On Mar 10, 11:21 am, mkkuh...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Mary K.
Kuhner) wrote:
> One place where I know that I, as a player, do *not* want
> realism is in the handling of injury. I know that recovery
> from even small injuries is timeconsuming and painful and
> may leave permanent impairments. But I would rather, in this
> respect, that games were like action movies. And it's not very
> confusing, because most people have plenty of experience with
> the Hollywood conception of injury (in fact, many people have
> more experience with it than with realistic conceptions of
> injury, at least while they are young).
>
> Realistic injury rules have been tried in various games
> (Harn springs to mind) and some people enjoy them, but many
> don't. I think that for most players there are large areas
> where they actively do not want realism, as well as other
> areas where they need it badly. One can hope for a group
> with fairly compatible needs.
I don't know anyone who wants to play realistic injury rules, although
somewhere I am sure someone does want that.
>
> Saving the best attack for last would be borderline for me.
> It's not a genre convention I've really internalized and
> I would have to make a deliberate effort, though having
> Hong Kong movies as a guide would help a lot.
Writing the rules for it would be a headache I think. Using as a
specialized option for a certain type of character might be
interesting. On the other hand, things you save for last are things
you often don't get to use. Sometimes that is for a good reason: you
have already triumphed.
On a strategic level, this is not an uncommon idea. "I won't use spell
'X' for this encounter unless it goes really sour. We have to overcome
'Y' when we get near our goal and I can't do it twice, at least in the
near future." Whether it's a spell or an enchanted crossbow bolt, the
principal is the same.
An individual combatant might have a technique that could be best used
after she knows her enemy's vulnerability and it would be used late in
a fight. That would be a factor of her style of fighting.
> Finding out, now and then, that a fight is too hard only
> after I've gotten into it, on the other hand--that maps so
> well to my real-life experiences that it doesn't strike
> me as all that unrealistic. Sometimes you just make
> mistakes. Two teenage muggers tackled the head of one of
> Florida's aikido schools a while back. (She re****ts that
> after they got up and ran away, she wanted to shout after
> them, "Come back! I could do so much more than that!")
KNOWING you can get out of a difficult fight and having it be a
regular part of your way of doing things is an extremely unrealistic
mind-set. Your example involves non-lethal combat. In fact, all
examples from unarmed combat are rather tenuously connected to the
level of violence in an RPG.
Here's another example of a real-world mistake of this kind: two men
see a man smacking a child around. They hustle up to the guy to say
something, perhaps intervene physically. He draws a pistol and shoots
one of them. The other one runs. If the player-characters realize that
making a mistake can easily have drastic consequences, I have no
problem at all with the idea that someoties it won't.
Finding out that your opponents in a barfight are going to be your
brand-new inlaws was one of the best examples of this kind of non-
lethal error that I remember. It wasn't in my campaign but my
character had to explain it to his bride.
> And in the kinds of situations that arise in games it
> seems remarkable that your players can always avoid it.
Of course they can't always avoid it. The consequences when they don't
avoid it is that they have a hard fight. Fortunately for them, they
rarely meet anyone who is an even match for them.
> Are they really capable of ensuring, every time, that there
> are no unexpected reinforcements, no highly-capable
> people travelling incognito, no treachery in their own
> ranks, and no magical surprises? Also, doesn't losing a PC
> to an early lucky blow sometimes change a good-looking
> fight into not-so-good?
All very true. The idea is that one can try to avoid unfavorable
fights, not that it will always work.
Will in New Haven
--
"This ring, no other, was made by the elves, who'd pawn their own
mother to grab it themselves..." <Bored of the Rings>
> Mary Kuhner mkkuh...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
