Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter > Tabletop Design - The Senet House
Disabling strikes in game rules
Jubal:
One thing I was mulling over - a logical point but one I've not thought on much before - in a recent ACOUP post about spears was the importance of disabling over killing in battle. In other words, the key aim is not to ensure death, but to ensure rapid loss of fighting ability, and those things are similar in that they generally both involve killing people but they're not the same in that a pointy neat stabby killing weapon like a rapier will not necessarily make someone lose their fighting ability quite as fast as something that destroys muscles or simply cuts a limb off, and even if that difference is measured in seconds, those might be the seconds that let someone else poke a pointed object rather hard into you.
This feels like something that few game mechanics model in any sense: I've seen health as generic pools, and I've seen systems that try to model effects limb-by-limb (though that's slow and clunky to run in most games). But I think I'm yet to see a game model that accounts for the relative disabling-ness of different weapons. Has anyone seen such a thing and can anyone think how one might separate those concepts? Would that be a useful thing to do in games (and would it make for a more accurate combat model to begin with really)?
Spritelady:
This seems to me to be an interesting aspect of a debate that I find intriguing generally, which is how to create a combat system that makes sense, is practical to run in a TTRPG (ie is not super clunky and slow, such that it maintains the sense of urgency and excitement that a combat encounter generally should have), AND usefully models 'realistic' elements of an actual fight.
It also touches on the subject of how to make melee characters interesting (especially at higher levels), and in particular, how to functionally distinguish between weapon types (which is something that I feel DnD 5e lacks, and I am not hopeful about the system that One DnD attempted to introduce to supposedly rectify this situation).
I certainly think that introducing ways for weapons/attacks to disable an opponent would be an interesting component to a combat system, although I can't immediately think of a good way to do so that wouldn't mostly just be flavouring the concept of depleting an enemy's pool of health.
dubsartur:
--- Quote from: Spritelady on November 21, 2023, 05:21:16 PM ---It also touches on the subject of how to make melee characters interesting (especially at higher levels), and in particular, how to functionally distinguish between weapon types (which is something that I feel DnD 5e lacks, and I am not hopeful about the system that One DnD attempted to introduce to supposedly rectify this situation).
--- End quote ---
Ironically 1e D&D had mechanisms for that in its table of bonuses and penalties to hit depending on the weapon and Armour Class. But the biggest issue has always been that D&D combat is so abstract and is hard to believe in if you think too much about the details of how the paladin is fighting the dragon or how the rogue in the middle of the room survived the fireball (and shouldn't it set the house and furnishings on fire? what about smoke penalties? does a Fireball in this edition create pressure which could blow the roof off?) Its also easy to accidentally make one weapon clearly superior in game-mechanical terms and that can annoy players who have a vision of their character using a specific weapon.
Grappling is the main way to disable people in real combat, and Doug Cole takes the view that people rarely grapple in RPGs because the mechanics are clunky and annoying. He created his own rules modules to solve this. Another solution is the High Medieval solution: give everyone who matters a complete covering of mail and weapons that don't thrust through mail well, and let them batter and bleed each other until one can't fight (the ordinary people who can't afford all that labour-intensive armour get a hand or a leg chopped off and die in the background while the people who matter are bashing it out).
RPGs often have a rule for 'nonlethal damage' which is not our world's physics and biology but can be a game world's. Its pretty common in pulp and supers settings that people can be punched, kicked, and clubbed without lasting effects.
GURPS has been pretty good at weighting its combat to disability rather than death, and giving rules options for weapons which make a small deep hole (high Armour Divisor but low Wounding Modifier), but their rules for combat with edged weapons have some 'legacy code' from Steve Jackson asking SCA members in the 1980s. And as the quality of backyard experiments improves, we are seeing some unheroic things like 'this blade shape can penetrate that armour in a random man's hands, that blade shape won't penetrate if you give it to an Olympic athlete.' A lot of people like the tropes of the bare-chested barbarian or the short slender woman fighter and don't want to hear that one of the biggest benefits to being strong is that you can wear more armour and move better in it.
Nobody in a RPG wants to hear 'you survived the fight but with internal bleeding and you die of an infection 1d6 months later' but that happened a lot in the sixteenth century (eg. poor Luis Mendoza on the Magellan Expedition)
Jubal:
--- Quote from: dubsartur on January 10, 2024, 01:16:04 AM ---Grappling is the main way to disable people in real combat, and Doug Cole takes the view that people rarely grapple in RPGs because the mechanics are clunky and annoying. He created his own rules modules to solve this. Another solution is the High Medieval solution: give everyone who matters a complete covering of mail and weapons that don't thrust through mail well, and let them batter and bleed each other until one can't fight (the ordinary people who can't afford all that labour-intensive armour get a hand or a leg chopped off and die in the background while the people who matter are bashing it out)
--- End quote ---
Would the bit about grappling hold true on a battlefield? I'd have assumed that in a combat with multiple opponents, the penalty of exposing yourself to strikes from your opponents' surrounding men would be sufficiently great that most of the time people wouldn't be that keen to initiate grapples and would rather stabbing and shield bashing if they had to be shorter than spear distance, because those things (at least I'd have assumed) keep you in a better upright posture for when the next opponent comes in at you.
dubsartur:
--- Quote from: Jubal on January 12, 2024, 02:39:54 PM ---
--- Quote from: dubsartur on January 10, 2024, 01:16:04 AM ---Grappling is the main way to disable people in real combat, and Doug Cole takes the view that people rarely grapple in RPGs because the mechanics are clunky and annoying. He created his own rules modules to solve this. Another solution is the High Medieval solution: give everyone who matters a complete covering of mail and weapons that don't thrust through mail well, and let them batter and bleed each other until one can't fight (the ordinary people who can't afford all that labour-intensive armour get a hand or a leg chopped off and die in the background while the people who matter are bashing it out)
--- End quote ---
Would the bit about grappling hold true on a battlefield? I'd have assumed that in a combat with multiple opponents, the penalty of exposing yourself to strikes from your opponents' surrounding men would be sufficiently great that most of the time people wouldn't be that keen to initiate grapples and would rather stabbing and shield bashing if they had to be shorter than spear distance, because those things (at least I'd have assumed) keep you in a better upright posture for when the next opponent comes in at you.
--- End quote ---
I guess I was starting out from "disabling without killing."
When you are fighting with weapons you often want to keep your distance becuse distance is time and time lets you realize something is coming at you and react. But by sometime in the fourteenth century, someone in western European armour was immune to most weapons powered by muscles. Very stiff narrow-pointed weapons like some kinds of arrows or daggers might get through mail on a solid hit, and something like a two-handed axe or hammer might break a neck or cause a concussion, but the vast majority of hits will be ineffective.
At that point you start seeing a lot of grappling because its easier to stab one of the places which are not quite invulnerable if the stabee is restrained (and you can get into grappling distance safely because of your own armour). It also gives you options like throwing them off their horse so the poor guys on foot can finish them off or disarm them while they are trying to sit up in thick mud while horses step on them (plus you can take their expensive horse!) Between about 1350 and 1450 we see a lot of pictures like this.
Mr. Golden Garter can easily let go if he needs to defend himself, until then he or a friend can beat on his partner's neck and armpit and back like a pinata
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