game's ever crashed during saving, you may well be screwed.
> Also, the D20 system sucks. It just doesn't make any sense (strength
> affects to-hit probabilities? armor affects a person's ability to not be
> hit?). Nothing has changed from D&D's second edition rules, aside from how
> the math is done.
Oh that's the ultimate of lost causes - you'll never get the D&D/D20
fans to admit there's logical flaws in the system, and the rest of the
world just don't care. Yes, the D20 system sucks; no, it doesn't make
any sense if you start logically dissecting it; and no, it's not going
away anytime soon, so just try to ignore that it's there. I know
that's easier said than done, as it's anything but transparent, but
it's pointless to be irritated by it.
Carl Burke
>
> "magnulus" <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message news:<0UORc.1551$zt3...@bignews5.bellsouth.net>...
> > Anybody else get alot of crashes with this game?
>
> Nope. Kotor was quite stable for me. A very few CTD's, but, nowadays,
> what game doesn't?
COH. At least, it's been stable for me this past month and a half
once my drivers were current.
--
Carl Burke, cbu...@mitre.org
Freedom server: Molly Hackett, lvl 21 Inv/Axe Tank
Liberty server: PowerNinjaPlum, lvl 10 Ice/Ice Blaster, sentai group "Awesome Power Ninjas"
Others: assorted low-life scum.
magnulus
"Stephen Mackey" <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote in message
news:20040809150045...@mb-m14.aol.com...
> Uh, yes, armor can deflect blows. What's so nonsensical about that?
>
Because the animation for KOTOR and other D&D based games shows the shots
missing the target completely. The D&D system cannot distinguish between
shots that hit, but are ineffective, and shots that miss altogether.
Because some weapons aren't dependent on strength as much as "dexterity".
Like a rapier or a foil. You only have to be so strong to use one, and then
there comes a point where all the extra strength will not matter at all.
Even heavier swords are as much dependent on "dexterity" and learned skills,
as physical strength.
The D6 system, the White Wolf World of Darkness system, GURPS, the one
they used in Fallout... they are all better and more logical than D&D, even
3rd edition. 3rd edition is an improvement but it still has alot of absurd
bagage.... because after all it's D&D.
Stephen Mackey
>> Uh, yes, armor can deflect blows. What's so nonsensical about that?
>>
>
> Because the animation for KOTOR and other D&D based games shows the shots
>missing the target completely.
That's a problem with the game engines, not with the D20 system.
>Because some weapons aren't dependent on strength as much as "dexterity".
>Like a rapier or a foil. You only have to be so strong to use one, and then
>there comes a point where all the extra strength will not matter at all.
>Even heavier swords are as much dependent on "dexterity" and learned skills,
>as physical strength.
I would presume that's why there's a feat for such things, like I mentioned in
my previous post. ;) You can argue that it should be default in certain cases
rather than a feat (which I myself can see the point of), but it's hardly a
huge flaw.
>The D6 system, the White Wolf World of Darkness system, GURPS, the one
>they used in Fallout... they are all better and more logical than D&D, even
>3rd edition.
Hmm. Haven't had much experience with the D6, WoD, or GURPS systems. But I
distinctly remember Fallout's system having its problems. For instance, late
in the game it was pointless to aim anywhere except at an opponent's eyeballs.
;)
>3rd edition is an improvement but it still has alot of absurd
>bagage.... because after all it's D&D.
It certainly does have a few "legacy" issues, I'll agree to that. But just a
few, not a lot. What's wrong with the concept of D&D in general? Don't like
epic dungeoneering fantasy?
Stephen Mackey
>Oh that's the ultimate of lost causes - you'll never get the D&D/D20
>fans to admit there's logical flaws in the system, and the rest of the
>world just don't care.
I'm going to prove the first half of your statement wrong right now, just for
the heck of it. :)
A. I'm a fan of D&D's latest d20 version.
B. I admit there are logical flaws in said version.
What, you want examples? Well, you could just Google for my posts on the D&D
'group, but I'll be accomodating.
Large numbers of monsters that could and should be templates are instead their
own separate species.
Multiclassed spellcasters are screwed over.
The archmage prestige class, as a prestige class concept, is utterly redundant.
The system breaks down around level 20, necessitating the epic ruleset, which
has its own problems that I won't bother addressing here.
Familiars and animal companions tend to be useless for everything except spying
and possibly transportation once their owners reach mediumish levels.
The rules for having "monster" characters instead of normal ones are poorly
balanced and were not a part of the core rules from the start as they should
have been.
Well, that's a good half dozen. Hope that fills your pessimistic lil tummy.
magnulus
"Stephen Mackey" <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote in message
> I would presume that's why there's a feat for such things, like I
mentioned in
> my previous post. ;) You can argue that it should be default in certain
cases
> rather than a feat (which I myself can see the point of), but it's hardly
a
> huge flaw.
It's a fundamental flaw, and if there is a feat for it, it's a bandaid.
I'll get to more of why it's bad in a minute...
> Hmm. Haven't had much experience with the D6, WoD, or GURPS systems. But
I
> distinctly remember Fallout's system having its problems. For instance,
late
> in the game it was pointless to aim anywhere except at an opponent's
eyeballs.
> ;)
>
Well, I only have limited experience with those PnP systems (it's not like
pen and paper roleplaying is on anything but a slow death spiral), but I do
know how they work. And they are alot more flexible and can handle a wider
variety of situations without alot of special rules.
Let's take Knights of the Old Republic. Using a default character, a
soldier, he quickly becomes a DAMAGE SPONGE after a few leveling ups.
That's just not the kind of character I want to play with. A guy that eats
up medpacks every few turns. This doesn't square with my idea of Star Wars,
where if people get hit, they should be hurt in some way, at the very least.
Luke Skywalker doesn't friggin' get hit, and when he does, he gets his hand
cut off.
And if you watch the Star Wars movies, you see scenes like where Han Solo
runs down a hall and Stormtroopers fire at him. In the D20 system, Han
would get "hit" multiple times . Of course, apologists for the D20 system
will say that these hits represent stuff other than actual hits- they are
abstractions. But it really changes the whole feel of a game when you are
playing with abstractions (again, D&D betrays it's primitive wargame roots.
D&D would be an OK system for a tactical large scale wargame where people
really don't care if Man-at-Arms #53 actually got hurt or merely took a
glancing blow, but it's piss poor at actually telling a believable, yet
dramatic story. In the D6 system, in the same scenario, Han Solo would run
down the hall and only RISK being hit, the chances of the stormtroopers
actually hitting him would be much less. Also, in the D20 system, Han Solo
has more incentive to just wade through the hordes of stormtroopers and kill
them all (because he can just take medpacks or whatever, and he has a huge
reserve of hitpoints, arguendo), but in the D6 system, trying to avoid
getting hit in the first place would be much more effective because he
doesn't have this botomless pool of hitpoints.
>
> It certainly does have a few "legacy" issues, I'll agree to that. But
just a
> few, not a lot. What's wrong with the concept of D&D in general? Don't
like
> epic dungeoneering fantasy?
It's a poor system, they could do better... especially for a computer
game where they aren't limited by pen and paper rules. Fallout is a good
example of what can be done with a computer based system. And yes, I'd say
aiming for the eyes is the best move for a skilled gunfighter... why not?
If you miss, you hit the guy in the head and he's still dead. Why aim in
the knee or something? Are you going to kill a guy by hitting him in the
knee?
One reason use they use these d20 systems is because nobody will play
anything else; it's free publicity, everybody knows what D&D is. And that's
just sad. Of course, I suppose you could argue it does create ready made
rules and background material, I will grant that.
No, I'm not really into epic D&D type fantasy. I do like Gothic and
Morrowind, but they aren't D&D, and the rules definitely aren't the same.
Stephen Mackey
>Well, I only have limited experience with those PnP systems (it's not like
>pen and paper roleplaying is on anything but a slow death spiral),
I'd question that. P&P rpgs have never been hugely popular, but they've not
exactly shrunk greatly over the years, either. I think they're pretty much
constant.
No, computer MMORPGs won't replace them, anymore than a computer can replace a
board game. Not until we get .hack-like virtual reality, anyway. ;)
>but I do
>know how they work. And they are alot more flexible and can handle a wider
>variety of situations without alot of special rules.
Okay. I think D20 as a base system is quite flexible. D&D is less so (it's
important to recognize that D20 is not D&D, D&D simply grows out of a D20
base), but it still does what it does pretty well, and it was built around
minimizing special rules cases, in fact.
>Let's take Knights of the Old Republic.
Okay, let's not.
Well, alright, I'll read your argument, but using a computer implementation of
a system meant for pen and paper to criticize it is always, always a bad idea.
I wouldn't think of criticizing 2E AD&D by talking about the flaws in Baldur's
Gate, for example. There's just too much that's different, either of necessity
or because the designers got lazy (or overly creative, in some cases).
>That's just not the kind of character I want to play with. A guy that eats
>up medpacks every few turns. This doesn't square with my idea of Star Wars,
>where if people get hit, they should be hurt in some way, at the very least.
>Luke Skywalker doesn't friggin' get hit, and when he does, he gets his hand
>cut off.
Luke Skywalker doesn't face nearly as many enemies as the standard crpg
protagonist, however.
This is a (arguable) problem with KOTOR in failing to emulate the Star Wars
feel, not with the underlying system. You could emulate it easily by starting
out with a Luke Skywalker-esque character who has a few levels on him, and
fights only against smaller numbers of incompetent 1st level mooks (sure,
Obi-wan SAID storm troopers are good marksmen, but let's face it, they can't
shot for squat). Not much damage taken, fewer enemies to fight overall, thus
no need for medpacks.
> And if you watch the Star Wars movies, you see scenes like where Han Solo
>runs down a hall and Stormtroopers fire at him. In the D20 system, Han
>would get "hit" multiple times .
That completely depends on the uberness, or lack thereof, of the storm
troopers. It's nowhere near a given.
In a worst case scenario, if there's truly dozens and dozens of storm troopers
firing, at least one or two are likely to score an automatic hit via a
critical. But that really takes big numbers, bigger than the movies show.
>Of course, apologists for the D20 system
>will say that these hits represent stuff other than actual hits- they are
>abstractions.
That's odd, because they're supposed to represent actual hits. ;) It's just
that the skill of the target manages to keep them from being life threatening,
thus eroding them down to minor scrapes and bruises and so on.
> But it really changes the whole feel of a game when you are
>playing with abstractions
What's wrong with abstractions?
>Also, in the D20 system, Han Solo
>has more incentive to just wade through the hordes of stormtroopers and kill
>them all (because he can just take medpacks or whatever,
Once again, the existence of plentiful cheap medpacks is the fault of KOTOR.
Nothing in the D20 system says you have to have lots of access to instant
healing items.
> and he has a huge
>reserve of hitpoints, arguendo),
Being a roguey type, I would think him more the sort to have a great AC but not
so great hit points. This, of course, leaves him in a position where he can
fight successfully against the troopers most of the time, but even one lucky
shot can be really dangerous to him. Which seems to emulate the movies fairly
well.
>trying to avoid
>getting hit in the first place would be much more effective because he
>doesn't have this botomless pool of hitpoints.
You're assuming that he has a bottomless pool of hp in the first place, when
it's far from likely. Not everyone gets d10 hp per level, and not everyone has
a great Con score to add to their hp!
>It's a poor system, they could do better... especially for a computer
>game where they aren't limited by pen and paper rules.
Okay, on that last point, I WILL agree with you, shockingly. ;) I believe that
most computer games would be better off using their own rules designed to work
well for the computer, instead of trying to cash in on pen and paper rules that
inevitably get mangled in the conversion.
>Fallout is a good
>example of what can be done with a computer based system.
Yes, and Diablo 2. Smooth and clean and functional... because it was designed
for the computer from the start.
>And yes, I'd say
>aiming for the eyes is the best move for a skilled gunfighter... why not?
It's not exactly in genre, though. And shouldn't a game system made for a
specific genre be all about emulating that genre to the best of its abilities?
In fact, I can't think of a SINGLE story where the extraordinary skilled
gunslinger routinely aimed for the eyes of his enemies.
Why not let it be, you ask?
Because in a battle situation, eyeballs are hard enough to SEE, let alone shoot
at, that's why. Come on, some guy's trying to blow your brains out and you're
going to take an extra five seconds to focus on his pretty blue peepers? Even
superhero comics don't try to suspend our disbelief THAT much! ;)
>If you miss, you hit the guy in the head and he's still dead.
It takes significant time to focus on the eyes. Why not just aim for the head
straight out, like a sensible man? Or even better yet, the CHEST, which is
almost as nasty a place for getting shot in, and rather a larger target?
>Why aim in
>the knee or something?
Straw man. Most gunslingers don't habitually aim for the knees, either. If
they do go for the knees, it's generally specifically to try and take someone
alive.
>One reason use they use these d20 systems is because nobody will play
>anything else;
That's funny, GURPS and Vampire still seem to be around. Or did they vanish in
a puff of smoke when I blinked last?
> it's free publicity, everybody knows what D&D is. And that's
>just sad.
Yes, it's sad that people want to cash in on popular rpg systems while at the
same time not implementing them correctly or using their own system that would
probably work better for a computer game, just so they can get a built in
fanbase.
But that's not the SYSTEM'S fault.
>No, I'm not really into epic D&D type fantasy. I do like Gothic and
>Morrowind, but they aren't D&D, and the rules definitely aren't the same.
D&D's more than elves and dragons, you know. My favorite D&D settings are the
nonstandard ones... Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, etc. The system could
certainly handle a Morrowind or Gothic style setting with utter ease.
The rules aren't the same, that's true. Gothic's not that bad, though I could
never really get the hang of the melee system. Morrowind... ah, Morrowind. I
love the flexibility and freedom to death, but the lack of balance is so bad (I
dislike creating personal restrictions to make up for poor game design) that it
practically nullifies any benefits that freedom might have had. Plus, I
dislike any game that rewards tedium, and the "Stand in a room and jump or cast
a spell over and over again" way of training skills certainly is tedious to me.
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
> Nothing has changed from D&D's second edition rules, aside from how
> the math is done.
What, replacing a dozen separate systems (saving throws, rogue
abilities etc.) with a single mechanic (D20 + mod > some difficulty)
isn't a change?
Mean_Chlorine
> Mean_Chlorine said:
>
> >Oh that's the ultimate of lost causes - you'll never get the D&D/D20
> >fans to admit there's logical flaws in the system, and the rest of the
> >world just don't care.
>
> I'm going to prove the first half of your statement wrong right now, just for
> the heck of it. :)
> A. I'm a fan of D&D's latest d20 version.
> B. I admit there are logical flaws in said version.
> Large numbers of monsters that could and should be templates are instead their
> own separate species.
> Well, that's a good half dozen. Hope that fills your pessimistic lil tummy.
Those are LOGICAL flaws according to you? That there is redundancy in
the game, so that not all choices are optimal minimax choices?
Well, if that floats your boat.
I was more thinking of sillinesses such as how armor is implemented:
an unarmed person takes the same amount of damage from a sword hit as
a person wearing protective armor. That's certainly not true in real
life, where the person wearing armor would be marginally easier to
hit, but take a lot less damage.
I also fail to see a logical reason for bonuses not stacking. Beyond
the designers simply trying to make it harder to unbalance the game by
making uber-powerful player-characters that is.
Then there's the increasingly "Magic the gathering"-ish aspects of the
game, such as my pet peeve, the boundlessly stupid double-headed
weapons. I mean, double-headed double-axe? Double-headed katana? FFS!
In answer to your query: there are better systems out there, e.g.
GURPS.
The usual argument against detailed & logical systems such as GURPS is
that they're cumbersome to play, and while that's true for PnP, it
isn't true for computer games, where the computer handles the numbers
- so personally I'd be happy if D20 died a horrible screaming death
and was never used in a computer game ever again.
