When human brains work as CPUs, then true sims can happen at the tabletop.

I think others have touched on this, but the reason is almost certainly because--in general--combat evolved into the focus of activity in RPGs. As such you needed it to be articulated, extended, and detailed, and you needed to give PCs not only a fair shake but a good deal of control.

It might be possible to achieve some of that in a realistic manner, but designers, GMs, and players by and large haven't found a better way than progressive injury.

A skirmish wargame can probably retain interest using a system of hit => roll a save => no effect or hors de combat because there are a lot of figures on a side, individual mortality is acceptable, and interesting terrain is probably a given, as is morale. This means the players will see a continuously evolving situation as the combat continues, with multiple decision points.

In an RPG one-on-one combat with a similar system, you basically have "nothing happens for a while, and then it's over". Hit points, or the slightly elaborated death spiral concept, give you a chance to see something happening over time, to which you can react.

That's not to say there aren't games that do "realistic" combat, and I'm sure there are games that give greater mechanical and non-mechanical emphasis to the soft factors of combat, individual maneuver, or non-combat activities, but I feel these are the reasons that most games take the approach of gradually wearing down combatants' physiques.

Albedo is another RPG with more realistic, and pretty damn lethal damage. It also has fatigue and combat panic as elements the PCs have to face. And post combat stress too on top of that. So you might survive the conflict (after possibly a long stay in the hospital even with advanced medical) but are a nervous wreck after.

CHAINMAIL has a realistic combat system.  You get hit with a halberd, you die.

And after one or two adventures Dave Arneson started fiddling with it to make player characters live longer.  In, oh, 1971.

Damn.  It's a fucking game, not a medical simulation.

Quote from: CRKrueger;935969Dude, Phoenix Command!

Bio One, years earlier.  Your character is shot, spend ten minutes rolling dice to determine how he is incapacitated or dead.

Because the odds of him being neither after a hit from a bullet is about 3 to 5%.

Never played Traveler but damn that's elegant. Very impressed.

It sounds like you just need a system with vitality/wounds and a hefty death spiral on the wounds.  (Not nearly so bad as a straight death spiral, because the wounds aren't affected often.)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;936005CHAINMAIL has a realistic combat system.  You get hit with a halberd, you die.

And after one or two adventures Dave Arneson started fiddling with it to make player characters live longer.  In, oh, 1971.

Damn.  It's a fucking game, not a medical simulation.

Hahaha, I wanted to post the same thing:
In Chainmail, you (an individual in a unit) are either Up or a Casualty.
Unless you are a Hero, then you fight like X individuals (& take that amount of "hits" to kill).

Once it went from 1d6 Casualties per attack in mass combat to 1d6 "points of damage for a hit" in individual combat (note also the shift from 1-minute rounds to 6/10 second rounds), it left the old scale of play but kept a lot of the abstraction of the old scale. It's an odd "artifact" of how the D&D line evolved.

In my experience, players love to roll on critical charts and dealing pain and woe to those foes that they face.  However, they are loath to have those same critical charts rolled against them.

Quote from: RunningLaser;936038In my experience, players love to roll on critical charts and dealing pain and woe to those foes that they face.  However, they are loath to have those same critical charts rolled against them.

Agreed. The players tend to forget that critical hit and fumble tables are a "double-edged sword".

If that was a pun, it was intentional. And not a very good one at that.

(hangs head in shame)

I think a lot of games in tge 80s and 90s tried to capture more realistic approaches to this. Since I am not a medical expert in any way, no idea how successful they were. Most of them were a bit on the complex side. I think these days most gamers want something quick and most of their understanding of bodily injury is informed by the movies. If you can make a fast and intuitive, realistic system, people might like it. One thing though, realistic doesn't always equal more fun. I tried making unarmed combat rules for years that were informed by my experience from martial arts and full contact sparring. I was able to come up with stuff that matched what I felt was real, but I quickly realized that didn't resonate with most players. So I ended up junking the whole idea. You also run into people with similar expertise and experience disagreeing bitterly on how best to model it mechanically. You might run the risk of making a mechanic only EMTs and emergency room doctors appreciate if you are not mindful of that sort of thing.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;936005....

And after one or two adventures Dave Arneson started fiddling with it to make player characters live longer.  In, oh, 1971.

..

Gronan, since you were there did Dave ever use the hit location stuff that is in the Blackmoor supplement?  If s,o how did it work out?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;936040I think a lot of games in tge 80s and 90s tried to capture more realistic approaches to this. Since I am not a medical expert in any way, no idea how successful they were. Most of them were a bit on the complex side. I think these days most gamers want something quick and most of their understanding of bodily injury is informed by the movies. If you can make a fast and intuitive, realistic system, people might like it. One thing though, realistic doesn't always equal more fun. I tried making unarmed combat rules for years that were informed by my experience from martial arts and full contact sparring. I was able to come up with stuff that matched what I felt was real, but I quickly realized that didn't resonate with most players. So I ended up junking the whole idea. You also run into people with similar expertise and experience disagreeing bitterly on how best to model it mechanically. You might run the risk of making a mechanic only EMTs and emergency room doctors appreciate if you are not mindful of that sort of thing.

Another part of these complex systems is the slow things down so much you lose the feel of things happening quickly and somewhat chaotically.  It turns combat into something more akin to filling out tax forms.  

I think a better way to get the realism, and simulate the detriments of combat, is to hit the player smartly with a stick each time they are hit.  This way it is more than just numbers on a page  And if they die, well no beer and snacks for them for the rest of the game...I mean character death has really got to hurt.

Quote from: CRKrueger;935969Dude, Phoenix Command!

Thank you! Today, you are my hero.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;935989Was that example hyperbole, or is Phoenix Command really that detailed? :eek:

It is pretty detailed--everything in that example, as far as I can recall is real. And the example is simplified. When I first read Phoenix Command decades ago, I thought it would be awesome for a combat simulation computer program, because that's the only way to make it work "real-time". A tablet app would be awesome for it.