Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Vulnerability to Injury
REALITY

If combat is realistically deadly, then the following should be true:

1. Whenever a normal human takes a hit from a deadly weapon, there should be a chance of an outright kill in one blow. If I hit anyone - even Clint or Arnie - with a two-handed sword, the chance of a kill with one blow should be pretty high. If I stab Arnie with a four-inch dagger, the chance of a kill might not be high, but it should at least exist.

2. Combat damage can leave a character permanently crippled. A character can be left alive but have permanent damage which will impair his abilities.

3. As a character gets injured, his fighting abilities are impaired. A character who has taken many flesh wounds in a fight should have difficulty moving properly and be distracted by pain. If the muscles in my leg are cut through, I can't walk or stand, which makes fighting difficult.

4. Open wounds have a chance of getting infected. I don't think I know of a single roleplaying game which includes one of the great horrors of the world before antibiotics - infected wounds. If someone slices your arm open, you can't just shrug it off. Aside from making your arm not work (see 3 above) there is also a chance of gangrene.

GAME STYLE

If combat was realistic in a roleplaying game, characters who went repeatedly into combat would end up killed or crippled after a few fights. Assuming you're not playing one of the few marginal games like Paranoia where player characters are meant to be killed off every scenario, player character death can be avoided in a number of ways:

1. Avoid combat. It's perfectly possible to write a game that has nothing to do with combat, but it would probably be dull. I wouldn't want to play a game about working in an office; a game of power-politics can be fun from time to time; but what I really want is a game where I get to kill things. Roleplaying lets me live out the experiences I can't have in real life, like brutally slaying people as my Saxon and Viking ancestors did. I want combat!

2. Make player characters exceptionally hard to kill. This is probably the most common solution to the problem. Werewolf makes PCs super-hard combat-beasts with powers of regeneration and technology-jinxing in a world full of normal humans who suddenly find that their guns don't work near werewolves. AD&D and many others just give player characters and a few NPCs ridiculous levels of Hit Points, allowing them to literally survive a hail of arrows, without any justification. I dislike this as it takes the feeling of risk and therefore the excitement out of combat: see Combat without Consequences. Warhammer FRP has Fate Points, each of which lets a character escape death once: thus a character has a limited number of free escapes, but once they're gone they're gone (a successful campaign conclusion might lead to the reward of one extra Fate Point: these things are rare).

3. Require players to use tactics. This is my favourite. The PCs face enemies, or potential enemies, of such strength and numbers that they would never survive if they tried to fight them all in one go. Instead they must use diplomacy and caution to avoid making enemies where possible. Where this is not possible they must use tactics to survive, for instance by making sure that they fight on their terms, choosing the field of battle, using ambush and surprise, and attacking where the enemy is weak. This is what happens in the film Seven Samurai: open battle against all the bandits at once is out of the question, but cunning tactics finally defeat them.

Traveller is like this: one player described it to me as the game where you never get in a fight unless you know you're going to win. Weapons are extremely powerful, so a survivable fight generally involves shooting an unsuspecting enemy who doesn't know you're there from a distant position of cover. Even in a game where swords and arrows are the deadliest weapons, you can run a similar style. I did this with my home-brewed game The King's Men and was very pleased with the result. Six player characters could not fight thirty bandits in an open fight, but by making hit-and-run attacks, burning their bases with fire arrows and killing off isolated individuals they inflicted enough casualties to drive the bandits away seeking easier pickings, without losing a single man themselves.

4. Have the players command groups. This is an idea which I have long dwelt on but never run: each player commands troops, and must manage his units. The setting would probably make casualties inevitable, so the replacement of lost troops from your units takes the place of healing up Hit Points in AD&D. Men fight for money: paying more makes it easier to hire men, but getting your men killed makes potential recruits reluctant to join you.