The only thing to consider at times is that the more realistic fights can be, the more one does the math in ones head and says "It's too dangerous to do this regularly... the percentages always get you in the end....". Or put another way, thrilling heroics generally produce dead characters. Depends a lot on what sort of game you want. (Forex: If George Lucas had been using a realistic combat system, Luke and Han would be dead several times over, and the Jedi would own a fair number of folk until a hail of bullets and fragmentation attacks took them out...).

I liked a lot from TNE (the ship combat system with specific damage areas and modelling of each ship design for instance) but overall it didn't feel like Traveller without 2D6. And designing your own ships (complete with said characterization for damage by area) was never something easily done (and they didn't cover bellweather designs like the Type A, Type S, etc).

It's frustrating for players to get one-shot takeouts. Mind you, they generally don't mind it when it is on their opponents.... but it will tend to inform how and when you fight (carefully, with surprise and ambush, and no too often). Reminds me of Cyberpunk... their combat system could be quite lethal and they made the point of mentioning this and indicating the best way to deal with an adversary might be a well placed claymore mine instead of a straight up fight.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 8:44 PM Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


On 28Apr2020 0644, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:

> I forgot to specify that the discussion was here on the TML & the GDW  > rep, which I now recall, was LorenW, & also, as best I recall, most
 > of us TML'ers were critical of the way the TNE combat system could >
instantly incapacitate PC's w/o actually doing much damage.
I was always in favour of that, and saw it as a feature - it lets the
PCs lose without dying horribly all the time.

What annoyed me were all the people who claimed it made people too tough
because "they could keep fighting after taking a plasma bolt to the
head", which was wrong on so many levels (the most obvious being that
the head had very few hit points, and head hits KO'd you on serious
rather than critical wounds), and showed that they hadn't actually read
the rules, or hadn't paid any attention when they had.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>

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