It was a fantasy game with a combat system gave every weapon its own hit chart that cross referenced armor type. So different weapons had different effects against different types of armor. And it wasn’t just “blunt weapons have +5 modifier against chainmail” type stuff it had a chart that you rolled against for every weapon/armor combination so if you were using a sword against an opponent in chainmail you rolled on an entirely different chart than if your opponent was in platemail.
1st Edition AD+D did something very similar. You didn’t roll on an entirely different chart, but each weapon had its own list of modifiers versus every armor type, so it in effect was rolling on a separate chart. However, while each weapon (dozens of them) were specced out separately, the armor was only specced out per unmodified armor class (so armors that gave you the same armor bonus had the same position in the chart.)
Rolemaster had about six or seven different charts you’d roll on for any given action. On the one hand, you could pull of some amazingly detailed stunts. On the other hand, six or seven charts. Bureau 13 had a detailed damage chart for every square inch of the body that listed how much soft tissue you had to go through (on the way in and on the way out), whether or not there were bones or organs, what your chances were of getting knocked unconscious, thrown into shock, or just plain killed outright.
Rolemaster would have been my first guess as well. In college we also called it “Chartmaster” or “Rulemaster” because of its complicated rules. Since I was more of a “story” gamer than a “rules” gamer, it never really did much for me.
The other one I thought of was David Hargrave’s Arduin, which was known for its particularly grisly combat tables, but I don’t think they were as complex as the OP describes.
I was thinking that you could computerize the combat system. I loved the level of detail of the combat system and how perillous combat was under that system. Using a simple hit point system makes people far too ready to engage in combat.
Not really; Ask the level 1 wizard with d4 HPs how excited he is to be engaging in combat.
Combat lethality/fear level doesn’t really hinge that heavily on how abstracted damage is - it just hinges on how likely you are to survive it. Adding more gruesome visual effects just…adds more gruesome visual effects. It may or may not make people more or less excited to engage in combat, since lots of other things factor in there - including how likely it is that you will die (or become incapacitated) and how easy it is to heal up afterwards.
You can use a very abstracted system of damage (ala, say, Burning Wheel) and still have combat be wince inducing and deadly, and I’m sure it’s possible to create a ‘realistic’ hit location system without making combat particularly lethal, though I’m not sure anyone has ever done it, because generally the only people who can be arsed to create “realistic” hit location charts are ALSO people who think that fights should be over in a round because they just totally stabbed their opponent in the spleen.
To come back towards topic though, computerized Rolemaster would be amusing, probably, and certainly take some of the gruntwork out, but I dunno that it’d make a very good game. It’s all probably slightly irrelevant, however, since Rolemaster has passed into legal limbo with the demise of Iron Crown Enterprises.
Yeah, it’s Rolemaster, or possibly first edition MERP (which was based on a heavily simplified version of Rolemaster’s rules).
It’s also the first RPG I ever played. To this day, I’m still puzzled by the fact I stuck with that particular hobby.
One thing I fondly remember was when my best friend and I realized that RM/MERP’s combat system was fucked up and instead of portraying combats as free flowing duels of skills, it really was a model for people taking turns clubbing each other over the head as hard as they could. Here’s why:
on one hand you had a relatively low and fixed defensive bonus which was based on your base agility, with a further bonus if you had a shield. On the other hand, you had an offensive bonus which went higher and higher the more points you sunk into your weapon skill. A combat roll was pretty simple: roll 1d100, add offensive bonus, substract defensive bonus, check table for how much damage you ended up doing. This presumably to represent that while a complete rookie would have a hard time inflicting any serious damage to another person even if they wanted to, a skilled fighter would murderize you in one stroke.
To offset this, you had the option to split your offensive bonus into a defensive one, essentially exchanging less damage for higher protection.
The problem came in when you factored in the critical hit tables: if you hit someone particularly hard, you got to roll on another series of tables that had more detailed results on top of the basic hit points loss - breaking bones, gouged eyes, bleeding damage, concussions, etc…, even instant kills. And some of these critical hits resulted in “stunned for X rounds”. Stunned meant that you couldn’t act at all for one round… including splitting your offensive bonus for defensive purposes.
So the best course of action in any one-on-one combat was to keep all of your offensive bonus to attack and pray to get that stunned result. In which case you had X further rounds you got to hit at your maximum potential, which in turn meant even more chances to stun, etc… First stunning blow wins, essentially. And since blunt trauma critical tables were those with the most stun results, clubs and maces were the weapons you really wanted to use, even if they weren’t optimal against all types of armour (in fact they kinda sucked against anything besides chainmail IIRC)
