Game Design

I've taken the time to do some design work on the tentative Soul Saga RPG that I've been toying with. Having tried my hand at home-brewed rules and even overhauls of entire game engines, creating an entirely new system is still posing quite a challenge.

My first major decision has been settling on the basic dice engine, which will be percentile-based. Expressing game mechanics as percentages is clean and straightforward and makes adapting real-world statistics easier.

Speaking of real statistics, did you know that shooting accuracy figures for police and military forces are extremely hard to find? The best I could come up with was an often-repeated but unsubstantiated forty percent hit figure for police shootouts within ten to twenty feet. Slightly better sourced were statistics claiming ten percent average accuracy for trained soldiers at three hundred meters with the M16A2 rifle and ninety percent accuracy for snipers with M24s at six hundred meters.

The search for realistic firearms data led me to reexamine another aspect of most RPGs that I've always found woefully inadequate: damage rules. The worst offenders are systems that use "hit points" to track characters' health status. The manifold distortions involved in reducing a person's physical well-being to a number are disconcerting enough, but the idea of someone with one hundred HP being whittled down to fifty or ten or even one and still going about his business normally is against all logic.

Of course, what these game terms are supposed to represent are injuries like ballistic trauma, blast injuries, and blunt trauma. While each of these conditions can vary widely in severity, the bleeding likely entailed by all of them means that traumatic injury isn't a one-off proposition. Training and adrenaline might keep you on your feet after sustaining ten points of "piercing damage" (aka ballistic penetrating trauma), but the external and internal hemorrhaging will pose increasingly serious problems over the next few minutes and hours.

Most RPGs only address the effects of cumulative injuries. The oversight I want to correct is their omission of the progressive aspects of trauma.

Some will object that portraying damage more realistically will cramp the players' style by making everyone conflict-averse. I counter that the lethality of combat is offset by the implementation of more realistic marksmanship and melee rules. The fact is that even trained professionals miss most of the time, and battles tend to be resolved when the enemy retreats, surrenders, or is incapacitated rather than massacred.

Besides, sound logistics and advance planning wins more battles than sheer force. So the upshot is that more realistic combat will discourage hack and slash antics and encourage players to fight smarter.