In defense of the cinematic (Damage and Quick-Shooting Bows)

I do a lot of posting about “realistic” stuff, and increasing the verisimilitude and simulationism achievable – hopefully at minimal cost – for GURPS.

An example – instead of being able to accelerate from a standing stop to full Move in one turn, if you halve your acceleration (so on turn one, Joe average can go 2 yards, on turn 2, he can move 5 yards) it actually makes a huge difference in the ability for not unusual guys to break the 100m dash record.

That being said – there’s a reason to use a bunch of cinematic rules (and some of RAW falls in that category) even in otherwise realistic games.

That reason is, quite simply, player engagement.

Real might just be boring

Consider a fantasy archer. His ability to influence a combat in a game is basically in proportion to his ability to do two things: the first is do damage where no one else can, the second is to plain-old contribute to bog-standard combat. For most cases, it’s the second one that will come up most often. This means that to have fun with a character that has sunk, in all probability, a crazy amount of points in Bow (frex) to be good at it, he wants to be effective.

But typically, without lots of “cinematic” skills, you draw an arrow, ready a bow, and then either shoot, or aim. You can, with the right skills, Fast-Draw that arrow, as well as Quick-Shoot the bow, knocking (nocking?) two seconds off of a typical 2-3 second pause between shots.

For this archer, effective means projectiles on target, and fun means you want each shot to be meaningful. While “damage per seccond” really has no place in GURPS, you do have certain expectation that shooting once every third turn or so will be fun.

So the payoff for going less than 1/3 as often as the other guys better be huge (I might not hit every round, but when I do, you’re *going down*).

Makes up for three seconds of loading the thing

Part of this is the frenetic pace of GURPS combat, with none of the normal lulls that would make that time to draw, nock, aim, and fire disappear into a few turns of “I evaluate!” or “I step back and catch my breath.”

But the RAW make it pretty darn attractive to “hit hit hit hit hit hit hit hit-with-extra-effort! hit hit” as a melee fighter. Possibly with worrying about deceptive attacks, hit locations, wounding modifiers, or whatnot. And if you’re really good, doing it all more than once with Rapid Strike.

Compared to all that, “I ready my arrow; I aim. Still aiming. OK, now I shoot!” is boring and relatively speaking, unhelpful, especially in a DF context.