What Would be the Perfect Realistic-type Tabletop Game?

[Conners]

This thread is about discussing what elements would form the greatest possible tabletop game which attempts to be realistic. That doesn't mean it can't have fantasy elements, of course. Discussions don't need to be in-depth with mechanics--you can present basic ideas, or system you know of which have tried X.

People who are not interested in such a system are welcome to give feedback on ideas presented in the thread. See the spoiler tab at the bottom of this post for more detail.


On the basic level, there are five parts to a tabletop system of this nature. So that you don't have to cover your ideas for a whole system, and to split up our posts making them easier to read, I suggest we put the subject (as determined by the following categories) bolded and centred, above our suggestion.

Quoting and critiquing each other is of course, also part of the discussion.

Spoiler

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If your idea crosses over multiple topics and its hard to separate them, just do "Health & Combat & Fantasy".

Health

This is about injury, death, and medical mechanics. Whether to have HP, or Wound Tracking. Whether to have bleeding mechanics. How quickly players should be healable. It can also relate to how easy it is to die.

Combat

Simply, combat. This is probably the meat of our discussion.

Character

This relates to stuff like character generation, how the skill system works, and other such details.

Social

Basically how interaction should work within the game. Not just Diplomacy and Bluff rolls. Some games have had mechanics for breeding dogs, or holding dinner parties. This is for discussing how much of that would be interesting, as well as how to handle normal Diplomacy/Bluff kinds of situations.

Fantasy

This is for discussing how to handle fantasy elements, in conjunction with realism elements. Stuff like how a magic system should work, how to have "realistic monsters" etc..

For those disliking realistic games:

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The idea of whether one should make a tabletop game with realism as a goal, is not up for debate within this thread. If it was, we could easily get off track, and the discussion defuse.

Instead, you are welcome to give your feedback on mechanics presented in the thread, or that you are aware of from already made realism games. Either as to why you dislike them and it is a negative thing for a tabletop game, or as to why it is an exception and you think it was a good idea.

Looking forward to an interesting and creative discussion with everyone here. Let's see if our gaming experience has paid off!

Will post my own take on things a little later.

[Exediron]

It lives!

I have high hopes for this thread, and hopefully it will attract enough people to really take on a life - and perhaps even make a system when all is said and done.

I mean to begin by addressing some basic questions such as: what makes a system realistic, systems I think do it partially right (or come close) and a few ideas I've already had. I want to devote some time to writing my first contribution and it's late now, so I won't be posting it tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

EDIT: I'm going to be compiling my posts in this thread on various aspects here, so that they can be viewed together:

Weapons and Damage Types [page 3]

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I think a distinction we need to make here is that we're talking about a realistic system here, not a historically accurate system. The way I see it, a realistic fantasy system is a way to apply the laws of the real, physical world (physics) to a fictional world. Therefore the physics of weaponry is relevant - what actual historical weaponry was like, less so.

This post will be devoted mainly to the topic of weapons, with tangential points on damage, wounds and armor:

Damage Types:

Although there are variable and variables to spare, you can break the damaging attacks of an edged weapon down into three pretty broad categories: Chop, Slash and Thrust. You can also bash with an edged weapon, but you aren't really using it as an edged weapon at that point. Arguably every weapon should have the option to Bash, with the effectiveness based on the characteristics of that weapon.

(Descriptions are, of course, somewhat simplified)
A chop is when the edge connects more-or-less straight, with the force going inwards towards the target - the blade is driven into the target. Chopping attacks are tighter than slashes and create deeper, if smaller, wounds.
A slash is when the blade is primarily moving across the target, and the cutting action is caused by the blade slicing the target as it travels across. Slashing attacks create the largest possible wound sizes, but they are often shallower and require large movements to execute.
A thrust is when the weapon is inserted into the target point first, using its point to part the target and allow the blade entry for a significant length. Thrusts are good at penetrating armor and have a greater chance of an instantly fatal wound, but produce less bleeding than chops or slashes.
A bash is any blunt force attack made with the weapon; with a sword this would usually be using the pommel as the contact point, but it could be elsewhere. Bashes bypass most armor and cause concussion damage instead of bleeding.

Each of these broad damage forms corresponds roughly to a type of attack and weapon handling. In general, I think the wielder of the weapon should have the choice of which attack form to use, with the different damage types causing different wounding effects. Most weapons are best at only one or two damage types - the Katana (my own personal weapon of choice) would come out strong on the slash, weaker on everything else. Other weapons wouldn't be able to do some damage types at all. In game system terms, this helps to give weapons more meaningful differences other than just a single pure damage statistic: when fighting an unarmored opponent you might use a slashing attack for maximum damage, but if your opponent has chain mail on you'll have to switch to thrusting (or precision slashing, but I'll cover that later) which your weapon might be much worse at.

Just like weapons have strengths and weaknesses in various damage types, so does armor; chain armor is excellent against slashing attacks, only decent against thrusts and not very good at all against crushing. Most armor doesn't provide equal coverage to the entire body - a mail hauberk may leave the lower arms and legs exposed, and a cuirass leaves the limbs with weaker protections than the torso. There should be some ability to choose not only your attack type but the general target of your attack, with corresponding adjustments to the difficulty of the attack and its results.

