I should start by saying that whatever we end up playing it's all good. I have played and enjoyed diceless and lightweight systems. I feel the result points system is almost identical to diceless as it happens, and that's OK. ROFL stomping our way through the scenarios can be fun. I want to do RP more than combat
So here this is just about games design and rules. I like games design and rules. I am a mathematician by trade, and I like modeling the real world, or modeling 'movies and comics'. There is emotion attached to this, because I get excited about modeling things, but the level of emotion is that of a 'chat in a pub over a beer'.
Aiming
It's the moment of aiming that when what you aim at makes a difference
- If you aim of the center of mass and hit you will do damage appropriate for weapon, the armour and the toughness
- If you hit a millimeter further away you do the same damage
- If you hit a centimeter further away you probably do the same damage (depends if you were aiming for the eyes or not)
- If you hit three centimeters further away you probably do the same damage
- As long as you get a solid blow you probably do the same damage
In maths we have a technique known as 'reduction to absurdity' and the following two examples do a reduction to absurdity just as a way of demonstration that in the real world the theory is wrong.
- if you are aiming for the center of mass and exactly hit it you clip the heart. If you are less accurate you have a chance of bullseyeing the heart.
- If there is a hole in the armor, and you are off target and hit the weakness you do more damage. The more accurate you are the less chance there is of hitting the armour.
Another way of viewing the issue of accuracy
The bullet doesn't suddenly change what it is hitting when you are more accurate
- If you aim 'at the person' if you are more accurate you will hit closer to the center of the mass.
- If you aim more accuractly you don't suddenly hit the head instead of the chest
- If you aim ultimately accuractly you don't suddenly hit the eyes instead of the head
Torg handles this adequately well. it has vital shots. Actually I think the rules could be a tiny bit improved: if you aim for the eyes and miss you might still hit the head... But that's such a small difference that I am not too worried about it from a 'realism' point of view.
Realistic????
Can someone explain to me how 'once the bullet has landed within a centimeter or two of the target' it's somehow 'realistic' that suddenly we hit the eyeballs instead of the center of mass? It doesn't feel realistic to me at all. I can see it for melee combat a little. In melee I don't 'aim' attacks. I rely on muscle memory and body coordination at the point of collision. But it's only a little.
Most game systems decouple the 'tohit' from 'the damage' because for most people it's more realistic. Many add in 'critical rules' to capture luck. Concrete examples: d20 (all variants that I am aware of including all the pathfinder), AD&D, Mutants and Masterminds, Torg. There are exceptions: White Wolf, Shadowrun (almost the same system anyway), Rolemaster (laughs... that's a well broken system). These systems that couple the two ideas were designed from the ground up with the coupling... Torg isn't. Torg is designed from the ground up with the two being separate.
For missile combat it's (for me) totally unrealistic
Locations
If you want a more realistic accuracy based systems add locations and put an accuracy modifier and a damage modifier on the location. You can have two flavours. One is 'if you don't say what you are aiming for it's the chest' (which is what every police officer is trained for I think). The other is 'you randomly roll location'.
I've run with these kind of location rules and Torg die rolling for over 10 years and they are quite good (we were just doing 'Aylse' in a non possibility based game for most of the time). In melee combat we mostly used random locations, in missile it defaults to chest because that's what you are 'supposed' to aim for if you aren't doing something special
I think it's a degree of complexity not needed in RPOL. In tabletop it's good because people like rolling die in tabletop, and it adds more to the drama. I've tried location systems in RPOL and most people just forget to roll them. That's why I think the vital blow rules are good
Accuracy having some effect
I use the following (house) rule to simulate the importance of accurately hitting the target
- You exactly hit it's a 'grazing blow': maximum one stun
- You hit but only by 1 or 2: it's a 'glancing blow' (does half damage after armour subtracted)
- You hit by 3 or more: you do full damage
This captures my feelings on the realism of accuracy, and the limits of it's ability to do damage. The location you hit is the one you aimed at, and we don't have bullets teleporting away from the chest to the head when a high bonus number is rolled. If you hit it solidly you do good damage.
Effects: Mostly none when players attacking bad guys. Players tend to 'roll well, or roll bad'. When they roll bad not much happened anyway, and when they roll well it's exactly in line with the game designers aims and objects. When the bad guys hit the players though, it gives the players a big bonus in survivability which I like. Basically it fixes the glass ninja problem.
This has no impact on the games designers calculations and allows me to use standard scenarios and models. It doesn't have the flaws of the 'result point based' system while still having accuracy being really important
Flaws of the Result points system
The flaws include
- Destroys (and I mean destroys not weakens) the value of toughness and strength. Dex already is the best physical attribute, and suddenly it becomes better at doing damage than strength (which is all strength does), and at not taking damage than toughness (except for surprise attacks it is just better). Anyone who has tough>dex or str>dex (as long as they have about 6 points of toughness/str) is measurably inferior to a person that has dex > any other physical attribute. This is not anywhere near as much the case in the standard rules.
- The damage done by weapons is for some characters +10 to +15 more than the game is designed for. That makes it fantastically hards for the GMs to create monsters that are a reasonable challenge. For reference +10 can turn 2 stun into 'you are dead'. This turns the game into 'might as well be diceless rules systems' (which are OK we just need to realise it).