Re: Star Wars: Armour and damage: straw poll

On Feb 11, 2:26=A0pm, DougL <lampert.d...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I considered mentioning that it was a shoulder wound. But then I'd
> have felt compelled to launch a tirade about what a nasty wound a shot
> to the shoulder is likely to be in reality.

Especially if done by any sort of 'energy' weapon. From what I've seen
lasers and particle weapons tend to cause explosions when they reach
high enough power levels to immediately and seriously damage a person,
let alone to do so after getting through armor. A shoulder hit should
remove the entire limb and much of the body if done by an effective
military class weapon.

Oddly enough I always thought old show Star Trek did a reasonable job
at times with their weapons. In the first aired show, a miss by a hand
laser causes a grenade like secondary explosion upon impacting a stone
column. Another time a phaser is fired at a piece of equipment someone
was working on with the result that said person took a significant (if
still vastly unstated) injury from the resulting flare of energy
released from the destroyed equipment. Treating stone walls as if they
were pre-warmed butter, Star Trek weapons are the master of one-shot
kills (or one shot disable if set for stun).

But I can't really call Star Wars' poor injury modeling a fault with
the movie, it's more fun if things work the way they show it. It is
Space Opera afterall. And I think a game one way or the other should
mirror it if it's call a Star Wars RPG.

I don't think I've near seen a good genre based reason provided for
the death spiral. That always comes from people wanting to be
realistic without really understanding the subject.

I have seen game play reasons. Those can make sense depending upon the
goals of the game.