Important Weapon Attributes:

In addition to the type and degree of damage they are capable of dealing, there are a few other attributes that are very important to weapons:

Speed: This represents the attack speed of the weapon, how fast it maneuvers, can be moved from offense to defense; it would have an effect on the difficulty of blocking the weapon and perhaps on whatever version of attacks per round exists in the system. If recovery is not a separate attribute, speed would account for recovery.
Reach: An underrated but very important aspect, reach is exactly what is sounds like: the striking distance of the weapon. Note that this is not the same thing as the length of the weapon - it is the distance from which an effective attack may be delivered. The reach of a primary thrusting weapon is always going to be better than a slashing weapon, and the reach of a shield bash is effectively zero.
Recovery: I'm not sure if recovery should be part of speed or not. Recovery is how long the weapon takes to ready for another attack after executing one. A 12lb sledgehammer would have excellent damage, but terrible recovery. Weapons with poor recovery time usually involve large movements to use, are very heavy, or both.
Fatigue: This is how much using the weapon in combat physically drains the wielder. The above mentioned 12lb sledge will very quickly tire its user out, whereas a knife will do so not significantly faster than fighting unarmed.
Blocking Ability: How many ways the weapon has to block an attack, if its strong enough to block an attack, if it can be used to snare an attack, etc. I'm not really sure how to implement this one as a numerical attribute.

An example weapon statistic block might look something like this (the values here are largely arbitrary, since there isn't any system to go with them - I favor a 100 based system, so they're based on that):

Katana
2 pounds, 28" blade, 38" overall
Chop 60
Slash 95
Thrust 60
Bash 30
Speed Good [this would be a number in a real system]
Reach Moderate [this would be a number in a real system]
Recovery Moderate [this would be a number in a real system]
Fatigue Light [this would be a number in a real system]

--=-=--

That's it for this post. I think the ability to make decisions such as area and type of attack ought to not only make combat more realistic, but give back some of the 'options' some people feel are lacking from melee fighters - these are the sort of options a real fighter chooses among, not whether or not to activate their Iron Tiger Heart Blinding Surge or whatever.

Next time I mean to discourse a bit about my thoughts on a basic combat system. I think a realistic system pretty much needs to focus on physical combat and treat magic as an extension of physics, so physical combat is going to be very important. One of the big mistakes D&D makes is treating magic as though it operates on utterly different rules than the rest of the world, rather than just being another way to manipulate those rules - which is more of how I see it. If magic works within the laws of physics (through some dark matter or however else you want to explain it) it helps to keep it scaling at a reasonable pace with physical warriors, and flat-out eliminates some of the more troubling aspects. I'll elaborate on this concept later as well.

[Conners]

Health

I like the idea of keeping track of each body-part's condition. You'd also keep track of which part was how armoured. TRoS even had a system where you could decide which section of your body to focus your defence on, so that could be fun.

Combat

Would love to see some detail put into the combat. TRoS had a good system, where you could pull off a variety of actions and try to outsmart each other.

Games which have different wound charts for different attack types, and armour reacting differently to each type. Someone mentioned such a system in the other thread.

Character

The Lifepath system of burning wheel is probably a good example of character creation.

Skills, on the other hand... I have never been able to work out a good skill system. Will rely on others for help with this.

Social

Rules for commanding armies and maintaining an empire seem distinctly lacking in games.

Having Fable-like hero mechanics, where you can become famous and get involved with politics, armies or suchlike would be good to see. DnD tries it a little, with the Followers thing--but I'd like to see it expanded.

Fantasy

Hmm... maybe inspiration could be taken from The Witcher? Magic is a tricky one, all the same...

Maybe something where anyone can learn magic, though few choose to. After that, its a question of whether your a moderately skilled warrior who knows a few useful spells, of an outright mage who has potential for both great power and versatility?


Sorry if I'm being a little vague. Thought I should throw out some general thoughts to start things off with, before we get deeper into the discussion and mechanics of concepts we like.

[mjlush]

I think you may be well advised to sit back and think what is realistic:-

Is it realistic to:-

• Survive having a 2 inch iron bar fired through the skull
• Fall 18,000 feet without a parachute suffering only a sprained leg or 33000 ft with major injury's
• Accidentally kill your self with a Bow and arrow (in 1552 Henry Pert shot an arrow in the air, and were it landed he was there)
• How Adolf Hitler got into power, seriously if he was a character in a book, it would get shelved right next to Baron Munchausen

The point I'm trying to make here is that Reality is unrealistic sites like Cracked make a living out of this sort of thing. I'm not saying that everything should be resolved on the 50:50 rule, but I am saying that realistic rules should embrace the chance of low probability events.

[Rakmakallan]

As much as I love the idea of realistic (and hard) fantasy and sci-fi made into RPGs, there are only two conceivable ways of this happening: story games and overly-detailed games. In the former case it would be mostly rules-light, possibly GMless and degrees of realism would be incorporated in the game depending on the social contract it presumes. In the latter case, we would need pages upon pages detailing even the most minute detail for weaponry, armours, injury, physical and mental abilities, the nature and laws of magic and so on. For these and for more, we have FATAL.