But that's just me, and I think all sorts of strange things, so who
cares what I think. I even tend to think things such as that the
ruleset should be transparent and hidden from the player, making it
difficult to numbercrunch and minimax, so I'm probably not really a
true rpg player anyway!
I'm dropping out of this discussion now; as I said it's pointless and
been discussed hundreds of times before. Those who love D20 see no
flaws with it, those who don't, see tons.
Julie d'Aubigny
>
> I'm dropping out of this discussion now; as I said it's pointless and
> been discussed hundreds of times before. Those who love D20 see no
> flaws with it, those who don't, see tons.
I'm sure it's devastatingly convenient for you to think so, of course.
--
Elizabeth D. Brooks | kali.ma...@comcast.net | US2002021724
Listowner: Aberrants_Worldwide, Fading_Suns_Games, TrinityRPG
AeonAdventure | "Dobby likes us!" -- Smeagol
-- http://www.theonering.net/scrapbook/view/6856
magnulus
"Stephen Mackey" <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote in message
> I'd question that. P&P rpgs have never been hugely popular, but they've
not
> exactly shrunk greatly over the years, either. I think they're pretty
much
> constant.
> No, computer MMORPGs won't replace them, anymore than a computer can
replace a
> board game. Not until we get .hack-like virtual reality, anyway. ;)
>
What planet are you living on? It's pretty much agreed that computer
games have eroded the market for board/boxed wargames, and imagine there's a
similar trend for roleplaying games, although perhaps not to the same
degree. Pen and paper roleplaying has a social aspect that wargamming
really doesn't have, and also the computer version hasn't yet captured the
depth of the experience possible with pen and paper... but for many people,
the computer will be "good enough".
I'm not sure a "massively multiplayer" game is required to compete with
pen and paper games. Look at Fallout. It is a roleplaying game in the
purest sense. The main obstacle to games like Neverwinter Nights
challenging pen and paper games is the difficulty of setting up the games
(granted doing pen and paper isn't easy, but it has a far lower barrier to
entry than the computer "dungeon master" type games, such as Neverwinter
Nights, we have seen so far- Vampire: TM-Redeption was fairly easy but also
limited).
> Okay. I think D20 as a base system is quite flexible. D&D is less so
(it's
> important to recognize that D20 is not D&D, D&D simply grows out of a D20
> base), but it still does what it does pretty well, and it was built around
> minimizing special rules cases, in fact.
It's the other way around- D20 grew out of D&D. It's true that Star War
D20 isn't completely like D&D 3rd edition, but it is much closer to D&D than
to any other system.
> > But it really changes the whole feel of a game when you are
> >playing with abstractions
>
> What's wrong with abstractions?
Nothing... but with a system like D20, which is often used in very combat
oriented games, it doesn't really profit the game any to have the basic
mechanic for combat be an abstraction. It's harder to create really drama
and tension when you cannot be sure if you character is recieving real or
imaginary hits, and when a character's "skill" is represented by hitpoints
instead of actual skill points and stats.
With a computer you might be able to add back some of this drama (for
instance, combat animations that show the character "dodging" or parrying
when he is actually "hit"), but it's far better to have a straightforward
mechanic, unless it is to avoid something that is needlessly detailed.
> Once again, the existence of plentiful cheap medpacks is the fault of
KOTOR.
> Nothing in the D20 system says you have to have lots of access to instant
> healing items.
True, but that wouldn't change the fact that the fighter "skill" is
largely represented by having alot of hitpoints (again, skill abstracted
into hitpoints). It does strain credulity somewhat to believe that simply
because a character is a fighter specialist he can absorb dozens more hits,
than say, a thief.
> You're assuming that he has a bottomless pool of hp in the first place,
when
> it's far from likely. Not everyone gets d10 hp per level, and not
everyone has
> a great Con score to add to their hp!
>
OK... Han Solo would probably be a "Scoundrel" and not have alot of
hitpoints, and he would generally rely more upon his DEX, but one of his
buddies in the party would (maybe Chewbaca?). That doesn't change the fact
there's a disparity between hitpoints based on character class, ie, their
profession. Imagine in the real world something analogous... football
players and boxers could take lots of hits... but accountants would all die
from a paper cut. Only the way you balance this out, is to have boxers and
football players agree to have thousands of paper cuts in place of the
accountants (maybe the boxers would be payed to hold the paper for the
accountants, just like fighters in classic D&D were often reduced to being
the pain sponge for the mages). That's the D20 system in a nutshell.
The Star Wars D20 system is tweaked a bit from the 3rd edition D&D rules-
weapons are generally more deadly and there and the defensive scores are
affected more by level than in D&D, but they are still tweaks on a very
idiosyncratic system that, at the core, is a very primitive 35+ year old
wargame.
> Okay, on that last point, I WILL agree with you, shockingly. ;) I believe
that
> most computer games would be better off using their own rules designed to
work
> well for the computer, instead of trying to cash in on pen and paper rules
that
> inevitably get mangled in the conversion.
The problem is Lucas holds the license to Star Wars. Lucas has licensing
agreements with Wizards of the Coast/TSR/Hasbro. So basicly any game with
Star Wars that is an RPG has to use Wizards of the Coast/TSR rules (Jedi
Outcast, an action game, has stats, but it's not an RPG, so it gets around
it).
> Yes, and Diablo 2. Smooth and clean and functional... because it was
designed
> for the computer from the start.
Diablo I did have the "fighter as pain sponge/hitpoint resevoir"
mentality, but Diablo II did at least add some new classes and changed some
of the rules. And the rules were always straightforward- with dexterity
determining the to-hit, and strength determining the damage, armor and
weapnos a player could use, ONLY.
> It takes significant time to focus on the eyes. Why not just aim for the
head
> straight out, like a sensible man? Or even better yet, the CHEST, which
is
> almost as nasty a place for getting shot in, and rather a larger target?
>
The eye attacks are for unarmed attacks- that's why Fallout has them.
They didn't have a generalized "shoot the head" attack. "Shoot for the
eyes" is close enough.
The chest is a "good" target, but for a trained marksman it wouldn't
necessarily be the choice for killing somebody quickly. Counter-terrorist
teams almost always train to shoot somebody in the head. Shooting somebody
in the chest, there would still be too much risk the person would be able to
retaliate vs. a headshot if a person was almost certain they could pull off
a headshot.
> That's funny, GURPS and Vampire still seem to be around. Or did they
vanish in
> a puff of smoke when I blinked last?
But they aren't as popular as D&D. Maybe Vampire is close. But so far it
hasn't attracted many PC gamers.
> Plus, I
> dislike any game that rewards tedium, and the "Stand in a room and jump or
cast
> a spell over and over again" way of training skills certainly is tedious
to me.
If you think that's an acceptable way to level a character, why not
reward it? After all, shouldn't practicing a skill count for something?
Nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to play Morrowind that
way.
magnulus
"Mean_Chlorine" <mike_no...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:6a0d745b.04080...@posting.google.com...
> I was more thinking of sillinesses such as how armor is implemented:
> an unarmed person takes the same amount of damage from a sword hit as
> a person wearing protective armor. That's certainly not true in real
> life, where the person wearing armor would be marginally easier to
> hit, but take a lot less damage.
This is a basic flaw/quirk in the D&D system. Damage and hits are
connected in D&D in a way they wouldn't be in real life. "Armor reduces
your chance of being hit" sounds totally illogical, but that's how D&D
works.
> Then there's the increasingly "Magic the gathering"-ish aspects of the
> game, such as my pet peeve, the boundlessly stupid double-headed
> weapons. I mean, double-headed double-axe? Double-headed katana? FFS!
>
Yes, I personally find this ridiculous. In real life double weapons
aren't better than one necessarily, it just depends on the circumstances and
the type of weapon. But it D&D this ties back into the quirk of hitting and
damage being mistied together. Axes wouldn't benefit from being doubled, as
they are dependent on leverage to a great degree, and creating a double
bladed katana wouldn't have the effect of two katanas either.
I studied some Kali with a teacher years ago (FYI, Kali is Filipino
armed-unarmed fighting, and it uses "dual" weapons frequently, also knives,
staves, flails, and other goodies). Kali differs from say, Kendo and the
Japanese katana type arts, in the emphasis on infighting and trapping
(although it has longer range styles, often emphasizing attacking the weapon
arm). Swinging two swords actually will produce less force in one had vs.
having one long weapon (like a katana or "long sword")... but the two swords
present oppurtunities at infighting and trapping that aren't present with
one weapon. The two-weapon wielder might be able to slash up an opponent in
a flurry of hits, but the person with one weapon might be able to cut the
other person in two, depending solely on luck and skill.
Also look at the Chinese staff vs. the Japanese or European quarterstaff.
Very similar, if not the same weapon, but they are used in different ways.
One way emphasizes leveraged attacks more than the other.
Basicly, dual weapons will hit more often in real life, but the individual
hits will not be as devistating as the single hit from a single weapon
(although they could still be fatal or disabling). All other things being
equal, the dual weapons will also tend towards a shorter range than the
single weapon, but also have more defensive and countering abilities (again,
it depends on the weapon- I doubt two shorter swords could counter a
claymore's swing, for instance).
Of course, in the D20/D&D system, the dual weapons don't have reduced
damage, they have reduced probability to hit, which is at best a gross
simplification, and at worst, contrary to reality. So go figure.
John Parkinson
> This is a basic flaw/quirk in the D&D system. Damage and hits are
> connected in D&D in a way they wouldn't be in real life. "Armor reduces
> your chance of being hit" sounds totally illogical, but that's how D&D
> works.
You can consider that a lot of 'misses' in D&D have actually hit the
armour but not penetrated it.
--
John Parkinson
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
> You can consider that a lot of 'misses' in D&D have actually hit the
> armour but not penetrated it.
But without armor damage it isn't reflected that the armor has been
hit. If you add structural hitpoints, DR etc. to armor, then it would
make sense.
Ross Ridge
> You can consider that a lot of 'misses' in D&D have actually hit the
> armour but not penetrated it.
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen <tor.iver....@broadpark.no> wrote:
>But without armor damage it isn't reflected that the armor has been
>hit. If you add structural hitpoints, DR etc. to armor, then it would
>make sense.
It wouldn't make any sense, armour isn't ablative nor does it partially
resist damage. In the real world, almost any attack that hits the armour
but doesn't penetrate doesn't damage the armour or the person wearing it.
Almost any attack that hits the armour and actually penetrates it,
kills or incapacitates the person wearing it. That's basically how it
works in the real world, whether you're talking about chain mail or an
M1 Abrams tank. Really the only thing here that doesn't "make sense"
in D&D is having more than one hit point. Realism like this, however,
isn't much fun.
Ross Ridge
--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/rridge/
db //
Clemens Schmitz
> my pet peeve, the boundlessly stupid double-headed
> weapons. I mean, double-headed double-axe? Double-headed katana? FFS!
Which are, of course wholly appropriate in a Star Wars environment. (I
agree about historical fantasy, though...)
> In answer to your query: there are better systems out there, e.g.
> GURPS.
Which have their own share of problems, some of which you point out in
the next paragraph:
> The usual argument against detailed & logical systems such as GURPS is
> that they're cumbersome to play, and while that's true for PnP, it
> isn't true for computer games, where the computer handles the numbers
But GURPS expresses most characteristics as numbers. If you want to have
any say about how your character progresses you need to able to meddle
with those numbers...
> But that's just me, and I think all sorts of strange things, so who
> cares what I think. I even tend to think things such as that the
> ruleset should be transparent and hidden from the player, making it
> difficult to numbercrunch and minimax, so I'm probably not really a
> true rpg player anyway!
How do you think this should be handled? Keeping the numbers away from
the player in a GURPS-like system?
Gothic managed to do it in a rudimentary way (more completely in the
original vision drafts, but during design and production it turned out
that giving the player numbers for damage and stuff was way more useful
than letting them guess them by looking at weapon models), but they
system was set up as pretty simple with only few skills and a low number
of skill levels.
Xocyll
of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>"Stephen Mackey" <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote in message
>news:20040810014350...@mb-m29.aol.com...
> True, but that wouldn't change the fact that the fighter "skill" is
>largely represented by having alot of hitpoints (again, skill abstracted
>into hitpoints). It does strain credulity somewhat to believe that simply
>because a character is a fighter specialist he can absorb dozens more hits,
>than say, a thief.
The hitpoints are partially abstracted skill but not completely.
A trained Fighter is going to be able to take more damage _and_
_continue_ _Functioning_ than a more sedentary mage type, simply because
being physical is what he does.
Doesn't matter if you call them Fighter, Mage, Thief or
Football Player, Computer Geek, Gymnast, they have different areas of
expertise.
Yes there are exceptions, but the average football player has to be able
to take hits and keep going, and the average computer geek (or chess
club member, etc) would take the same hit and be incapacitated, because
they've never built up their ability to take the hit, pain threshold,
endurance etc.
That's one of the things I like about CoH, they have split the whole
Armor Class thing into Defense and Resistance as well as having the HP
of the archetypes different according to their "physicalness".
Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr
chainbreaker
> Yes there are exceptions, but the average football player has to be
> able
> to take hits and keep going, and the average computer geek (or chess
> club member, etc) would take the same hit and be incapacitated,
> because they've never built up their ability to take the hit, pain
> threshold, endurance etc.
>
> That's one of the things I like about CoH, they have split the whole
> Armor Class thing into Defense and Resistance as well as having the HP
> of the archetypes different according to their "physicalness".
>
>
> Xocyll
I think this is why most games simply sidestep the issue by not allowing the
"nerd" classes to wear certain types of armor.
--
chainbreaker
If you need to email, then chainbreaker (naturally) at comcast dot
net--that's "net" not "com"--should do it.
Stephen Mackey
>> Okay. I think D20 as a base system is quite flexible. D&D is less so
>(it's
>> important to recognize that D20 is not D&D, D&D simply grows out of a D20
>> base), but it still does what it does pretty well, and it was built around
>> minimizing special rules cases, in fact.
>
> It's the other way around- D20 grew out of D&D. It's true that Star War
>D20 isn't completely like D&D 3rd edition, but it is much closer to D&D than
>to any other system.
>
This is because game designers are lazy and tend to base D20 games on the most
popular D20 game out to save themselves the work. ;) You could take the basic
D20 rules and make something completely unD&Dish if you wanted.
>Nothing... but with a system like D20, which is often used in very combat
>oriented games, it doesn't really profit the game any to have the basic
>mechanic for combat be an abstraction. It's harder to create really drama
>and tension when you cannot be sure if you character is recieving real or
>imaginary hits,
What on earth do you mean by this?
>and when a character's "skill" is represented by hitpoints
>instead of actual skill points and stats.
A character's skill is represented by all these things together, and a few more
things besides.
>Imagine in the real world something analogous... football
>players and boxers could take lots of hits... but accountants would all die
>from a paper cut.
People don't die from paper cuts. A paper cut is NOT worth even 1 hp of damage
regardless of how many hp you have or don't have, unless it hits a major blood
vessel or something.
But okay, if the accountant gets tackled and can't get up, while a football
player gets tackled and can keep going on for as long as he's needed... I don't
see a problem with that. Why do you think an acccountant should be as hardy as
a football player?
>just like fighters in classic D&D were often reduced to being
>the pain sponge for the mages). That's the D20 system in a nutshell.
No. Not D20 in a nutshell. Allow me to quote a couple questions from an
official faq from the Wizards of the Coast web site.
"Q: Does a d20 System game have to have classes and levels?"
"A: No. Nothing in the licenses or the System Reference Document require the
use of classes or levels."
"Q: Does a d20 System game have to have Armor Class and hit points?"
"A: No. Nothing in the licenses or the System Reference Document require the
use of Armor Class or hit points."
There. You see? D20 is not D&D, just because many D20 publishers choose to
copy D&D.
>And the rules were always straightforward-
Like D&D's aren't? ;)
>with dexterity
>determining the to-hit, and strength determining the damage, armor and
>weapnos a player could use, ONLY.
You still haven't told me why taking the feat that emulates this isn't a viable
solution for you.
