Real Effects Rarely Represented (Or Not At All) In RPGs [Pt. 1]

Skills In Combat Situations: Adrenalin & The Fight-Flight Effects

The military has spent a lot of time studying how soldiers operate under stress situations. Interesting results have been discovered and confirmed. Some of those discoveries have included the following things that happen when adrenalin is flowing and the fight-or-flight responses are active:

• Skills that require cereberal tasks or tasks that require manual dexterity are harder to perform.
• A person whose adrenalin is switched up can perform physical tasks and simple cognitive tasks faster than they could without the adrenalin IF the skill is one that has been trained hard and long and where any physical movements have been committed to physical muscle memory.
• Visual cues gain primary focus and other cues (such as sounds, kinethesic sensations, touch, smell, and taste may be deprioritized.This results in slightly faster responses to visually observed information.
• Parsing speech can be harder because of the brain prioritizing visual data and, as a direct side effect, deprioritizing non-visual information processing. There are loud noises and often trauma to ones ears in combat which is part of the problem hearing instructions but the processing aspect is different and additive; Reduced processing of audible information slows comprehension or can prevent comprehension.
• When adrenalin wears off (usually shortly after a threat encounter, longer if one has traumatic injuries), exhaustion sets in because the body's neuroconductors are depleted and a lot of your available sugars and nutrients have been burnt through.
• A person that suffers a trivial or light injury will not percieve the injury as much or even at all. In extreme cases, some don't even notice they have a serious injury. The fight-and-flight response includes routing the blood to the torso and away from arms in case of a slash or bite.
• When adrenalin wears off, injuries become apparent. Someone with serious or mortal wounds could suddenly collapse and potentially die. With other injuries, pain will start to be noted and exhaustion (and maybe dehydration as well) and movement may be more difficult or impossible.
• When the adrenalin wears off, physical reactions can include shaking, shivering and issues with coordination or strength. Vomiting is not uncommon.
• When the adrenalin has worn off, emotional responses may also kick in and traumatic events can lead to dissociation or a '1000 yard stare'.'
• Shock (from injuries of physical or mental nature) can set in quickly when adrenal responses are switched off.
• One thing not seen while the adrenal response and the fight-or-flight are switched up is much in the way of impairment or functional degredation (prior bullet points describe this above in more detail) unless the wound taken is one that causes serious musculoskeletal damage, a life-threatening gross bleed, or significant damage to the brain or spinal column.

Injury Impacts: Aware Of A Threat Versus Unsuspecting

Some years ago, I spoke at length with a paramedic who worked in a city that had many gunshot wounds and stabbings. We discussed various aspects of how these things work in the real world. We spoke of the Golden Hour (the hour between a person sustaining a serious injury and getting the patient to a trauma center). That conversation included how horrific wounds not impacting the brain, heart, or a life-threatening gross bleed tends not to kill the target outright (unlike many game and TV wounds...) and if you can stabilize someone and get them to a trauma center within the Golden Hour, they had a good chance of surviving.

A number of other accounts I have read of people being one-shotted and dying or being hit at the start of a fight and just dropping, incapacitated, unconscious or dead. How does this happen when other times a similar human can take horrific damage and keep fighting effectively?

The answer lies in whether the injury is sustained while the adrenalin was cranked up and fight-and-flight responses were active or was sustained while the person was unaware and unsuspecting - that difference makes a world of difference.

If one is aware of at threat and is at least moderately switched up, a wound not destroying key areas (spine, brain, heart) or a gross bleed, there is a chance to ignore the impacts until the adrenalin wears off. The degree of success at the shrugging off is related to how aware and imminent the threat was when the injury was sustained.

If one is not aware of a threat and hasn't got their adrenalin switched up, then the first punch, the first kick, the first bullet can incapacitate the injured person. Sometimes they can pass out and/or have shock set in immediately which then presents a lethal risk for the injured person.

Skill Atrophy: Use It Or Lose It

When a person does not practice a skill, that skill becomes atrophied. In the worst case, a skill could be lost entirely. A skill one had become very competent at will tend to atrophy to a particular point, but not disappear. A skill one had only a limited competence at (such as one you started to learn but were re-vectored to other things and never came back) will tend to be lost.

In most skill-driven games, character skill levels advance but no skill ever atrophies or is lost. That's just not how humans work. If we don't use it, we lose the fine points or the entire skill.

There will be some example at some point of how to integrate these facts into a gritty combat system without killing playability. I'm working at a 2D6 sci-fi game and plan to include as many of these as I can. Some are simple and some are harder to get both feeling right and also being low drag in play.