[neonchameleon]

Do you own a copy of GURPS? That's where I'd start.

[Grinner]

For being an effort at anal-retentive realism, your core assumptions are both simplistic and childish.

You have combat listed as an entire category, but how much of reality is dedicated towards combat? Meanwhile, you have character skills, arguably one of the most essential elements, tucked away into character creation. Combat would comprise an extended contest of innate character attributes, and a few learned skills, and equipment. And when guns are involved? You may as well just flip a coin. Then there's also the complication of ancillary skills. What if the player has a solid knowledge of tactics, but the character shouldn't, or vice versa?

Aside from the issues regarding playability (or the Physics Homework Storytime! Problem, as I like to call it), you must also understand that you cannot accomplish this using extant mechanics, for these mechanics are inherently abstract. For example, what is a skill? Basketweaving is not just knowledge of basket patterns. It's a combination of bilateral finger dexterity, logic, and basket patterns. Hell, a sufficiently clever character could do away with basket patterns altogether or develop his own.

I think you're going about this the wrong way, and what I'm seeing now is the beginning of a fantasy heartbreaker. Your list even looks like the table of contents of a D&D handbook. Just go play GURPS and call it a day.

[Conners]

I think you may be well advised to sit back and think what is realistic:-

Is it realistic to:-

• Survive having a 2 inch iron bar fired through the skull
• Fall 18,000 feet without a parachute suffering only a sprained leg or 33000 ft with major injury's
• Accidentally kill your self with a Bow and arrow (in 1552 Henry Pert shot an arrow in the air, and were it landed he was there)
• How Adolf Hitler got into power, seriously if he was a character in a book, it would get shelved right next to Baron Munchausen

The point I'm trying to make here is that Reality is unrealistic sites like Cracked make a living out of this sort of thing. I'm not saying that everything should be resolved on the 50:50 rule, but I am saying that realistic rules should embrace the chance of low probability events.

I'm OK with modelling interesting stuff. But I don't see how you can model things that bizarre, other than outright plugging them into the game (like, "roll on table of bizarre stuff we looked up").

The falling one isn't too hard though--we just have to have a maximum falling damage (I forget what the maximum falling speed is), which is effected by weight of gear, armour, and what you land on (water isn't a bad one, but you need trees and snow, or some other combination, to survive the really high falls).

As much as I love the idea of realistic (and hard) fantasy and sci-fi made into RPGs, there are only two conceivable ways of this happening: story games and overly-detailed games. In the former case it would be mostly rules-light, possibly GMless and degrees of realism would be incorporated in the game depending on the social contract it presumes. In the latter case, we would need pages upon pages detailing even the most minute detail for weaponry, armours, injury, physical and mental abilities, the nature and laws of magic and so on. For these and for more, we have FATAL.

While I think it is worth going into detail, there is a limit for how far you can reasonably go. Some people have managed to pull off complex systems with a few spreadsheets, and yet get through combat pretty quickly. So, it's mostly a matter of finding that balance.

Do you own a copy of GURPS? That's where I'd start.

GURPS was made with the intention of it fitting any setting, with some adjustments. While it is a great system that does a good job of everything, having something which specializes in one setting/subject/theme has its advantages.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I actually have a rather interesting and realistic LARP that I participate in quite extensively. Here's a link to the rules.

[Conners]

Health

Another possibility, is rather than tracking the health of each limb, wounds are tracked in a vacuum from the the location chart. So, "arm damaged, -2 to combat rolls with that arm." would be on your list of wounds.

The question of bleeding can be annoying to track... even though it's similar to poison in other tabletop games. Probably the fact you rarely deal with poison in most encounters, but bleeding is common.

The other question is how to deal with blows which don't penetrate armour... It's hard to say.


I have ideas for how to manage these things, but some of them seem clumsy. Anyone else have ideas?

[Lorsa]

There's a swedish game called EON which some people say have a "much more realistic damage system". It tracks three kinds of damage; Pain, Trauma and Bleed. Different kind of weapons do different types of damage. Not that EON is a good system to emulate as I believe it having so many inherent flaws that it's almost unplayable and fails at being both realistic and fun.

While I will have to think a bit on how health should work, I can say a few things are characters and their skills.

Many systems end up with starting characters not being very realistic at all. D&D is among the worst here, where an ordinary level 1 character has no useful skills whatsoever, can't craft or have any profession to a relevant level, can't swim or jump, don't know the value of objects around them and has no knowledge of their country's history or traditions. There's plenty of other systems that simply fails to emulate normal people.

As a rule, people in general are rather... well general with their skills. There are experts but even those can usually dance, swim, tie knots, craft, jump, sneak etc etc. A good system I believe, should encourage people have to a decent baseline among many number of skills and supply enough skill points or whatever for this to be feasible. While the Burning Wheel creation system is quite fun to go through and has the added realism of people not being equal (although this depends on how balanced you want the system to be) it is also rather strict and restrictive. You can't be a doctor for just 2 years, or a captive of war for 1. Giving people some pool of points to distribute among their skills is I think more realistic as it allows for a larger amount of backgrounds. So, a good skill system I think will encourage people to be generalists.

