Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Your definition of "cinematic" seems to be synonymous with what the RAW call "realistic": That is, the baseline rules without any of the designated cinematic options in force. And your definition of "realism" seems to be the baseline rules with many or all of the "harsh realism" rules turned on. At this point I think you've moved the goalposts so far that we aren't even talking about the same thing.
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It's been made pretty clear, by Kromm and others, that the baseline GURPS rules
aren't meant to reflect reality, they are meant to enable Heroic play and, if necessary, take realism into a dark alley and shoot it.
Which is fine, because that's is how most people want to play RPGs. I just find it odd that someone would claim that Luck is too unrealistic for them, but still accept campaign switches in the baseline GURPS rules that are very much less realistic than Luck.
There are a lot more people in the real world have survived several instances where they might have died than there are people who never require any medical assistance after taking bullets to the brain or heart, but can be confident that because they are fit and healthy, there won't be any bleeding and the wounds will eventually heal on their own. A world where some people are more often lucky than others is a world we actually live in. A world where two hollow-point .22 LR bullets to the Skull
cannot kill a normal human* (but will usually incapacitate him safely) is a cartoon.
*Absent some highly unusual critical hit results.
Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
As for the campaign incident you refer to, it's possible that I misunderstood the rules; but my recollection is that the injury level was "crippling" rather than "dismemberment." There is no rule that explicitly says that a crippling injury as such removes the limb. The consequence of crippling for a leg is some form of Lame. The character was able to see a surgeon, who was able to prevent the leg from being lost and instead have it be a bad leg, which is still a lesser level within Lame. (The character also ended up with Addiction to laudanum, as a free bonus!) I think what I was doing was minor variant interpretations within the RAW; it would have been perfectly RAW for the crippled guy to end up with Bad Leg in the first place.
Oh, and did I mention that this was a swashbuckling martial arts campaign?
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Fair enough. I remembered reading an account of the event where it said that the leg was 'destroyed'. It may not have been used as a term of art, i.e. that the damage was twice the crippling threshold, in which case the leg would be completely destroyed absent TL7+ medicine (and would realistically need to be removed in order to prevent infection at TL5 or lower).
In any case, I don't feel that this was an unreasonable turn of events. I just think that interpreting events so that the character remained playable was essentially the same thing as allowing Luck, just done by fiat rather than built into the characters.