Quote from: Claudius;337214But if you roll the hit location die at the same time that you roll the damage die, you don't waste any time, don't you?

Indeed, in our RQ games we quickly learned to roll to hit (d%), location (1d20), and damage (usually some combination of d4s, d6s, and d8s) all at once and ignore the 2nd and 3rd if the 1st was a miss. WFRP was even simpler because hit location is the same d% roll as to hit, inverted (so 38 to hit = location 83).

Hit location systems need to be results focused. Just like a hit point system, you need to look at how serious you want wounds to be, what will take someone down, etc. All too often, hit location systems look at the nuts and bolts and come up with an incomplete simulation of real-life injury which is very complex and unpredictable. GURPS really didn't get it right until fourth edition. OTOH, Hero System kept it simple and generally works ok.

I have a house rules cyberpunk/bladerunner game that uses hit locations and they have never been an issue. The character sheet has the hit location outline on it and each of the 20 locations has a hit point score based ont eh pCs hit points so the left chest area has 100 % of hit points the hand has 50% when an area is reduced to 0 hit points effects vary from head = dead, chest = unconsious and bleeding .. etc
when shooting you can aim for a locatiion by aiming for a round (no penalty to hit) or take a - to do it on the fly. In melee combat you always name the location you are aiming at and if its one of the 2 your opponent is blocking (3 with martial arts) then your strike is blocked.
When you are firing at a target under cover or lying prone then cover 'works' because if you hit an area that is protected by cover etc then well you miss.

I devised a hit location system becuase I found guns killed people really easily. the gun damage was extraoplated from the momemtum of the round and typically a shot from a 9mm killed 60% of the time. The hit location system meant that locations when out fast. Legs rendered useless etc but people lived longer which made the game more playable rather than less.

I like systems where hit locations become involved in criticals.  I don't care whether I hit a guy in the stomach for 2 points, I care whether or not I disemboweled the son of a bitch.

Quote from: T. Foster;337217Indeed, in our RQ games we quickly learned to roll to hit (d%), location (1d20), and damage (usually some combination of d4s, d6s, and d8s) all at once and ignore the 2nd and 3rd if the 1st was a miss. WFRP was even simpler because hit location is the same d% roll as to hit, inverted (so 38 to hit = location 83).

The above or the below is where I've seen it work.

Quote from: jrients;337231I like systems where hit locations become involved in criticals.  I don't care whether I hit a guy in the stomach for 2 points, I care whether or not I disemboweled the son of a bitch.

Personally, I roll hit location only on criticals, using a very low granularity 1D10 head, chest, arm, leg ± modifier depending on facing.  For non-critical hits I view hit points as more abstract.

Hit locations work fine in Boot Hill and Flashing Blades, and the miniscule amount of time added by reading another die is more than outweighed by interesting consequences of getting shot in the arm or stabbed in the eye.

As a GM, I can take or leave hit locations. Mostly I like them. I prefer to play with hit locations, because it adds a lot to my suspension of disbelief. I'm not as good a player as I am a gm, so  like when the rules give me some details like that to make combat feel a little more real.
I really liked the games I've played that have elaborate wounding, like Millennium's End. I like fairly elaborate location charts, like TriTac and Metal Magic and Lore. I like locations built into crit charts, like Rolemaster and Arduin. I even like a simple d6 roll on a hit location die for simple games that don't have built in ht location.
The only thing I don't like is when there's a formula for hit location that becomes so transparent in play that it becomes tedious.

Quote from: jrients;337231I like systems where hit locations become involved in criticals.  I don't care whether I hit a guy in the stomach for 2 points, I care whether or not I disemboweled the son of a bitch.

This.

The game I'm writing has a single pool of hp and a massive damage threshold. When people beat the massive damage threshold, they roll randomly for wounds. These can be arms, legs, vitals, stunning, knockback, whatever. Can't wait to playtest it.

Quote from: jrients;337231I like systems where hit locations become involved in criticals.  I don't care whether I hit a guy in the stomach for 2 points, I care whether or not I disemboweled the son of a bitch.

Fucking right.