[mjlush]

GURPS was made with the intention of it fitting any setting, with some adjustments. While it is a great system that does a good job of everything, having something which specializes in one setting/subject/theme has its advantages.

I think your going to have to define realistic now. If realistic set of rules specializes in a given setting/subject/theme, that rather implys that the rules are reflecting the reality of that setting/subject/theme rather than 'Real Life' (or more to the point Real Life with some, none or more unreal aspects overlaid). From there it is an easy jump to say that Toon is a realistic system as it accurately simulates Tom and Jerry style cartoon action.

To put it another way a realistic set of rules should, with minor modification, be able to be used in any realistic setting there inherently generic

IMHO this is what GURPS does pretty well... in fact the only setting that GURPS fails in is where your trying to be unrealistic. GURPS supers is a case in point (I've not read GURPS Diskworld or Girl Genius but I suspect they are similar)... it covers the gritty realistic supers well, but as soon as you start get into four colour comics the realism gets jarring and the system starts to break down.

[Jeff the Green]

I don't think that you could design a realistic, universal system. Because there are too many stories you could tell, there are too many subsystems you'd have to make. I mean, you could do politics, scientific discovery, war, social interaction (of hundreds of different kinds), athletic competition, survival, interaction with animals...

So really the only approach that might work is a very rules light approach. Maybe even freeform, with a nearly powerless DM.

[Rhynn]

The other question is how to deal with blows which don't penetrate armour... It's hard to say.

I have ideas for how to manage these things, but some of them seem clumsy. Anyone else have ideas?

Well, a whole pile of RPGs deal with these, in different ways.

In HârnMaster, there's rules for armor converting hits from Edge and Point weapons into Blunt (all damage rolls use 1D6, 2D6, or 3D6 based on the severity of the hit, plus a bonus from your weapon, but Blunt requires the most damage points to cause serious injuries, and can't e.g. decapitate or dismember you). In Artesia: Adventures in the Known World, any non-critical hit is "non-penetrating" against plate, and non-critical Cut hits are "non-penetrating" against mail or scale. The main failing of The Riddle of Steel, IMO (and it's a pretty insignificant one), is that armor is always penetrated when you land a successful blow, and many of the results make no sense (i.e. the result almost always requires that the armor was actually punctures or cloven open). This is partly a result of the really specific to-hit tables of TROS.

As for damage, all of those games have their own method. In HârnMaster, you'd record "GB22 r elbow" (grievous bruise, AKA crush, 22 Injury Points - which cause Physical Penalty to all physical skills - right elbow) or "SS16 thorax B1" (serious stab, thorax, bleeding wound 1 meaning you get 1 Blood Loss Point per Turn; BPs cause Physical Penalty; once they exceed Endurance, you go into shock and pass out, and once they exceed twice Endurance you die). Each injury would be recorded separately. HârnMaster is one of those games where you can die of an injury long after the fight, due to complications, but it's intentionally been made unlikely - if you get treatment, you'll probably be fine.

In A:AKW, you'd rather similarly record "groin 8 Cut", or maybe "left arm 8 Impact, Grievous -8 DEX Bleeds" (bleeding is 1 Body point per phase/round/minute based on injury type).

In TROS, you'd record "left hand BL 0 S 7 P 7-X broken" (Blood Loss 0, Shock 7, Pain 7-X; X being your Willpower, Shock being immediate penalty, Pain being permanent penalty and wound severity for healing).

In Aces & Eights, using the Advanced Scrapes rules, you'd record, say "left foot 2" (meaning you're down two hit points; hp basically never improve after character creation) or "right forearm 11 broken bone, bullet lodged, severe bleeding, arm mangled" (a whole host of injury effects that affect your Speed and Accuracy, the use of the arm, etc.). Hit point loss affects Speed and Accuracy, and depending on your Reputation, may force you into cover or to run away. There's a chance to die from poor treatment or lack of treatment, and a fair chance you'll never heal entirely from serious injuries (retiring due to injuries is a perfectly fine fate for a PC, and simply refraining from being a professional gunfighter is okay too). But the game can be played with just the Basic Scrapes rules, which let you have a long life of gunslingin' with no permanent injuries and no chance of death from complications. The game is, after all, supposed to be an old-school D&D style Wild West game, with high lethality. (Based on the Knights of the Dinner Table game parody Cattlepunk.)

GURPS is realistic but has, in some ways, a lesser "resolution" to the modeling than some of the others (except A:AKW, certainly). You have hit points equal to your Health attribute, injuries cause you to lose them (different types of damage have different multipliers for the damage that makes it through armor, and some more exotic types have multipliers for armor, too). Losing HP causes shock (temporary degradation of skills). Losing enough risks unconsciousness. Losing more than enough risks death. And losing a whole lot causes death automatically. (Losing even way more destroys your remains, if possible.) Major wounds (enough HP at once) can cripple limbs. Optionally, injuries may cause bleeding (not fast enough to matter in combat; it's over units of one minute, when combat is in units of one second), and accumulated injuries can cripple limbs.

