Grittiness and Lethality in Game Combat vs in Read-Only Fiction

[Edgar Ironpelt]

Medievalish-Fantasy game systems do a fair job of emulating the injury and death rates seen among secondary characters and nameless mooks in read-only fiction, but a poor one of emulating the much lower injury and death rates among the protagonists - the characters who would be PCs in a game.

As evidence, I offer this list of injuries suffered by the nine members of the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings during the course of the story. I'm leaving out the purely magical effects, the fatigue, thirst, starvation, and exposure damage, and the injuries to characters other than members of the Fellowship.

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Frodo, Sam, and Pippin get scratched up by brambles, while hiding from a Black Rider during their walk through the Shire

Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop. [physical injury, even if most of the life-endangering effect came from magic]

Sam gets a scratch along the scalp in the fight against the orcs in Moria

Frodo gets the wind knocked out of him by a spear thrust in the fight against the orcs in Moria [He is presumed dead after that attack, but was saved by his mithril chain shirt]

Gandalf gets injured ["I was burned"], dies, and then gets better, fighting the balrog. [This happens off-screen]

Boromir is wounded and killed fighting orcs at Parth Galen. Unlike Gandalf, above, he does not get better. Noteworthy in that he received multiple wounds in that fight, where nearly all of the other examples are of single wounds.

Merry gets a cut on his forehead at Parth Galen. The orc leader uses a nasty orc healing ointment on it.

Merry and Pippin suffer various minor cuts and sores while being driven as captives of the orcs. [Those cuts and sores heal in a "remarkable way" when they drink from and bathe their feet in a stream in Fangorn Forest.]

Gimli suffers a head injury in the Battle of Helm's Deep. It gets bandaged, and he passes it off as nothing serious.

Frodo gets stung by Shelob in the Pass of Cirth Ungol

Sam and Frodo get scratched by thorn bushes after jumping off a bridge when escaping Cirth Ungol

Pippin gets crushed (and seriously injured) by the falling body of the troll he kills, at the battle before the Black Gate of Mordor.

Sam gets knocked down from behind and hits his head, at the Crack of Doom. [The injury bleeds.]

Frodo has his finger bitten off by Golum, at the Crack of Doom.
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I count 17 examples of members of the Fellowship getting injured in the whole Lord of the Rings, with 5 of the examples being bramble and thorn scratches. And I note that Aragorn and Legolas do not get injured at all.

I submit that this is a low, low, low injury rate, compared to that typically seen in a tabletop game that covers the same amount of adventuring, run under either D&D rules or under some alternative rule set having about the same degree of crunch in its mechanics.

 

[GobHag]

People might not like to hear it but DnD has very much created it's own 'genre' marks in Fantasy as a whole. Hp is 'meant' to be a mix of luck and stamine but what players actually see is 'I can get hit by a fist the size of a truck and I'd need to take a breather after that, maybe.' and this has led to a lot of non-lit fantasy to portray violent as less bloody.

 

[EzraV]

People might not like to hear it but DnD has very much created it's own 'genre' marks in Fantasy as a whole. Hp is 'meant' to be a mix of luck and stamine but what players actually see is 'I can get hit by a fist the size of a truck and I'd need to take a breather after that, maybe.' and this has led to a lot of non-lit fantasy to portray violent as less bloody.

Comic books and their pulp-fiction predecessors, both of which pre-date and influenced D&D, have also contributed to an attitude that violence is less bloody or injurious. Gaming has both reflected and contributed to that view.

 

[Reynard]

I think it is typical in D&D for us to describe hits with some flair and even gore, but these are 80s action movies starring Bruce Willis hits -- purely cosmetic. What seems generally unpopular with most gamers and D&D players in particular are death spiral injury systems where every time you get hit there is a chance the resulting injury will make it easier to hit you next time, and so on until you are a crippled corpse.

 

[aco175]

Without bringing up the countless threads on what HP are- perhaps some of the wounds in the books/movies are not ones involving blood. Although scratches from brambles do not tend to reduce HP in my games. And a spear thrust from a troll does more along the lines of a mace attack if wearing mithral. But, I do get the point of superheroes and being the star of the show.