>> That's funny, GURPS and Vampire still seem to be around. Or did they
>vanish in
>> a puff of smoke when I blinked last?
>
> But they aren't as popular as D&D. Maybe Vampire is close. But so far it
>hasn't attracted many PC gamers.
...so?
So they're not as popular. Boo hoo. Not EVERYONE can be the popular kid in
class. They're still around and don't look like they're in danger of dying out
anytime soon.
>> Plus, I
>> dislike any game that rewards tedium, and the "Stand in a room and jump or
>cast
>> a spell over and over again" way of training skills certainly is tedious
>to me.
>
> If you think that's an acceptable way to level a character, why not
>reward it?
Activities that aren't fun should not be rewarded. An EQ design mentality
leads to legions of people who play because it's an addiction, not because it's
fun. And that's Wrong.
> After all, shouldn't practicing a skill count for something?
Yes, but practicing constantly over a short time span only does so much before
its usefulness sharply drops off. And Morrowind completely ignores this.
>Nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to play Morrowind that
>way.
And you DID read the part of my post where I said I dislike putting
restrictions on myself to make up for flaws in a game's design, right?
Hermann
Doesn't it, though? I instinctively want to agree with you, but this defies
physics as I remember it. A certain amount of momentum will be absorbed by
the armour, giving the penetrating attack less energy and hence less damage
potential, since the body itself aborbs the remaining momentum.
> In the real world, almost any attack
> that hits the armour but doesn't penetrate doesn't damage the
> armour or the person wearing it. Almost any attack that hits
> the armour and actually penetrates it, kills or incapacitates
> the person wearing it.
Well, if you're talking about modern weapons, these projectiles have much
more kinetic energy than the medieval counterparts (somewhere in the
magnitude of 10 to 1), so I'm not sure that's a valid comparison for D20
fantasy, but they're spot on for D20 Modern.
magnulus
"Stephen Mackey" <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote in message
> But okay, if the accountant gets tackled and can't get up, while a
football
> player gets tackled and can keep going on for as long as he's needed... I
don't
> see a problem with that. Why do you think an acccountant should be as
hardy as
> a football player?
I don't. But if you walk up to a football player and shoot him in the
head, he will be just as dead as the accountant under the same
circumstances.
>
> "Q: Does a d20 System game have to have classes and levels?"
> "A: No. Nothing in the licenses or the System Reference Document require
the
> use of classes or levels."
> "Q: Does a d20 System game have to have Armor Class and hit points?"
> "A: No. Nothing in the licenses or the System Reference Document require
the
> use of Armor Class or hit points."
> There. You see? D20 is not D&D, just because many D20 publishers choose
to
> copy D&D.
and yet in all of their D20 games (BTW, I am speaking of "D20 system" in
the generally understood sense, and not the legal sense of the license
distinct from their OGL initiative), the concept of classes exists, and the
hitpoint/vitality point concept is there and it's plain to see the
similarity. WOTC is talking about a game that doesn't exist.
> Like D&D's aren't? ;)
>
No. How does "better armor makes you harder to hit with a sword" make
sense in RL, even if it makes sense in D&D? "Hit" only makes sense if it
is interpreted in a way other than the plain English. If I throw a baseball
into a player wearing a chest protector pad- does it hit him in the chest,
or does it not hit him, but instead hits the pad? Most people would agree
that the person was hit, even if the chest protector absorbed most of the
blow, because most people consider clothing and apparel intimately connected
with a person.
What they really want to say is "better armor makes you harder to be hurt
with a sword", but such a clarity would requires a totally different
mechanic on the part of D&D/D20.
> You still haven't told me why taking the feat that emulates this isn't a
viable
> solution for you.
>
What feat would that be?
Sorry, I don't like forking out 40 bucks for the books to find out. All I
know, I know from playing the computer games. And I don't see a feat that
allows a person to use dexterity to determine their to-hit probability.
>
> Activities that aren't fun should not be rewarded. An EQ design mentality
> leads to legions of people who play because it's an addiction, not because
it's
> fun. And that's Wrong.
Why is standing in a room jumping not fun? Again, nobody forces you to
stand around and jump in the room. In fact I never do this when playing
Morrowind. Why? Because that's not how I want to spend my time.
> Yes, but practicing constantly over a short time span only does so much
before
> its usefulness sharply drops off. And Morrowind completely ignores this.
Really? I tried this one time in Morrowind... and guess what, the
ability to level up by jumping up and down does decrease over time. If a
player wants to stand around and jump to get their jumping practice in, and
"game" the system, well, that's their business. It's not really hurting me
that the game lets them do that.
> And you DID read the part of my post where I said I dislike putting
> restrictions on myself to make up for flaws in a game's design, right?
>
So do you always avoid saving in a game, just because it helps make up for
"flaws" in game design?
magnulus
"Ross Ridge" <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote in message
news:cfaaus$use$1...@rumours.uwaterloo.ca...
> It wouldn't make any sense, armour isn't ablative nor does it partially
> resist damage. In the real world, almost any attack that hits the armour
> but doesn't penetrate doesn't damage the armour or the person wearing it.
> Almost any attack that hits the armour and actually penetrates it,
> kills or incapacitates the person wearing it. That's basically how it
> works in the real world, whether you're talking about chain mail or an
> M1 Abrams tank. Really the only thing here that doesn't "make sense"
> in D&D is having more than one hit point. Realism like this, however,
> isn't much fun.
>
A better modeled mechanic would be to have the armor soak up a certain
amonut of damage (this is how Fallout does it, If I'm not mistaken as it's
been a while, as do many other systems). If you wanted, you could have
critical hits that present the possibility of destroying or damaging the
defensive ability of the armor, or perhaps the armor wears down over time
and needs repairing. But the system D&D uses is most certainly NOT a
reflection of the reality you mentioned above, because it changes the
generally defined definition of what it means to be "hit", and instead
abstracts it away. The only thing the attack die roll really determines is
if a player gets wounded or not. Again, this is fine for having a battle
between hundreds of orcs and dwarves, but real drama demands that the
players know when they had a near miss or a glancing blow. Again, it's why
D&D misses the big piture. Roleplaying shouldn't be about stats, it should
be a grownup version of "make believe" or "pretend", and the PC version
especially, a good dose of storytelling; this is what seperates an RPG from
a wargame. The mechanics should facilitate the drama and story, not the
other way around. Having to compromise the storytelling (because you
cannot tell an ineffective hit from a clear miss) in order to facilitate the
mechanics is bass ackwards.
Stephen Mackey
>> But okay, if the accountant gets tackled and can't get up, while a
>football
>> player gets tackled and can keep going on for as long as he's needed... I
>don't
>> see a problem with that. Why do you think an acccountant should be as
>hardy as
>> a football player?
>
> I don't. But if you walk up to a football player and shoot him in the
>head, he will be just as dead as the accountant under the same
>circumstances.
>
...unless he uses his sports-trained reflexes to partially dodge the bullet,
resulting in a graze across the cheek instead of a solid shot.
If you mean a situation involving surprise, immobility, etc, then that's what
the coup de grace, sneak attack, and death attack rules are for.
> and yet in all of their D20 games
Whose D20 games? WotC's? Exactly how many different D20 games do you think
they've created?
>> Like D&D's aren't? ;)
>>
>
> No. How does "better armor makes you harder to hit with a sword" make
>sense in RL, even if it makes sense in D&D?
Oh, for Frith's sake.
Consider "you" to be the squishy, fleshy you beneath all your armor. There.
It suddenly makes sense, doesn't it?
>> You still haven't told me why taking the feat that emulates this isn't a
>viable
>> solution for you.
>>
>
> What feat would that be?
Weapon Finesse.
>Sorry, I don't like forking out 40 bucks for the books to find out.
You don't know about the SRD?
Your ignorance is unsurprising, but painful. RESEARCH something before you
COMPLAIN about it.
The rules are available, online, for free, minus only the flavor text and a few
"signature D&D" monsters.
>All I
>know, I know from playing the computer games. And I don't see a feat that
>allows a person to use dexterity to determine their to-hit probability.
Didn't play Neverwinter Nights, I see. Or the Temple of Elemental Evil. Or
Icewind Dale 2.
Hm.
Which games did you say you'd played, again?
>Why is standing in a room jumping not fun?
That question is sufficiently idiotic that it doesn't deserve an answer.
> Again, nobody forces you to
>stand around and jump in the room.
You're just repeating yourself now.
Why should I waste my time artificially limiting my actions in the attempt to
make a badly-balanced game not suck when I can instead play a more
well-balanced game and not spend energy or effort worrying about avoiding
actions that break the system?
>So do you always avoid saving in a game, just because it helps make up for
>"flaws" in game design?
Who said being able to lose the game through death is a flaw?
Knight37
@bignews5.bellsouth.net:
> No, I'm not really into epic D&D type fantasy. I do like Gothic and
> Morrowind, but they aren't D&D, and the rules definitely aren't the same.
Don't EVEN try to compare the rules system in Morrowind to D20 favorably.
That system was BROKEN plain and simple. Not to mention totally unfun.
While MW might have been entertaining as a "fantasy world sim" it was crap-
tastic as an actual GAME.
Knight37
Carl Burke
> ... But the system D&D uses is most certainly NOT a
> reflection of the reality you mentioned above, because it changes the
> generally defined definition of what it means to be "hit", and instead
> abstracts it away. The only thing the attack die roll really determines is
> if a player gets wounded or not. Again, this is fine for having a battle
> between hundreds of orcs and dwarves, but real drama demands that the
There are good historical reasons why D&D is like this, given that it
was an outgrowth of medieval combat rules for miniatures 30-old years ago.
(Role-playing came later and swamped the wargaming side of things.)
That doesn't make it a realistic system, or a good role-playing system,
just a simple and fast one. There have been a lot of attempts to make more
"realistic" systems that chop up the problem differently, some successful,
most not. Generally, the more realism in the system, the longer it takes to
resolve combats, and drama gets swamped by calculations.
I'd agree that CRPGs should be able to do a whole lot better than the
D&D-style mechanics of armor class and hit points, because the computer can
handle the boring stuff that bogs down face-to-face gaming. There are few
excuses for using simplistic mechanics in today's games. IMHO.
--
Carl Burke
cbu...@mitre.org
chainbreaker
> I'd agree that CRPGs should be able to do a whole lot better than the
> D&D-style mechanics of armor class and hit points, because the
> computer can handle the boring stuff that bogs down face-to-face
> gaming. There are few excuses for using simplistic mechanics in
> today's games. IMHO.
I took the tack of just accepting the D&D stuff for what it is, for better
or worse and quit trying to equate it to "reality", whatever *that* is, long
ago. Some of the stuff that's come out under that banner I've enjoyed, some
not.
G Johnston hot.com>
wrote:
> Anybody else get alot of crashes with this game? It is wierd because
>most other games I have on my PC don't crash. It's getting to the point
>where it is seriously affecting my enjoyment of the game- it is annoying.
>It happens during loads.
It depends on exactly how the game is crashing. For myself, the game
seems to work fine, but after having to load about 10 to 15 times
(from a save or going into a new area) it'll crash. After getting
through that whole "report to Microsoft" form, I can load the game
back up and it works fine...until the next crash 10 to 15 loads later.
Very annoying, but as long as I save frequently it doesn't seem to
affect anything beyond my sanity. Similar situation?
It's really the only program that's giving me problems...everything
else works fine. I'm running XP Home with an Radeon 9800 Pro, Asus
MP, 2.8 MHz, 1 Gig RAM, Maxtor SATA HD.
Mean_Chlorine
> > The usual argument against detailed & logical systems such as GURPS is
> > that they're cumbersome to play, and while that's true for PnP, it
> > isn't true for computer games, where the computer handles the numbers
>
> But GURPS expresses most characteristics as numbers. If you want to have
> any say about how your character progresses you need to able to meddle
> with those numbers...
Why do one need to meddle with them, though?
Personally I'd prefer a system with static base stats (one might be
able to allocate points at the start of the game to reflect personal
preference in what type of character to play) which didn't increase
with level; instead there should be a separate set of stats for
'proficiency', which would increase with usage of the skill or weapon.
Level, IMHO, should be an honorary title afforded when the player has
accomplished something/accumulated experience, and it should not
change any stats.
That's my view. I know I'm in the minority.
> > But that's just me, and I think all sorts of strange things, so who
> > cares what I think. I even tend to think things such as that the
> > ruleset should be transparent and hidden from the player, making it
> > difficult to numbercrunch and minimax, so I'm probably not really a
> > true rpg player anyway!
>
> How do you think this should be handled? Keeping the numbers away from
> the player in a GURPS-like system?
Pretty much, yes.
> Gothic managed to do it in a rudimentary way (more completely in the
> original vision drafts, but during design and production it turned out
> that giving the player numbers for damage and stuff was way more useful
> than letting them guess them by looking at weapon models)
The problem is that games rarely give sufficient feedback. It's fairly
easy to tell that a weapon is effective if you find you can take the
enemies arm off with one swipe, but it's harder if the only feedback
you get is that it takes five rounds before the enemy drops instead of
seven. Damage skins & somewhat exaggerated amounts of blood is needed
to provide feedback to the player.
>, but they
> system was set up as pretty simple with only few skills and a low number
> of skill levels.
I liked that, I detest the endless hyperinflation in
skills/weapons/traits/feats/classes/etc of D20.
magnulus
"Carl Burke" <cbu...@mitre.org> wrote in message
news:41191582...@mitre.org...
> There are good historical reasons why D&D is like this, given that it
> was an outgrowth of medieval combat rules for miniatures 30-old years ago.
> (Role-playing came later and swamped the wargaming side of things.)
> That doesn't make it a realistic system, or a good role-playing system,
> just a simple and fast one.
When D&D started out, it was a collection of rules, tables, a dice for
every different kind of mechanic in the game: in short calling it simple was
about as far as you could get from the truth.
magnulus
It crashes to desktop and I can restart the game. The rest of the time it's
stable. It would be nice to get it fixed.
Ross Ridge
> resist damage. In the real world, almost any attack that hits the armour
> but doesn't penetrate doesn't damage the armour or the person wearing it.
> Almost any attack that hits the armour and actually penetrates it,
> kills or incapacitates the person wearing it. That's basically how it
> works in the real world, whether you're talking about chain mail or an
> M1 Abrams tank. Really the only thing here that doesn't "make sense"
> in D&D is having more than one hit point. Realism like this, however,
> isn't much fun.
magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> A better modeled mechanic would be to have the armor soak up a certain
>amonut of damage
I explained above, no, it wouldn't. Armour doesn't partially soak
up damage.
>... But the system D&D uses is most certainly NOT a reflection of the
>reality you mentioned above, because it changes the generally defined
>definition of what it means to be "hit", and instead abstracts it away.
No, the only reason D&D doesn't reflect what I said above is because
people in D&D have more than one hit point.
Ross Ridge
> armour isn't ablative nor does it partially resist damage.
Hermann <hr_h...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Doesn't it, though? I instinctively want to agree with you, but this defies
>physics as I remember it. A certain amount of momentum will be absorbed by
>the armour, giving the penetrating attack less energy and hence less damage
>potential, since the body itself aborbs the remaining momentum.
Well, that's really never the case. With blunt weapons armour just
spreads the energy of the impact over a wider area. With sharp wepaons
the armour prevents the body being cut by the weapon. If a sharp weapon
manages to penentrate or bypass the armour then in the unlikely event
that not enough energy is left over to penentrate the body, the weilder
of the weapon can normally provide the additional force to do so.
But either way, there's really only two levels of damage, either it's
enough to kill or incapacitate the victim or it leaves him essentially
unharmed (though it's possible that he might die of an infected wound
after the battle is over or something like that). Very rarely are you
going to get a result in between that would leave the person still able
to fight yet be hurt by the wound in a way that would have a significant
affect on the outcome combat. Hit points are a particularily bad
representation of reality, you don't die in combat from the accumulated
effect of dozens of flesh wounds, you die because someone manages land a
fatal blow. All this is the same whether you're wearing armour or not.