In Twilight 2013, you'd record "slight, left leg" or "critical, head". Each combination of location (head, torso, arm, leg) and severity (light, moderate, serious, critical) has its specific effects, and each severity has its general effects. Damage is your weapon's base plus your margin of success, and each hit location has a threshold of X points for each severity (based on your attribute scores).


Tracking "limb hit points" is, IMO, very low-resolution "realism." RuneQuest has done it forever, and it's fine, but it's not super-realistic. (Not that RuneQuest is in general. It's strictly impossible for a human to survive 20 stab wounds, for instance.) It just doesn't make a lot of sense - the level of the individual injury is what really matters. I can have 10 shallow cuts on my arm and not have it be useless, and the pain will probably affect anything I do to some degree, so you might as well model universal "pain."


Every one of those systems models a certain kind of combat, though. Even GURPS, which is "universal" but fits best when you want a good degree of gritty realism. (It can be mitigated with advantages and optional rules that add levels of complexity over the base.) Aces & Eights is Wild West gunslinging and knife-fighting (and a whole separate non/less-lethal brawling system). Twilight 2013 is modern small unit combat with firearms. The Riddle of Steel is ancient personal close combat up to the 18th century or so. HârnMaster is Dark Ages to High Medieval (say 8th through 13th century) personal close combat.

If you hope to design a game system, you need to know many game systems thoroughly, understand their goals and how their rules achieve those goals (or fail to; bad examples are okay too). And I mean many, like a dozen or more. Preferrably of similar genres and/or levels of realism as your own goal is.

Choosing at least slightly popular ones (rather than other people's fantasy heartbreakers, or very niche games) is probably a good idea, because it can give you an idea of what level of realism is actually playable. That's absolutely a choice you have to make. All of the above games compromise realism for the sake of getting the results they want, for the sake of playability, and sheerly because you can't get perfect realistic modelling anyway. You have to cut corners in a way that gets the results you want.

[Conners]

There's a swedish game called EON which some people say have a "much more realistic damage system". It tracks three kinds of damage; Pain, Trauma and Bleed. Different kind of weapons do different types of damage. Not that EON is a good system to emulate as I believe it having so many inherent flaws that it's almost unplayable and fails at being both realistic and fun.

While I will have to think a bit on how health should work, I can say a few things are characters and their skills.

Many systems end up with starting characters not being very realistic at all. D&D is among the worst here, where an ordinary level 1 character has no useful skills whatsoever, can't craft or have any profession to a relevant level, can't swim or jump, don't know the value of objects around them and has no knowledge of their country's history or traditions. There's plenty of other systems that simply fails to emulate normal people.

As a rule, people in general are rather... well general with their skills. There are experts but even those can usually dance, swim, tie knots, craft, jump, sneak etc etc. A good system I believe, should encourage people have to a decent baseline among many number of skills and supply enough skill points or whatever for this to be feasible. While the Burning Wheel creation system is quite fun to go through and has the added realism of people not being equal (although this depends on how balanced you want the system to be) it is also rather strict and restrictive. You can't be a doctor for just 2 years, or a captive of war for 1. Giving people some pool of points to distribute among their skills is I think more realistic as it allows for a larger amount of backgrounds. So, a good skill system I think will encourage people to be generalists.

The use of three types of damage might be a good way to go. Hopefully we can avoid the problems which EON presented.

I agree strongly with you on character skills. I've been unhappy with the way games like DnD handles it... The problem is, people end up putting all of their points into skills which they know or think might be useful during the game, and that is almost never a trade skill.
While Burning Wheel's lifepath system seems to do some things quite well, you're probably right that there are problems with the current model. The question is how we get players to invest in a variety of skills...

I think your going to have to define realistic now. If realistic set of rules specializes in a given setting/subject/theme, that rather implys that the rules are reflecting the reality of that setting/subject/theme rather than 'Real Life' (or more to the point Real Life with some, none or more unreal aspects overlaid). From there it is an easy jump to say that Toon is a realistic system as it accurately simulates Tom and Jerry style cartoon action.

To put it another way a realistic set of rules should, with minor modification, be able to be used in any realistic setting there inherently generic

IMHO this is what GURPS does pretty well... in fact the only setting that GURPS fails in is where your trying to be unrealistic. GURPS supers is a case in point (I've not read GURPS Diskworld or Girl Genius but I suspect they are similar)... it covers the gritty realistic supers well, but as soon as you start get into four colour comics the realism gets jarring and the system starts to break down.

Haven't looked at Toon in detail, but it's possible it does closely simulate Tom and Jerry.

On a basic level, some tabletop systems probably do a decent job of this. Generally, though, we probably don't need to make a system which simulates modern war as well as medieval war--that tends to require more abstraction to get it to work non-clumsily. For a system which can portray any setting, GURPS is the best choice. In this case, I merely wish to work with members of the community to create a tabletop system they would love to play, with realism as a major element. My preference is for a medieval type setting, but will be happy with what the community is interested in.

I don't think that you could design a realistic, universal system. Because there are too many stories you could tell, there are too many subsystems you'd have to make. I mean, you could do politics, scientific discovery, war, social interaction (of hundreds of different kinds), athletic competition, survival, interaction with animals...

