The way we've gotten around the issue of the D&D hit-point scenario, in many of the games I've played, is allowing called shots on surprise attacks, if your attack role succeeds...and automatic critical hits, if that's what you're aiming for...and applying some common sense to the results.  If you have a called shot to the neck, and you hit...the guy's dead.  You call a shot to the back of the leg, and hit, the guy is hamstrung and can't do much that involves any sort of leg motion.

RuneQuest/BRP handles it pretty well.  The average person has 10-11 total hitpoints. Each location has a percentage of those hitpoints.  Head, Legs and Abdomen have 33%, Arms have 25% and chest has 40%.

So the guard, if an average person would have 3 hp in his head, legs and abdo, 4 in the chest and 3 in the arms.

A dagger does 1d4+2 damage.  And we assume the hero has is better than the average person so we give him a 1d4 damage bonus.

As long as roll to hit is made, and the guard has light armor (1-3 pts) then the odds are pretty high that the sneak attack will take the guard out.

Its pretty easy to include a rule that says if the target is unsuspecting and the attacker makes his stealth roll that the shot is perfectly placed and does max damage, ignoring armor.  (a critical)

Apocalypse world uses a mechanic called harm. It's essentially 6 HP per entity. The first 3 harm are injuries that heal with time. The 4-5 are real serious injuries; broken bones, massive trauma etc. the 6th hp is "you are dying". All weapons do 1-4 harm. Every time you take harm you make a very simple roll to see if it is worse, better or as established. Most goon NPCs are killed with 1-2 harm, bosses a bit more and real notable NPCs work just like characters.

The narrative aspect of the game/mechanic is what makes it beautiful. In your example above with the thief, the guard would just be dead because he can't defend himself. Period.

You should check it out if you have not read up on Apocalypse World Engine games.

but do those house rules apply to players as well?  Assassins would definitely ruin a players day.  It also makes it very difficult to convey a "dangerous" atmosphere without picking of a player or two each time.

They aren't house rules. They do apply to character vs. character interactions but using them NPC vs. player violates the GM guidelines as it isn't very fun or awesome. The GM has rules to follow and though you could do that, there are better ways. But I don't think getting into details in this thread meets the OPs question.

Happy to discuss it in another thread though :)

Pierre de Craon, 1392, somewhat surprised to learn that his assassination attempt on Olivier de Clisson, Constable of France, had failed.

An exception to every rule.

In reply to gladiusdei (msg # 10):

That comes down to just how realistic you want combat to be.  In the 'real world', there's no such thing as PCs and NPCs and anyone is subject to the same chances of mortality as anyone else.  If you want realism, PCs should die about as often as the people they encounter, unless your PCs are incredibly skilled and the people they deal with are too dumb or too poor to hire someone to take them out.

In most games (that I've played or heard about, at least), there is an expectation that the PCs are 'remarkable' individuals, who are above average (hence the reason PCs don't start out with basic 'mook' stats).  Most games I've played have also strongly suggested that, barring their own suicidal stupidity, PCs should not be killed, as having to make new characters and integrate them into the group kills the joy for some people (not all games are like that...I still remember playing an 'Aliens' RPG, back in college...it stated, very early and very plainly in the rules, that ALL players should make at least two or three characters...because PCs were DEFINITELY going to die.  Our group went in with...fifteen characters, I think?  One survived...the platoon sergeant twisted her ankle jumping out of the APC and had to 'stay with the car'...)

So, typically, no, those house rules do not apply equally to the players' characters.  But they could, if you wanted them to.

Another interesting point to whole "realism" factor is WHERE do you want your realism to occur.  And, I believe this is the beauty of many systems which use hit points or other abstractions: Your realism doesn't have to be in the dice.

Remember - if playing DnD, a to-hit roll doesn't represent a single swing and a single attempt to block with a shield.  It's a series of blows traded, maneuvering, footwork, and (for the most experienced character) watching attack lines in an attempt to find that opening in the defenses.  The attack roll? represents whether that was a real opening or not - when whether or not the attacker (in the attack roll sense) actually go through and landed their weapon somewhere on the target.

In a fantasy milieu we have some extra abstraction that is difficult for us moderns to follow: How the heck does armor work?  Thanks to movies and books - most people just assume that someone wearing anything less than a bunker's worth of plate armor would die to any blow.  However, this would make little sense historically, as MANY people survived combat.  To that end, many good 'ole YouTubers have even attempted to recreated these situations by boiling leather and demonstrating using swords made of modern steel (yes, modern steel can be a heckuva lot sharper than early attempts at metallurgy), and have thoroughly demonstrated that even leather armor could hold-up to more than a few slices in a fight.