Armour just makes it harder for your enemies to land a blow that kills
you outright, sends you into shock, knocks you unconscious, or sends
you to the ground screaming in pain. Pretty much anything else might
as well have missed you completely for all the effect it's going to have
on the outcome of combat.
Julie d'Aubigny
>
> It wouldn't make any sense, armour isn't ablative nor does it partially
> resist damage. In the real world, almost any attack that hits the armour
> but doesn't penetrate doesn't damage the armour or the person wearing it.
> Almost any attack that hits the armour and actually penetrates it,
> kills or incapacitates the person wearing it. That's basically how it
> works in the real world, whether you're talking about chain mail or an
> M1 Abrams tank. Really the only thing here that doesn't "make sense"
> in D&D is having more than one hit point. Realism like this, however,
> isn't much fun.
Ross nails it pretty thoroughly, I think. It's also misleading to say
that people who enjoy D&D don't realize this...many are just not really
much into caring when it's fun otherwise.
Julie d'Aubigny
It was fun as an actual game. Some of the rules were broken (alchemy,
for instance). But, overall, it's a fun game. Unless, that is, many of
us imagined the fun and we're really mistaken. Is that what you want to
say?
And, for computer games, I do think I prefer Morrowind's style over
D20's, but D20 is still fun in a crpg environment.
magnulus
>
> I explained above, no, it wouldn't. Armour doesn't partially soak
> up damage.
>
Chain mail and padded armor does work that way. Modern armor like kevlar
also does this.
KC Wong
favorably.
> > That system was BROKEN plain and simple. Not to mention totally unfun.
> > While MW might have been entertaining as a "fantasy world sim" it was
crap-
> > tastic as an actual GAME.
>
> It was fun as an actual game. Some of the rules were broken (alchemy,
> for instance). But, overall, it's a fun game. Unless, that is, many of
> us imagined the fun and we're really mistaken. Is that what you want to
> say?
I think most games (e.g. KotOR) have the "fun element" already laid out for
you, while other games (like Morrowind, The Sims, SimCity, etc.) have the
"platform" for creating fun ready.... sorta like Lego.
Ross Ridge
> I explained above, no, it wouldn't. Armour doesn't partially soak
> up damage.
magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Chain mail and padded armor does work that way. Modern armor like kevlar
>also does this.
No, chain mail, padded armour and kevlar do not partially soak up damage.
If anything manages to pentrate these kinds of armours, you're dead
or dying.
magnulus
> "Ross Ridge" <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> > I explained above, no, it wouldn't. Armour doesn't partially soak
> > up damage.
>
> magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > Chain mail and padded armor does work that way. Modern armor like
kevlar
> >also does this.
>
> No, chain mail, padded armour and kevlar do not partially soak up damage.
> If anything manages to pentrate these kinds of armours, you're dead
> or dying.
Penetration isn't necessary to cause damage. Imagine hitting somebody
wearing chain mail being hacked at with a sword. It may not cut them, but
it is still likely could break bones and cause deep bruising. That kind
of armor really wasn't designed to protect against solid hits, but to keep
glancing blows from being as dangerous.
Mean_Chlorine
> > A better modeled mechanic would be to have the armor soak up a certain
> >amonut of damage
>
> I explained above, no, it wouldn't. Armour doesn't partially soak
> up damage.
While that argument is intuitively attractive, I think it is
completely and utterly wrong. It is a lot harder to chop someones arm
off, if his arm is covered in sheet metal. However, the arm may quite
possibly still break, as the armor is very thin and flexible, or, as
the armor may break, get partly cut. At least in norse saga there are
stories about blows doing exactly this (break bones) when hitting
armor, ie doing less damage than if there'd been no armor.
> >... But the system D&D uses is most certainly NOT a reflection of the
> >reality you mentioned above, because it changes the generally defined
> >definition of what it means to be "hit", and instead abstracts it away.
>
> No, the only reason D&D doesn't reflect what I said above is because
> people in D&D have more than one hit point.
Also there is no reason to expect all hits to be one-hit-kills. It's
never been true, not even today, with modern ultra-powerful assault
weapons. There are countless stories of people who continue to fight
despite grievous wounds - e.g. Blackbeard the pirate.
> Ross Ridge
Ross Ridge
> No, chain mail, padded armour and kevlar do not partially soak up damage.
> If anything manages to pentrate these kinds of armours, you're dead
> or dying.
magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Penetration isn't necessary to cause damage. Imagine hitting somebody
>wearing chain mail being hacked at with a sword. It may not cut them, but
>it is still likely could break bones and cause deep bruising.
If the blow breaks bones you're crippled, unable to fight and if you're
not in shock and dying, probably lying on ground screaming in pain.
If it just causes a nasty bruse you're still up and fighting and no
closer to death. There's very little chance for anything in between,
it's pretty much all or nothing.
Ross Ridge
> up damage.
Mean_Chlorine <mike_no...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>While that argument is intuitively attractive, I think it is
>completely and utterly wrong. It is a lot harder to chop someones arm
>off, if his arm is covered in sheet metal. However, the arm may quite
>possibly still break, as the armor is very thin and flexible, or, as
>the armor may break, get partly cut.
The result of being partly cut is that you go in shock and die or you
ingore it and continue fighting.
> At least in norse saga there are stories about blows doing exactly this
>(break bones) when hitting armor, ie doing less damage than if there'd
>been no armor.
Breaking someone's bones is just an effective way of eliminating someone
from the battle as cutting off their arm. Effectively, the amount of
damage done is the same.
>> No, the only reason D&D doesn't reflect what I said above is because
>> people in D&D have more than one hit point.
>
>Also there is no reason to expect all hits to be one-hit-kills. It's
>never been true, not even today, with modern ultra-powerful assault
>weapons.
It only ever takes one hit to kill or incapicitate someone. That's it.
Just one hit. You don't need to "damage" them enough first. How often
they've been hit before doesn't affect the likelyhood of dying from
a blow and blows that don't manage to take a person completely out of
combat rarely have any affect on that person's ability to fight.
> There are countless stories of people who continue to fight
>despite grievous wounds - e.g. Blackbeard the pirate.
Stories are just that, stories. And, yes, in a fantasy RPG there's
nothing unreasonable about basing a combat system on stories like this.
Accordlingly, there's nothing unreasonable about D&Ds combat system.
It may not be realistic, but it allows fights to take place that are
like the ones in fantasy fiction.
Hermann
> of the weapon can normally provide the additional force to do so.
This might be true in the case of pole arms, but not slashes or arrows (in
which case there are no wielders).
The remaining momentum of an object, as it passes through, say, chainmail
might be enough to cut through soft tissue, but it's not necessarily enough
to cut through a bone.
The sharp end of a warhammer (as in the medieval models with one blunt end
and one sharp end) is also a good example where the amount of damage should
be reduced by armour.
> Very rarely are you
> going to get a result in between that would leave the person still able
> to fight yet be hurt by the wound in a way that would have a significant
> affect on the outcome combat.
There seems to be two schools of thought on this; military combat medicine
versus and Hollywood adrenaline rushes. I'm not sure either portraits
medieval combat correctly.
> Hit points are a particularily bad
> representation of reality, you don't die in combat from the accumulated
> effect of dozens of flesh wounds, you die because someone manages land a
> fatal blow.
Agreed. But is it the fundamental concept of hit points you critize here (in
favour of a wound level model), or the D&D concept of _total_ hit points, as
opposed to hit points spread out over body parts?
> All this is the same whether you're wearing armour or not.
> Armour just makes it harder for your enemies to land a blow that kills
> you outright, sends you into shock, knocks you unconscious, or sends
> you to the ground screaming in pain. Pretty much anything else might
> as well have missed you completely for all the effect it's going to have
> on the outcome of combat.
Well, you don't just pass into circulatory shock over a blow, it takes a
certain amount of blood loss as well. Hit points seem to represent blood
loss as well as trauma.
magnulus
> from the battle as cutting off their arm. Effectively, the amount of
> damage done is the same.
>
But RPG's should be about drama and storytelling, not strictly combat.
In that context, there is a significant distinction between being killed and
being rendered combat ineffective. After all, if our hero breaks a bone, he
might be back next week. But if he dies, it's game over. Therefore, the
amount of damage that armor can soak or deflect is relevent.
Xocyll
entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>"Ross Ridge" <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>> I explained above, no, it wouldn't. Armour doesn't partially soak
>> up damage.
>
>magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>> Chain mail and padded armor does work that way. Modern armor like kevlar
>>also does this.
>
>No, chain mail, padded armour and kevlar do not partially soak up damage.
>If anything manages to pentrate these kinds of armours, you're dead
>or dying.
Mostly right.
Padded armor is going to absorb some of the impact of blunt weapons.
Maybe not enough to prevent injury from a really hard impact, but enough
to prevent a broken bone in a lesser impact.
Even chainmail was worn with padding underneath so that it could
mitigate some damage from more indirect blows.
A full on hard hit though is likely to sheer right on through.
You don't have to be hit really hard to get hurt, since even smallish
cuts cause bloodloss which would eventually lead to death.
Or think of a quick slash across the stomach.
Chainmail gets scratched.
Padded armor/leather _might_ prevent the cut or diminish it.
No armor and the one slashed gets to watch his intestines fall out,
since the abdominal wall was cut.
Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr
Mean_Chlorine
> >Also there is no reason to expect all hits to be one-hit-kills. It's
> >never been true, not even today, with modern ultra-powerful assault
> >weapons.
>
> It only ever takes one hit to kill or incapicitate someone. That's it.
> Just one hit.
I'd really, really, like to know what you base this on.
> How often
> they've been hit before doesn't affect the likelyhood of dying from
> a blow and blows that don't manage to take a person completely out of
> combat rarely have any affect on that person's ability to fight.
Or this.
> Accordlingly, there's nothing unreasonable about D&Ds combat system.
QED, right?
Robert Barnhardt
>I think most games (e.g. KotOR) have the "fun element" already laid out for
>you, while other games (like Morrowind, The Sims, SimCity, etc.) have the
>"platform" for creating fun ready.... sorta like Lego.
That's a good point; the other half of it is that some people have a definite
preference for (or aversion to, if you want to be negative) one design
philosophy or the other.
Personally, as much as I enjoyed the story and NPCs in Planescape: Torment,
there were certainly points when I thought, "Hey, whose game IS this, anyway?"
Needless to say, I guess, when I'm led around nasally by the designers of
lesser RPGs, it _really_ gets on my nerves.
Funny thing is, I've always enjoyed adventure games -- and in most old-school
IF, there certainly wasn't any way I could delude myself into thinking that I
was playing anything but the author's game.
I think it's partly the curse of modern gaming environments: the more open and
freeform they _appear_, the more likely it is to rub me the wrong way when I'm
roughly pushed in a certain direction. These days, too many games leave me
chafing like a bear: while 20 years of hard development have beefed up the
rendering side of games to Charles Atlas proportions, gameplay has spent the
same time having sand kicked in its face until it's nearly buried beneath it.
(Sure, it's an old song, but I like singing it now and then. <g>)
- R.
Rick Russell
Stephen Mackey <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote:
> Uh, yes, armor can deflect blows. What's so nonsensical about that?
There has been some debate in the RPG community over this issue. The
D&D camp argues simplicity: "hit" or "no hit". The alternate view
argues that there is a distinction between being "hit" (that is, a
blow making contact with the possibility of causing damage) and
"wounded" (getting hit with sufficient power or finesse to cause
injury, despite armor).
Many game systems use a damage resistance model for armor -- the armor
can resist or absorb a certain amount of damage per hit, or per combat
round, etc.
Since D&D now offers plenty of items and spells with "damage
resistance" or "damage soak" properites, the distinction is no longer
very important.
Rick R.
Stephen Mackey
>Many game systems use a damage resistance model for armor -- the armor
>can resist or absorb a certain amount of damage per hit, or per combat
>round, etc.
>
>Since D&D now offers plenty of items and spells with "damage
>resistance" or "damage soak" properites, the distinction is no longer
>very important.
Ah. I also remember seeing an optional rule for giving armor damage resistance
in the latest... warrior-oriented splatbook, I think it was.
So yes, if that's what you insist on in a game, you can add it to D&D and the
whole system doesn't fall apart.
Rick Russell
Stephen Mackey <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote:
> That completely depends on the uberness, or lack thereof, of the
> storm troopers. It's nowhere near a given. In a worst case
> scenario, if there's truly dozens and dozens of storm troopers
> firing, at least one or two are likely to score an automatic hit via
> a critical. But that really takes big numbers, bigger than the
> movies show.
That doesn't really reflect my experience in NWN or KOTOR. If you're
surrounded by a dozen weak enemies who only hit on a 20, and they get
a couple of attacks per round, you'll still take a lot of hits. Sure,
you're only getting hit once per round or so, but all the hits are
criticals. So you'll get plenty of blood drawn, even if the encounter
is not life-threatening overall.
> Once again, the existence of plentiful cheap medpacks is the fault of KOTOR.
> Nothing in the D20 system says you have to have lots of access to instant
> healing items.
But it's required, since mosquitos can hit you and do full damage if
they roll a 20. Pretty good damage too.
Rick R.
Stephen Mackey
>That doesn't really reflect my experience in NWN or KOTOR. If you're
>surrounded by a dozen weak enemies who only hit on a 20, and they get
>a couple of attacks per round, you'll still take a lot of hits. Sure,
>you're only getting hit once per round or so, but all the hits are
>criticals. So you'll get plenty of blood drawn, even if the encounter
>is not life-threatening overall.
Even taking into account the extra attacks (which I admit I'd forgotten about,
oopsie), that seems odd. It's not just "Roll a 20, get a crit," after all.
You roll to threaten a critical, then you roll again to confirm it... and if
the target's AC is so high that you can only hit on a crit anyway, your chances
of confirming the crit aren't that great.
But I'll admit I haven't run the numbers, so I could be wrong. If you like, I
could ask over at the D&D 'group.
>> Once again, the existence of plentiful cheap medpacks is the fault of
>KOTOR.
>> Nothing in the D20 system says you have to have lots of access to instant
>> healing items.
>
>But it's required, since mosquitos can hit you and do full damage if
>they roll a 20. Pretty good damage too.
Your tongue's in your cheek with that example, right? ;)
John Secker
<rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> writes
>But either way, there's really only two levels of damage, either it's
>enough to kill or incapacitate the victim or it leaves him essentially
>unharmed (though it's possible that he might die of an infected wound
>after the battle is over or something like that). Very rarely are you
>going to get a result in between that would leave the person still able
>to fight yet be hurt by the wound in a way that would have a significant
>affect on the outcome combat. Hit points are a particularily bad
>representation of reality, you don't die in combat from the accumulated
>effect of dozens of flesh wounds, you die because someone manages land a
>fatal blow.
was explicit from the early days of the D&D system that most "hit
points" for high level characters represented fatigue, dulling of the
reflexes and the like, as a hero's resistance was slowly worn down. Only
the last few hit points actually represent serious physical wounds. I
have not really got into the latest version of the game so I can't say
whether this is still made clear, but it is fairly logical - a hero's
body does not suddenly become able to withstand dozens of sword wounds
as he goes up in level - what happens is that he is able to dodge or
evade the blow which would have hit a zero-level person, at a cost of a
small amount of his battle-readiness.
> All this is the same whether you're wearing armour or not.
>Armour just makes it harder for your enemies to land a blow that kills
>you outright, sends you into shock, knocks you unconscious, or sends
>you to the ground screaming in pain. Pretty much anything else might
>as well have missed you completely for all the effect it's going to have
>on the outcome of combat.
>
prevented the blow causing a physical wound, but there is still some
damage caused in terms of fatigue and slowing of the muscles. A severe
blow by a mace on your head or body, even if it is completely blocked by
your armour, will have an appreciable effect on your continued combat
effectiveness. Without the armour there would have been a greater
effect.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> writes
>"Ross Ridge" <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>> No, chain mail, padded armour and kevlar do not partially soak up damage.
