Not that AD&D does any better, but if you’re in a fight and you’ve exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn’t trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes’ state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is—well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it’s really hard to build a multiplayer game that’s actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven’t had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there’s an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn’t clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I found the rules of Shadowrun the most realistic and also playable, Second Edition if I remember right, I didn’t keep up - I just hate the setting and the artwork with a fury. I don’t remember all the exact details, but splitting damage into stun and health, having damage an effect on your abilities, rerolling sixes so that with good luck a weak weapon can do a lot of damage, damage modified by weapon skill (accurate aiming), adding inborn ability to learned skill together (not the most realistic but better than nothing), having dice pools reflecting what you pay more attention to, and the cleverly cinematic karma pool, are all things that seem like cinematic realism to me and IMHO playable. If only the rules were more open source like the d20 and used in different settings that make more sense… having both technology and magic is not necessarily a bad idea but somehow the Shadowrun world manages to make it very childish, and the novels that introduced the world are pretty much the weirdest fantasy I have ever read, just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?...
just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?
A liberal/progressive trying to make a “sympathetic” fundamentalist Christian, i.e., one sympathetic from the prog point of view.
Not that AD&D does any better, but if you’re in a fight and you’ve exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn’t trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes’ state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is—well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it’s really hard to build a multiplayer game that’s actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven’t had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there’s an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn’t clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I found the rules of Shadowrun the most realistic and also playable, Second Edition if I remember right, I didn’t keep up - I just hate the setting and the artwork with a fury. I don’t remember all the exact details, but splitting damage into stun and health, having damage an effect on your abilities, rerolling sixes so that with good luck a weak weapon can do a lot of damage, damage modified by weapon skill (accurate aiming), adding inborn ability to learned skill together (not the most realistic but better than nothing), having dice pools reflecting what you pay more attention to, and the cleverly cinematic karma pool, are all things that seem like cinematic realism to me and IMHO playable. If only the rules were more open source like the d20 and used in different settings that make more sense… having both technology and magic is not necessarily a bad idea but somehow the Shadowrun world manages to make it very childish, and the novels that introduced the world are pretty much the weirdest fantasy I have ever read, just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?...
A liberal/progressive trying to make a “sympathetic” fundamentalist Christian, i.e., one sympathetic from the prog point of view.