Poor Boromir, not knowing he was a NPC and not a PC.

 

[Laurefindel]

Medievalish-Fantasy game systems do a fair job of emulating the injury and death rates seen among secondary characters and nameless mooks in read-only fiction, but a poor one of emulating the much lower injury and death rates among the protagonists - the characters who would be PCs in a game.

That's true.

I'm of two minds about that. On one hand, I'd like to emulate stories where injuries present an extra layer of challenge. On the other hand, injuries tend to come up often in RPG - at least how we tend to play them in North America my French friends would say - and for lack of better words, it gets old fast.

As evidence, I offer this list of injuries suffered by the nine members of the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings during the course of the story. I'm leaving out the purely magical effects, the fatigue, thirst, starvation, and exposure damage, and the injuries to characters other than members of the Fellowship.

That's an interesting case study because in LotR, injuries are mentioned but rarely have a big impact on the characters' abilities or have lasting consequences so in that regard, the characters of the Fellowship are not so dissimilar to D&D characters who simply lose hp until they die (like Boromir) or get knocked out without lasting consequences (like Frodo against the Orc chief's spear in the Moria).

There are a few notable exceptions but on a meta-RPG level, most can be attributed to magic curses or poison - Frodo's wound on Weathertop, Shelob's bite in her lair, Faramir and Eowyn's injuries against the Witch-King (Eowyn gets her arm broken while blocking the Nazgul's mace with her shield, but it doesn't prevent her to strike and kill the Witch King, which in turns magically knocks her out, like Pippin).

In other words, few of the injuries in LotR are beyond the DM saying "you got a nasty scratch on the head and it hurts" or "you feel drained, wet, scratched, and miserable", but against some enemies it becomes "you got hit by a Morgul knife; take 1d4+4 damage and make a DC20 Wis saving throw. You failed? Well, now you're incapacitated, and make another DC20 saving throw each day. If you fail 3, you die; good thing you Hobbits have advantage on such saves...", or "you got stung by Shelob, make a DC25 Con save or fall unconscious", or you struck the chief Nazgul; Make a DC30 Wis save or suffer the black death!"

Either that or Frodo's player is a drama student who likes to over-act in his roleplay...

 

[John Dallman]

I've spent a lot of time playing games where you can get killed pretty easily (RQ and GURPS), and it makes a profound difference to how players approach fights. You don't just wade in; you look for advantages, try to limit the number of opponents you'll be engaging at once, and generally use sensible tactics.

I'm fine with this; my interest is in the outcomes resulting from the fights, not "how many X I can deal with by myself."

 

[EzraV]

I've spent a lot of time playing games where you can get killed pretty easily (RQ and GURPS), and it makes a profound difference to how players approach fights. You don't just wade in; you look for advantages, try to limit the number of opponents you'll be engaging at once, and generally use sensible tactics.

I'm fine with this; my interest is in the outcomes resulting from the fights, not "how many X I can deal with by myself."

Mongoose Traveller (at least 1st edition when I ran it) is like this too. The first time I ran it one of my players picked a fight with an NPC—I forget how many game sessions it took him to recover. That was the last time any of the players engaged in combat voluntarily in that campaign.

 

[Umbran]

I submit that this is a low, low, low injury rate, compared to that typically seen in a tabletop game that covers the same amount of adventuring, run under either D&D rules or under some alternative rule set having about the same degree of crunch in its mechanics.

Oh, no. This will be another "what do hit points represent" argument.

If someone were taking the transcript of a D&D game, and turning it into a novel, it is not necessarily true that they will translate any and all hit point loss into text in the narrative. That would render this analysis inaccurate.

 

[MGibster]

The second edition of Blue Planet used a game system called Synergy (I think) and it was quite easy for two untrained people to get into a fist fight without causing any damage. Your character could land a solid punch and simply fail to do any notable damage. Did it literally mean there were no visible effects of being punched? No. Maybe your character gave the NPC a bloody lip or later on he'll have a nice shiner on his eye. But none of those were enough to affect the overall health of the NPC so there's no reason to keep track of it on the character sheet.

Of course those little injuries add up after a while. Death by a thousand cuts.