>> If anything manages to pentrate these kinds of armours, you're dead
>> or dying.
>
>magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>> Penetration isn't necessary to cause damage. Imagine hitting somebody
>>wearing chain mail being hacked at with a sword. It may not cut them, but
>>it is still likely could break bones and cause deep bruising.
>
>If the blow breaks bones you're crippled, unable to fight and if you're
>not in shock and dying, probably lying on ground screaming in pain.
>If it just causes a nasty bruse you're still up and fighting and no
>closer to death.
effectively is likely to be measurably reduced.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<kali.ma...@comcast.net> writes
>Ross Ridge wrote:
>>
>> It wouldn't make any sense, armour isn't ablative nor does it partially
>> resist damage. In the real world, almost any attack that hits the armour
>> but doesn't penetrate doesn't damage the armour or the person wearing it.
>> Almost any attack that hits the armour and actually penetrates it,
>> kills or incapacitates the person wearing it. That's basically how it
>> works in the real world, whether you're talking about chain mail or an
>> M1 Abrams tank. Really the only thing here that doesn't "make sense"
>> in D&D is having more than one hit point. Realism like this, however,
>> isn't much fun.
>
>Ross nails it pretty thoroughly, I think. It's also misleading to say
>that people who enjoy D&D don't realize this...many are just not really
>much into caring when it's fun otherwise.
>
wounds, and Ross also seems to think that you are either dead or
unwounded, which is not true even in real life, and certainly not in
heroic fantasy.
--
John Secker
Carl Burke
It wasn't as elegant as some later systems, but it was pretty simple.
Index skill against armor class, roll to hit, maybe to save, again for damage.
Only one damage stat to worry about, no reduction in capability given damage
taken, no phases to worry about within a single attack... (relatively) simple.
You hit somebody enough, he falls down. If you haven't hit him enough,
he's still up. Nobody gets tired.
Maybe more accurately, the _bookkeeping_ was simple. Simple modifiers
summed to get one value, one pool for damage. Spells were either preloaded
ammunition (by the book) or a pool of points for most variants.
Lots of tables, though. It's pretty easy to make new tables for whatever
new situations you have. That's why there came to be so many of them.
Tables for damage to characters from trebuchet fire, for God's sake!
And lots of tinkering around with unusual dice, because that was the
easiest way to generate differently scaled distributions.
Now, if you want to say that things like Steve Jackson's microgames that
came out a few years later were even simpler and faster, you get no argument
from me. But we're also not talking Aftermath, or any other system that
required some fancy calculations plus table lookups plus differential
effects based on hit location, etc. etc. We aren't talking Squad Leader,
with a lot of special-purpose phases to handle different aspects of combat.
But neither of those ever captured anything like the same mind share.
--
Carl Burke
cbu...@mitre.org
Rick Russell
magnulus <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Sorry, I don't like forking out 40 bucks for the books to find out. All I
> know, I know from playing the computer games. And I don't see a feat that
> allows a person to use dexterity to determine their to-hit probability.
It's called "Weapon Finesse". I think KOTOR had a similar combat feat
called "Lightsaber Finesse".
Rick R.
Rick Russell
Stephen Mackey <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote:
> Your tongue's in your cheek with that example, right? ;)
Not entirely. The fact is, you can be wearing an environmental suit
made of titanium, and the lowliest creature with a wooden club still
goes through your armor and does full damage on a 20.
Damage resistance addresses this problem to some degree, since only
strong attacks penetrate armor, and they cause less damage when they
do. That's why many non-D&D games use some kind of hit
probability/damage resistance model.
Rick R.
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
> rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Ross Ridge) wrote in message news:<cfcsv7$k6t$1...@rumours.uwaterloo.ca>...
>
> > It only ever takes one hit to kill or incapicitate someone. That's it.
> > Just one hit.
>
> I'd really, really, like to know what you base this on.
No, no, it's prefectly logical. He just assumes that
1) All organs are vital organs.
2) All weapons are deadly.
3) There are no degrees of ability: Either you're at 100% efficiency
or you're motionless.
4) All armor is rigid: Either the attack stops with no ill effects, or
all of it somehow gets through.
See? It all makes sense.
I cannot fathom to the extent someone are willing to sacrifice their
credibility to defend the D&D Armor Class system.
The REALLY funny thing is monsters' "natural armor" which, unlike what
egg-shell humans put on, *has* Damage Resistance characteristics. It's
almost like the author of the Monster Manual had a different draft
than the author of the Player's Handbook.
Darin Johnson
> If it just causes a nasty bruse you're still up and fighting and no
> closer to death. There's very little chance for anything in between,
> it's pretty much all or nothing.
OK, imagine being hit by a club. There a LOT of possibility between
not feeling the strike and having your chest crushed. There's the
chance of being bruised, having the wind knocked out, being knocked
down, blinding pain from a blow to the kidneys, etc. A sword that
doesn't pierce armor is going to have similar effects as a club.
Consider "bullet proof" vests. Being hit by a bullet can knock the
wearer down and leave them stunned.
--
Darin Johnson
Gravity is a harsh mistress -- The Tick
Michael Scott Brown
news:qcGq06Gi...@secker.demon.co.uk...
> But hit points were never intended to simulate only physical wounds. It
> was explicit from the early days of the D&D system that most "hit
> points" for high level characters represented fatigue, dulling of the
> reflexes and the like, as a hero's resistance was slowly worn down. Only
> the last few hit points actually represent serious physical wounds.
Gah. <sign of cross>
You're about 20 years out of date on that one. This representation of
hit points - as "foo" that is somehow ablated as a hero is subjected to
harm, was discredited as logically inconsistent even when 1st Edition was
the only one in print. From 2nd edition onwards, the ideas that you
describe are still there, but implemented more rationally. Namely, that a
hero's ability to fight - be it divine favor, dumb luck, supreme skill at
rolling with punches, magical tattoos on his arse, and so on and so forth -
serves to mitigate the _purely physical_ harm he experiences from attacks.
He takes less measurable physical harm from each attack directed at him
than someone without heroic capabilities. As you understsand yourself, this
doesn't mean you can "stab him in the guts" over and over, but rather than
you can *try* to stab him in the guts over and over, but each time you do
you only manage to achieve a skitter off his ribs (whereas you would have
skewered outright a lesser man).
However, delivering enough physical abuse (even in small increments) to
someone will eventually incapacitate him - at which point he's just as easy
to kill as anyone else.
The thing that is not happening, however, is that attacks are somehow
ablating his luck, or his fighting ability - it's absurd to imagine that
someone is somehow "less lucky" because you threw a dagger at him. He's
just as lucky - he's just less healthy, and the more you chew up his flesh,
there will come a point where his luck can't save him enough if he's hurt
again.
For all practical purposes D&D heroes have damage reduction of
approximately 1/Level; but the bookeeping is simplified by inflating the hit
point count rather than dividing all the weapon damage. D&D's current
guardians have made it very clear - hit point losses should be evaluated in
terms of relative damage (ie; someone with 5/10 hp is just as badly hurt as
someone with 50/100), and every attack does *physical* damage to the hero,
though not necessarily very much due to the mitigation effect. Heroes that
are immobilized can be instantly killed by _any_ lethal weapon or attack
form, because they are unable to use their heroic defenses.
People that fail to understand this essential element of D&D's ...
CINEMATIC HERO .. assumptions tend to get all off-kilter about how horrible
the system is - but it's designed to allow for larger-than-life hard to kill
heroes who can take lots of flesh wounds. The hero of Die Hard, for
instance, or Rambo, or our poor Boromir - these are all examples of good
D&D-character visions. They get hurt, they whine about it, but they keep
fighting until someone finally kills them through and through! (Boromir was
further a fine example of some additional mechanics, though)
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
news:MOqSc.100546$dP1.3...@newsc.telia.net...
> > the weilder of the weapon can normally provide the additional force to
do so.
>
> This might be true in the case of pole arms, but not slashes or arrows (in
> which case there are no wielders).
> The remaining momentum of an object, as it passes through, say, chainmail
> might be enough to cut through soft tissue, but it's not necessarily
enough
> to cut through a bone.
Arrows don't cut through bones, generally, anyway, so that's a bit of a
non issue, wouldn't you say?
> The sharp end of a warhammer (as in the medieval models with one blunt end
> and one sharp end) is also a good example where the amount of damage
should
> be reduced by armour.
Actually, warhammers are rather infamous not just for rending armor but
for doing for the skull of the poor bastard beneath with ruthless certainty
(and giving a bad enough concussion when they don't penetrate that the fight
is over regardless). There is a very small range of force where you deliver
enough energy to make a helm or armor plate yield, but not enough to
penetrate flesh or bone beneath as well - and the power with which such
weapons can be swung is such that you have plenty of energy to accomplish
both. This is true of most weapons that are capable of rending metal, and
consequently, the primary control of preventing death from such attacks is
to *deflect* the line of attack so that the concentrated energy is not
enough to make the metal yield. Hence the curves of carapaces and the like.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> "Ross Ridge" <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> > Chain mail and padded armor does work that way. Modern armor like
kevlar
> >also does this.
>
> No, chain mail, padded armour and kevlar do not partially soak up damage.
> If anything manages to pentrate these kinds of armours, you're dead
> or dying.
This is oversimplified. People shot while wearing a vest experience an
injury not unlike being kicked by a horse (depending on caliber of the gun,
etc., etc.), and with sufficiently powerful rounds, they can be killed
through blunt trauma even when the vest is not penetrated.
A comparison of the effects upon one's insides of being shot in the
torso, and the effect of being "kicked" in the torso would seem to suggest
that the armor can indeed be described as "soaking" damage to some degree,
though perhaps a more apt comparison would be 'transforming' it.
However, you are right in that when the vest is penetrated by a round,
its killing power isn't appreciably alleviated in most cases. Bulletproof
vests are rated against the level of energy they can stop, and being shot by
anything over that tends to be only marginally different from being naked.
-Michael
John Secker
<tor.iver....@broadpark.no> writes
>mike_no...@yahoo.co.uk (Mean_Chlorine) writes:
>
>> rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Ross Ridge) wrote in message
>>news:<cfcsv7$k6t$1...@rumours.uwaterloo.ca>...
>>
>> > It only ever takes one hit to kill or incapicitate someone. That's it.
>> > Just one hit.
>>
>> I'd really, really, like to know what you base this on.
>
>No, no, it's prefectly logical. He just assumes that
>
>1) All organs are vital organs.
>2) All weapons are deadly.
>3) There are no degrees of ability: Either you're at 100% efficiency
> or you're motionless.
>4) All armor is rigid: Either the attack stops with no ill effects, or
> all of it somehow gets through.
>
>See? It all makes sense.
>
>I cannot fathom to the extent someone are willing to sacrifice their
>credibility to defend the D&D Armor Class system.
>
more than one hit point, and the gradual erosion of hit points that D&D
characters suffer in combat.
--
John Secker
Michael Scott Brown
news:oz7Sc.3959$zt3....@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
> I don't. But if you walk up to a football player and shoot him in the
> head, he will be just as dead as the accountant under the same
> circumstances.
The thing you seem to be missing about d20/d&d is that "shoot him in the
head" is a process that is opposed by your target; a successful attack roll
does not bring with it any assumption about where the blow lands -and in
fact, the survival of the target (after a comparison of the potential
severity of your attack - the damage rolled - and his heroic defenses - his
hit point total) essentially determines whether or not you *can* say that
you shot him (squarely) in the head. You need to immobilize your victim
before you can avoid this mechanic and kill the person outright (something
that is perfectly well covered by d20 rules).
> No. How does "better armor makes you harder to hit with a sword" make
> sense in RL, even if it makes sense in D&D? "Hit" only makes sense if it
> is interpreted in a way other than the plain English.
That's rather the point. "Hit" in d20 means "hit badly enough to risk
lethal damage".
This is a wonky definition, as it means that attacks that strike the
body of an armored person but are deflected or repelled are therefore
"misses", but the system is self-consistent in its usage of the term. An
inept game designer can, however, fail to realize this and forget to make
graphics showing attacks being deflected by armor ..
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> > armour isn't ablative nor does it partially resist damage.
>
defies
> physics as I remember it. A certain amount of momentum will be absorbed by
> the armour, giving the penetrating attack less energy and hence less
damage
> potential, since the body itself aborbs the remaining momentum.
It's very unlikely that the attack will have only epsilon more energy
than required to overcome the defense. Everything behind the armor is very
soft and squishy.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
news:usmavi...@broadpark.no...
> John Parkinson <jp--usenet-...@destiny.org.uk> writes:
> > You can consider that a lot of 'misses' in D&D have actually hit the
> > armour but not penetrated it.
>
> But without armor damage it isn't reflected that the armor has been
> hit. If you add structural hitpoints, DR etc. to armor, then it would
> make sense.
So does assuming that armor is rarely hit in the same place twice, and
recognizing that to be considered armor, high DR and structural hit point
reserves are required. Further, d20-misses that hit the armor do so by
virtue of deflection - which implies that the damage rolls in such impacts
(to be applied to the armor) should be inherently reduced. End result: you
have a vast amount of bookkeeping to do for very little effect. It doesn't
add anything to the game.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> Nothing... but with a system like D20, which is often used in very
combat
> oriented games, it doesn't really profit the game any to have the basic
> mechanic for combat be an abstraction. It's harder to create really
drama
> and tension when you cannot be sure if you character is recieving real or
> imaginary hits, and when a character's "skill" is represented by hitpoints
> instead of actual skill points and stats.
In the end, it's still a health bar that goes to zero at a rate that
depends on your heroism.
However, it would be nice if a computer implementation tracked impacts
vrs. "airballs" in its animation programming. It wouldn't be hard, just test
for "touch attack" satisfcation as well.
> True, but that wouldn't change the fact that the fighter "skill" is
> largely represented by having alot of hitpoints (again, skill abstracted
> into hitpoints). It does strain credulity somewhat to believe that simply
> because a character is a fighter specialist he can absorb dozens more
hits, than say, a thief.
When the paradigm of d20 is that the fighter is better trained at
"rolling with the punches" and reducing the severity of attacks he
experiences, this is perfectly credible. Go punch a Marine in the mouth,
and see how well you do at bringing him down. Then do the same to a punk-ass
gang banger.
> OK... Han Solo would probably be a "Scoundrel" and not have alot of
> hitpoints,
Han is a veteran character; he avoids dying with spectacular
reliability - in d&d, this means he should have high hit point totals.
> and he would generally rely more upon his DEX, but one of his
> buddies in the party would (maybe Chewbaca?). That doesn't change the
fact
> there's a disparity between hitpoints based on character class, ie, their
> profession. Imagine in the real world something analogous... football
> players and boxers could take lots of hits... but accountants would all
die
> from a paper cut.
No. D20's scale for "regular joes" and noncombatants is 1-4 hit points -
ie; 1 hit point's worth of damage is something that hurts you so badly that
you're 25% of the way to being unable to function. This is quite similar to
the damage rating of a dagger (d4), you might notice - and people with knife
wounds tend to want to go to the hospital to get fixed (except for the ones
that die from their injuries). Now, barring the coup attack (which kills
anyone), and bearing in mind that double-damage critical hits are possible
(so a dagger can do up to 8 in the hands of an average guy), consider what
happens when you stab a Marine recruit in the thigh. He will glare at you,
and then set about killing you. Then he will pluck the dagger out. Now
repeat the experiment with your mother in law. She ain't fighting back.
These baselines describe the hit die *size* issue; the tougher someone
is "inherently" the larger his hit die setting; however, this mechanic is
coupled with the high-level-hero mechanic, and so what you get is high level
scoundrels are "just as hard to incapacitate" (because, though relatively
fragile, they have high heroic damage reduction) as mid-level soldiers (who,
though tougher, have less damage reduction).
