[Runequest] Runequest Digest, Vol 30, Issue 25

[Wayne Shaw]

At 12:58 PM 11/22/2010, you wrote:
>I like this. I fight Historical european longsword, I have allso 
>tried the I-33 manual. In addition, I fight re-enactment-fighting, 
>and allthough you can question realizm in a light contact-system, 
>all of my experiences support that you don't aim when you're engaged 
>in a melee-fight. If you really wanted to have aiming as an 
>integrated part of the combat-system, you could have advanced tables 
>based on statistics from melee-fights. Certain angles of attacks 
>usually results in certain areas hit. For instance when two people 
>with swords of the same length, you generally don't see that many 
>hits in the legs, and if there are leg-hits, it's usually because 
>one of the fighters are vastly inferior to the other person. IMO 
>it's far to many variables.

That's why the melee and ranged tables in RQ3 were different of 
course, but that's not really the full issue; as you say, with medium 
length weapons a leg hit isn't that common for example.  But at some 
point your hit location system starts to get really cumbersome if you 
have to base it on too many specifics of attack method, especially 
since you need to deal with a lot of non-humanoid configurations too 
(and presumably _their_ default fighting styles).

The problem with most hit location choice methods is that they're 
either too easy, too pointlessly hard, or don't make distinctions 
between how easy some locations are over others.  As an example with 
baton, I'm going to find it a hell of a lot easier to go after a hand 
or arm than I am at the head.