So really the only approach that might work is a very rules light approach. Maybe even freeform, with a nearly powerless DM.

I agree. If we wanted to do that, GURPS or probably something more rules-lite would be the wise choice. Seems I was not proper in my wording, since people have misunderstood my intention. Sorry about that.

Character

We want players to have normal skills to make their characters interesting, outside of combat and adventure. Question is, how best to accomplish this? Maybe make out-of-combat skills cheaper to purchase points for...?



EDIT: Going to reply to Rhyn. Didn't see his post till after I posted.

[Emmerask]

For Health/Combat I really really like dark eyes system, its complex enough but not so complex that you have to have a chart with countless numbers in front of you.

-You have your overall health, if you get to 5 to zero you are not able to fight anymore if you go below zero you die in d6 rounds.

When your health is below 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 you also get combat ability reduction.

-Your body also has 7 zones (head, chest, stomach, left/right arm, left/right leg), each can sustain 3 wounds that of course reduce your characters abilities in associated fields.

-Each zone is individually armored and the armor value is subtracted from the damage value, if the resulting damage is > 0 your hitpoints are reduced.

-If the damage is > the wound threshold (a number depending on constitution and strength) you get a wound (or more if dmg * 2 > etc).

It sounds all a bit much on first glance, especially if you come from less complex systems like d&d but you can track all this on one tiny diagram with your body
example of the sheet: http://derricks-home.de/images/img_d...Kampfwerte.gif

In my opinion its the perfect balance between complexity and easy to use.
You don´t have to keep track of individual hitpoints for each bodypart while combat still has an effect on you unlike binary systems like d&d where there are only two states, alive or dead ^^.

[Conners]

Tracking "limb hit points" is, IMO, very low-resolution "realism." RuneQuest has done it forever, and it's fine, but it's not super-realistic. (Not that RuneQuest is in general. It's strictly impossible for a human to survive 20 stab wounds, for instance.) It just doesn't make a lot of sense - the level of the individual injury is what really matters. I can have 10 shallow cuts on my arm and not have it be useless, and the pain will probably affect anything I do to some degree, so you might as well model universal "pain."

You're right. I should've thought that idea out better. Sorry about that.

I agree with everything you've said. I'm also very impressed by your knowledge of systems. I hope you'll stay around to help us further.

Health

Thinking about what you said.... hm... Which system do you have preference for, as a base model?

I rather like Harnmaster's system, but I haven't a lot of experience playing it.




@Emmerask: Thank you for mentioning this system. I'll have to take a look at it too, later. What do you think of the systems Rhynn mentioned?

[Lorsa]

I tend to think pain isn't such a big deal in combat as people think. Usually the body blocks out severe pain cause by heavy trauma in order to actually do something (like getting away). It's more likely to be an effect afterwards. Injuries that make parts of your body stop working are more likely to have negative effects, but people have been running with strained ankles and broken bones so in general I seem to think people overly assume realistic implies sever wound penalties. When I broke my arm I hardly felt anything except a strange numbness and when my dad cut off part of his right hand fingers with a chainsaw (at age 18 or so) he was able to walk back from the woods without feeling any pain. If your hand is cut off you won't be able to use a sword but you'd probably be able to run away or fight with your other hand.

Pain is usually an issue after fights and even then if you really focus on something you can mostly ignore it. The headache you can get from an ordinary cold is usually worse than a strained ankle you can't walk on as far as impairing actions (except walking of course).

[Spiryt]

It really depends on situation, starting with determining if given organism is actually "in fight" - if somebody is getting wounded badly without being actually pumped up or frightened, pain will definitely occur.

When I chopped small wound on my calf with an axe I didn't really feel anything at all ever, but if I had hit the bone I would probably hurt my throat yelling.

[Eldan]

Hm. The problem is that with realistic healing, the characters are likely out of order for days to weeks after each bit of combat. With lasting injuries.

Plus things like weapon upkeep, hygiene, disease...

[Emmerask]

I tend to think pain isn't such a big deal in combat as people think. Usually the body blocks out severe pain cause by heavy trauma in order to actually do something (like getting away). It's more likely to be an effect afterwards. Injuries that make parts of your body stop working are more likely to have negative effects, but people have been running with strained ankles and broken bones so in general I seem to think people overly assume realistic implies sever wound penalties. When I broke my arm I hardly felt anything except a strange numbness and when my dad cut off part of his right hand fingers with a chainsaw (at age 18 or so) he was able to walk back from the woods without feeling any pain. If your hand is cut off you won't be able to use a sword but you'd probably be able to run away or fight with your other hand.

Pain is usually an issue after fights and even then if you really focus on something you can mostly ignore it. The headache you can get from an ordinary cold is usually worse than a strained ankle you can't walk on as far as impairing actions (except walking of course).

A wound doesn´t make you unable to fight that is true, though this slight numbness in the broken arm you mentioned for example would mean you are slower/less accurate with your sword-arm resulting in a lower attack or defense score.

@ Connors, well the gurps system is pretty much equal to the dark eye system in a lot of ways, thats not a big surprise since dark eye is more or less a low magic specialized gurps system.