> The chest is a "good" target, but for a trained marksman it wouldn't
> necessarily be the choice for killing somebody quickly. Counter-terrorist
> teams almost always train to shoot somebody in the head.
..*and* the chest. The procedure is to try to kill with a chest shot
double-tap but to add a header attack just in case they are wearing armor
better than your gun. The procedure becomes less necessary as the weapons
used are upsized - but 9mm silenced pistols don't cut through much.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
news:6a0d745b.04080...@posting.google.com...
> I was more thinking of sillinesses such as how armor is implemented:
> an unarmed person takes the same amount of damage from a sword hit as
> a person wearing protective armor. That's certainly not true in real
> life, where the person wearing armor would be marginally easier to
> hit, but take a lot less damage.
D&D's basic armor rules are best evaluated as an approximation over
time - rather than tracking 8 1-point hits, we just resolve one 8-point hit
every 8 rounds. It's a wargaming holdover which is arguably the klugiest
thing about the game, and the worst thing to port to a video game (though it
would be great for a war-game). However, it's also the reason that D&D
combat plays so fast. The game physics essentially wipe the table of all
the "little stuff" and just track "telling blows".
> I also fail to see a logical reason for bonuses not stacking.
Bonuses do stack in D&D - just not (most) bonuses from the same source.
There are quite a few logical reasons from a game design standpoint, and
seeing as it's perfectly rationalizable (namely, bonuses "set" their
benefit, rather than "adding" it).
> Then there's the increasingly "Magic the gathering"-ish aspects of the
> game, such as my pet peeve, the boundlessly stupid double-headed
> weapons. I mean, double-headed double-axe? Double-headed katana? FFS!
What do double-weapons have to do with Magic the card game? Where is a
double-headed katana in the D&D rules? Are you aware that bladed staffs are
weapons that have appeared in the East's history?
> In answer to your query: there are better systems out there, e.g. GURPS.
Many RPG players disagree that gurps is better. It is, however,
*different*.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> Let's take Knights of the Old Republic. Using a default character, a
> soldier, he quickly becomes a DAMAGE SPONGE after a few leveling ups.
> That's just not the kind of character I want to play with. A guy that
eats
> up medpacks every few turns. This doesn't square with my idea of Star
Wars,
> where if people get hit, they should be hurt in some way, at the very
least.
Try to imagine the idea that being hit might only amount to minor
injuries because of heroic capabilities.
> Luke Skywalker doesn't friggin' get hit, and when he does, he gets his
hand
> cut off.
Actually, Luke gets hit in every movie - sand people, bar fight, wookie
strangle, trash monster drowning, snow monsters, falls from snowspeeders,
beaten by flying furniture, hand cut off, hand shot, electrocuted ...
> And if you watch the Star Wars movies, you see scenes like where Han
Solo
> runs down a hall and Stormtroopers fire at him. In the D20 system, Han
> would get "hit" multiple times.
d20 *starwars*, however, would track those hits as Vitality damage,
which doesn't represent injuries but effort spent avoiding injuries.
I don't like that mechanic very much becuase it has much silliness under
the hood.
But it does look every bit like the movies - so it's not necessarily
right to say "d20" can't represent what you've seen.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> Because some weapons aren't dependent on strength as much as
"dexterity".
> Like a rapier or a foil. You only have to be so strong to use one, and
then
> there comes a point where all the extra strength will not matter at all.
Tsk. It most certainly will when you try to put it through armor.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> Also, the D20 system sucks. It just doesn't make any sense (strength
> affects to-hit probabilities? armor affects a person's ability to not be
hit?).
Such statements indicate ignorance.
-Michael
Hermann
> > say, chainmail might be enough to cut through soft tissue, but
> > it's not necessarily enough to cut through a bone.
>
> Arrows don't cut through bones, generally, anyway, so that's
> a bit of a non issue, wouldn't you say?
Yes, but in the paragraph above I talked about objects in general, not just
arrows.
> Actually, warhammers are rather infamous not just for
> rending armor but for doing for the skull of the poor bastard
> beneath with ruthless certainty
Agreed. This, however, goes for most attacks against the skull.
> (and giving a bad enough concussion when they don't penetrate
> that the fight is over regardless). There is a very small range
> of force where you deliver enough energy to make a helm or armor
> plate yield, but not enough to penetrate flesh or bone beneath
> as well - and the power with which such weapons can be swung is
> such that you have plenty of energy to accomplish both.
It seems that you and Ross assume that all strikes in combat situations are
perfectly balanced, perfectly aimed, and executed with maximum strength,
speed and precision. I very much doubt that this is the common case.
I would assume that medieval combat is extremely tiring. After running in
heavy armour, most fighters would not be able to muster their full combat
potential, resulting in much worse than optimal hits.
> This is
> true of most weapons that are capable of rending metal, and
> consequently, the primary control of preventing death from such
> attacks is to *deflect* the line of attack so that the
> concentrated energy is not enough to make the metal yield. Hence
> the curves of carapaces and the like.
My point was that the force needed for an acute object to pass through
armour will increase the further the object passes, since the stopping force
of the armour will increase as the surface between the object and armour
increases.
When aimed at the skull, the difference between 2 and 3 inches is probably
moot. When aimed at the thigh, the same inch is the difference between a
wounded femoris and a severed femoralis.
John Secker
Michael Scott Brown <mister...@earthlink.net> writes
>"John Secker" <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:qcGq06Gi...@secker.demon.co.uk...
>> But hit points were never intended to simulate only physical wounds. It
>> was explicit from the early days of the D&D system that most "hit
>> points" for high level characters represented fatigue, dulling of the
>> reflexes and the like, as a hero's resistance was slowly worn down. Only
>> the last few hit points actually represent serious physical wounds.
>
> Gah. <sign of cross>
> You're about 20 years out of date on that one. This representation of
>hit points - as "foo" that is somehow ablated as a hero is subjected to
>harm, was discredited as logically inconsistent even when 1st Edition was
>the only one in print. From 2nd edition onwards, the ideas that you
>describe are still there, but implemented more rationally. Namely, that a
>hero's ability to fight - be it divine favor, dumb luck, supreme skill at
>rolling with punches, magical tattoos on his arse, and so on and so forth -
described certainly refer to physical effects such as fatigue, which is
what a loss of hit points represent in my interpretation. That is the
"damage" that a "hit" does to a hero, even though it may not cause a
wound in the medical sense.
>serves to mitigate the _purely physical_ harm he experiences from attacks.
> He takes less measurable physical harm from each attack directed at him
>than someone without heroic capabilities. As you understsand yourself, this
>doesn't mean you can "stab him in the guts" over and over, but rather than
>you can *try* to stab him in the guts over and over, but each time you do
>you only manage to achieve a skitter off his ribs (whereas you would have
>skewered outright a lesser man).
> However, delivering enough physical abuse (even in small increments) to
>someone will eventually incapacitate him - at which point he's just as easy
>to kill as anyone else.
> The thing that is not happening, however, is that attacks are somehow
>ablating his luck, or his fighting ability - it's absurd to imagine that
>someone is somehow "less lucky" because you threw a dagger at him. He's
>just as lucky - he's just less healthy, and the more you chew up his flesh,
>there will come a point where his luck can't save him enough if he's hurt
>again.
ability? I never mentioned luck, so you would seem to be introducing it
as a strawman. The reduction in capabilities represented by the early
loss of hit points is physical, not metaphysical, though it would be
treated by a masseur or physiotherapist rather than a doctor.
>
> For all practical purposes D&D heroes have damage reduction of
>approximately 1/Level; but the bookeeping is simplified by inflating the hit
>point count rather than dividing all the weapon damage. D&D's current
>guardians have made it very clear - hit point losses should be evaluated in
>terms of relative damage (ie; someone with 5/10 hp is just as badly hurt as
>someone with 50/100), and every attack does *physical* damage to the hero,
>though not necessarily very much due to the mitigation effect.
reinterpret my words. But in my version, a hero down to 50/100 HP would
probably look OK, just tired, stiff and maybe a bit bruised or dazed,
while an accountant at 2/4 HP would be seriously injured and require
hospitalisation. The accountant doesn't have any fighting reflexes and
stamina to break down, so you start right in on real wounds.
> Heroes that
>are immobilized can be instantly killed by _any_ lethal weapon or attack
>form, because they are unable to use their heroic defenses.
>
> People that fail to understand this essential element of D&D's ...
>CINEMATIC HERO .. assumptions tend to get all off-kilter about how horrible
>the system is - but it's designed to allow for larger-than-life hard to kill
>heroes who can take lots of flesh wounds.
dodging or deflecting the arrows, but as he tires he starts getting hit
seriously. He still has more ability to absorb real damage than the
accountant, so he can take several arrows in the body and still keep
fighting - though even he would be instantly dead if hit, say, in the
eye or heart. But where I think we disagree - and if I am disagreeing
with the current version of D&D then I am quite happy to do so - is that
in the early stages, the first "hits" are not necessarily flesh wounds,
or wounds at all. If Boromir dies with ten arrows in him, then Boromir
reduced to 50% hit points does not have five arrows in him - he probably
has none, or just a nick on his left arm, but he is getting too tired to
keep on dodging for much longer.
> The hero of Die Hard, for
>instance, or Rambo, or our poor Boromir - these are all examples of good
>D&D-character visions. They get hurt, they whine about it, but they keep
>fighting until someone finally kills them through and through! (Boromir was
>further a fine example of some additional mechanics, though)
>
real-life combat trauma. I just disagree about the nature of the early
lost hit points.
--
John Secker
Hermann
> more energy than required to overcome the defense. Everything
> behind the armor is very soft and squishy.
It's not, actually. Bone, muscle and tendons have very high stopping power,
and the extremities, which take the most blows in close combat, is virtually
nothing _but_ bone, muscle and tendon.
If everything behind the armour was soft and squishy, then accordingly,
every bullet would pass right through body. This, however, is not the case,
and bullets usually have at least 10 times the kinetic energy of arrows. You
might want to ask yourself why arrows have flukes.
Charles Whitney
>
> "Stephen Mackey" <stros...@aol.comdiespam> wrote in message
> news:20040809200001...@mb-m11.aol.com...
> > I would presume that's why there's a feat for such things, like I
> mentioned in
> > my previous post. ;) You can argue that it should be default in certain
> cases
> > rather than a feat (which I myself can see the point of), but it's
hardly
> a
> > huge flaw.
>
> It's a fundamental flaw, and if there is a feat for it, it's a bandaid.
> I'll get to more of why it's bad in a minute...
>
> > Hmm. Haven't had much experience with the D6, WoD, or GURPS systems.
But
> I
> > distinctly remember Fallout's system having its problems. For instance,
> late
> > in the game it was pointless to aim anywhere except at an opponent's
> eyeballs.
> > ;)
> >
>
> Well, I only have limited experience with those PnP systems (it's not
like
> pen and paper roleplaying is on anything but a slow death spiral), but I
do
> know how they work. And they are alot more flexible and can handle a
wider
> variety of situations without alot of special rules.
>
> Let's take Knights of the Old Republic. Using a default character, a
> soldier, he quickly becomes a DAMAGE SPONGE after a few leveling ups.
> That's just not the kind of character I want to play with. A guy that
eats
> up medpacks every few turns. This doesn't square with my idea of Star
Wars,
> where if people get hit, they should be hurt in some way, at the very
least.
hand
> cut off.
>
Solo
> runs down a hall and Stormtroopers fire at him. In the D20 system, Han
> will say that these hits represent stuff other than actual hits- they are
> abstractions. But it really changes the whole feel of a game when you are
> playing with abstractions (again, D&D betrays it's primitive wargame
roots.
> D&D would be an OK system for a tactical large scale wargame where people
> really don't care if Man-at-Arms #53 actually got hurt or merely took a
> glancing blow, but it's piss poor at actually telling a believable, yet
> dramatic story. In the D6 system, in the same scenario, Han Solo would
run
> down the hall and only RISK being hit, the chances of the stormtroopers
> actually hitting him would be much less. Also, in the D20 system, Han
Solo
> has more incentive to just wade through the hordes of stormtroopers and
kill
> them all (because he can just take medpacks or whatever, and he has a huge
> reserve of hitpoints, arguendo), but in the D6 system, trying to avoid
> getting hit in the first place would be much more effective because he
> doesn't have this botomless pool of hitpoints.
Well, I think it is the way it is simply because it would absolutely suck to
have a game where you end up missing 45-50 times per fight before you got
the one hit that killed your adversary, or ended up having your game ending
and having to restore a save game again and again and again because your
opponent's number came up on a roll when he was attacking you in a system
that affords hits more than 2% of the time.
If you're going to argue this, you probably should extend your argument to
ask why RPGs have so much fighting in them, since, if the one-hit-kills
system applies, everyone would be steadfastly avoiding a fight. And then it
pretty much becomes a puzzle game rather than an action based one. I don't
think it would be very successful.
C
Michael Scott Brown
> > It's very unlikely that the attack will have only epsilon
> > more energy than required to overcome the defense. Everything
> > behind the armor is very soft and squishy.
>
> It's not, actually. Bone, muscle and tendons have very high stopping
power,
> and the extremities, which take the most blows in close combat, is
virtually
> nothing _but_ bone, muscle and tendon.
Good gods, man. COMPARED TO STEEL.
<shakes head sadly>
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> > You're about 20 years out of date on that one. This representation of
> >hit points - as "foo" that is somehow ablated as a hero is subjected to
> >harm, was discredited as logically inconsistent even when 1st Edition was
> >the only one in print. From 2nd edition onwards, the ideas that you
> >describe are still there, but implemented more rationally. Namely, that
a
> >hero's ability to fight - be it divine favor, dumb luck, supreme skill at
> >rolling with punches, magical tattoos on his arse, and so on and so
forth -
> Who said anything about "luck"? I certainly didn't.
I, however, did, because it's a perfect example of a heroic quality that
sane people understand is not well represented by something "ablative", and
thus discussing how luck is constant while the body erodes is much more
informative when discussing how to get the game wrong (such as "the body is
constant while luck ... erodes ... ).
> The mechanics I
> described certainly refer to physical effects such as fatigue, which is
> what a loss of hit points represent in my interpretation. That is the
> "damage" that a "hit" does to a hero, even though it may not cause a
> wound in the medical sense.
<sigh> And right there is where you are absolutely wrong about the game.
In the last 2 editions, *all* damage that a hero experiences is physical
harm, that absolutely involves wounds. Period. It is not fatigue (this is
represented with different mechanics). It is not a loss in the ability to
defend oneself in any way, shape or form. There are not "hits that weren't
really hits" - there are only "hits that aren't as *bad* as they could have
been". Every bite from a monster with poison will make a wound and inject
that poison, etc. A model that tries to pretend that being hit makes you
"tired" in proportion to how dangerous the hit wound have been is absurd.
"Damnn! That guy has a greataxe! I'm going to get tired faster!".
The hero fights with his capabilities intact until he's too badly hurt
to defend himself anymore. The damage he acquires on the way to
unconsciousness is essentially superficial
knockout-blow/incapacitate-from-pain/battering/bruising/flesh wound crap;
he's not at risk of death from any injuries save the ones that take him (or
occur once he is) below zero. The virtue of being a cinematic hero is that
you aren't really wounded badly until you're defeated - or on the verge of
it (3rd edition uses "disabled" rules to dramatize the nearly-down; many
variants expand on the original rule a bit). This deliberate suppression
of injury effects is a game design decision (because death spirals aren't
any fun), and is generally justifiable (given that non-incapacitating
injuries often hinder a fighter not at all due to adrenaline - that's what
it's for!) - though clearly, examples of whimpering cripples also exist.
Gurps players really have a hard on for that.
> Which seems to be pretty much what I said, ignoring your attempts to
> reinterpret my words. But in my version, a hero down to 50/100 HP would
> probably look OK, just tired, stiff and maybe a bit bruised or dazed,
> while an accountant at 2/4 HP would be seriously injured and require
> hospitalisation.