The difficulty then becomes: where does one draw the line between the need for speediness of play (in fights), a realistic assessment of 'health', toughness of armor, and overall skill of combatants.

When taking the first example of the assassin vs guard - the concept behind sneak attack damage was to represent the notion that the assassin should be striking a vital area, without the guard having even an opportunity to make USE of the armor (typically because hopefully our would-be assassin has the skill to find a gap in the armor and strike a kidney.)  So - again - hopefully the benefit of this assassination attempt would either preclude the armor's existence, or would have such a high damage multiplier as to improve the odds of a one-hit kill.  Or, at least severely hamper the guard.  Maybe the system also has incapacitation rules?

If you want combat in your RPG that's both realistic and moderately fast to resolve, hand the players a couple of swords (or guns) and tell them that whichever one comes back to you after the fight is the winner.  :p

Two objections:

1.  In play by post, players are often huge distances away.

2.  Roleplaying games should be about CHARACTER skill, not PLAYER skill.

I truly believe BBR's statement was meant to be VERY tongue-in-cheek =).

It was out of his mouth the whole time!

look at the ":p"

;)

nice play!

I think I mostly agree with GamerHandle.

What helps me is a) not to apply combat rules unless they would be fun and interesting and b) not to take terms like "hit" and "damage" literally.

The first part means that in the example with the guard, the challenge (if there needs to be one) isn't rolling high enough and dealing enough damage, but planning and describing the approach to the guard. Or maybe the guard is just one part of a larger challenge. Point being that knifing the guard doesn't have to be handled by the combat rules if doing so doesn't make sense or wouldn't be fun. You kill the guard? Ok, the guard is dead. Now you have one move action in which to sprint across the hall and do the same thing to the other one standing next to the alarm gong. Go.

We like it when everything that involves the same actions can be handled by the same set of rules, because that makes things easy to adjudicate and more fair. The thief just took out two guards, so doesn't that mean he gets full XP for them? Doesn't that mean he can take out every equivalently tough creature that way? The real answer depends on one's own table, but the important thing to realize is that the basic answer is "Not necessarily."

The second part means that, to the degree a system allows it, I don't have to imagine a character taking a half-dozen hits with a greatsword. At most, he takes one, the last one, and everything else is dodged or parried. Or "a scratch" if one insists, though that doesn't always make sense when the attack is a greatsword or a dragonclaw.

Particularly in D&D (and particularly in 4th Edition) this lets me relax about the oddness of combat and lets me think of it more like fights in movies, where a landed blow generally has definite and final effect. And generally the mechanics support this, with a little extra thought: lost hit points don't matter to one's physical ability, whereas being "99% damaged" definitely would. Conclusion: lost hit points don't represent meaningful physical damage, until someone wants them to. Someone could be at 1 out of 250 HP and look hale and hearty - but the next arrow drops them like a sack of fat. Someone could be a 250 out of 250 and look like hamburger, but still be ready to fight on.

That is basically the way I've rationalized it to myself. If you want advice on how to see things my way, let me know. If you just want to challenge the way I see it, please don't bother. I don't for a minute believe anyone else will like to see it my way. I want the existing combat rules to be realistic (at least as much as movies are), so I look for leeway to think of them that way. If someone doesn't, then they won't accept any rationalization. That's up to them.

Thank you for an opportunity to drag out one of my favourite quotes:
«The Combat & Tactics book is a compromise that adds some detail to combat - not to make it more realistic, but to make combat more believable.»
- Rich Backer, Player's Options: Combat & Tactics: Foreword


«There are darn good reasons why people stop fighting after they lose a couple of limbs, why 12th-level fighters don't turn their backs on guys with knives in their hands, and why people ought to be polite to angry folks pointing loaded crossbows at them.»
 - immediately following the previous quote. :)
If what you want is getting rid of the "padded sumo" thing, C&T or WH40k RP are the most obvious examples.
Then there's Iridium System with its hitpoints-by-location and bleeding simulation.

First Edition AD&D had rules allowing an instant kill to an unsuspecting target.  At least, if your character was an Assassin.  Mere Thieves still just got Sneak Attack damage, but truthfully, a first level Thief sneak-attacking a first level Barbarian had decent odds of a one shot kill, strictly by-the-book.  Which is to say, allowing that said Barbarian was as likely to have 3 HP as 17, because re-rolling ones on your hit die was only a universal house rule and the chances of an 18 CON were actually quite slim.  I've certainly never seen a first level Barbarian with less than 10 HP, but that's because everybody read the rules and then politely agreed that if we were all cheating, it wasn't really cheating.

