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Originally Posted by Nightshade
He wasn't the only one to have an incoherent post. I'm actually with a leg on both sides here: without a hit location or major wounds system, some guns are simply _too harmless_. The classic is things like derringers, which used very small caliber bullets. Even with an impale, its way too easy with just a big pool of hit points for it not to be possible to kill someone outright with the gun (the possible exception is with some forms of the crit system which double against unarmored targets, but I tend to have issues with that approach by itself as it produces wierd artifacts where someone with a really trivial level of armor suddenly has a _massive_ advantage over someone without). Even impales don't show any sort of reliable lethality with many lighter pistol rounds.
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Interestingly enough that isn't entirely unrealistic. Pocket pistols and derringers has a well deserved reputation for being almost equally dangerous to those on either end. Killing someone with one usually takes a very lucky shot, a severed blood vessel, and time.
The hard thing about BRP though is that because it has hit points, there is a numerical rating that must be reached to kill a character, and a weapon that doesn't hit that rating just can't kill with one shot. Realistically, killing someone with a .25 or .32 caliber pistol with one shot is very very rare, but remotely possible. That isn't always the case in a game though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightshade
On the other end, once you do get into hit locations or major wounds, it can be rather too _easy_ to die outright (this is aside your issue of deaths from repeated shots, by the by; I'm just talking on a shot by shot basis) for the good of a campaign. Part of this, as you note, is that BRP doesn't address eventual lethality at all, so a hit is either immediately lethal or it isn't.
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Somewhat. IMO hit locations tend to reduce lethality. Killing someone with one hit tends to happen with attacks that would have killed the guy anyway (critical hits with impaling weapons). Characters tend to get taken out of the fight before they get killed.
I think I'll work on a "eventually fatal" type of result for the Western Spot rules. I might as well, I've got a 14 page price list, 6 weapons lists, bestiary, professions, new skills, a alternate rule for toxins ('cuz its more fun to have you buddy rush you back 20 miles to town to see the Doc then it is to have someone drop dead on the spot). If I did a chapter on history, notable personalities, and geography I could go for a entire supplment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightshade
Yeah. But of course I tend to want my cake and eat it too here; I want the basic system to be quasi-realistic, but I also know that having too much PC fatality is usually not a good thing for most campaigns.
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Amen. That is the tightrope that game designers must walk. Everyone sees the rope in a different spot, too. However, the thing is, I think the damages in BRP thanks to instant kills might be even more deadly than real life.
One thing that I liked about Timelords and CORPS was that a character could take a hit that might kill then in a couple of hours, but would be okay if it were treated. Something like that might not be a bad solution for some of us with BRP. It would be a potentially fatal wound so the lethality and danger factor is still there there, but can be treated, so the PC survivability factor is still acceptable.
Even a really simple would deterioration idea like:
Damage from one hit <=1/4hp= loose 1 hp/day
" " >1/4hp=1hp/hour
" " >1/2hp=1hp/min
" " >3/4hp=1hp/MR
might do it.