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.

Game Design 101: Experience Points

What Role Do Experience Points Play In An RPG?

Experience points (XP) exist to provide a method of character advancement. That's really just another way of saying a way to reward players and to give them the feeling their characters are alive because they can change and grow in response to their experiences.

So the first, and obvious, use of XP is to give the player's a reward and to show that the game world is not static, that their character's have a reward motivation for doing what they do, and to let the player's feel like they are getting somewhere. Character's progress in ability, perhaps from neophytes capable of only the most basic and simple operations to hardened professionals (or feudal lords and mighty wizards, depending upon the genre).

Less obvious, but no less important (and moreso to the GM), is the notion that a system integrating experience points progresses the game world. Not only do the character's grow in capability, but the game world adapts to that change by constantly providing them with 'just right!' challenges that match their level of power. In a spy game, this would take the form of new agents becoming experienced and then eventually creme-de-la-creme '00' agents with a license not only to kill, but to engage in massive, thrilling, over the top spy-thriller action.

But how necessary are XP? Are they a needed mechanic? How do we best implement them?

A lot depends on the sort of game system you play under. Some are very granular and have skills that go up regularly by very small amounts but have no levels (or do have levels but the skills still operate in a similar fashion). Some are less granular and have skills but increases are fewer and further between. Some have levels and levels bring skill gains, feats, new aspects, class advancements, you name it!

Experience points aren't necessary for short story arc games with a very limited number of playing sessions. In longer campaigns, it is almost a certainty that the game will benefit from characters who can grow and change. How you implement XP best would relate to the particular mechanics of your game system, but here are some general thoughts that you might consider...

• Tracking XP towards skill advancement or level advancement can be a simple thing with one broad award for a game sessions result which was arrived at fairly simply or can boil down to painstaking calculation of XP returns from each adventure goal, class action, item of treasure, etc. throughout the session. In the intensive form, there is often a task in partitioning off awards for each character and a lot of bookkeeping.
• XP can be determined in a very granular fashion with intense attention to what exactly and precisely was done or much more generally in terms of how the story progressed. You can guess which method is faster.
• XP can also be determined in a narrative-driven fashion by deciding just how many sessions you want to have between each advancement, either as a function of a pre-conceived advancement rate (for example 4 sessions per level in a level dependent game) or based on how many sessions you wish an entire campaign arc to fit in (50 weekly sessions to get to level 15, so 3 sessions to a level). In skill dependent systems, this would translate to how many skill-specific XP you might want to award in a session.
• You can decide (if you are scheduling advancements) whether they are 'everyone up at once' or staggered (if one class might need more XP to level or if some player is clearly better than the others at the table for instance).
• Ultimately, my experience has been (as someone who calculated painstaking individual awards and then later just made arbitrary decisions on when to level people up) that the end results are about the same, the only difference is a big one in how much bookkeeping you do. If the players never see what the GM does exactly, they are honestly none the wiser.

I have found, in my experience, that just deciding on a progress rate (in a level based game) and levelling up characters either all together or one or two sessions apart (to reward good play or show that some classes are harder to level in) is just as effective and feels the same to the players as doing all the painstaking bookkeeping. What's more, they never need know you did this. Or you can just tell them, if they won't fuss.

In a skill based game, if you know you want character skills (looked at on a per-skill basis) to go up at a particular rate, the same logic applies. Award increases (or skill tallies, if you need to let the players see the progress between skill level gains) in accordance roughly with that schedule and player gameplay.

In the long run, by doing advancement in a somewhat arbitrary but considered fashion, you eliminate bookkeeping for the GM and players, the outcome feels good at the table, and you can significantly reduce the amount of column-inches in game rules covering XP awards. (Which is simpler: XP totals for each monster, each encounter, each class or alignment correct action, some of these pooled then divided out to players and some calculated per player... or just deciding when it is time for a player to advance?)

Conclusion

Your XP concept only really needs to exist insofar as it lets the players feel progress and growth in the characters and the players can grow to allow their challenges to grow bigger, building tension and cresendo as the campaign reaches its climactic moments. As long as the players feel their PCs are developing (and the developments are fair in proportion to player choices of class or actions at the table), then the mechanics (or lack thereof) of XP awards are largely irrelevant.

Advice: Go with the less pain option, spend the time on stories and characters in your game rather than accounting.