As for most of the others, I think one really has to find the balance between realism and an easy to use system, having to write down every single wound and having to look up what exactly this does is too much imo and will hamper gameplay.

[Conners]

Spoiler

Show

I tend to think pain isn't such a big deal in combat as people think. Usually the body blocks out severe pain cause by heavy trauma in order to actually do something (like getting away). It's more likely to be an effect afterwards. Injuries that make parts of your body stop working are more likely to have negative effects, but people have been running with strained ankles and broken bones so in general I seem to think people overly assume realistic implies sever wound penalties. When I broke my arm I hardly felt anything except a strange numbness and when my dad cut off part of his right hand fingers with a chainsaw (at age 18 or so) he was able to walk back from the woods without feeling any pain. If your hand is cut off you won't be able to use a sword but you'd probably be able to run away or fight with your other hand.

Pain is usually an issue after fights and even then if you really focus on something you can mostly ignore it. The headache you can get from an ordinary cold is usually worse than a strained ankle you can't walk on as far as impairing actions (except walking of course).

Spoiler

Show

It really depends on situation, starting with determining if given organism is actually "in fight" - if somebody is getting wounded badly without being actually pumped up or frightened, pain will definitely occur.

When I chopped small wound on my calf with an axe I didn't really feel anything at all ever, but if I had hit the bone I would probably hurt my throat yelling.

Spoiler

Show

A wound doesn´t make you unable to fight that is true, though this slight numbness in the broken arm you mentioned for example would mean you are slower/less accurate with your sword-arm resulting in a lower attack or defense score.

Hmm... these are good points. The less we have to track pain, the less of a burden it is on combat. But there is the problem that even without pain, stuff like your arm being broken would, I guess, start to have a small to big effect on your combat skill?

The question of how to handle people hurt outside of combat, when their bodies aren't ready, is also worth considering.

Hm. The problem is that with realistic healing, the characters are likely out of order for days to weeks after each bit of combat. With lasting injuries.

Plus things like weapon upkeep, hygiene, disease...

Well, we could try it on the realistic level, then start to work out how much fantasy magic is worth applying for playability. I think this will vary group to group. Some might like the idea of shuffling between several characters, while the others recover.

@ Connors, well the gurps system is pretty much equal to the dark eye system in a lot of ways, thats not a big surprise since dark eye is more or less a low magic specialized gurps system.

As for most of the others, I think one really has to find the balance between realism and an easy to use system, having to write down every single wound and having to look up what exactly this does is too much imo and will hamper gameplay.

The question is, should we aim for ease of use, then see how realistic we can make it? Or see how realistic we can get, then adjust it for ease of use? We might have to start with the latter, since I don't know how to do the former.

Combat

Let's talk about Pain...

Based off earlier comments, perhaps pain should be combined with injury? Rather than calculate wounds separately, it would be considered when writing up the penalties for broken arms and the like?

Does this seem a good idea? Would anyone like to voice some further thoughts on pain?

[Rhynn]

Hm. The problem is that with realistic healing, the characters are likely out of order for days to weeks after each bit of combat. With lasting injuries.

Yes, absolutely. I don't see anything wrong with playing a game where the PCs have to take a few weeks to recover after a fight. Games that don't have D&D's rules aren't played like D&D. Not all fantasy RPGs need to have daily action and fights. Weeks of downtime and "normal living" (either skipped over or filled with just roleplaying, to some degree) are fine. I think fights should punctuate play rather than form the body of it, and this produces perfectly enjoyable games (in fact, I was surprised that my usually hack-and-slashy players enormously enjoyed a pretty combat-light, interaction-and-thinking-heavy game of Artesia).

You see characters dealing with long-lasting injuries in fiction a lot. The recent TV series Copper, ASOIAF, etc. In HârnMaster or TROS, "you're attacked by thugs/assassins while recovering from injuries" is a great scenario - suddenly, your character can't handle a bunch of thugs with knives as easily as he usually could. IMO in Aces & Eights, where characters can't advance forever but campaigns are supposed to be open and ongoing (sandbox, more or less), lethality and permanent injuries help give characters' stories endings - although I personally don't think I'd mind playing an ex-gunfighter who has to try to change his life (and deal with ghosts of the past) after he's injured badly and permanently.

HârnMaster also has a relatively detailed healing system, where you can indeed get infections in your wounds, etc., but unless your character is lying in a Gargûn dungeon (larder) or something, you can always do something when things take a turn for the worse. (Up to and including seeking divine aid.)

That sort of play isn't going to appeal to everyone, but that statement is true of every single RPG ever, and therefore completely irrelevant when the goal is "a realistic RPG." Every set of design goals for a system or a setting is going to rule out a lot of players, and refusing to do that IMO leads to producing crap that does nothing well.

Plus things like weapon upkeep, hygiene, disease...

I don't know any game that has the first (HârnMaster has weapon and armor breakage, but that's in-combat). Same for the second. The third is a part even of D&D, and can be a pretty significant way of challenging players in some games - and why not? (It's an essential part of the challenges of gritty post-apocalyptic survival like TW2013 - being forced to drink unfiltered water means you're exposed to illness, which leads to conflict and to action as you seek medicine or medical expertise... good realistic systems interacting with each other spontaneously generate things for players to do.)

