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Tyneras · 02-25-2021, 06:00 PM

People instantly die from a slit throat for the same reason mooks die from a sword swipe that doesn't even draw blood: it's a drama convention, it's not realistic.

Someone with a slit throat could very well drop unconscious from pain and shock, but take minutes to actually die of blood loss or drowning in their own blood. For most of human history we had no way to save someone who had suffered such an injury, so we wrote them off as dead even if their were quite alive for another 10 or 15 minutes.

Hit points, are as always, an abstraction. What they represent is different from game system to game system. What kills people is damage to the brain. Outside direct tissue damage, that means depriving it of oxygen. One of the best ways to do that is deprive it of blood. A great way to deprive the brain of blood is to turn insides into outsides. So GURPS abstracts this, makes tissue damage and blood loss interchangeable, close enough for an RPG, even if there are plenty of edge cases where things get weird. I can think of lots of ways to improve this, but they aren't worth the bookkeeping until I can offload that to an AI.

02-25-2021, 06:00 PM	#33
Tyneras Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Kentucky, USA	Re: Hit Points...to be, or not to be? People instantly die from a slit throat for the same reason mooks die from a sword swipe that doesn't even draw blood: it's a drama convention, it's not realistic. Someone with a slit throat could very well drop unconscious from pain and shock, but take minutes to actually die of blood loss or drowning in their own blood. For most of human history we had no way to save someone who had suffered such an injury, so we wrote them off as dead even if their were quite alive for another 10 or 15 minutes. Hit points, are as always, an abstraction. What they represent is different from game system to game system. What kills people is damage to the brain. Outside direct tissue damage, that means depriving it of oxygen. One of the best ways to do that is deprive it of blood. A great way to deprive the brain of blood is to turn insides into outsides. So GURPS abstracts this, makes tissue damage and blood loss interchangeable, close enough for an RPG, even if there are plenty of edge cases where things get weird. I can think of lots of ways to improve this, but they aren't worth the bookkeeping until I can offload that to an AI. __________________ GURPS Fanzine The Path of Cunning is worth a read.