Damage

[theancient]

No worries, that which dose not kill me had better be able to run futher and faster than inspired to chase, however it points out perhaps why I write through others. tell your wife khumusta Po and slam ott

[theancient]

First thing, the flat d8 is clearly wrong, since a katana is one of those hand-and-a-half swords. I don't have an answer on how to model that.

The second issue is hit points. They aren't strictly speaking health - they're how well you can take a hit. That includes little things like rolling with blows, flinches, deflections to less vital areas, putting up with the concussion damage from non-penetrating strikes, "luck", etc. The 1 point blow that puts someone down isn't necessarily a light tap - it's a hit that just manages to break/pierce/sever something badly enough to make living a less viable option.

If a weapon can, without modifiers, take down men-at-arms/ 1 hd monsters (let's call them grunts for now) half the time, it's a decent grunt sweeper, but will probably turn into a multistroke battle against more experienced warriors (higher HD). Arguably, if someone was just going to stand there (really just 'take a hit'), most of their hit points shouldn't count - they should stand a good chance of going down in one hit (now you've got me thinking how to model iaijutsu duels). In short, an abstraction of injury against an abstraction of the ability to deal with being hit, and all other weapons weighted by their effectiveness compared to an exemplar. I am hard pressed to think of a system that doesn't at some point base weapon damage on kill probabilities or injury capacity of a baseline target.

...and none of that even begins to address the whole force and penetration issue - which is what the armored pigs demonstrated. That was a really cool demo, by the way. I'd love to see the results. (The noted effectiveness of different weapons vs. flesh vs. armor, I mean. Not pictures of bisected pigs ). That's where you get into the whole AC vs. damage reduction approach, as well as weapon type vs. armor type damage variability. AD&D played with that, but the real king of the approach is probably RoleMaster - also notable for separating 'hits' (concussion) and 'injury' (those wonderful, wonderful critical tables), with different injury tables depending on the type of blow. A different school, but an old one nonetheless.

If memory serves I discussed the same with Dave Arneson- he indicated it was more or numerating diminishing combat effectiveness.