[mjlush]

Haven't looked at Toon in detail, but it's possible it does closely simulate Tom and Jerry.

It does... the thing is its not what most people would regard as a realistic system

On a basic level, some tabletop systems probably do a decent job of this. Generally, though, we probably don't need to make a system which simulates modern war as well as medieval war--that tends to require more abstraction to get it to work non-clumsily. For a system which can portray any setting, GURPS is the best choice. In this case, I merely wish to work with members of the community to create a tabletop system they would love to play, with realism as a major element. My preference is for a medieval type setting, but will be happy with what the community is interested in.

I'm sorry to have to bang on about this but you really really really need to define what you mean by realism. Especially if you want to mesh the rules and world

You say realistic medieval type setting your now working on two kinds of realism

Realism of the setting and realism of the rules.

Realistic medieval type setting basically says to me, the main PC killer is going to be infection. If there is enough magic and/or anachronistic tech sloshing round to prevent that, your going to have to decide how that will affect the rest of the setting.

Frankly you could have the most prefect physiological trauma model (so detailed and complex it will only run on one of the top ten supercomputers), but it will be totally wasted if the setting does not make sense.

Define how the setting works and you can start to make a rules system that will model the setting.

[Rhynn]

Define how the setting works and you can start to make a rules system that will model the setting.

Yup. Game-design sort of has to go top-down, like program design. (I've never heard of anyone coming up with agile methods for game design, but I guess someone might prove me wrong.)

What are you trying to do / model? What are your use requirements and goals? What are your use cases?

What sort of classes / rules modules (Character Creation, Task Resolution, Combat) is that going to involve?

How do these classes / rules modules interact? (How does combat relate to injury & healing? How does magic relate to everything?)

What sort of functions / rules for things (rules for hitting things, rules for parrying things, rules for shooting things) are needed?

How do these functions / rules work together?

What is the specific test of these functions / rules?

[Conners]

I'll answer Rhynn's questions soon, but I think everyone who is interested in the thread should also answer them (including Rhynn). We could compare our answers, and see what we agree on.

[Eldan]

Rhynn: I'm not saying that it's bad. In fact, I quite like some of the ideas, certainly in fiction. I'm just tihnking that it would create a dynamic very different from most RPGs that exist today.

[mjlush]

I'll answer Rhynn's questions soon, but I think everyone who is interested in the thread should also answer them (including Rhynn). We could compare our answers, and see what we agree on.

I'd disagree, I think a certain amount of leadership is in order. Put together a manifesto of what you have in mind, post it and listen and react to the feedback. Throw some ideas out and let them bounce off other people. You are the person most enthused about this idea it is likely that you will be the main author and play tester, I think that gives you the privilege to shape it.

Remember If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.
Charles Kettering

[Rhynn]

Rhynn: I'm not saying that it's bad. In fact, I quite like some of the ideas, certainly in fiction. I'm just tihnking that it would create a dynamic very different from most RPGs that exist today.

Well, from D&D and its kin, certainly, but I'm not sure I'd say "most" ... the D&D-style games are not, necessarily, a majority (they may be a plurality, and certainly have far and away the greatest market-share).

And yes, the different dynamic is exactly it.

One must hink about what dynamic you want, what dynamic the rules create, and how those mesh.

Different dynamics work for different games. If I want to play action-movie style fantasy (the basic late-2E / 3E D&D style), I don't even want bleeding rules, except as a special effect for some attacks. I certainly don't want complicated healing and chirurgery rules, and not even very detailed combat. If, however, I'm playing "Pillars of the Earth/World Without End/Robin of Sherwood" (e.g. HârnMaster), I probably do.

I'll answer Rhynn's questions soon, but I think everyone who is interested in the thread should also answer them (including Rhynn). We could compare our answers, and see what we agree on.

Put together a manifesto of what you have in mind, post it and listen and react to the feedback. Throw some ideas out and let them bounce off other people. You are the person most enthused about this idea it is likely that you will be the main author and play tester, I think that gives you the privilege to shape it.

Yeah, really, mjlush has the right of it. I'm just providing perspective (from owning altogether too many RPG books and having played altogether too many very different kinds of RPGs and having spent altogether too much of my life thinking and writing about RPGs).

I'd suggest you ask yourself what the point of this project is, to begin with. Is it just for its own sake? Do you want a system to play yourself, and none of the hundreds (seriously, and I'm not talking PDF fantasy heartbreakers) out there fit? Do you want to sell one? A project with no drive, no plan, no design document, no one in charge isn't going to go anywhere. Plenty of projects with all of those never do.

I think discussing realism in RPGs is always worthwhile - although, honestly, the realism of societies, economies, and life is IMO much more interesting and fruitful to discuss than the realism of rules and physical modelling, because it's easier to change without writing whole new coherent system. You can make a D&D setting feel real (enough) just by changing what is presented during play and in what manner, without changing the rules at all. But trying to make a game system just to have a (another) realistic one isn't necessarily that fruitful - especially design by committee. (There's a reason that expression is so often derogatory.)

[Lorsa]

And we swedes who are so great at commitees!