RPGPundit

The problems that occur in many "hit location" games are the following:

1. The fiddly nature of what each type of hit in each type of location will do; because if you're going a little "realistic" then logic kind of demands you go further. Thus, you slow down the game considerably.

2.  That this allows for the game to become much more potentially imbalanced, there's far more areas where you could figure out a "cheat", and crafty players, once they figure out that a called shot to the right-eye is the best possible location to attack, will ALWAYS be attacking nothing but the right eye.
Unless you rule that hit locations always must be totally random, or give ridiculous levels of penalties so that there's effectively no chance of hitting that area (which is the same as just saying "fuck it" and not using locations in the first place), both of which are stupid from the pov of emulation.

So both these things create "shocks" to the game that actually harm the opportunity for good immersion, it would seem.

RPGPundit

Hit location system can work, but they only do so when they are included to  enhance an aspect of the background for the game - in other words, to deepen immersion. For example, the hit location system in WFRP serves to reinforce the 'grim, gritty and dangerous'  background for the game. I used to play the original version of Boot Hill quite a lot back in the day, and it had a hit location system that allowed good shots to pick or modify where they hit – which we found both worked well and was very appropriate for emulating the spaghetti westerns we based our games on.

Where hit location systems fail is when they are included in a game 'for their own sake', usually just because the designer wants to show off his rules-writing skills, and not because the game actually needs them. This 'game designer fuck-wittery' (as a friend of mine would put it) is almost always counter-productive, for the reasons that RPGpundit has already outlined.

I've never found hit locations to be a problem.

GURPS' and Millennium's End's implementation of them was overly-complicated, but GURPS and ME were overly-complicated to begin with, so hit locations did not provide any noticeable bumps in the flow of play, which was already bouncing along like a four-wheel-drive with broken suspension on a dirt track.

Who made that transparent targeting grid you could place over various target silhouettes... and then roll your dice on... where the dice landed determined the hit location? Was that for Millenium's End?
I always thought that looked simultaneously interesting and gimmicky... like maybe it would work quick and easy, but would probably just be a pain in the ass.

Quote from: Simlasa;337330Who made that transparent targeting grid you could place over various target silhouettes... and then roll your dice on... where the dice landed determined the hit location? Was that for Millenium's End?
I always thought that looked simultaneously interesting and gimmicky... like maybe it would work quick and easy, but would probably just be a pain in the ass.

Three variants of that mode I am aware of.

Millienium's End
Warhammer 40K
Aces & Eights

Quote from: Simlasa;337330Who made that transparent targeting grid you could place over various target silhouettes... and then roll your dice on... where the dice landed determined the hit location? Was that for Millenium's End?

Yes, in ME. There was a transparent overlay with dots and numbers, and you'd put the overlay over a figure with hit locations on it, the "0" dot the exact point of aim.

You'd roll under your percentile skill with modifiers. If you got under or exactly on that number, you'd hit on the "0" point. If you missed by (say) "10", you'd hit on the "10" point. The point were clustered around the "0" point of aim. This was to represent the fact that in firing, though you may miss the point you aimed at, you might hit something close by.

You then understood why soldiers and police officers aim for "centre of mass" of the target - in a face-on person standing upright, about the solar plexus, where the sternum ends and belly begins. That's because even if you don't hit that point, you're likely to hit something. Whereas if you aim at (for example) the head, if you miss by more than a few inches, you miss them entirely.

This also made it interesting when someone was using a human shield.

They had a melee version for "swing" weapons, where the dots were clustered in a line rather than scattered about a point.

With both the firing and the swing, the GM placed the overlay, so that aiming at the solar plexus and missing by "10" did not always mean hitting them in the left shoulder, or whatever.

QuoteI always thought that looked simultaneously interesting and gimmicky... like maybe it would work quick and easy, but would probably just be a pain in the ass.

That part was quick and easy - or as quick and easy as would be looking up a hit location on a chart.

The complicated part was having different effects for striking the different body parts, which each had different resistances or vulnerabilities to injury of various kinds. There were modifiers and a chart for it, of course