And that is why your version is wrong. *No-one* is seriously injured
until they are at -1 hit points.
Your hero, after all, could have lost those 50 hit points through the
simple expedient of (avoiding most of) a dragon's bite - though he didn't
come away without a pair of gashes across his torso from the longest of its
fangs. This is identical to the accountant who has taken two 1hp slashes
from a knife. Neither requires hospitalization. The accountant will recover
from his injuries in two days of rest! If the hero in question were a 20th
level wizard, so would he, for that matter.
Differences in physique are handled by mainline hit die size - a d12
character is inherently tougher than a d4 character and can keep functioning
with levels of physical abuse that would make the d4 charcter cry for his
mommy (ie; one good knifing downs a d4 character, but only hurts the d12
character). Combined with damage mitigation from high level and
reinforcement from inherent toughness, and you have yourself a durable
damage mechanic - but one that tends to obscure the structure behind its
abstractions.
> Yes indeed - and here I largely agree with you. Boromir starts out
> dodging or deflecting the arrows, but as he tires he starts getting hit
> seriously.
No. Put this "tired" idea out of your head. D&D plays the scene like
this: Captain Uruk Hai man critically hits him with a strength bow for
whopping boatloads of damage, disabling him on the spot. The worst case
damage possible from a fighter/ranger mix with high strength and "gondorian"
as a favored enemy ... it's pretty staggering. Depending on what level you
imagine the LOTR movie to be (in 3rd edition, the main fellowship are _not_
low level characters, but you can play games with whether they are
high-single digits, teens, or epic), you can push into 60 hp damage without
even using a magical item. However, Boromir if is a ranger/barbarian blend,
and he has Die Hard as many rangers do - and so being disabled doesn't stop
him! He Rages, putting himself back into "positive" hit points, and fights
on with new abandon, until a few extra feathers finally grind him back into
the dirt.
> eye or heart. But where I think we disagree - and if I am disagreeing
> with the current version of D&D then I am quite happy to do so - is that
> in the early stages, the first "hits" are not necessarily flesh wounds,
> or wounds at all.
<sigh>
The conceptual contradictions that come of even *trying* to imagine that
damage isn't damage and hits weren't hits are too many to blather on about
here. Suffice to say, this perspective of yours is not viable, and should be
abandoned.
> If Boromir dies with ten arrows in him, then Boromir
> reduced to 50% hit points does not have five arrows in him -
Generally, people don't get arrows stuck in themselves *at all*, until
they're defeated.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> > Arrows don't cut through bones, generally, anyway, so that's
> > a bit of a non issue, wouldn't you say?
>
> Yes, but in the paragraph above I talked about objects in general, not
just
> arrows.
The point of the exercise was your disagreeing with the contention that
the weilder of a weapon is there to keep pushing when armor is penetrated -
by citing arrows and projectiles. But arrows aren't bonebreaking weapons
anyway, so their falling short in this regard does not detract from the
generality of the original statement.
> > (and giving a bad enough concussion when they don't penetrate
> > that the fight is over regardless). There is a very small range
> > of force where you deliver enough energy to make a helm or armor
> > plate yield, but not enough to penetrate flesh or bone beneath
> > as well - and the power with which such weapons can be swung is
> > such that you have plenty of energy to accomplish both.
>
> It seems that you and Ross assume that all strikes in combat situations
are
> perfectly balanced, perfectly aimed, and executed with maximum strength,
> speed and precision. I very much doubt that this is the common case.
Your strawman is fascinating. *ALL* strikes, *PERFECTLY* balanced and
aimed, *MAXIMUM* strength ...
Frankly, were I not in such a jolly mood, I would excoriate you for the
deficiencies in reason required to get from what we have said to what you
have said. But in this case, allow me to simply correct you. Professional
fighters make attacks that are aimed well *enough* and with strength
*enough* that if the defender fails to make them hit poorly (ie; moving so
that they glance on impact), he will get creamed, presuming he has the right
sort of weapon against the armor he's attacking (ie; one capable of actually
defeating it). There is no point in swinging a warhammer at all if you're
not going to put your target at risk - and there's no point in discussing jo
sticks against plated kits...
> I would assume that medieval combat is extremely tiring. After running in
> heavy armour, most fighters would not be able to muster their full combat
> potential, resulting in much worse than optimal hits.
<shakes head sadly>
Any form of combat is extremely tiring. However, if you let fatigue
slow you down, you die. So professional fighters get endurance.
Prospective knights essentially *live* in heavy armor after a point,
doing all their daily duties so attired (cleaning, exercising, dancing..).
You will not find a set of more physically fit individuals in all of
world history, save possibly our modern special forces units.
Assuming that their attacks are weak and therefore "might not do more
than make a hole in the armor" is a very silly place to stake claims about
war - and your arguments are obviously inapplicable to mechanically
propelled projectiles.
> My point was that the force needed for an acute object to pass through
> armour will increase the further the object passes,
When you rip through an armor plate in an impact with a proper armor
piercing device - which doesn't happen unless you have delivered enough
stress to match the yield strength of the metal, mind you - the points of
the "tear" serve as stress concentrators and the metal rips continuously
once the rend is made. The process is not the same as slowly pushing a cone
through a plate of steel, which is how you are imagining the situation.
-Michael
Hermann
>
> <shakes head sadly>
Colour me embarrassed. =)
Then I'm afraid I don't see your point.
I made two suggestions:
1) Armour absorbs kinetic energy from an object, reducing its damage
potential once past the armour.
2) The remaining kinetic energy is rarely enough to push the object through
the entire body; the kinetic energy will, rather, decide how far into a body
the object can penetrate and cause trauma.
Or, in game terms, armour aborbs damage.
Ross Ridge seemed to promote the idea that absorbance was a bad concept,
since armour would either deflect an object completely, or the object would
do just as much damage as if there had been no armour to begin with.
I got the same impression from your post.
Furthermore, mr. Ridge suggested that the damage of a weapon was either
negligible or crippling. I think he's got a good point, at least when it
comes to high-powered objects in modern warfare, but the absorbance of the
armour is an important factor in affecting which of the two trauma levels an
object will cause.
Hermann
that
> the weilder of a weapon is there to keep pushing when armor is
penetrated -
> by citing arrows and projectiles. But arrows aren't bonebreaking weapons
> anyway, so their falling short in this regard does not detract from the
> generality of the original statement.
Ah, well, my point also covered swords and other weapons which achieve their
effect by swinging rather than pushing. You can't apply more pressure at the
end of a swing when you notice your blow didn't achieve the desired effect,
unlike a spear or a dagger.
> > It seems that you and Ross assume that all strikes in combat situations
> are
> > perfectly balanced, perfectly aimed, and executed with maximum strength,
> > speed and precision. I very much doubt that this is the common case.
>
> Your strawman is fascinating. *ALL* strikes, *PERFECTLY* balanced and
> aimed, *MAXIMUM* strength ...
A slight amount of sarcasm is all. I must point out, that I'm asking out of
curiousity, as to how one could develop a hit and damage model better than
armour arbsorbtion and hit points (spread out over body parts, not D&D
style).
> Professional
> fighters make attacks that are aimed well *enough* and with strength
> *enough* that if the defender fails to make them hit poorly (ie; moving so
> that they glance on impact), he will get creamed, presuming he has the
right
> sort of weapon against the armor he's attacking (ie; one capable of
actually
> defeating it).
You may be right, but I have a completely different impression of medieval
fighting, which took much longer time one would usually think, and involved
a lot of undeflected hits on the body.
> There is no point in swinging a warhammer at all if you're
> not going to put your target at risk - and there's no point in discussing
jo
> sticks against plated kits...
Well, there are plenty of points. Throw your opponent off balance, tire him
out, etc. In a fight between a fully armoured but unarmed knight, and an
unarmoured man with a quarterstaff, my odds would be on the man with the
quarterstaff.
> <shakes head sadly>
> Any form of combat is extremely tiring. However, if you let fatigue
> slow you down, you die. So professional fighters get endurance.
> Prospective knights essentially *live* in heavy armor after a point,
> doing all their daily duties so attired (cleaning, exercising, dancing..).
> You will not find a set of more physically fit individuals in all of
> world history, save possibly our modern special forces units.
Do you have any references for this?
As far as I understand, you put on the armour for combat (or practice)
_only_, and took it off once you were done. No running around in combat
unless it was absolutely necessary. There was a very good reason why men in
full armour usually rode into combat.
Also, I would imagine that the eating and drinking habits of the nobility
made physical fitness virtually impossible. :P
> Assuming that their attacks are weak and therefore "might not do more
> than make a hole in the armor" is a very silly place to stake claims about
> war - and your arguments are obviously inapplicable to mechanically
> propelled projectiles.
Mechanically propelled? How so?
> When you rip through an armor plate in an impact with a proper armor
> piercing device - which doesn't happen unless you have delivered enough
> stress to match the yield strength of the metal, mind you - the points of
> the "tear" serve as stress concentrators and the metal rips continuously
> once the rend is made. The process is not the same as slowly pushing a
cone
> through a plate of steel, which is how you are imagining the situation.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that penetration of a weapon
through any given type of armour (not only plate) is the same, regardless of
the sharpness (or, rather, the angle of the tip) and width of the
penetrating cone?
Given the same force, would a spear an inch thick penetrate armour just as
easily as an equally sharp spear width a fourth of that thickness?
Michael Scott Brown
> I made two suggestions:
> 1) Armour absorbs kinetic energy from an object, reducing its damage
> potential once past the armour.
At issue is whether armor - when struck directly enough to rend it -
absorbs *enough* that the injury that results is any less severe. And this
is where your suggestion matches poorly to reality. The lethality of an
attack depends rather a lot on where it lands, so let's take torso and head
hits as a reasonable subset of potentially lethal endeavours. Of bullets
that penetrated bulletproof vest or ballistic helmet, how many dealt less
serious wounds to the victim? Of plate armors that were rent by lance or axe
or warhammer, how many of the men inside were merely scratched as a result
of their armor taking all the energy of the blow away, as opposed to slain
at the same instant as the blow that was so powerful as to sunder their
armor?
> 2) The remaining kinetic energy is rarely enough to push the object
through
> the entire body; the kinetic energy will, rather, decide how far into a
body
> the object can penetrate and cause trauma.
Oof. You need to learn more about wound mechanics. You actually get
*more* trauma from a bullet that stops in the body than one that passes
through - the latter case indicates that not all of the round's energy was
deposited in the target. Consequently, this depth/trauma/energy
relationship is much more complicated than you are assuming.
> Or, in game terms, armour aborbs damage.
In game terms, it is not clear that *penetrated* armor reduces the
associated injury severity overmuch. Armor is complicated stuff. :(
> Ross Ridge seemed to promote the idea that absorbance was a bad concept,
> since armour would either deflect an object completely, or the object
would
> do just as much damage as if there had been no armour to begin with.
I don't believe Ross thinks absorbance is a bad idea. He is, rather,
illustrating the relationships that make d20's model not entirely
unjustifiable. However, it's all simplified in the end. If you use
absorbance-armor, you lose the ability to represent rent armor not really
saving you, and you get funny effects like *never* being hurt by certain
kinds of attack forms - if you use deflection armor, you lose the ability
to explore the way chainmail works (turning sword slashes into club hits).
If you combine the two, you get a complicated mess, such as gurps gods-awful
PD + DR(location) system, or Alternity's good-idea-but-bad-in-implementation
damage-echelon system ...
> Furthermore, mr. Ridge suggested that the damage of a weapon was either
> negligible or crippling.
In practice, this is how real fights tend to play out. Adrenaline makes
you ignore injuries and pain, save for those that actually prevent you from
using your limbs. At which point you're already done...
> I think he's got a good point, at least when it
> comes to high-powered objects in modern warfare, but the absorbance of the
> armour is an important factor in affecting which of the two trauma levels
an
> object will cause.
So you're talking past each other. Armor's ability to absorb energy
determines its ability to turn potentially lethal injuries (ie; penetrate
the skin) into big bashing experiences instead (ie; blunt trauma and
bruising); but generally speaking, if that ability is overcome, the attack
is not weakened in similar proportion. Shoot someone with a vest rated for
handguns .. with an assault rifle ... and you will kill them dead just as if
they were naked; the vest isn't absorbing that attack very effectively.
-Michael
Stephen Mackey
>This is a wonky definition, as it means that attacks that strike the
>body of an armored person but are deflected or repelled are therefore
>"misses", but the system is self-consistent in its usage of the term. An
>inept game designer can, however, fail to realize this and forget to make
>graphics showing attacks being deflected by armor ..
Is there ANY crpg that animates this properly, I wonder? So that a miss could
strike your shield or your helmet and not just swish in the air? The graphics
always make any armor being worn look so... pointless. It's bloody annoying.
Okay, Diablo 2 has a shield block animation, but still, nothing for the rest of
the armor set.
--
Stephen Mackey
"Scientists tend to do philosophy about as well as you'd expect philosophers to
do science, the difference being that at least the philosophers usually *know*
when they're out of their depth."
-Jeff Heikkinen
Michael Scott Brown
> Ah, well, my point also covered swords and other weapons which achieve
their
> effect by swinging rather than pushing. You can't apply more pressure at
the
> end of a swing when you notice your blow didn't achieve the desired
effect,
> unlike a spear or a dagger.
Tsk. You were discussing when the blow *had* achieved the desired effect
(ie; penetrated the armor) - and a slashing attack that impacts, rends, and
for some reason halts with the blade a-biting, can certainly be given a
little extra love. However, doing so is dangerous, as if your foe has
contact with your weapon, he knows exactly where it is - and where you are -
and so as he's dead anyway ...
> > Your strawman is fascinating. *ALL* strikes, *PERFECTLY* balanced
and
> > aimed, *MAXIMUM* strength ...
>
> A slight amount of sarcasm is all. I must point out, that I'm asking out
of
> curiousity, as to how one could develop a hit and damage model better than
> armour arbsorbtion and hit points (spread out over body parts, not D&D
style).
By first working out what one wants their system to represent. A system
designed to represent injuries should use those as its currency, I'd say. :)
> > Professional fighters make attacks that are aimed well *enough* and with
strength
> > *enough* that if the defender fails to make them hit poorly (ie; moving
so
> > that they glance on impact), he will get creamed, presuming he has the
right
> > sort of weapon against the armor he's attacking (ie; one capable of
actually
> > defeating it).
>
> You may be right, but I have a completely different impression of medieval
> fighting, which took much longer time one would usually think, and
involved
> a lot of undeflected hits on the body.
The curvature of armor makes it such that very little movement is
required to make a blow hit with a less than ideal angle. I doubt anyone
here would disagree that two knights kitted out in plate had anything other
than a marathon ahead of them - the shield alone adds about half an hour to
the work required to kill another man (slightly exaggerating, there -
slightly..). But it's foolish to assume that people who have practiced
their weaponscraft in life or death situations for years would be out there
delivering biomechanically inefficient attacks, as you seem to insist.
Hell, I'm not sure I'm even _capable_ of making a biomechanically
inefficient attack after all my martial training.
For the conversation to be in any way relevant, you have to consider
weapons that *can* penetrate the armor to good effect when used correctly -
and used correctly - not when used with supreme luck and a karmic alignment
of the stars. The whole point of coming up with tools that would do for
armored men was to make the job of killing them feasible!
> > There is no point in swinging a warhammer at all if you're
> > not going to put your target at risk - and there's no point in
discussing jo
> > sticks against plated kits...
>
> Well, there are plenty of points. Throw your opponent off balance, tire
him
> out, etc.
Which you can do quite nicely without swinging your weapon, but by
moving when he swings his. Unless you are supremely confident of your
superior strength, and wish to win through the simple expedient of tiring
out his shield arm so as to access his head, your attacks aren't going to
tire someone out overmuch.
> In a fight between a fully armoured but unarmed knight, and an
> unarmoured man with a quarterstaff, my odds would be on the man with the
> quarterstaff.