Hit points are, for the most part, a pacing mechanism. Someone decided that things would be more fun and interesting if most attacks (particularly those toward the PCs) weren't likely to be instant kills. But there's always been a tension there, especially with players who want to deal more and more damage while facing less and less risk.

I liked 4th Edition's approach with minions. Rather than relying on random HP rolls to provide a few easy-kill monsters, some were just designated as having one "1 HP." Really all this meant was that any successful attack took them out, but the clever bit was that missed attacks had no effect on them. This meant that they didn't necessarily all drop against the first damage-on-a-miss that came along.

This doesn't necessarily solve the issue with the sneaky rogue, especially since it means that their sneak attack isn't vital to success - anyone can kill a minion guard in one blow. What one could do though is make things hinge on the PC's skill (however one handles that), by having a successful sneak mean that the target is a minion, and a failed sneak mean that the target is a regular enemy. The sneak attack would help, but wouldn't make up for the earlier failure - now there's risk for the thief.

Savage Worlds ??  For guns, Phoenix Command - if you can find it.  Shoot yourself in the head, you're dead.  I think they did a medieval variant called Swords Path Glory.  Vaguely like Rolemaster, but somewhat different.  They are buried lord-knows-where in the basement, more like stand along combat systems.

Savage Worlds depends a lot on which setting and variant rules you use.  The standard combat is fairly "pulpy" in that most Wild Cards can usually survive say getting shot, but it can pretty easily recreate a pretty realistic situation if some of the suggested rule variations from SWDX are used.

It is actually a very good system for a low powered "dark" fantasy imho, because it avoids that "trading hitpoints" phenomenon.

In Palladium, if you use the system where the hit points and structural damage capacity is broken up between the head, body, arms, legs, hands, and feet then it is not hard to take someone out.

30 hp/sdc gives

8 Head (round up fractions)
15 Main Body
3 Each Leg (2.1 rounded up to 3)
2 Each Arm (1.2 rounded up to 2)
1 Each Hand and Foot

I don't want to yank my own chain, but the way I roleplay combat stuff is something that I would say is "advanced roleplay" or something like that. Pretty much, you want to balance fantasy and realism and have a trust that everyone fighting will logically and realistically respond.

That last part is what ruins this system. I'm not saying people are bad, but people have different skills, etc when it comes to different fields of roleplay. Where one person would know that a blow staggers them, another person won't. Plus, people who form bonds with their characters, no matter how good the roleplayer, can often or sometimes try and metagame subtly to prevent character death.

Tl;dr:
In a perfect world of perfect RP, we wouldn't need systems to regulate what occurs when a certain amount of damage is take. In order to add realism to the mix.

Or something. I'll be honest I'm just trying to sound helpful and/or smart when I know I'm not right now.

I think what's being overlooked is the meta POV.

What are we supposed to be modeling combat on?  If combat is more realistic, and if it's a two-way street, you kosh someone on the head, they go down.  But that can happen to you, too.  If it's just a function of, say, hit location (and the tasty big multiplier) then the bad guys will be looking to sneak up on you, or aim for your liver and if you're on the receiving end of a lucky twist of the die, will you really be celebrating the realism?  (IME, decidedly not.)

So maybe what we need to be addressing is who this applies to.  In some games there are "minion" rules.  This is what occurs in fiction: the hero takes on five mooks and wipes them all out. The rule is there to make your hero look awesome.  Minions are just there to slow you down a little, and maybe put up some measure of resistance if the odds aren't ever in your favor.

This is appropriate for taking out unnnamed characters because that's what happens in the fiction.  Named characters basically get the benefit of the doubt and you have your fight.

For cinematic RPGs (supers/fantasy) independent of system, unnamed characters should go down more easily than named characters.

I'd suggest GURPS. It is module with lots of different switches. There are gritty and realistic switches and there are cinematic and over-the-top switches. But you can certainly have a realistic combat experience with it. If you know the rules, I find it isn't slower than D&D either.

I was awful fond of the combat in Deadlands Classic. Exploding dice for no upper damage limit, progressive penalties for injury, everybody gets maimed and killed with virtually the same amount of damage, but the fate chip system is there to make the Heroes more survivable. Had a great pulp action feel!