Recent content by Thomas Shey

I gather its derived from the comic series its based on. If there's a DC character who is handled differently every time she shows up, its Supergirl.

I dunno. He did a credible job fighting Ultra Man and the Engineer at the same time for a brief period, and given we're told the former is a physically upgraded version of him, that seemed perfectly credible. In addition Lex's power armor goods barely slow him down.

I don't think that follows. Soldiers have often gotten better medical treatment and other elements that make them less likely to catch most diseases than probably the population as a whole, at least outside of wound infection (where that's been a problem until the relatively modern period). It...

These are not actually entirely mutually exclusive. You can have the core system be relatively realistic, but provide a metacurrency that allows PCs and selective NPCs to put their thumbs on the scale. That's essentially the tact that Savage Worlds and a few others do.

"Normal" (as in contrast to paranormal or high-tech healing) is rarely a big factor in most games anyway. There's no harm in making it realistic if one wants, because its probably not going to be in play often at the PC end at least.

If you're going to be bucketed, you seem to fit there better than the other two, for much the same reason I characterize myself there (though you seem farther down that road than I am.)

Well, there's an emotional connection that can't entirely be escaped from. (You also have to deal with a game system that's output is, while not incorrect exactly, producing two little information for the desired case. On a certain level, a game who's combat causes casualties with the...

It tends to be pretty obvious if something is actively interfering with a Gamist preference, though (and whatever the theoretical preference, more than half of the shots you see taken at mechanics is because they've failed one or more people's expectations on a game level in some fashion).

Well, to some extent that's probably inevitable when you've got something that is firehosing steel. Even things like BARs can't match up with that.

Or the known tendency for adrenaline to give you the shakes. Though it has some benefits in dealing with pain and trauma, its not actually a benign impact on modern fire combat (its a little less clear with melee combat).

Absolutely. And dueling blades are kind of an outlier at least to some extent, since they were mostly used in a period when anything but pretty light armor wasn't common any more. Eh. The problem is armor-as-deflection has at least as many failure states because of its all-or-nothing nature...

Yeah, but assuming you don't assume really static combat, there's always attacks coming in at angles not intended. Even good breastplates aren't hermetically sealed; you can get up under them or come in at some angles because you still need to bend in them. You could deal with that by being...

Yeah, there's some limitations based on few games really getting into weapon types. You can address that sort of problem but it usually involves making the rapier be intrinsically low penetration, but multiplying after you deal with armor; that way its still pretty nasty against light or no...

It is kind of the low-hanging-fruit of mechanics-for-game-convenience. Even AC looks better if you know the original designers came from ship and armor combat games.

Yeah, its just not hard for aborbtion/deflection of damage and avoidance being conflated to produce some really odd results sometimes.