05-16-2006, 05:41 PM
Hi,
RPGs, IMHO, are all about doing virtual things that we'd be incapable of doing in real life. There are few of us who've actually trained with swords, and fewer still that would be able to do anything with the improbable swords found in games. Armor is another issue. A couple of people I know used to run an interesting demo at SF cons. They'd take a volunteer from the audience and have him/her come down on stage. Then they'd dress that volunteer in a decent set of replica plate (about 70 lb ~ 32 kg). Most of the volunteers could hardly walk, much less run and dodge. That's why most SCA "armor" is aluminum.
As to the whole KE debate, most of it is wrong. First, because the light weapons are going to be the ones with the higher KE (which goes like the mass times the velocity squared -- thus, half the weight times twice the speed will give you twice the KE). But in a collision, it is the momentum that matters more. As long as the speed can be kept up, the heavier weapon will prevail. Considering that throughout the period when hand weapons were in use, the trend was to lighter, faster, weapons, I think the question of what works better was empirically solved long ago. Again, that is why the realism in RPGs must be moderated with playability. If one were to look at what was being used at any one moment in history, one finds that pretty much everybody used the latest technology or lost.
Ultimately, though, it all comes down to the strategic/tactical level one wants to play at. Some people prefer real time button mashing twitch games and consider them realistic, although it isn't clear to me that hitting 'a-j-c-n-e' in under half a second is really analogous to 'strike, turn, dodge, spin, kick. Others prefer to issue orders to an army (often in a turn based situation) and let the computer handle the rest. Neither is better, or for that matter more realistic. And, as in most mattes of opinion, no amount of debate will win an adherent of one side over to the other.
Oh, BTW, yeah - I prefer turned based squad level games and flight simulators with good physics.
--Pete
Drasca,May 16 2006, 04:26 AM Wrote:If I had a virtual room however...But, there's the rub. As you point out, a large part of the problem is how to control a very realistic avatar. Do we need a full sensor suit? Should the suit weigh us down so that we have the realistic feel of the armor? Should we be limited to using things in game that we could actually use in real life (because the suit we're wearing puts forces on us that are realistic)? That type of a game is a sim, and works pretty well in flight and driving modes, where the skills needed do not take a lifetime to develop.
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RPGs, IMHO, are all about doing virtual things that we'd be incapable of doing in real life. There are few of us who've actually trained with swords, and fewer still that would be able to do anything with the improbable swords found in games. Armor is another issue. A couple of people I know used to run an interesting demo at SF cons. They'd take a volunteer from the audience and have him/her come down on stage. Then they'd dress that volunteer in a decent set of replica plate (about 70 lb ~ 32 kg). Most of the volunteers could hardly walk, much less run and dodge. That's why most SCA "armor" is aluminum.
As to the whole KE debate, most of it is wrong. First, because the light weapons are going to be the ones with the higher KE (which goes like the mass times the velocity squared -- thus, half the weight times twice the speed will give you twice the KE). But in a collision, it is the momentum that matters more. As long as the speed can be kept up, the heavier weapon will prevail. Considering that throughout the period when hand weapons were in use, the trend was to lighter, faster, weapons, I think the question of what works better was empirically solved long ago. Again, that is why the realism in RPGs must be moderated with playability. If one were to look at what was being used at any one moment in history, one finds that pretty much everybody used the latest technology or lost.
Ultimately, though, it all comes down to the strategic/tactical level one wants to play at. Some people prefer real time button mashing twitch games and consider them realistic, although it isn't clear to me that hitting 'a-j-c-n-e' in under half a second is really analogous to 'strike, turn, dodge, spin, kick. Others prefer to issue orders to an army (often in a turn based situation) and let the computer handle the rest. Neither is better, or for that matter more realistic. And, as in most mattes of opinion, no amount of debate will win an adherent of one side over to the other.
Oh, BTW, yeah - I prefer turned based squad level games and flight simulators with good physics.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?