Such a statement lacks much wisdom. The staff is a fine weapon - but
it's not much for cracking a man in plated kit. He has to withstand but
*one* blow and they are transformed to a grapple or a body slam. Tripping
the knight is not a difficulty for him; he can do gymnastics in his armor
and thus will be on his feet again in but a moment.
> > <shakes head sadly>
> > Any form of combat is extremely tiring. However, if you let fatigue
> > slow you down, you die. So professional fighters get endurance.
> > Prospective knights essentially *live* in heavy armor after a point,
> > doing all their daily duties so attired (cleaning, exercising,
dancing..).
> > You will not find a set of more physically fit individuals in all of
> > world history, save possibly our modern special forces units.
>
> Do you have any references for this?
None I can name; but I've seen it described often enough in documentaries
and read about it in the books I used to establish my knowledge of warfare
once upon a time.
> As far as I understand, you put on the armour for combat (or practice)
> _only_, and took it off once you were done. No running around in combat
> unless it was absolutely necessary. There was a very good reason why men
in
> full armour usually rode into combat.
Tsk. Read my statement again. *PROSPECTIVE* knights. Ie; squires in
training - living in armor was the means by which they were taught to be
familiar with the weight distribution of the armor, and to build the muscles
required to wear it well. I cannot imagine the experience was anything
other than brutally punishing. Armor is hot and uncomfortable when employed
out of doors.
> > Assuming that their attacks are weak and therefore "might not do
more
> > than make a hole in the armor" is a very silly place to stake claims
about
> > war - and your arguments are obviously inapplicable to mechanically
> > propelled projectiles.
>
> Mechanically propelled? How so?
Crossbows, ballista ...
> > When you rip through an armor plate in an impact with a proper armor
> > piercing device - which doesn't happen unless you have delivered enough
> > stress to match the yield strength of the metal, mind you - the points
of
> > the "tear" serve as stress concentrators and the metal rips continuously
> > once the rend is made. The process is not the same as slowly pushing a
cone
> > through a plate of steel, which is how you are imagining the situation.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that penetration of a
weapon
> through any given type of armour (not only plate) is the same, regardless
of
> the sharpness (or, rather, the angle of the tip) and width of the
> penetrating cone?
<sigh> PROPER ARMOR PIERCING DEVICE. Ie; optimized shapes.
-Michael
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> Michael Scott Brown said:
> >This is a wonky definition, as it means that attacks that strike the
> >body of an armored person but are deflected or repelled are therefore
> >"misses", but the system is self-consistent in its usage of the term. An
> >inept game designer can, however, fail to realize this and forget to make
> >graphics showing attacks being deflected by armor ..
>
> Is there ANY crpg that animates this properly, I wonder? So that a miss
could
> strike your shield or your helmet and not just swish in the air? The
graphics
> always make any armor being worn look so... pointless. It's bloody
annoying.
> Okay, Diablo 2 has a shield block animation, but still, nothing for the
rest of
> the armor set.
I'm drawing a complete blank. It's conceivable the Fallout did it right,
since its gurps engine handles airballs and DR based negation.
-Michael
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
> I thought he was attacking the D&D system? He dislikes people having
> more than one hit point, and the gradual erosion of hit points that
> D&D characters suffer in combat.
Yes, but he also attacks people attacking the "armor reduces chance to
hit" mechanism that is under discussion.
Ross Ridge
> Just one hit.
Mean_Chlorine <mike_no...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>I'd really, really, like to know what you base this on.
It's obvious to anyone how hasn't being playing RPGs too long. Millions
of people been killed by a single fatal blow. Why would you think it
would *require* several hits to kill anyone? Why would you be required
to make a non-fatal blow before you could make a fatal blow? How are
two or more non-fatal blows going combine to kill someone? You don't
need to stab someone in the arm before you can kill them by stabbing
someone in the heart. A dozen flesh wounds isn't significantly more
likely to kill someone as a single flesh wound, and isn't anywhere near as
likely to kill someone as stabing them once in the heart. Whether you've
already done a million points of "damage" or none at all to someone
you can still kill them with a single blow. While there's are always
exceptions, they're rare and poorly modeled by hit points and using a
single "damage" number to represent effect of being stuck by weapon.
Hit points would only make sense if combat consisted chopping off bits
of flesh and until enough flesh had be removed to kill the person.
But that's not how combat works, the goal in combat is to deliver a blow
that kills, incapacitates or otherwise prevents your enemy from fighting
back. There are no hit points in the real world, only critical hits.
Ross Ridge
--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/rridge/
db //
Mean_Chlorine
> I cannot fathom to the extent someone are willing to sacrifice their
> credibility to defend the D&D Armor Class system.
It's partly a matter of perspective, I think.
When I read his reply I was first going to answer something along the
lines that "when the model of reality and reality disagree, you adjust
the model, not reality", but thought better of it: the standard D&D
fans position is that the rules are not supposed to be a simple
simulation of reality, they're supposed to be a detailed simulation of
heroic fantasy. Hence it is irrelevant whether the rules are realistic
or not; what matters is that they enable simulation of, say, Conan the
Barbarian fighting the Spider God of Zamora (and winning).
In fact, I've often seen D&D fans state that realism is even
undesirable in RPG's.
That view is about as far from my own view on the subject as it is
possible to get.
Mean_Chlorine
> > > It's very unlikely that the attack will have only epsilon
> > > more energy than required to overcome the defense. Everything
> > > behind the armor is very soft and squishy.
> >
> > It's not, actually. Bone, muscle and tendons have very high stopping
> power,
> > and the extremities, which take the most blows in close combat, is
> virtually
> > nothing _but_ bone, muscle and tendon.
>
> Good gods, man. COMPARED TO STEEL.
>
> <shakes head sadly>
I think you mean that the force needed to overcome the armor is so
great that anything overcoming it will be so energetic that the flesh
and bones behind the armor can be approximated to having the stopping
power of air, relatively speaking.
This is probably true for military, full metal jacket, high-speed
ammunition, because it is so very energetic and fast, but just moving
to, say, 9mm hollowpoint ammo makes the assumption iffy.
And it definitely is not true for arrows, which have so low energy
they usually don't pass through the body even of people who're not
wearing any armor at all, and definitely not of cutting (rater than
piercing) melee weapons, which deliver their force to much larger
areas.
> -Michael
Michael Scott Brown
news:cffbo3$vi6$1...@rumours.uwaterloo.ca...
> Hit points would only make sense if combat consisted chopping off bits
> of flesh and until enough flesh had be removed to kill the person.
D&D's make sense, and they work by assuming combat consists of people
who are battered and abused by damage until they are too hurt-and-battered
to keep fighting effectively, at which point they become very easy to kill.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
> When I read his reply I was first going to answer something along the
> lines that "when the model of reality and reality disagree, you adjust
> the model, not reality", but thought better of it: the standard D&D
> fans position is that the rules are not supposed to be a simple
> simulation of reality, they're supposed to be a detailed simulation of
> heroic fantasy.
D&D's armor accounting does not, I think, pretend to be a detailed
simulation of anything, but rather, embraces the fact that it is a blatantly
simplified representation of a more complex process.
-Michael
Michael Scott Brown
news:6a0d745b.04081...@posting.google.com...
> great that anything overcoming it will be so energetic that the flesh
> and bones behind the armor can be approximated to having the stopping
> power of air, relatively speaking.
That was rather my point. The additional effort to get from the inside
of the armor to "into the flesh enough to do damage" is trivial.
> This is probably true for military, full metal jacket, high-speed
> ammunition, because it is so very energetic and fast, but just moving
> to, say, 9mm hollowpoint ammo makes the assumption iffy.
Bah. If the round doens't splatter uselessly on the armor, it will
hardly bounce off the skin after penetrating it!
> And it definitely is not true for arrows, which have so low energy
> they usually don't pass through the body even of people who're not
> wearing any armor at all,
Arrows bounce off of people?
This is news to me.
There appears to be a nomenclature disjoint here. We *do* want most of
our weapons to stop - eventually - inside the flesh of our target, in order
to maximize the energy transfer and subsequent destruction. At issue is
whether the body is so durable that the weapon is stopped cold at the
*beginning* of its lethal journey after penetrating armor - or whether the
flesh stops it "eventually". What happens in practice, generally, is that
attacks that rend armor don't tend to give any respect to ribs, much less
softer parts.
-Michael
chainbreaker
> Consider "bullet proof" vests. Being hit by a bullet can knock the
> wearer down and leave them stunned.
Or even dead, depending on circumstances, even if the bullet doesn't
penetrate the armor.
--
chainbreaker
If you need to email, then chainbreaker (naturally) at comcast dot
net--that's "net" not "com"--should do it.
chainbreaker
> Hit points would only make sense if combat consisted chopping off bits
> of flesh and until enough flesh had be removed to kill the person.
> But that's not how combat works, the goal in combat is to deliver a
> blow that kills, incapacitates or otherwise prevents your enemy from
> fighting back. There are no hit points in the real world, only
> critical hits.
>
> Ross Ridge
Yeah, but how much fun do you think a CRPG would be that used modeling like
this, and how long do you think people would play it? I know that most of
the damage modeling in what we have is fairy taleish, but dammit, I *want*
fairy taleish--otherwise I'd be playing Rainbow Six or somesuch.
I suppose optional damage modeling is a possibility, but doubt that's
something we'll ever see developed much, beyond rudimentary forms.
Hermann
> or axe or warhammer, how many of the men inside were merely scratched as a
> result of their armor taking all the energy of the blow away, as opposed
to
> slain at the same instant as the blow that was so powerful as to sunder
> their armor?
Are there only two possibilities here? Scratched and slain? Most attacks
against the head are lethal, but the chest is actually quite durable. Even a
punctured lung isn't necessary a lethal wound.
As I've mentioned, I do think you and Ross has a good point in that damages
are usually either crippling or negligible.
But RPGs need to model damages more detailed than that. He might be "out"
for the rest of the fight, but what does "out" mean? Can he survive a
similar blow to the other lung? Can he walk? The lung is punctured, but is
it collapsed as well? How long will healing take?
> Oof. You need to learn more about wound mechanics.
Back when I was still in orthopedic surgery, I picked up a thing or two
about bullet wounds. The energy dump theory has been proven faulty.
> You actually get
> *more* trauma from a bullet that stops in the body than one that passes
> through - the latter case indicates that not all of the round's energy was
> deposited in the target.
Not exactly true, it mostly depend on bullet dynamics and bullet cavities,
on whether the bullet tumbles or not, on whether it fragments or not, and so
on. A tumbling bullet that passes through the body is almost guaranteed to
cause more damage than one _in_ the body.
It indicates that the energy was not as high as to push the bullet all the
way through. When compared to a similar bullet, the wound where the bullet
passes all the way through might be less lethal, but when compared to a
higher powered bullet, the opposite is true.
> Consequently, this depth/trauma/energy
> relationship is much more complicated than you are assuming.
Agreed, but fantasy RPG rules will use an extremely limited damage model to
begin with, even more so if it is to cover modern weaponry.
> If you use
> absorbance-armor, you lose the ability to represent rent armor not really
> saving you, and you get funny effects like *never* being hurt by certain
> kinds of attack forms
Yes, assuming that you use separate rolls for to hit and damage, unlike, for
instance, Rolemaster.
> - if you use deflection armor, you lose the ability
> to explore the way chainmail works (turning sword slashes into club hits).
> If you combine the two, you get a complicated mess, such as gurps
> gods-awful PD + DR(location) system, or Alternity's
> good-idea-but-bad-in-implementation damage-echelon system ...
Thanks for this tip. I must look into Alternity.
> In practice, this is how real fights tend to play out. Adrenaline
> makes you ignore injuries and pain, save for those that actually prevent
you
> from using your limbs. At which point you're already done...
Again, agreed, but the damage system most be more complex than that. Since
it must also cover recovery and healing, you need a method to tell the torn
off limbs from the broken bones from the crippling flesh wounds.
> Shoot someone with a vest
> rated for handguns .. with an assault rifle ... and you will kill them
dead
> just as if they were naked; the vest isn't absorbing that attack very
> effectively.
Agreed, but the net energy would have been enough to kill the target in the
first place. However, there is a very noticable difference in the cavity
caused in ballistic gelatin from a bullet that pierced a vest, when compared
to a bullet cavity bypassing the vest.
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
> It's obvious to anyone how hasn't being playing RPGs too long. Millions
> of people been killed by a single fatal blow.
And millions of people have been wounded, but not killed, by a blow.
Why do you only want to model the first case?
Hermann
> little extra love.
If a sword was stopped short by the bone in the upper arm, exactly how do
you intend to push it through the bone by brute force?
> The curvature of armor makes it such that very little movement is
The curvature of... chainmail?
> But it's foolish to assume that people who have practiced
> their weaponscraft in life or death situations for years would be out`
> there delivering biomechanically inefficient attacks, as you seem to
insist.
Well, the Norman knights, for instance, performed remarkably poorly against
the force marched Saxon foot soldiers. The same goes for the French knights
at Agincourt. Of course, the mud was the kicker in the latter case, but
still shows vulnerable they were when forced into face-to-face combat.
> Such a statement lacks much wisdom. The staff is a fine weapon - but
> it's not much for cracking a man in plated kit. He has to withstand but
> *one* blow and they are transformed to a grapple or a body slam.
In which case the man who is not weighed down by 60 pounds of chain or plate
will have the upper hand.
> Tripping
> the knight is not a difficulty for him; he can do gymnastics in his armor
> and thus will be on his feet again in but a moment.
I'm starting to think you have a somewhat romantic image of the agility of a
knight. The military grade kevlar jackets we used in the army didn't weigh
more than 10 pounds, but they still had a _very_ noticable impact on
agility.
If fighting in broken or wet terrain, falling even once might be enough to
end the fight.
> None I can name; but I've seen it described often enough in
> documentaries and read about it in the books I used to establish my
> knowledge of warfare once upon a time.
Good enough for me; I was starting to fear you were an SCA nut. Those tend
to rely completely on their own experience of mock fighting, with little
disregard for battlefield conditions.
> Tsk. Read my statement again. *PROSPECTIVE* knights. Ie; squires in
> training - living in armor was the means by which they were taught to be
> familiar with the weight distribution of the armor, and to build the
> muscles required to wear it well.
But then again, squires didn't fight battles, did they? I would imagine that
their physical state deteriorated quite quickly.
> <sigh> PROPER ARMOR PIERCING DEVICE. Ie; optimized shapes.
Rephrase: is the penetration of an object of similar shape and force through
any given type of armour the same, regardless of the _width_ of the
penetrating object?
Rick Russell
Hermann <hr_h...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> If fighting in broken or wet terrain, falling even once might be
> enough to end the fight.
Indeed, many polearms were designed for this exact purpose.
A lot of the medieval armor that's survived for modern examination was
not battle armor -- it was ceremonial armor, or perhaps tournament
armor. Neither is optimized for the battlefield. I also suspect that
many contemporary artistic depictions of men in armor were based on
ceremonial armor, not actual battlefield conditions.
I strongly suspect that medieval European battle armors were precisely
what you would expect: chain and loose plate armors backed with
leather or quilting -- just like the armors in Asia, the Middle East,
and the Roman Empire. "Full plate" armor of the type you see in
museums was a rarity, and when it was used it proved to be ineffective
(Agincourt, innumerable battles with the Mongols and the Moors, etc).
Rick R.
magnulus
> d20 *starwars*, however, would track those hits as Vitality damage,
> which doesn't represent injuries but effort spent avoiding injuries.
> I don't like that mechanic very much becuase it has much silliness
under
> the hood.
> But it does look every bit like the movies - so it's not necessarily
> right to say "d20" can't represent what you've seen.
OK... so why do you need medpacks if it isn't real damage? I guess
that's the example of the silliness.
Michael Scott Brown
Of those that were merely wounded, and not incapacitated for their
wounding, their fighting ability is rarely impaired. A game designer would
do well to assume that *heroes* benefit from such circumstances.
-Michael